SOURCE: “Mary White Rowlandson's Self-Fashioning as Puritan Goodwife,” in Early American Literature, Vol. 27, No. 1, 1992, pp. 49-60.

[In following essay, Davis explores how Rowlandson's acceptance of her role in the Puritan social order affects her point of view in her Narrative and how this acceptance allowed the work to be published.]

While hierarchical and logocentric prescriptions for seventeenth-century American Puritan society would appear to allow no room for assertive female activity outside the domestic sphere, the publication of The Soveraignty and Goodness of God … ; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson in 1682 suggests that under certain conditions Puritan women's writing was approved. Cotton Mather's treatise written to describe the virtuous woman's character, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, sets down conditions under which women may enter the male-dominated discourse. Listing blessed women from antiquity, biblical times, and recent history who were versed in politics, military leadership, philosophy, liberal arts, poetry, and scripture, the Puritan minister illustrates female capacity for wisdom and erudition. His purpose, however, is not to encourage women to write, but to “advance Virtue” by promoting “Fear of God in the Female Sex” (Preface). According to Mather, a female should learn to read in order to study scripture, and when she writes, she must take care that she “might not without Sin, lead the Life which old Stories ascribe to Amazons,” but follow the lead of pious women who “have made a most Laudable use of Pens” and have “with much Praise done the part of Scholars in the World” (35). The key to acceptable writing for women seems to be that these acts are commended by their virtue and therefore “without sin.”

Thus the Puritan female who writes for publication may maintain her virtuous position only after her own sanctification has been affirmed, and only under certain conditions defined as appropriate for the feminine bride of Christ. Elsewhere, ministerial directives imply, and publishing history and court records affirm, that a woman's rhetoric must be confined to pious or otherwise traditional subjects, offered in humility, presented in deference to husband or other male authority, and composed in time not stolen from domestic responsibilities. Mary White Rowlandson, unlike Anne Bradstreet, the only other widely accepted female writer of her century,¹ appears to unequivocally accept the power structure of Puritan New England, along with its restrictions on feminine authorship, and to authenticate the hierarchy by writing herself into the role of Puritan goodwife in relation to all masculine authority figures, including God the Father. In so doing, she marks a fine equilibration between conventionality and independence, between disempowerment and powerment that particularizes the precarious place of a discerning woman in seventeenth-century New England, while she illustrates the subtle exchange between self-effacement and self-assertion required when a writing female desires to enter the zone of publicity and remain acceptable.

Rowlandson's narrative recounts her capture, along with three of her children, by Narragansett Indians during King Philip's War in 1676 while her husband was away seeking aid to defend their village of Lancaster, Massachusetts. After a week of suffering, the wounded youngest child died in her mother's arms, and the other two children were taken by different groups, leaving Mrs. Rowlandson to wander alone through the cold, barren countryside with her captors for eleven weeks. After her ransom, Rowlandson wrote a narrative of her experience, principally for the edification of her children and, according to the title page, “for the benefit of the afflicted” (112).

Going public with her story in an age when all authorities in her social and religious environment enjoined women to silence makes Rowlandson an anomaly in a culture that valued conformity.² The book was a best seller,³ however, going through more than thirty editions to satisfy the interested reading public, bringing Mrs. Rowlandson as close to public acclaim as any woman could aspire in Puritan society.⁴ The Narrative was accepted and sanctioned by the community because its readers perceived it in the same manner that Roy Harvey Pearce described it in his early critical discussion of the captivity narrative as a genre, as a “simple, direct religious” document recounting an experience “taken as part of the divine scheme” (2, 3). Its female author imposed no blasphemous competition to the patriarchal hegemony because she maintained the stance of bride-like submission required of women, subjecting herself first to God as ultimate authority and then to males as his earthly representatives.

