SOURCE: “Mary Rowlandson: Captive Witness,” in So Dreadfull a Judgement: Puritan Responses to King Philip's War, 1676-1677, edited by Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom, Wesleyan University Press, 1978, pp. 301-12.

[In the following essay, Slotkin and Folsom examine Rowlandson's work as both a captivity narrative and part of Puritan mythology and culture.]

“On the tenth of February 1675, came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster: Their first coming was about sun-rising; hearing the noise of some guns, we looked out; several houses were burning and the smoke ascending to heaven.” So Mrs. Mary Rowlandson begins the first and probably the finest example of a uniquely American literary genre, the so-called captivity narrative: that is, the history of a white European—or later, an American—made captive by hostile Indians and of what transpired between his or (more generally) her capture and ultimate release.

The captivity narrative found immediate favor in both America and Europe. Mary Rowlandson's Narrative, for instance, went through numerous American and English editions during the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Part of this interest in captivity narratives was of course historical; but even more, it has been suggested, the genre fulfilled a real literary need in an age and community to which novels were suspect. But captivity narratives, however historical in fact, are novelistic in effect; and indeed, subsequent to Mary Rowlandson, the historical content of these captivity narratives became more and more dilute, while the fanciful elements grew more and more pronounced, although the pretense of historical veracity was always maintained.

Although these narratives were usually rather brief and literarily slight, their influence should not be underestimated. Their popularity was great, their circulation large—not only among those who first invented them but throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century as well. From the publication of Mary Rowlandson's narrative in 1682 until the publication of Benjamin Church's narrative in 1716, captivity narratives were virtually the only form of personal narrative about the frontier approved for publication by the Puritan censors. These narratives formed the archetype of a kind of official mythology in which the colonial experience was symbolized by the peril of a white Christian woman in the Indian-haunted wilderness. According to Golden Multitudes, Frank L. Mott's study of best-sellers, of four narrative works that attained best-seller status between 1680 and 1720, three were captivity narratives. Not until the nineteenth century did a novel written by an American gain a similar degree of popularity, and as late as 1824, a captivity narrative could successfully compete with the novels of Cooper and Scott in the literary marketplace.¹

Rowlandson's book is therefore to be taken not only as the creation of a Puritan myth, but as the starting point of a cultural myth affecting America as a whole. Gradually, “the captivity” became part of the basic vocabulary of American writers and historians, offering a symbolic key to the drama of American history: a white woman, symbolizing the values of Christianity and American civilization, is captured and threatened by a racial enemy and must be rescued by the grace of God (or, after the Puritan times, by an American hero). Captivity mythology is central to such works as Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly (1799), to Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, and to the hundreds of pseudo-Coopers who published dime novels and “pulp” westerns from 1850 to the present.²

We know little more of Mary Rowlandson than what she tells us in her Narrative, and what little we do know is strangely unrevealing. She was born, probably in 1635 and probably in England, the daughter of John White, wealthiest of the original proprietors of the infant settlement of Lancaster, Massachusetts. About 1656 she married Joseph Rowlandson, the first minister of Lancaster. As his wife, she had a position of considerable prestige in the community and until the outbreak of hostilities twenty years later, she lived an uneventful life there. In the successful assault upon Lancaster on February 10, 1676, however, she and her three children were carried off by Indian attackers. Her husband, she tells us, was absent at the time, somewhere “in the Bay,” that is, at or near Boston. Presumably the Reverend Rowlandson was petitioning the colonial officials for a garrison of troops to be stationed at Lancaster, whose exposed position had become all too evident after the first unsuccessful Indian raid on the town during the preceding August. In any event his absence was fortunate for himself, since the Indians killed the male defenders and took only women and children captive. Mary Rowlandson and her three children were taken prisoner, and the youngest child, who had been seriously wounded in the fighting, died shortly afterward. Rowlandson's Indian captors apparently realized the value of their prisoner and kept her with the notion of ransom in mind. On May 2 she was returned to her own people for the considerable sum of £20 in goods. Soon after her release, her two surviving children were also set free. Increase Mather saw in her deliverance a sign that God was at last consenting to harken to the prayers of his people, and the event has an important place in his history.

