Rowlandson, Mary | Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom (essay date 1978)
Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom (essay date 1978)
SOURCE: “Mary Rowlandson: Captive Witness,” in So Dreadfull a Judgement: Puritan Responses to King Philip's War, 1676-1677, edited by Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom, Wesleyan University Press, 1978, pp. 301-12.
[In the following essay, Slotkin and Folsom examine Rowlandson's work as both a captivity narrative and part of Puritan mythology and culture.]
“On the tenth of February 1675, came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster: Their first coming was about sun-rising; hearing the noise of some guns, we looked out; several houses were burning and the smoke ascending to heaven.” So Mrs. Mary Rowlandson begins the first and probably the finest example of a uniquely American literary genre, the so-called captivity narrative: that is, the history of a white European—or later, an American—made captive by hostile Indians and of what transpired between his or (more...
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