Unhome and Hearth: Food and Cultural Hybridity in Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God

This blog is written by one of our distinguished guest writers, Sonya Parrish, a doctoral candidate whose work spans the transatlantic long eighteenth century. In more than a few conversations--all of which I prize highly--Sonya has convinced me, with deftness and verve, of the hilarity and epic-ness of Rowlandson's food issues. Stealing food from a baby has been a particularly wonderful image for us to ponder. I am honored and proud to present her excellent blurb here, "Unhome and Hearth." Thanks Sonya!

Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, published in 1682, is at face value an account of one colonial American woman’s captivity among American Indians during King Philip’s War.  However, as a literary work it has come to be known as the preeminent text classified as an Indian captivity narrative.  As a prime example for all captivity narratives after it, Rowlandson’s text worked to formulate the genre as a whole.  Seeped in religious iconography, racial assumptions, and the formation of lived traumatic experiences as testimony, the Indian captivity narrative genre which Rowlandson helped solidify enabled the Puritan community as a whole, and the captive in specific, to form a solidified European cultural identity based widely on differentiation between the captive/Puritan English and the captor/Indian Other. Or so some scholars would have us continually believe.

More recent scholarship from people such as Christopher Castiglia and Michelle Burnham have taken another look at Rowlandson’s account of captivity in light of new feminist and postcolonial theories.  In this vein, I propose we begin to consider Rowlandson the captive in connection with the cultural hybridity she came to represent in the very text Puritans used to uphold English superiority in the brave, new world of the American colonies.  As home is believed to be where the heart is, and the kitchen is commended as the heart of any home, it seems only fitting that food itself serves as the crux for Rowlandson’s realization of cultural change stemming from her captive experience.

From the beginning of her captivity, food is one of Rowlandson’s main concerns.  It could even be classified as an obsession within the text.  In detail, Rowlandson continually chronicles her quest for food, what food she had or was denied, and her constant worries about food.  While she at first resists the temptation of American Indian cuisine, hunger does get the better of Rowlandson’s palate eventually, and her cultural change through food is represented fully during her fifth remove:

The first week of my being among them, I hardly ate any thing; the second week, I found my stomach grow very faint for want of something; and yet it was very hard to get down their filthy trash: but the third week, though I could think how formerly my stomach would turn against this or that, and I could starve and die before I could eat such things, yet they were sweet and savory to my taste. (79)

This is the first, but not the last, instance in the text where Rowlandson highlights her changing taste toward food.  Presented here in survivalist terms, this change from disgust with American Indian food to delight in its taste is a very specific example of the cultural hybridity that Rowlandson undergoes while in captivity.  One can view this passage as a simple statement on hunger; however it must be remembered that cultural identification and cultural consumption are often united. Taste and dietary consumption are closely tied to cultural identification, and this has been the case historically, supported by the fact that a culture can be identified by other cultures or degraded by other cultures according to the food they consume. 

With this in mind, it is interesting to note that Rowlandson does not simply state that she forced herself to eat American Indian food, but rather that she grew to enjoy it.  The food became “sweet and savory to [her] taste” in such a way that she begins to identify herself with what she consumes throughout her captivity.  This change is even more apparent during her seventh remove when she gives an account of her consumption of horse liver:

There came an Indian to them at that time, with a basket of Horse-liver.  I asked him to give me a piece: What says he can you eat Horse-liver? I told him, I would try, if he would give a piece, which he did, and I laid it on the coals to roast; but before it was half ready they got half of it away from me, so that I was fain to take the rest and eat it as it was, with the blood about my mouth, and yet a savory bit it was to me. (81).

The American Indian man with the Horse-liver questions Rowlandson’s ability to eat the meat presumably because she is English and as an Englishwoman it would be assumed that she would not  stoop to eat the liver of a horse.  Rowlandson herself not only consumes the liver, but consumes it raw as was the way with the rest of the tribe surrounding her.  With “blood about [her] mouth” she describes herself in terms much like she described the Indians who attacked the English garrison at the beginning of her text, the “bloody Heathen[s]” (69) who first took her captive.  Her entrance into American Indian culture through food was achieved because she associated herself with a savage display of blood she aligned with Indians earlier in the narrative.

