Moving Targets: the Travel Text in 'A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.'
Marilyn C. Wesley
Summary:
Mary White Rowlandson's account of her and
her children's capture by Wampanoag Indians
during King Philip's War in 1676 is
significant on two accounts.
On February 20, 1676, Mary White Rowlandson and three of her children were
taken captive at her Lancaster, Massachusetts home during one of the raids
of the Native American uprising known as King Philip's War. Her account of
that experience, published in Boston in 1682, was the first full-length work
of what has come to be known as the Indian captivity narrative, but it is
also by nature of its content the first travel book by a woman published in
North America. For eighty-two days Rowlandson accompanied her captors - a
small band of Wampanoag braves and all of their dependents - on a forced
march that traversed and doubled back over a fifty-mile radius of New
England between the Connecticut River and Wachusett Mountain. Rowlandson's
narrative is really two accounts: the first, the story of spiritual progress
signaled by her own title - The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, Together
with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the
Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson; the second, a woman's
travel narrative, a peripatetic record which, like the course of her
journey, crosses and double-crosses the straight path of her story of
salvation, demonstrating that the contradictory trope of the woman traveler
may express that which is suppressed in the dominant culture.
Rowlandson directly presents the objective of her religious account:
And here I may take occasion to mention one principal ground of my setting
forth these lines: even as the Psalmist sayes, To declare the Works of the
Lord, preserving us in the Wilderness, while under the Enemies hand, and
returning of us in safety again, And His goodness in bringing to my hand so
many suitable Scriptures in my distress. (57)(1)
It is this Puritan parable of God's providence and salvation, rather than
the female travel narrative, that has been read by most critics and
scholars. Richard VanDerBeets describes Rowlandson's narrative as "an
intense and satisfying expression of profoundly felt religious experience"
(Held 42) and makes Rowlandson's religion the basis for generic
classification of all seventeenth-century captivity narratives as spiritual
instruction (Indian 1-9).(2) Even Annette Kolodny, who astutely observes
that Rowlandson's popular work presents the first publication of "a white
woman's journey" through the wilderness, by concentrating on the typology of
spiritual captivity, concludes that Rowlandson represents the captive
heroine's anguish in a forbidding landscape rather than the adaptation to
new surroundings paramount in the travel narrative.(3) And yet Rowlandson's
pious instruction is always grafted on to the main text. For example, after
Rowlandson sets forth her "principall ground" above, she again takes up her
primary account: "But to Return, We travelled on till night; and in the
morning, we must go over the River to Philip's Crew ..." (57).
This pattern of travel text and religious digression is especially striking
in the initial paragraphs which describe the raid. Just before Rowlandson's
captivity, her sister was "struck with a Bullett, and fell down dead over
the threshold." Rather than continue her dramatic description of the
life-threatening events, Rowlandson pauses to comment on her sister's
regeneration, the Puritan realization of personal salvation through the
emotional experience of the truth of God's word as revealed in the Bible
that served as evidence of election:
In her younger years she lay under much trouble upon spiritual accounts,
till it pleased God to make that precious scripture take hold of her heart,
2 Cor. 12.9. And he said unto me, my Grace is sufficient for thee. More than
twenty years I have heard her tell how sweet and comfortable that place was
to her. But to return: The Indians laid hold of us, pulling me one way, and
the Children another.... (44)
There is no disputing that Rowlandson's interposition at such a juncture
signals the extreme significance and genuine reassurance of her religious
faith. That her sister was the recipient of God's grace would allay the
suffering of earthly experience through the promise of heavenly reward.
Nevertheless, mundane reality dominates Mary's consciousness and cannot be
suspended for long.
The basic structure of The Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of
Mrs. Mary Rowlandson is the graphic presentation of details of the secular
captivity regularly interrupted by religious interpolations and quotations
from scripture that predict the ultimate restoration of Rowlandson to her
community and her family. Given this split structure, to read the narrative
only in the light of its digressions is to miss a significant portion of the
text.
Of course, captivity narratives, Rowlandson's included, have been read from
perspectives other than that of moral instruction. They have provided
historians with documents bearing on significant events, supplied
ethnologists with details of Native American life, furnished patriots an
enemy to contest, lent politicians an excuse for the acquisition of land,
and given ordinary readers a taste of high adventure and a hint of low
prurience.(4) But as a narrative of female travel The Narrative of the
Captivity and Restauration has rarely been considered.(5)
The text, made up of an Introduction detailing the initial attack followed
by a series of twenty segmented "Removes" determined by the stops and starts
of the forced march, is organized around the principle of problematic
movement. Although the travel account is a narrative history, it eschews the
orderly sequence of diary or chronicle, the available Puritan forms for the
organization of private and public experience,(6) for an invented structure
dependent on geographical rather than chronological arrangement. As Richard
Slotkin observes, "time is marked not in temporal days ... but in spatial
and spiritual movements ..."(109). The compelling issue is not, however, how
this text is structured, but why. "The central concern is not how narrative
as text is constructed," cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner contends, "but
rather how it operates as an instrument of mind in the construction of
reality" ("Narrative" 5-6).
