Graduate Program

English

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

2008

Thesis Director

Angela Vietto

Thesis Committee Member

Ann Boswell

Thesis Committee Member

Jad Smith

Abstract

This thesis traces the path of Hannah Dustan's story of captivity from its first appearance in the seventeenth century through today and explores the cultural history and significance behind her story. Dustan's story of her capture and bloody escape from the Abenaki tribe was first told by Puritan minister Cotton Mather, in his 1697 sermon Humiliations Follow 'd with Deliverance. Incorporating captivity narratives into sermons was not atypical, but it may surprise modem readers to find a story with a protagonist who commits murder in a sermon about humiliation. By examining primary documents and exploring the history of the captivity narrative genre, I explain how this is not only possible, but would have made perfect sense to its contemporary readers.

Dustan's story takes on new life in the nineteenth century as a new generation of readers is exposed to her story. Curiously readers are no longer reading Mather's version of the story, but a series of versions re-written and re-imagined by contemporary writers. Writers likeTimothy Dwight, B.L. Mirick, John Greenleaf Whittier, Sarah J. Hale and Nathaniel Hawthorne all compose their own version of the story. With the shift in moral ideals and the changing views on motherhood, children, and Native Americans, the nineteenth-century writers have a whole new set of problems to grapple with when telling Dustan's story, and feel the need to adapt her character and her actions to make them a better fit for their audience. Originally written during a time of war and intense racial conflict, the story was clearer in the seventeenth century. By the nineteenth, with the Indian Wars in the past, readers were not as easily able to relate to the sense of life-and-death conflict so central to earlier readers' understanding of the text. In order to write about Dustan and make her story make sense, the story and its heroine had to be revised to fit the current issues and concerns. In this paper I present the ways that some authors tried to manipulate Dustan into a suitable heroine that could agree with nineteenth century ideals.

Visually, Dustan's image is presented and preserved in the two statues that have been erected in her honor. Created in the nineteenth century, these statues tell a similar version of Dustan' s story as the texts written about her at that time. They continue to intrigue us, however, and one is the model for a bobblehead doll, created by the state of New Hampshire in 2008. The nineteenth-century writers established a pattern of reinterpretation that continues to re-shape the story today. Dustan's story is currently being re-hashed by yet another generation, whose view of her is complicated by their own values.

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