[In the following essay, Derounian argues that the narrative duality in Rowlandson's work is the result of a tension between her religion and the psychological trauma she endured during her captivity..]

“Deut. 32.29, See now that I, even I am he, and there is no God with me: I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal neither is there any can deliver out of my hand.”

(From the title page to the Cambridge “second Addition” 1682 and Cambridge “second Edition” 1682 of Mary Rowlandson's Indian captivity narrative)

The earliest captivity narrative to be published as a single book, Mary Rowlandson's only work became an immediate best-seller in America and went through four editions in 1682, the year of its publication. For almost two hundred years, Rowlandson's captivity narrative continued to be popular, and when its popularity decreased (primarily because of the widespread availability of fiction), its critical reputation increased. One aspect of the narrative that has received much critical attention is a dichotomy between the voice telling the narrative details and the voice interpreting them, what Minter has called the “curious and double present-mindedness” of the narrative (341). Diebold, the latest scholarly editor of the captivity, defines the styles of the two voices as “the energetic ‘colloquial’ style … found in the bulk of the narrative, in her renditions of persons, places, and events,” and “the ‘biblical’ (and the use of biblical quotations) when she tries to elicit their significances” (“Critical Edition” cvi). To use my own terms, empirical narration (the “colloquial” style) defines the author's role as participant, while rhetorical narration (the “biblical” style) defines her role as interpreter and commentator. The split in Rowlandson's narrative between the participant and the commentator voices is very clear. I believe, however, that the narrative's duality arises not merely from this contrast between participant and observer, but additionally from a clash of codes between Rowlandson's psychological and religious interpretations of her experience. I contend that during and immediately after her captivity she suffered from psychological trauma akin to what is now termed the “survivor syndrome” (Niederland, “Survivor Syndrome” 413), but that she tried to minimize the symptoms to conform to the Puritan doctrine of providential affliction. The blend of religious and psychological commentary in this “archetype” of the captivity narrative genre gives the work a distinctive texture quite lacking in later examples of the genre, and the tension between these two forces—the known and the conventional against the unknown and the unconventional—defines the narrative's distinctive appeal. Although Rowlandson's religious commentary has already received considerable attention from Downing, Minter, and Pearce, her psychological commentary, and the resulting narrative tension, has not been sufficiently analyzed. Slotkin comes closest to acknowledging this dichotomy in the following observation: “The captivity archetype demanded that the ordeal culminate in both a physical and a psychological rescue from the devil, but for most captives the latter was either incomplete or impossible” (128). But ultimately he is more interested in the archetypal significance of Rowlandson's captivity than in detailed attention to her commentary.

A recent article by Greene unearths important information about Rowlandson's life after her release from captivity. His most significant findings are that Rowlandson remarried after the death of her first husband, Rev. Joseph Rowlandson, and that she lived much longer than previously believed. On August 6, 1679, a little over eight months after her first husband's death, Rowlandson married Captain Samuel Talcott, a Harvard graduate and a respected leader of the Colony (Greene 27-28). Talcott died in Wethersfield on November 11, 1691, but Mary Rowlandson Talcott outlived him by many years and died on January 5, 1710/11 (30, 33). Unfortunately, as Greene himself concedes, even if evidence in his article “extends Mary Rowlandson's life by over thirty years and enriches her marital experience, we do not know much about her life during that period” (33). One particularly critical question that remains unanswered is exactly when Rowlandson wrote her account. From her use of the first-person plural at the beginning and end of the narrative and from other internal references (Diebold, “Mary Rowlandson” 1246), we can assume that she refers to her first husband and that she wrote it before his death on November 24, 1678, probably shortly after her release in 1675, when her emotional state was still especially fragile. Being able to establish conclusively her exact composition date would make it easier to assess the links between her work and her personal life. Until such information becomes available, however, the most reliable source for details of her captivity experience—as well as its emotional and spiritual aftermath—is still her own document.

