SOURCE: “‘My Own Credit’: Strategies of (E)Valuation in Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative,” in American Literature, Vol. 64, No. 4, December, 1992, pp. 655-76.

[In following essay, Toulouse argues that an important function of Rowlandson's Narrative is to ensure the author's reintegration into the society from which she had been abducted, and she examines several strategies that Rowlandson employed to achieve this end.]

After detailing God's “strange” providences to her Indian captors in the twentieth remove of her Narrative, Mary Rowlandson pauses to acknowledge a special providence to herself:

O the wonderful power of God that I have seen, and the experience that I have had: I have been in the midst of those roaring lions, and savage bears, that feared neither God, nor man, nor the devil, by night and day, alone and in company: sleeping all sorts together, and yet not one of them ever offered me the least abuse of unchastity to me, in word or action. Though some are ready to say, I speak it for my own credit; but I speak it in the presence of God, and to His glory.¹

The quotation brings together motifs that occur throughout the Narrative: Indian savagery, her “miraculous” redemption from it (reminiscent of its scriptural antecedent in Daniel), and her gratitude to the God who saved her. Examined closely, however, the passage complicates these motifs in revealing ways. The odd notion of taking “credit” (or not) for one's freedom from sexual assault resonates back through Rowlandson's entire narrative. She here implies that disapproving voices have indeed claimed that she has spoken (whether orally or in print) to her own “credit” and not to God's. Surely the strongest means for countering this perhaps general accusation is not only to suggest her resemblance to Daniel in the lions' den but also to use the specific image of a passive female body that is miraculously left untouched. At the same time, however, Rowlandson's stress on this inviolate body does not simply point to her orthodox desire to credit God with her redemption; it also points to her own need to be reintegrated into the community as the same body (mentally and physically) that was wrenched from it—that went out into the wilderness but remained the same. What she wants is precisely that her tale be credited and that in being so credited her own credit—worth, value, on multiple grounds—be restored. The central problem of her Narrative lies in proving why the “redemption” of her female body from the Indians was, in fact, worth it.

In this essay I will examine three of the culturally available strategies to which Rowlandson turns in order to persuade herself and her readers to credit her. I will further argue that, often because of her gender, each of these strategies becomes internally divided in ways that both draw this credit into question or suggest reasons for it on grounds entirely different from those on which the text ostensibly relies. Finally, given the limitations of space, I will suggest that in Rowlandson's seeking out, appropriating, and complicating of the available cultural strategies for locating self-worth, her woman's text can be seen as broadly representative of her generation for reasons scholars have not yet fully considered.²

The Preface to the second edition of the Narrative suggests a secular as well as spiritual justification for Rowlandson's narrative. “Ter Amica” (almost certainly Increase Mather) notes that Rowlandson is a “gentlewoman” whose husband is Lancaster's minister.³ The “public concernment” in this matter should thus be great because Joseph Rowlandson's “capacity and employment was public in the house of God, and his name on that account of a very sweet savor in the churches of Christ” (320). For Ter Amica, it is clear that Mary Rowlandson's value is contingent on that of her husband. Yet she had sources of secular value other than her husband's profession. She was a “gentlewoman” not only because of her marriage but also because her father John White was the wealthiest man in Lancaster. The Lancaster town records note at one point a proposition to the “towne … to consider what to doe about the minister's land in the posession of John White.”⁴ The comment is a vague one—but telling in its implications, suggesting as it does that some of the land allocated for the minister Joseph Rowlandson's use was owned by his father-in-law. It seems clear that the issue of Mary Rowlandson's status, secular as well as spiritual, appears to have played a role not simply in the Boston ministers' possibly uncomfortable decision to publish a woman's narrative but also in her own willingness to have it published. The defensiveness of her comment above implies that she allowed publication of her text both because she believed her status entitled her to it and, I would argue, because the Narrative attempts to demonstrate (reinstate) such entitlement.

Rowlandson's use of the language of status appears throughout the Narrative but is especially prominent in the twelfth remove. Picking up her daily load in preparation for breaking camp, she complains of its heaviness and is slapped by her mistress. Rowlandson comments, “I lifted up my heart to God, hoping the redemption was not far off: and the rather because their insolence grew worse and worse” (340-41). The Indians also carry heavy loads, but equality is not the issue for Rowlandson anymore than for her father or her husband—hierarchy is. “Insolence” suggests her sense of social specialness as John White's daughter and Joseph Rowlandson's wife. In the nineteenth remove Philip himself seems to recognize her proper status by noting “two weeks more and you shall be mistress again” (351). A discussion of the slapping Indian mistress follows this comment. Rowlandson describes her as “a severe and proud dame … bestowing every day in dressing herself neat as much time as any of the gentry of the land.” The language of status hierarchy as defined by dress (compare the sumptuary laws) permeates this comment. Yet there is a paradox here. If the Indians are simply “insolent” and therefore presumably socially less than she, why does Rowlandson place such weight on Philip's remark and why does she comment on the “gentry”-like pride of her “mistress”?

Clearly, as Laurel Ulrich has noted, Mary Rowlandson cannot define “insolence” from outside a social schema; she must define it in the terms of a hierarchical social discourse she has learned and in turn projects onto the Indians.⁵ If some Indians are “insolent,” there are obviously also those of the “better” sort who are capable of recognizing Rowlandson's own social place and with whom, if they are women, she tacitly seems to compete for status.

