Mary Rowlandson
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Mary White Rowlandson (c. 1635-7 – January 5, 1711) was a colonial American woman, who wrote a vivid description of the nearly three months she spent living with Native Americans. Her short book, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, is considered a seminal work in the American literary genre of captivity narratives.
Born Mary White in England, she lived in the frontier village of Lancaster, Massachusetts, where she married Joseph Rowlandson in 1656. Her husband was ordained a Puritan minister in 1660. At sunrise, on February 20, 1676, during King Philip's War, the bloodiest war in American colonial history, Lancaster came under attack by a band of Indians. A mother of four, she was among the hostages taken that day. For more than two months, she was forced to accompany her captors as they fled through the wilderness to elude the colonial militia, under what she describes as horrible conditions. In simple, artless prose she recounts the stages of the odyssey in twenty distinct "Removes" or journeys. She witnessed the murder of her friends, the death of one of her children, and suffered starvation and depression, until she was finally reunited with her husband. On May 2, 1676, she was ransomed for 20 pounds, raised by the women of Boston in a public subscription, and paid by John Hoar of Concord at Redemption Rock in Princeton.
During her captivity, one child died and two others were separated from her, but throughout her ordeal she sought solace in the Bible--the text of her narrative is replete with verses and references describing conditions similar to her own. She saw her trial as a test of faith and considered the "Indians" to be "instruments of Satan". Her final escape, she tells us, taught her "the more to acknowledge His hand and to see that our help is always in Him."
Rowlandson's book, published in 1682, was among the first of a genre that was to become immensely popular in the seventeenth century: the Indian Captivity Narrative. It set the tone for many subsequent captivity narratives in which the emerging American community developed a sense of "us against the other" (in this case, the Native American population), who often came into violent confrontation. According to these accounts, it is the strength of character of the Americans, bolstered by religion and destiny, that helps them to survive in the "Wilderness" (a term Rowlandson frequently uses). At the same time, it protects them when they are forced to accommodate themselves to the conditions of North America through a process of acculturation with Native culture and knowledge. By laying the groundwork for these in her account, Rowlandson effectively helped create the first uniquely American literary genre, and set the stage for the immensely popular American cowboy tales and the pioneer epics we today call the Western.
Mary Rowlandson had three children; Joseph, Mary, and Sarah.
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[edit] References
- Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, Women's Indian Captivity Narratives. Penguin Classics Series, 1998. ISBN 0-14-043671-5.
- Anthology of American Literature, (4th edition) ed. George McMichael. Macmillan, 1989. ISBN 0-02-379621-9(v. 1)
- Mary White Rowlandson - URL retrieved October 11, 2006
