 Born circa 1637 in England.  Her parents John and Joan White were among the first settlers of Salem in  She was living in Lancaster by age 17.  She married Joseph Rowlandson, a minister, in 1656  They had 4 children:  Mary, who lived for three years  Joseph, b  Mary, b  Sarah, b  (At the time of their capture, the children were 14, 10, and 6)

 In 1675 Joseph Rowlandson went to Boston to beg for troops from the Massachusetts General Assembly, during which period Mary Rowlandson was captured.

 While a prisoner, Mary Rowlandson travelled some 150 miles, from Lancaster to Menamaset then north to Northfield and across the Connecticut river to meet with King Philip/Metacomet himself, sachem of the Wampanoags.  Next she traveled up into southwestern New Hampshire, south to Menamaset, and north to Mount Wachusett.

 Three months after her capture, Mary Rowlandson was ransomed for £20.  She was returned at Princeton, Massachusetts, on May 2,  Her two surviving children were released soon after.  Their home had been destroyed in the attack

 After her redemption, the couple lived in Boston and then moved 1677 to Wethersfield, Connecticut.  Joseph Rowlandson died November 24, 1678, three days after preaching a powerful sermon about his wife's captivity,  "A Sermon of the Possibility of God's Forsaking a People that have been near and dear to him."

 Mary Rowlandson remarried Aug. 6, 1679 to Captain Samuel Talcott.  He died in 1691  She lived until 1711(?).

 Book was written to retell the details of Mary Rowlandson's captivity and rescue in the context of religious faith.  No copies of the first edition of Rowlandson’s narrative still exist.  2 nd issue begins its title page with a significant emphasis upon God’s providence:  The 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

 According to Richard Slotkin,  "In [a captivity narrative] a single individual, usually a woman, stands passively under the strokes of evil, awaiting rescue by the grace of God.”  “The sufferer represents the whole, chastened body of Puritan society.”  “The temporary bondage of the captive to the Indian is dual paradigm-- of the bondage of the soul to the flesh and the temptations arising from original sin, and of the self-exile of the English Israel from England.”  “In the Indian's devilish clutches, the captive had to meet and reject the temptation of Indian marriage and/or the Indian's ‘cannibal’ Eucharist.”  To partake of the Indian's love or of his equivalent of bread and wine was to debase, to “un-English” the soul.

 According to Richard Slotkin,  "The captive's ultimate redemption by the grace of Christ and the efforts of the Puritan magistrates is likened to the regeneration of the soul in conversion.”  The ordeal is at once threatful of pain and evil and promising of ultimate salvation.  “Through the captive's proxy, the promise of a similar salvation could be offered to the faithful among the reading public, while the captive's torments remained to harrow the hearts of those not yet awakened to their fallen nature"  ( Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier )

 Reasons for captivities:  revenge  ransom  replacement of tribal numbers decimated by war and disease

 750 individual captivities between 1677 and 1750 (less than half the total number of captives) Of those…  300 were ransomed  150 converted to Catholicism  some assimilated

 Captivity Narratives show influence of 3 other genres:  The spiritual autobiography  Redeemed believer traced the steps in his/her conversion from doubt to faith  A literary staple in Puritan New England  The Puritan sermon  The jeremiad  Sermon form in which the speaker laments the falling away of the faithful from their earlier commitment to a covenant.  Considered America’s earliest literary form  Modeled after the prophet Jeremiah’s lamentations over the backsliding of the chosen people of Israel

 Religious expression  Justification of westward expansion  Nineteenth-century: cultural symbol of American national heritage  Popular literature  Reinforcement of stereotypes  Spanish: Indians as brutish beasts  French: Indians as souls needing redemption  English in Virginia: innocent exotics  Puritans: Satanic threat to their “religious utopia”

 Fears of cannibalism  Fears of scalping  Hunter-predator myth: captive as cultural mediator between savagery and civilization  Judea capta, for Puritans: Israel suffering under Babylonian captivity.  Freudian view: captivity becomes adoption  Myths  Myth of “Love in the Woods” (Pocahontas and John Smith)  Myth of “Good Companions in the Wilderness” (Cooper's Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook)  Myth of “White Woman with a Tomahawk”  Hannah Dustan: (killed 10 Indians and scalped them when she escaped)

 Abruptly brought from state of protected innocence into confrontation with evil  Forced existence in alien society  Unable to submit or resist  Yearn for freedom, yet fear perils of escape  Struggle between assimilation and maintaining a separate cultural identity  Condition of captive parallels suffering of all lowly and oppressed  Growth in moral and spiritual strength  Deliverance

 Separation: attack and capture  Torment: ordeals of physical and mental suffering  Transformation: accommodation, adoption  Return: escape, release, or redemption

 Can trace the lineage of CN  Narrative of Alvar Cabez De Vaca  Frontier Indian wars  Prisoner of war narratives  Revolutionary War  Civil War  WWI & WWII  Korean War  Vietnam  Closely akin to the Slave Narrative