Her use of the language of status hierarchy suggests Rowlandson's need to use the modes of understanding available to her as they offered some indication of her own importance. At the same time, however, in her projection of such categories onto the Indians she comes close to showing up the relativity of status arrangements. If it is the captive context in which she finds herself a servant, it is this same context in which she sees the Indians not as simple “savages” but as possessing a social structure with a hierarchy that, at least in her eyes, bears similarities to her own. But if this is so, if the systems are projected as similar, what then becomes of the notion of fixed status? What grounds it? That Weetamoo—Rowlandson's chief mistress—was indeed a chief, a sachem, in her own right, Rowlandson cannot admit, even though it was common knowledge. But for Rowlandson herself, in this text, Indian women derive their worth from that of their husbands, their “masters,” just as for Ter Amica it is Rowlandson's husband's status—and equally, for the town, her father's—that grants Rowlandson her standing as a “gentlewoman” whose writing and publishing of a text is permissible. Her change from “mistress” to servant in a frontier context underscores the fact that female status—and by implication frontier status—is always contingent. She is a beggar until she is made “mistress” again by the cost of her “redemption.”

Her “redemption” for goods valued to £20 shows up the unstable grounds of status as well. While the text suggests that £20 is a middle figure, Slotkin and Folsom have claimed (and the historical valuation of land and property bears them out) that it was actually rather high—certainly higher than that of any of the other captives.⁶ Does her own purchase “at great price,” oddly recalling her father's purchasing power in Lancaster, help to restore Rowlandson's “credit”? Does it contribute to her sense of social specialness in a way that overlaps with her sense of religious specialness? Certainly, the connection of the two forms of redemption, coming as they do at the end of the text, would seem to suggest their relationship in her mind. At the same time, however, does not a worth based on a debated monetary value again demonstrate the relativity of “specialness,” whether such value is determined by her father, her husband, her Indian “master,” the community who raised the money to redeem her, or even by Rowlandson herself? The high price she asks for her redemption again both establishes and destabilizes any fixed ground for her worth. The repercussions involved in such unmooring of the bases of personal “value” become increasingly evident when we examine Rowlandson's use of two other, far more well-known models for determining personal and social “credit.”

In the discourse of martyrdom, the suffering Christian achieves moral status through physical trial. Martyrdom provides the theme of male and female, Protestant and Catholic “saints'” lives. The invariable structure of a martyrdom involves the movement from affliction to redemption, or, in a common image pattern, from “captivity” to “restauration.”⁷ In the paradigm offered by the New England jeremiad, the emphasis falls not so much on the simple fact of the martyr's final salvation but, as both Miller and Bercovitch have noted, on the meaning of the specific affliction.⁸ For Rowlandson, this is certainly the case. At the end of her Narrative, she quotes Hebrews 12:6—“For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth” (365). Her prosperity before the captivity, she now admits, had made her anxious about her spiritual state. Now, however, she knows she is special indeed: “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” (365-66). The intensity of her affliction, almost more than her deliverance from it, becomes the sign of her spiritual status; as she is afflicted more than anyone else, so is she more favored of God. She shapes her captivity around this center, the ending merely providing a fulfillment of the “redemption” prefigured in the initial affliction.

Philip Greven has argued that seventeenth-century Puritan child-raising practices, designed to break a child's will before the will of its parents (as an image of God's will), can give rise to masochistic personality structures.⁹ Studying cultures in which women lack a public face and are considered mentally and physically inferior to men, Karen Horney and others have claimed that women develop similar structures.¹⁰ Social history would thus seem to confirm Horney's argument in telling ways. Both Puritan men and Puritan women may be raised in such a manner that the self-sacrifice, submission, and self-abnegation that are part of the language of martyrdom become necessary components of a sense of self-worth, but for women these traits are reinforced not only by theology but also by specific historical/cultural attitudes towards women as a sex. The self-sacrifice and affliction of the martyr thus become signs that could indicate not only “true” sainthood but also “true” womanliness.¹¹

The agent of a martyr's affliction and redemption is the body, not the body as aggressive and actively competitive but as weak, passive, and enduring—all characteristics theologically recognized as Christian and culturally recognized as womanly. Rowlandson's text, as we noted earlier, uses her woman's body as the vehicle for her sense of spiritual specialness. Towards the beginning of the narrative, before she specifically begins to organize the body's afflictions as general signs of her specialness, she makes particular reference to the suffering body of a mother. All her more general reflections on the bodily afflictions that signal spiritual worth follow from this initial examination of female martyrdom, in which she again competes with another woman.

In the fourth remove, just following the intense description of the death of her daughter Sarah, Rowlandson digresses from her own tale to complete the harrowing story of a Mrs. Joslin. Soon after Rowlandson leaves her, Joslin, a pregnant Puritan woman, is burned at the stake with her two-year-old in her arms. Scholars have called Rowlandson's description of Joslin's ordeal an example of the “outraged maternity” theme but have not directly considered this scene in light of Rowlandson's use of the martyr paradigm. Joslin would seem to offer an indisputable image of the female—specifically the mother—as martyr, yet in telling Joslin's story Rowlandson not only builds her up but also subtly undercuts her achievement.

