Within a short time after the Indians attacked her home in Lancaster, Mary Rowlandson was faced with a saddening reality. Her home and livelihood was destroyed in the attack while she and her children were separated and taken captive. Faced with new harsh circumstances and unsure of her family’s well-being, Mary was constantly searching for some form of assistance or salvation. Primarily resorting to praying and reading her Bible, Mary’s faith carried her through over ten weeks of captivity by a people she did not know and couldn’t understand. Constantly exposed to the wilderness and its elements, in Mary’s mind, by the grace of God, encouraged her to persevere through tough times.

Mary often suffered both physically and emotionally throughout the duration of her captivity but managed to find solace in her Puritan faith. Upon strokes of good fortune, Mary could be thankful to God for providing her with sustenance or with a place to sleep. When she and her captors were on the move throughout the Winter, she drew on passages in the Bible to give her strength when crossing a bitterly cold river or when carrying burdensome loads on her back. Mary’s faith carried her through her captivity and the winter up until the point of her release. Even following her release, Mary found ways to praise and thank God for providing her and her family with the new life they built upon their reunification.

To some, Mary’s faith can be an inspiration, as it gave her the courage to continue life after all seemed to be lost. However, to many modern Americans, faith in God no longer plays a vital role in our lives. Some may consider Mary to be naïve and to have placed too much responsibility in God but it cannot be denied that Mary’s belief in God saved her. Regardless of the reality of the existence of God, Mary’s story remains an inspiration as it shows the necessity to believe in something greater than yourself when faced with dire circumstances.

Mary Rowlandson’s general view of the Indians that captured her are that they are uncivilized savages. She immediately gives a violent description of how the town of Lancaster was invaded by these “barbarous creatures” (9). They stormed through the town with guns blazing, burning down houses and attacking anyone in sight. A father, mother, and small child were beaten, while the other two members of the family were taken alive. The “murderous wretches” (4) shot and killed anything that moved. Another man tried to escape, but was quickly shot down. Terrified, he begged for mercy, offering the Indians money. The Indians rejected his offer, beat him, stripped him naked, then ripped out his insides. Mary witnessed this massacre unfold, all while being captured. The townspeople were either killed or captured, with their blood all over the streets and houses. Just twenty-four people, including Mary, were to be held captive, lucky to still be alive.

Before the invasion, Mary said she would rather be killed by the Indians than captured. However, when she actually encountered them, she changed her mind. She “chose rather to go along with those ravenous beasts, than that moment to end my days; and that I may declare what happened to me during that grievous captivity” (8). At that moment, Mary realized that people of her time and of future generations needed to know just how ruthless and barbaric these Indians were. Had she been killed, there would be one less account of personal experiences being captured by these perceived savages. It is important to know what life was like for people such as Mary to live in colonial times during the 17th century. The colonists had to live in constant fear of the Indians, hoping that a day so dreadful and brutal, like the one that is vividly described in Captivity and Restoration, would never occur.

A question to think about is this: How much of Rowlandson’s account is true? Could she be exaggerating her experiences in order to confirm the barriers of mutual understanding between the Europeans and Native Americans?

The challenges Mary Rowlandson faces throughout the book are wildly traumatic.  She is ripped apart from everything that she knows and thrown into this chaotic life as someone being held captive.  She is forced to see her loved ones die due to the brutality of the Indians.  Rowlandson is able to stay somewhat strong throughout the process but she isn’t given many chances to see the kindness of the Indians, so she sees them as savages.  I’m sure it is very difficult to see the good in the people that took everything from you and separated you from your family.  The death of her brother-in-law and her youngest daughter definitely did not help that cause either.

Rowlandson faces many different types of savagery throughout the book.  She is barely given the necessities she needs to survive, while also being constantly ordered around and talked down to, but this is war and thats how it changes people.  After Mary and her family settle back in and build a house in Boston, she sees Indians that are now apart of the society there because they are now seen as friendly.  This shows that war changes people and having a hate for your enemy will be a vital part in the war if you want to win.  War brings savagery out in people and that is the reason Rowlandson views the Indians as savages, because she has only seen that side of them.

A question I pose is, do you think a Native American being held captive would have a similar story?

