메리 롤랜슨의 ‘포로서사’: 이론의 포로, 제국의 포로? (Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative: Captured by Theory or Captured by Empire?)

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초록

This paper explores the significance of Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative in a wider context of American cultural history, emphasizing the importance of understanding Rowlandson’s text in connection with the Puritan habitus, not through recent theoretical tendencies too often focusing on race, gender, and class issues regardless of the specific text’s signifying dimensions. Recent interpretations of Rowlandson have thus decontextualized and deterritorialized the complex textures of the text while attempting to save the silenced voices or feelings often identified with those of Mrs. Rowlandson. This reductionist tendency has accomplished its textual mission of saving gendered subjectivity resisting the totalizing thrust of the Puritan ideology, only by disregarding other meaning-producing dimensions of Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative.
What this paper suggests is that we need to focus again on the Puritan ideology deeply embedded in Rowlandson’s text and explore the complex negotiations working in the historical contexts in which this text was produced, namely, the printers of the text, Increase Mather the Amicum, Rowlandson the author herself, and the Puritan audiences in New England. These agents who helped producing the meaning of the text have all different interests in the effort of publishing and circulating the text, but they all shared the Puritan ideologies and worries on the Puritan community in crisis particularly resulted from King Philip’s War, the land war between two races/civilizations. This paper concludes that the upshot of this re-reading is that Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative is a communal religious text aspiring to be an imperial text which will dominate the future American imagination.

영어초록

This paper explores the significance of Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative in a wider context of American cultural history, emphasizing the importance of understanding Rowlandson’s text in connection with the Puritan habitus, not through recent theoretical tendencies too often focusing on race, gender, and class issues regardless of the specific text’s signifying dimensions. Recent interpretations of Rowlandson have thus decontextualized and deterritorialized the complex textures of the text while attempting to save the silenced voices or feelings often identified with those of Mrs. Rowlandson. This reductionist tendency has accomplished its textual mission of saving gendered subjectivity resisting the totalizing thrust of the Puritan ideology, only by disregarding other meaning-producing dimensions of Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative.
What this paper suggests is that we need to focus again on the Puritan ideology deeply embedded in Rowlandson’s text and explore the complex negotiations working in the historical contexts in which this text was produced, namely, the printers of the text, Increase Mather the Amicum, Rowlandson the author herself, and the Puritan audiences in New England. These agents who helped producing the meaning of the text have all different interests in the effort of publishing and circulating the text, but they all shared the Puritan ideologies and worries on the Puritan community in crisis particularly resulted from King Philip’s War, the land war between two races/civilizations. This paper concludes that the upshot of this re-reading is that Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative is a communal religious text aspiring to be an imperial text which will dominate the future American imagination.

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