[In the following essay, Henwood explores how Rowlandson uses the Psalms in her text and the importance of them in Puritan religion.]

[God] gave [David] the “shield of his salvation,” and girded him with strength to battel; and gave him the necks of his enemies, that he destroyed those that hated him. Therefore he gave thanks unto the Lord among the nations, and sang praises unto his name, awaking up his glorie, awaking up his Psalterie and Harp, awaking himself early, to praise the Lord among the peoples, and to sing unto him among the nations.

Henry Ainsworth, Annotations upon the Book of Psalmes (1617)

And here I may take occasion to mention one principal ground of my setting forth these few Lines; even as the Psalmist says, To declare the works of the Lord, and his wonderful power in carrying us along, preserving us in the Wilderness, while under the Enemies hand, and returning of us in safety again; and his goodness in bringing to my hand so many comfortable and suitable Scriptures in my distress.

Mary Rowlandson, A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682)

Shepherd, soldier, singer. Lover, giant-killer, king. Poet, penitent, prophet of the Messiah. As one of the most colorful and diverse characters in the history of the Old Testament, David, son of Jesse, has the potential, typologically speaking, to bear a shifting spectrum of emblematic meanings. When the New England Puritans undertook the combat with the wilderness to found their New Jerusalem, Israel's poet-hero sounded for them the call to battle, the cry for help, the prophecy of victory, the music of consolation. His Psalms,¹ the record of his own spiritual “wilderness experience” (Guruswamy 294), constituted the material for the first book printed in the wilds of America, the Bay Psalm Book (The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre) of 1640.

Not surprisingly, then, Mary Rowlandson, in her painfully literal combat with the wilderness during her nearly three-month forced trek through the New England bush, turns most often to this first book of the New England Puritans to relieve her anguish. Approximately one-third of the Biblical references that pervade Rowlandson's narrative of her captivity among Wampanoag Indians come, David Downing estimates, from the Psalms (Downing 255). The peculiar double-voicedness of Rowlandson's text, the split narrative self that intrigues so many critics,² seems to emerge, to a large extent, out of the multivalent voice(s) of David's songs. In the Psalms, Rowlandson finds a context for her misery, spiritual assurance, and emotional release.

Rowlandson, as Teresa Toulouse has pointed out, is well aware of the complexities and contradictions of Biblical voices and often exploits them to her own ends.³ Biblical language does not necessarily act, as many critics have assumed,⁴ as a restrictive mold superimposed on Rowlandson's personal authorship. On the contrary, it often provides her with a sanctioned means of expressing her emotional torment, especially her anger. Kathryn Derounian is right, I think, to suggest that self-expression is crucial to Rowlandson's psychological survival of her ordeal (Derounian 91). However, whereas Derounian and others have portrayed the Biblical text as inhibiting Rowlandson's ability to tell her own tale, I argue that the sacred Psalms render publicly legitimate, even righteous, the captive's very human frustration and rage and thus enable her, as well as the communal vision she is a part of, to survive.

In Writing a Woman's Life, her provocative discussion of the female tradition of autobiography, Carolyn Heilbrun asserts that “above all other prohibitions, what has been forbidden to women [writers] is anger” (13). Surprisingly, though, anger was not forbidden to Puritan women, so long as they turned their rage to heroic, communal uses. As we shall see, Rowlandson in her narrative manages to find an outlet for her own frustration by taking her anger public and communicating it through the language of a Puritan Biblical hero—David, the Psalmist. Rowlandson finds in the Psalms a reserve of hope as well as an arsenal of curses against her enemies. Both sources of emotional sustenance prove essential to her spiritual survival in the wilderness, where the captive must marshal all her personal resources—her faith and her rage—in order to keep sane and sacred her own identity.

For the Puritans, anger, like sexual desire, was not necessarily an evil in itself. Properly channelled, the one into righteous indignation and the other into the marriage bond, both human frailties had their divinely appointed uses (Porterfield 35). Cotton Mather's famous tract on proper feminine behavior, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion or the Character and Happiness of a Vertuous Woman (1692), forcefully illustrates this apparent paradox. Mather's ideal “vertuous woman” is, quite predictably, meek, mild, and mum, until, that is, she turns to divinely inspired authorship. When a pious Puritan woman takes her place beside her Biblical precursors—Mather names Deborah, Hannah, Huldah, and Mary—as one of the female “Scribes” of God's spirit, she speaks God's truth with aggressive fervor. Asserts Mather: “They to whom the common use of Swords is neither Decent nor Lawful, have made a most Laudable use of Pens; and they that might not without Sin, lead the Life which old Stories ascribe to Amazons, have with much praise done the part of Scholars in the world” (Ornaments 6, 5). If women cannot be battlefield Amazons, they can, as authors, number among “the Amazons of Zion,” those female saints, both ancient and modern, whom Mather extolls in a later essay on female comportment, Tabitha Rediviva (Tabitha Rediviva 24). They can also, as acknowledged speakers of “the most sure word of Prophecy,” become female Jeremiahs, voicing the anger of God's awakened wrath. Although directed to purge all unfeminine “dross” of their “own wrath” from their individual speech, Puritan women writers are free to use their prophet's privilege to impersonate the masculine anger of a vengeful God (Mather, Ornaments 6, 30).

