"Money Answers All Things": Rethinking Economic and Cultural Exchange in the Captivity Narrative of Mary Rowlandson

Abstract

From the voluminous critical literature on the early modern captivity narrative in recent years comes an insight that has transformed this crucial American genre: captivity fosters exchange.1 Viewed in its own day and for centuries afterward as a static expression of loss, a jeremiad about the dangers of failing to hold “civilized” cultures in higher regard than “savage” ones, the captivity narrative has, in this new critical light, become a dynamic text about transculturation.2 Though they may have bemoaned their forcible removal from their own environments and in some cases been returned to “civilization” warning others of their plight, many seventeenth-century captives, this new insight suggests, also engaged in a lively cultural exchange with what has come to be known as the ethnographic “other.” But if the notion of captivity as a paradigm of exchange marks an advance in our understanding of what this genre has to offer, the concept of exchange within the paradigm nevertheless remains tethered to an older, monolithic model of economic relations that continues to hamper our understanding of how some captives thought about cultural difference. Specifically, the model of exchange informing the work of most scholars has been that of commodity exchange or barter. To be sure, many if not most of the narratives that have been analyzed for connections between economic and cultural exchange revolve around commodity transfers. A case in point, often hailed as the consummate example of transculturation, is Cabeza de Vaca's Relación (1542), which represents exchange almost exclusively in commodity terms.3 A close second, however, in terms of the importance of cultural exchange in captivity, is the narrative of Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), which offers a model that includes barter but is also significantly tied to monetary exchange, that is, to exchanges of commodities or services for money, and vice versa.