In order to understand both the psychological and the religious commentary in the narrative, we must review a few facts about Rowlandson's captivity. The initial attack was sudden and brutal: Rowlandson estimates that of the thirty-seven people in her house, only one escaped either death or capture. Twelve died, including Rowlandson's eldest sister and her nephew, whose violent deaths she witnessed. Rowlandson herself and her six-year-old daughter, Sarah, were wounded, and Rowlandson was separated from her two other children, William and Mary. Little Sarah died after nine agonizing days and was buried in the wilderness by the Indians. Emotionally and physically weakened, Rowlandson endured twenty forced “removes” in the depth of winter. As a prisoner, she was the victim of gratuitous violence when, for example, a squaw threw hot ashes in her eyes and her mistress, Weetamoo, beat her with a cudgel. Yet because she was a minister's wife likely to bring a large ransom, Rowlandson was more valuable to the Indians than many other prisoners, and she therefore observed more physical abuse than she actually experienced. Added to her physical hardship was an unfamiliar and irregular diet including horse feet and liver, ground-nuts, entrails, and bear meat, which Rowlandson calls “filthy trash” (44). Despite her faith and her access to a Bible, Rowlandson came close to despair—and even suicide—on several occasions. Recalling her state of mind after Sarah's death, Rowlandson reflects, “I have thought since of the wonderful goodness of God to me in preserving me in the use of my reason and senses in that distressed time that I did not use wicked and violent means to end my own miserable life” (39). From these few facts alone, it is clear Rowlandson underwent a deeply traumatic experience that wrought profound changes in her character. In Slotkin's words, “Mrs. Rowlandson's experiences have marked her and left her spiritually alienated from her family. The restoration to the paternal bosom is incomplete. She has seen through the veil that covers the face of God and cannot lose the sorrowful, necessary knowledge in the bosom of her restored family and church” (111). These changes, in turn, determined her spiritual and psychological interpretations of the basic narrative.

Before her captivity, Rowlandson acknowledges, she had been lax about her spiritual development. In the third remove, for example, she admits, “I then remembered how careless I had been of God's holy time, how many Sabbaths I had lost and misspent and how evilly I had walked in God's sight, which lay so close unto my spirit that it was easy for me to see how righteous it was with God to cut the thread of my life and cast me out of His presence forever” (38). Most of her spiritual commentary is therefore concerned with the significance of her captivity as a God-sent trial, and on that level the work functions as a spiritual autobiography. According to Slotkin, “Indian captivity victimization by the wilderness was the hardest and most costly (and therefore the noblest) way of discovering the will of God in respect to one's soul, one's election or damnation” (101). Paradoxically, only by undergoing the hellish wilderness journey does Rowlandson deepen her religious sensibility and recover her conviction that she is indeed one of the Elect. Structuring her captivity as a spiritual autobiography was therefore one way for Rowlandson to memorialize God's providence for herself. But as a Puritan writer, she possessed the added responsibility of turning personal experience into public ideology. One of the ways she stresses the significance of her captivity is to refer to the Old Testament characters of Joseph, Samson, and Daniel and therefore identify with “the cycle of biblical captivities” (Downing 255). The anonymous author of “The Preface to the Reader,” an introduction to the captivity printed in all of the seventeenth-century editions and possibly written by Increase Mather himself (Minter 343), emphasizes both her personal and public responsibilities:

This Narrative was Penned by this Gentlewoman her self, to be to her a Memorandum of Gods dealing with her, that she might never forget, but remember the same, and the several circumstances thereof, all the daies of her life … 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 selfe.

I hope by this time none will cast any reflection upon this Gentlewoman, on the score of this publication of her Affliction and Deliverance.

(A True History n.p.)

In An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences, published in 1684, two years after Rowlandson's work, Increase Mather closely connects “covenant theology” with Indian captivity by stating in chapter 1, “… several of those that were taken Captive by the Indians are able to relate affecting Stories concerning the gracious Providence of God, in carrying them through many Dangers and Deaths, and at last setting their feet in a large place again,” and then relating the story of Quentin Stockwell (39). Indeed, in his sermon Humiliations Follow'd with Deliverances (1697), Cotton Mather defines affliction typologically through the Indian captivity experience, and he ends by retelling the story of Hannah Dustan, which he titles “A Narrative of a Notable Deliverance from Captivity” (41). Five years later, in 1702, he introduces the seventh book of the Magnalia with this emblem of the state of the church:

If any one would draw the Picture of the Church, (saith Luther) Let him take a silly poor Maid, sitting in a Wilderness, compassed about with hungry Lions, Wolves, Boars and Bears, and all manner of Cruel and Hurtful Beasts; and in the midst of many Furious Men assaulting her every Moment: For this is her Condition in the World. Behold that Picture of the Church Exemplified in the Story of New-England, and now Writ under it, Having obtained help from God, she continues to this Day.

