SOURCE: “‘Now … Didn't Our People Laugh?’ Female Misbehavior and Algonquian Culture in Mary Rowlandson's Captivity and Restauration,” in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Vol. 21, No. 4, 1997, pp. 1-28.

[In following essay, Arnold discusses how Rowlandson lacks understanding of the culture of her Algonquian captors and what her work reveals about their society, especially its humor.]

Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it.¹

If Bakhtin is right, laughter might be the perfect instrument of imperialism. Yet, at least from our twentieth-century vantage point, America's early imperialists—the Puritans—seem like the most humorless of folk.² Indeed, most of the moments of laughter left in the colonial records are jokes made by Algonquians and other Indians. It would seem that humor was the perfect tool for cracking the shell of the Puritan “white-backs,” a way of turning upside down those human beings Paula Gunn Allen has called “America's first boat people.”³ In colonial texts, Algonquian humor disrupts the colonists' attempts at distance and superiority, forcing the settlers into an uncomfortable familiarity.

Even more common in colonial texts than actual jokes, though, is a form of humor which Bakhtin calls “muffled laughter.” In such instances, Bakhtin argues, the laughter has been reduced so that “it continues to determine the structure of the image, but … [the laughter] itself is muffled down to the minimum: we see, as it were, the track left by the laughter in the structure of the represented reality, but the laughter itself we do not hear.”⁴ For Bakhtin, the hallmark of this track is the intrusion of the dialogical into a monological reality. By dialogical I mean “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness” and the disharmony such a plurality creates in what might otherwise be a unified narrative.⁵ In this essay, I am interested in the dialogue formed when Algonquian voices and perspectives intrude upon the Puritans' monological understanding of events.⁶ It is equally important to note that just as the laughter which creates this dialogue has often been “reduced,” so does it tend to lack the joviality we usually associate with humor. As Bakhtin argues in Rabelais and His World, “this laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and reviles.”⁷ Thus, in Puritan colonial documents the track left by Algonquian muffled laughter can often be found in the moments of cultural disjuncture and disharmony which unsettled the Puritan narrative structures. In this essay, I look at the way muffled laughter can help us better understand the Algonquian image of British colonists and British colonization in Mary Rowlandson's 1682 Captivity and Restauration. Through an investigation of Rowlandson's captivity narrative, I argue that a close reading of Algonquian muffled laughter, first, provides us with a greater understanding of the Algonquian side of early cross-cultural encounters and, second, reveals the ways in which cultural discomfort and disharmony are not anomalies, but rather were integral concepts for early American identity.

In February of 1676 a Narragansett war party laid waste to Mary Rowlandson's town of Lancaster in retaliation for a particularly brutal massacre of one of their villages. While most of the Lancaster residents were killed on site, Rowlandson and nine others were taken captive and were ransomed by colonial authorities eleven weeks later. After her release, Rowlandson published her account of her captivity among and release from the Narragansett and Wampanoag Indians of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

The literary product of that captivity—Rowlandson's 1682 Captivity and Restauration—has been seen as establishing a distinctly American genre—the captivity narrative, and her unique combination of autobiography and forced internment laid the groundwork not only for later accounts of Indian captivity (real and imagined), but also for African American slave narratives and novels such as Herman Melville's Typee. Beyond this larger cultural influence, Rowlandson's Captivity and Restauration is also significant for its representation of the day-to-day relations between New England's British and Algonquian inhabitants. In Rowlandson's text, cross-cultural communication is impeded by cultural differences as well as ill will. Indeed, Rowlandson's misunderstanding of Algonquian customs causes her to insult and disobey her captors more often than even she intends. Rowlandson's misbehavior not only asserts British authority over Algonquian peoples, but also is essential to her formulation of an early American self. It is this misbehavior that provokes “muffled laughter” from her Algonquian captors, and it is this response in her captors that unsettles and contradicts Rowlandson's Puritan-centered vision of events, thereby forming a cross-cultural dialogue. One of the most famous literary instances of muffled laughter between the colonizer and colonized occurs between Queequeg and Ishmael in Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, an example I will use to help explicate the term and its role in colonial contacts before returning to a fuller reading of misbehavior and muffled laughter in Rowlandson's narrative.

In the opening chapters of Moby-Dick, Melville suggests that cross-cultural encounters are as much about social gaffes as they are about initially successful communications. In one instance of outspoken derision, Melville's narrator Ishmael ridicules his Pacific Islander friend Queequeg for having misunderstood the proper use of a wheelbarrow. Queequeg responds to Ishmael's dismissal, “Didn't people laugh,” by reminding him that Europeans and Americans are just as capable of making a cultural faux pas as any islander is. In Queequeg's story of a white captain's blunder within island culture, we see that laughter is the means by which the colonized turn their colonizers “upside down” and peer at them “from above and below.” In doing so, the colonized redefine the structure of colonial encounters by providing a counternarrative to the easy vision of European superiority so often staged in colonial documents.

Queequeg's story begins with a “stately” white captain who is invited to a wedding feast for Queequeg's sister on the islander's home of Kokovoko. As the king's son, Queequeg peers at the captain “from above and below” (as Bakhtin puts it), thereby providing the reader with an insider's understanding of the ceremony. He lulls the reader as he lavishly describes the feast's “central ornament”—a large punch bowl filled with the “fragrant water” of young coconuts. Here the story turns. The captain, though late, is placed in front of the punch bowl, between the King and the High Priest who is to lead the service. According to “the immemorial ceremony of the island,” the Priest opens the banquet by dipping his “consecrated and consecrating fingers” into the bowl before allowing the “blessed beverage” to circulate. The captain, “[s]eeing himself placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking himself—being Captain of a ship—as having plain precedence over a mere island King—especially in the King's own house … coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punch bowl; taking it I suppose for a huge finger-glass.” At this point Queequeg asks Ishmael, “Now … Didn't our people laugh?”⁸

While Ishmael's narrative leaves behind Queequeg's story with a rapidity that suggests embarrassment, the islander's tale and its purpose within Melville's narrative are worth investigating. This laughter is “ambiguous” in accordance with Bakhtin's definition. Although the laughter invoked is not necessarily kind, it appears to be gay (at least from Queequeg's perspective) even as it mocks and denies Ishmael and the captain's vision of themselves and their image of the structure of colonization.⁹ For Queequeg, the captain's gaffe is due to his (mis)understanding of himself in relation to the islanders, as well as his lack of cultural knowledge. Indeed, the captain's gaffe is not unlike gaffes committed by clumsy colonists in Algonquian jokes. In the article, “The American Indian as Humorist in Colonial Literature,” Luise van Keuren relates William Wood's rendition of an Algonquian joke about a horse caught in an Algonquian spring trap meant for local deer. Keuren notes, “For these natives the poor horse is an appropriate emblem for the lubberly colonist. It is an emblem of a foolish creature falling into a simple snare, a symbol at once pretentious in its refinement—a squaw horse [as they call it]—and laughably clumsy.”¹⁰ Like an Algonquian story of an English horse caught in a deer trap, Queequeg's anecdote turns the captain upside down. The captain is revealed to be a bungling outsider—just as the horse (and the Englishmen it represents) is exposed as a “naive wanderer” who “despite all his fancy gadgets and sophisticated knowledge of the world, is a bumbler in his newfound land.”¹¹ It is the captain's presumption of his own “sophisticated knowledge” and cultural superiority that causes his social impropriety. He is a white captain, while Queequeg's father is a “mere island King.” Thus the captain assumes not only that he can understand island culture, but also that he has the prerogative to dip his fingers before the king might. Indeed, had the captain deferred to Queequeg's father, he would have seen that he was meant to drink the liquid, not bathe in it.

