SOURCE: “Mary White Rowlandson's Self-Fashioning as Puritan Goodwife,” in Early American Literature, Vol. 27, No. 1, 1992, pp. 49-60.

In following essay, Davis explores how Rowlandson's acceptance of her role in the Puritan social order affects her point of view in her Narrative and how this acceptance allowed the work to be published.

While hierarchical and logocentric prescriptions for seventeenth-century American Puritan society would appear to allow no room for assertive female activity outside the domestic sphere, the publication of The Soveraignty and Goodness of God … ; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson in 1682 suggests that under certain conditions Puritan women's writing was approved. Cotton Mather's treatise written to describe the virtuous woman's character, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, sets down conditions under which women may enter the male-dominated discourse. Listing blessed women from antiquity, biblical times, and recent history who were versed in politics...