Mary White Rowlandson holds a secure if modest place in Colonial American literary history as the author of the first and deservedly best-known New England Indian captivity narrative and, except for sixteenth-century Spanish accounts, the first account...
At sunrise on 10 February 1676, a little more than a year after the confederated colonies of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Plymouth, and Connecticut declared war against the Algonquian tribes allied under the leadership of the Wampanoag Metacom, or...
(b. ca. 1637; d. 1710 or 1711) Author of a captivity narrative, the first book in English published by a woman in North America. Mary White Rowlandson was born in England and moved with her family to the Salem, Massachusetts, area, where she married...
Excerpt from The Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson Reprinted in Eyewitness to America Published in 1997 "I had often before this said, that if the Indians should come, I should choose rather to be killed by them...
Mary White Rowlandson (c. 1635-7 – c. 1678) was a colonial American woman, who wrote a vivid description of the seven weeks and five days she spent living with Native Americans. Her short book, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary...
At the end of the Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), Mary Rowlandson tells us that since returning from captivity, she does not sleep well at night: I can remember the time, when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my...
I propose to conceptualize the setting for early American captivity narratives as the "literacy frontier": the area of contact between cultures with widespread literacy and those with little or no exposure to reading and writing. Unlike other partitive, thematic formulations of frontier, such as...
In the essay that follows, Neuwirth looks at Rowlandson's work in terms of gender politics, arguing that the text features multiple narrators who favor a Puritan male ideology and its construction of femininity; he notes, however, that a female voice eventually does emerge.
In following essay, Arnold discusses how Rowlandson lacks understanding of the culture of her Algonquian captors and what her work reveals about their society, especially its humor.
In the following excerpt, Faery examines how Rowlandson's text was used in the formation of an American national character and identity founded on white male supremacy.
The "Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson" is a personal account of the survival, hardship and courage needed to endure her capture by the Narragansett Indians. Mrs. Rowlandson relies on her faith and resourcefulness to endure her ordeals.
Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative and Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass' slave narratives all were best sellers in their time. These narratives continue to appeal to readers today because they are success stories about overcoming extreme hardship.
