The Afterlives of King Philip's
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The Afterlives of King Philip’s War: Negotiating War and Identity in Early America by John David Miles Department of English Duke University Date: ____________________________ Approved: _____________________________________ Priscilla Wald, supervisor _____________________________________ Matt Cohen _____________________________________ Cathy Davidson _____________________________________ Jane Thrailkill _____________________________________ Leonard Tennenhouse Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2009 ABSTRACT The Afterlives of King Philip’s War: Negotiating War and Identity in Early America by John David Miles Department of English Duke University Date: ____________________________ Approved: _____________________________________ Priscilla Wald, supervisor _____________________________________ Matt Cohen _____________________________________ Cathy Davidson _____________________________________ Jane Thrailkill _____________________________________ Leonard Tennenhouse An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2009 Copyright by John David Miles 2009 Abstract “The Afterlives of King Philip’s War” examines how this colonial American war entered into narratives of history and literature from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and investigates how narrative representations of the War restructured both genre and the meaning of the historical event itself. This investigation finds its roots in colonial literature and history – in the events of King Philip’s War and the texts that it produced – but moves beyond these initial points of departure to consider this archive as a laboratory for the study of the relationship between genre and knowledge on one hand, and literature and the construction of (proto-) national community on the other. Because of its unique place in the history of the colonies, as well as its positioning within literary studies of Puritan New England, King Philip’s War is an example not just of how one community faced a crisis of self-definition, but how that crisis was influenced by, and in turn is reflected in, the literature it produced. In this conception, genre is more than literary form, but represents a social technology with implications for the broader production of knowledge. Following the use and production of genre in narrative reveals both literary history and the complicated map of how narrative constructs knowledge in tension with the conventions of genre simultaneously hem in and catalyze reading practices. iv Dedication To Mildred Roach Miles, for unwittingly starting me down this path many years ago. With many thanks and loving memory. v Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv List of Tables .................................................................................................................... vii List of Figures .................................................................................................................. viii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ ix Introduction: Remembering the Forgotten War: Using King Philip’s War to Narrate American Community ..........................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Letters to London: King Philip’s War Crosses the Atlantic ............................47 Chapter 2: Capturing Genre: Mary Rowlandson In and Out of the Context of King Philip’s War .....................................................................................................................110 Chapter 3: Born to Die: Writing King Philip’s War into American History ..................172 Epilogue: Not Fade Away: King Philip’s War and the Persistence of History ..............236 Bibliography .....................................................................................................................240 Biography .........................................................................................................................260 vi List of Tables Table 1: A summary of the newsbook reports published in London during and immediately following King Philip's War. .......................................................................63 vii List of Figures Figure 1: “Shipwreck makes a romantic return” by Nolte and May. ..................................2 Figure 2: Advertisement for the clipper ship the King Philip . ............................................5 Figure 3: Detail of an illustration of King Philip from Nathaniel Coverly’s 1770 edition of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative. .............................................................7 Figure 4: North, across the bow of the King Philip. Ocean Bay Beach, San Francisco, California May 19, 2007. .................................................................................46 Figure 5: Page from The Present State of New-England (1675) with the Boston Council’s proclamation regarding the treatment of Indian allies. .....................................................70 Figure 6: Actual broadside from the Boston council regarding Indian allies. .................72 Figure 7: Page from A Continuation of the State of New-England (1676). .....................89 Figure 8: Frontispiece from Zacharias Fowle’s 1770 edition of the Rowlandson’s narrative. .........................................................................................................................163 Figure 9: Detail from Coverly’s 1771 edition of Rowlandson’s work. ..........................165 Figure 10: Woodcut from Coverly’s 1770 edition of Rowlandson’s text. ......................167 Figure 11: Detail from the title page of John Boyle’s 1773 edition of Rowlandson’s narrative. .........................................................................................................................169 Figure 12: Edwin Forrest as Metamora. ..........................................................................205 viii Acknowledgments One of the great ironies of graduate education is that the doctorate is conferred for individual effort, when the reality of the process is a much larger, collective enterprise, one involving classmates, mentors, fellow conference goes, writing and reading groups, librarians, friends, and family. By taking a moment now to thank those who had the greatest influence on my graduate career I hope that I can begin to at least recognize some of the debts of gratitude I owe, while simultaneously acknowledging that I could never hope to thank everyone who had a part my graduate education. My decision to enter graduate school was initially made following an undergraduate seminar at Trinity University taught by Caroline Levander. It was in that class, following my conversations with Caroline and my classmates – Vanita Reddy chief among them – that I began to understand the promise and possibility of literary criticism. This enchantment was fed by discussions with my friends and general intellctual raconteurs Todd Ferguson and Kevin Beck – two others of a literary bent – whose rigorous and creative intellects prodded me forward, even in the most non-academic of settings. While studying for my MA at the University of Arizona I learned that not only can detailed reading be rewarding, but so can teaching others to find their own literary recompense be a productive endeavor in its own right. I owe this to the training that I received at the hands of two dedicated teaching advisors, D.R. Ransdell and Joanne Behling, but also to my peers in our teaching group – Ryan Moeller chief among them – who demonstrated that passionate teaching need not usurp and engagement with life. ix If Trinity gave birth to my passion for scholarship, Arizona offered me the language to articulate this desire; without a class in my first semester with Annette Kolodny I would never have understand the social and cultural importance of literary scholarship. The prodding and mentorship that I received from Greg Jackson, Eric Hayot Charlie Bertsch, and most especially my advisor Daniel Cooper-Alarcón, may have pushed me to move beyond Arizona, but if they caused me to change my geographic locale, the questions that they prompted me to ask still echo in my mind. Nor are my fellow students at Arizona forgotten, as Amy Hamilton and Emily Dagger continue to prod me out of the rutted tracks of intellectual laziness, even if from greater distances than before. More than anything else, I remember my years at the University of Arizona as ones in which the possibilities of the field of literary studies were revealed to be as broad as the clear blue Western horizon, silly though that may sound. Whatever misgivings I might have had from time to time with the school at large, or frustrations I felt for the institutionalization thereof, I still consider Duke University’s English Department to be the ideal model of engaged and exciting scholarship; as a community of scholars it has no peer, and I simply cannot express how lucky I feel for the years that I spent plodding about the campus. In its intellectual strivings, Duke remains my ideal of academia can be, and I hope that the professors, peers,