DISNEY’S POCAHONTAS AND JOSHUA’S RAHAB

IN POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVE

 

Lori L. Rowlett

 

 

At first glance an ancient prostitute and a saccharine sweet cartoon character from Disney might seem poles apart.[1] However, upon closer examination, an analogy begins to emerge between the Bible’s Rahab and Disney’s ‘Pocahontas’ (Donaldson 1999). The story of Rahab (Josh. 2) fits a pattern of the way that female characters are used in accounts of conquest: she represents the ‘good native’ who acquiesces almost immediately to the conquerors, as though she recognizes from the start an innate superiority in them and in the colonizing culture. She is far too eager to turn her back on her own people, her indigenous religion and even her identity. The story of Pocahontas contains many of the same elements as the Rahab story. In both cases, the ‘good native’ who takes to the colonizers immediately is a woman who later marries into the community. In both cases, she serves as a savior, protecting the men from her own people, effectively allowing them to colonize her native land, and herself. A comparison of the Disney-fication of the colonized woman with her ancient prototype sheds light on our own cultural practices of self-representation and depiction of the ‘other’.

Narratives of colonization, whether they are folk tales, official accounts, or literary representations, often evince a gender polarity in which the conquering culture (the one composing the story) gives itself characteristics which are considered masculine, while the colonized other is feminized. For example, in the early nineteenth century, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft wrote of the ‘luxurious effeminacy’ of the Native Americans (Pike 1992: 7). They were considered passive recipients (like ova) of ‘civilization’ brought in by the more ‘active’ (like sperm) imperialists. (Pike 1992: 6). Native Americans were said to be stronger on feeling than reason and to be licentious, whereas the Europeans regarded themselves as rational and very much in control of natural impulses. As Frederick Pike pointed out in his book on the myths and stereotypes of civilization and nature:

 

Wherever the imperialist process unfolds, daring colonists expect to be rewarded by readily available sex proffered by inferior creatures who ostensibly welcome seduction and subjection. . . Racist and sexist beliefs coincide to the point of being indistinguishable (1992: 8).

 

The accusation of excessive sensuality in indigenous people is closely related to the attribution of closeness to nature, as Pike also mentioned:

 

The conflation of nature and woman has helped to perpetuate the widespread male conviction that woman is somehow outside the bounds of and antithetical to civilization. Men, as they tend to perceive the situa­tion, are the creators of civilization and the architects of progress...(1992:6).

 

Women, on the other hand, are viewed as the embodiment of the forces of nature which must be brought under the civilizing control of men. Similarly, the Europeans, who perceived themselves as the ‘masculine’ race, felt that they had a natural right to dominate those whom they stereotyped as effeminate (Pike 1992: 5-6). The fact that the Native Americans practiced (and still do practice) religions in which harmony with nature is highly valued adds to the perception that they were and are closer to nature and the body, both devalued as somehow ‘base’ and more feminine than those things European males attributed to them-selves. Disdain for Native American beliefs and rituals was expressed in the missionary impulse to eradicate ‘superstitions’ (Pike 1992: 95) in favor of more supposedly rational forms of religion, and in the Christian tradition of labeling other religions as primitive, chaotic and even evil. The tendency to think of indigenous rituals as sensual rites, because of the emphasis on dance, drumming and singing, was intertwined with the general view of the indigenous people as more sexual.