At the end of the previous remove, Joslin and Rowlandson have opened the Bible to the last verse of Psalm 27: “Wait on the Lord, Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart, wait I say on the Lord” (331). In the fourth remove it becomes clear that Joslin had not so “waited,” but, writes Rowlandson, “being so near her time, she would be often asking the Indians to let her go home,” until they, “vexed with her importunity,” finally murdered her (331-32). In the third remove Rowlandson had described how, when her Sarah died, she had come close to killing herself but had not done so. The juxtaposition of the two mothers suggests Rowlandson's desperate competition with Joslin. The latter has obliquely engaged in suicide, dying with her children, born and unborn. Rowlandson, though longing to die with her “babe,” appropriately sits and waits on the Lord, only to encounter more affliction. In fact, after Joslin's death she describes in great detail her own agony of body and her despair about her separation from her other children. In dying with her infants, Joslin suffers no more bodily or mental pain. Rowlandson, as mother, must continue to suffer both, doing God's will, awaiting His pleasure, not her own. Who then, she implies, is the “true” martyr? Who is the most blessed mother—she who dies or she who suffers separation from her family?¹²

To demonstrate the extent of her superiority as female martyr, Rowlandson must show the body in a state analogous not only to the state of the fallen soul but also to the culturally assumed status of women, the “weaker vessel.” The body must be revealed as weak, pitiful, and utterly degraded, enduring only through grace. If the Puritan paradigm of utter dependence marks the soul's debasement before God, it is also one of the first clear “signs” of movement towards conversion. In this sense, by implication, the analogous dependence of women might also be interpreted as its own curious mark of specialness as well as of social or physical inferiority: “And the last shall be first.” Thus the height to which Rowlandson will rise, as woman and as Puritan, will be contingent on the lowliness, passivity, and utter dependence of her body. Therefore the text presents her repetitive concern with bodily weakness. Not only does she “stink” with her wounds and become so filthy that her Indian master tells her to wash herself, but she focuses obsessively on parallels between her own loathesomeness and the wretchedness of the food she eats.¹³ At one point one of her captors is surprised at her willingness to consume a portion of bloody, half-raw horse liver. While both food and her ability to eat it can thus be signs of God's sustaining her, such sustaining is often set in the (for her) more compelling context of her physical degradation.

At the same time, however, as with the language of status, the text begins to suggest a sense of unease within the discourse of martyrdom. If in the Joslin case Rowlandson can locate feelings of self-worth in her affliction-as-mother, if in her intense focus on bodily degradation she can often surface with a sense of specialness, then at other points in the text—often in connection with events involving or thoughts about her children—she covertly reveals the strain and anger underlying the use of such self-denial as the paradoxical grounding for the self's value. In the process, the model of afflicted specialness, while not undermined, is increasingly strained.¹⁴

The most compelling example of Rowlandson's testing of the martyr model is in the thirteenth remove. In that remove's first major sequence Rowlandson charts her increasing despair that “all my hopes of restoration would come to nothing.” The English army, her husband, and even her Bible appear to have failed her (343). Her comment is framed by Indian lies about her family: at the beginning of the sequence they tell her that her son Joseph has been eaten; at the end they tell her that her husband is dead or about to remarry! Her disappointed hopes and the Indians' outright lies resonate with the four scriptural passages Rowlandson uses within this sequence. A quotation from Job asks for pity upon one whom the “Lord has touched”; a quotation from Judges refers to Samuel's unawareness that “the Lord was departed from him”; a quotation from Psalms argues for commitment and trust; but the feelings pulsing behind these three are strikingly illuminated by a fourth from Isaiah 55:8—“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.” In the midst of the despair in which she singles out these passages, Rowlandson attempts, within the discourse of afflicted specialness, to assert that she has received “less than I deserved” and that “God did not leave me to have my impatience work toward himself, as if His ways were unrighteous.” But the Isaiah quotation and the quotations from Judges and Job indicate her awareness of the tenuousness of such claims. Rowlandson has not only admitted (as recently as the previous remove) that her spirit was in fact “very impatient, and almost outrageous”; she also indirectly indicates why and towards whom she feels such outrage. The language of “deserving”—a language that depends on a clarity of expectations—is utterly destroyed in these three scriptural passages. The language of David may soften the blow, but it does not dispel it. If God's thoughts are not by any measure her thoughts, then she cannot “deserve” anything, and her punishment need not be a sign of a God-given afflicted specialness. Rowlandson's marking of her “impatience” in the twelfth remove, despite her later disclaimer of God's “unrighteous” ways, suggests her anger at the lack of divine clarity she experiences as much as her anger at “heathen” lying.

Further reasons for and expressions of an anger that calls into question her unequivocal acceptance of the martyr model surface in the remove's second sequence. Her feelings towards a God who ignores her desires break out again in the context of family, here, tellingly, with reference to dying babies and their mothers. Just before her initial discussion of Indian lying, Rowlandson gladly makes a shirt for a papoose in exchange for food. Following her comments about a God whose thoughts are not her thoughts, this willingness to engage with the Indians is transformed. When asked, for example, to give up her apron to make a “flap” for a papoose, she adamantly refuses and engages in a verbal and then a literal fight with her mistress in which she barely escapes being cudgeled to death. The juxtaposition of these events (her willingness, then her unwillingness to accept tasks relating to children) suggests that the anger and despair generated in the first sequence have led to a resurgence of feelings about her living children and her dead daughter that threaten her reliance on the discourse of afflicted specialness.

In the next paragraph, Rowlandson records a brief meeting with Joseph and expresses her relief that he has not been sold to the French (Catholics). Toward the end of the remove, however, bought by a new master, Joseph is taken deeper into the wilderness. Rowlandson does not comment on this fact, but instead goes on to recount the story of her meeting with a sick English “youth” and a dying papoose. She describes both in great detail, particularly the papoose, who is “stretched out, with his eyes and nose and mouth full of dirt, and yet alive, and groaning” (344). Rowlandson does not aid the baby, however, but helps the Englishman to a fire, an act for which she is later punished and then released. She frames the entire incident with a quotation from Isaiah 54:7—“For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee.” Immediately following this scene, however, Joseph is taken from her.