(3)

Once again, Indian captivity and deliverance define the journey of the New England soul and society toward redemption. From Rowlandson's narrative to Mather's religious and propagandist intent, we discern a line of orthodoxy that progressively takes precedence over the individual experience.

Counteracting the religious commentary in Rowlandson's work, however, is the psychological commentary of a deeply troubled person. This psychological commentary exists throughout the narrative, but it is especially evident at the end, where Rowlandson includes a long interpretive section reviewing her past and present emotional and spiritual states. From the evidence in the narrative, Rowlandson shows signs of what psychiatrist William Niederland terms the “survivor syndrome” (“Clinical Observations” passim). Used to label the mental and physical effects evident in survivors of mass persecution (for example, the Holocaust) and natural disasters, the survivor syndrome indicates “a type of traumatization of such magnitude, severity, and duration as to produce a recognizable clinical entity” (Niederland, “Clinical Observations” 313). The following symptoms constitute a classic profile of this syndrome: 1) depression and “emotional anesthesia,” 2) chronic anxiety and insomnia, 3) hypermnesia and amnesia, 4) survivor guilt and unresolved grief, 5) identity change, 6) psychosomatic illnesses, and 7) inability to verbalize (Niederland, “Clinical Observations” 313-15). Rowlandson reveals all these symptoms except numbers six and seven. (Later in this essay I will address the reasons she does not display these last two symptoms.)

Throughout, Rowlandson's narrative contains references revealing its author's depression and emotional bleakness, but frequently Rowlandson masks these signs with outward spiritual interpretations. For example, in the narrative's concluding section, she claims to weep for joy at God's goodness in preserving her and her family:

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!

I have seen the extreme vanity of this world. One hour I have been in health and wealth, wanting nothing, but the next hour in sickness and wounds and death, having nothing but sorrow and affliction. Before I knew what affliction meant, I was ready sometimes to wish for it.

When I lived in prosperity, having the comforts of the world about me, my relations by me, my heart cheerful, and taking little care for anything, and yet seeing many whom I preferred before myself under many trials and afflictions, in sickness, weakness, poverty, losses, crosses, and cares of the world, I should be sometimes jealous lest I should have my portion in this life, and that scripture would come to mind, Heb. 12:6, “For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.”

(74-75)

Yet careful attention to this and similar extracts indicates the traumatized survivor furnishing a spiritual cause for a physical effect and interpreting her weeping and insomnia as signs of spiritual development, not emotional frailty.

When Rowlandson was captured, she first fell into a state of shock that helped to numb her against the physical, emotional, and spiritual dislocation. In her narrative, she refers to her psychological denial of her experience as she actually underwent it: “And here 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 and what my condition was” (52). This state continued for approximately one month, but after that she recalls the moment when “emotional anesthesia” gave way to tears: “Then my heart began to fail 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” (46). Survivor syndrome victims often experience “psychic numbing,” defined as “a diminished capacity for feeling of all kinds” (Lifton and Olson 5). However, Rowlandson seems, uncharacteristically, to maintain some sensitivity through her faith and her ability to verbalize what has happened to her. She continues to feel depressed but does not regress to “psychic numbing.”

Chronic anxiety forms “a prominent symptom among survivors” and is associated with fears of renewed persecution (Niederland, “Survivor Syndrome” 415). Accordingly, Rowlandson's anxiety comes out most clearly in the final section of her narrative. Although she strives to overcome her anxiety by referring to God's providence in sending her affliction, the undercurrent of psychological unrest and tension remains. Rowlandson therefore continues to relive the past but almost simultaneously attempts to place it in a spiritual perspective. On the one hand, she believes the Lord has presented her with an extreme test of her faith and humility:

But now I see the Lord had His time to scourge and chasten me. The portion of some is to have their afflictions by drops, now one drop and then another, but the dregs of the cup, the wine of astonishment, like a sweeping rain that leaveth no food, did the Lord prepare to be my portion. Affliction I wanted and affliction I had, full measure (I thought) pressed down and running over. Yet I see when God calls a person to anything and through never so many difficulties, yet He is fully able to carry them through and make them see and say they have been gainers thereby. And I hope I can say in some measure, as David did, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted.”