The ironies implicit in Mather's notions of virtuous female authorship are, of course, reflected on a much larger scale in his culture as a whole. As Amanda Porterfield has persuasively illustrated in her recent study, Female Piety in Puritan New England, virtues conventionally prescribed to women—humility, self-control, self-sacrifice, submissiveness—formed the basis of the New England Puritan's relationship to God and society, regardless of gender. Nonetheless, while Puritan ministers manifested what Porterfield calls a “fixation on anger,” they delivered sermon after sermon urging their congregations on to offensive warfare against the indigenous population (Porterfield 42). The manipulation of personal anger into publicly justified outrage was one of the philosophical accomplishments of colonial Puritanism. Thus Hannah Dustan, who slew and scalped her Indian captors with a tomahawk, could become a Puritan heroine, and Mary Rowlandson, who uses the Psalms to both assuage and exploit inner turmoil, could become a best-selling author in a devotional tradition.

The Psalms furnish Rowlandson with a public, liturgical language that centers her experience in the communal sphere of meaning but also empowers her to speak passionately of her own grief, confusion, and anger. They provide a vital means of self-expression under conditions that threaten to obliterate the captive's identity and even her sanity.⁵ As Rowlandson, dazed and disoriented, struggles to cope with an unstable Indian world that nearly engulfs her in terror and madness, she turns to the familiar language of the scriptures, especially the Psalms, to reassure herself that her suffering has meaning and that her identity as one of God's chosen is therefore still intact.

Finding the means of emotional self-assertion becomes a complicated survival strategy in a situation in which open displays of grief are typically punishable by death. As David Sewell has documented, for many white prisoners of the Indian wars, the psychological trauma of captivity was aggravated by the emotional repression enforced by the natives (40). Rowlandson is no exception to this trend: at the beginning of her captivity, she lives in constant terror that her young child, who cannot control her moans of pain, will be slain for being a nuisance (Rowlandson 36), and she is kept from her other daughter, Mary, because the child angers the Indians by bursting into tears every time her mother tries to visit (37). Mary Rowlandson is, however, above all a survivor,⁶ and it is her rhetorical resourcefulness as much as her bartering and sewing skills that enables her to come out of her wilderness ordeal with her self and sanity preserved.

As a captive and as a narrator of captivity, Mary Rowlandson wrestles with “sorrow that cannot be exprest” (34). On top of her captors' prohibition of emotional outbursts, she initially finds herself too shell-shocked, too “astonished,” to give vent to her own emotions. And so, despite heartbreak, dizziness, fatigue, stinking wounds, and unrelenting hunger, Rowlandson does not succumb to weeping until the eighth remove, more than a quarter into her narrative. She describes the scene as follows:

then my heart began to faile; and I fell a-weeping; which was the first time, to my remembrance, that I wept before them. Although I had met with so much Affliction, and my heart was many times ready to break, yet could I not shed one tear in their sight; but rather had been all this while in a maze, and like one astonished; but now I may say, as Psal. cxxxvii.I. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sate down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.

(42)

When Rowlandson finally finds release from psychological numbness, she captures the pathos of that moment and its conflicting emotions in the language of the Psalms. Her memory of the sacred songs, the hymns of civilization, plays a key role in restoring her sense of self. Throughout her narrative, Rowlandson consistently mines the riches of the voices of the Psalms. In her struggle to find a language to express both private anguish and public doctrine, she exploits a wide range of the Psalmist's moods and the Biblical voice she adopts is by turns repentant, suffering, chastizing, thankful, praising, vengeful, angry, even cursing. Rowlandson realizes textually the epigraph to the Bay Psalm Book: “Let the word of God dwell plenteously in you …” (Col. 3:16). In the plenteousness of the Psalms, the captive finds a richness and diversity of human expression that speaks to and for her emotional need and thus becomes her own.

As a churchgoer, Rowlandson would have been accustomed to hearing psalms read or sung both before and after every sermon she attended (Hambrick-Stowe 111). She would have sung psalms in family devotions and incorporated them in her private meditations. Moreover, she would have recognized in David's collection of spiritual songs a Biblical precedent for the public conversion narratives required for church membership (Swaim 36). If, as Patricia Caldwell has suggested, the first New England authors were able to move “through the Bible, almost as through a physical space” (Caldwell 31), the Psalms provided one of the most familiar and trustworthy Puritan paths through the scriptural landscape.

