SOURCE: “Her Tortures Were Turned into Frolick: Captivity and Liminal Critique, 1682-1862,” in Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst, The University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 41-86.

[In the excerpt that follows, Castiglia argues that Rowlandson's book reveals that her experiences as a captive challenged her Puritan beliefs, changed her identity, and forced her to find the means to act on her own.]

Anglo-America's first captivity narrative, published in 1682, commences a long tradition of exploration by white female captives of the relationships between racial and gender identities and hierarchies. In February 1675, Narragansett Indians attacked Lancaster, Massachusetts, and took Mary White Rowlandson, wife of the town minister and daughter of its wealthiest landowner, captive for eleven weeks. Rowlandson later related her ordeal to “Ter Amicam” who in 1682 published the text (divided into twenty sections, labeled “removes,” that measure her physical journey) along with his preface and a sermon by Rowlandson's husband, Joseph. Insofar as her story diverges from its stated intention of showing God's providence in saving a helpless sinner from the barbarians, Rowlandson's narrative challenges several central assumptions of her home culture. Rowlandson develops, in contrast to her monovocal theological frame, a more complex perspective that allows her to see the Indians as more than stock characters in the drama of her religious salvation.¹

At the outset of her narrative, Rowlandson expresses her culture's view of the Indians as “hell-hounds” (1682, 35), possessed of a “savageness and brutishness” (36) beyond description. By characterizing her captors as animals and heathens, Rowlandson affirms the Puritans as human and spiritual, the proper subjects of culture. In keeping with her vision of the irredeemable evil of the Indians, Rowlandson attributes to God any kindness shown her in the first part of her narrative. In the third remove, for instance, when a Narragansett woman brings Rowlandson's son for a visit, or later when a man gives Rowlandson a Bible to read, she attributes both acts to Providence. Similarly, when in the fifth remove the Narragansetts lay some brush on the bottom of a raft so Rowlandson's feet remain dry, she attributes the act to God's mercy.

Later in the fifth remove, however, Rowlandson describes a different sort of divine intervention: namely, “the strange providence of God in preserving the heathen” (44). Pursued by the colonial army, hundreds of Indians, mostly women, many sick or carrying babies, convey their entire settlement across a river that the English cannot cross. With her observation of Narragansett mobility and of English ineptness, Rowlandson, even while she justifies her captors' success by claiming that God preserved the Indians so they could continue to “try” the whites (68), begins to soften Puritan orthodoxy's extreme opposition between the divinely favored whites and the hellish Indians. Consequently, in the eighth remove when Rowlandson receives food and assurances of her captors' kindly intentions toward her, while she does not explicitly comment on the humane behavior of the Indians, neither does she attribute their kindness to God.

Significantly, the eighth remove also describes Rowlandson's “adoption” into the tribe. When she is asked to sew a shirt for King Philip, he pays her a shilling, with which Rowlandson buys some horse meat. For the remainder of the narrative, Rowlandson barters her sewing skills for food and shelter, assuming her place in the tribe's economy. Rowlandson's new economic role alters her views not only of her captors but of her home society as well. Teresa Toulouse discusses the crisis engendered in Rowlandson's narrative by her lost sense of fair “exchange” within Puritan discourses of value. Having “paid her debt,” as a wife, mother, citizen, and Christian, both to society and to God, Rowlandson voices a complaint, according to Toulouse, that she is not “paid back” her fair market value in earthly or spiritual satisfaction (664). Given this analysis, it is not surprising that Rowlandson notes when the Indians recognize and, more importantly, compensate, her worth as a producer in their economy. When an Indian fails to pay Rowlandson her price, she records the fact with bitterness. Yet she also notes that she is always paid for her labor, even if the debtor is sometimes late in making payment. In the ninth remove, for example, she writes of making a shirt for a “sorry Indian” (48) who refuses to pay her. “But he living by the riverside where I often went to fetch water,” Rowlandson continues, “I would often be putting of him in mind and calling for my pay; at last he told me if I would make another shirt for a papoose not yet born, he would give me a knife, which he did when I had done it” (48). Her sense of divine and secular swindle in white culture is apparently countered by fair trade in Narragansett society, and her captors restore the “worth,” as Toulouse discusses it, that her nominal “protectors” have stolen.

In entering the Indian economy, Rowlandson transforms herself from an object of exchange in a trade conducted between men (the Indians and the British haggle over Rowlandson's “worth” in terms of tobacco and firearms) to an agent of exchange. Her new economic role seems to allow Rowlandson more physical agency; when she finds herself hungry toward the conclusion of the ninth remove, Rowlandson for the first time sets out to remedy her own dilemma (“I was fain to go and look after something to satisfy my hunger” [49], she states) rather than waiting, as she had done previously, for someone else to bring her relief. With this change in her economic status, Rowlandson demonstrates a consequent shift in her allegiances: later in the ninth remove, when she receives three tokens of the Indians' favor (her master shows her the way to her son, a squaw cooks her dinner, and another gives her a place to sleep), Rowlandson attributes none to God, even going so far as to note that the Indians show her great kindness even though she is a stranger to them (50).