Well-versed in scripture, Rowlandson, while invoking the lamentations of male fellow-sufferers Job and David, would have found discursive models for virtuous behavior under stress contained in Old Testament accounts of captive women such as Sarah and Esther. Forced into Egypt to escape famine in Canaan, Abraham commanded his wife Sarah to pass as his sister so Pharaoh would not harm him in order to claim Sarah as his mistress. The obedient wife submitted to her husband's will and to the attentions of Pharaoh until a plague warned the Egyptian ruler of his misdeed and caused him to send the pair back to their homeland, enormously more wealthy because of their sojourn in Egypt. Many years later, during Israel's captivity in Babylon, Esther found herself at the mercy of powerful King Ahasuerus, and her people quailing under his edict that all Jews should be destroyed. In obedience to her elder kinsman Mordecai, Esther risked death to beg the king's favor in order to save her people's lives. Not only were the Jews spared, but the captive Israelites were encouraged to slay those who had earlier desired to harm them. Again rescue and reward followed providential affliction. These scriptural examples of matriarchal subjection to male authorities of their own race and belief system as well as to the powerful masculine enemy, even to the point of risking violence to their own person, gave Rowlandson divine models for analysis in creating her own representation in narrative form. By recording choices portraying the kind of submission sanctioned by her pious and venerated precursors, Mrs. Rowlandson was assured that her readers would perceive her discourse as valid and “without sin,” in conformity to the only role sanctioned for women in Puritan society, that of goodwife.

The critical concerns of New Historicism, especially as explained in Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, aid the modern reader in assessing Rowlandson's representation of her own identity forged from the complex interplay of relationships in her Narrative. Greenblatt summarizes his model for self-fashioning, by author or character, this way:

we may say that self-fashioning occurs at the point of encounter between an authority and an alien, that what is produced in this encounter partakes of both the authority and the alien that is marked for attack, and hence that any achieved identity always contains within itself the signs of its own subversion or loss.

(9)

I borrow Greenblatt's model to describe Rowlandson's self-fashioning in relation to an absolute power or authority situated at least partially outside the self. For Rowlandson, as a thoroughly indoctrinated Puritan woman married to a minister, that authority is the entire patriarchal hierarchy including God, the Bible, males in general, and her own husband in particular. Puritans had an intense need for psychological and social order and relied on scripture to determine the chain of command that begins with God who creates and directs all things and sets up a hierarchy to govern his cosmos. Ranked under the Godhead are Puritan divines, then males, females, and children and servants. That recognition of order maintained through levels of relationships depends largely on the philosophy of Petrus Ramus, a French contemporary of John Calvin, which defines all relationships as dual and dependent on the existence of their contraries. Every relate must have its correlate, and no relate can have more than one correlate, e.g. God/soul, ruler/subject, man/wife. While most social relations are voluntary and originate in free choice, these oppositions in relationships are necessary for each person's good. Thus, Puritan society defined a woman's identity by the relationships that prevailed in her sphere; in the church, she was bride to Christ; in the home she was wife to husband, mother to child, goodwife to servant—designations altogether gender-based and hierarchical. Society's smooth operation depended on the cooperation of each of these binary oppositions in assuming the special and assigned duties and responsibilities of each one's place. In giving divine sanction to the relationship of the authority to the subject, in comparison to that of Christ to the Church, Puritan fathers canonized the hierarchy and warned that its breakdown would result in chaos. Therefore, for Puritans to resist authority, and especially for women to resist the authority of males, Christ's representatives on earth, was to resist the power of God himself, and consequently to risk damnation of their souls. Apparently acknowledging no conflict with the religious and cultural restrictions of her day as barriers to self-awareness and wholeness, Rowlandson sees her self in relation to all the components of authority as a woman with the possibility of redemption coupled with the necessity for submission. This ingrained determinative of subjection even on one occasion closes down the possibility of breaking away from her captors and bolting for the safety of familiar people and ideology. The equilibrium between the risks of threat and security becomes blurred when the known becomes the Indian camp and the unknown the uncharted course of independent action, and she refuses the offer of an Indian to help her escape and to escort her home because she desires to “wait Gods time, that [she] might go home quietly, and without fear” (161), under the authority of God's providence and her Puritan redeemers.

