Dictionary of Literary Biography on Mary Rowlandson
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 of captivity published in North America: The Soveraignty & Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson ... (1682). While the popularity of her narrative has carried it through some thirty editions since its first publication, little is known of her life beyond the facts contained in her account.
The wife of the Reverend Joseph Rowlandson, pastor of the Puritan church at Lancaster, Massachusetts, Mary Rowlandson was captured during King Philip's War by a Wampanoag war party at the 20 February 1676 attack on Lancaster and was ransomed and freed at Princeton, Massachusetts, on 2 May of the same year. Her ordeal included witnessing the slaughter of relatives and friends during the initial attack, her own wounding by a musket ball, near starvation and physical privation throughout a forced march to some twenty separate campsites, or "removes," and the death of her six-year-old daughter during the march. Yet the significance of her captivity narrative lies not so much in its unfolding tale of ordeal and fortitude as in its expression of profoundly felt religious experience.
Calvinists believing that the Indian inhabitants of the wilderness were often directly the instruments of Satan and indirectly those of God, the Puritan settlers could view the torments of Indian captivity as one of God's ways of testing or punishing his creatures. "God strengthned them [Indians] to be a scourge to His People," Rowlandson writes; "the Lord feeds and nourishes them up to be a scourge to the whole Land." The scriptual citation she uses for support is Hebrews 12:6: "For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every Son whom he receiveth." In the course of her narrative Rowlandson turns to the scriptures for comfort more than sixty-five times, as she reflects on a variety of incidents ranging from the death of her child (Genesis 42:36: "Me have ye bereaved of my Children ...") to her staying dry while fording a river (Isaiah 43:2: "When thou passeth through the waters I will be with thee ..."). Most of her citations are strikingly appropriate to her captivity experience--Psalms 106:46, for example: "He made them also to be pitied, of all those that carried them Captives."
Ultimately the experience was a morally instructive one; there were lessons to be drawn. On the first Sabbath of her captivity, Rowlandson recalls "how careless I had been of God's holy time, how many Sabbaths I had lost and misspent.... Yet the Lord still shewed mercy and upheld me; and as he wounded me with one hand, so he healed me with the other." When, after her release, she is troubled with small matters ("a shadow, a blast, a bubble, and things of no continuance ..."), she thinks upon her recent captivity: "It was but the other day that if I had had the world, I would have given it for my freedom ... I have learned to look beyond present and smaller troubles." Perhaps the chief spiritual significance for both the captive-narrator and her reader lay in interpreting the captivity as an illustration of God's providence. "God was with me, in a wonderfull manner, carrying me along and bearing up my spirit ... that I might see more of his Power," writes Rowlandson. "One principall ground of my setting forth these lines is to declare the Works of the Lord, and his wonderfull power in carrying us along, preserving us in the Wilderness, while under the Enemies hand, and returning us to safety again."
Thus, as test or punishment by God, as opportunity for redemptive suffering, and as evidence of divine providence, the experience of Indian captivity is viewed as salutary and morally instructive. Explicit in the narrative are the spiritual lessons to be learned, lessons intended as well for the moral edification of the reader. In this mode and by these apprehensions. Mary Rowlandson's Indian captivity narrative serves as an intense and satisfying expression of religious experience. "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 did the Lord prepare to be my portion," she writes. "Affliction I wanted, and affliction I had ... And I hope I can say in some measure, as David did, It is good for me that I have been afflicted."
After her redemption and return to her husband, Mrs. Rowlandson spent the winter in Boston. Then the Reverend Mr. Rowlandson secured a church in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and moved his family there in 1677. He died the next year, and the town voted Mary Rowlandson a pension of £30 a year for as long as she remained a widow. Nothing more is known of her after that time.
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