Queequeg's story reveals the fundamental role laughter plays in disrupting and abetting colonization. In this sense, laughter is integral to what Peter Stallybrass and Allon White call “the double process of colonization” in which:

The Other must be transformed into the Same, the savage must be civilized … but at the same time, the Other's mimicry of the polite is treated as absurd, the cause of derisive laughter, thus consolidating the sense that the civilized is always-already given, the essential and unchanging possession which distinguishes the European citizen from the West Indian and the Zulu [or the Pacific Islander and Algonquian] as well as from the marmoset and the manteger.¹²

Queequeg's story disrupts this paradigm by emphasizing that there is more than one standard of civilization, and in this sense, he undermines both the captain and Ishmael's visions of themselves. The visiting captain's gaffe is due to his insistence upon acting as if he were in Europe, even as his notion of his status is derived from a sense of himself in opposition to the islanders. The captain's attempt to play by his own culture's rules (a punch bowl is a “finger-glass”) is an integral step in Euro-American colonization in that it empties the island of its indigenous culture. Queequeg's story reinserts the presence of indigenous culture and places the captain in the position of the “savage other” who must conform. Queequeg's parable serves as an important critique of Ishmael as well, for Ishmael's own Eurocentric notions of cultural evolution and civilization cause him initially to dismiss Queequeg as an alien and a savage. In the opening chapters, Ishmael reads Queequeg's dark skin, tattoos, idol, and tomahawk as signs of Queequeg's inferiority, and these signs stand in direct opposition to Ishmael's own identity as a white, unmarked Christian—even before Ishmael leaves the Massachusetts coastal town of New Bedford. In contrast, Queequeg's story undermines this opposition, since his revelation that Europeans are also outsiders emphasizes a commonality among Ishmael, the captain, and himself. This bond is no longer at the expense of indigenous culture, but arises through the recognition of multiplicity. In Bakhtin's words, the structure of the friendship has been changed from one based on “dogmatic (monologic) ossification” to one which “immerses thought itself in the joyful relativity of evolving existence” that is characteristic of dialogicality and carnivalistic laughter.¹³

While Melville's discussion of the role of miscommunication and laughter in cultural encounters looks westward to America's mid-nineteenth-century frontiers, it also turns back to the original settlement of New England.¹⁴ The failure of early contacts between British colonists and Algonquians is encapsulated in the name of Ishmael and Queequeg's ship. The Pequod, Ishmael instructs us, “was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians, now extinct as the ancient Medes.”¹⁵ Yet here, too, Ishmael has misread the signs: The Pequots are from Connecticut, and they are far from extinct, in spite of colonists' attempts.¹⁶

Ishmael's misreading is fitting in that it continues a New England tradition. Like Ishmael's initial encounters with Queequeg, early British colonists' encounters with the Pequots and other Algonquians were characterized by failed attempts to understand cultural others—a failure epitomized by the genocidal Pequot Massacre of 1637. Yet, unlike Ishmael and Queequeg's relationship, British-Algonquian interactions didn't improve. Though the years between the Pequot Massacre (1637) and King Philip's War (1675-1676) were marked by the publication of a number of texts bent upon avoiding British-Algonquian warfare,¹⁷ by 1676 economic factors had made communication a lower priority for the British, and cultural ruptures and miscommunications grew more rampant.

Mary Rowlandson's 1682 captivity narrative attests to the importance of British-Algonquian misunderstandings for the construction of an early Anglo-American identity. Written in the years immediately following King Philip's War, Rowlandson's narrative marked the beginnings of a new campaign which argued that the best encounters were no encounters at all. With the collapse of the fur trade, Algonquians' role in the colonial economy was virtually eliminated; thus, good relations with Algonquians became less important to the British.¹⁸ Moreover, the increase in British immigrants made Algonquian lands more appealing and Algonquian populations slightly less threatening. Rowlandson—like Queequeg's captain—refuses to accommodate or recognize Algonquian cultural rules. Her rejection of Algonquian standards is essential both to her presentation of herself as a “Puritanically-correct” female and her vision of the Algonquians as uncivilized, intruding others. By misbehaving within Algonquian culture, Rowlandson implies that Algonquian cultural rules are irrelevant, just as Algonquians are a non-integral component of the New England colonies. Like Queequeg's laughter, Algonquians' rebukes of Rowlandson's behavior provide a countertext to Rowlandson's narrative in that they emphasize the presence of indigenous culture and its influence upon cross-cultural encounters. Although these rebukes represent instances of “muffled” rather than the boisterous laughter of Queequeg, they maintain the ability to transform the Puritans' dogmatic and monologic understanding of colonial encounters into a dialogue.

Rowlandson's narrative is unique not only because of who wrote it—Rowlandson is the first Anglo-American woman to publish an autobiography—but also because of who her captors were. For the bulk of her internment, Rowlandson lived with two important leaders of what was to be the last great war waged by Southern New England Indians against the British. The two leaders Rowlandson stayed with were Weetamoo, a squaw-sachem (or female leader) of the Wampanoags, and her husband Quanopen, a Narragansett sachem. Along with Church's Entertaining Passages, Rowlandson's Captivity and Restauration contains one of the few firsthand accounts of New England's early female leaders. As critics have noted, Rowlandson uses this encounter with Weetamoo and other Algonquians to tell a distinctly Puritan version of the war. Namely, the Puritans are God's backsliding but still chosen people, and Indians are agents of the devil, who start a war to punish God's community and remind God's people of their duties. Yet Rowlandson's details of the day-to-day life from within the Algonquian compound inadvertently reveal a countertext to the Puritan's version of the war and of Algonquian culture. In this sense, because it records traces of Algonquian laughter, Rowlandson's report provides a rare opportunity to undo the distinctly one-sided version of events told by Puritan leaders. Rowlandson's communications and miscommunications with her Wampanoag and Narragansett captors present a very different sense of Algonquian culture and Algonquian-British relations than the controlling facade proposed by other Puritan writers. I will focus upon those miscommunications (the cultural ruptures of muffled laughter) and their ability to undo Rowlandson's attempt to present a Puritan self and a Puritan version of Algonquians as irrelevant cultural outsiders.

Though critics have often discussed Rowlandson's successful attempts to fashion herself and her narrative within Puritan conventions, few have noticed Rowlandson's repeated failure to adhere to the conventions of Algonquian society. Unlike the mistakes of Queequeg's captain, though, Rowlandson's misbehavior is rarely met with laughter which “bursts out into a loud register.”¹⁹ The more often Rowlandson acts up, the more she is slapped, burnt, and threatened with death. Indeed Algonquians usually laugh aloud not when Rowlandson is willfully defiant, but when she is unintentionally clumsy, for example, when she falls off her horse or staggers through a stream.²⁰ As Luise van Keuren points out, this humor is far from kind. The Algonquians laugh when Rowlandson—the colonist—is revealed to be a “bumbling” interloper and tenderfoot. In contrast, Rowlandson's “misbehavior” is largely a function of her desire to posit the Algonquians as the cultural intruders. Rowlandson most often misbehaves when she acts as if she were still in British colonial society, and she usually expresses outrage at her captors' less than charitable response. Rowlandson's Puritan upbringing has trained her to respect and obey Algonquian men; yet it leaves her woefully unprepared to respect and obey powerful Algonquian women, particularly the female leader with whom she lives. Moreover, Puritan cultural assumptions about white supremacy impede her ability to accept her own subordinate position within Algonquian hierarchies. Rowlandson's repudiation of Wampanoag and Narragansett social conventions plays an integral role in her maintenance of a female Puritan identity. However, they also set her up to receive punishment for discrediting and disobeying Algonquian women.