According to the preface to the Bay Psalm Book, the traditional reliance on scriptural psalms in worship is largely owing to their abundance and variety of expression. The Psalms, according to the author of the Preface (probably John Cotton; Harastzi 19-27), “the Holy-Ghost himselfe in infinite wisdome hath made to suit all the conditions, necessityes, temptations, affections &c. of men in all ages.” Paradoxically, at the same time that the plentiful expression of the Psalms gives voice to every facet of human experience, it also prohibits the invention of new forms of expression. The passage quoted above continues: “by this [supplying of psalms for all conditions] the Lord seemeth to stoppeth mens mouths and mindes ordinarily to compile or sing any other psalmes … seing, let our condition be what it will, the Lord himselfe hath supplyed us with farre better.” There is, for the Puritans, a fine line between personal expression and heretical expression,⁷ and the language of the Psalms played an important role in helping navigate the narrow space between.

The Psalms, especially those written in the first-person, provided New England Puritans with a vocabulary and phraseology that sounded from the apparently lyric depths of private, historic experience but were publicly intelligible and hence socially acceptable. For women, the Psalms represented a special opportunity for public expression, since an exemption from the church rule of silence allowed them to join in the congregational singing (Hambrick-Stowe 114).⁸ The Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in colonial America, thus served as one of the first means of giving early American women a voice to be heard. In an important sense, the Psalms underpin Rowlandson's entire narrative, since she uses the Psalmist's very words to justify her literary creation:

And here I may take occasion to mention one principal ground of my setting forth these few Lines; even as the Psalmist says, To declare the works of the Lord, and his wonderful power in carrying us along, preserving us in the Wilderness, while under the Enemies hand, and returning of us in safety again; and his goodness in bringing to my hand so many comfortable and suitable Scriptures in my distress.

(42)

By identifying herself textually not only with Old Testament prophets—Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos, and Micah—but also with the prophetic singer, David, Rowlandson finds in the midst of her affliction hope and a sense of vocation. “I shall not die but live,” proclaims Rowlandson through Psalm 118, “and declare the works of the Lord.”

Very near the beginning of her narrative, Rowlandson emphasizes the strength of her identification with David by using a fragment from the Psalms to draw the reader into the spiritual heart of her historic ordeal. The imperative voice of Psalm 46 calls us to enter directly into the pathos of Rowlandson's situation: “Come, behold the works of the Lord, what desolation he has made in the earth” (33). When we consult the whole psalm, however, we discover that this poignant invitation to lament is actually framed within a celebration of God's faithfulness. The psalm opens with the familiar reassurance, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble,” and closes with the confident assertion, “The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.” Examined in its original context, the apparent cry of despair becomes part of a meditation on the steadfastness of the Lord—the militant Lord of conquering armies.

Rowlandson's Biblical quotations serve as meditational signposts, directing us to ponder their meaning in the larger Biblical passages to which they point, and the “comfort” Rowlandson finds in her “comfortable Scriptures” (42) derives at least in part from her awareness of the verses that frame the isolated quotation. That Rowlandson expects her readers to share this awareness is clear from her phrasing of her quotation from Psalm 27: “Psal. xxvii.13. I had fainted, unless I had believed, &c.” (35, emphasis mine). Once we take into account the comprehensive perspective, however, many of the so-called “comfortable” Scriptures that come to Rowlandson's emotional aid during her captivity are strangely disturbing to a modern humanist sensibility. In several of the psalms upon which Rowlandson draws, the speaker does not stop at declaring the wonderful works of salvation but looks forward to further works of divine vengeance by “the Lord of hosts” upon the Enemy. Rescue is incomplete, it seems, without bloody revenge. As C. S. Lewis says, in such psalms “the spirit of hatred which strikes us in the face is like the heat from a furnace mouth” (23).

Such hostility is implied, if not expressed, in nearly every psalm from which Rowlandson quotes, even those that do not appear to be particularly bloody-minded. Rather than exploring undefinable angst or vague mental torments, the Psalms tend to define suffering in terms of an antagonistic Other—the treacherous friend, the wicked neighbor, the evil foe, the “floods of ungodly men” (Psalm 18). Even at their most introspective moments, the Psalms are never purely lyric poems (Fisch 108), and the concrete language of Hebrew poetry consistently defies individual subjectivity by insisting on putting a human face to oppression. In his moments of misery, David, like Daniel, to whose situation Rowlandson also compares her own, becomes an archetypal captive, surrounded by torturers. Thus, the “&c” in Rowlandson's citation from Psalm 27 (“I had fainted, unless I had believed, &c”) sketches a complete scenario of captivity, suffering, and retribution that plants Rowlandson squarely in the shoes of her Biblical model.⁹

Even Psalm 119, which Rowlandson quotes twice, builds its extended acrostic meditation on the law on a scaffolding of bipolar oppositions—the righteous speaker struggling to obey the law and the evil enemies who harrass his efforts. When Rowlandson declares near the end of her narrative, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted” (Psalm 119: 71 [65]), she is reminding her readers that her afflictions point up the lawless, persecuting heathen around her: “the proud have forged a lie against me: but I will keep thy precepts with my whole heart. / Their heart is fat as grease; but I delight in thy law” (v. 69-70). Her earlier quotation from Psalm 119 (“I know, O Lord, that thy judgments are right, and that thou in faithfulness hast afflicted me,” v. 75 [45]) is also taken from a section of the psalm that deliberately frames the speaker in contrast to his foes. At the same time that the suffering psalmist prays for “merciful kindness” that he may live to continue delighting in the law, he also prays for revenge on the enemy: “Let the proud be ashamed; for they dealt perversely with me without a cause. …” (v. 78).