In addition to marking the self in relation to an absolute power, Greenblatt calls for definition of self in relation to a threatening Other perceived by the authority as that which is unformed or chaotic or that which is false or negative. In the Narrative, this place is filled by Indians, representative of the forces of darkness as opposed to the powers of God, the authority, the good. Rowlandson accepts the Puritan view of Indians as barbaric infidels, calling them “bloody” and “merciless” heathen and black and “hellish” creatures (119, 120, 121, 162). Her language clearly classifies Indians as demonic, barbarous sons of Satan like “him who was a lyer from the beginning” (142), leading critics generally to view the narrative of her terrifying experience in the “vast and howling Wilderness” at the mercy of a “company of hell-hounds” as an allegory of the Puritan conception of the soul's journey through dark places of sin and hell to wholeness of self-knowledge and redemption (130, 120-121).⁵ Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in Good Wives suggests another way that Rowlandson's perception of these aliens arouses her fear. Her Calvinist view of the baseness of man causes her to recognize in Indians detested animal-like qualities that she unwittingly applies to herself, projecting a “perceived yet repellant sameness” in her own return to the vileness of a bestial nature (229). Indians are labelled dogs, “roaring Lyons and salvage Bears,” wolves, and “ravenous beasts” and portrayed as radically alien beings who act capriciously and without reason in response to animal appetites, making them “untouchables” to this Christian woman (161, 121). She remarks that she was so overcome when two Indians brought a letter from her husband that she got them by the hand, “though they were Indians” (151). The Indian habitat remains a desolate wilderness in which the Christian woman recognizes no beauty or solace, territory foreign to civilization. As Annette Kolodny shows in The Land Before Her, Rowlandson's narrative strongly hints that, on her own, she could never survive in the wilderness (19). Finding the untamed environment a terrifying phenomenon, Rowlandson labels the swamp “a deep Dungeon” (132), the hills “tiresome and wearisome” (138), and the river she must wade so “swift, and so cold that I thought it would have cut me in sunder” (147). Only an “English Path,” upon which she stumbles in the forest, comforts her in its reminder of her lost ordered culture (132). As Richard Slotkin points out, Rowlandson's markers for her journey in “Removes” denote “spatial and spiritual movements away from civilized light into Indian darkness” (109). This plunge into the “horrible pit” of wilderness experience exposes her own vulnerability to dark nature (165). She deplores that her “Wolvish appetite” (146) for the wild food that now tastes savory makes her seem a “bruit Creature” (137), and that, lacking a bed, she, “like a Swine, must ly down on the ground” (145). Without comment, she recounts her unkempt appearance and her seizure of food from children unable to chew the tough carcass. The prospect of sliding into the chaotic and demonic looms fearfully close.

Because the Puritan teaching that the goodwife accepts all males as authority figures is so deeply grounded in her psyche that her subjection becomes almost automatic, Mary White Rowlandson submits herself without argument to Indian males as distorted images of authority in her imposed society. Part of her submission may be explained by awareness of the dire conseqences of rebellion, such as that of the pregnant woman murdered for her complaints and continuous pleas for release. Shrewd enough to realize that males hold power in Indian society just as in her own, Rowlandson wisely wishes to remain in favor with those who control her livelihood. She seems, however, to submit willingly, almost effortlessly, likely because of her training as a Puritan goodwife in the ethos that names males as authority figures because they represent Christ on earth and take the literal place of Christ as bridegroom to their earthly wives. Even though throughout the narrative Rowlandson apprehends Indians collectively as the antithesis of Christ or Christian males and speaks of them as “merciless Heathen” and “ravenous Beasts” (120, 121), she gives respect to individual Indian men, even going so far as to recognize strength and kindness in her Indian master and to lean on him as her protector. After his three weeks' absence, she says “glad I was to see him” (150) and calls him “the best friend that I had of an Indian” (139). She offers her master money and a knife she received as payment for her sewing and says she is “not a little glad that I had any thing that they would accept of, and be pleased with” (136). Here Rowlandson mediates internally between the Puritan ideologue and the creature longing for survival, and the self that emerges is the woman who justifies submission to the alien other by displacing enculturated behaviors onto those most likely to reward her submission with favor. Thus she assumes self-control by deferring, putting off ultimate control by the alien. Such an exchange of goods for favor, considered in both economic and psychological terms, suggests a comparable negotiation in the battered self of this Puritan woman. To acknowledge her captors with any sort of esteem would appear to deny her ingrained logocentric world view; to fail to render such regard under the threat of annihilation would suggest complete disregard of one's life. When two allegiances are in conflict, the most immediate subverts the one able to be deferred. For all her spirituality, Mary Rowlandson is a woman of this world who longs to continue life in a material sense, and she wittingly pays the price for survival.