Similarly, throughout most of the Bible, the beliefs and practices of the various ethnic groups lumped together as Canaanites are condemned as obscene. Prostitution is the prevailing image for neighboring peoples’ religions in the Bible. Agricultural fertility and human sexuality are metaphorically linked in many ancient Near Eastern religions, as in the Sumerian myth of Inanna and Dumuzi, and the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris (Rosenberg 1994). Both connect the cycles of nature (the agricultural seasons) with the sexual relationship between a grain god and a fertile goddess,[2] whose reunion renews the earth. Therefore the deeply metaphorical sexual aspect of the polytheistic religions of the ancient Near East became a pretext for the condemnation of those participating in these religions as ‘whoring after other gods’. As in the judgment of the Europeans concerning the Native Americans, who were said to be more given to temptation and less capable of marital fidelity (Pike 1992: 95), the accusation of heightened sexuality and infidelity prevails in characterizing Canaanite practices and beliefs. Added to the stereotype of the sensual Canaanite is the confusion of the Hebrew terms zóna (prostitute) and q desa (holy woman, priestess, from kodesh, a root meaning holy) when talking about the so-called ‘temple prostitutes’ of Canaanite religion whose function evidently had to do with re-enacting the earth-renewal mythology mentioned above. Taking part in the associated ritual practices, which presumably involved a q desa, is referred to in the Bible as zenut (same root as zônâ). It is hardly surprising, then, that Rahab is a converted sex worker. She is a symbol of (among other things) the transformation of the land from sexually lascivious paganism (in Hebrew eyes) to colonized docility.

All four of the elements common to the Pocahontas and Rahab conquest stories are gender-related. First, the woman falls in love with, has sex with, and/or marries a conqueror. As Pike pointed out in connection with another (analogous) imperialistic situation:

 

For a Yankee man to marry a Latin woman did not upset imperialist concepts about races meant to dominate and races destined for dependence. However, for an American woman to marry a Latin man did upset the natural balance. It meant that the woman of a race destined for domi­nance would be dependent (in line with sexist assumptions) on the man of a race naturally destined for submission (1992: 9).

 

Second, the indigenous woman saves conquerors from and helps them against her own people. Third, she wholeheartedly embraces the conquerors’ culture, setting for them an example of converted and thereby ‘improved’ otherness. Fourth and most important, her body, and particu­larly her reproductive powers, are co-opted by the conquering culture.

        A comparison of the parallels between Rahab in the conquest of Canaan and Pocahontas in the conquest of the Americas as represented by Disney must include the rescue scenes. In the Disney cartoon, Poca­hontas uses that occasion to proclaim publicly her romantic love for John Smith. Rahab the prostitute uses the occasion to proclaim the machismo of the Hebrews’ god. Both cases are shaded by the gender polarities so often found in narratives of conquest, but both also reflect the values of their respective cultural contexts: military might in the ancient Near East, and, in contemporary America, a valorization of the male-female romantic coupling pushed so emphatically in popular culture.

        Easily the most famous scene in the Pocahontas legend is the one in which she throws herself over the prostrate John Smith and begs for his life. It probably never happened. The melodramatic salvation scene did not appear in Smith’s original travel accounts, but was added when he wrote his memoirs in old age. Smith apparently fancied himself irre­sistible to women; his diaries contain several scenes in which women go to extraordinary lengths to save his hide (Barbour 1986). An especially salacious story appears in his Turkish adventures. A married woman who adored him (supposedly) helped him sneak out of her country (again, shades of Rahab) so that he could escape through Eastern Europe and Russia. The description of Pocahontas throwing herself upon him may tell us more about Smith’s self-regard than it does about the historical Pocahontas.

Likewise the biblical account of Rahab may be shaded by masculine ego. Joshua’s spies had gone into Jericho, enemy territory, to spy out the land for conquest. Her ‘inn’ was a brothel in which she did business (zenut). As frequently occurs in male fantasy, but not often in real life, the sex worker seemingly was so overcome with the men’s prowess that she would do anything for them, although she had known them only a short time, perhaps just long enough to service them.

