Transcript Mary Rowlandson - Faulkner University

MARY ROWLANDSON &
THE CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE
MARY ROWLANDSON
Born circa 1637 in England.
 Her parents John and Joan White were among the
first settlers of Salem in 1638.
 She was living in Lancaster by age 17.
 She married Joseph Rowlandson, a minister, in
1656
 They had 4 children:

Mary, who lived for three years
 Joseph, b. 1661
 Mary, b. 1665
 Sarah, b. 1669

 (At
the time of their capture, the children were 14, 10, and 6)
MARY ROWLANDSON

In 1675 Joseph Rowlandson went to Boston
to beg for troops from the Massachusetts
General Assembly, during which period Mary
Rowlandson was captured.
MARY ROWLANDSON
While a prisoner, Mary Rowlandson travelled
some 150 miles, from Lancaster to
Menamaset then north to Northfield and
across the Connecticut river to meet with King
Philip/Metacomet himself, sachem of the
Wampanoags.
 Next she traveled up into southwestern New
Hampshire, south to Menamaset, and north to
Mount Wachusett.

MARY ROWLANDSON
Three months after her capture, Mary
Rowlandson was ransomed for £20.
 She was returned at Princeton, Massachusetts,
on May 2, 1676.
 Her two surviving children were released soon
after.
 Their home had been destroyed in the attack

MARY ROWLANDSON
After her redemption, the couple lived in
Boston and then moved 1677 to Wethersfield,
Connecticut.
 Joseph Rowlandson died November 24, 1678,
three days after preaching a powerful sermon
about his wife's captivity,

 "A
Sermon of the Possibility of God's Forsaking a
People that have been near and dear to him."
MARY ROWLANDSON

Mary Rowlandson remarried Aug. 6, 1679 to
Captain Samuel Talcott.
 He
died in 1691
 She lived until 1711(?).
MARY ROWLANDSON

Book was written to retell the details of Mary
Rowlandson's captivity and rescue in the
context of religious faith.
 No
copies of the first edition of Rowlandson’s
narrative still exist.
 2nd issue begins its title page with a significant
emphasis upon God’s providence:
 The
Sovereignty and Goodness of GOD, Together With
the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a
Narrative Of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary
Rowlandson
CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE: DEFINITION

According to Richard Slotkin,
 "In [a captivity narrative] a single individual, usually a
woman, stands passively under the strokes of evil,
awaiting rescue by the grace of God.”
 “The sufferer represents the whole, chastened body of
Puritan society.”
 “The temporary bondage of the captive to the Indian is
dual paradigm-- of the bondage of the soul to the flesh
and the temptations arising from original sin, and of the
self-exile of the English Israel from England.”
 “In the Indian's devilish clutches, the captive had to meet
and reject the temptation of Indian marriage and/or the
Indian's ‘cannibal’ Eucharist.”
 To partake of the Indian's love or of his equivalent of bread
and wine was to debase, to “un-English” the soul.
CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE: DEFINITION

According to Richard Slotkin,
 "The captive's ultimate redemption by the grace of
Christ and the efforts of the Puritan magistrates is
likened to the regeneration of the soul in
conversion.”
 The
ordeal is at once threatful of pain and evil and
promising of ultimate salvation.
 “Through
the captive's proxy, the promise of a
similar salvation could be offered to the faithful
among the reading public, while the captive's
torments remained to harrow the hearts of those
not yet awakened to their fallen nature"

(Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier)
BACKGROUND

Reasons for captivities:
 revenge
 ransom
 replacement
and disease
of tribal numbers decimated by war
STATISTICS

750 individual captivities between 1677 and
1750 (less than half the total number of
captives)
Of those…
 300
were ransomed
 150 converted to Catholicism
 some assimilated
INFLUENCED BY…

Captivity Narratives show influence of 3 other
genres:

The spiritual autobiography
 Redeemed
believer traced the steps in his/her conversion
from doubt to faith

A literary staple in Puritan New England
The Puritan sermon
 The jeremiad

 Sermon
form in which the speaker laments the falling away of
the faithful from their earlier commitment to a covenant.
 Considered America’s earliest literary form

Modeled after the prophet Jeremiah’s lamentations over the
backsliding of the chosen people of Israel
RHETORICAL PURPOSES
Religious expression
 Justification of westward expansion
 Nineteenth-century: cultural symbol of American
national heritage
 Popular literature
 Reinforcement of stereotypes

Spanish: Indians as brutish beasts
 French: Indians as souls needing redemption
 English in Virginia: innocent exotics
 Puritans: Satanic threat to their “religious utopia”

THEMES AND TYPES






Fears of cannibalism
Fears of scalping
Hunter-predator myth: captive as cultural mediator between
savagery and civilization
Judea capta, for Puritans: Israel suffering under Babylonian
captivity.
Freudian view: captivity becomes adoption
Myths



Myth of “Love in the Woods” (Pocahontas and John Smith)
Myth of “Good Companions in the Wilderness” (Cooper's Natty
Bumppo and Chingachgook)
Myth of “White Woman with a Tomahawk”

Hannah Dustan: (killed 10 Indians and scalped them when she
escaped)
CONVENTIONS








Abruptly brought from state of protected innocence into
confrontation with evil
Forced existence in alien society
Unable to submit or resist
Yearn for freedom, yet fear perils of escape
Struggle between assimilation and maintaining a
separate cultural identity
Condition of captive parallels suffering of all lowly and
oppressed
Growth in moral and spiritual strength
Deliverance
PATTERN
Separation: attack and capture
 Torment: ordeals of physical and mental
suffering
 Transformation: accommodation, adoption
 Return: escape, release, or redemption

CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE IN HISTORICAL
PERSPECTIVE

Can trace the lineage of CN
 Narrative
of Alvar Cabez De Vaca
 Frontier Indian wars
 Prisoner of war narratives
 Revolutionary
War
 Civil
War
 WWI & WWII
 Korean War
 Vietnam

Closely akin to the Slave Narrative