(75)

On the other hand, as she shows in her parenthetical qualifiers “(I thought)” and “in some measure,” she cannot be certain that her captivity constitutes “full measure,” so she feels considerable apprehension at the thought of other tests. Rev. Joseph Rowlandson's final sermon, a jeremiad preached on November 21, 1678 in Wethersfield, reiterates the theme of affliction in Puritan life and echoes in more theological terms many of the same issues found in the captivity. Indeed, the text of this sermon was issued with the first edition (no complete copies extant), the London edition, and both 1682 Cambridge, Massachusetts editions of Rowlandson's narrative (Vail 168-69), although the sermon was also apparently published separately. For this humiliation sermon, Rowlandson took as his text Jeremiah 23:33: “And when this People, or the Prophet, or a Priest, shall ask thee, saying, What is the burden of the Lord? thou shalt then say unto them, What burden? I will even forsake you, saith the Lord.” Rowlandson's captivity narrative shows microcosmically God's providence in saving a single sinner when she acknowledges her laxness, while her husband's sermon examines macrocosmically the entire Colony's increasing tendency toward spiritual complacency.

Another aspect of Rowlandson's anxiety takes the form of nightmares and insomnia, and she most strikingly draws attention to these symptoms at the end of her narrative, where she states, “I can remember the time when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts whole nights together, but now it is other ways with me. When all are fast about me and no eye open but His who ever waketh, my thoughts are upon things past, upon the awful dispensation of the Lord towards us, upon His wonderful power and might in carrying of us through so many difficulties in returning us in safety and suffering none to hurt us. 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” (74). Rowlandson seems to suffer from what psychiatrist Erwin Koranyi terms “a ‘vigilant’ type of insomnia” (166), in which she obsessively ruminates on the past. Night after night, then, she suffers from sleeplessness as the “workings” in her thoughts revive the past, and she vacillates between the anxiety of recalling past affliction and the assurance of God's will in her captivity.

This tendency to merge past and present suggests the disorientation and alienation haunting Rowlandson on her return to civilization. She also was prone to hypermnesia, which caused her memories of the captivity to be “overly sharp, distinct, and virtually indelible” (Niederland, “Survivor Syndrome” 416). Indeed, this symptom may partially explain her story's strong narrative details and its clear structure of separate removes. Patients with hypermnesia do not necessarily recall their entire experience so vividly; often they select particularly traumatic incidents. For Rowlandson, some of these might include the initial attack, the death of Sarah, the mental and physical abuse, and the continual attempts to stave off starvation. In the eighteenth remove, for example, Rowlandson describes how hunger forced her to take away food from a captive child: “The squaw was boiling horses' feet; then she cut me off a little piece and gave one of the English children a piece also. 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). In his article on the historical value of Rowlandson's work, Leach notes this very tendency to recall some incidents vaguely but others vividly. Although he does not ascribe this contrast to the “survivor syndrome,” if we carefully examine the wording of his description, it provides plausible evidence for this being the case: “To her, in retrospect, the many remarkable happenings of her captivity must have seemed almost like the jumbled details of a bad dream, but with certain important episodes well fixed in her mind to serve as focal points for the reconstruction and narration of her great adventure” (353).

