SOURCE: “Mary Rowlandson's Great Declension,” in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 24, No. 5, 1995, pp. 427-39.

[In the following essay, Dietrich argues that by being allowed to write her story, Rowlandson moved beyond the traditional Puritan expectations for women and that the experience changed her into a self-reliant person in some ways.]

Mary Rowlandson spent eleven weeks and five days in captivity among the Wampanoag, Nipmuck, and Narragansett Indians; during this time she traveled over 150 miles. Her captivity narrative, A True History of the Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, was published in 1682 and is considered the archetype of the genre. Scholarly reactions to captivity narratives inevitably focus on the genre's dramatization of the Puritan emigrant's guilt for leaving the mother country and ambivalent feelings about life in exile in the New World.¹ The unwilling captive represents the entire Puritan community enslaved by the English prelates. In the Puritan framework, the captivity is part of God's test and judgment. Therefore, a captive must accept her trial as the work of God so that she comes to say, as Mary Rowlandson does, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted” (64).² A captive faces circumstances similar to those facing the Puritan emigrant: Rowlandson, as captive, must be willing to bear the breakup of her family, her isolation in a strange land with new people, and her helplessness, all as part of God's plan.

Mitchell Robert Breitwieser's American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning is the most comprehensive examination of Rowlandson's narrative to date. His overview and analyses of the critical attitudes toward the narrative—from Milton Stern's to Jane Tompkins', Susan Howe's, and Kathryn Zabelle Derounian's—is most valuable. However, Breitwieser does not question the critical tendency to define the narrative only in terms of the Puritan paradigm, nor does he consider its gender-specific characteristics.

Rather than placing the emphasis on Rowlandson as model Puritan soul in the captivity paradigm, I would like to suggest some of the textual places and narrative moments in which Rowlandson and the Puritan agenda conflict. I will examine the ways Rowlandson's captivity narrative format enabled her to construct an autobiographical self that explored beyond the familiar boundaries of female experience. Her wilderness journey allowed her to negotiate cultural restrictions on women's freedom and identity. Removed from the family members that defined her pre-captivity self, Rowlandson showed the inadequacy of passivity and the necessity of business aggressiveness in her daily struggle to survive. Additionally, once ransomed, Rowlandson transformed knitting needle into writer's pen and thus was not only allowed to “tell the tale,” but the Puritan patriarchs actually encouraged and permitted publication of her text. Her captivity experience provides Rowlandson a “cover” that simultaneously allows her to write beyond the confines of traditional female experience and to maintain her status within the boundaries of traditional conceptions of proper societal behavior. She explores the frontiers of woman's sphere and woman's societal definition, and thus explores her self-definition as she confronts her readers with her transformation from a confined, dependent woman to a woman for whom self-reliance is axiomatic.

Granting that scholars traditionally recognize early American captivity narratives as historical rather than fictional, it is nevertheless important to remember that the past has been filtered through the perceptions and special interests of its narrators. As numerous critics have shown, early American captivity narratives, such as Rowlandson's, served as a prelude to early American fiction.³ In my examination of Rowlandson's construction of a wilderness captive, I will demonstrate her specific contributions to character development and narrative voice in the development of American literary history.

Mary White Rowlandson was born in England, most likely in 1636. Her father, John White, emigrated to Massachusetts in 1638, and his family followed the next year.⁴ They lived first in Salem, then in Wenham, and finally in 1653 they moved to Lancaster, an unincorporated town of nine families located thirty miles west of Boston. In 1654, Mary White married Reverend Joseph Rowlandson. They had four children; the youngest died in infancy in 1658 or 1659.

Changes were occurring in Puritan Boston shortly following the Rowlandson marriage. The years from 1660 to 1690 encompass a period called New England's Grest Declension. It was a time when the children of the original emigrants began to fall away from the original purpose. This second generation of emigrants was still hard-working and ambitious, but now their ambitions were becoming increasingly secular. Preoccupied with worldliness and money making, they were beginning to turn away from the church.

At sunrise on February 10, 1676, “Indians with great number” (31) attacked the tiny Puritan fold at Lancaster. The residents were quite likely roused from their sleep. Indirectly, they exemplify the failure of the second generation to uphold the design of their ancestors. Illustrating the entire Puritan body grown lax, the slumbering residents of Lancaster rested content behind their protective garrisons on their cultivated lands—that is, until the attack. Mary Rowlandson and her three children were taken captive. Ironically, her husband was in Boston pleading with the Massachusetts Council for more protection from the Indian raids; he returned to find his house burned and his family abducted.