Of all Rowlandson's selections from the Psalms, the most seemingly lyric moment she reproduces in her own text comes from Psalm 6 and also occurs near the end of her narrative, in the passage in which she describes the lasting aftereffects of the trauma she has experienced:

I remember in the night season, how the other day I was in the midst of thousands of enemies, and nothing but death before me; it was then hard work to persuade myself that ever I should be satisfied with bread again. But now we are fed with the finest of the Wheat, and (as I may so say) with honey out of the rock; instead of the husks, we have the fatted Calf; the thoughts of these things in the particulars of them, and of the love and goodness of God towards us, make it true of me, what David said of himself, Psal. vi.6, I water my couch with my tears. Oh the wonderful power of God that mine eyes have seen, affording matter enough for my thoughts to run in, that when others are sleeping mine eyes are weeping.

(64-65)

Here, Rowlandson uses the Psalmist's language to paint a portrait of her own ceaseless introspection; while others are at peace, enjoying God's plenty and sleeping soundly, she turns restlessly inward to reflect on past sorrows. The Psalmist here is not, as he often is, on a battlefield, at a coronation, or praising God in the temple. Instead, this lament finds him isolated and alone, in bed, bemoaning his grief to himself. Nevertheless, towards the end of the psalm, the speaker sketches in the inevitable enemies encircling his couch, and the complaint closes with a prayer for their defeat: “Let all mine enemies be ashamed and sore vexed: let them return and be ashamed suddenly” (v. 10).

In the seventeenth remove, when Rowlandson reports being very near the end of her physical and emotional strength, she quotes three deceptively contemplative, melancholy verses from Psalm 109 that make clear the outward-looking hostility underlying the captive's self-pity. Writes Rowlandson: “Now may I say as David, Psal cix. 22,23,24, I am poor and needy, and my heart is wounded within me. I am gone like the shadow when it declineth: I am tossed up and down like the Locust: my knees are weak through fasting, and my flesh faileth of fatness” (52). This poignant passage comes at a point in the narrative when Rowlandson is so exhausted by her trials that she is reduced to eating the broth of a boiled horse foot in order to stay alive. Her spirit must receive refreshment, however, from the recognition—shared, no doubt, with her original readers—that as she echoes David's groans she also echoes his extended litany of holy curses against the oppressors. The Psalmist begs that the adversary's days might be few, that his children might be fatherless and his wife a widow, that he might become prey to the extortioner, that curses might “come into his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones” (v. 18). As the title in the King James Bible reminds us, Psalm 109 is not primarily a moving prayer for deliverance but rather another instance of “God's Vengeance Invoked on the Adversaries.”

There is nothing covert about Rowlandson's expression of anger through her incorporation of angry psalms into her narrative. Why should Rowlandson take pains to conceal anger that she sees as righteous and that she so plainly reveals in her two central references to the opening verses of Deuteronomy 30? The Deuteronomy passage contains the first scriptural solace that Rowlandson finds after receiving her plundered Bible. Here, she finds both the promise of “mercy” and the promise of retribution (38). Near the close of her narrative, she reiterates these two linked promises by quoting for us directly Deuteronomy 4 and 7: “If any of thine be driven out to the utmost parts of heaven, from thence will the Lord thy God gather thee, and from thence will he fetch thee. And the Lord thy God will put all these curses upon thine enemies, and on them which hate thee, which persecuted thee” (64).

The Psalmist's vindictive spirit would have been as familiar to a New England Puritan's ear as the following opening lines from the Bay Psalm Book's versification of Psalm 94:

O Lord God, unto whom there doe
          revenges appertaine:
O God to whom vengeance belongs,
          clearly shine forth againe.

When Rowlandson quotes from this same psalm in the nineteenth remove (v. 18, “When my foot slipped, thy mercy, O Lord, held me up” [53]), the larger, vengeful meaning would have been clear to her readers. Coming as it does on the heels of one of Rowlandson's indignant retorts to her Indian mistress, the pointer to Psalm 94 does not conceal but rather emphasizes Rowlandson's angry resentment. The title the Authorized Version gives Psalm 94 is, after all, “Jehovah Implored to Avenge his People.”

Psalm 118, “that comfortable scripture” that gives Rowlandson a reason for writing, could also be classified, according to Lewis's categories, as a “terrible” or “contemptible” cursing psalm (Lewis 24). The psalm opens, innocently enough, with an invitation to praise God for his constancy to his people: “O Give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good: because his mercy endureth for ever. / Let Israel now say, that his mercy endureth for ever” (v. 1-2). The speaker describes how God has miraculously preserved him in the past, anticipates relief from his present distress, and finishes by praising God again for his salvation. “This is the day which the Lord hath made,” the poet exults, “we will rejoice and be glad in it” (v. 24). Part of the Psalmist's rejoicing, however, involves gloating defiantly over the soon-to-be-conquered enemy. The dark middle section of the psalm features a violent refrain:

All nations compassed me about: but in the name of the Lord will I destroy them.

