SOURCE: “Mary White Rowlandson Remembers Captivity: A Mother's Anguish, a Woman's Voice,” in Women's Life-Writing: Finding Voice/Building Community, edited by Linda S. Coleman, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997, pp. 109-18.

[In the following essay, Boswell focuses on how Rowlandson defined herself by her sex and how her Narrative shows special concern for mothers and children.]

With troubled heart and trembling hand I write,
The heavens have changed to sorrow my delight

—Anne Bradstreet

And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: baby, come hug, Baby, come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.

—Amy Hempel

Mary White Rowlandson's A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, written sometime after her release from captivity in 1676 and published in 1682, was a bestseller during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in both the colonies and in England, and has continued to be a popular text in the United States, most especially with literary and feminist scholars, well into the twentieth century.¹ Because of the profoundly grim circumstances that led her to write this text, and because of the compelling narrative voice with which she told her story, Rowlandson's work has always been studied by American clergy, politicians, historians, and most recently, literary scholars, all of whom have been able to contextualize the Narrative to fit their differing needs.

We know that the seventeenth-century audience for whom she wrote this work read the Narrative as an indictment of the local native tribes and as a testament to the power of the Puritan faith, and that the text continued to be popular well into the nineteenth century. During the twentieth century, scholars of the Colonial American period have continued to acknowledge the value of her text; indeed, this text has been read as a captivity narrative, a spiritual autobiography, an anthropological study of Native American life, a case study of post-traumatic stress syndrome, an historical account of King Philip's War, and another glimpse into the Puritan mind. Rowlandson, about whose private life we know almost nothing beyond her own words, has been described by turns as a martyr, a propagandist, a saint, a victim, and a survivor.

Mary Rowlandson's text is worthy of all of these readings, and more. In fact, I suggest we add Rowlandson's narrative to another category of literary texts: narratives of the mother. Of all the ways in which her text functions, this aspect—Rowlandson as mother as storyteller—makes her text accessible to us in another valid way, and puts her narrative in context with other writings by American women. Read as a “mother narrative,” this life-writing has a depth and complexity that we recognize in slave narratives, poetry, and much fiction written by later American writers. Rowlandson's recounting of her eleven weeks of captivity shares characteristics with Bradstreet's elegies to her grandchildren, Annie Burton's Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. Like these works, Rowlandson's story is a mother's story, and her voice is a mother's voice.

Quite simply, Rowlandson's narrative represents an elegy to her children. Like so many other women of her century, Rowlandson succeeded in combining the personal sphere with the outside world in subtle yet significant ways: in this, a most public document, Rowlandson suggests a most private expression. She defines herself as a mother to her children, and expresses through her language, her rhetorical strategies, and her silences, her feelings of loss, anger, and grief, and ultimately, her loyalty to her children's captivity stories.

The introductory section of Rowlandson's narrative, in which she describes in graphic detail the massacre in Lancaster, Massachusetts, in 1676 by native Algonquians, allows us to glimpse the importance of family—mothers, fathers, children, babies—to her narrative. Within these six paragraphs, she identifies the victims not by using their formal, given names but by using their familial names: “There were five persons taken into one house; the father and the mother and a sucking child” (54).² These are generic family members who are being seized upon; these are “anyfamily.” After describing several vivid scenes of violence and bloodshed, she writes a particularly simple, straightforward sentence in which she introduces herself and her children: “Then I took my children (and one of sisters, hers) to go forth and leave the house” (55). With this one sentence, she has introduced three aspects to her readers which will become increasingly important as she continues her story: she has defined herself within her family, she has distinguished herself and her family from the other “everyfamilies” she has mentioned, and she has begun to describe herself proactively.

Rowlandson continues to describe how she and her three children (a teenaged son, Joseph; a ten-year-old daughter, Mary; and a six-year-old daughter, Sarah), leave their burning home amid gunfire: “The Bullets flying thick, one went through my side, and the same (as would seem) through the bowels and hand of my dear child in my arms” (56). Within minutes she and her wounded youngest child become separated from the other two children, and all are taken captive.

Just before Rowlandson begins to narrate the story of her captivity among the Algonquians, she stops her narrative and adds a curious yet fascinating sentence to her opening remarks:

I had before this said that if the Indians should come I should choose rather to be killed by them than taken alive, but when it came to the trial, my mind changed; their glittering weapons so daunted my spirit that I chose rather to go along with those (as I may say) ravenous beasts than that moment to end my days.