Rahab too quickly abandons her identity and her roots to integrate with the colonizing culture, as though she immediately recognizes the superiority of the conqueror. Pocahontas too is presented as being drawn right away toward Captain John Smith, and away from her own culture. In both cases, the colonizing forces reflect their own self-concept and inflated se1f-regard through the eyes of the colonized ‘other’. The woman in both cases risks her own safety to save the men’s lives from her own people, giving the impression that the woman prefers to ally herself to the conqueror.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the film is the Disney corporation’s use of the rescue scene. Not only is the conquest of the Americas trivialized by having Pocahontas use the rescue as an occasion for announcing her romantic feelings for Smith, but additionally, the conflict is misrepresented. The English troops and the Native American warriors are shown as morally equivalent. Both are choosing warfare rather than peace, and both are scolded by Pocahontas, who argues for the peace and love ‘path’ . There is no mention of the real set of power relations underlying the entire situation: one of the parties was trying to conquer the other and take its land. Native Americans were not invad­ing Europe; Europeans were invading the Americas. In the cartoon, men from both sides march toward each other, singing a song declaring the other side to be savage. Never mind the fact that the Native Americans were defending their homes from a brutal invasion, and the Europeans felt entitled to whatever they could take by force for colonization.[3]

Disney’s film contains many errors of fact. Pocahontas would have been only about twelve years old when Smith was in Jamestown, not a well-developed woman as in the cartoon. The cartoon Pocahontas was made to look more Asian than Native American, which indicates that perhaps the Disney personnel thought that one ‘other’ was more or less the same as any ‘other’. One wonders whether perhaps the (grossly unfair) stereotype of Asian women as submissive and dependent played into the decision. Whatever the reasons, Disney’s artist used various models in creating the cartoon Pocahontas, including one from the Philippines (Edgerton and Jackson 1996: 95).

Pocahontas never was known to have had a romance with John Smith, although she later married another Englishman, John Rolfe. Furthermore, the religion of the Native Americans in the Disney cartoon is an absurd hodge-podge, representing no particular tribe. The talking tree is borrowed (probably unconsciously) from various European mythologies, and is therefore an example of the Euro-American filmmakers’ projection of their own culture’s dimly remembered and stereotypical idea of what indigenous closeness to nature might look like. In some European myths, trees can and do transform into deities or people and back again.[4] Native American nations differ greatly from one another, and do consistently revere nature as alive, but the Powa­tans were never known to anthropomorphize in quite the way shown in the movie. Likewise, the concept of animal familiars is European, espe­cially Celtic. Native Americans often have a totem animal, but, depending on the particular beliefs of a given tribe, it may be a clan totem or an individual one revealed in a vision. It would not be a pet. As one of Jamestown’ s historian-educators said to me, ‘Pocahontas would not have thought of raccoons as cute. She probably would have thought of them as edible.’[5]

The Canaanites in the Bible are treated in analogous ways. They apparently exist in Joshua primarily to be exterminated in the battle scenes. Most of them are dehumanized (except Rahab herself) as though they were clones of one another. As with the Native Americans, who in reality belonged to distinctive nations, the individual cultures which made up the so-called Canaanites were treated as though most of them were interchangeable in the narrative.

The Disney cartoon and the biblical text both emphasize the volun­tary aspect of Pocahontas’s and Rahab’s actions. When Rahab voluntar­ily places herself at the service of the conquerors, the episode is usually cited as an example of inclusiveness in the Bible.[6] Her ‘profession of faith’ is generally read by biblical scholars in a positive light, showing that all who place their faith in Yahweh can find a place among Yah­weh’s people. However, at the same time, she is used as an example of the ‘good native’ . Turning her back on her own people, she becomes a salvific figure for the Hebrew military men, helping Joshua’s spies flee Canaanite guards. She converts to the conquering Hebrew religion, but she has had no time to learn about it. Instead, her reasons invoke a rhetoric of violence (Rowlett 1992: 19-22 and 1996b: 173-81):

 

I know that Yahweh has given you the land, and that the fear of you has fallen upon us, and all the inhabitants of the land melt away before you. For we have heard how Yahweh dried up the water of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to the two kings of the Amorites that were beyond the Jordan, to Sihon and Og, whom you utterly destroyed (Josh. 2.9-10).

 

In other words, the god’s chief virtue was his capacity to cause death. She was subsequently absorbed into the Hebrew community, making a complete break from her own ethnic group:

 

The young men who were spies went in and brought out Rahab...and all she had...and placed them outside the camp of Israel...Rahab the harlot and her father’s household and all she had, Joshua spared. She has lived in the midst of Israel to this day, for she hid the messengers whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho (Josh. 6.23-25).