Lancaster had been utterly destroyed during the attack, and was not resettled until 1681. The Rowlandson family, after Mary's release, resided for a short while in Charlestown and Boston, but in 1677 moved to Wethersfield, Connecticut, where the Reverend Rowlandson had been called as minister and where he died the following year. His widow was awarded an annual pension of £30, but the Wethersfield town records do not indicate its ever having been paid. Presumably—although again documentary evidence is lacking—she died in 1678, shortly after her husband.

In one sense it is fortunate that we know so little about the external facts of Mary Rowlandson's life, for such lack of knowledge forces us back to the text of the Narrative itself for its interpretation. And this Narrative is a far more complex document than is generally realized. As a historical document reflecting shifts in Puritan ideas and values, Mary Rowlandson's book is extremely valuable.

Chief among the shifts she registers is the wartime change in Puritan attitudes toward the Indians. Prior to 1675 opinion at least among the ministry had held that the Indians were “heathens”; subsequently they became “savages.” A “Praying Indian,” according to Mary Rowlandson's eloquent witness, was no more than a hypocrite, totally enslaved still to his master Satan, the Prince of this World and the Father of Lies—and it should be remembered that she was by birth and by marriage part of the group that had previously most staunchly defended the enterprise of the “Apostle” Eliot in his attempts at converting the Indians to Christianity.

No human quality is easier, of course, than omniscience after the fact. It is simple enough for us to see, from the vantage point of three hundred years later, that the Indians were not the devilish savages into which contemporary opinion—reacting, admittedly, to the stresses of war—transformed them and that the colonists were not entirely the godly saints they thought themselves to be. The conflict between the two parties, it is evident enough now, was not primarily a moral struggle of good against evil which the Puritans interpreted it to be, but a far more basic difference in attitude toward life itself. The Puritans were dedicated entirely to an idea of progress by which, to adapt Kipling, “lesser breeds without the law” would be raised up from their savagery and included in the godly commonwealth of Christian men. The Puritans could scarcely be expected to sympathize with the unaccountable tenacity with which America's Indian inhabitants clung to their old ways. The Indians evinced what seemed from the Puritan point of view an inexplicable fondness for their traditional values and an equally inexplicable resistance to those ways in which good Christian men—again, the Apostle Eliot is a convenient but by no means unique example—endeavored to lead them. Although they would not have used the term, the events of the war forced the Puritans to the reluctant belief that the heathens were “invincible” in their “ignorance,” and hence would have to be dealt with summarily. And here is where Mary Rowlandson's limited and fallible account of the Indian wars becomes a uniquely human and touching document, both as a record of incredible fortitude under hardship in which the inner life is as carefully observed as the outer and as an account of the Indians that couples genuine human sympathy with a hatred almost unimaginable to one who has not gone through her experiences.

Ostensibly, as the original title tells us, the subject of that work we have come to know as the Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson is in fact The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed, and it is certainly true that few Puritan texts hold so uncompromisingly as this Narrative to a demonstration of the ostensible moral they set themselves. Yet it has been insufficiently noticed that the Providence to which Mary Rowlandson directs the reader is a peculiarly Puritan one, the paradoxical expression of a paradoxical faith; it is not a simple naive statement that God is in his heaven and that all must therefore be right with the world.

Most commentators on American intellectual history begin with an acknowledgment that Puritanism is (in style, at least) a highly Manichean religion, one in which the powers of evil are seen as almost equal to the powers of good. Although the whole world may show forth the sovereignty and goodness of God, these powers are quite often shown by inversion, and quite often as well they are not indicated through a statement of how benevolent this world is, but of how malevolent it can be. Mary Rowlandson's Narrative, in short, often argues the sovereignty and goodness of God through a peculiarly tough-minded Puritan variant of the traditional argument from design, a descendant not of Paley's simple-mindedly optimistic notion that when one sees a watch he infers a watchmaker but of the more sophisticated ontological proof of the existence of God: that God exists because I can conceive of him. For Mary Rowlandson, quite simply, the fact that this world is so bad is the most convincing possible proof that somewhere there must be a better one.

Consequently, Mary Rowlandson's faith, as shown in her Narrative, is itself as dualistic as the Calvinism that brought it forth. The ultimate paradox is simple, easy enough to demonstrate albeit hard to explain: God is in control of all his creation, but for his own good reasons he has allowed his saints to exist in a world which, at least from their finite point of view, is at times an evil one. Stated this way the argument is old and commonplace, one of the timeworn justifications for a problem with which religious thinkers have wrestled since the dawn of time, that of a benevolent God who nonetheless permits evil in his creation. But few, at least within an orthodox Christian tradition, have been so uncompromising in their dualism as Mary Rowlandson.