(57)

Rowlandson is describing a familiar adage to her readers: talking about a hypothetical trauma, and living through a real one, are two very different experiences. She admits that she used to talk about wanting to die at the hands of the enemy; when faced with that limited but real choice, she chooses to live. Why? She tells us that she chooses to live because the weapons of her captors frighten her, yet we also know, from her own descriptions, that the fighting has stopped and she knows she is to be spared. Her reason does not seem to follow from what she has described so far. Why, then, does she tell us she wants to live, and why does she give us an unclear reason?

Rowlandson has already given us enough information about herself to help us understand why she chooses to stay alive, not through overt description but by association. She has mentioned her children, their fates, and their actions more often in these first six paragraphs than she has mentioned any other persons. What remains on her mind by the time she is taken captive is not death but life—specifically the lives and survival of her family. We cannot read this final comment without identifying her decision to go with her captors instead of dying as an act to protect her children, especially the wounded youngest child. If Rowlandson was not daunted by the weapons of her captors, if she wanted to remain alive because her children were also alive, then why does she not tell us outright? Why does she not tell us directly that she chooses life over death for her children's sake? Why does she only suggest as much through her descriptions and emphases on familial relationships? Reading her narrative in the context of other Puritan writing might help us to explore these questions.

Rowlandson writes like other female Puritans of her generation: she uses rhetorical strategies taught to her by her clerical teachers (most probably Increase Mather), who themselves used rhetorical strategies based on Ramean logic and Biblical hierarchies.³ To Puritan writers, the world is hierarchical and, within that paradigm, all of God's creations are ranked according to their “value”; the order among humans is, in its simplest form, men, women, children. Teresa Toulouse has pointed out that Rowlandson acknowledges this value system by ascribing titles to her captors (“my mistress,” “the master,” etc.) and by trying to find her own ever-shifting title while she is among the natives (658). Even among “heathens,” Rowlandson defines her worth as less than her captors' because, although she is a Christian, she is a female Christian. Her worth, no matter in whose company, is ultimately defined by her sex.

Her children's worth, according to the Puritan hierarchical scale, is slightly less than her own.⁴ So, when describing why she chooses life over death when faced with the enemy, to an audience of Puritan readers (all of whom would understand the same hierarchical system she does), of course Rowlandson would attribute her need to stay alive to the force of the native warriors around her, not to her commitment to her children. In the world in which she writes her story, she and her children are not so important nor their stories so compelling to Puritan audiences as a story of Christian vs. heathen or men-with-weapons vs. defenseless female. She states a reason for living that her audience would approve. She implies, however, by constant descriptors, that her allegiance is to her children.

This is only the first passage in which Rowlandson's words belie her emphases in the Narrative. Like other female writers in colonial New England, including Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley, Rowlandson employs a pattern of silences, implications, and encoded language in her text, which could, of course, mean different things to different reading audiences.⁵ If we understand that she deemphasizes her relationship to her children in order to tailor her text to a Puritan norm, we might also understand that indeed her children are much more important to her narrative than we had thought. Much of what she narrates—a story full of Biblical passages, descriptions of the natives, memories of her trials—she does on behalf of those captives who had less value and less voice than she: her children.

Rowlandson's wounded daughter dies nine days into their captivity: “About two hours in the night my sweet babe like a lamb departed this life” (60). Once again, Rowlandson relates that she did what she had thought she could never do; although she could not “bear to be in the room where any dead person was,” she spent the night lying with her “dead babe side by side all the night after” (60-61). She tells us that, once more, she has chosen to live instead of using “wicked and violent means to end my own miserable life” (61). Her reasons for wanting to stay alive at this low point become clear to us in the next paragraph: she wants to bury her child. For the second time in her narrative, she has associated her desire to live with the welfare of her child.

Beginning in the fourth remove and continuing throughout the twenty removes that make up her narrative, Rowlandson regularly mentions her dead child and her two living children: “Heartaching thoughts here I had about my poor children, who were scattered up and down among the wild beasts of the forest” (64); “[M]y spirit was ready to sink with the thoughts of my poor children” (71); “My son was ill … my poor girl, I know not where she was nor whether she was sick or well, or dead or alive” (71). Additionally, she reports on quite a number of other mothers and children, both English captives and natives, as she continues to survive among the Algonquians. “Here one [native woman] asked me to make a shirt for her papoose” (75); “Philip's [Rowlandson's native ‘master’] maid came in with the child in her arms and asked me to give her a piece of my apron to make a flap for it” (76). She even mentions a “deer with a young one in her” during the fourteenth remove (80).

