Conflicting Cultures in Louise Erdrichs Captivity Essay example -- Lo

Kidnapping colonists during the struggle for land in the proto(prenominal) centuries of American floor was a strong force influencing the images of Native Americans circulate among the Puritan pioneers. During these centuries, the battles between the natives and the Puritans cost thousands of lives on both sides, and countless stories in the forms of captivity narratives revealed truths and myths about the Native people. Although there were countless pieces of literature and propaganda make in this time period, the actual Indian captivity narratives have been change down to works that presumably record with some degree of verisimilitude the experiences of non-Indians who were captures by American Indians (Derounian-Stodoloa, Levernier, 9). Through such a narrative by bloody shame Rowlandson, who was taken captive by the Wampanoag tribe in 1676, the contemporary writer and poet Louise Erdrich shows another side of history that could not have been expressed by the surviving captiv es hundreds of years ago. That recreation is her poem, Captivity, which uses the inner conflict of the captive cleaning lady to express both historical feelings of Native Americans and their place among whites, along with Erdrichs conflicts within her own life. Coming from a mixed family, with her mother organism part Native American, Erdrich experiences a pull from both her European history and Native American heritage. Through her poem, Captivity, Erdrich exposes the inner conflict that is felt by both historical women and herself, such as the conflicting feelings and cultural pulls of the twain societies through sharing experiences of removal from their known worlds and returns to the white mans society. In order to fully understand Erdrichs interpretation... ...rk, 1993.Erdrich, Louise. Captivity, in Kelly, Joseph ed. The patsy Reader Poems. Norton and Company impertinently York, 2001.Fast, Robin Riley. Resistant History revise the captivity Narrative in Captivi ty and Blackrobe Isaac Jones. American Indian gloss and Research Journal. 231 (1999) 69-96.Logan, Lisa. Mary Rowlandsons Captivity and the amaze of the Woman Subject. Early American Literature. 28 (1993) 255-277.Namias, June. White Captives Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier.University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill, 1993.Vaughan, Alden T. Early English Paradigms for New World Natives. American Antiquarian Society. 1021 (1992) 33-67.Woodard, Maureen L. Female Captivity and the Deployment of dry wash in Three Early American Texts. Papers on lyric poem and Literature. 322 (1996)