The Woman Who Was a Fox: The Structure of a Natchez Oral Narrative

Abstract

The structure of literary narrative in Natchez has rarely been discussed. Although both John R Swanton in 1908 and Mary R. Haas in 1934–36 together collected over 70 Natchez literary narratives, only one has been published with the Natchez text, as an introduction to a grammatical sketch of the language (Kimball 2005). Following the lead of Dell Hymes (1981; 2003), Natchez literary narratives are better understood in a verse format than as prose. This paper is such an analysis of a literary narrative, “The Woman Who Was a Fox,” told to Haas by Nancy Raven in 1934. [Keywords: Natchez, oral literature, narrative structure, morphology, semantics]