 

Eventually she married (or at least had sex with) an Israelite. She relin­quished her own identity, thereby becoming a part of the patriarchal social order being asserted in the conquest narrative. She took a place in the hierarchical system under Joshua’s command. She functioned not as an individual woman but as the embodiment of otherness being altered and engulfed. The contrasting fate of the other inhabitants of Jericho is graphically described:

 

They utterly destroyed all in the city, man and woman, young and old, and ox, sheep, and donkey, with the edge of the sword (Josh. 6.21).

 

There are two ways to control living beings—eradication and domestication. Eradication means simply exterminating people; extermination abolishes power by abolishing its object. Domestication, as in the stories of Rahab and Pocahontas, represents an attempt to bring the populace into line, so that the colonized support the dominating culture without coercion (French 1985: 128-31). Therefore it is essential that the colonizing culture represent the indigenous people as voluntarily complicit in their own domination. We have no actual accounts of these stories from the pens of Pocahontas or Rahab. Their willing, even eager, compliance comes only from the words put into their mouths by representatives of the colonizing culture.

Like Rahab, colonial Virginia’s Pocahontas later married a conqueror, John Rolfe, with whom she had a son. Like Rahab, she converted to the conqueror’s religion before her marriage into the coloniz­ing culture. Conversion may be seen simply as one more manifestation of domestication by the colonizer. One of the most famous portrayals of her (outside of the rescue scene) is the John Gadsby Chapman painting of her baptism. The painting depicts her wearing white English clothing, in the scene’s center, in stark contrast to the other Native Americans lurking about the dark periphery in native garb. She became England’s colonial ‘good native’, converting to England’s Christianity from her native religion. The function of her baptism is analogous to that of Rahab’s conversion in the biblical story. Instead of the old adage, ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’, one could say, ‘the only good native (or Canaanite) is one who no longer is truly a native’. In other words, instead of exterminating the person bodily, the colonizer merely exterminated everything about her that made her who she was. Thus transformed, she was fine.

When Pocahontas was baptized, she was christened Rebecca. The biblical name is symbolic of her turn away from her ‘savage’ indige­nous religion, but the name change is also indicative of her voluntary relinquishment of her identity. Colonized people have often found themselves addressed by names they do not recognize but which sound more familiar to those addressing them. Taking away one’s familiar name, the primary means of personal definition, is domination through domestication at its deepest level. It leaves the person’s self image completely vulnerable to any change a colonizer wants to impose on it. Likewise, a colonizer will usually change the name of conquered territory, symbolically altering an indigenous people’s self-definition to suit their own purposes. Examples abound New Spain, New England, Vir­ginia (named for England’s ‘virgin’ queen) and Louisiana (named for the king of France). Each place had its own Native American name supplanted.

Sexuality, marriage and reproduction are elements of both the stories. After her conversion, Pocahontas married John Rolfe. In one of his letters,[7] he gave as one of his reasons for the marriage the opportunity it would provide him to help assure her salvation. Actually her conversion seems to have been part of her acculturation: she was instructed in Christianity at the same time that she was taught English.

Before her conversion, Rahab was a prostitute, a very disreputable profession in ancient Israelite culture, although its meaning is ambiguous elsewhere in the ancient Near East, as discussed above. Her conver­sion, which included subsuming her into the conquering culture at the cost of her individuality and independence, elevated her to respectabil­ity and inclusion. She was transformed into the good native (good Canaanite) because she no longer had Canaanite characteristics.

An interesting point in the Pocahontas and Rahab stories is that the two women each gave their bodies willingly to the colonizer for reproduction. When children were born, they belonged to the conquering cul­ture of the father. Therefore the woman not only lost much of her personal and ethnic identity, but she had to watch her children lose their ancestral heritage. In a sense the women’s bodies, their wombs, were colonized.[8]

Nothing is said about Rahab’s motivation for marriage, but she turns up in a New Testament text (Mt. 1) in the Davidic monarchy’s genea­logy, which is in keeping with the concerns of many of the biblical writers: the birth and lineage of certain very important males is often highlighted in stories concerning women.

