Rowlandson, Mary

(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 Joseph Rowlandson, a minister in Lancaster. They had three children. Lancaster, about fifty miles west of Boston, was a small British frontier community of approximately fifty families on the edge of what was the new English settlement and a number of Native American communities. On February 10, 1675, Native men attacked Lancaster. Mary Rowlandson and her children were among those captured. Her youngest daughter was killed. This was not merely an assault on a small population, but rather an event that marked the beginning of what became called King Philip's War.

Rowlandson was the first woman of British North America to publish a prose document in the English

language. Her account was both shocking and violent. Her first paragraph announced that on the morning of the assault "men's bodies" were "split open, houses and barns" were "in flames." Members of Lancaster's families were "fighting for their Lives, others wallowing in their Blood! Mothers and Children" were "crying out for themselves, and one another, Lord, what shall we do!"

Rowlandson, a highly literate woman, was a Puritan. The Puritans believed that incidents like Indian attacks did not simply happen. God determined them. They saw themselves as part of a new Israel, creators of a new community whose mission was to show the world a model of true Christian life. Rowlandson, her family, and Lancaster became part of not just another set of battles, but a struggle between the devil's world and a new Christian rebirth. In what was to become one of the shortest but most brutal wars in American history, Rowlandson became a witness of, participant in, and recorder of the furious encounters between the British and Native Americans.

Between her capture in February and her ransom and return eleven weeks later in May, Rowlandson experienced a major transformation in her life. From a leading member of her society, as the wife of Joseph Rowlandson, she became a servant of Narragansetts, Wampanoags, and Nipmucs who attacked Lancaster.

All of these Native groups objected to the increasing expansion of the English population and settlement in southern New England. In the forty years since the "Great Migration" of 1630 to the Boston area, a vast depopulation of natives occurred. Most of this was based on the spread of diseases, to which the native population was not immune. A series of incidents prompted disagreements, a death occurred, then the outbreak, and warfare began. Metacom, head of the Wampanoags, was called King Philip by the English, and the warfare was known as King Philip's War. Rowlandson and her family were caught up in these battles. In the process of her "removes," Rowlandson met with and admired Metacom.

Rowlandson's narrative, The Sovereignty & Goodness of God, also called A True History of the Captivity & Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, was published first in London, then in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1682. It became what in our day would be called a best seller. Readers were fascinated by the fearsomeness of Indian warfare, the courage of a woman captured and victimized, and the sorrow of a mother who lost her youngest daughter in the attack. Rowlandson survived disaster by the power of her belief in God and by submitting to God's plan. The war and her trials demonstrated the ways which the new Zion and its people could fail in their mission to the new world, but how God graciously forgave them. Her writing and her traveling with various southern New England natives also showed how she learned to understand and sympathize with her native neighbors and enemies.

Mary Rowlandson became the founder of a significant literary and historical genre, the captivity narrative, which influenced later writers. The wartime and border experiences of capture from the late seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries became a consistent theme of early American life and writing, ministerial sermons, journals, newspapers, and novels. In the twentieth century captivity became a popular theme in films such as John Ford's The Searchers, with John Wayne as the uncle and Natalie Wood as his captive niece (1956). In the 1991 film Dances with Wolves, Kevin Costner's lover is really a white captive turned Lakota.

Like Rowlandson's account, many of these later stories portray Native Americans as the savage enemy. Many involve mindless Indians running off with young Anglo-American women and children. White male captives like John Smith and Daniel Boone were often portrayed as heroes able to defeat the savage, thus making way for the new Anglo-America. Mary Rowlandson's is an affecting story of her experiences. It remains a most powerful account of her life in early America. The legacy of the captivity narrative, beginning with Rowlandson, continues to influence how Americans view their own culture as well as that of the native peoples.

King Philip's War, Legacy Of; Legacies of Indian Warfare; Native Americans: Images in Popular Culture; Sampson, Deborah.

Axtell, James. The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Axtell, James. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Namias, June. White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Rowlandson, Mary. Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson and Related Documents. Edited by Neal Salisbury. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1997. Originally published as A True History of the Captivity & Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, vol. 1 (1682). New York: Garland Publishers, 1977.

Sayre, Gordon F., ed. American Captivity Narratives: Selected Narratives with Introductions. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.

Vaughan, Alden T., and Clark, Edward W., eds. Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption 1676–1724. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Washburn, Wilcomb E., ed. The Garland Library of Narratives of North American Captivities, 111 vols. New York: Garland Publishers, 1976–1983.

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