Rowlandson draws the line, however, in submission to female Indians because her training as goodwife assigns her the position of mistress in her household, equal to female peers and head of servants and younger women. Taking great pains to portray Indian women as cruel and capricious creatures, she names their offenses more frequently and their kindnesses less often than those of the males. While a male Indian gives her a Bible, it is a female who snatches it from her and throws it away, then slaps her for complaining about her heavy load. While her master notices her disheveled appearance and helps her wash herself, a female Indian throws ashes into her eyes. The women she also criticizes more for their character failures, finding them full of that most contemptible sin of pride. While able to accept the commands of Indian males, Rowlandson balks at following orders from their women. Once when the Indian chief King Philip's maid demands her apron for a baby's flap, Rowlandson refuses and runs from the wigwam, relinquishing the apron only when the maid throws a stick at her. On another occasion when her mistress reprimands Rowlandson for begging food, she retorts that she “had as good knock me in head as starve me to death” (149). Even King Philip recognizes the difficulty of a Puritan woman schooled to expect respect from her peers and her household but forced to take orders from heathen women, and Rowlandson notes, without comment, his consoling remarks: “Two weeks more and you shal be Mistress again” (150).

For Mary White Rowlandson the role of housewife becomes the controlling construct into which she fits her experiences and by which she governs her behavior as a captive because of its soteriological value, both spiritually and physically. For, although ultimate salvation comes only by God's grace, as Ulrich says in Good Wives, Mary Rowlandson survives because she knows how to use huswifery in the service of her captors (227). Realizing early that her proficiency with sewing and knitting needle makes her workmanship highly sought by those who control her, Mrs. Rowlandson turns traditional feminine skills into means of earning food and favors, industriously keeping her fingers busy making caps, shirts, and stockings which she exchanges for bits of bear meat or cornmeal, a hat or handkerchief or apron, or entrance into the warmth of a wigwam. Understanding servility because her Puritan mind-set makes her captive in her place in the hierarchy of Puritanism, she is also able to wander about from campfire to wigwam begging food and shelter, acknowledging rebuff without comment, while continuing to make thrifty use of whatever is given her. Her pocket becomes her cache for everything she must save for survival, the housewife's apron serving as a veritable cupboard containing, from time to time, bear meat raw and cooked, cornmeal, knitting and sewing materials, corn kernels, crumbs of cake given by an Indian girl on the first day of captivity, and always her Bible. Also in typical goodwife fashion, Rowlandson's nurturing instincts surface whenever she has occasion to be with her children or when she comes upon other suffering English people, but ironically, those compassionate tendencies are reserved for her own kind and not expended on the “bloody heathen.” Finding a youthful English captive lying on the cold ground alongside a dying Indian papoose, Rowlandson gives succor and comfort to the boy but not to the baby. When a papoose in her master's family dies, she regards its death as beneficial in making more room in the wigwam, while she mourns pitifully the death of her own daughter. Puritan housewife to the bone, Mary White Rowlandson maintains her stance of pious and industrious nurturer, fiercely protective of her own kind while excluding the alien other, and always justifies her position by the authority of scripture and the God she knows from its pages. In this way, the ideological self remains intact and uncontaminated by identity with pagan sympathies.

Rowlandson uses discourse to order the strange and abhorrent experience of captivity and to write herself within it as conforming to the only role she knows and the only role approved for Puritan females, that of woman as wife. Both used by the author and imposed on the author, art in the form of rhetoric, by controlling the discourse, empowers and limits those who speak and write. That thesis helps to explain the tricky but successful position of Mary White Rowlandson, accepted artist in a century that disapproved of women's public speaking and writing. For Puritans, self-fashioning always takes place in the context of community and social goals of the congregational group, and, because Puritans uphold communally-held conventions, self-fashioning must conform the self to approved status. Rhetorical art of Puritan patriarchs ordered that women should be identified as submissive and silent brides of Christ and their husbands. Working within that imposed code, this particular woman used her own art to write herself into a position that fit the patriarchal terms of identity but at the same time allowed her to create her own singular, though conforming, voice. Thus the discourse enabled her, but only within strict limits which it also imposed—hence it both empowered and disempowered her.