Among the most characteristic symptoms of the survivor syndrome are intense guilt and unresolved grief at having survived when other people did not. These feelings apply particularly to survivors who have sustained widespread family loss. During Rowlandson's captivity, her own instincts for self-survival prevent her from feeling too much guilt, but after her release, she repeatedly admits her guilt at still being alive when so many are dead or untraced: “Yet I was not without sorrow to think how many were looking and longing and my own children amongst the rest to enjoy that deliverance that I had now received, and I did not know whether ever I should see them again” (71). Although she initially feels relieved to be ransomed, she cannot stop thinking about her two captive children and her dead daughter: “That which was dead lay heavier upon my spirit than those which were alive and amongst the heathen, thinking how it suffered with its wounds and I was no way able to relieve it, and how it was buried by the heathen in the wilderness from among all Christians” (72). Apparently still unable to come to terms with her grief at Sarah's death, Rowlandson calls her six-year-old child her “babe” on several occasions and, even more significantly, uses the impersonal pronoun it (as in the preceding quotation) when referring to her. Rowlandson is unusually fortunate because her son William and daughter Mary eventually return alive; however, thoughts of little Sarah continue to haunt her. Most survivor syndrome sufferers “feel themselves still bound to the dead, living a half-life devoid of pleasure and with limited vitality” and never fully overcome their guilt and grief (Lifton and Olson 5). Yet in time Rowlandson's return to orthdox Puritanism and her second—presumably happy—marriage may have helped to lessen the grief she reveals at the end of the narrative (Greene 30).

Perhaps the most convincing evidence that Rowlandson underwent severe trauma during her captivity is that she changed as a result of the experience. The psychological symptoms examined up to this point indicate stages of spiritual growth for Rowlandson herself, and she therefore presents her change in positive terms, rationalizing the captivity as a God-given test of her faith. In the thirteenth remove, Rowlandson claims that the most immediate change was an awareness of previous spiritual negligence and a corresponding growth in religious sensibility: “Now had I time to examine all my ways. My conscience did not accuse me of unrighteousness toward one or other, yet I saw how in my walk with God I had been a careless creature” (56). Her increased spirituality also encourages her to discipline herself and resist some undesirable secular habits—smoking a pipe, for example:

For though I had formerly used tobacco, yet I had left it ever since I was first taken. It seems to be a bait the devil lays to make men lose their precious time. I remember with shame how formerly when I had taken two or three pipes I was presently ready for another, such a bewitching thing it is. But I thank God He has now given me power over it; surely there are many who may be better employed than to lie sucking a stinking tobacco pipe.

(47)

Further, Rowlandson's spiritual development lays the foundation for a permanent reversal of values described at the very end of her narrative which helps her to “look beyond present and smaller troubles and to be quieted under them” (75).

As we have seen, the psychological commentary in Rowlandson's captivity narrative suggests that she suffered from the standard survivor syndrome symptoms of depression, anxiety, insomnia, hypermnesia, amnesia, death guilt, and personality change. But her work does not show evidence of two other usual symptoms: psychosomatic illness and inability to verbalize the experience. The reasons she does not display these two symptoms may be related. Many survivor syndrome victims exhibit “a poor ability to verbalize” (Koranyi 167), as if their confrontation with the “heart of darkness” has made them distrust the positive communicative function of words. But for others, the will to survive becomes the will to testify: “‘The victims elect to become witnesses’” (Elie Wiesel, quoted in Des Pres 28). In Rowlandson's case, Puritan ideology not only encouraged but almost required her to memorialize her experience for posterity. In so doing, she may have decreased her likelihood of developing the psychosomatic complaints typical of many survivor syndrome victims, including headaches, gastrointestinal upsets, ulcers, and hypertension, for the “more aggression is verbalized, the less the chance for psychosomatic disorders” (Hoppe 324). By writing about her captivity, Rowlandson perhaps diverted the aggressive tendencies she might have had into acceptable channels.

Given the presence of both religious and psychological commentary in the narrative, it is important to assess the extent to which the providential interpretation of affliction overcomes the inevitable human response to pain and loss. The following two comments emphasize the narrative's dual function as religious and psychological document and the narrator's dual function as spiritual and emotional commentator. In his article on early Puritan captivity narratives, Minter points out that “Rowlandson's narrative … operates, in a very traditional way, as a story, as an ‘ensample,’ of God's salvific activity” (340), while Des Pres, writing on the Holocaust, focuses on the role of the survivor himself: “… the survivor is not a metaphor, not an emblem, but an example” (176). Together, these observations suggest the clash between ideology and individualism exemplified by the captivity's traditional elements set against the writer's personal suffering. In more general terms, a similar tension between head and heart, intellect and emotion, spirituality and secularism is fundamental to Puritan literature, and the orthodox position always prevails. Perhaps this phenomenon is clearest in Anne Bradstreet's elegies on her grandchildren, in which the poet's human response submits to Puritan orthodoxy but the resulting thematic tension enhances the significance of the poems. In Rowlandson's narrative, too, the tension between religious and psychological commentary enriches and deepens the narrative texture to show the two sides of Puritanism. The dual commentary is most evident in the final section of the narrative, a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes, that resonant text fusing spiritual and emotional truths. Although Rowlandson herself considers her orthodoxy to be genuine, evidence of the survivor syndrome keeps breaking into the work's otherwise consistent tone to suggest the emotional strain of maintaining an ideologically required position.