While she never appears to recognize her captors' strategic behavior toward her, then, Rowlandson, following her economic participation, does acknowledge her random treatment, thereby contradicting her earlier notion that all Indian action was intended for her trial, while all kindness came from God alone. “Sometimes I met with favor,” Rowlandson concludes the tenth remove, “and sometimes with nothing but frowns” (50). Continuing this note of arbitrariness, Rowlandson, in the final removes of her narrative, sometimes thanks God for her captors' kindnesses (as in removes twelve, fourteen, and seventeen) and sometimes does not (as in removes fifteen and eighteen). In the nineteenth remove, Rowlandson even thanks the Narragansetts themselves. When her master helps her to bathe, she acknowledges the favor shown her, not by God, but by the Indian. She similarly notes the hospitality of an old woman who gives her food and bedding. Finally, at the conclusion of the nineteenth remove, when strangers feed Rowlandson, she notes how little “we prize common mercies when we have them to the full” (64). The move from God's mercy to “common” mercies marks a change in Rowlandson's spiritual security and in the impermeable selfhood that, at the beginning of her narrative, that security requires her to inscribe.

The arbitrariness that enters Rowlandson's account indicates the degree to which her “wilderness” experience destabilized the rigid hierarchies of Puritan orthodoxy, hierarchies based on firmly held binarisms (white/Indian, society/wilderness, male/female, divine/evil) that Rowlandson clearly articulates at the outset of her narrative. Perhaps, as Tara Fitzpatrick suggests, Rowlandson's narrative shows that Puritanism itself was a divided ideology—divided, for example, between a strong faith in community and an emergent individualism, or between the belief that the “wilderness” was Satan's domain and the belief that it was a realm promising providential knowledge. Whether generative or reflective of discursive conflict, Rowlandson's text refuses to produce coherence, a refusal that challenges not only narrative conventions but the framing assertion of functional Puritan social order as well.

Rowlandson's challenge to the binaries undergirding Puritan ideology is tied to her implicit critique of the notion of fixed and innate identity. In calling some of her captors “insolent,” Toulouse argues, Rowlandson acknowledges that there are, among the Indians, differences in “character” (if some Indians are “insolent,” others are presumably “polite”) that result in social hierarchy and hence social structure. As Annette Kolodny notes, furthermore, Rowlandson's acceptance by the Indians—rather than of the Indians—may have served to destabilize her cultural faith in fixed identities. For “native peoples,” Kolodny writes, “acceptance into the group was determined solely by acculturation, while for Euro-Americans there was always a racial requirement” (1993, 29). By making the captive part of the tribe (often adopting the captive as a member of the family), the Indians show that “identity” is not the result of preordained essence but of acquired language and behavior.² In thus distinguishing between Indians and showing them as socially constructed beings rather than as the innately devilish villains of Puritan sermons, Rowlandson demonstrates “the relativity of social arrangements” and challenges the notion of “fixed status” (Toulouse 1992, 658) with which she begins her narrative.

Rowlandson's articulation of destabilized “status” is not limited to her captors, furthermore. In the course of her narrative, Rowlandson also comes to act less in accordance with what she identifies as “white” values, particularly compassion. In the thirteenth remove, when the papoose of Rowlandson's mistress dies, she callously remarks that “there was more room” in the wigwam without the baby (55). When, in the eighteenth remove, a woman gives Rowlandson and an English child horse's feet to eat, she reports, “Being very hungry, I had quickly eat up mine, but the child could not bite it, it was so tough and sinewy but lay sucking, gnawing, chewing, and slabbering of it in the mouth and hand. Then I took it of the child and ate it myself and savory it was to my taste” (60). Rowlandson eats foods she had previously considered inedible (a standard “turning point” in the captivity narratives), and one can gather from the scene in which her master brings Rowlandson water with which to bathe that she gave up some former standards of cleanliness and grooming (Gherman 1975, 59-60). As Rowlandson begins to seem less “white” by her own definition, the Indians become less alien, and the racial oppositions structuring her earlier notions of identity momentarily collapse.