During the remainder of the text, Rowlandson continues to identify herself and her condition through the food she consumes.  In the end, however, Rowlandson is bartered back to her husband and returns to her home, only to be faced with new and different worries about food and consumption. Upon returning to English society, Rowlandson states:

I can remember the time, when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts, and whole nights together, but now it is other ways with me. When all are fast about me, and no eye open, but his who ever waketh, my thoughts are upon things past, upon the awfull dispensation of the Lord towards us; upon his wonderful power and might, in carrying of us through so many difficulties, in returning us in safety, and suffering none to hurt us.  I remember in the night season, how the other day I was in the midst of thousands of enemies, & nothing but death before me: It is then hard to work to persuade myself, that ever I should be satisfied with bread again.  But now we are fed with the finest of Wheat, and, as I may say, with honey out of the rock. Instead of the Husk, we have the fatted Calf. (111)

Keeping Rowlandson’s obsession with food in mind, it is no mere coincidence that a food metaphor should appear to describe the disquieting and different feelings she has when she is returned to her home. 

Homi Bhabha’s idea of unhomeliness, as presented in his introduction to Locations of Culture, sheds some light on the cultural crisis Rowlandson undergoes by the end of her narrative.  Specifically, unhomeliness, or the idea of feeling displaced between two cultures especially in regard to the domestic or private sphere, gives us a perspective into Rowlandson’s change, as much of it deals with food, eating, and her feelings after returning to her home.  Bhabha describes unhomeliness as “the estranging sense of the home and the world – the unhomeliness – that is the extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations” (1137) and this is exactly what we see occurring with Rowlandson at her homecoming.  Her identification with Indian culture through food is further explored as she seems hesitant to say she will ever be comfortable with eating English food or “bread” again.  Within this domestic space of home, where she was once restful, she now feels a restlessness that can never be erased, and she describes this restlessness and uncertainty by using food, the cultural product that most aligned her with Indian life throughout her narrative.  Her identification with Indian culture in the form of food consumption makes her a cultural hybrid, an unhomed individual, a new entity entirely within this domestic Puritan space that is something completely different than her old notion of selfhood. Her obsession with food throughout her narrative, and her use of food metaphors upon her return to English society, highlight the ways in which Rowlandson’s cultural identity and comfort changes through contact with Indians while in captivity.  She is neither entirely Puritan nor entirely Indian, but she is something new and unhomed, changed presumably through her identification with food in two very different cultures. She may uphold certain Puritan ideologies in regard to religious discourse, racial assumptions, or assertions of English superiority, but the convenient binaries seemingly established by this narrative break down when one begins to consider what she ate, how she ate, and what she thought about eating during and after her captivity.

Sonya Lawson Parrish received her B.A. in Literature from Lindsey Wilson College and her M.A. in English Studies from the University of Louisville. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Literature program at Miami University where she has also earned a graduate certificate in Women and Gender Studies.  She is completing work on her dissertation which focuses on representations of female captivity, political agency and speech act theory in the transatlantic long eighteenth century. Other areas of scholarly interest include feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and pop culture studies in the long eighteenth century and today. She has been previously published in MP: An Online Feminist Journal and The Pennsylvania Literary Journal. When not diligently working on her scholarship, Sonya enjoys playing with her cats, cooking good Southern comfort food, and reading comic books.

Bibliography

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. 1994. London: Routledge, 2004.

Burnham, Michelle. Captivity & Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682-1861. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth UP, 1997.

Castiglia, Christopher. Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1996.

Rowlandson, Mary White. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. (1682). Neal Salisbury, ed. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997.

This guest blog was moderated by Rachel

My guts they yawl, crawl, and all my belly rumbleth

HODGE: Daintrels, Diccon? Gog’s soul, man, save this piece of dry horse-bread,
Cha’ bit no bit this livelong day, no crumb come in my head.
My guts they yawl, crawl, and all my belly rumbleth,
The puddings cannot lie still, each one over other tumbleth.
By gog’s heart, cham so vexed, an in my belly penned,
Chwould one piece were at the spitalhouse, another at castle’s end! (Gammer Gurton’s Needle II.i.17-22)

Why food now? Because it's vital. What we put into our bodies is as significant to the formation of identity as are the technologies of gender, race, nation, class, sexual orientation. Food constitutes our bodies; food provides texture for life; food enriches life with meaning. We see this everywhere food is deployed as metaphor in literature.

The past decade has seen plenty of interesting work in this nascent field as it relates to early modern studies (Timothy Morton, Ken Albala, Robert Appelbaum, Julian Yates, Bruce Boehrer, to name a few; seminal works from scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum have also recently attracted new attention). But by and large food has escaped sustained critical attention. How can this be given how essential food is to the structure of daily experience? My initial hypothesis (one that I am sure I will be revising many times through the lifespan of this blog and my dissertation) is that contemporary society has made food too ordinary. As if it is something that magically materializes ex nihilo in our fridges or in the freezer aisles at the supermarket. As we become increasingly distanced from the processes of food production and as food becomes increasingly plentiful, we de-vitalize and disenchant food.

The gourmand James Beard claimed that “Food is our common ground, a universal experience.” Following Beard, the recent popularization of farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture, and food co-operatives speaks to the ongoing centrality of food as a method of defining and forming community. Against this over-idealization of food, however, I will attempt to trace in this blog an examinationn of the alienating and exclusionary processes of food production in late medieval and early modern foodways. I hope to use this blog as a forum for exploring ideas about how late medieval and early modern literature conceptualized foodways and foodsheds.

By developing a literary history of local English foodways, I seek to show that the supposed “common ground” of food habits conceals a series of oppositional binaries between producer and consumer, urban and rural, and, perhaps most starkly, between human and animal. Just as enclosures demarcate boundaries between human and animal, we might also remember that food is necessarily place-based, creating cuisines that define and divide regions, ethnicities, and nationalities. A whole terroir of signification lies beneath cultural ideas and representations of food.

Recent efforts in critical food studies identify culinary traditions as positive unifiers of culture and community. For food historians and anthropologists, culinary habits constitute a text signifying the dietary and ethical values of a culture. For example, the dietaries analyzed by Ken Albala in his recent book, Eating Right in the Renaissance (UC Press, 2002), speak vividly about the aspirational goals of nutritional science and the developing practices of healthy eating.

These dietaries, however, only refer to food on the dining room table, forgetting the animals, marketplaces, and labor that precede the finished product. Early modern dietaries direct their audiences to whole health by promoting an idea of food, food as an abstraction. The realm of literature, drama, and poetry provides an alternate perspective on food as a site of conflict, as the difference between haves and have nots, between the wheat and the chaff, between cow and beef, sheep and mutton. As the character Hodge says in the Tudor comedy Gammer Gurton’s Needle, the deep-seated class difference in the cultures of food are loudly proclaimed in between the desperations of the spitalhouse and the aspirations of the castle.

Investigations into food and rural agricultural economies in the late medieval and early modern period frequently reveal conflated images of animals and underclass labor. For example, Hodge and Gyb the Cat must compete for the same meal. Food, then, is not a universal human experience, but common to all animals. The permeability of the human/animal divide becomes apparent in the portrayals of provincial labor and domesticated animals in comedic drama. Food economies depend upon a naturalization of this labor, creating an unstable and uncomfortable relationship of human and animal that is buried by ideology.

An investigation into the literary history of early modern foodways will prove wide-ranging. It will take us from the deer parks of The Merry Wives of Windsor, the pastures of English Shepherds' Plays, the markets of Bartholomew Fair, and elsewhere. My hope is that this project will prove surprising - for both you and me. Like Hodge, my guts yawl, crawl, and all my belly rumbleth in anticipation of the table we are setting on this blog.

Welcome Post

Welcome to the Early Modern Food Network, a blog dedicated to the study of food, diet, and theories of consumption from roughly 1500 to 1800. For more information on who we are, what we do, and what extras this blog has to offer, check out our "About" page.

We warmly encourage you to feast your eyes upon the generous offerings of our "blog table," and strongly invite students and scholars of Early Modern food to consider submitting to be a guest contributor to our weekly reflections, discoveries, reviews, and inquiries on this fascinating area of focus.