The text does not attempt to reconcile the possible discrepancy between the Isaiah quotation and Joseph's removal but instead registers her response to the death of yet another Indian baby—“That night they bade me go out of the wigwam again: my mistress's papoose was sick, and it died that night, and there was one benefit in it, that there was more room. … On the morrow they buried the papoose, and afterward, both morning and evening, there came a company to mourn and howl with her: though I confess, I could not much condole with them” (346). Many scholars have remarked upon Rowlandson's callousness towards the Indians in this scene but have neglected to place it in the context of the events which precede and immediately follow it. Preceded by the dying first papoose and Joseph's removal from her, the burial scene is followed by a seemingly unrelated barrage of scriptural references in which Rowlandson's own voice seems almost to disappear:

Many sorrowful days I had in this place: often getting alone: Like a crane, or a swallow, so did I chatter: I did mourn as a dove, mine eyes ail with looking upward. Oh, Lord, I am oppressed; undertake for me, Isaiah 38:14. I could tell the Lord as Hezekiah, verse 3. Remember now O Lord, I beseech thee, how I have walked before thee in truth. 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. As David said, Against thee, thee only have I sinned: and I might say with the poor publican, God be merciful unto me a sinner. On the Sabbath days, I could look upon the sun and think how people were going to the house of God … but I was destitute … and might say as the poor prodigal, he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat and no man gave unto him, Luke 15:16. For I must say with him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight, verse 21.

The series finally ends with the Isaiah passage used earlier in the remove, “For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee” (346-47).

Throughout this passage, Rowlandson scripturally grovels in her attempt to acknowledge the extent of her dependency and her appropriately self-abnegating acceptance of it. But the intensity of this apparently orthodox self-denigration by the martyr resonates oddly in the context of the series of observations about dying children that so closely precedes it, implying that instead of using Scripture only to prove her acceptance of her situation, Rowlandson employs it also to express her anger about her own and her children's torment. The rhetoric of debasement is mixed with a subtly more demanding rhetoric. While the last quotation expresses the dependency of the earlier Isaiah passage, it is preceded by comments that qualify the biblical speakers' and Rowlandson's own acceptance. The Hezekiah quotation and her comment on the righteous state of her conscience (this following her remarks on the Indians!) show a Rowlandson who, using the voices of Scripture for her own purposes, calls her God to task. She has fulfilled her obligations—walking “before thee in truth” and behaving righteously in the world—but He, as the events of the entire thirteenth remove seem to demonstrate, has not fulfilled His covenant with her. Thus, in spite of the fact that Rowlandson is perfectly orthodox in using Scripture to find analogies to her situation, the kinds of Scripture she uses and their curious mix express conflicted emotions. Her complicated use of Scripture reveals both a fear and an anger at a punishing God that must be transformed into an anger at herself, which nonetheless resurfaces as a paradoxically self-abnegating accusation of Him.¹⁵

The Isaiah quotation that ends the thirteenth remove should be read in the context of this potentially explosive mix of emotions: “For a small moment I have forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee” (347). Rowlandson quoted the passage two paragraphs earlier, when, after aiding the sick Englishman, she is punished then freed. If such release portends “great mercies,” they are brief; immediately after she quotes the Scripture, Joseph reports his sale to his new master. At the end of the remove, when no mercy has occurred, the repetition of the quotation becomes less a mark of acceptance than of resigned summation, demand, and reproach. If Scripture can be used to locate a logic of affliction in which affliction can be construed both as deserved punishment and as mark of worth, it is clear that Scripture also presents equal reasons for questioning such a logic. Rowlandson's encounter with, and her own use of, this textual doubleness not only accounts for the anger implicit in so much of her own text but also underlies her confused confrontation with the providential schema that Increase Mather and many later scholars have wished to view as the stabilizing core of her Narrative.

Allowing for different degrees of application, one major assumption that informs spiritual autobiography, the jeremiad, and providential history is that individual and communal experience are composed of readable “signs” which suggest a divine intention at work in events. Rowlandson's text records such signs in order to establish her spiritual status, only to chart how their clarity disappears. If, for example, a “special providence” keeps her feet dry and helps her locate food and shelter when even the Indians are wanting, the next moment she trudges through mud, starving, blinded with ashes, and cast out of her master's warm teepee. If she and Sarah are preserved “to see the light of the next morning” and if Joseph seems to appear in specific answer to her prayer, the next moment Sarah dies in agony and Joseph's Indian master sells him. At one point Rowlandson states flatly, “Sometimes I met with favor, and sometimes with nothing but frowns” (340).¹⁶

For Rowlandson, the Indians are the masters of the false sign. Not only do they continually lie about her son and her husband; they also distort and parody English institutions. In the nineteenth remove, for example, they form a “General Court” in which to determine her ransom, and (more significantly for Rowlandson) the “Praying Indians” are shown both using and mocking Puritan interpretive conventions.¹⁷ As many scholars have remarked, Rowlandson's most intense anger seems reserved for this group.¹⁸ For her, even their kindness (also explicitly noted in the nineteenth remove) only heightens the fact of their demonism: two Praying Indians who feed her at the end of the remove, for example, possess the bloody clothes of Englishmen killed at Sudbury. Professing Christianity outwardly, harboring unregenerate hearts inwardly, the Praying Indians, more than their fellows, are marked by Rowlandson as servants of Satan, the supreme hypocrite, the “father of lies.”¹⁹

But if Rowlandson's attack on the Praying Indians signals her continuing outrage at Indian duplicity, it also reflects uncomfortably on herself. The fact that they are professed Christians who engage in interpretive practices similar to her own, yet who nonetheless are hypocrites, underscores her own continuing dilemma about what signs indicate her spiritual condition and how she herself might distinguish between “true” and “false” signs. Indeed, since these supposedly converted Christians tend to use signs in a manner comparable to “him who was a liar from the beginning,” the whole question of divinely grounded signs is called into question. In her attack on the Praying Indians, Rowlandson comes extremely close to suggesting that the world is Manichean—split between the divine and the demonic. If this is so, there could exist no means at all for distinguishing between true and false outer signs and, even more terribly, between true and false inner “affections.”