One final, tantalizing issue remains. Slotkin believes that most returned captives “were simply so stricken by the horror of their ordeal that their minds were permanently impaired and they became prey to strange guilts and torments” (128-29). Yet if many captives underwent similarly traumatic experiences, why is evidence of this trauma both during and after the captivity so notably absent from their narratives? There are many possible answers to this question, but the most plausible answer lies in the development of the captivity narrative as a popular literary genre. Released captives who wrote their own narratives, but especially editors who “embellished” a captivity account for publication (Cotton Mather, for example), quickly realized the genre's inherent potential for religious, propagandist, sensational, or literary exploitation. Following Pearce's classic article, it is generally accepted that the captivity narrative as a popular genre fell into several phases: 1) the earliest narratives, initiated by Rowlandson's work, which were direct religious documents written in the first person, 2) the later seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century narratives that turned into propaganda tracts, especially against the French and Indians, 3) the mid- to late-eighteenth-century narratives that became so stylized and melodramatic in content, style, and characterization that they recall the popular sentimental novels of the day, and 4) the wholly fictional nineteenth-century works that simply incorporated aspects of the captivity narrative within them (for example, incidents in some of Charles Brockden Brown's and James Fenimore Cooper's novels) (1-20). In all four stages of the captivity narrative, the religious, propagandist, sensational, or literary intent progressively diminished the individual experience for some other end. Only in this earliest of full-length narratives, I believe, does the author reveal a psychological integrity that pervades the captivity account and makes it unique within the genre.

Works Cited

Des Pres, Terrence. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976.

Diebold, Robert D., ed. “A Critical Edition of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative.” Diss. Yale Univ. 1972.

———. “Mary Rowlandson.” American Writers before 1800. Ed. James A. Levernier and Douglas R. Wilmes. 3 vols. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1983. 3: 1245-47.

Downing, David. “‘Streams of Scripture Comfort’: Mary Rowlandson's Typological Use of the Bible.” Early American Literature 15 (1981): 252-59.

Greene, David L. “New Light on Mary Rowlandson.” Early American Literature 20 (1985): 24-38.

Hoppe, Klaus D. “Re-Somatization of Affects in Survivors of Persecution.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 49 (1968): 324-26.

Koranyi, Erwin K. “Psychodynamic Theories of the ‘Survivor Syndrome.’” Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal 14 (1969): 165-73.

Leach, Douglas E. “The ‘When's’ of Mary Rowlandson's Captivity.” New England Quarterly 34 (1961): 353-63.

Lifton, Robert J., and Eric Olson. “The Human Meaning of Total Disaster: The Buffalo Creek Experience.” Psychiatry 39 (1976): 1-18.

Mather, Cotton. Humiliations Follow'd with Deliverances. Boston, 1697.

———. Magnalia Christi Americana. London, 1702; facs. rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1972.

Mather, Increase. An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences. Boston, 1684; facs. rpt. Delmar, N. Y.: Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints, 1977.

Minter, David. “By Dens of Lions: Notes on Stylization in Early Puritan Captivity Narratives.” American Literature 45 (1973-74): 335-47.

Niederland, William G. “Clinical Observations on the ‘Survivor Syndrome.’” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 49 (1968): 313-15.

———. “The Survivor Syndrome: Further Observations and Dimensions.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 29 (1981): 413-25.

Pearce, Roy Harvey. “The Significances of the Captivity Narrative.” American Literature 19 (1947): 1-20.

Rowlandson, Mary. A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Garland Library of Narratives of North American Indian Captivities 1. London, 1682; facs. rpt. New York: Garland, 1977.

———. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption 1676-1724. Ed. Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1981.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973.

Vail, R. W. G. The Voice of the Old Frontier. 1949. New York: Octagon, 1970.