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.