SOURCE: “‘Now … Didn't Our People Laugh?’ Female Misbehavior and Algonquian Culture in Mary Rowlandson's Captivity and Restauration,” in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Vol. 21, No. 4, 1997, pp. 1-28.

In following essay, Arnold discusses how Rowlandson lacks understanding of the culture of her Algonquian captors and what her work reveals about their society, especially its humor.

Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it.¹

If Bakhtin is right, laughter might be the perfect instrument of imperialism. Yet, at least from our twentieth-century vantage point, America's...