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2 - Women writers and war

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

By
Jonathan Vincent
Edited by
Dale M. Bauer
Jonathan Vincent
Affiliation:
University of Louisville
Dale M. Bauer
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

From its inception, feminism has not known whether to fight men or to join them;

whether to lament sex differences and deny their importance or to acknowledge

and even valorize such differences; whether to condemn all wars outright or to

extol women’s contributions to war efforts . . . The story of feminismandmale/

female identifications is . . . a tumult of ongoing encounterswith a long, grand

genealogy – from the prototypical maternal figure, the Madonna, to the exemplary

woman warrior, Joan. As discourse, feminism is not just a series of explicit

endorsements but a cluster of implicit presumptions guiding rhetorical choices and

controlling dominant tropes and metaphors.

Jean Elshtain, “Feminism’s War with War”

Exclusions: patria, patrimony, patriarchy

In February 1676, a band of Nipmuc, Narragansett, and Wampanoag Indians assaulted the village of Lancaster, Massachusetts. The raid was a local battle of Metacom's (or King Philip's) War, a bloody imbroglio raging across sectors of New England that would alter profoundly colonists' sense of New World sanctuary and divine commission. Although largely exacerbated by English expansion, and though the war's toll fell most adversely on indigenous Americans, the events at Lancaster that afternoon left numerous colonists dead and many houses in ashes. The assailants, as was customary, took hostages. Among the party of settlers abducted from the scene of that “dreadfull hour” was Mary Rowlandson, a pious pastor's wife, who would spend the next three fretful months traveling or encamped among her enemies: cryptic creatures her biblically filtered optic could regard only as “hell-hounds,” “ravenous beasts,” barbarous “Heathen” devils (The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, 69- 71). Although she was eventually ransomed and returned home, her “affliction,” as she typically described the unwanted adventure, drank so deeply of the “Wine of astonishment” as to violate the bordered integrity of her self-comprehension (112). “I can remember the time when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts,” she reflects, “but now it is other wayes with me” (111).

Six years later, partly to restore that breached fortress of personhood, Rowlandson wrote and published The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), an account of her harrowing capture, bondage, and “redemption” for having survived such an ordeal of spiritual and cultural otherness.

Type
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The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature , pp. 30 - 54
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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  • Women writers and war
  • Edited by Dale M. Bauer, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  • Book: The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature
  • Online publication: 28 September 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9781107001374.004
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  • Women writers and war
  • Edited by Dale M. Bauer, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  • Book: The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature
  • Online publication: 28 September 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9781107001374.004
Available formats
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  • Women writers and war
  • Edited by Dale M. Bauer, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  • Book: The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature
  • Online publication: 28 September 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9781107001374.004
Available formats
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