As Rowlandson journeyed with her captors away from Lancaster, she entered deeper into the forested recesses of “this lively resemblance of hell” (33-34). The wilderness serves as both a literal and a figurative hell: it is the New World landscape, and it is the condition of the Puritan mind that has turned away from God. Janus-faced—it holds both the opportunity for redemption and the possibility of destruction.⁵ Unlike eighteenth-century New World travelers who delighted in describing the attributes of the scenery, Rowlandson resisted all forms of intimacy, literary or literal, with the wilderness. Her use of the word “remove” for each encampment creates the impression of distance without the need for explicit details. The word “remove” further creates the sensation of the captivity as an all-encompassing experience—a complete expulsion from the ordinary.

As Mitchell Breitwieser suggests in American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning, when Rowlandson's wounded daughter dies in the wilderness after the first week of captivity, her burial along the trail marks Rowlandson's final break with the familiar (113). Like Bradford's Separatists standing on the desolate sands of Cape Cod against a hideous and desolate wilderness backdrop, Rowlandson's severance with the past is complete. And like them also, she begins almost stoically, to adapt to her wilderness-condition. Puritan ministers frequently reminded their congregations that material goods get in the way of a relationship with God and that on the day of judgment the sinner stands alone, stripped of family, friends, and possessions. Rowlandson's removal from the ordinary concerns of daily life and isolation from all that was familiar dramatize the paradigm of the sinner offered by Puritan ministers: her vision cleared by the interruption of her familiar concerns, she looked out and saw that she was all alone and without possibility of appeal.

Early in her narrative, Rowlandson distinguishes herself from two fellow captives: her older sister Elizabeth and Goodwife Joslin. Representing the culturally assumed submissive and dependent status of the Puritan woman, Elizabeth and Goodwife Joslin are unable to cope with the unfamiliar and extraordinary circumstances they face in their captivity. Their powerlessness emphasizes Rowlandson's versatility. The Indians, who are vexed by Goodwife Joslin's constant pleas to let her go home, finally murder her. Elizabeth no sooner says she would rather die than be taken captive, “but she was struck with a Bullet, and fell down dead over the Threshold” (33). Rowlandson, instead of refusing her captive status, uses it as a motive for enacting the drama of gender politics which produced and conditioned her experience as a New World Puritan woman. Through the remembering and writing of her captivity, Rowlandson comments on the life of Puritan wives, often homesick, displaced, yearning for the old country, and committed to an exile of separation that might last forever.

Rowlandson's sister's attitude toward the captivity is reminiscent of fellow captive John Gilberd's. Gilberd, a seventeen-year-old captive, has been turned out of his wigwam because he is sick with dysentery. Rowlandson discovers him quivering in the cold, with nothing on but his shirt and waistcoat. In an ironic reversal of the strong frontiersman/passive woman stereotype, she advises him to go and get warm by a fire—“lest he should ly there and die” (48). Rowlandson's conspicuous reversal of the power dynamics of gender accentuates not only her own prescription for survival, but her forceful sense of self. Her faith does not prevent her from using her own initiative and resources. Pushed outside of the familiar, Rowlandson's autobiographical self's multiplicity—a self that includes conflict and paradox—is versatile and boundary-crossing.⁶

Knitting, for example, an activity associated with good seventeenth-century women resigned to the domestic arena, allows Rowlandson to be self-supporting.⁷ Iconographically comic, Rowlandson travels up and down the wilderness, armed with yarn and needles. Removed from the family members that defined her pre-captivity self, she shows the inadequacy of feminine passivity and the necessity of business aggressiveness in pursuit of a livelihood. She successfully bargains for food with the Indians, many of whom wish to exploit or deride her. She tempers her unfeminine aggressiveness, however, by emphasizing her exceptional circumstances.

Referring to her owner as “My Master,” Rowlandson is able to comment indirectly on the plight of the emigrant woman. Involved in a mission that might not be her own, removed from the security of country, family, and friends, and forced to live isolated and vulnerable in a New World of hardship and starvation, the command to plunge deeper into the wilderness must have, at times at least, appeared senseless. The Master's commands to move on are analogous to the unending demands of the Puritan patriarchs. Rowlandson's narrative records the confusion, frustration, and despondency that colonial women—silenced by the total assent that Puritanism demanded from its adherents—were unable to express overtly.

