Mary Rowlandson Book Report

The story of Mary begins in England. She was called as Mary White and was born in Somerset, England in 1637. Later her family left England and settled at Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony before1650, and then moved to Lancaster, on the Massachusetts front in1653. There she got married to Reverend Joseph Rowlandson, the son of Thomas Rowlandson of Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1656. The couple had four children between 1658 and 1669, with their first dying young daughter Sarah.
The narrative opens with the sunrise on February 10, 1675, Lancaster which was anticipated by the residents including Mary's husband, Joseph was attacked by the Narragansett Indians. The setting of the narrative is primarily Massachusetts Bay Colony, ranging from what

is now western Massachusetts to Boston; with excursions northward into what is now Vermont and New Hampshire. During the attack of the Native American raiding party, 13 people were killed and at least 24 people were taken as Captive, and many of them were injured. Rowlandson and her three children, Joseph, Mary, and Sarah, were among those taken captive in the raid. Rowlandson's 6-year-old daughter, Sarah, suffering from her fatal wounds died after a week of captivity. Rowlandson and her children were kept as the hostage and were forced to accompany the Indians as they travelled through the wilderness to carry out other raids and to escape the English force for more than 11 weeks. Rowlandson’s captivity lasts from February 1675 until May 1676. The final pages of her narrative tell briefly of the year or so following her release.
The severe conditions of her captivity were recounted in her narrative.

Rowlandson was ransomed for 20 dollars raised by the women of Boston in a public subscription. John Hoar of Concord at Redemption Rock in Princeton, Massachusetts paid the ransom money and recovered Rowlandson on May 2, 1676. Rowlandson narrates her story in the first person point of view, as she is telling the story as a memoir, focused on events she had witnessed and experienced. Rowlandson’s tone is colored by retrospection that is perception after the fact. She narrates the story of her captivity having already been freed, and she knows how the story ends. Though she is at times filled with depression, her overall tone remains confident. Her tone can also be described as instructive: she presents her story as a lesson to others. Rowlandson’s narrative is partly objective and partly subjective. When one observes the people and the events that she described in her narrative from outside, it is objective. The description of her thoughts, feelings, and motivations, however, make the narrative partly subjective. An outside observer could not understand the feelings and emotions that Rowlandson undergone during her captivity and that she relates in her

narrative.
Rowlandson describes her captivity, survive and return to civilization without being reduced to the savagery of the Indians through symbolization and foreshadowing.

She also shows how dependent she is on the grace and providence of God. The attack on Lancaster; travels through the wilderness, increasing awareness of her own capacity for savagery shows the major conflict in her life. The Ninth Remove, in which Rowlandson realizes her captivity, is by no means near an end and in which she realizes her dependence on both the will of God and the kindness of strangers. In this section, she first eats the meat of a bear and finds it healthy rather than disgusting. Rowlandson’s lack of patience with the captive child who is unable to properly chew the meat makes her threaten the Indians in return when they threaten her shows her daring spirit. The confusion between civilization and savagery; about the uncertainty of life; the centrality of God’s will; the fear of the New World shows her lost hope. The representation of victory and the deliverance foreshadows her ultimate redemption and the success of the colonists in King Philip’s War at the end of the Fifth Remove. And the drunkenness of Quannopin is foreshadowed as the ultimate decline of the Indians and their defeat by the colonists in the Twentieth Remove. Quannopin is a sagamore Indian who is related to King Philip. He was Rowlandson’s master when she was among the Indians. He had purchased Rowlandson from the Indian who had

primarily taken her captive; Quannopin was generally kind and decent to her.