They compassed me about; yea, they compassed me about: but in the name of the Lord I will destroy them.

They compassed me about like bees; they are quenched as the fire of thorns: for in the name of the Lord I will destroy them.

(v. 10-12, my emphasis)

In these verses, the Psalmist's sense of righteous indignation transmutes into outright belligerence, and compassion is swallowed up in violent intentions. God may be constant, but the angry Psalmist, who segues from adoration to anathema, is humanly inconstant, in his tone at least.

Taken as a whole, Psalm 118 would seem to incense rather than assuage a troubled heart. Not surprisingly, this psalm was a favorite battle hymn of sixteenth-century European Calvinists (Reid 47). Rowlandson's “comfort” seems strongly tied to a militant, violent spirit—a spirit that becomes more manifest in her quotation from Psalm 55. Rowlandson lights upon the 22nd verse of Psalm 55 after her return from her visit to her son. After a physically and emotionally gruelling journey, Rowlandson turns to her Bible, her “great comforter” (44). She reads: “Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee, Psal. lv.22” (44). What Rowlandson must also read but does not quote in her retelling of the event is the continuation of that sustaining thought. Quoted below are the complete two final verses (verses 22 and 23) of the psalm:

Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved.

But thou, O God, shalt bring them down into the pit of destruction: bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days; but I will trust thee.

The vindictiveness of these concluding lines is inescapable. When we look at the psalm as a whole, we see that the vengeful spirit of the closing verses actually pervades the entire psalm. As the speaker prays for deliverance, he seems to take strength from his own spite as he curses his tormentors: “Destroy, O Lord, and divide their tongues …” (v. 11), the Psalmist begs, “Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick into hell …” (v. 15).

Before Rowlandson turns to the curses of Psalm 55, she is restless in her spirit; to use her words, she “went up and down moaning and lamenting” (44). After she turns to her scriptural “comforter,” her restlessness does not seem to be calmed and a gnawing hunger remains. Immediately following the fragment from Psalm 55, Rowlandson abruptly begins a new paragraph with the brusque statement, “But I was fain to go and look after something to satisfie my hunger” (44). The spiritual food Rowlandson finds in the Psalms leaves her hungry because, by encouraging angry thoughts, it provokes rather than placates her troubled soul. On the other hand, Rowlandson's hunger for revenge, like her physical hunger, teaches her a means of survival. Goodwife Joslin gives up the struggle to adapt to her captive life and is consequently killed (Toulouse, “‘My Own Credit’” 660). Meanwhile, Rowlandson, hungry, restless, and angry, learns to barter and fend for herself. On one level, the Psalms bolster Rowlandson in her life-sustaining rage.

In the twelfth remove of her narrative, Mary Rowlandson acknowledges: “My Spirit was … (I confess) very impatient and almost outragious” (45). At this point in her story, Rowlandson tries to calm her admittedly violent spirit by turning once again to the Book of Psalms. “Be still, and know that I am God,” she reads (Psalm 46:10). Psalm 46, we have already seen, is a psalm of assurance and praise (a “quieting Scripture,” Rowlandson calls it [46]), but it is also a psalm that, like so many others, envisions victory in overtly militant terms. “The Lord of hosts is with us,” the Psalmist declares, meaning, “The Lord of armies is with us.” The God of refuge is a God of military strength. The very verse that Rowlandson quotes in her narrative looks forward to the actions of a conquering God. The complete verse 10 reads: “Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.” At the close of Rowlandson's narrative, this quotation will be echoed in the concluding fragment from Exodus, “Stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord” (65), Moses's words predicting the complete destruction of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea.

Thus, Rowlandson appears to follow a trend of seeking solace in psalms that only apparently soothe but actually justify her “outragious” spirit. Psalm 37, which “revive[s]” (47) Rowlandson in the thirteenth remove, serves as another text that could be paraphrased: “Be still, and watch God's violent judgment on the wicked.” Rowlandson quotes verse 5: “Commit thy way unto the Lord, trust also in him, and he shall bring it to pass” (47). The tone of quiet expectancy runs through the psalm's following few verses, as verse 7 urges, “Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for him …,” and verse 8 advises, “Cease from anger, and forsake wrath: fret not thyself in any wise to do evil.” Verse 11 even seems to anticipate the peace-loving spirit of the Beatitudes with the comment, “the meek shall inherit the earth.” Nevertheless, upon closer examination, it seems that the meek shall inherit the earth only through the Lord's violent interference in human events. The Psalmist describes with apparent zest the impending afflictions of the wicked: they will slay themselves with their own swords, their arms will be broken, they will be consumed by fire like a sacrifice, they will be altogether “cut off.” “Cease from anger,” the Psalmist seems to be saying, “and relish God's anger in action.” Anger and violence still find expression but agency shifts from the individual to the deity.