In her narrative, Rowlandson not only reconstructs life in the Indian community but also parodies the position of Puritan women, for whom being obedient to their husbands paralleled proper reverence to God. Admittedly, we can only speculate on the extent of Rowlandson's conscious subversion, but this does not dismiss the significance of the narrative's ability to recuperate a sense of the Puritan woman's plight. When Rowlandson is restored at the end of her narrative, she, in a sense, exchanges a less restrictive form of captivity for a more victimizing one within the confines of the patriarchal Puritan society. After all, as a good minister's wife, it is her obligation to submit to the stern and repressive will of the Puritan community. The protesting voices of Rowlandson's sister and Goodwife Joslin illuminate the dilemma Rowlandson faces as she submits to her situation and accepts what God has in store for her. she too could refuse her captive status; however, she chooses to accept it. Furthermore, her submission does not prevent her from taking an active involvement during her travels with the Algonquian captors, and once ransomed, she does not return to her position as the silent minister's wife. Instead, she reconstructs her own metaphoric reading of her experience through her writing.

Rowlandson is not only able to comment on the situation of the emigrant woman, but she also gives an eye-witness account of life with the Indians. She records the behavior of her captors in an attempt to provide a focus to her bewildering circumstances, and over time, she comes to see them not only more distinctly, but outside of the Puritan paradigm.

In the first removes of her captivity, Rowlandson views the Indians as an indistinguishable force of chaos:

The Indians were as thick as the trees; it seemed as if there had been a thousand Hatchets going at once: if one looked before one there was nothing but Indians, and behind one, nothing but Indians; and so on either hand; I myself in the midst …

(41)

If Rowlandson is going to survive, she realizes that she needs to bring a sense of order to the alien world around her. To stabilize herself and gain a sense of control, she carefully details the disorder and unpredictability of the Indian behavior. She finds the Indians' moods to be completely impulsive: their capricious torments are suddenly followed by acts of mercy. She reflects, “Sometimes I met with Favour and sometimes with nothing but Frowns” (45). For example, noticing Rowlandson's difficulty walking as she carried her wounded daughter in her arms, the Indians set her on a horse with Sarah in her lap. As they “were going down a steep hill, we both fell over the horse's head, at which they, like inhuman creatures, laught, and rejoiced to see it” (34). Rowlandson records the Algonquians' inconstant behavior and in so doing, confirms for her reader the contrasting Puritan demand for rigid emotional and moral constancy. Under the senselessness of her present chaos, she attempts to discover the order, the single edifying design.

The Puritans regarded themselves as God's chosen, and they interpreted their own experiences in epical terms. They allegorized not only the major events of their lives, but the ordinary occurrences as well. Everything was significant. Even the dreariest chore had apocalyptic value because the most mundane action could be fit into the larger pattern of the divine plan. In light of this, Rowlandson begins to see a divine order in the midst of the surrounding chaos, and she is able to view the Indians as God's agents for “affliction to our poor Country” (59). When, for example, an Indian gives her a Bible he took after the raid on Medfield, it is an act of providence—“the wonderful mercy of God to me in those afflictions, in sending me a Bible” (37). She couldn't attribute this act of kindness to a “murderous wretch,” a “bloody heathen.” Although it was the Indians who laid the brush upon the raft which enabled her to keep her feet dry, she acknowledges the act “as a favour of God to my weakened body” (40). Her belief in God's hand in her daily affairs enables her to generate a coherence behind the seeming chaos of her captivity and to locate meaning in otherwise arbitrary events.

The recurrent image of the river's dangers provides an organizing foci for her demonstration of God's concern for her. Of all the events that are repeated during the captivity, none reoccurs so often as the river crossings.⁸ The wilderness rivers' unpredictable vagaries remind Rowlandson of the power and terror of Nature and the feebleness of humankind. She reminds herself of God's promise: “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, and through the Rivers, they shall not overflow thee” (51). And although God seems to be with Rowlandson and the Indians as they cross the Baquaug, He also allows the river to put a stop to the English army. Confronted with this puzzling spectacle, Rowlandson is forced to view the Indians more intently and with fewer prejudgments than one confined to the Puritan garrison can usually manage. Her God, rather unbelievably, seems to provide safety for the Indians as well as the white man. With the Indians, Rowlandson rebukes the English army for its “slowness and dullness.” The dissolution of her Lancaster world and the chaos of her present situation give her the opportunity to reconceptualize both the Indians and the Puritans. Her world has been turned inside out, and this provides her with an exceptional vantage point from which to see and re-evaluate her experience.