Towards the end of the Narrative, of course, Rowlandson addresses this interpretive dilemma not by projecting her own fears onto the Praying Indians but by recasting her notions of providential history in different terms. Put very simply, she suggests in the twentieth remove (as she had earlier in the fifth) that her own and her community's inability to read God's plan does not mean that no overarching plan exists—merely that it is not yet readable. It is in this context that she lists more fully God's “strange” providences to the “heathen.” The providences to the Indians become transformed into “signs” that the English—with Mary Rowlandson as their representative—are simply not yet “ready for so great a mercy as victory and deliverance” (333-34). The very term “ready” points to a future time when they will be saved. Thus, rather than attributing Indian victories to Satan or abandoning the theory of providential “signs,” Rowlandson suggests that providence be read only after rather than during the course of events.²⁰

She thus attempts to allay her own and her countrymen's fears about a possible lack of readability that could undercut their belief in an interlinked personal and communal assuredness. At the same time, in making the English experience of this (now only momentary) interpretive gap analogous to her own, she also seems able to reconstitute the grounds for her own feelings of specialness. Once again Scripture becomes her means of setting up the individual/communal pattern. In the fifteenth remove, Rowlandson remarks on how she had often wished to “run out against the heathen, but the scripture would quiet me again, Amos 3.6, Shall there be evil in the city and the Lord hath not done it?” (348). In the twentieth remove, she repeats the quotation with reference to the English inability to defend themselves against Indian attacks: “But what shall I say? God seemed to leave His people to themselves, and order all things for his own holy ends. Shall there be evil in the city and the Lord hath not done it?” (358). Her own sense of diminishment is here curiously transformed into self-assertion: to be saved the English must be reduced precisely to the state of this single captive woman.

A readable pattern seems re-established: her experience is their experience, their experience is hers. On the other hand, what is the content of this pattern: “Shall there be evil … and the Lord hath not done it”? One could, as Slotkin and Folsom do, read this text as an argument that even Satan's duplicity is subservient to divine intent, that the good can be known through evil as well as through the good, but one could also, as so often in Rowlandson, read the scriptural language of explanation as an angry woman's self-abnegating means of expressing compliance and at the same time voicing accusation and condemnation.²¹ While her analogy between herself and the English thus appears to re-establish the possibility of a readable providence, the Scripture that sets up this parallel reveals the God “whose thoughts are not your thoughts” of the thirteenth remove, the God who by the end of the twentieth remove no longer speaks through signs but instead leaves “us most in the dark, when deliverance is nearest” (357).

To examine only three of the varying available models Rowlandson uses—the discourses of status, of martyrdom, and of providence—is to discover the ways in which their capacity to give her the “credit” she seeks and thus restore her to her community in the ways she might desire become compromised from within. As she competes for status in a new social setting, her text reveals not only the relativity of status but also its clear grounding in pure power relations, whether Indian or Puritan. In her demand for £20 she acts out a belief in her intrinsic worth, only to figure with stark clarity the debatable and shifting grounds of exchange on the frontier. Her use of the specialness-through/as-affliction paradigm, while seeming to grant her a scriptural and gender-prescribed worth, at the same time arouses an intense though scripturally contained anger that threatens to break through her desire (as woman and as Puritan) to retain the martyr model. More generally yet, her sense of an interlinked personal and communal worth derived from the capacity to read divine intention in outer and inner “signs” is perpetually juxtaposed to an awareness (and an equally contained rage) that a Deus absconditus can be bound by no fixed reading.

Such a return, under duress, to what Perry Miller would have called the “Augustinian strain” in Puritan thought does not delight Mary Rowlandson in the ways it attracted some first-generation Puritans. They might stress the pleasure as well as the fear involved in confronting a mysterious God—it is pleasure certainly that underscores John Cotton's early preaching and the delight in “closing” with mystery that drew his problematic follower Anne Hutchinson across the sea. Rowlandson's text indicates that for her (and for a generation raised on the external covenant theory developed and propounded in the jeremiads and adumbrated in the Halfway Covenant of 1662) a mysterious God holds no such delight. As we have seen, in her attempts to discuss what she “deserves” and the terms of the covenant she has fulfilled, and even, at times, to hint at the lack of proportion between what she suffers and what “sins” she has in fact committed, Rowlandson prefers a God whose “measures” for punishing and redeeming are clearly readable, both in event and word.²²

Her orthodox submission to a hidden God and her anger and anxiety about the self-suppression that such a model for determining personal worth entails appear simultaneously in her complicated use of largely Old Testament texts. As we have briefly suggested, the hopefulness of David and the clarity of certain demands and responses in the prophetic books seem often strained to the limits by her reliance on tonally ambiguous texts in Job, Amos, and Isaiah, and the desolate Deuteronomy 28 to which her Bible first “leads” her. It is in just such an ambivalent emotional context that one can consider Rowlandson's closing description of her own Job-like insomnia: “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 dispensations of the Lord towards us; upon His wonderful power and might …” (365). The concluding lines of the text highlight a possible reason for this sleeplessness: “The Lord hath showed me the vanity of these worldly things, That they are the vanity of vanities, and vexation of spirit, that they are but a shadow, a blast, a bubble, and things of no continuance. That we must rely on God Himself and our whole dependence must be on Him.”²³

