A Narrative Of The Captivity Mary Rowlandson Summary

At first sight, these two works have little things in common. The settings are very different one from another and the narratives depicted different times and also different historical contexts. Mary Rowlandson was a Puritan woman, wife and daughter of Puritans’ reverends, established in Lancaster, Massachusetts, in the colony called New England. The book entitled A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) reports her captivity – with her children – by Indians during King Philip’s War in 1676. She was captive eleven weeks that ended with her release after undergo extreme conditions in wilderness, even the death of her youngest child in Mary’s arms the first week of the captivity, and only with the companion of a bible.
This text is very important for the whole American literary tradition and this book originated several texts based on this idea, about fictional or non-fictional text, coining the captivity narrative term and generating a genre itself. In Bauer’s words, this text is an example of the “gendered specificities of the frontier experience and the colonial encounter” (667). In this narrative readers can find real events of a women who survived to the captivity and she become stronger because of the reinforcement she suffered in her strong believes and her faith in God. By writing this text, Mary Rowlandson “exploits her authority as a captive” in order to present real events in comparison to those texts of travelers from England who have not spend some weeks under an Indian