Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative Analysis

Throughout human history, religion has oft been the root of conflict and Christianity especially has been the mask of racism. From the very beginnings of the New World the early squabbles of the English colonists who occupied Native land and ultimately spurred the mass genocide of indigenous people prove the racist indifference demonstrated upon a people who were considered lesser. However, captivity narratives of that time featuring Native Americans as the captors of these American settlers– presumably good, Christian people– tell a different story whereas what can reasonably be deemed religious propaganda paints Native Americans, in the words of the English, as uncivilized savages. Perhaps the most popular of these narratives is that of Mary

Rowlandson, officially titled The Narrative of the Captivity and the Restoration of Mrs.Mary Rowlandson. Rowlandson’s narrative quite literally cannot be disentangled from her Puritan beliefs, which can be understood at the intersection of the concepts of posthumanism and individual liberty, or more particularly at the difference between collectivism and individualism.
To be sure, these abstractions in tandem can most concisely be realized by the following quote from Jane Tompkins: “When the Indians are kind to [Mary Rowlandson], she attributes her good fortune to divine Providence; when they are cruel, she blames the captors” (Longheed). It goes without further explanation, of course, that Mary Rowlandson’s position in her own narrative seems to be– at least from the readers’ perspective– contradictory. The foremost part of the quote requires the comprehension of Divine Providence, a Puritan conviction which sees all event and occurences of Rowlandson’s personal experience as foreordained by God. For example, when Rowlandson’s small child dies in the third remove of her narrative after being captured she expresses the tragedy in so many words– “God having taken this dear child” (Rowlandson). It is clear that Rowlandson perceives even negative developments as God’s doings. But when it comes to the actions of her captors, she often comes to an alternate conclusion. In the fifth remove, for instance, lamenting about the fact that the Native Americans still put her to work on the Sabbath day, she comments, “I cannot but take notice of the strange providence of God in preserving the heathen” (Rowlandson). Although the heated statement objectively credits God’s providence, it does not directly fault him for putting the Native Americans in her foreordained path in the first place. Instead the rebuking is virtually indistinguishable from an uninvolved reaction out of anger.
Indeed, Pamela Longheed’s essay entitled “‘Then Began He to Rant and Threaten’: Indian Malice and Individual Liberty in Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative” delves deeper into these contradictions.

One finds that their cause is imputed to the Puritan’s aversion to individualism, one that is naturally rendered against the providence of God. Longdeen cites the preface of Rowlandson’s narrative to explain the phenomenon. The preface writer describes the attack on Rowlandson’s place of origin Lancaster as “the causeless enmity of these barbarians, against the English, and the malicious and revengeful spirit of these heathen” (Longdeen). Rhetoric like “causeless enmity” and “malice” represents the Calvinist ideology that names God the determiner of all human action, whilst human will is only responsible for intention. Such is the basis of Divine Providence, which rejects individual

liberty.
The concomitant of this scheme is the demonization of the Native Americans for their malicious intent.

Though this would mean their actions, as cruel as Rowlandson believes them to be, are in actuality God’s transgressions. By incident, readers are inordinately confronted with this seemingly paradoxical situation in the fifth remove again. Mary Rowlandson comes close to being rescued as the English army had chanced upon the Native American captors. Unfortunately, the river ruined that opportunity, and Rowlandson in her recall of the fluke, writes
God did not give them courage or activity 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 this river, as well as for the Indians with their squaws and children, and all their luggage. “Oh that my people had hearkened to me, and Israel had walked in my ways, I should soon have subdued their enemies, and turned my hand against their adversaries” (Psalm 81.13-14). (Rowlandson)
As glimpsed through the excerpt, the English did not have their own agency as much as God had agency over them. Misfortunes that transpire are due to God’s will on the premise that intention itself is binary. The English have good intent, the Native Americans bad– although neither can markedly determine their

