Mary Rowlandson A Narrative Of The Captivity Analysis

Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative „A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson“, published in 1682, is an account of a Puritan women held captive by Natives after having witnessed the destruction of her town and her return to her Puritan community. Although her narrative speaks greatly of Puritan faith and culture, the Puritan lens is lifted at some points and entirely neglected, telling not only the story of the faithful women withstanding and surviving savages, but one of cultural contact and assimilation.

First and foremost Rowlandson’s scripture can be read as an anti-type, showing similar structures to the Jeremiad. Rowlandson and her community were estranged from the core Puritan community geographically. In consequence, the control of the church loosened, therefore they were „failing“ god. Thus, as a righteous punishment, the community was dismembered and she was taken captive, which she describes in graphic detail „[…] the bullets
Whereas the first paragraph of the 19th remove is exemplary for her usual narrative, presenting her journey as an anti-type to biblical stories “Being almost spent, I thought I should have sunk down at last, and never got out; but I may say, as in Psalm 94.18, “ When my foot slipped, thy mercy, O Lord, held me up.” (Rowlandson, page. 256). Her tone changes in the following to one of neutral observation “ My master had three squaws, living sometimes with one, and sometimes with another one, this old squaw, at whose wigwam I was, and with whom I had lived and served all this while. (Rowlandson, p. 256). Employing little to no figurative language, such as comparing the Natives to “madmen” (Rowlandson, p. 257) in a later passage, she displays a different narrative/approach. Here, she experiences her captivity solely as an observing figure without a Puritan/religious