Rowlandson's identification with the conflicted voice (or voices) of the Psalms seems to provide her with a temporarily liveable, if unstable, solution to a fundamental ontological dilemma of Puritanism: the paradox of living one's own history while sustaining belief in the unchangeable nature of foreordained events. For Teresa Toulouse, the divided pull of this paradox creates a kind of stasis in Rowlandson's narrative, as the captive is torn between Biblical injunctions to remain passive in God's hands (Psalm 27, “Wait on the Lord”; Psalm 55, “Cast thy burden upon the Lord”, Psalm 46, “Be still, and know that I am God”) and the conviction that she must act (by praying, for example) in order to ensure her own salvation (Toulouse, “Mary Rowlandson” 33-34). As we have seen, however, the very psalms Toulouse points out as encouraging passivity actually offer substantial psychological compensation in the form of potent threats and visions of violent retaliation against the enemy.

The Psalmist himself draws attention to this subliminal gratification in two of the psalms to which Rowlandson turns for assurance. Rowlandson quotes from Psalm 38, for instance, near the beginning of her narrative, as she recalls sitting, herself wounded, holding her wounded child in her arms: “I may say as it is in Psal. xxxviii.5,6, My wounds stink and are corrupt, I am troubled, I am bowed down greatly, I go mourning all the day long” (36). As he bemoans his wretched state, the Psalmist takes the deliberate stance of a patient martyr who nonetheless looks to his God for retribution. Describing the insults hurled at him by his enemies, he maintains: “But I, as a deaf man, heard not; and I was as a dumb man that openeth not his mouth. / Thus I was as a man that heareth not, and in whose mouth are no reproofs. / For in thee, O Lord, do I hope: thou wilt hear, O Lord my God” (v. 13-15). The martyr can afford to be reticent, to dwell on his own patient suffering, when he is able to rest assured an active God will deliver the curses for him. Psalm 118, the psalm that Rowlandson claims underwrites her authority as an author, expresses the benefits of such a position even more directly. “I shall not die but live, and declare the works of the Lord: the Lord hath chastened me sore, yet he hath not given me over to death,” quotes Rowlandson. The works of the Lord have “chastened” the speaker yet, earlier in the psalm, the Psalmist, scourged but not abandoned, confidently awaits further works of divine vengeance against the encompassing foes: “The Lord taketh my part with them that help me: therefore shall I see my desire upon them that hate me” (v. 7). Here, the Psalmist presents himself as a passive observer of justice; he shall “see” his own “desire” enacted, but the vengeance belongs to, and is thus sanctified by, the Lord.

The Psalms, with their verbal enactment of sanctified violence, are, according to Harold Fisch, centrally concerned with effecting change. Whereas modern-day Western aesthetics privilege a view of poetry as introspective stasis, the Hebrew poets of the psalms saw their art as a means of action. As a psalm follows the common trajectory from self-pity through remembrances of God's faithfulness to imprecations against the persecutors, the poetry's prophetic power enables the Psalmist to imagine his sufferings already overcome. “The psalms,” writes Fisch, “are not only testimonies to past and present events; they are testimonies to the future as well. Having established or reestablished his bond with the ‘Thou’ who ‘hast been my help,’ [the psalmist] already sees his enemy vanquished; he has no more to fear. Poetry has made something happen” (110-11).

Goodwife Joslin is a poor reader of the Psalms because she fails to recognize that the sacred poetry has already “made something happen.” When she and Rowlandson “light” on the final verse of Psalm 27, “Wait on the Lord, be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart; wait, I say, on the Lord” (38), Joslin seems not to grasp the psalm's full measure of encouragement. The psalm fulfills, in effect, its own prophecy. The concluding verse urges sufferers to wait for the Lord's deliverance, but the opening verses speak of that salvation as a thing already past. Temporally, the psalm traces a circular path, as the first three verses illustrate: the psalm opens with a statement of present assurance (“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? [v. 1]), then reflects on God's constancy in the past (“When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell” [v. 2]), then looks to a future that promises to repeat the past (“Though a host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear” [v. 3]). Goodwife Joslin fails to realize that her final emancipation is already accomplished in the injunction to “wait,” mistrusts the prophecy, and dies a hideous death through her impatience.

In Rowlandson's narrative, the Psalms not only enable the captive to envision revenge but also help her to perceive the meaning of seemingly inscrutable scriptures. Rowlandson's use of the Psalms as an interpretive gloss not only on her situation but on other pieces of scripture follows the reading pattern she establishes when she first opens her bible to Deuteronomy. Although Rowlandson finds in chapter 28 that “there was no mercy for me; that the blessings were gone, and the curses came in their room,” she testifies: “But the Lord helped me to go on reading till I came to Chap. xxx, the seven first verses; where I found there was mercy promised again, if we would return to him by repentance” (38). Each time Rowlandson turns to a specific Biblical verse, the Lord helps her “to go on reading”—the rest of the chapter, the rest of the psalm, or a verse from another Biblical book.