Doubling this basic paradox in Mary Rowlandson's Puritan thought is another, less philosophically basic to Calvinism but more operative as a specific value in the Narrative. This is the notion of a “special providence,” an idea ultimately derived from the Old Testament notion of the Israelites as a chosen people, a group with whom God has made an individual covenant. According to this idea, which depends upon a somewhat simplistic reading of the Old Testament as moral history, God made a special covenant with his chosen people, by which he would guarantee their welfare if they did not fall from his ways. The various misfortunes of the Hebrews, then, were inflicted upon them as a chastisement by a just if impatient God to punish them for straying from his commandments. According to the Puritan reading of the Old Testament, God had finally lost faith in the Hebrews as his chosen people and had chosen the Puritans in their stead, but the notion of the chosen people itself, protected by a just God from misfortune, survives intact, even though the specific identity of these chosen people has been changed. Yet this view is itself heavily qualified: if, as Christ reminds us, God marks the sparrow's fall, clearly his providence is general as well as special and larger than the protection of a small group of his saints. For his own wise ends, God sometimes chooses to chastise his own, even if in order to do so he must also sustain his enemies.

In the Narrative this paradoxical view of the quality and direction of God's providence is most clearly seen in the ambiguous role of Mary Rowlandson's Indian captors. She specifically raises the question in her discussion, during the “twentieth remove,” of five “remarkable passages of providence” in which God had specifically protected his enemies at the expense of the general welfare of his saints. Here the term “remarkable” clearly becomes synonymous with “paradoxical,” and the paradox is very simply that God has reserved his special care not for his saints but for his enemies.

Nor is this the only example of Rowlandson's ambiguous treatment of her captors. The observant reader will notice first off that, her protestations to the contrary, her treatment as a prisoner was not particularly harsh. The hardships she suffered were common to the whole party, Indians and captives alike. Perhaps, as some commentators have suggested, her captors realized that she would prove to be a valuable commodity for exchange; more to the point, however, is the fact—which the reader must look carefully to distinguish—that the Indians themselves were by no means living off the fat of the land. Indeed, on one level at least, the Narrative may be read as an account of the hardships to which the Indians had been reduced by the inroads of the English upon their supplies.

In any event, during the course of the Narrative Rowlandson's rhetorical treatment of the Indians as devilish instruments of Satan becomes more and more conventional and pro forma. Although she never admits as much, her awareness that her captors, whatever their ultimate purpose in the providential scheme of things may be, are not personally especially malevolent, becomes increasingly evident. And this brings us to one final consideration of the implications of this paradoxical Narrative, the not-so-obvious point that it is in many ways a psychological text as well as a theological or historic document.

Mary Rowlandson is tantalizingly silent about her reunion with her husband. We may only speculate upon their conversations after her return from captivity and her final remove to Boston. The ostensible “moral” to her story, and the one upon which we may be certain their speculations partially dwelt, is summed up in the various biblical captivities and restorations to which she refers her readers in her Preface and at various points in the body of the Narrative; and yet we may hope that her curious mind did not rest on only this obvious and simple moral. For there is another dimension to her Narrative than the moral one, a dimension that explains as well as any other single factor both the power of this particular book and the popularity, among serious readers, of the whole genre of Indian captivities. This dimension is, for lack of a more precise term, an internal, psychological one.

The modern reader, unused to the rhetoric of theological argumentation, may well find the temptation overwhelming to reduce Rowlandson's Narrative to a historical account issuing in a conventional ethical moral; for from the vantage point of the mid-twentieth century the reductive equation of a religious text with an ethical one seems so self-evident as to be almost axiomatic. The modern reader, far more than Rowlandson or her contemporaries, is inclined to assume without thinking that a religious treatise finally comes down to an implied moral, included in it somewhere, of “thou shalt not.” More than Mary Rowlandson's, the modern reader's interpretation of the Bible reduces that book to an expanded paraphrase of the Decalogue.