Rowlandson's accounts of mothers and children who are sick, dying, or dead are so numerous that they become an implicit “road map” for her reader. We can gauge Rowlandson's journey—both the literal and the spiritual—by the signposts she remembers to include. The most significant signposts she includes are not the Biblical passages nor the technicalities of her captivity; they are, quite clearly, her memories of the mothers and children she has encountered. She has led her readers on her journey most carefully by forcing us to pay attention to those details she thinks are most important. In this sense, she is an adept guide, one who masters the “wilderness” of her captivity narrative by using silent signals and linguistic codes to help her readers understand her most significant journey as that of an anguished mother.

The pattern of silence/implication/encoded language that Rowlandson uses is consistent and pervasive. There are so many stories of “dying babies and their mothers,” according to Toulouse, that these stories help readers to understand Rowlandson's “feelings toward a God who ignores her desires” (662). Rowlandson's stories of mothers and their children allow her to express not just anger but a manifestation of her personal anguish as well. All Puritan texts reflect the writers' relationship to God; Rowlandson's use of Biblical quotations and reflections on how she reads God's will are quite traditional aspects of Puritan writing.

What is not traditional—especially in texts generated by male Puritans—is the constant mention of mothers and children in peril. In this sense, Rowlandson's is truly a “mother narrative.” On her children's behalf, she identifies—however subtly—the violations against her children that they cannot articulate themselves: they have been devalued and abandoned by their own godly community. Near the end of the narrative, after she has been “redeemed” for twenty pounds, she describes her feelings about her freedom: “We were now in the midst of love, yet not without much and frequent heaviness of heart for our poor children” (95). Her happiness, near the end of the narrative, is always tempered by the memory of her dead daughter: “That which was dead lay heavier upon my spirit than those which were alive and amongst the heathen” (96).

Finally, after describing in painstaking detail the return of her daughter Mary from captivity, she concludes with a pointedly eulogistic passage: “Our family being now gathered together (those of us that were living), the South Church of Boston hired a house for us” (98). Rowlandson cannot forget that she has returned alive, but without the child who was wounded with the same bullet that wounded her. Nor does she want her readers to forget this child, either.

There are, of course, two Mary White Rowlandsons, the one who appears in this narrative and the historical one who wrote of her captivity and restoration two years after being released by the Algonquians. The first one is, in terms of narrative, the agent of her story, and the second is the voice who tells the story. The agent Mary Rowlandson has a story that concludes. She and her two living children all survive captivity and are reunited in the final remove of the Narrative, and she ends her story with a poignant, lyrical passage about her relationship to her faith and her God. “Afflication I wanted and affliction I had, full measure (I thought) pressed down and running over” (99).

About the writer of this text we know much less. We do know the external facts of her life after her captivity and publication of the Narrative. She was widowed two years after her release, remarried, and lived until 1710.⁶ We also know that although she was the daughter of a wealthy colonist and the wife of a powerful minister, she lived modestly during the years after her release. Perhaps most significant to this study, we know that she published no other works beyond the Narrative. In the culture of the colonial Puritans, Mary White Rowlandson was considered a “goodwife,” not a member of the clergy, nor a writer.

We do not know much about how this goodwife came to write this work, and yet her text is considered one of the most powerful testaments to Puritan faith ever written, and one of the most important historical documentations of English-Native relations during the colonial period. However she came to write and publish it—whether commissioned by an approving Puritan clergy, the colonial militia, or her husband—she must have known that her work was to be a public document.⁷ She knew her work was likely to be edited, amended, and augmented by others, especially by the Puritan clergy. Like other female Puritan writers who truly believed in their faith and in the wisdom of their chosen leaders, Rowlandson must have understood that her work would be edited and shaped to conform to the Puritan narrative form, and she consented to it.

Consenting to remember and recount for the public a most private and horrific event as she did, Rowlandson found ways to embed within her text those aspects of her captivity that her Puritan community deemed less important than she did. Like the texts of other Puritan writers who were women, her text reflects how a woman writer dealt with textual compromise. Using the correct form, the appropriate rhetorical strategies, and the Biblical language with which her community was most fluent, she told two stories: the public allegory about the Puritan community's ongoing struggle with evil, and the personal story she kept reminding her readers to remember: her struggle to defend and tell her children's stories.

In his study of Rowlandson's narrative, Mitchell Robert Breitweiser makes the point that, writing only two years after her release, Rowlandson continued to grieve her experience: “[M]ourning is for Rowlandson incomplete at the time she writes, and the writing becomes a part of the work of mourning” (9). Remembering her eleven weeks with the Algonquians forced her to relive the nightmare of captivity, death, loss, and destruction. Writing, however, also allowed her the painful comfort of bringing her children out of relief, of bringing Sarah back to life, of controlling a world she would never control otherwise. Writing publicly, in formal Puritan rhetoric, might have seemed a small price to pay for the chance to tell one's own story.

