Teaching "A Very Surprising Narrative"


Part 1: The Handout
Assignment Overview:
We will be reading Abraham Panther's "A very surprising narrative..." and we will use Panther's account as a starting point to examine the ways in which gender tropes began to develop in the following contexts:
·Historical Context
·Social Context
·Links to Other Works
You will come to class with a short response (300-500 words) containing cited information on the location and validity of Panther's narrative. That response will be the starting point of our in-class discussion.

Details:
You will read Abraham Panther's "A very surprising narrative..." and Annette Kolodny's "Turning the Lens" (pdfs provided) and analyze them for historic and social contexts. Link the Panther Narrative to at least one other reading from the class using Kolodny's methods.
Your analysis can consider the following questions:
How trustworthy is the text?
Why would someone tell this story? Why did it become popular?
What makes this work "surprising"? Given what we have discussed in class on issues of gender and race, what underlying message(s) or social norms are enforced here? What norms are broken?
In relation to the other work, how is the Panther Narrative unique? How is it similar? Why do those differences or similarities exist? How do they effect both stories?

Check List:
Did you give a thorough analysis and not just a summary?
Did you include at least one other reading from the class?
Did you discuss the Panther Narrative in its social and historical contexts? Did you model your analysis after Kolodny's methods?

Part 2: In Class Assignment
Students would first break into groups and discuss their responses with each other. Anyone who did not do the homework would be sent home for the day.

We would open the floor to discussion, and each group would show on the board the links that they found to the other readings in the class, making a concept map in markers on the whiteboard demonstrating how the stories are interconnected. Students would mark differences as well as similarities.

Once we have mapped out the reading visually in its context, we would discuss what our findings mean. Students would be encouraged to discuss how gender plays out in the Panther Narrative and why.

Part 3: Included Materials
Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn Zabelle, ed.Women’s Captivity Narratives. New York: Penguin, 1998.

Kolodny, Annette. “Turning the Lens on "The Panther Captivity": A Feminist Exercise in Practical Criticism.” Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 329-345.

Abstract and new sources

Sorry this is a few minutes late; I had a heck of a time getting this down to 500 words. Notes and a list of more sources to follow.

Surprising Narratives, Stable Boundaries: The Panther Narrative and US Adversarial Self-Identity

From the British to Indians, Russians and now terrorists, American identity since her birth in 1776 has been continually tied to adversity to outside threats. Framing US identity in terms of her enemies is often linked back to the Revolutionary War; often captivity narratives depicted Indians as dark demonic other, reinforcing the binary divide between ‘savage’ and civilized, captive and captor (Colley 205, Burnham 2). This divide, Ebersole argues, was used to form a sense of self for the new republic, creating a ‘false consciousness’ that trapped redeemed captives ‘within the discursive boundaries’ of the puritan clergy, creating propaganda that promoted this adversarial divide between red and white (61-2). In my essay, I will use the “Panther Captivity” to illustrate narrative tropes found in Revolution-Era captivity narratives that helped to foster the fledgling nation’s sense of self as civilization fighting against first the tyranny of an irrational Britain and then an uncivilized frontier.

Indians became the monstrous fantastic lurking just outside the borders of civilization and women were the workhorse upon whose backs the nation could conquer and assimilate both natives and their lands. Native and women’s bodies became encoded in propaganda for the new republic, the real pain and hardship of the American frontier and Indian wars made spectacle and repurposed for the new nation’s identity (Ebersole 145-6). In the hegemonic view of Indian-white relations that were created, women were often the vulnerable point at which the Indian could attack not just the country itself but US core identity; that women could cross cultural boundaries and interact freely with both whites and natives was a sign that national markers of identity – “languages, rituals, and institutions” – were discursive in nature and not tied to biology or white superiority (Castiglia 7), a fact that American settlers had to fight in order to establish an identity separate from Britain and native civilizations. Panther’s tale of not just a woman but a ‘lady’ being able to outsmart, conquer and cultivate the untamed frontier plays into this need to create a myth of savagery conquered by white civilization.

Unfortunately, scholars still insist on reframing captivity narratives such as the Panther Narrative in analysis comfortable to Western tropes rather than accurate to the narrative’s cultural/historical nature. Richard Slotkin links the giant that the unnamed lady slays to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight without any evidence that the unknown author would be familiar with Arthurian legends and only a vague connection to the Green Knight as ‘vegetation god”, an assertion that Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola echoes in Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives (257, 84). While Benjamin Franklin may have been one of the first to recognize Indian-white relations as a “contest of civilizations” (Heard 9), the mythos of Indian as savage in need of conquest and subjugation influenced and continues to inform North American Indian-white politics, often resulting in legislation that further subjugates native populations under Western-centric laws (Simpson 252). It is imperative that captivity narratives not only be looked at for their content but their function in building and continuing to maintain America’s adversarial self-identity as we continue our relations not only with other countries but with the subjugated land and people in our own borders.