Although Rowlandson's narrative generally reflects the Puritan beliefs in the divine sanction of English colonization and the “savagery” of the Indians, it also reveals a clear sign of movement towards rupturing those ideologies as the previous example illustrates. As she lives in the Indian community, she begins to see the “barbarous creatures” as individuals. Her examination of the Indians against the colonial stereotype finds them innocent of the charges of sexual abuse of their captive women, and she observes only one instance of drunkenness in all the time she is with them. Their peculiar individual portraits emphasize the differences between Rowlandson herself and the peripheral characters. Rowlandson describes Quanopen, her master, as “dressed in his Holland shirt, with great Laces sewed at the tail of it; he had his silver Buttons, his white Stockings, his Garters were hung round with shillings; and he had Girdles of Wampum upon his Head and Shoulders” (57-58). One of his three squaws, Weetamoo, spent each day “in dressing herself near as much time as any of the Gentry of the land; powdering her hair and painting her face, going with Neck-laces, with Jewels in her ears, and bracelets upon her hands” (53). By the final remove, even when the Indians dance together, Rowlandson no longer views them as one mass of dancing “black creatures in the night” as she had in the second remove. Now each is a distinct individual. She refers to them by name and gives a detailed description of their attire. Whereas pre-captivity Rowlandson could only view the Indians through the Puritan paradigm, she now occupies a position that allows her to explore the difference between the actual Indian and the Puritan stereotype.

Despite her many detailed descriptions of people, Rowlandson's own physical appearance is left to the reader's imagination. Perhaps it becomes more powerful by the very fact that it is unexpressed, which allows readers to concoct their own portrait of a filthy, smelly, disheveled Rowlandson standing in vivid contrast to Weetamoo with her Kersey Coat, girdles of wampum, bejeweled ears, red stockings, and powdered hair. Again, Rowlandson twists the colonial stereotype: the neat and tidy Indian stands aside the bedraggled, slovenly Puritan. In the nineteenth remove, her Master asks her when she has last washed herself. Blurring the distinction between Puritan and Indian, Rowlandson responds that it has been over a month. He fetches her the water himself and bids her wash and then gives her a glass to see how much better she looks (53). This revision of the Puritan text is tempered by the fact that Rowlandson's self-portrait is unexpressed and her situation is extraordinary; nevertheless, it deliberately challenges the Puritan stereotype of the clean, well-kept, and proper woman.

Just as Lot's wife is turned into a pillar of salt when she disobeys God's command not to look back, so too does Rowlandson risk the condemnation of the Puritan patriarchs with her retrospective narrative. John Winthrop's association of Anne Hopkins' desire to write with her loss of reason exemplifies the scorn toward women writers. A second illustration is Thomas Parker's condemnation of his sister for publishing a book: “Your printing of a Book beyond the Custom of your Sex, doth rankly smell.”⁹ Back in the security of the fold, Rowlandson desperately needs to return to the questions and issues raised by her captivity. Perhaps her participation in an oral culture—where the ability to “tell the story” conferred individual and tribal identity—intricately connects to her need to relate her experience. In the controlling presence of her male critics, Rowlandson enters a literary wilderness as she attempts to reconstruct her ordeal and keep her errant perceptions in check. Although her language is imbued with a social, political, and economic reality of male domination, Rowlandson devises a self that defies patriarchal control and confounds orthodox stereotypes.

Rowlandson's audience was ill-equipped, however, to appreciate the symbolic significance of her great declension. Annette Kolodny's “A Map for Rereading: Or, Gender and Interpretation of Literary Texts” (1980) and Jean E. Kennard's “Convention Coverage or How to Read Your Own Life” (1981) focus on deciphering texts that are seen to have deeper, perhaps unacceptable muted subtexts beneath their palimpsestic surfaces. According to Kolodny, interpretive strategies are learned and gender inflected. Her argument, that the unreadability of texts written by women is due to a textual system dictated by men, accounts for the seventeenth-century reception of the Rowlandson narrative. Puritan women readers, living in a society that did not allow for a plurality of interpretations, were unable to look beyond the orthodox plot and, therefore, failed to recognize Rowlandson's captivity as symbolic of the situation of women in a patriarchal society. However, they would recognize Rowlandson's exemplification of the emigrant ordeal—the loss of identity and the confusion and adversity to wilderness life. Rowlandson not only articulated her fellow women's grief and discouragement, but because she returned from her captivity, she demonstrated the possibility of journeying from settlement to wilderness without losing one's essential civilized self.