The Puritans believed that human language, flawed as it was, was the most precious gift with which a wrathful God had left humankind after the Fall. Their respect for language is nowhere more apparent than in Rowlandson's Narrative, where she understands that some aspects of her captivity she can explain, and some must be understood not through language but through other means—through silence or subtlety. When we listen to her story, we hear a voice compromised by violence, by conformity, by grief. We also hear in goodwife Mary Rowlandson's voice a woman's story of grace and loss, delivered clearly as an elegy on mothers and their children.

Notes

1. There is a vast and fine body of scholarship on Rowlandson and her Narrative. Most useful as general works have been Breitweiser, Slotkin and Folsom, Slotkin's Regeneration through Violence, Vaughan and Clark, and Kolodny. I also found Ulrich's Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England to be helpful. There are a number of recent articles on Rowlandson's work, many of which have contributed to my interest and understanding, most especially Burnham, Davis, Derounian, Downing, Logan, whose article “Mary Rowlandson's Captivity and the ‘Place’ of the Women Subject” was particularly valuable to me. Teresa Toulouse's “‘My Own Credit’: Strategies of (E)valuation in Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative” has also been useful.

   I dedicate this essay to Mary Kennedy Hutson.

2. All quotations from, and references to, Rowlandson's text are from The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, in Katherine M. Rogers, ed., The Meridian Anthology of Early American Women Writers: From Anne Bradstreet to Louisa May Alcott (New York: Penguin, 1991).

3. Ramean logic, named for the French logician Petrus Ramus, was, as Daniel Shea has described it, “the approach [to knowledge] of the educated Puritan in the seventeenth century” (96). Ramean logic collapsed the systemized rhetoric of Aristotle into two hierarchical, dialectical categories. A Puritan minister, trained to argue a sermon or treatise according to the rules of Ramean logic, would always move from general to specific in his argument, and always set up a series of opposites. The best readings on Ramean logic, and on its relationship to the Puritan way of knowing, are in Miller, Morgan, Ong, and Shea. See also Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, and The American Jeremiad.

4. See especially Logan and Greven, The Protestant Temperament.

5. See Martin, and Cowell and Stanford, eds., for critical essays and good bibliographies on Bradstreet; for critical essays on Wheatley, see Robinson.

6. See especially Greene, “New Light on Mary Rowlandson.”

7. For a good discussion on the circumstances of the publishing history of the Narrative, see Derounian, “The Publication, Promotion, and Distribution of Mary Rowlandson's Indian Captivity Narrative in the Seventeenth Century.”

Works Cited

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978.

———. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.

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

Burnham, Michelle. “The Journey Between: Liminality and Diologism in Mary White Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative.” Early American Literature 28 (1993): 60-75.

Cowell, Pattie, and Ann Stanford, eds. Critical Essays on Anne Bradstreet. Boston: Hall, 1983.

Davis, Margaret H. “Mary White Rowlandson's Self-Fashioning as Puritan Goodwife.” Early American Literature 27 (1992): 49-60.

Derounian, Kathryn Zabelle. “The Publication, Promotion and Distribution of Mary Rowlandson's Indian Captivity Narrative in the Seventeenth Century.” Early American Literature 23 (1998): 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 (1981): 252-59.

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

Greven, Philip. The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America. New York: Knopf, 1977.

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

Logan, Lisa. “Mary Rowlandson's Captivity and the ‘Place’ of the Woman Subject.” Early American Literature 28 (1993): 255-77.

Martin, Wendy. An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1974.

Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1954.

Morgan, John. Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes Towards Reason, Learning and Education, 1560-1640. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.

Ong, Walter, S. J. Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958.

Robinson, William H. Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley. Boston: Hall, 1982.

Rogers, Katharine M., ed. The Meridian Anthology of Early American Women Writers: From Anne Bradstreet to Louisa May Alcott, 1650-1865. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Shea, Daniel B. Spiritual Autobiography in Early America. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1975.

Slotkin, Richard, and James K. Folsom, eds. So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip's War, 1676-1677. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1978.

Toulouse, Teresa. “‘My Own Credit’: Strategies of (E)valuation in Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative.” American Literature 64 (1992): 655-76.

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

Vaughan, Alden T., and Edward W. Clark, eds. Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1642-1836. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1981.