"Native Encounters: Representing Otherness in Roger Williams and Rosmarie Waldrop's 'A Key into the Language of America'"

Moving to Providence, Rhode Island, Rosmarie Waldrop turns to Roger Williams’s work to find some context for the Indian place-names that puzzle her sight. Writing upon the model of his "Key", she further explores the motifs of colonization, gender, and translation, and reassesses the American narrative of conquest from a female point of view. Comparing the two texts, this essay shows the lines of continuities and discontinuities in the creation of identities (Williams’s, Waldrop’s, the native’s) and in the representation of difference, through the interplay of voices and cultures staged by both writers.