Although there are points throughout Captivity and Restoration which Mary portrays the Indians favorably, her overall opinion is that they are savages. Most of the book has to be read before an example of Indian kindness is provided. Mary is freezing and starving for almost all of her time as a captive. One night she meets an old woman who provides her with food, blankets and a seat near a fire, and tells her to come around whenever. This positive representation is by and large the exception. Constantly in Mary’s depictions of events, her captors are described as cruel, unstable and violent. In one instance, Mary was told to leave a wigwam but she refused because she thought it was not a good decision. Then immediately a man stood up and “drew his sword and told me he would run me through if I did not go presently.”(41) Mary goes on to say that she saw this same man walking around Boston years later “Under the appearance of a friend Indian”(41).

Clearly based on the amount of negative representations of Indians, Mary believes them to be savages, incapable of living harmoniously with whites. She does however believe that some Indians are capable of acting in an appropriate way. She refers to them as “friend Indians”. It took much of her time in captivity to meet a friend Indian but this doesn’t have to signify that most Indians are cruel. Perhaps the Indians that kept her were just less good hearted because they saw her as nothing more than a prisoner.

While it becomes clear Mary Rowlandson’s views of civilization and savagery become more blurred as the book progresses, she easily draws distinctions between the two early in her account of her captivity. In her book White Trash, which examines class in US history, Nancy Isenberg argues early European settlers in British North America thought civilization could only exist when people made proper and complete use of the land. In this light, she states, the word “waste” connoted very negative images of savagery. Throughout the first third of the book, Rowlandson notes the “wasteful” lifestyle of her American Indian captors, which she often uses to describe the savagery of her captors (10).

Her depiction of “Praying Indians” exemplifies her early accounts of the difference between savagery and civilization. Whereas the dress of some American Indians later on in the book causes the lines of savage and civilized to be a blur, her initial comments on “Praying Indians” demonstrates how she believed an American Indian could never truly embrace European notions of civilization. “Praying Indians” was a term applied to American Indians in the 17^th century who embraced Christianity and organized small villages of like-minded American Indians. In this respect, becoming Christian and following the Puritan model of the close village, the “Praying Indians” represented to many settlers the ability to “civilize” the “savage.” However, in the first third of the book, she is very critical of these people and often depicts them as vicious killers who value guns more than life (16, 67). However, as she begins to blur civilization and savagery, she is often still skeptical of the “Praying Indians.” This might stem from her inability to reconcile with a God who would offer salvation to American Indians.

It is difficult not to feel some compassion for Mary Rowlandson’s tribulations; taken into captivity, she lost her home, her family, her comforts, and her freedom.  Surrounded by the unfamiliar – to be generous – hungry, tired, and desolate, she turned to the only security from which she believed she could not be separated: her faith.  Rowlandson’s story was arguably the first in a long line of epic “American” adventure stories in which a hero enters into a chaotic situation or dead-defying struggle only to emerge victorious (or redeemed).  For her, the foundation of her successful release from captivity appears to have been her Puritan faith.  But it is difficult to discern whether her faith was confirmed by her tribulations or was it reshaped?  Did her struggles and deprecations teach her compassion and empathy for the struggles and deprecations of her Indian captors?

It is not clear to what extent this story is history, myth, propaganda, and/or truth.  However, it does seem clear that Rowlandson understood her purpose in writing the narrative: to express the possibility of redemption with faith in God and his wisdom.  Nevertheless, perhaps this was more than an expression of Puritan religious teaching but a reflection of the realities of life in a foreign and hostile environment.  Survival in frontier America was no more guaranteed or knowable than salvation.

Denis Brennan

Together, I hope this blog will provide our class with a forum for shared communication about the broad scope of American history as experienced in some of the contemporary literature – principally novels – of various, distinctive eras in American history.  We cannot, of course, depend on novels (which are by definition fiction) to accurately reflect the unvarnished “truth” about history, but literature (as well as other forms of story-telling, such as plays and film) has a way of bringing  life, perspective, representation, and understanding to history that scholarly historical texts often lack.  Understanding of history is particularly important because understanding our past provides an opportunity, limited though it may be, to conceive and decide our future.

In addition, good literature often can describe history at dual levels; it can tell us something about both the history of the period the story purports to describe, as well as the era in which the text was written and published.

I look forward to sharing information, analysis, and substantive discussions on this blog and in class during the Winter Term.

Please leave a comment about your own perspective on the value of history and the role that fiction (novels, plays, movies, etc.) might play in discovering, appreciating, and understanding the history of the United States.

Denis Brennan