A Short Story Review

HI!


What a lovely day it is outside! I'm hoping to go swimming in a little while and then while I'm swimming hopefully it will rain :) :) :) :)

So I read this amazing short story in this awesome book Mels got me, The Vintage Book of American Women Writers. The story is by Mary Rowlandson and it's from 1682. It's obviously an early American story and the intro says it was the precursor of the American novel. The title of the short is pretty self-explanatory, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson-- it dramatizes her experience of being taken captive by the Narragansett tribe in Massachusetts in 1676.  (It's possible there is more to the story than what I read but I don't think so, I think what I read is complete) The intro to the story says Mary was captive for 6 weeks but the narrative in the story is longer I think (Wiki says she was captive for 11 weeks).  ..... It is definitely the most interesting thing I've read from that time or any pre- or early- American stuff. It's probably one of the most interesting things I've read, ever. It's so freaking good!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It's got a lot of good stuff and a lot to think about. A few things that I like about it and that made it such a good read: You'd think that it would be super bigoted: a white female colonist being taken captive by Indians.... but it's actually really insightful and a frank and unusual commentary on the different Europeans and different tribes occupying the northeastern North America. Perhaps it was unintentional, I don't know. But it's a damn sparkly gem of a short story. It is straightforward about quite a bit of things, once you get around the language, and kind of solidified a lot of Early American life stuff for me. Throughout the course of the story, Mary is dealt a few bad hands but you really don't feel sorry for her. I don't know about you guys (like anyone is even reading this ha ha) but I don't like to feel sorry for the protagonist, I mean obviously you want to make a connection with the character but I don't like to pity them. I kind of assumed I would feel sorry for her, and don't get me wrong, she definitely has some shitty stuff happen to her, but mostly... I just wanted to know what was going to happen!!!! Early-Colonist-Versus-Natives stuff has been done a million times, movies etc, but with this story I was immediately taken into that world, forgot about this modern existence and while I was reading, it seemed totally possible that the Natives were so powerful and awesome that they sent the Europeans all back to the motherland. I mean, how often does that happen to you? For me it was like this totally irrational feeling like maybe all of history could be changed if I just make it through this story to find out I'm really reading this back in Italy and that the tribes got to keep their land and all of our modern American Indian history just never happened and everything was alright. It was a super compelling and interesting read. I have always been hugely curious into every aspect of daily early American life and I think that this story and this author do an amazing job of delivering that. It's quite possible that it's such a successful short because it was written by a woman. It's got all of this depth and details and just really interesting snippets of Culture Clash. She admits more than once in the story that the Narragansett are superior to the Europeans in several ways. That is really good to read. It's like, Wow! She's actually saying it! Everything she wrote was like just... REAL. I think Americans look back to Early American life as this mythical, impossible-to-touch thing. For example... sometimes you hear someone say "Oh Thomas Jefferson grew hemp" with this weird bias like it was "alleged" that he grew hemp and it's just what stoners tell people to make smoking weed more like acceptable or whatever. In this she states extremely plainly that the Narragansett used all of the hemp from her barn to set her house on fire. It's literally "...[Started the fire] which they did with Flax and Hemp which they brought out of the barn"... it's just an accurate minute detail of early American life, that if portrayed now would be like this huge thing or blown out of proportion or misused... everything in the story is like that. Just straight up, no sugar on top, just boom, everyone gets killed, her house gets burned down, she's been shot, she's taken on this insane journey with these amazing Narragansetts, she's gotta survive this insane thing and at the same time you really feel compassion for the tribe and PLUS it's like totally funny at parts, probably parts that aren't exactly meant to be funny but they are. Like tobacco addiction. Fucking funny stuff. So great. In this review I just barely skimmed the surface of what this short story is all about, so if this sounds at all interesting or intriguing to you, you should totally give it a read!!!!!!!!!!!! The only off-putting thing about it is the use of biblical text but it fits in really well because she has this bible that someone from the tribe and she kind of makes these connections with the versuses that she hadn't made before in her safe life... it's really interesting. My favorite thing about it is the language, it's totally fucking awesome!!!!!! Like, "Pease" (peas) and "Harty-Chokes" (artichokes) Fryday (Friday) etc... SO CLASSIC!!!! SO GOOD!!!!! I guess my last word of advice to encourage people to read this story is this:  some stuff like say Little House stuff (which I love, don't get me wrong) was written by an adult for children so naturally a lot of stuff is all messed up. Like, umm every single thing about the Indians. It was written at least 40 years after it had all happened. It's riddled with flaws and inconsistencies. But this short story is just about the opposite of that. It's really up front (I assume because at that time it was acceptable to write and speak in this manner, there was no "political correctness" and obviously no one could predict the horrible and awful future of the American Indian tribes. No one would DARE have the guts to write something like this as historical fiction) and it was not written for children but (quoted from the intro) "Written by her own hand for her private use, and now made public at the earnest desire of some friends, and for the benefit of the afflicted". It is full of violence but our protagonist is not really in danger,  in fact it really speaks to human compassion and empathy, which is such a nice change from the misogynist story-telling that basically grips the entertainment industry in it's fist. All in all, the best story I've read yet in this anthology. But I still have a lot more stories to go :) :) :)

Tell me, does it sound interesting to you????
 Love ya,
Smog
P.s. here's her pic from Wiki... I think it's linked if you wanna check the wiki out :)