Slave Narratives
As I have learned in this class a fair amount of writings and novels in general are literatures of contact, usually involving the meeting of two or more distinct groups or cultures. A reaction such as this often has a desirable byproduct, an alluring text that shares similarities and also differences of the groups and cultures that it blends together so eloquently. Furthermore, when a text is spawn from such a situation one tends to notice many of the text-specific patterns and archetypes that are present. In this paper I would like to thoroughly examine these text specific patterns and bring them to the attention of the reader using various examples and quotes. The two pieces I am going to pay attention to are Mary Rowlandson?s narrative in Women?s Indian Captivity Narratives and Harriet Jacobs narrative in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, An American Slave & Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
The first piece to be dissected is Mary Rowlandson?s Indian narrative. Here we have two distinct and very dissimilar groups, the overzealous religiously engulfed Puritans and the devilishly savage Indians. This piece borne a few text-specific patterns, the first
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