Women, Agency, and History Theme Analysis

In Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, Townsend creates a new portrait of the woman most people know as Pocahontas—a widely-known historical figure whose agency, feelings, personality, and very words have been lost to history while other people’s accounts of and assumptions about her have proliferated through the ages. In telling Pocahontas’s story, Townsend seeks to restore justice and indeed agency to the Algonkian “princess.” Throughout the book, Townsend uses the story of Pocahontas to more broadly argue that for untold scores of women throughout history—especially women of color and women from oppressed cultural groups—the fact that agency was denied to them in their lifetimes unfortunately means that their stories will be posthumously corrupted and coopted.

Throughout the book, Townsend shows how Pocahontas struggled throughout her lifetime—in spite of her relatively privileged status as the daughter of the powerful paramount chief (or mamanitowik) Powhatan—to secure agency over her own choices in the face of colonialism. As Townsend shows in the book’s early chapters, many of the “facts” that exist in the collective cultural consciousness about Pocahontas are, in fact, myths. As Townsend explores the roots of these myths, she establishes how the falsehoods about Pocahontas that many people accept as truth in the modern day were actually sources of Pocahontas’s struggle for agency during her lifetime. For instance, though Pocahontas is widely believed to have been the favorite daughter of her powerful father, Powhatan, Townsend asserts that this favoritism did not exist—in fact, Pocahontas was the daughter of a common woman and thus likely quite expendable to her father for much of her life. Pocahontas had to strive, as her father before her did, for agency and power—she used her communication and language skills to secure her importance both to her own tribe and to the colonists. Colonial power over her people was becoming clearer by the day, and Pocahontas, in spite of her youth, no doubt understood that this meant a significant change to the landscape of her world.

Townsend examines how Pocahontas, during moments in which her power and agency were stripped from her completely, did all she could to retain some measure of control over her own fate. When Pocahontas was taken captive by the English when she was 15 or 16, Townsend describes how her captors later wrote that the young woman used silence as a tactic to get them to “wait upon her words” and heed her more carefully, even in spite of her disadvantaged position. Upon her arrival in Jamestown as a prisoner, Pocahontas attracted much attention from the colonists, who realized they had a “royal hostage.” She complied with their ideals of her, converting to Christianity at their behest and even marrying a relatively wealthy tobacco planter, a widower named John Rolfe. Pocahontas, Townsend suggests, strategized throughout her captivity not just to keep herself alive, but to actively advance her social position among the colonists. By appearing to eagerly adopt their language, religion, and customs—and by using her father’s own political strategy in marrying someone from another “tribe” and begetting a child, Thomas Rolfe, who might hold allegiance to both parents’ peoples—Pocahontas did manage to wrestle a measure of agency for herself out of a terrible situation. 

Townsend also goes on to show how Pocahontas, stripped of her agency while alive and forced to wrest back what little power over herself she could, has also been denied agency in death through the corruption and commodification of her life story. As uncountable individuals from historians to Hollywood executives bastardize Pocahontas’s biography, each falsehood told about her life, her choices, and the reasons behind her actions further robs Pocahontas’s legacy of humanity and agency. Pocahontas’s story, Townsend asserts, is “a story of heroism as it exists in the real world, not in epic tales.” Yet over the years, the corruption of Pocahontas’s life story and what it says about colonialism, power, agency, and the struggle of women of color to survive in a world (which was, in Pocahontas’s time, quite literally ruled by white men) has resulted in a kind of retroactive loss. Pocahontas was not a naïve girl who fell in love with members of the company that killed and colonized her own people, nor was she a devout convert who eschewed her past in the name of  accepting the Christian God into her life. Narratives that categorize Pocahontas as such, Townsend warns, continue to deny the truth of her life and disrespect the very real difficulties Pocahontas endured in order to do the best with the hand she  was dealt. Pocahontas died in England after having been brought to London to be shown off at court as Rebecca Rolfe—a “princess” who chose an English man and a Christian life over her own people. Townsend argues that it is wrong to assert that Pocahontas willingly chose such circumstances out of anything other than an iron-willed desire to, in whatever way she could, broadcast her people’s humanity to a racist and uncaring group of colonizers. Perpetuating anything to the contrary means retroactively continuing to strip Pocahontas of her agency in death by willfully misinterpreting the reasoning behind her complicated, calculated choices in life.

Even though one may be denied agency in life, Townsend suggests, there is still a glimmer of hope that the truth of one’s stories, choices, and actions may be restored. When this fails to happen—as it did for centuries and still often does in Pocahontas’s case—Townsend argues that this failure comes to represent a continued theft of agency.