On the other hand, Pocahontas married for love, especially in the Disney portrayal. In Disney’s cartoon and in its recent sequel, Pocahon­tas appears as something of a love addict. She is madly in love with Smith in one episode, then he leaves and Rolfe comes along. She is wildly smitten again. Just as the biblical story of Rahab is a reflection of its time, the Disney version of Pocahontas reflects our own time. Young people are raised on the myth of the all-consuming romance. Girls and women are given a much stronger dose of the myth than are men and boys. Consequently, Disney, Hollywood and other producers of popular culture promulgate and reinforce over and over again the idea that a young woman’s pathway to happiness lies in being swept away by a strong male who will marry her. The entire Disney movie was built on the patently false romance between Pocahontas and Smith, as though the only aspect of Pocahontas’s life which could possibly be interesting was a whirlwind romance culminating in a passionate kiss.

There are political dimensions also to the romantic obsession. In addition to the dynamics of colonizer/colonized, strong male/acquies­cent female, and civilized Christianity/’savage’ paganism, the coupledom-is-everything message is imperialistic. Our culture rules out of bounds the matrilineal and communal patterns of the Native American cultures located on the East coast (Hudson 1976) as somehow less legi­timate than European patrilineal and patrilocal patterns. Probably it is because American culture’s conservative agenda pushes the nuclear family as ideal, and denigrates alternative family structures. Even the traditional extended family is downplayed because of its association with communitarian values. Any communal or ‘village’ approaches to caring for children is usually written off as ridiculous. (Remember the ridicule directed at Hilary Clinton when she wrote her book called It Takes a Village?) In the Disney cartoon, then, when Pocahontas leaves her people in favor of seeking her fortune with a white man in a foreign culture, the stamp of approval is given to the ‘couple’ as the primary unit of society rather than the community, which would have centered on the mother’s kin group. The romantic heterosexual couple and the resultant nuclear family are valorized at the expense of other options, such as a web of relationships.

Both Rahab and Pocahontas are, in a sense, cartoon figures. Neither is allowed to speak in a truly indigenous voice. The colonizing powers telling the story have given her words to speak in praise of themselves as conquering heroes. She is supposed to be grateful because she is allowed into their society. In both cases, the woman is regarded as worth saving and assimilating because she recognizes the specialness of the conquerors, making her the mirror which magnifies their own glory. She becomes the medium for transmitting the colonizing power’s arro­gance in its representation of itself to itself.

 


[1] My 1996 paper for the AAR session on women and war in the Religion, Peace and War session focused on Smith’s memoirs and several well-known visual representations of Pocahontas rather than the Disney cartoon (Rowlett 1996a).

[2] I prefer to refer to her as a fertile goddess rather than a fertility goddess, because she has attributes in addition to her fertility.

[3] Conversation with Laura E. Donaldson at the annual SBL meeting, November 21, 1998; also mentioned by Edgerton and Jackson (1996).

[4] Examples which come to mind immediately include the story of Apollo and the laurel tree, Merlin’s Oak in the Arthurian legends, and the figure of the Celtic ‘Green King’ or ‘Green Man’ (Rosenberg 1994, and Matthews 1998).

[5] Private communication with Irene Baros-Johnson, formerly an educator at Jamestown settlement in Virginia, 1995.

[6] For example, Elwell says that ‘It was within God’s purposes that those Canaanites who would give up their Canaanite identity in order to become Israelites, culturally and religiously, should be absorbed into the Hebrew nation and be allowed to survive’ (1989: 138).

[7] Some of the letters of John Rolfe appear in Ralph Hamer’s A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia (1615) and are reprinted in part in Rasmussen and Tilton (1994: 28).

[8] I examined this topic more thoroughly in my 1996 paper (Rowlett 1996a: n. 1), in comparison with the ‘rape camps’ of Bosnia, in which Muslim women were raped to colonize their reproductive systems, making them bear the children of the conquerors.