Rowlandson's interactions with Wampanoag and Narragansett women are marked by an escalating hostility. More than halfway through her travels (remove twelve out of twenty-one), Rowlandson remarks that the Algonquians' “insolency grew worse and worse.”²¹ Yet it would seem Rowlandson's own behavior had taken a downward turn, since her displays of disobedience increase.²² To Rowlandson, the reason for her punishment is mysterious. She comments, “Sometimes I met with Favour, and sometimes with nothing but Frowns.”²³ Ironically, it is Rowlandson's refusal to acknowledge Algonquian rules which highlights their presence. As critic David Sewell is quick to point out, Rowlandson emphasizes the instability of Algonquian culture throughout her narrative. For the Puritan goodwife, their motives are so incomprehensible that she finds her captors “unstable and like madmen.”²⁴ Yet Rowlandson's Algonquian captors chastise her for predictable reasons. Though Rowlandson dismisses her own agency in determining the nature of her stay, the pattern of her behavior preceding Algonquian reproofs suggests that her actions are significant. The castigations Rowlandson receives correspond to her infractions of Wampanoag and Narragansett conventions surrounding status, reciprocity, and adoption—three qualities that laid the groundwork for positive social interactions among members of Algonquian communities. These castigations mark the “track” of the reduced laughter that restructures Rowlandson's reality.

It is Rowlandson's transgression of these three conventions and the resulting muffled laughter which is the focus of my discussion of her misbehavior, and I argue that Rowlandson's increasing blindness towards these customs helps her formulate an identity that exorcises Algonquian culture in order to posit herself as a respectable female British colonial subject. Her text, then, is marked by the struggle between her reality and the “muffled laughter” which seeks to undo it.

Rowlandson's first type of social infractions revolve around her denial of Algonquian conventions of female social status. Critics such as Teresa Toulouse and Margaret Davis have suggested that Rowlandson refuses to submit to Algonquian women because she views them as subordinate both to Algonquian men and to herself as a white captive.²⁵ However, the roots of Rowlandson's misbehavior are more complex. Rowlandson appears to be unaware of how women obtained status in Wampanoag and Narragansett communities, and how she herself fit into their hierarchical pattern of relations. This misunderstanding causes Rowlandson to disobey and defy Algonquian women.

According to ethnohistorian Catherine Marten and numerous colonial documents, Wampanoag society consisted of three basic social levels: “(1) the sachem and members of the ‘royal family’; (2) ordinary members of the community; [and] (3) resident nonmembers (generally captives of war) who acted as servants.”²⁶ As the squaw-sachem of a Wampanoag community, Rowlandson's mistress Weetamoo belonged to the first of these levels. Squaw-sachems obtained their status through their lineage and their ability to lead—not through their relationship to men (as Rowlandson and critics seem to believe). In contrast, the various squaws Rowlandson begs from belong to the middle rung of Wampanoag society—they are auwaog, or common people.²⁷ Finally, Rowlandson herself belongs to the lowest status group—resident nonmembers, who served as slaves and servants, or, as Rowlandson calls them, maids. Colonist Roger Williams informs us that the Algonquians considered such people “‘Obscure and meane’ … like the dead, they had no names.”²⁸ The relative status of individuals in Wampanoag culture determined the form that cross-cultural and intertribal interactions took, and the people's deference to communication etiquette and status helped acknowledge and reinforce the individuals' power.²⁹ In this sense, Rowlandson's lack of deference to her social “betters” is both insulting and threatening.

Rowlandson has the worst relationship with Weetamoo, the communities' “queen” and highest-ranking member—female or male. As a squaw-sachem (leader), Weetamoo had the right to expect the members of her community to listen and speak to her in an attentive and courteous manner. Colonists Roger Williams and Edward Winslow indicate that community members acknowledged sachems with a respectful silence.³⁰ Often, lower-ranking individuals would display their deference to and esteem for the sachems with the phrase Cowaunckamish, “my service to you,” and by stroking the sachems' shoulders and torso.³¹ Rather than showing respect for Weetamoo, Rowlandson seems to go out of her way to be discourteous. She refuses to do the work Weetamoo asks her to do, she complains about her chores, she talks back to Weetamoo when given orders, she threatens to tear Weetamoo's coat, she refuses to mourn the death of Weetamoo's child, she cries publicly when the squaw-sachem calls her, and she ignores Weetamoo's shows of hospitality.³² In sum, Rowlandson is far from the ideal servant or even the ideal house guest.

Rowlandson's rudeness to Weetamoo is an untimely threat to the squaw-sachem's hegemony, and Weetamoo strikes back at even the smallest slight to her status. According to colonist Benjamin Church, Weetamoo had trouble controlling her 300 warriors during King Philip's War, and Rowlandson's repeated public attacks on her authority could only have further jeopardized Weetamoo's position within the community.³³ Indeed, Weetamoo is not wrong to take offense. Even when Rowlandson's behavior seems unintentionally disrespectful, her commentary suggests that the disrespect was heartfelt. In one incident, Rowlandson transgresses a food taboo by feeding Weetamoo and Quanopen from the same bowl.³⁴ While her actions indicate that she views the couple as equals, her explanation of the incident reveals this is not the case. She labels Weetamoo a “proud Gossip,” or as editor Amy Lang puts it a “person … of slight and trifling character”—a seemingly odd characterization for a queen and powerful military leader.³⁵ Thus whether Rowlandson means to attack Weetamoo's status, she clearly feels Weetamoo needs to be taken down a level. To Rowlandson, Weetamoo's behavior is incongruent with her rank.

But part of Rowlandson's problem is that she ignores Weetamoo's true status within her community. It was common knowledge that Weetamoo was a sachem and a military commander, yet Rowlandson never makes any mention of this fact in her narrative.³⁶ In fact, according to Rowlandson, Weetamoo's daily schedule consists merely of getting dressed, putting on makeup, wearing jewelry, and making “girdles” out of wampum and beads.³⁷ Thus, the image of Weetamoo that Rowlandson presents is a far cry from the military threat that Increase Mather and other Puritan historians have detailed. For Rowlandson, Weetamoo's status is domestic and wholly dependent upon men: she is Quanopen's wife and “King Philip's wife's Sister,” but she is never the “Squaw-sachem of the Pocassets.”³⁸ Such terminology is particularly ironic when one considers that female sachems did not derive power through their husbands, but through inherited lands.³⁹ In stark contrast to Rowlandson's domestic portrait, other colonists describe Weetamoo as a crucial player in a war that was to determine whether British or Algonquians controlled New England. In addition to leading 300 of her own warriors,⁴⁰ Weetamoo served as the link between the Narragansett and Wampanoag confederacies, and consequently provided King Philip with crucial allies. Increase Mather argued that Weetamoo was “next unto Philip in respect of the mischief that hath been done, and the blood that hath been shed in this Warr.”⁴¹ As a Puritan female, Rowlandson did not envision that women obtained status through leadership and war activities. Consequently Rowlandson judges Weetamoo based on her behavior in the domestic sphere and her defiance of Puritan notions of female decorum.