Rowlandson's narrative voice marks an important stage in the developments of both the genres of the travel narrative and of fiction. William Spengemann discusses the connection between the travel narrative and fiction in his The Adventurous Muse: The Poetics of American Fiction, 1789-1900. While Spengemann does not explore the contribution of the captivity narrative as a genre, I am indebted to his examination of the shift in William Bradford's narrative voice between the first and second books of Plymouth Plantation from a more retrospective account to an immediacy that earlier narratives lacked. In her captivity narrative, Rowlandson takes one step beyond Bradford, and this step makes an essential difference.

Incorporating both techniques into a single narrative, Rowlandson frequently interrupts her reflections—made from the superior vantage point of one who has safely survived the ordeal and has returned to inform the others—with spontaneous reactions to her immediate situation. This combination is a significant contribution to the development of the travel narrative. Rowlandson's descendants—for example, Sarah Kemble Knight, William Byrd, Alexander Hamilton, and Elizabeth House Trist—inherit her method of oscillating between involvement and more distanced observation. The gulf between the retrospective telling of the tale and the actual travel itself is bridged by the narrator who does not limit herself to a retrospective narrative.¹⁰

The presence of Rowlandson's two voices enabled her readers to both experience and relate to the wilderness ordeal through the emotionally engaged voice and also realize, through the second disengaged and retrospective voice, that the narrator has returned and gained from her experience. As the retrospective narrator, Rowlandson is primarily the pious Christian making the best of life in the vast and howling wilderness. She has exchanged her simple faith for a more profound relationship with God. She is God's “precious Servant and Hand-maid” (28). He is her wilderness guide. As members of tightly knit communities, seventeenth-century Puritans understood that the journey to Salvation is made alone with God as their guide. Rowlandson's reliance on God dramatizes this dependence.¹¹

With a scrupulous eye, she is constantly on the lookout for God's hand in her suffering. Even in the few times when she wonders why God preserves the Indians, her faith in God who hears prayers and who cares about injustice and who will set her free in His time never wavers. She employs Old Testament types to give a sense of divine order and cosmic significance to her mission. She is Daniel in the Lion's den, Jonah in the whale, Moses and the Hebrews in the desert. And in her isolation, she is Job. Because her transculteration is not of her choosing, she is given license to free herself from the restrictive pattern of her own society and interpret her departure as representative of the collective predicament.

However, Rowlandson's narrative voice is not always reflective; she does not only plant herself firmly in the midst of the action. Instead, when employing her second narrative voice, Rowlandson is the survivor who suffered hunger and unsanitary conditions, put up with the unkindnesses of Indians such as Weetamoo, and suffered anxiety regarding her children's safety. She complains of being “cold and wet and snowy, and hungry, and waery, and no refreshing (for man) but the cold ground to sit on, and our poor Indian cheer” (39). She worries about catching cold as they wade over Baquaug River: “The Water was up to the knees, and the stream very swift, and so cold that I thought it would have cut me in sunder” (51). This second narrative voice is vigorous. Observations are close up. Rowlandson's grief, rather than her theology, permeates this voice.

The conclusion of the narrative is curiously incomplete because the engaged suffering voice and the disengaged pious voice are still in conflict. As the final paragraphs of her account show, the redeemed Rowlandson continues to mourn as she struggles to attain some final, intelligible understanding of her wilderness metamorphosis. At the same time, she works to secure re-admittance into the Puritan community.

Despite the title of her narrative, when Rowlandson returns to the Lancaster fold, she is not “restored” to her pre-captivity self. She is no longer timid and submissive. Her house is burned, her daughter Sarah is dead, and suffering from insomnia, she wakes weeping in the night. However, throughout her narrative, she works to convince her readers that her “essential” person—her chaste, Puritan, English self—has not been tarnished; in fact, it has been purified through her experience of the fires of hell. Indeed, Rowlandson's professed rejection of the Indian culture may have been an exaggerated response to the ethnocentrism of the Puritan community.