At two particularly crucial junctures, Rowlandson turns to the vengeful vision of the Psalms to extend and clarify her reading of difficult scriptural passages. Halfway through her narrative, in the thirteenth remove, as she wrestles with inexplicable tortures inflicted by an apparently righteous God, Rowlandson finally finds something in the Bible to “revive” her: “Isaiah lv.8, For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. And also that, Psal. xxxvii. 5, Commit thy way unto the Lord, trust also in him, and he shall bring it to pass” (47). As Toulouse has noted, the passage from Isaiah offers a dubious kind of reassurance, for a God whose ways are not our ways is an unreadable God, whose mysterious will can appear capricious and cruel (Toulouse, “My Own Credit” 662). Psalm 37, however, as we have seen, compensates for the incertitude by holding forth to the mystified sufferer the eventual promise of a brutally decisive victory.¹⁰

Similarly, a verse from the Psalms illuminates the baffling words from Amos which Rowlandson quotes more than once during her ruminations on divine justice: “Shall there be evil in the City and the Lord hath not done it?” (Amos 3:6, [51, 59]). In the twentieth remove, as part of her attempt to explain Providence's apparent favor toward the Indians as part of the chastizing of God's chosen ones, Rowlandson joins Amos's troubling interrogation of the origin of evil with a consolation repeated from Psalm 118: “It is the Lord's doing, and it should be marvellous in our Eyes” (59). Here, the foundational psalm upon which Rowlandson builds her identification with David and the spiritual testimony of her narrative squelches a potential theological dilemma with a powerful assurance that, as we have seen, grows out of a battle-hymn pledge of violent retribution.

In common with most Puritan captives taken by Indians, Rowlandson identifies most readily with the angst and anger of Psalm 137 (“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion …”), the psalm that embodies her first outpouring of the anguish of captivity. While the pathetic eloquence of this lament echoes through many captivity narratives as a ritual wail of the captive's grief, the well-used refrain has its fierce as well as its plaintive side (see Appendix for complete text of the psalm). Lewis calls the cursing conclusion, in which the Psalmist looks forward to the brutal massacre of his enemy's children, “devilish” (Lewis 23) and even John Calvin, in his commentary on the psalm, has to admit that “It was … the height of cruelty in them [the Israelites] to invite the Babylonians to destroy their own brethren, or fan the flames of their hostility.”¹¹ Nevertheless, according to Calvin, the Psalmist's vindictiveness is justified because he simply acts as a mouthpiece for God's holy vengeance. Calvin instructs us that “the Psalmist does not break forth into these awful denunciations unadvisedly, but as God's herald, to confirm former prophecies” (Calvin 196). As in the case of Hannah Dustan, the Psalmist wields the tomahawk, but, linguistically speaking, God shoulders responsibility for the violence. The Psalmist evidently is only speaking what God has spoken before. Explains Calvin: “It may seem to savour of cruelty, that he [the Psalmist] should wish the tender and innocent infants to be dashed and mangled upon the stones, but he does not speak under the impulse of personal feeling, and only employs words which God had himself authorized” (Calvin 197).

As is characteristic of many psalms, Psalm 137 alternates between different forms of address. Beginning in the first-person plural, it switches to the first-person singular, and then to the second-person address of apostrophe. This blurring of the distinction between the individual and collective voice plays a crucial role in conveying the psalm's message, and also a key message undergirding Rowlandson's composite, multi-voiced text. Personal survival is so inseparable from the survival of the collective identity that loosening one's grasp on the national memory is portrayed as a kind of self-cursing: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning / If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. …” For Mary Rowlandson and her compeers, the collective voice of the Psalms, which they heard as both a historical record of and a model for the sacred history they were living, formed an important part of the armor of righteousness that the first colonists donned to preserve intact their personal and corporate identity.

Just as fellow Indian captive Jonathan Dickinson, stripped naked by his captors, is at one point in his ordeal forced to use leaves from his Bible to clothe himself (Dickinson 22), Mary Rowlandson uses her Bible to protect and project her vulnerable self in its “wilderness-condition” (36). Long before Philip gives her an opportunity for visual self-inspection in his mirror, Rowlandson employs her Bible as her spiritual mirror, her “guide by day” and “Pillow by night” (49). Rowlandson uses this mirror of the inner self as an aid to self-realization. In her Bible, particularly in the Psalms, she recognizes an experiential identity and finds a public, devotional voice for her confusion, pain, and anger. As Mary Rowlandson enters into the Psalms and relives them, they become the tool of her survival—the key to her wresting emotional meaning out of her devastating experience and the key to her expressing that meaning without alienating herself from the community she re-enters. Rowlandson knows that one may be an Amazon on paper but that a flesh-and-blood female warrior is, as Mather indicates, an indecent freak in actual seventeenth-century New England society. The language of the Psalms liberates Rowlandson to express anger without becoming immodest; it allows the virtuous minister's wife to be outspoken without becoming a social outcast.