Yet Mary Rowlandson and her husband may well have begun their own speculations from a different point of view, one summed up perhaps best by the prophet Amos, whom she mentions twice in the body of her Narrative: “Woe to them that are at ease in Zion.” For the power of Rowlandson's Narrative, leaving aside for the moment its ethical and historical significance, lies in its study of the emotional effects of what she calls “affliction” rather than in whatever philosophical reflections may be drawn from her own particular misfortunes. From this point of view her Narrative conforms to an ancient and powerful literary archetype, the story of a person who is placed in a position of comfort and affluence and who then has everything stripped away.

For the Puritans, this story had special significance. Complacency of spirit was the great enemy of Puritan religiosity: to experience the crisis of conversion, the soul had to be in a state of grave anxiety about its chances of salvation. Under the persecutions of the Anglicans or the hardships of the early emigration and settlement, such a keyed-up psychology was more easily maintained than it could be in 1675 when persecutions had ended and the circumstances of American life were growing more easy and homelike. Out of a resulting complacency could arise such movements as the Half-Way Covenant or the still more latitudinarian Brattle Street Church; under such complacency the teaching of children and servants, the missionary work to the Indians, the care and maintenance of the ministry would all decay, and with them the discipline of a true Bible Commonwealth. If Rowlandson's captivity was therefore a punishment for complacency or slothfulness in religion, it could serve as a symbolic rebuke to a backsliding Puritan community. This in fact was the use made of captivity materials by the ministry. After the war, they were often made the occasions of revival sermons and were published as appendices to sermons calling for the renewal of the covenant by new conversions.

That Rowlandson was herself aware of this dimension to her Narrative is evident enough from the fact that a great many of her religious references and allusions are drawn from the Book of Job, the classic biblical statement of this archetypal theme. Job, who is described in the biblical account as God's good servant is mysteriously afflicted by all kinds of misfortunes in order to test the depth of his faith. Though sorely tempted to curse God and die, Job remains true to him and is at last restored to his former state. Significantly, Job is surrounded by various “comforters” (the term Job's comforter has come to mean someone who gives false help on the basis of superficial understanding) who try to rationalize God's treatment of Job on the assumption that he must have done something to arouse God's anger, an act of which he is himself unaware. God, however, when called upon to explain his actions, speaks to Job from a whirlwind and propounds to him a set of paradoxes, none of which Job can answer; the point is that God's ways are beyond the understanding of man and that man must accept God's will without question. God's justice is beyond the powers of man's interpretation. That God is just, then, becomes a statement of faith rather than of reason.

This “moral” to the Book of Job has left many thinkers unhappy, and some—Melville in Moby-Dick being the classic example—have taken bitter exception to it; but the central issue of the Book of Job, the statement of the uncertainty of the world itself, is a notion from which few who, with Mary Rowlandson, have experienced affliction would recoil. Moreover, if—in terms of the Book of Job—God's ways are by their very nature beyond the powers of human interpretation, then their rational explication becomes ultimately futile, as Mary Rowlandson's five examples of “remarkable passages of providence” make eloquently clear. Of more importance than the moral is the psychological study of the behavior of man in the throes of affliction. And in my opinion this explains the remarkable power of Mary Rowlandson's Narrative.

Basically, then, this book is an examination of the price of survival, of what one must learn and of the compromises one must make merely to stay alive. Behind all Rowlandson's moralizing stands an eloquent testimony to the value of life itself as something ultimately precious and worth preserving. The question of how one survives under affliction is one to which Mary Rowlandson devotes many pages, some eloquently descriptive of the shrifts to which she was reduced by a world suddenly and inexplicably gone mad. But behind this question stands another, never directly confronted, of why one should take the trouble. In short, is life worth it? The answer, for Mary Rowlandson, is yes.

Yet, as her Narrative soberly reminds us, this life itself, valuable as it may be, is to be purchased only at great cost. Mary Rowlandson discovered that the “value,” as it were, of her life was £20 in goods. Still, this was not the total reckoning: the greatest expense proved to be an internal one, and the ransom Mary Rowlandson finally paid was the sacrifice of that ease in Zion of which the prophet Amos spoke. “I can remember the time,” she tells us soberly at the end of her Narrative, “when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts, whole nights together, but now it is other ways with me.” Her experiences have marked and altered her, given her a vision that alienates her from her restored family. She is perhaps experiencing what a post-Holocaust world would call “the guilt of the survivor,” but she herself experiences this in her own Puritan terms. She feels that she has seen through the veil that covers the face of God, like Melville's Pip, and the vision has made her not insane, but possessed of a sanity that makes the real world hollow, empty of meaning, vain, a spider's web held out of nothingness by the mere will of an angry God.