Even as Rowlandson misbehaves, from Weetamoo's perspective, so too does Weetamoo behave in a manner that Rowlandson perceives as offensive. Rowlandson doesn't acknowledge Weetamoo's status in Wampanoag society; thus, she judges the sachem according to how a female British colonial subject should behave. Puritan settlers expected women to be subordinate, subservient, unworldly, and self-denigrating.⁴² As a leader and military captain, Weetamoo is bound to fail on all of these accounts. According to Rowlandson, Weetamoo is “insolent,” “proud,” and a “gossip,” and she is overly concerned with her dress and physical appearance.⁴³ For Rowlandson, Weetamoo's appearance signals her “trifling” character since she is overly aware of worldly appearances. According to Rowlandson, Weetamoo is

A severe and proud Dame … bestowing every day in dressing herself near as much time as any of the Gentry of the land; powdering her hair and painting her face, going with her Neck-laces, with Jewels in her ears, and bracelets in her hands.⁴⁴

According to William Bradford, it was Algonquians' pride that justified their slaughter in the Pequot War of 1637 and made the Puritan's victory so “sweet.”⁴⁵ Here Rowlandson's inter-weaving of Weetamoo's pride and her appearance substantiate the colonists' negative portrayal of the squaw-sachem's “inappropriate” behavior.

Yet Rowlandson's dismissal of Weetamoo's clothing shows that she is judging the squaw-sachem by Puritan not Wampanoag conventions. For Rowlandson, Weetamoo's obsession with dress signifies her sinful “Pride”;⁴⁶ yet for the Wampanoags Weetamoo's appearance reinforces her status. Since she was a leader, Weetamoo's jewelry and intricate clothing were not only acceptable, but also expected and necessary for the preservation of her status within the tribe. Wampanoags of high status displayed their power by wearing wampum (shell currency) and other valuable items which showed their “lack of immediate need for … money.”⁴⁷ Thus, when Weetamoo meets with a British emissary to discuss Rowlandson's release, she wears “a Kersey coat … covered with Girdles of Wampom from the loins upward.”⁴⁸ At the same meeting, Quanopen's “Garters were hung round with shillings; and he had Girdles of Wampom upon his Head and Shoulders.”⁴⁹ Just as Weetamoo's supposed insolence is a function of her desire to recoup authority, so too is her physical display of worldly goods an attempt to reinforce her status before her people and before the British.

Rowlandson's rejection of Weetamoo's status and Wampanoag hierarchies is essential to her construction of herself as a female British colonist and to her notion of British cultural dominance. To begin with, Weetamoo challenges the portrait of femininity Rowlandson seeks to create. Were Rowlandson to acknowledge and defer to Weetamoo's status, she would undermine her own portrait of herself as an upkeeper of the Puritan social order. As critic Margaret Davis notes,

Puritans had an intense need for psychological and social order and relied on scripture to determine the chain of command that begins with God who creates and directs all things and sets up a hierarchy to govern his cosmos. Ranked under the Godhead are Puritan divines, then males, females, and children and servants. … Society's smooth operation depended on the cooperation of each … [community member] in assuming the special and assigned duties of each one's place.⁵⁰

Feminist critics have argued that Rowlandson confirms this social order by styling herself as pious, domestic, subordinate to men, and wholly dependent upon God.⁵¹ In contrast, as a squaw-sachem and war-chief, Weetamoo challenges this genered chain of command. Weetamoo “directs” her male-warriors, and she attempts to direct Rowlandson, who (at least by her own reckoning) is one of God's chosen people and, hence, is superior. In order to show her allegiance to God's order, Rowlandson must dismiss Weetamoo and the Wampanoags' ungendered hierarchies.

Furthermore, Rowlandson must reject Weetamoo's social position in order to present a reassuring picture of British cultural dominance. Like other Puritan historical tracts written in the wake of King Philip's War, Rowlandson's narrative seeks to reassure its readers that New England Algonquians are subordinate and manageable. Rowlandson accomplishes this goal largely by denying Algonquian agency: Their actions are merely the will of God as he attempts to bring the Puritan colonies back in line. Thus, even the Wampanoags' better survival skills and war tactics mainly remind Rowlandson of “the wonderful providence of God in preserving the Heathen for farther affliction to our poor Country.”⁵² Rowlandson's erasure of Weetamoo's role as a leader and military commander is likewise essential to her portrait of Algonquians as controllable. To a large extent, Europeans' understanding of their cultural dominance depended upon gendered metaphors of relations. Just as God made women subordinate to men, so too did God make Indians subordinate to Europeans; thus, often American Indians and women were conflated in early modern drawings.⁵³ Such gendered metaphors also reassured Europeans of the inevitability of the conquest of the Americas. The American continent and peoples were shown as desiring and needing the “penetration” of European culture in the same way that early modern women were believed to be characterized by “a desire for completion by intercourse with the male.”⁵⁴ The representation of America and American Indians as female emphasized this dependent relationship.

As a squaw-sachem, Weetamoo undermines this reassuring image of a submissive Algonquian population. Because Weetamoo challenges the hierarchical relations between men and women, she also challenges the hierarchy between the British and Algonquians. In fact, according to the “Entertaining Passages” by colonist Benjamin Church, squaw-sachems were quite adept at establishing dominance over male British emissaries. Church's narrative of King Philip's War shows both Weetamoo and Awashonks—another Wampanoag squaw-sachem—manipulating Church into greeting them as cultural superiors. As a colonial outsider and non-Puritan, Church shows such exchanges as part of the give-and-take that are a natural component of cross-cultural encounters. Yet, as a Puritan goodwife, Rowlandson would jeopardize her own submission to cultural hierarchies if she allowed Weetamoo's plays for dominance to go unchecked. In this sense, Rowlandson's misbehavior serves the important function of disrupting Weetamoo's power plays and Weetamoo's potential threat to the social order of the colonies.

Rowlandson's second type of cultural faux pas involves her misunderstanding of Wampanoag and Narragansett conventions of reciprocity. Ironically, while Wampanoag and Narragansett notions of reciprocity and exchange ensure Rowlandson's good treatment by the common women, they also ensure her repeated punishment by Weetamoo. Rowlandson's unintentional rejection of Weetamoo's generosity not only insults the squaw-sachem, but also undercuts the relationship Weetamoo seeks to establish with Rowlandson.