actions.
Withal, there are some further contradictions. Details of the narrative would suggest that Mary Rowlandson had some significant agency to her life. As she remains a captive, her hostage situation being approximate to the daily lives of toil that the Native Americans lead, she learns to be ingenious, searching for food and trading goods. Literary scholar Sidonie Smith beholds this incongruous self-reliant behaviour, specifying one illustration of the transpiration:
These unbooked acts of reading and acting constitute a different kind of witnessing and a different kind of witness: a woman living in a liminal space outside gendered norms of Puritan society, resourceful, unmoored and mobile, waywardly embodied, exercising an agentic role in an exchange economy, calculatedly grabbing food from a child's mouth. (Smith)
The eighteenth remove sees Rowlandson justify the action with a verse from Job reading, “The things that my soul refused to touch are as my sorrowful meat” (Rowlandson). What is contrary here to prior establishments is the tangible discordance that is generated by Rowlandson’s harsh act as compared to the lack of agency that her religious convictions hold in high regard. Still, Rowlandson maintains her religion to warrant her deed despite its impression as a mere self-preservation of the most selfish kind.
Accordingly, there is a posthumanist theorization of Rowlandson’s narrative offered by Smith in her essay “Reading the Posthuman Backwards: Mary Rowlandson’s Doubled Witnessing”. In this essay, Smith makes note of the collectivist ideals that uphold Rowlandson’s beliefs. That is, just as noteworthy– or more so– as the impression of Divine Providence that Mary Rowlandson exemplifies in her text, is her use of scripture to create a Biblical alignment of the empirical record that she writes. This utilization is discerned in virtually every remove. Rowlandson recollects once in the eighth remove an encounter with her son Joseph, also a captive. They reminisce on their luxuries of the past, but they recognize their resolve in a verse from Job: “Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return: the Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” The result of these Biblical remembrances that converge purposely at various points in the short memoir is another idiosyncratic justification for her strife and its particulars. In this fashion, Rowlandson looks outside of herself to explicate happenstance in that the “remembered past is not individualized, but a collectivized, eschatological past of Biblical history” (Smith). Rather than Rowlandson’s experience existing on an interior container of her singular humanity, what Rowlandson experiences is a posthuman realism which examines the exterior influence of God. Puritans might pervasively adopt a posthuman mindset given that they were known for being “suspicious of excessive individuation,6 hierarchical in their social relations, and exclusionary in their faith, for they understood an individualized relationship of Protestants to their God as a threat to the coherence of community” (Smith). There is no question, then, that Puritans shun individuality in most or all aspects.
The basis for Rowlandson’s positioning allows for the Native Americans to be cast in a negative light on the foundation of their paganist followings. The English’s failure to fully grasp the Native Americans’ faith by proxy disinherits Rowlandson’s captors’ of a certain relationship with God by the strict and/or biased standards of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. In consequent, the Native Americans are portrayed as individual agents of violence and malevolence, for the sole reason that they have no omnipresent moral authority to en masse identify themselves with. Ergo, the Native Americans do not exist outside of themselves, as is the Puritan creed in posthumanist context. The Native Americans, in this construct, are not only shifted away from a posthumanist paradigm that is represented in such a state of being that is ‘beyond human’, but on account of their definitively racialized estrangement they are sanctioned to the effect of being something less than human.
Thereof, a comparison can be made between Longheed’s and Smith’s essays together. They both point out Rowlandson’s depiction of god as the primary determinant of life’s circumstances. Longheed’s essay focuses on the notion of intent versus action and how the belief system of the Puritans rebuff individual liberty and therein the Native Americans. Puritans believe Divine Providence to be the final arbiter. Similarly, Smith posits Rowlandson’s tendency towards posthumanism by her ability to universally and inwardly interpret historical text– the consequence of which is a collectivist thought in turn for self-reliance and a sense of individuality. Longheed’s and Smith’s essays juxtaposed demonstrate a religious pretext– advanced by Mary Rowlandson’s narrative– that favours collective cognition over individual awareness.
Thus, individualism and collectivism become the main conflicts of interest in The Narrative of the Captivity and the Restoration of Mrs.Mary Rowlandson. Pamela Longheed propounds the prioritization of divine intervention as the antagonist of individual liberty; Sidonie Smith discourses a posthuman exegesis of Rowlandson’s theological meta-rendition of her personal narrative. Whichever way, the excuse of religion employs its somewhat wayward principles to alienate the Native Americans and/or Mary Rowlandson’s captors. And per usual, higher superiors of the unknown are the germ for the suffering of the othered.