To the basic humanity of her vision she brings a language steeped in the Bible and in Puritan mythology. Both the structure of the narrative and its recurrent images tie it to the common heritage of the Puritan audience. The structure of her adventure is essentially that of the conversion experience, that most central of Puritan rituals, and its imagery links the individual adventure to larger myths of collective experience, particularly the myth of the Apocalypse and the experience of emigration with its attendant traumas. Thus, the narrative lends itself to interpretation in the favored Puritan mode of “exfoliation,” of revealing microcosms that imply macrocosms.³

Imagery and allusions extend the reference of the basic structure. As a captive, Rowlandson experienced starvation, but in her narrative fact is transmuted into symbol, boiled horses' feet and parched corn becoming almost sacramental in function. When the Indians take her, their waste of food symbolizes their wasting the opportunity of grace afforded by the presence of the Christians among them. Her past and present misuse of “food,” temporal and spiritual, is symbolized in the vile stuff she not only has to eat but actually finds “savoury” (even when it is filched from fellow captives). It is as if she has been made to partake of a Black Eucharist, like the supposed cannibal sacraments that the “possessed” spoke of during the Salem witchcraft hysteria. When through the grace of God she is both rescued and saved, she declares that though she despaired of ever again having “bread” (either of wheat or symbolic wafer), “now we are fed with the finest of Wheat and, as I may say, with honey out of the rock.” Or, as she says elsewhere, God has made “meat out of the eater,” converting the Indians who would have devoured the Puritans into “food”—for thought, at least.

The attack of the Indians and the dividing of the Rowlandson family by the raiders contain echoes of Wigglesworth's extremely popular poetic account of the Last Judgment, The Day of Doom (Boston, 1662). Like the Last Judgment, the captivity begins with the breaking of the familial circle. In Wigglesworth it is Christ who makes the division, separating families according to judgment. The Christian is forbidden to pity the damned, for “such compassion is out of fashion.” Therefore:

The tender Mother will own no other of all her
          numerous brood
But such as stand at Christ's right hand acquitted
          through His blood.
The pious Father had now much rather his graceless
          Son should lie
In Hell with Devils, for all his evils burning eternally.(4)

Rowlandson is not quite up to Wigglesworth's standard: she mourns her children left in the wilderness and her murdered kindred. Yet in the end she accepts their fates with resignation, and she praises God for giving her strength to bear her losses.

The theme of the breaking of the family has historical significance as well. It became the central metaphor in orthodox Puritan literature for any rupturing of the social compact by dissident religionists, political opponents of the Puritan regime, or back-sliding children. But in the captivity narratives it also served to acknowledge and exorcise the spiritual malaise of the “emigration trauma”: the feeling that the Puritans themselves might have broken the familial claim of English law and English kinship by coming to America. Thomas Shepard, defending New England from critics who thought the settlers should return to England, justified the emigration by reference to “a strange poise of spirit the Lord hath laid upon many of our hearts,” to go “against so many perswasions of friends,” forsaking “our accommodations and comforts, … [forsaking] our dearest relations, Parents, brethren, Sisters, Christian friends … and all this to go to a wildernesse.”⁵ In Mrs. Rowlandson's Narrative, the will of God that the family be broken and the salvation-seeker removed into a wilderness is clear beyond question, and if there is guilt associated with the seeker's departure, there is also atonement provided in the Narrative itself. Thus, myth resolves into credible imagery what to logic is paradox or contradiction.

Notes

1. Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes, p. 303. R. W. G. Vail, Voice of the Old Frontier, lists works about the frontier published before 1800.

2. Roy Harvey Pearce, “The Significances of the Captivity Narrative,” American Literature 19:1 (March 1949), pp. 1-20; Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, chaps. 4-5, pp. 257-59, 326-30, 384-93, 440-59, 518-38.

3. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, chap. 4.

4. Michael Wigglesworth, “The Day of Doom,” reprinted in Colonial American Writing, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce, pp. 233-34, 248, 289-90.

5. Thomas Shepard, “A Defense of the Answer,” in The Puritans, ed. Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, p. 121.