American Literature

In the narrative of her capture and three month imprisonment during the late winter and early spring of 1676, Mary Rowlandson describes her ordeal through descriptions of her captors and environment with the added perspective of Christian scripture. The use of scripture is not merely an indicator of Rowlandsons own religious inclination toward Puritanism but also creates religious parable of her strife. This parable emerges throughout her narrative, aligning Rowlandson with the suffering of such biblical characters as Job and the tribe of Israelites both of whom suffered through the will and lessons of God to attain a greater faith. While the Israelites had the Egyptians and the great unknown of the desert to contend with, Rowlandson is being tested with the vast New England wilderness and the alienness of the native tribes. Within the patterns of Mary Rowlandsons day-to-day and religious observations, she clearly delineates the lines between herself as one of Gods children and the Native Americans as godless heathens, who represent a trial and test to Christian faith.

God and scripture are a presence in Rowlandsons from the beginning of her narrative, though less prevalent than it becomes as her own situation becomes alternately dire and hopeful as the months of captivity pass by. In the introduction, which describes the murder and gathering of her neighbors and family by the Native Americans, Rowlandson makes little initial reference to the Bible as she is caught up in the descriptions of the atrocities that accompanied her capture. However, even within this first section, the parallels between her story of attrition and that of Job are clearly drawn (213). Like the biblical martyrs feels that her capture is retribution for lacking piety and devotion, I remembered how careless I had been of Gods holy time how many Sabbaths I had lost and misspent, and how evilly I had walked in Gods sight which lay so close unto my spirit, that it was easy for me to see how righteous it was with God to cut off the thread of my life and cast me out of His presence forever (215). Even before the natives become a divine trial of faith by being connected with the tribulations of Job, they are presented as a complete antithesis to God and Christian ideals.

Alternately called merciless Heathen, Infidel (212) and black creatures (213), the natives become hellish fiends in the eyes of Rowlandson. Even the charity of the, at first, few who helped to feed her and traded with or helped her is lost on Rowlandson. In initially casting the natives as unredeemable in the eyes of God, she does not sway in her conviction. From the beginning separated in her view from salvation, even the continued good fortune and survival of the natives does not prompt Rowlandson to reexamine her views of Gods attitudes toward her captives. Instead, within her illusions to the martyred heroes of scripture, the natives survival plays into the larger view of their existence being for the sole designs of the Creator is testing his flock. Noting the British soldiers inability to provide rescue Rowlandson excuses this too as part of a larger plan, God did not give them courage or acuity to go over after us we were not ready for so great a mercy as victory and deliverance if we had been, God would have found out a way for the English to have passed the River (219). It is interesting that Rowlandson at no point rebukes the tribes right to existence but is nevertheless certain that they are both an affront to and a lesson from God for his chosen people, Puritans like herself.

Throughout the narrative, despite and perhaps because of the heavy reliance on scripture, Rowlandson does not fail to make note of both the cruel and the charitable amongst the tribe. However, no matter how well intentioned, the Native American tribes continued disbelief in the religious and cultural ideologies of Christianity and European civilization doom them from the beginning. She and the other white Christian captives Rowlandson encounters is, to Rowlandson, a shining beacon in Gods plan. She survives through her belief and comfort in the word of God alone denying herself the concept of self-preservation and therefore the capability of individuality, Rowlandson equally condemns the natives as a whole to the role of immoral heathens, who are in their existence mere tools of God to be used and discarded.