By and large, Rowlandson's daily interactions with common women are positive. Even though once a woman throws ashes in Rowlandson's eyes for rearranging a fire against an Algonquian's wishes, generally Rowlandson seeks out these females as providers of food, shelter, and refuge.⁵⁵ Rowlandson marvels every time the women provide her with food and shelter, and she juxtaposes their kindness with Weetamoo's bad temper. Yet their actions are not unusual. Wampanoag and Narragansett convention dictated that “generosity and sharing were obligatory … in [all] social relations.”⁵⁶ As anthropologist Kathleen Bragdon explains,

no one in a Native community [in Southern New England] was allowed to go hungry or unclothed, no request for goods or service was to be denied, and ungenerous actions were counted among the most heinous of antisocial acts.⁵⁷

Generosity and hospitality were more than a show of good manners or general good will on the part of Algonquians: They were an important means of establishing and cementing relationships. Algonquians maintained both interpersonal and spiritual relations through reciprocal exchanges, and generosity was one form of reciprocity. To give others goods did more than connote a desire for positive interactions; it also empowered the giver and the receiver. As ethnographer George Hamell reveals, “wealth connotes well-being … [and] in this sense, is a kind of medicine” to Algonquians; consequently, “One could not only accumulate wealth and well-being, one could also display it through its use/function as ornamentation, or through its social functions as gifts to the living or dead.”⁵⁸ For the receiver either to reject offerings or be ungrateful was a tremendous insult to the giver. As Marten points out, “Not only did the donor thus lose his goods, but also the prestige of being acclaimed a generous man if his sacrifice was not noted by the proper thanks.”⁵⁹ Rowlandson undermines Weetamoo's prestige by not acknowledging the squaw-sachem's gifts of food and shelter.

Thus, while Rowlandson appreciates the common women because they show her generosity, by turning to them for food she effectively rejects Weetamoo's displays of power. In one instance, Rowlandson returns to Weetamoo's wigwam after a round of begging only to receive a round of abuse. Here she is told she has disgraced her captors by begging and “if … [she] did so any more they would knock … [her] on the head.”⁶⁰ Rather than feigning submission or apologizing for her affront, Rowlandson retorts somewhat sarcastically, “I told them, they had as good knock me on the head as starve me to death.”⁶¹ Certainly this is not Rowlandson's first show of “ingratitude.” Earlier, when Rowlandson is on a similar begging spree, the sachems send a messenger to retrieve her. In addition to being “kickt … all the way home,” Rowlandson is sent to bed without supper, and it is here that she remarks rather unself-critically, “Sometime I met with Favour, and sometimes with nothing but Frowns.”⁶²

While Rowlandson undoubtedly did go hungry during her stay in Weetamoo's household (low food supplies were one reason Algonquians began the war), Weetamoo clearly objects to Rowlandson's very public repudiation of her generosity. For sachems, displaying generosity served much the same function as wearing wampum. It emphasized that the sachems' wealth and power were so extensive that they could literally be given away. Rowlandson's begging sprees and complaints jeopardized this display of power. Since sachems secured hegemony through gifts to community members, Rowlandson's lack of gratitude (unintentional or not) signals her rejection of Weetamoo's right to rule, just as clearly as Rowlandson's backtalk signals her rejection of Weetamoo's authority.

Furthermore, Rowlandson's suggestion that Weetamoo is a bad host serves as an ironic comment upon British (mis)readings of the events leading up to King Philip's War. In part, King Philip's War can be seen as a result of British ingratitude for and misunderstanding of the generosity that the Wampanoags and other Algonquians had shown them. Though the initial success of Plymouth Plantation was in part due to the food and land “gifts” furnished by the Wampanoags, hunger for land led colonists to encroach upon King Philip's holdings in the Mount Hope region. For the British, Wampanoag gift giving had been a sign of submission to British rule and desires, not of Wampanoags' power. In early modern England, one showed hospitality and generosity to one's social betters. Consequently, British colonists and explorers often mistook Natives' offerings for an acknowledgment of European cultural supremacy.⁶³ In this sense, gift giving often encouraged British insolence rather than ensuring positive relations. Rowlandson's failure to acknowledge her debt to Weetamoo is symptomatic, then, of British-Algonquian relations in the region. If Rowlandson were to present Weetamoo as generous, she would jeopardize British readings of these interactions and of the war itself.

Rowlandson's third type of misbehavior arises from her misunderstanding of Wampanoag and Narragansett expectations of adopted resident nonmembers. Although Rowlandson perceives herself and other British captives as anomalies within the tribe, the Wampanoags and Narragansetts routinely integrated enemy women into their communities. Capturing and adopting cultural outsiders—particularly women—was an important means of bolstering Algonquians' disease-ravaged populations, and usually resident nonmembers became servants or spouses of community members. In fact, Rowlandson runs into a number of Algonquian women in a position akin to her own: both Quanopen's and King Philip's maids are most likely also captives turned servants.⁶⁴ Yet, while Rowlandson clearly identifies these women as subordinate members of the community, she has trouble seeing herself in the same light.

As I have already suggested, Rowlandson's interactions with Algonquian women are complicated by her refusal to take her place on the lowest rung of Wampanoag female hierarchies. Yet Rowlandson's other gaffe as a resident nonmember is her repeated repudiation of adoption customs. Adopted members of Algonquian communities were expected to assimilate and to reformulate their loyalties and identities with respect to their new communities.⁶⁵ Quanopen's maid provides an example of a captive who has appropriately assimilated. She has acclimated successfully enough to be allowed to travel on her own for three weeks without her master having to worry that she won't return.⁶⁶ Rowlandson's inability to assimilate complicates her stay and causes her captors to punish her repeatedly.

Rowlandson's repudiation of adoption customs is not a sign of her rudeness or obstinacy; rather, for Puritans, assimilation was antithetical to their mission in the colonies and to a Puritan narrative of self. In 1629, John Winthrop gave nine reasons for beginning the “Intended Plantation in New England,” and not one of these were to become a better Algonquian.⁶⁷ If the colonized and the colonizer were to converge it would be on British terms. Winthrop argued that the Algonquians would “benefit … by our neighborhood and learn of us to improve part [of their land] to more use than before they could do the whole … [thus] they have of us that which will yield them more benefit than all the land which we have from them.”⁶⁸ Algonquians would become like the British both culturally and religiously: they would learn different farming patterns, and they would “improve” their souls. If Puritans were to become more like their Algonquian neighbors, they would move farther—not closer—to God. As a jeremiad, Rowlandson's narrative depends structurally upon her repudiation of Algonquian customs: She must reject the “devil's ways,” whether it is tobacco or Algonquian society, in order to be restored to her community and her state of grace. Consequently, while Rowlandson may come to accept Algonquian foods, she does not yield herself entirely to an Algonquian lifestyle, as adoption customs mandate. When her homeward thoughts plague her, she laments, “I understood something of Lot's Wife's Temptation, when she looked back.”⁶⁹ It is essential that Rowlandson, as a Puritan and a Puritan writer, keeps her gaze focused back on God, even though as a temporary adoptee she is told to keep her eyes focused forward on the Wampanoags and Narragansetts.

Whether they intended their British captives' stays to be temporary or long term, the Wampanoags and Narragansetts actively discouraged ties to English society. Early on in her captivity, Rowlandson witnesses the public burning of a pregnant Puritan goodwife who had asked to be let go one too many times. Angered, the Algonquians warn the other captives that if they “attempted to go home, they would serve them in like manner.”⁷⁰ The captives' backward glances do not annoy the Algonquians just because the warriors fear losing ransom money, or they would not have burnt the woman. Community members also express outrage when Rowlandson tries to maintain an English cultural identity. When Rowlandson asks to lodge in a vacant house, they express disbelief and chastise her by asking, “What, will you love English-men still?”⁷¹ Similarly, Rowlandson's captors castigate her for trying to keep the Sabbath and for reading the Bible instead of attending a Wampanoag burial ritual.⁷² Clearly, Rowlandson is expected to suppress her English cultural roots during her internment.