The series of “that” clauses, echoing Ecclesiastes, makes it sound as if Rowlandson is repeating a series of doctrines, summarizing absolutely the hard credo she has finally learned to accept. But, as throughout her text, the rhetoric of scripturally framed submission intersects with other feelings. Given the tensions within the models we have examined, we could argue that she uses Ecclesiastes precisely to express her lack of acceptance and her related anger and fear before the Father who also never sleeps—and that these emotions, as much as her gratitude, account for her sleeplessness. The assertive dependency of this biblical credo (like the end of the thirteenth remove) thus argues that its opposite is also occurring. The more mechanically Rowlandson acknowledges her submissiveness in orthodox terms, the more she complicates the range of explanation offered to her by such orthodoxy. The repetitive tensions of her text argue that what Rowlandson feared is true: she cannot and will not be reintegrated into the community as the same self that left it. As hard as she might try to conceal it in her Narrative, her text reveals the impasse imposed upon her imagination by her own interrogation of the old models for establishing her sense of value. At the same time, however, we could suggest that (as Young Goodman Brown discovered) the community to which she wished to return, and upon whose stabilizing evaluative strategies she had relied, was not in fact so separate, nor ever had been, from the destabilizing factors she herself confronted in the wilderness. Her concerns were their concerns in ways that the tensions we have examined in her text help to reveal more clearly.

Analysis of the ways in which Rowlandson's Narrative expresses divided emotions within and about the accredited languages available for structuring self-worth does not simply contribute to a close reading of her text. If Rowlandson herself arrives at an impasse, the terms of this impasse could nonetheless have created new possibilities for construing their experience for her readers—men and women alike. The Narrative's overwhelming popularity in fact suggests that it provided readers with a variety of ways of reworking the meaning of secular and spiritual worth.²⁴

Consider the issue of status. In his Journal for 1644, John Winthrop sniffs at the lack of quality of the men of Lancaster (then Nashaway Plantation): “The persons interested in this plantation, being most of them poor men, and some of them corrupt in judgement and others profane, it [their desire to establish a town and a church] went very slowly, so as that in two years they had not three houses built there, and he whom they had called to be their minister left them for their delays.”²⁵ For Winthrop, it appears that the original founders of Lancaster were not only men of little status, but ignorant to boot. The town records suggest that even Joseph Rowlandson, who before his ordination was one of the early town covenanters, came from the “lesser” sort: at the death of his father, his mother and his brother could not sign their names, printing instead their “marks.”²⁶ If such men, according to a first-generation observer like Winthrop, had little status, then how could/did they achieve it?

A closer reading of the town records might yield more insight into how status was determined in frontier towns like Lancaster. Certainly, the need for a concept of status did not disappear, but (as was becoming the case in England) status became defined less in the terms of blood or birth than by the resources one possessed to acquire land.²⁷ Neither Rowlandson's father (John White, Lancaster's wealthiest citizen) nor John Prescott (nearly as wealthy and the town's biggest booster) was gentry—the former came from well-to-do husbandmen and the latter was a blacksmith.²⁸ Their prestige was based on the land they were granted and the land they later bought—in short, on the basis of wealth garnered by inheritance or pluck—and not on their birth.²⁹

While the Rowlandson text certainly demonstrates her own desire to take on the airs of a fixed “gentry,” it also, in its expression of flexible status definitions, brings to the fore the relativity of such ascriptions by showing precisely the connection of status to power and money rather than to the possession of any intrinsic quality. It shows, in other words, precisely what was happening in Lancaster. Thus, rather than helping control the tendency for Puritan towns to disperse, as its backers apparently intended, the text's expression of the realtivity and flexibility of the standards for defining status could have had precisely the opposite effect. If status was dependent on land ownership—and certain towns (compare the Salem from which Rowlandson's own father had moved, among others) had already begun to run into problems with land distribution—then why not disperse? In fact, movements outward that might have seemed radical to certain Boston ministers could have seemed socially as well as economically natural and desirable to their status-seeking participants.

In such a context one can also return to Rowlandson's bodily afflictions. If her affliction of body denotes spiritual specialness and is a “sign” that she has not been spiritually “Indianized” (a common fear and threat expressed in the jeremiads), her often-noted ability to deal with her afflictions—to knit, sew, barter, beg, and to survive on the land just as well as her captors—offers another reading of the meaning of affliction. A Puritan woman is here shown capable of indeed being “Indianized”—on a secular level. She derives her sense of worth not only through God's sustaining of her but also through her own will and capacity to sustain herself. As critics have recently noted, Rowlandson resists becoming the “Judea capta” that the ministers wished her to be. Instead, her text demonstrates to Puritan men and women alike their ability to survive in frontier circumstances and their capacity thereby to supplant and, given their assumed Christian and civilized superiority, to surpass the indigenous populations. Even more directly, the fact that she is a woman could have demonstrated to Puritan men that Puritan communities (with women and children as their core) could survive both the movement out from established towns and the formation of new ones.³⁰