Rowlandson most disturbingly demonstrates the discursive construction of naturalized “identity” when, at the conclusion of her narrative, she returns to her home culture, where most Puritans would not accept her “sociological” view of the Indians. At that point in her tale, Rowlandson again deploys her initial, predictable stereotypes about Indians. In the twentieth remove, when on her redemption the Indians warmly wish her well, Rowlandson again attributes their kindness to God's intervention. Rowlandson also returns to a picture of the Indians as nothing more than “roaring lions and savage bears” (70). The closure she (or perhaps her ministerial editor) provides in order to align her experiences with the typological image of the passively suffering, captive Israel contradicts the understanding and grudging appreciation Rowlandson has demonstrated for the Indian culture and her lessened security in English “superiority.” The very contradiction demonstrates the power investments in different conceptions of identity, however, and destabilizes the absolute and naturalized “us vs. them” opposition that begins the narrative.

Rowlandson's resistance to the power investments of white society is notable as well in her “failed” return to Puritan society. On Rowlandson's redemption, the Boston council orders a day of public thanksgiving, but Rowlandson declines to participate. Stating, “I thought I had still cause of mourning” (72), Rowlandson expresses her resistance to offering a “thanksgiving” that would confirm her successful return by and to divine Providence. Her home culture attempts, as did the Indians, to prescribe Rowlandson's behaviors and even her reactions, but she refuses to comply, hence making her Indian captors and her Puritan rescuers analogous (an association she also makes when, after her redemption, she comments, “I was not so much hemmed in with the merciless and cruel heathen but now as much with pitiful, tender-hearted, and compassionate Christians” [71]), while marking her difference from both. Mitchell Breitwieser has documented Rowlandson's use of mourning (remembering the individual characteristics of the lost object or person, rather than allowing loss to be subsumed into a discourse of “exemplification” that turns every lost object or person into a “type” or representative of some cultural ideal) to prevent her complete return to white society. Breitwieser seems to assume that Rowlandson's subversion is an innocent by-product of her grief; I am suggesting, however, that her refusal results from her newfound agency. There are moments in her text when Rowlandson chooses not to mourn. In the thirteenth remove, for example, when her son tells her he “was as much grieved for his father as for himself,” Rowlandson responds, “I wondered at his speech, for I thought I had enough upon my spirit in reference to myself to make me mindless of my husband and everyone else” (54). Her moments of grief are selective and well-chosen, serving to distance Rowlandson from her husband (and the Puritan order that he, as minister, represents), and to prevent her complete reintegration into his world.³

Rowlandson's challenge to Puritanism arises due to her position, in Tara Fitzpatrick's words, at an “intersection in the contest of cultures” (1991, 12). The shifting of her racial identity, as I have argued, seems closely related to her changed notion of acceptable gender activities. On the one hand, Rowlandson remains fiercely traditional in her gender identity, as one sees in her great affection for her master and her equally strong hostility to his wife. Accustomed to having a “master” whose pleasure she serves, Rowlandson easily adapts to her subordinate role under Indian men. She chafes, however, under the orders of an Indian woman, who displaces Rowlandson from her traditional role as mistress of the house (Ulrich 1980, 228). Yet Rowlandson's acceptance of Indian life seems to begin precisely at the moment when she assumes an economic position in the community. That position gives her an agency among the Indians that she would not necessarily have had in her own culture where, as Breitwieser notes, her dealings “would always have been subaltern, in the name of her husband, putatively if not really subordinate to his vision and direction” (1990, 147). Allowed a mobility, an economic status, and a political centrality she would not have enjoyed in Lancaster, even given the social prominence of her husband and father, Rowlandson seems more willing to reevaluate the notion of social roles in general. Rowlandson's narrative makes clear that the Puritans, as much as the Indians, have a stake in “possessing” her body and its meanings. Yet even while she reveals the efforts of religion to police the borders of identity by requiring that the Puritan subject be “properly” gendered and racialized, Rowlandson, by assuming agency over the dispossession of her identity, ultimately refuses orthodoxy's selfhoods. …

The history of appropriation and resistance begins with the first captivity narrative—Mary Rowlandson's—and the “Preface to the Reader” provided by the pseudonymous “Ter Amicam,” possibly Increase Mather. Creating from Rowlandson's story a parable of the captive Israel delivered from heathen bondage by God, Ter Amicam must simultaneously assure his congregants of their hopes for salvation, calm their racial anxieties in the midst of a destructive war with the Indians, and excuse the extraordinary fact of a Puritan woman telling her own story while discouraging other women from doing the same. Rowlandson's editor undertakes the task by making her narration a sign not of her articulateness and daring resilience, but of her continuing subservience and obligation to her divine protector.

This Narrative was penned by the Gentlewoman herself, to be to her a memorandum of Gods dealing with her, that she might never forget, but remember the same, and the severall circumstances thereof, all the dayes of her life. A pious scope which deserves both communication and imitation. Some friends having obtained a sight of it, could not but be so much affected with the many passages of working providence discovered therein, as to judge it worthy of publick view, and altogether unmeet that such works of God should be hid from present and future Generations: And therefore though this Gentlewomans modesty would not thrust it into the Press, yet her gratitude unto God made her not hardly perswadable to let it pass, that God might have his due glory, and others benefit by it as well as her self. I hope by this time none will cast any reflection upon the Gentlewoman, on the score of this publication of her affliction and deliverance.