Similarly, Rowlandson's captors expect her to relinquish ties to Englishmen and women. Rowlandson's concern for a young English captive alarms Weetamoo and Quanopen, and Rowlandson is only able to assuage their fears that she is not still English-centered by refocusing her domestic energies upon a male community member. Though Weetamoo and Quanopen confine her to her quarters for visiting the Englishman, they reinstate her visiting privileges when she asks if she might help an Algonquian man reknit his stockings.⁷³

Certainly many of the “insults” Rowlandson receives can be read as attempts by Algonquians to break her bonds to her blood family and, thereby, further cement her loyalties to her new household. The Wampanoags and Narragansetts try to discourage her homeward glances by telling her that her English husband thinks she has died, or that he himself is dead, murdered, remarried, under pressure to remarry, or currently courting.⁷⁴ While Rowlandson takes these comments as signs of the Algonquians' “horrible addictedness to lying,” it seems more likely that they signify the Algonquians' desires to entice her to take a new husband.⁷⁵ When Rowlandson continues to ask after her English family, the Algonquians use humor to rebuke and socialize her. In response to her queries about her son, Rowlandson is told that his master ate him and that he was “very good meat.”⁷⁶ Throughout the narrative, community members use lies and jests to break Rowlandson of her previous loyalties and chastise her for her “inappropriate” backward glances.

While Rowlandson finds this joke about cannibalism discouraging rather than amusing, it marks an important moment in her narrative. For European colonists, cannibalism was a sign of what critic Peter Hulme calls “unregenerate savagery.”⁷⁷ Somewhat ironically, cannibalism seems to have had similar connotations in Algonquian communities, since it was used as a way of distinguishing between the Ninnimissinuok—the [real] people—and outsiders.⁷⁸ While documents from the colonial period suggest that cannibalism was highly unusual among the Narragansetts and the Wampanoags, Algonquian peoples often listed cannibalism as one of the reasons they feared and abhorred their Iroquois neighbors.⁷⁹ The Algonquian word for the Mohawks (Mohowaúgsuck or Mauquàuog) literally means “men-eater” and is derived from the word móho, to eat.⁸⁰ By the time of Rowlandson's captivity, it is clear that her captors knew that the British had a similar fear of and distaste for cannibalism. Thus, I would argue that the joke that Rowlandson's son was “very good meat” is amusing on a number of levels. On one level, the joke makes fun of Rowlandson's concern that her son will be “consumed” by Algonquian culture even as it taunts her with her inability to stop such an assimilation. As I have argued, in the context of Rowlandon's captivity experience, such a joke would be reasonable on the part of her captors, albeit unwelcome from Rowlandson's perspective.

On another level, the joke mocks and appropriates Rowlandson's understanding of Algonquian peoples. In the Algonquian languages spoken by Rowlandson's captors, the notion that her son's master might have eaten a person was a linguistic absurdity. How could a Wampanoag (“person of the East or dawn”) or a Narragansett (“person of the edge of the water”) be a Mohawk (Mohowaúgsuck) or “man-eater”?⁸¹ Yet on some level this transformation is not so absurd as linguistics suggests: Although early travelers such as William Wood had found the Narragansetts and Wampanoags to be more industrious than intimidating, by the time of King Philip's war, Wood's description of the Mohawks as “cruell bloody people, which were wont to come downe upon their poore neighbours with more than bruitish savagenesse … in so much that the name of a Mowhack would strike the heart” was remarkably similar to the reputation of the war-torn southern nations.⁸² Quite clearly, the man taunting Rowlandson with her son's supposed death wanted to strike fear in her heart as the Mohawks once might have done to his own family. In this sense, the Narragansetts and Wampanoags had become Mohowaúgsuck—the objects of fear and loathing in southeastern New England. At once, they both are and cannot be the troubling outsiders Rowlandson envisions them as. Thus, if we are to read the humor in Rowlandson's text as existing upon a continuum from muffled to riotous, this joke represents what I would consider the loud and tumultuous end of the scale. By pointing out the paradoxical and multivalent status of the Narragansett and Wampanoag, the joke disrupts the categories Puritans used to contain Algonquian peoples. As such the joke represents a moment of extreme dialogicality in the text.

Consequently, this joke has important political ramifications and stands in direct opposition to Rowlandson's more general concern of how to categorize the Wampanoags and Narragansetts. Until King Philip's War, colonists had been split over the question of whether Algonquians could be assimilated into the British empire. British New Englanders had spent a significant amount of money, time, and energy attempting to convert and assimilate the Massachusetts, Wampanoag, and Narragansett peoples. Nominally this effort had been a success: Missionaries such as John Eliot and the three generations of Mayhews had set up a series of intertribal “praying towns” throughout the area in which Christianized Algonquians were expected to dress, act, and farm like British colonists or—as Neal Salisbury puts it—be “red Puritans.” Rowlandson's narrative undermines this assimilationist agenda, and her refusal to conform to the norms of Algonquian society emphasizes the impassable divide between the two cultures.

Just as Rowlandson is ultimately incapable of becoming a Wampanoag or Narragansett, so too are they—from her perspective—incapable of becoming Puritans. In fact, the failure of the praying towns to transform Algonquians into colonial subjects is a major subtext of Rowlandson's work. Rowlandson emphasizes that the loyalties of Christianized Indians remains with their unchristian kin, and not with the British. According to Rowlandson, the attack on her town of Lancaster was led by “Marlberough's Praying Indians,” who lived a mere ten miles from the Lancaster settlement.⁸³ Thus in Rowlandson's narrative, praying towns ensure danger rather than remove it. Similarly, Rowlandson harps on the “un-Christian” behavior of the Praying Indians with whom she interacts. By noting that a Praying Indian sold her daughter “for a gun,” Rowlandson emphasizes both the converts' unregenerate conduct and his propensity for violence.⁸⁴ After her only semi-positive encounter with Christianized Algonquians, Rowlandson feels compelled to balance her narrative with a list of Praying Indians' offenses. Her catalog of false converts includes a man who betrays his own father, men who take part in an ambush against the British, and a man who wears “a string about his neck strung with Christian fingers.”⁸⁵ Rowlandson's message is clear: Converting and assimilating Algonquians doesn't work.⁸⁶ For Rowlandson, though, the absurdity of a “Christian Indian” does not arouse derisive laughter. Rowlandson's images of discontinuity are decidedly chilling, and were she to laugh she would diminish the suffering that she suggests attempts at assimilation have caused. Thus, whereas the cannibalism joke points to the instability of the concept of outsiders and others, Rowlandson's images of Praying Indians reinforce the divide between the cultures. Rowlandson's rejection of Algonquian conventions and Algonquians' ability to be members of the colonial culture reveal that a Puritan identity is not dependent upon Algonquians, but is opposed to them.

