My understanding is that between about 1800 and 1850 the autobiographical captivity narrative became a way to make a quick buck and raise funds for a ride back to "civilization," which you'd think would get them to hew closer and closer to the genre constraints as set by this Puritan period. But I find them hilariously all over the map, partly I think because they were being written faster, and sooner after the captivity, with less in the way of conscious religious modeling -- just using genre tools to try to drum up that emotional charge without connecting it to its source.
(Like hurt/comfort fanfic you write for a canon you've never actually consumed yourself, she says, perhaps unkindly, but with a chuckle too.)
Sarah Ann Horn in 1838, for example, is religious herself (also Mormon), but her narrative is all tragedy and no transfiguration. Her faith is never in question, only how much she'll have to suffer before she is freed, which scene itself comes as an anti-climax, since she's traded to Comancheros who then have to travel with her to Santa Fe, and then she has to travel again across the same territory of her captivity to get to Missouri. You'd think last that would be the opportunity for a dramatic recap of her emotional drama! It's taken care of in two bitter sentences.
But what her narrative does do is sell the exotica of Indians, with an afterword about their customs and a lot of emphasis throughout about their cruelty. It works as propaganda for Indian war, which was ongoing and hyperviolent in Texas at that time, even though I doubt that was her main intent in writing it. But it's very striking, comparing her to Rowlandson, how she fails to hit the beats Rowlandson does. Horn doesn't describe her own character having changed at all, just the catalogue of her suffering and how she's borne it.
(My favorite, though, is Nelson Lee's narrative, from 1858, which is not religious at all. He spends a lot of time describing his captor, Rolling Thunder, and the fact that he considers Lee's descriptions of trains, ships, gravity, the ocean -- glorious bullshit fabulated by a lesser mind. It's not at all a story about Lee's soul, or even his suffering, though he goes into that some; in some ways it reads much more like a slave narrative than a captivity narrative, down to the daring escape at the end.)
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2016-12-03 12:51 pm (UTC)(Like hurt/comfort fanfic you write for a canon you've never actually consumed yourself, she says, perhaps unkindly, but with a chuckle too.)
Sarah Ann Horn in 1838, for example, is religious herself (also Mormon), but her narrative is all tragedy and no transfiguration. Her faith is never in question, only how much she'll have to suffer before she is freed, which scene itself comes as an anti-climax, since she's traded to Comancheros who then have to travel with her to Santa Fe, and then she has to travel again across the same territory of her captivity to get to Missouri. You'd think last that would be the opportunity for a dramatic recap of her emotional drama! It's taken care of in two bitter sentences.
But what her narrative does do is sell the exotica of Indians, with an afterword about their customs and a lot of emphasis throughout about their cruelty. It works as propaganda for Indian war, which was ongoing and hyperviolent in Texas at that time, even though I doubt that was her main intent in writing it. But it's very striking, comparing her to Rowlandson, how she fails to hit the beats Rowlandson does. Horn doesn't describe her own character having changed at all, just the catalogue of her suffering and how she's borne it.
(My favorite, though, is Nelson Lee's narrative, from 1858, which is not religious at all. He spends a lot of time describing his captor, Rolling Thunder, and the fact that he considers Lee's descriptions of trains, ships, gravity, the ocean -- glorious bullshit fabulated by a lesser mind. It's not at all a story about Lee's soul, or even his suffering, though he goes into that some; in some ways it reads much more like a slave narrative than a captivity narrative, down to the daring escape at the end.)