Mary Rowlandson thus finds a strategy of survival by dwelling plenteously in the Psalms, exploiting their rich and diverse opportunities for emotional utterance. She adopts the attitude of the typical author of an early American conversion narrative who, according to Patricia Caldwell, “assimilates himself into the Bible world and outlook, dwells there imaginatively, see through its windows” (178). For Rowlandson and her fellow Puritans, who were, as Richard Slotkin and James Folsom emphasize, “preeminently ‘the people of the Book’” (39), the Bible was a vast, roomy resource of expressive possibility—an expansive vantage point from within which to articulate a literary fusion of personal emotion and collective mission.

Mary Rowlandson's narrative necessarily manifests, as Toulouse says, a “textual doubleness” (Toulouse, “‘My Own Credit’” 665) because the word of God with which it is so replete is necessarily at least, as Saint Paul would have it, “twoedged” (Heb. 4:12). Thus, to view anger as undercutting or subverting Rowlandson's public, devotional text—to attribute her frustration to prefeminist rage, rebellious subjectivity, or survivor's guilt—is to overlook the anger inherent in the devotional voice itself. From a modern humanist point of view, what is perhaps most disturbing about the raw, violent emotion that surges beneath Rowlandson's narrative is that its presence is, for Rowlandson, legitimate and deliberate. It is the anger of the righteous, God's anger. As Toulouse reminds us, Rowlandson is not on the “outside” of American Puritanism (Toulouse, “Mary Rowlandson” 45). As private vindication and communal self-justification work together in her text, Rowlandson's manipulation of the Psalms reminds us that the voice of public orthodoxy, even of Puritan public orthodoxy, is never monotone or univocal. Discordant but not divided, Rowlandson's survival narrative stands, as did American Puritanism, in the strength of its own determined contradictions.

Appendix: Psalm 137
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

Notes

1. Unlike modern Biblical scholars, seventeenth-century Puritans saw the many voices of the Psalms as issuing from the mouth of a single speaker. Thus, Henry Ainsworth introduces the first Puritan commentary on the Book of Psalms with a biographical “Preface concerning David, his life; and acts” (Ainsworth 1).

2. Recent generations of literary scholars have demonstrated a fascination with the apparent split between the so-called “vigorous and homely style” Rowlandson uses to describe day-by-day events and the more “elevated” rhetoric of the Biblical language she employs to comment upon the meaning of events (Downing 252). Thus, David Minter speaks of Rowlandson's “curious and double present-mindedness” (Minter 341); Kathryn Derounian attributes the “empirical” and “rhetorical” divisions in Rowlandson's narration to the author's “survivor syndrome”; Mitchell Brietwieser explores the “realistic” fracturing of Rowlandson's narration that occurs when subjective suffering breaks through the social codes he sees as repressing personal mourning (Breitwieser 10). My own arguments build on and seek to extend the work of Teresa Toulouse, who has probed the “textual doubleness” of a narrative voice that “scripturally grovels” but also expresses frustration and rage (Toulouse, “‘My Own Credit’” 664-65).

3. Observes Toulouse: “instead of using Scripture only to prove her acceptance of her situation, Rowlandson employs it also to express her anger about her own and her children's torment” (Toulouse, “‘My Own Credit’” 664). “What seems evident,” writes Toulouse elsewhere, “is that the Bible provides less a script of ‘prescriptive’ forms to which [Rowlandson] must conform than a variety of voices available for her use” (Toulouse, “Mary Rowlandson” 38).

4. See, for example, Derounian and Breitwieser.

5. Rowlandson is perplexed by the sudden mood changes of her captors, who seem to her “unstable and like mad men” (54). Her own mental instability manifests itself in periodic bouts of complete disorientation: “I cannot but remember how many times, sitting in their Wigwams, and musing on things past, I should suddenly leap up and run out, as if I had been at home, forgetting where I was” (47).

6. In her schema of female archetypes in Indian captivity narratives, June Namias classifies Rowlandson as a Survivor (Namias 25). Richard Slotkin and James Folsom present their edition of Rowlandson's narrative as primarily “an examination of the price of survival, of what one must learn and of the compromises one must make merely to stay alive” (Slotkin and Folsom 309).

7. Patricia Caldwell explores this quandry in depth in her study of American conversion narratives. See esp. 97-103.

8. In some churches, women may also have been allowed to break the rule of church silence to give conversion narratives (Caldwell 50, n.16).

9. Toulouse reads the quotation from Psalm 27 as evidence that Rowlandson sees David's captivity “historically re-enacted” in her own (Toulouse, “Mary Rowlandson” 38).

10. Whereas Toulouse suggests that the psalmist's language argues for “commitment and trust” and thus “softens” Rowlandson's anger in the face of an indecipherable Providence, I read Rowlandson's conjunction of scriptural passages here as evidence of a specious appeasement. The antagonistic us-versus-them mentality of the psalm actually reinforces Rowlandson's outrage by redirecting it towards her captors.

11. Ironically, in Psalm 137 the psalmist, a would-be baby-killer (“Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones”), longs to perform the very act Indian captors were so often falsely accused of committing. For a thorough discussion of how the Puritans used charges of infanticide to “demonize” native North Americans, see Ramsey.

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