(Lincoln 1913, 115)

Rowlandson did not wish to speak, Ter Amicam assures his congregants, knowing her proper place as a (silent) woman, but felt compelled to do so, to warn others of the savageries of the heathen Indians and to praise the mercies of God in overcoming them. “Excuse her,” Ter Amicam requests of his readers, “if she come thus into publick, to pay those vows, come and hear what she hath to say” (116). Given the frame of reference her editor provides—in which women only by extraordinary acts of God can be persuaded to come into public—one wonders how her readers could have heard “what she hath to say,” since her content deals largely with women's adaptability and fitness to exist not only in public but in the wilderness itself. In the editor's hands Rowlandson's narrative reinforces prevailing stereotypes, thereby justifying fear and hatred of the Indians and ensuring women's submission. Yet a tension remains between the narrative as described by the minister—featuring female modesty, Indian depravity, and English superiority—and the evidence that emerges from the narrative itself, which represents female endurance and cunning, Indian kindness and social complexity, and English ineptness and brutality.

Notes

1. Several critics have noted the “double” nature of Rowlandson's perspective. Gherman refers to the “Allegorical and the Realistic” (1975, 56) levels of Rowlandson's text; Kolodny traces separate “spiritual” and “physical” journeys that “get progressively sorted out” (1984, 18); and Breitwieser finds in Rowlandson's tale “a collision between cultural ideology and the real” (1990, 4). Susan Howe notes, “Mary Rowlandson's thoroughly reactionary figuralism requires that she obsessively confirm her orthodoxy to readers at the same time she excavates and subverts her own rhetoric” (1991, 100). Arguing that “God's text in Rowlandson's text is counterpoint, shelter, threat” (124), Howe concludes that the “trick of her text is its mix” (127). In what is to my mind the most persuasive discussion of the divided narrative, Teresa Toulouse claims that Rowlandson's text reveals “an angry woman's self-abnegating means of expressing compliance and at the same time voicing accusation and condemnation” (1992, 667), concluding that Rowlandson thereby represents “the anger and desire for defining specialness of the socially (and sexually) disenfranchised expressed in ways that both use and strain the boundaries of orthodoxy” (672). Tara Fitzpatrick has argued, as I do at the conclusion of this chapter, that the dual, “sometimes dueling,” voices of Rowlandson's narrative may more logically be attributed to two distinct speakers: Rowlandson and Increase Mather (1991, 2). I am also indebted to a paper on Rowlandson's “two narratives” given by Laura Henigman in the advanced American literature seminar, Columbia University, spring 1986.

2. Susan Howe has similarly argued that Rowlandson's narrative demonstrates that “all individual identity may be transformed—assimilated” (1991, 96), thereby challenging Puritan faith in the fixity of character.

3. Here I am also taking issue with the argument advanced by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse in The Imaginary Puritan (1992). Armstrong and Tennenhouse contend that Rowlandson's consistent desire to return to her home culture caused her to recreate “Englishness” in writing, thereby giving rise to modern authorship as the individual representative of a collectivity. While I agree that Rowlandson ultimately comes to speak for a collectivity—white women (see my discussion in chap. 4)—I disagree that she expresses consistent desire for her home culture or that she successfully reintegrates into that culture. The tentative language Armstrong and Tennenhouse use to describe Rowlandson's return—“Rowlandson ends up pretty much where she begins, in the bosom of her family and friends. Indeed, she seems to return to the same community that was in place before the Indian uprising, and her return appears to restore that community's original state of wholeness” (211, emphasis mine)—suggests their inability to resolve Rowlandson's closing assertion of her separateness from English culture with their claim of her represented wholeness.

Works Cited

Breitwieser, Mitchell Robert. 1990. American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief, and Ethnology in Mary White Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Fitzpatrick, Tara. 1991. “The Figure of Captivity: The Cultural Work of the Puritan Captivity Narrative.” American Literary History 3:1-26.

Gherman, Dawn Lander. 1975. From Parlour to Tepee: The White Squaw on the American Frontier. Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts/Amherst.

Kolodny, Annette. 1993. “Among the Indians: The Uses of Captivity.” The New York Times Book Review, January 31, 1, 26-29.

Lincoln, Charles. 1913. Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Rowlandson, Mary. 1682. “The Sovereignty and Goodness of God.” Pp. 31-75 in Vaughan and Clark (1981); also reprinted in Drake (1851), Peckham (1954), and VanDerBeets (1973).

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. 1980. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750. New York: Oxford University Press.