Finally, there is the issue of how different readers might have reacted to the scripturally contained anger of this narrative. For Rowlandson, as we have seen, such anger occurs at two sites: her orthodox self-abnegation before a higher power and her increasing inability to read that power's intentions. Miller, Bercovitch, and particularly Emory Elliott have described how third- and fourth-generation Puritans were at once accused, vilified, and uplifted by the rhetoric of the jeremiads of their “fathers.” Philip Greven, on whom Elliott draws, has called attention to the fathers' tendency, whether they were ministers or not, to delay granting land and thereby independence to third-generation sons.³¹ Appearing and originally achieving its popularity in the context of such tensions, Rowlandson's text, so scripturally complicated in its direct and its covert anger, could have provided such sons (and daughters) with a seemingly orthodox means of indulging rage not only at the Indians (permissible objects) but at their God and their own repressive parents. More tentatively, in the context of a growing desire to disperse in order to find their own land and thereby to determine their own status, such readers might have found in Rowlandson's realization that an oppressing God is not bound by human desires for immediate providential clarity a source of new freedom as well as a cause of anger and anxiety. Freedom from a construable plan could direct attention to the self's own agency while not, for the moment at least, denying that such actions would eventually be revealed as part of divine intention. At the same time, however, if the conception of a readable providence that provided the scaffolding for the individual/community relationship detailed in covenant theology were to be thus transformed, so would the nature of the covenant itself, and, as Tara Fitzpatrick has recently argued, in the context of a new orthodoxy that focused more on the piety of individuals, the old models of connecting individual and group experience would inevitably break down.³²

Mary Rowlandson's Narrative was preceded and followed by intense religious, social, and political turmoil. The debates over the Halfway Covenant (1662), the Synod of 1679, and King Philip's War itself (1676-78) are followed in the next decade by the continuing battles over and eventual loss of the original Massachusetts charter, the Andros overthrow, and—significantly—by the Salem witch trials of 1692. Initiated in large part by accusers (and accused) who also act within the language of Puritan orthodoxy, the trials reveal certain broad concerns which seem similar to those suggested in Rowlandson's Narrative. Once again we see the anger and desire for defining specialness of the socially (and sexually) disenfranchised expressed in ways that both use and strain the boundaries of orthodoxy. The debates over “spectral evidence” recall Rowlandson's own obsession with determining true and false signs, and the equation of witchcraft with Indian sorcery further suggests the connection of the Indians not only with Satan but also with problems of indeterminacy that have come home to the Puritan community itself. Finally, more specifically, as social historians have claimed, the anger of the traditional Salem villagers who most energetically supported the trials is an anger that is gendered, generational, and inflected by issues related both to spiritual and secular status and to land ownership.³³ In Rowlandson's text, an impasse—not an equilibrium—is reached over the culturally available models of valuation. While it offers varying, indeed possibly opposite interpretations to its different readers, the text itself can only inscribe this almost palpable impasse. In Salem, for its own local reasons but also within a more generally destabilized context, impasse provoked social explosion. While it refers to a different time and a different series of historical events, Mary Rowlandson's popular text offers wavering indications of things to come. In so doing, it richly complicates our own reading of how and why a woman's text became “representative.”³⁴

Notes

1. Mary Rowlandson, The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, together, with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (Boston, 1682). This text (the second edition) is used and emended in So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip's War: 1676-1677, ed. Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1978), 313-66. The citation is from Slotkin and Folsom, 360-61. All future references to the Narrative are also from this edition and will be noted parenthetically in the text.

2. Most of the historical information highlighted here is from Slotkin and Folsom. They offer not only a gathering of primary texts but also introductions to each of them and an excellent general introduction. For an extended historical/theoretical reading of frontier literature, including Rowlandson's text, see also Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1975). Other texts with useful general information/interpretation include Douglas Edward Leach, Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip's War (New York: Macmillan, 1958); Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark, eds., Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1642-1836 (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1981); Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonization, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1975). Related studies with a general focus on women and the frontier and specific comments on Rowlandson include Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982); and Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984). Articles and essays on Rowlandson include Roy Harvey Pearce, “The Significances of the Captivity Narrative,” American Literature 19 (1947): 1-20; David Minter, “By Dens of Lions: Notes on Stylization in Early Puritan Captivity Narratives,” American Literature 45 (1973/74): 335-47; Ann Stanford, “Mary Rowlandson's Journey to Redemption,” Ariel 7 (1976): 27-37; David Downing, “‘Streams of Scripture Comfort’: Mary Rowlandson's Typological Use of the Bible,” Early American Literature 15 (1981): 252-59; Robert Diebold, “Mary Rowlandson,” in American Writers Before 1800, 3 vols., ed. James A. Levernier and Douglas R. Wilmes (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1983), 3:1245-47; David Greene, “New Light on Mary Rowlandson,” Early American Literature 20 (1985): 24-38; Kathryn Zabelle Derounian, “Puritan Orthodoxy and ‘The Survivor Syndrome’ in Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative,” Early American Literature 22 (1987): 82-93, and “The Publication, Promotion and Distribution of Mary Rowlandson's Indian Captivity Narrative in the 17th Century,” Early American Literature 23 (1988): 239-61; and Tara Fitzpatrick, “The Figure of Captivity: The Cultural Work of the Puritan Captivity Narrative,” American Literary History 3 (1991): 1-26. A recent full-length study is Mitchell Robert Breitwieser, American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief, and Ethnology in Mary White Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1990).

3. The Preface, signed by Ter Amica, is reprinted in full in Slotkin and Folsom, So Dreadfull, 318-22. The Mather attribution is made by David Richards in a 1967 unpublished Yale College honors thesis, “‘The Memorable Preservations’: Narratives of Indian Captivity in the Literature and Politics of Colonial New England, 1675-1725,” 20-30. See also the note in Minter, “By Dens of Lions,” 336-37; Derounian, “The Publication,” 240; and Breitwieser, American Puritanism, 198.

4. Henry Nourse, ed., The Early Records of Lancaster, Mass. 1643-1725 (Lancaster, 1884), 76.

5. Ulrich, Good Wives, 228. See also Karen Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580-1640 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), 2-3, 46-63, 122, and passim. Kupperman particularly focuses on attitudes towards “status.” In his diary entry for 1 May 1697, Samuel Sewall records a visit by Hannah Dustan in which she notes that her “Master” (whom she killed) had formerly lived with the Rowlandsons. This comment suggests Rowlandson's very explicit awareness of Indian similarities and differences even before her period of captivity. See Samuel Sewall, Diary, ed. Mark Van Doren (New York: Macy-Masius, 1927), 143.