By writing (fashioning) herself as Puritan goodwife, Rowlandson as artist orders her turbulent experience into an approved text. Snatched from the comfort of her home and thrust into the wilderness by Indian captors, she is shocked by disparate and terrifying stimuli foreign to anything that her Puritan upbringing prepares her for. The chaos of apparent aimless wandering, lack of elementary provisions for daily needs, absence of family and friends for succor and protection, irrational violence and inconsistent behavior by her captors, and the blackness of the dark forest, the unknown and the Indian savages all drive Rowlandson to the point of near desperation, forcing her to describe her predicament as “a lively resemblance of hell” (121). Rowlandson takes part in controlling her destiny by using her discursive power to make sense of the experience and to define her part in it.⁶ In his new book-length discussion of the narrative, Mitchell Robert Breitwieser finds that Rowlandson's experience forces her to reassess her place at the fringe of power and argues that, despite her good intentions, she undercuts Puritan values she attempts to uphold. She challenges the conventional charge to sublimate mourning and asserts her independence, even to the point of showing pride in her cleverness at bartering with the Indians. Her grudging acceptance of Indians as a social entity with unique conventions further questions the Puritans' binary division between Christian order and chaotic otherness. He finds in the last sentences of the narrative an expression of Rowlandson's continuing tension between her postredemption life and her recollection of trauma: “It was but the other day that if I had had the world, I would have given it for my freedom, or to have been a Servant to a Christian. I have learned to look beyond present and smaller troubles, and to be quieted under them …” (167). Breitwieser's close reading uncovers here a “contrite denouement, a willing passivity” balanced by a lingering disquiet that equates emancipation with “a favorable exchange of masters that leaves the abjection of servitude intact” and briefly and cryptically reveals that Rowlandson is still “equivocating over whether redemption is freedom or simply a kind of upgrade in servitude” (176, 177). Such discursive subversion, disseminated throughout the narrative, is so subtle and dense, so well camouflaged by evocations of scripture and allegorical allusions, that it seems to have gone unnoticed in her time. Because Rowlandson acknowledges no conflict with secular or spiritual authorities, and because she records her place in the language of the patriarchs, that which identifies the place of woman as wife, her record is sanctioned as subscribing to the patriarchal ordering of society described and regulated by scripture and interpreted by the divines.

Rowlandson's approval by authority is confirmed by the book's anonymous publisher, an obviously masculine voice that claims credit for persuading this modest woman to allow publication of her private material and gives credibility to a work that would not be allowed to stand on its own because of its female author.⁷ His preface commends the narrative for its “pious scope” because of its “many passages of working providence” and asks the public to accept the work of “this Gentlewoman” without casting reflection upon her for her otherwise impertinent act of writing. To further cement the author's credibility, the introduction reminds readers that Mrs. Rowlandson was married to a minister, “that faithfull Servant of God, whose capacity and employment was publick in the house of God, and his name on that account of a very sweet savour in the Churches of Christ” (115). If the writer cannot stand on her own merit, her relation to her husband, man of God and representative of Christ, makes her worthy.