In this sense, Rowlandson and Ishmael disagree over the importance of cross-cultural interactions. After spending the night in Queequeg's bed, Ishmael laments, “he treated me with so much civility and consideration, while I was guilty of great rudeness.”⁸⁷ Certainly Queequeg's loving embrace is a far cry from Weetamoo's slapping hands, but Rowlandson's response to her stay in Weetamoo's wigwam also differs from Ishmael's introspective analysis. Rowlandson uses cultural encounters to reveal the distance between the two women's cultures, not to bridge their differences. This difference is the disparity between presence and absence: to be “unBritish” is to be “unstable and like mad men”—that is, to be without distinct cultural rules.⁸⁸ In this sense Rowlandson's narrative is caught between her own monological vision of colonial encounters and the dialogical interruptions of Algonquian muffled laughter. For if Rowlandson were to acknowledge Algonquian social conventions surrounding status, reciprocity, and adoption, she would as good as admit the land she travels on is Algonquian, not British. According to early modern English travel etiquette, one behaves in compliance with the conventions of the host's culture, not that of the traveler.⁸⁹ Rowlandson's misbehavior complements her portrait of the Wampanoags and Narragansetts as hostile invaders of British territory. By insisting upon the prerogative of British cultural rules, Rowlandson stamps the cultural territory as British not Algonquian. Yet the muffled laughter of her captors unsettles this vision of New England.

Notes

1. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 23.

2. This is not to say the Puritans were completely without humor or wit: Moments of comedy erupt in the most serious of works—such as Michael Wigglesworth's “Day of Doom.” Critic John Gatta has written of the importance of wit in Edward Taylor's poetry (Gracious Laughter) and Harrison T. Meserole has written an overview of Puritan humor called “‘A Kind of Burr’: Colonial New England's Heritage of Wit,” Gracious Laughter: The Meditative Wit of Edward Taylor (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989). Yet the notion of America's Christian forefathers as humorless is part of our sense of cultural origins. In his book Indi'n Humor, Kenneth Lincoln speaks of “a Puritan exclusion of humor from the serious or sacred (as I grew up anyway),” Indi'n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 22; and Bakhtin argues that “Early Christianity … condemned laughter. … Only permanent seriousness, remorse, and sorrows for his sins befit the Christian,” M.M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 73.

3. The “whiteback” joke is from Charlie Hill's appearance on The Tonight Show and is republished in Kenneth Lincoln's book Indi'n Humor as follows: “the first English immigrants … were illegal aliens—‘Whitebacks, we call ‘em.’ Hill imagines the Algonquians asking innocently, ‘You guys gonna stay long?’” (Lincoln, 6). Paula Gunn Allen's joke is from a conversation.

4. M.M. Bakhtin, The Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 164. My application of Bakhtin's carnivalesque laughter to moments of imperialism is not entirely unprecedented. In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), Peter Stallybrass and Allon White note that in the seventeenth century, the fair was a staging ground for the “spoils of colonized cultures” and was a means by which “imperial superiority” was confirmed and distributed to European plebeians (41-42). In this essay I am following Kenneth Lincoln in arguing that Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque is equally important for understanding American Indian responses to colonization as it is for understanding the ways in which Europeans grappled with their relationship to the cultures they colonized (Lincoln, 44-46).

5. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 6.

6. My reasons for labeling the Puritan understanding of reality as monological are complex, and I discuss them in greater depth in the book-length version of this project. To summarize, I label Puritan histories as (attempted) monologues because they are based upon a theology of the “mono-logos” (the word of a single, unified God). Thus, as in traditional dramas in Puritan histories, “from the very beginning everything is predetermined, closed-off and finalized” since reality itself is predestined by the one right and true God (Bakhtin, The Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 18).

7. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 11-12.

8. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: W.W. Norton., 1967), 59.

9. The “gayety” of Queequeg's story can be attested to both by our own laughter and the fact that the incident serves to cement their friendship. Directly after the incident, Ishmael continues to cling to Queequeg “like a barnacle” (Melville, 61).

10. Luise Van Keuren, “The American Indian as Humorist in Colonial Literature,” A Mixed Race, ed. Frank Shuffelton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 86.

11. Ibid., 86.

12. Stallybrass and White, 41.

13. Bakhtin, The Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 164.

14. Duban points to the connection between whaling and the American “frontier.” As William Gilpin, a mid-nineteenth-century politician, stressed, America's “‘pioneer army’ consisted both of overland adventurers and a marine whaling fleet,” in James Duban, Melville's Major Fiction (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983), 86.

15. Melville, 67.

16. Somewhat ironically, at least one Pequot (William Apess) led an Indian uprising in Massachusetts during Melville's lifetime.

17. These texts include Roger Williams' A Key Into the Language of America (1643), Thomas Shepard/John Eliot's New England's First Fruits (1643), Eliot's The Day-Breaking … of the Gospell with the Indians in New England (1647), Shepard's “The Clear Sun-shine of the Gospel Breaking Forth upon the Indians on New-England” (1648), Edward Winslow's The Glorious Progress (1649), Henry Whitfield's “The Light appearing more and more toward the perfect Day” (1651), Whitfield's Strength out of Weaknesse (1652), Eliot/Mayhew's Tears of Repentance (1653), Eliot's A Late and Further Manifestation (1655), (Anonymous) A Further Accompt (1659), Eliot's A Further Account (1660), (Anon.) A Brief Narration (1671), Eliot's Indian Dialogues (1675), and twenty-odd books translated into Massachusetts by Eliot and his Massachusetts aides. See Ola Winslow, John Eliot: Apostle to the Indians (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), 200-202, and J. William T. Youngs Jr., “The Indian Saints of Early New England,” EAL XVI (3) Winter 1981/82: 254-56.

18. Neal Salisbury, “Social Relationships on a Moving Frontier: Natives and Settlers in Southern New England, 1638-1675,” Man in the Northeast No. 33 (Spring 1987): 89-95.

19. The phrase “bursts out into a loud register” is Bakhtin's. See The Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 165.

20. Van Keuren, 84, and Mary Rowlandson, “A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson,” (1682), ed. Amy Schranger Lang, Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women's Narratives, ed. William Andrews (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 34, 51.

21. Rowlandson, 45.

22. Critic Margaret Davis notes that Rowlandson “names their [Wampanoag women's] offenses more frequently” than men's offenses; however, I would argue that it might be reasonable to presume that Rowlandson also offended Wampanoag women more. See Margaret H. Davis, “Mary Rowlandson's Self-Fashioning as Puritan Goodwife,” EAL Vol 27(1) 1992: 55.

23. Rowlandson, 45.

24. David Sewell, “‘So Unstable and Like Mad Men They Were’: Language and Interpretation in American Captivity Narratives,” A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 47. Rowlandson, 54.

25. M. Davis, 54-55. Teresa Toulouse, “‘My Own Credit’: Strategies of (E)valuation in Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative,” American Literature, 64(4) (December 1992): 657-58.

26. Catherine Marten, Wampanoags in the Seventeenth Century: An Ethnohistorical Survey, Plimoth Plantation Inc., Occasional Papers in Old Colony Studies, No.2. (Dec. 1970), 19. Also see Kathleen Bragdon, The Native People of Southern New England, 1500-1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 169.

27. Kathleen Bragdon, “Another Tongue Brought In”: An Ethnohistorical Study of Native Writings in Massachusett (Ph.D. Dissertation, 1981), 119.

28. Kathleen Bragdon quotes Roger Williams' A Key Into the Language of America (1643), 5, in The Native People of Southern New England, 1500-1650, 169.

29. Kathleen Bragdon, “‘Emphaticall Speech and the Great Action’: An Analysis of Seventeenth-Century Native Speech Events Described in Early Sources,” Man in the Northeast (Spring 1987) No. 33: 103-05, 108.

