Making Captivity Narratives Relevant to High School...

The captivity narrative genre is not often a favorite type of literature among most students. Perhaps because of the time in which they were written, students have trouble relating to characters whom lived in a setting more than two and three hundred years ago. Although the genre receives attention in many early level American literature college courses, high school English teachers rarely—if at all—teach captivity narratives. When it is used, students perceive the captivity narrative as a historical document rather than a literary text. In other words, students do not recognize captivity narratives as literature. However, the captivity narrative deserves a place in the high school English classroom because as a genre, captivity narratives†¦show more content†¦For Rowlandson’s original audience, her captivity narrative serves multiple literary purposes. Taken at face value, Rowlandson’s narrative both describes the events of her captivity and defe nds her moral, religious, and physical chastity. As the title suggests, Rowlandson depicts her captivity as an example of how God tests a person’s faith with secular temptations. In effect, the narrative is a spiritually didactic argument that teaches its readers how to keep their faith while suffering through affliction. Rowlandson frequently quotes biblical scripture, thereby comparing herself to characters in biblical stories and authenticating her narrative. Although she claims to be a divine example, Rowlandson makes it clear that the threat of captivity could happen to anyone when she describes Native Americans as devilish and savage. By maintaining a religious subject and propagating an anti-Native American sentiment, Rowlandson plays the tunes that her audience wants to hear. As a book that went through nearly thirty editions (Armstrong 375), Rowlandson’s Sovereignty and Goodness of God qualifies as popular fiction as soon as readers find traces of the captivit y narrative in other forms of popular fiction. Before accepting Rowlandson’s work as popular fiction, we must find similarities between the captivity narrative and other popular fiction. To do this, I will compare the captivity narrative to two popular fiction genres—adventure and sentimental novels. Adventure novels,Show MoreRelatedOne Significant Change That Has Occurred in the World Between 1900 and 2005. Explain the Impact This Change Has Made on Our Lives and Why It Is an Important Change.163893 Words   |  656 PagesE SSAYS ON TWENTIETH-C ENTURY H ISTORY In the series Critical Perspectives on the Past, edited by Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig Also in this series: Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, eds., Oral History and Public Memories Tiffany Ruby Patterson, Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life Lisa M. Fine, The Story of Reo Joe: Work, Kin, and Community in Autotown, U.S.A. Van Gosse and Richard Moser, eds., The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture