The Mass Marketing of the Colonial Captive Hannah Duston

Abstract

Abstract: Literary artefacts are more than commemorations of beloved literary characters and scenes: they significantly help to shape our identities as national and cultural subjects. Hannah Duston's seventeenth-century captivity narrative offers a fascinating example of how one narrative can be reproduced in many shapes and forms in order to support concepts of cultural and national identity. Her two-page narrative was first published in 1697 by Cotton Mather but eventually spawned several print text versions, a shoe company, a commemorative Jim Beam whiskey decanter, and a plethora of dime-a-dozen artefacts. Despite this vast number of visual and print reproductions, only one aspect of her narrative is repeatedly generated: Duston's slaughter and subsequent scalping of her Indigenous captors. I argue that Duston's captivity narrative successfully travels from seventeenth-century Puritan print culture to contemporary mass culture because her narrative consistently supports colonial and neo-colonial ideals, respectively, concerning American identity and national duty.