Mary White Rowlandson's self-fashioning occurs in the manner suggested by Greenblatt, at the point of encounter between an authority and an alien, and results in the production of an identity in which some amount of individuality is exchanged for participation in the social and religious covenant. Poised between the contraries of Puritan hierarchical authority based on the sovereignty of God and the perceived disorder of Indian satanic forces, Rowlandson records the external and internal war between spirit and flesh, between the weight of orthodox imperatives and the surges of libidinal energy. Because of her continued insomnia and the traumatic visions she fails to block from memory, Richard Slotkin concludes that Rowlandson emerged from this conflict “spiritually alienated from her family. … 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). As well as looking into the face of God, Rowlandson has looked into her own soul and found a self capable of a range of alternatives: of slipping into bestiality, of surviving outside of community, of spiritualizing ominous reality. Only the latter is fully compatible with Puritan ideology. By projecting a self demanded by her theological milieu, that of submissive goodwife, she fashions a self through her discourse that assures her accepted place in relation to the authority she honors and ensures her safety against the alien Other she fears. Kathryn Derounian describes Rowlandson's personality change resulting from her traumatic captivity as positive, resulting in heightened spiritual awareness and self-discipline (“Survivor Syndrome” 90). That same discipline forges a personality that manages to fuse apparently discrepant allegiances. The selfhood of independent will and self-assertion (evident in her instincts for survival, her opposition to Indian females, even in her very act of writing) she subverts in order to reinforce the identity of submissive goodwife to God and man that she values. But the tension of such an exchange floats just under the text's surface and, according to Derounian, finds its expression in Rowlandson's dual commentary that shifts between a colloquial and a religious voice, showing evidence of the “survivor syndrome” that “keeps breaking into the work's otherwise consistent tone” (“Survivor Syndrome” 92). That rupture of the internalized self into the orthodox and authorized narrative fails to mar its “pious scope” in the minds of seventeenth-century readers because Rowlandson effectively masks her unorthodoxy even to herself and forges an identity that requires religious orthodoxy and obedience while it earns the rewards of communal and spiritual approval. At the point of exchange Rowlandson suppresses the claim to individualized selfhood for the promise of present and ultimate salvation, the only choice allowed for a Puritan woman in seventeenth-century New England.

Notes

1. Charles Evans's American Bibliography lists four works published by women between 1639 and 1700: Anne Bradstreet's Several Poems, 1678; Sarah Goodhue's A Valedictory and Monitory Writing, 1681; Rowlandson's A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, 1682; M. Hooper's “Lamentations for Her Sons Poisoned by Eating Mushrooms,” 1694.

2. John Winthrop's well-known condemnation of one Mistress Hopkins for “giving herself wholly to reading and writing” which resulted in the “loss of her understanding and reason” (225) represented the hierarchy's view of women who privileged writing over attendance to domestic affairs.

3. Richard Slotkin, in Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, calls the Narrative an archetype, the initiator of the captivity narrative in American literature and model for subsequent accounts of captivity (102).

4. Kathryn Zabelle Derounian, in “The Publication, Promotion, and Distribution of Mary Rowlandson's Indian Captivity Narrative in the Seventeenth Century,” addresses the publication history of the narrative and describes its popularity in old and New England.

5. See Ann Stanford's “Mary Rowlandson's Journey to Redemption” and David Downing's “‘Streams of Scripture Comfort’: Mary Rowlandson's Typological Use of the Bible.”

6. Mitchell Robert Breitwieser suggests that experience is a motive for discourse, that Puritan writing was a manner of “exerting control over the dispersive and centrifugal energies of unsettled life, powerful because [it] challenged those energies …” (50).

7. Breitwieser argues that Rowlandson's anonymous publisher, Per Amicum, realizes that the book is subversive (102 ff.), but I believe he gives that gentleman more credit for perceptive reading against the grain of feminist discourse than he or any other Puritan writer I know about.

Works Cited

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

Derounian, Kathryn Zabelle. “The Publication, Promotion, and Distribution of Mary Rowlandson's Indian Captivity Narrative in the Seventeenth Century.” Early American Literature 23 (1988): 239-61.

———. “Puritan Orthodoxy and the ‘Survivor Syndrome’ in Mary Rowlandson's Indian Captivity Narrative.” Early American Literature 22 (1987): 82-93.

Downing, David. “‘Streams of Scripture Comfort’: Mary Rowlandson's Typological Use of the Bible.” Early American Literature 15 (1980/81): 252-59.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980.

Kolodny, Annette. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Mather, Cotton. Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion. 1692. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1978.

Pearce, Roy Harvey. “The Significance of the Captivity Narrative.” American Literature 29 (Mar. 1947): 1-20.

Rowlandson, Mary White. Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, 1682. In Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699. Ed. Charles H. Lincoln. New York: Scribner's, 1913.

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

Stanford, Ann. “Mary Rowlandson's Journey to Redemption.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 7:3 (1976): 27-37.

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750. New York: Knopf, 1982.

Winthrop, John. Winthrop's Journal: A History of New England, 1630-1649. Ed. James Kendall Hosmer. New York: Scribner's, 1908. Vol. 2.