Mary Rowlandson
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Mary White Rowlandson (c. 1637 – January 1711) was a colonial American woman, who wrote a vivid description of the eleven weeks and five days 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.
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[edit] Biography
Born Mary White in England, she lived in the frontier village of Lancaster, Massachusetts. She was the daughter of one of the town's founding fathers (Vaughan 1981, 32) and she married Joseph Rowlandson in 1656. Her husband was ordained a Puritan minister in 1660. At sunrise, on February 10, 1676, during King Philip's War, the bloodiest war in American colonial history, Lancaster came under attack by a band of Narragansett Indians. She was the mother of three: Joseph, Mary, and Sarah, and was among the hostages taken that day. For eleven weeks and five days (Neubauer 2001, 70), 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 twenty 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, Mary's youngest child, Sarah, died, while the remaining two were separated from her; nevertheless, Rowlandson continued to seek guidance from 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."
Until recently, it has been assumed that she died before her narrative was published (Vaughan 1981, 32). However, more recent historical research indicates that Mary Rowlandson re-married after the death of her husband and lived as Mary Talcott till January 1711, thus reaching an age of approximately 73 years (Salisbury 49-51).
The book, however, not only became one of the era's best-sellers, going through four editions in one year, but also earned her an important place in the history of American literature. "A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson", an account of her captivity among the Narragansett Indians during King Philip's War in 1676, is a frequently-cited example of a captivity narrative, an important American literary genre used by James Fenimore Cooper, Ann Bleecker, John Williams, and James Seaver. Because of Rowlandson's intimate relationship with her Indian captors, her book also is interesting for its treatment of cultural contact. Finally, in its use of autobiography, typology, and in its homage to the Jeremiad, Rowlandson's book helps the reader understand the Puritan mind.
[edit] See also
[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
- Philbrick, Nathaniel, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. New York: Viking Penguin, 2006. ISBN 0-670-03760-5
- Paul Neubauer, “Indian Captivity in American Children's Literature: A Pre-Civil War Set of Stereotypes,” The Lion and the Unicorn, Vol. 25, No. 1, (January 2001), 70-80
- Alden T.Vaughn, Edward W. Clark, eds. Puritans among the Indians: accounts of captivity and Redemption 1676-1724 (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Belknap, 1981), 269 pages
- Salisbury, Neal. "Introduction: Mary Rowlandson and Her Removes." Rowlandson, Mary. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. 1682. Ed. Neal Salisbury. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1997. 1-60.
