The Captivity Narrative
Almost three centuries before Hearst, a not dissimilar abduction took place. “There was twenty-four of us taken alive and carried captive,” wrote the author of the Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, published in 1682 (and now available at the Project Gutenberg website, among other online locations). Rowlandson was a collateral victim of King Philip’s War, a seventeenth-century conflict in which a Native American confederation led by Metacom (a Wampanoag sachem called King Philip by the English) fought to retake its land from the colonials. She was captured during the Lancaster Raid of 1675 when a party of Nipmucs, Narragansetts, and Wampanoags laid waste to the Massachusetts Bay Colony settlement of Lancaster Village. Much like twentieth-century readers who thrilled to true-crime titillation of Every Secret Thing, New England colonials were fascinated. Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration would become one of the first bona fide American literary hits, going through four editions during the author’s lifetime. It is easy to see why. In lurid detail, Rowlandson evokes the scene after the attack, noting that it was a “solemn sight to see so many Christians lying in their blood, some here, and some there, like a company of sheep torn by wolves, all of them stripped naked by a company of hell-hounds, roaring, singing, ranting, and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out.”
Rowlandson’s account wasn’t the first, nor would Hearst’s be the last, but both are examples of a genre that scholars call captivity narratives, accounts of abduction by racial, religious, or political others, usually concluding with the authors’ eventual rescue and their reflections on the ways the experiences transformed them. Such narratives have always found a readership, but they resonated with particular power among colonial readers. As cultural critic Richard A. Slotkin writes in Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860, of the “four narrative works which attained the status of best seller between 1680 and 1720, three were captivity narratives; the fourth was Pilgrim’s Progress.”
The reasons for the popularity of these narratives are many. In The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, Harvard University historian Jill Lepore explains that “Rowlandson employed all the strategies of description available to contemporary chroniclers…numbers, stark images, and biblical references. And she invoked all the most powerful signs of chaos—spilled blood, diabolical Indians, naked Englishmen.” The narrative is autobiographical and consciously literary, Rowlandson promising the reader a harrowing journey into bondage and a safe return, with a newfound appreciation for order and authority. If the lesson is strongly flavored with sensationalism, that only increases the impact. As both sermon and propaganda, the captivity narrative successfully deployed elements found in both literary and artistic expressions of the gothic genre, which would soon become wildly popular on both sides of the Atlantic.