Good minister's wife, self-confident Puritan, Rowlandson “lived in prosperity, having the comforts of this World” (65) about her. She is secure in her ability to control things—until her captivity. Suddenly she is catapulted into a situation beyond the confines of the garrison, beyond the limits of her own faith. Like the Puritan emigrant, she is removed from all that is familiar and is forced to redefine herself in the absence of everything that had at one time comprised her life. Through the telling of her story, Rowlandson attempts to reimagine her experience in an effort to come to terms with both her wilderness ordeal and her own metamorphosis. Her journey narrative serves as a testament to her great declension.

Notes

1. In Chapter Seven of Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century, David Cressy examines the emigrants' attachment to their kinsfolk and contemporaries in England.

2. Mary White Rowlandson, A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, ed. Amy Schrager Lang (Journeys in New Worlds. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). Henceforth, all quotations from Rowlandson's narrative will be indicated by page number in text.

3. William Spengemann explores the connection between the travel narrative and fiction in The Adventurous Muse: The Poetics of American Fiction, 1789-1900. Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark examine the captivity narrative as literature in Puritans Among the Indians. For a discussion of the travel narrative's influence on the fictional protagonist in Britain, France, and early America, see Percy G. Adams' Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel.

4. Joseph Rowlandson died in 1678 at the age of forty-seven. Until 1985, it was believed that Rowlandson died shortly after. In “New Light on Mary Rowlandson,” David Greene confirms that Mary Rowlandson married Captain Samuel Talcott in the small Connecticut Valley town of Wethersfield on August 6, 1679. She died there on January 5, 1722, at the age of seventy-three.

5. Huddled in their ships in 1630, Winthrop and his fellow passengers predicted “manifold necessities and tribulations” in the wilderness (Winthrop Papers, II. 136, 146-147, 233). But they felt that the transcendent demand for communal unity justified the risks of disruption to their lives. The Puritans do not seek adventure for the sake of adventure, but travel for the sake of the idea. Forerunners to Rip Van Winkle, Natty Bumppo, Daniel Boone, and Thoreau, the Puritans flee to the darkness of the forest, in part for protection from civil turmoil.

6. In Myths to Live By, Joseph Campbell uses the word journey as a metaphor for self-examination. “In searching out its [the world's] wonders, we are learning simultaneously the wonder of ourselves” (239). Rowlandson's odyssey through the New World wilderness is analogous to her opportunity for introspection.

7. For a study of women's work in a New England rural community, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812.

8. John Seelye's Prophetic Waters examines the New World river as defining agent in the metamorphosis of explorers and settlers of the Atlantic seaboard. Descendants of Rowlandson became increasingly courageous during their water crossings. In 1704, Sarah Kemble Knight crossed dangerous rivers. Instead of reconciling herself to the ordeal and praising God for keeping her feet dry, Knight dared not move her “tongue a hair's breadth” least she should topple the wherey. On a Sunday in summer in the late nineteenth century, Robert Lebrun asks Edna Pontellier if she won't be afraid of crossing the sea in a canoe. Edna's “no” is sure and assertive.

9. Thomas Parker, The Copy of a Letter Written … to His Sister (London, 1650), 13. Wendy Martin discusses the American hostility toward women's writing in The American Triptych, 58-59.

10. The metamorphosis of the seventeenth-century New World emigrants was so radical that anxious authors wrote about self-preservation instead of transformation. It wasn't until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that residents are comfortable enough with their New World status to admit to the extent of the alteration. Whereas Rowlandson can detail only the perceptual changes, her descendants give graphic descriptions of their transformations. Taken by the Shawnee when she was 12, Mary Jemison was adopted by the Senecas; she accepted their culture and twice married Indian chiefs. In James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer, Judith and Hetty Hunter live in close proximity to Indians and must deal, as Rowlandson does, with social, theological, anthropological, and psychological issues resulting from their contact with Indians and life in the wilderness.

11. Sarah Kemble Knight's dependence on her guide anticipates the search by later writers for companions for themselves or their protagonists. No longer members of the divine fraternity, the traveler needs associates with whom to journey beyond known boundaries. William Byrd's Ned Bearskin, Rip's escort to the wilderness ampitheatre, Natty's Chingachgook, Goodman Brown's Black Man, Ahab's Fedallah—all are guides whose comradeship would normally be unthinkable. These fellow-travelers contribute an added psychic dimension which propels the protagonist forward and allows him to successfully penetrate into the heart of the darkness.

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