Creation myths/narratives
• Genre
• Genesis (Judeo-Christian) vs. Pima
• How would you compare/contrast the two? (cite specific
textual details)
• More specifically, how would you compare/contrast the two in
how they might foster a pro-ecological or anti-ecological
perspectives?
Genesis
vs.
Pima
• Written text
• Oral tradition
• Universal/garden
• Specific topography,
rooted in local knowledge
of bioregion
• God/man/creatures
• Persons/creatures
• Centrality of man to
narrative
• Centrality of other
creatures to narrative
• “Dominion”
• “Make it useful”
Early American
Environmental Texts:
Rowlandson, Crevecoeur, Emerson
A Narrative of the
Captivity and Restoration
of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
Published 1682
Some key terms/ideas: captivity narrative,
wilderness, typological reading
Context
• 1675-78: King Philip’s War (First Indian War; Metacomet’s
War)
• Biggest military, economic, and political disruption in all of
17th C Puritan New England
• Relative to the population at the time, the war was one of the
most fatal and costly in North American history
• Rowlandson captured after an attack on Lancaster, MA on the
morning of February 10, 1676. She was held captive for 11
weeks
1773 edition: Rowlandson with gun
1773 edition: detail
Captivity Narratives
• Rowlandson’s tale is an example of the genre “captivity
narratives” that were common throughout the late-17th and
18th Cs.
• Captivity narratives: stories of people captured by enemies
they consider uncivilized. Sometimes these tales end in the
return of the captive, other times in his/her “assimilation.”
Captivity Narratives
• Framed by abduction and restoration.
• Focus on travels, experience, and suffering.
• Stress moral and religious meaning.
• Generate stark divisions between familiar and unfamiliar,
‘civilized’ and ‘savage,’ even as such divisions are often also
complicated by the narrative.
• “Captivity” is usually only defined in one direction.
Rowlandson’s Narrative
• Rowlandson, born in England and married to a clergyman in New
England, found strength in her religion and used her captivity as
evidence of God’s intervention and goodness.
• Four printings in short amount of time, widespread readership, and
first American “bestseller” (for over 150 years).
• Biblical typology: a way of interpreting events as shaped by God and
pre-figured by Biblical stories and parables.
• Narrative has a dual structure: eternal narrative (typological) vs.
removes.
• American/biblical wilderness.
Rowlandson’s Narrative
I went along that day mourning and lamenting, leaving farther my
own country, and traveling into a vast and howling wilderness, and I
understood something of Lot’s wife’s temptation, when she looked
back. We came that day to a great swamp, by the side of which we
took up our lodging that night. When I came to the brow of the hill,
that looked toward the swamp, I thought we had been come to a
great Indian town (though there were none but our own company).
The Indians were as thick as trees: it seemed as if there had been a
thousand hatchets going at once. If one looked before one there was
nothing but Indians, and behind one, nothing but Indians, and so on
either hand, I myself in the midst, and no Christian soul near me, and
yet how hath the Lord preserved me in safety? Oh the experience
that I have had of the goodness of God, to me and mine! (318)
Typological reading
• Events are lesson and warning for English
• Story always mapped onto eternal truth and its Biblical
textualization.
• Thus, allowed ‘normal’ people to open book of scripture and
see it as a type of their own experiences and stories.
• Rowlandson’s text thus offers at least two ways that it wants
itself to be read: the historical narrative and the biblical narrative.
Rowlandson’s Narrative
• Typological reading:
And after I was thoroughly hungry, I was never again satisfied. For
though sometimes it fell out, that I got enough, and did eat till I
could eat no more, yet I was as unsatisfied as I was when I began.
And now I could see that Scripture verified (there being many
Scriptures which we do not take notice of, or understand till we
are afflicted) “Thou shalt eat and not be satisfied” (Micah 6.14).
Now might I see more than ever before, the miseries that sin
hath brought upon us. Many times I should be ready to run
against the heathen, but the Scripture would quiet me again,
“Shall there be evil in a City and the Lord hath not done it?”