30. Bragdon, “Emphaticall Speech and the Great Action,” 105.

31. Ibid., 104.

32. Rowlandson, 40, 45, 46, 48, 49, 53.

33. Benjamin Church, “Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip's War …” (1716), So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Response to King Philip's War, 1676-1677, ed. Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), 73-74.

34. Rowlandson, 43.

35. Rowlandson, 43, footnote 25.

36. Toulouse, 658.

37. Rowlandson, 53.

38. Ibid., 36; Toulouse, 658.

39. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 178.

40. Robert Steven Grumet, “Sunksquaws, Shamans, and Tradeswomen: Middle Atlantic Coastal Algonkian Women during the 17th and 18th Centuries,” Women and Colonization: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock (New York: Praeger, 1980): 51.

41. Increase Mather, “A Brief History of the Warr with the Indians in New-England” 1676, So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip's War, 1676-77, ed. Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), 137-38.

42. See M. Davis, Lyle Koehler, A Search for Power: The ‘Weaker Sex’ in Seventeenth-Century New England (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), and Margaret Olofson Thickston, Fictions of the Feminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Representation of Women (Ithaca: Cornell Uviersity Press, 1988).

43. Rowlandson, 43, 45, 53, 57-58.

44. Ibid., 53.

45. Myra Jehlen quotes William Bradford, “The Literature of Colonization,” The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. 1, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 90.

46. Puritan women during this period were often chastised for excessive dress.

47. Marten, 19. Bragdon, Native Peoples of Southern New England, 171. Drawings of King Philip and other sachem display a similar use of wampum. For example, see Gary Nash, Red, White, & Black: The Peoples of Early North America, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992), 102; and Alan and Mary Simpson, eds. Diary of King Philip's War 1675-76 by Colonel Benjamin Church (Chester, CT: The Pequot Press, 1975), 51. The only portrait of squaw-sachems that I know of is by De Bry and is based on White's sketches from the Roanoke settlement. Since De Bry often changed White's drawing radically, it is unlikely that the drawing is highly accurate. See Jehlen, 65-66.

48. Rowlandson, 58.

49. Ibid., 58.

50. M. Davis, 52.

51. See M. Davis and Teresa Toulouse.

52. Rowlandson, 59.

53. Theodor Galle's engraving of Amerigo Vespucci and an American Indian Woman (after a drawing by Jan van der Straet) is the quintessential reproduction of European perceptions of the gendered relations between American Indians and Europeans (Hulme, xii). In Galle's engraving, the naked American Indian woman is rising out of a hammock to greet Vespucci; Vespucci stands erect, holding a phallic annunciation of his conquest—a flag and flagstaff. For an analysis of this image and others like it, see Jehlen, 31-32, 38-39; Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europeans and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797 (New York: Routledge, 1986), 3, 8-9; Louis Montrose, “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” New World Encounters, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 177-211; Helen Carr, “Woman/Indian: ‘The American’ and His Others,” Europe and its Others, Vol. 2, ed. Francis Barker, et al. (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985); and Margarita Zamora, Rereading Columbus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

54. Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 30.

55. Rowlandson 47, 52.

56. Bragdon, The Native People of Southern New England, 1500-1650, 131.

57. Ibid., 131.

58. George R. Hamell, “Mythical Realities and European Contact in the Northeast During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Man in the Northeast, No. 33 (Spring 1987): 67-68.

59. Marten, 20.

60. Rowlandson, 53.

61. Ibid., 53.

62. Ibid., 45.

63. Portraits of Christopher Columbus and Sir Walter Raleigh receiving gifts from Native Americans reflect this interpretation of events. See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), plate 6, and Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1984), 47. While American Indians presented European explorers and settlers with necessities such as food and water (and land), drawings of explorers insist upon depicting gift giving as American Indians' acknowledgment of European supremacy and right to rule. In the portraits of Raleigh and Columbus, American Indians fawn and cower before the explorers, while Raleigh sits enthroned and Columbus stands erect and regal before them. For the European home audience, American Indians' recognition of Columbus and his flag signals their witnessing and acceptance of his claim to their territory.

64. Rowlandson, 44, 48.

65. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Iroquois Women, European Women,” Women, ‘Race,’ & Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks & Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), 250-51.

66. Rowlandson, 44.

67. For the curious, Winthrop's reasons were as follows: to (1) carry the [true] gospel to the Americas, (2) escape desolation of European churches by “flying into the wilderness,” (3) ease the burdens of overpopulation, (4) make use of “wasted” land, (5) escape competitiveness, envy, and greed, (6) find a less corrupt place to raise children, (7) nurture a church from infancy, (8) provide an example of forsaking worldly possession, and (9) do the “great work in hand” God has for his servants. John Winthrop, “Reasons to be considered for … the Intended Plantation in New England,” (1629), The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology, ed. Alam Heimert and Nicholas Delbanco (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 71-72.

68. Winthrop, 73.

69. Rowlandson, 41.

70. Ibid., 39.

71. Ibid., 33.

72. Ibid., 40, 45.

73. Ibid., 49.

74. Ibid., 34, 47-48.

75. Ibid., 46.

76. Ibid., 46.

77. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797 (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3.

78. By “real people” I am employing the distinction Algonquians made between humans and “other-than-human” beings, as argued in George R. Hamell's essay, “Mythical Realities and European Contact in the Northeast During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.”

79. Bragdon, Native Peoples of Southern New England, 226.

80. Williams, 104. Similarly, when William Wood interviewed various Algonquians for his 1634 travel narrative, New England's Prospect, he was told that, “These [Mohawks] are a cruell bloody people, which were wont to come downe upon their poore neighbours with more than bruitish savagenesse, spoyling of their Corne, burning their houses, slaying men, ravishing women, yea very Canniball they were, sometimes eating on a man one part after another before his face, and while yet living; in so much that the name of a Mowhack would strike the heart,” 64.

81. Laurie Weinstein-Farson, The Wampanoag (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1989), 22. In Native People of Southern New England, Kathleen Bragdon points out that the term Wampanoag was “probably not an original self-designation” (21). The earlier term used for this community was Pokanoket (“place of clear land”), a name derived from Massasoit's village near Plymouth Plantation (Bragdon 21, Weinstein-Farson 22). Yet, in spite of our uncertainty over what the communities originally called themselves, the names Wampanoag, Pokanoket, and Narragansett were common by the time of Rowlandson's captivity. Moreover, it is clear that all of these groups used the term Mohowaúgsuck or “man-eater” to refer to their enemies the Mohawks. Thus, I believe my argument stands in spite of such complications.

82. Wood, 64.

83. Rowlandson, 34, footnote 13.

84. Ibid., 37.

85. Ibid., 54-55.

86. Rowlandson's loathing of cultural cross-dressing further supports her argument that assimilation (in any direction) is an absurd and unobtainable goal; see Rowlandson, 51-52, 58.

87. Melville, 34.

88. Rowlandson, 54.

89. According to Thomas Palmer, a seventeenth-century theorist about travel, one could ignore the rules of a land only if that land was not a “nation.” Rowlandson's description of the Wampanoags emphasizes that they are not a country in and of themselves. This is very different from Rowlandson's contemporary Benjamin Church, who routinely treats Wampanoag leaders as leaders in their own right. Sir Thomas Palmer, How to Make Our Trauailes Profitable (London, 1606), reprinted (New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1971).