6. Slotkin and Folsom, So Dreadfull a Judgment, 352. See also John Langdon Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Charles W. Sever, 1873), 316, where it is noted that Joseph Rowlandson's entire yearly payment by his congregation was originally £50. See also Nourse, Early Records, 44.

7. See, for example, Mary Beth Rose, “Gender, Genre, and History: Seventeenth-Century English Women and the Art of Autobiography,” in Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1986), 245-78.

8. See, for example, Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953), 27-39; and Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 16-27, 51-52, 56-58, 80, and passim. While their positions on the ultimate function of the jeremiads differ, both Miller and Bercovitch focus on the meaning of affliction. See also Slotkin and Folsom, So Dreadfull a Judgment, 308-09.

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

10. See Karen Horney, Feminine Psychology (New York: Norton, 1967). I refer particularly to “The Problem of Feminine Masochism,” 214-33. Related and debated studies include Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978); and Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982).

11. See Cotton Mather, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, 1692 (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1978), 80-116. Mather wavers between urging assertiveness and adherence to traditional roles. More generally, see Ulrich, Good Wives, and Rose, Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

12. See Breitwieser's discussion of Rowlandson's possible identification with her sister (who is shot) as well as with Joslin (American Puritanism, 110-12). I read these scenes more in terms of competition.

13. Ulrich, Good Wives, 229.

14. See Murray J. Murphey, “The Psychodynamics of Puritan Conversion,” American Quarterly 31 (1979): 135-47. In the third stage of conversion, as Murphey reads it, hostility to God must be projected outward onto the old self-willed self, onto sin in general, and onto those perceived as sinful. Beneath the martyr's idealization of a punishing God lies an anger that should be—but is not always—projected away from Him.

15. Neither Ulrich nor Derounian reads these remarks in terms of the context of dying children. Breitwieser acknowledges Rowlandson's coldness and resentment, but ascribes them to her identification with Indian mothers and to her dislike of being made an “emblem” for a communal sin not her own. See Breitwieser, American Puritanism, 115-19.

16. See Breitwieser's interesting claim that she not only experiences instability but also enacts a demonic restlessness in which no meaning is fixed (American Puritanism, 76-78).

17. Note that the passage discussed, 2 Kings 6:25, involves the lawfulness of paying a great price for something of little value. This discussion immediately follows Rowlandson's fixing of her own value at £20.

18. See, for example, Slotkin and Folsom, So Dreadfull a Judgment, 303-04.

19. See note 6. Hannah Dustan's comment suggests that Rowlandson's rage against the Praying Indians was not abstract. Her detailed anecdotes argue for a very personal sense of betrayal.

20. See Sacvan Bercovitch's analysis of such thinking in The American Jeremiad.

21. Slotkin and Folsom, So Dreadful a Judgment, 305.

22. Unlike Breitwieser, I do not focus on Rowlandson's possible projection of an “outside” to Puritanism. Rowlandson shows tensions/slippages in her inherited models, but she does not thereby become less Puritan. The text expresses both past and current stresses within Puritanism.

23. Because it highlights the repetition of these clauses, I use the edition found in Narratives of Indian Wars 1675-1699, ed. C. H. Lincoln (New York: Scribner's, 1913), 14. I quote from the Norton Anthology of American Literature, 3rd ed., ed. Nina Baym et al. (New York: Norton, 1979), 173.

24. For an extended discussion of the seventeenth-century publishing history of the text, see Derounian, “The Publication,” 239-57.

25. John Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal, “History of New England,” 1630-1649, 2 vols., ed. James Kendall Hosmer (New York: Scribner's, 1908), 165.

26. Henry Nourse, Early Records, 62.

27. James T. Lemon, “Spatial Order: Households in Local Communities and Regions,” in Colonial British American: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press), 98-99.

28. See Nourse, Early Records, 21; see also Almira Larkin White, compiler and ed., Ancestry of John Barber White and of his Descendants (Haverhill, Mass.: Press of C. H. Webster, 1913), 25-35.

29. See Nourse, Early Records, 25; see also Lemon, “Spatial Order,” 98.

30. See Fitzpatrick, “The Figure of Captivity,” 5-7. See also Kolodny, The Land Before Her, 17-34; and Ulrich, Good Wives, 184-201.

31. See, for example, Miller, From Colony To Province, 27-39; Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, 62-92; and Emory Elliott, Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), viii-ix, 3-8, 13-15, 16-62, and passim. See also Philip Greven, Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970).

32. Fitzpatrick, “The Figure of Captivity,” 3-7, 11-12, 13-16, and passim.

33. For a discussion of Salem withcraft focused on the interrelation of generational problems, changes in definitions of status, and conflicts between traditional landowners and “new” land-owner merchants, see Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974). For a discussion of the role played by gender in such controversies that both draws on and criticizes Boyer and Nissenbaum, see Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: Norton, 1987). See also Slotkin's discussion in Regeneration through Violence.

34. For a related emphasis on the representativeness of female experience for colonial experience, see Patricia Caldwell, “Why Our First Poet Was A Woman: Bradstreet and the Birth of an American Poetic Voice,” Prospects 13 (1988): 1-32.

Versions of ideas explored in this essay were first presented at conferences in 1988 in Dubrovnik and Izmir, and in 1990 at the American Literature Association meeting. My thanks to Julie Amberg, Janice Carlisle, Barbara Ewell, Alan Heimert, William Scheick, Maaja Stewart, and Michael Zimmerman for their comments.