(Amos 3.6) (327)
Rowlandson’s Narrative
• Organized into a series of “removes.”
But now, the next morning, I must turn my back upon the town,
and travel with them into the vast and desolate wilderness, I
knew not whither. It is not my tongue, or pen, that can express
the sorrows of my heart, and bitterness of my spirit that I had at
this departure: but God was with me in a wonderful manner,
carrying me along, and bearing up my spirit, that it did not quite
fail. (312)
Rowlandson’s Narrative
• How does Rowlandson depict Native Americans?
Now away we must go with those barbarous creatures, with our
bodies wounded and bleeding, and our hearts no less than our
bodies. . . . This was the dolefulest night that ever my eyes saw.
Oh the roaring, and singing and dancing, and yelling of those
black creatures in the night, which made the place a lively
resemblance of hell. And miserable was the waste that was there
made of horses, cattle, sheep, swine, calves, lambs, roasting pigs,
and fowl. (311)
Rowlandson’s Narrative
• Why do images of food/moments of eating come up often in
the narrative?
The first week of my being among them I hardly ate any thing;
the second week I found my stomach grow very faint for want of
something; and yet it was very hard to get down their filthy trash;
but the third week, though I could think how formerly my
stomach would turn against this or that, and I could starve and
die before I could eat such things, yet they were sweet and
savory to my taste. (317)
America and Wilderness
• What makes America unique during the colonial period? It
has tons of wild spaces!
• America has a complicated relationship with wilderness: it is
feared; it is loved; it is what makes America unique during the
colonial period and onward.
• In his seminal work, Wilderness and the American Mind,
Roderick Nash argues that “wilderness was the basic
ingredient of American civilization” (xi).
America and Wilderness
Biblical Views
• Eden, the perfect space, is a middle landscape (a form of
pastoral). Wilderness is depicted as both positive and
negative.
• The Old Testament reveals that the ancient Hebrews regarded
the wilderness as a cursed land.
• Wilderness is associated with exile, punishment, being kicked
out of Eden.
America and Wilderness
Biblical Views
• But…the very harsh conditions of wilderness make it a place of
sanctuary from society, a place of preparation for spirituality.
• Israelites wandering in the desert for 40 years.
• Jesus fasting and praying for 40 days and tempted by Satan in
the Judean desert.
America and Wilderness
• European colonists imagine America as a place of wilderness,
where civilization can be built, but also an escape from the
corruption of European society.
America and Wilderness
• European colonists imagine America as a place of wilderness,
where civilization can be built, but also an escape from the
corruption of European society.
Later views:
• Wilderness: challenging; rugged space; sublime. Escape
comes from challenge to the self, the need for individual
courage, the possibility of solitude and encounter with
Otherness.
America and Wilderness
Negative View
• It could kill you.
• It could make you wild, uncivilized, evil.
• “The pioneer, in short, lived too close to wilderness for
appreciation” (Nash 24).
• Example: Mary Rowlandson.
America and Wilderness
•
•
•
•
Positive Potential
Wilderness as spiritual place – Rowlandson’s reading of her
experiences – if we hear most clearly from God in nature, then
wilderness of America may make it a spiritual place
Freedom
Release from social conventions
Potential of developing an earthly paradise
For Tuesday
Reading questions:
• At the time Emerson was writing, there really was no such thing as
“American literature.” U.S. writers were assumed to be less
sophisticated and important. How could Emerson’s essay, Nature,
be seen as a manifesto rejecting the European tradition and
standing up for American art and philosophy?
• In Chapter I, “Nature” (28-30), what is the poet’s unique
relationship with the landscape?
• In his conclusion Emerson says, “Empirical science is apt to cloud
the sight, and by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to
bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole” (51).
What is he saying here? Do you agree with him? What is Emerson’s
overall relation to science in this essay?
• Emerson was trained as a minister, but then broke with the church
and embraced philosophy. How is this essay influenced by a
Christian tradition, but how does it also depart from what we would
typically consider Christian thought? (look especially at the last few
pages)