What, then, is the effect of The Captivity's unconventional structure? How
does the emphasis on travel affect the text as an instrument of perception?
First, and most obviously, the narrative structure divides the text in two,
leaving the reader to speculate on the relation between the divergent
elements. Second, it develops the notion of what I shall call the haphazard
as an experiential category and a psychological frame literally unthinkable
within Puritan epistemology. Third, it allows for the revision and
representation of two other unthinkable concepts: the Indian(7) and Mary
Rowlandson herself. The effect of the spatial pattern, the shift in emphasis
from when to where, allows her to move outside of the proscriptive narrative
of Puritan teleology. Thus a critical focus on textual journey inaugurates a
study of the constructive effect of the trope of the woman traveler.
Reading Double
From the traditional religious perspective, the only purpose of the travel
subtext in The Captivity is to magnify the significance of the religious
text. The determination of the structure by Indian movement, in this
reading, emphasizes Mary's(8) loss of power and makes the "test" of her
faith all the more arduous. Rowlandson's own interpretation along these
lines draws on parallels to the Biblical wanderings of the Israelites in the
desert and specifically invokes the type of Job in his unbearable
afflictions.(9) But contemporary psychological study of the story-making
process suggests a critical paradigm(10) for the study of Rowlandson's dual
text which would not subjugate the alternative purposes of the travel
narrative to the religious text.
In "Narrative Thinking as Heuristic Process," cognitive theorists John
Robinson and Linda Hawpe maintain that "narrative thinking," or the process
of making stories out of raw experience, is a kind of problem-solving:
"Stories are a means for interpreting or reinterpreting events by
constructing a causal pattern which integrates that which is known about an
event as well as that which is conjectural but relevant to an
interpretation" (112). There are two different causal procedures that may be
brought to bear on this explanatory process: the "search for precedents," in
which the present is categorized in terms of definitive past models, and the
creation of hypotheses "derived from ... knowledge of human behavior" (117).
Ransomed from her eleven-week captivity, living in temporary quarters in
Boston,(11) Mary Rowlandson must "reinterpret" for herself, and ultimately
for her readers,(12) the events that deprived her of her six-year-old
daughter Sarah and her family home. That is, she tries to combine both what
can be "known" and what is "conjectural" about her powerful experience in
the recognizable pattern of a public narrative. One explanation for her
dramatic adventure, well established in the kind of epistemological
precedent Robinson and Hawpe refer to, is near at hand in Puritan doctrine
as God's providential intervention in the lives of his saints, the stuff of
diaries and histories of the period, which forms the substance of
Rowlandson's salvation account. But, as the complete narrative reveals,
there are also inconsistencies, "conjectural" elements, with which at some
level of consciousness Rowlandson must struggle. To omit the experience that
doesn't conform to precedent would be to destroy the causal efficacy of the
narrative, yet how can Rowlandson write a story she cannot conceive?
Rowlandson's logical quandary, the conflict between Puritan philosophy and
existential events, is frequently represented in the text in terms of the
motif of ambiguous movement, as an important incident of impeded and
indecisive motion suggests.
"The Fifth Remove" recounts the flight of the Indians from an English Army
in close pursuit. Despite Rowlandson's loyalties, the Indians emerge for the
reader as an enterprising and dedicated group. A small contingent of
warriors drops back to delay the English forces,(13) while the rest of their
band gets away by traveling rapidly and efficiently. Yet expediency does not
overshadow compassion during the desperate escape: "some carried their
decrepit mothers, some carried one, and some another." When a group carrying
a large Indian on "a Bier" through "a thick Wood" could "make no hast," they
took him "upon their backs" (53). Even Mary, because she is wounded, is
"somewhat favored in [her] load" (53-54). When the Indians arrive at the
Baquaug River, the company quickly cuts dried trees and fashions rafts for
transportation. All the Indians pass over the winter-swollen river to
safety, while the English troops turn back, unable to cross, a discrepancy
that continues to trouble Rowlandson throughout the narrative:
There were many hundreds, old and young, some sick and some lame, many had
Papooses at their backs, the greatest number this time with us, were squaws
and they travelled with all they had, bag and baggage, and yet they got over
this River aforesaid; and on Monday they set their Wigwams on fire, and away
they went: On that very day came the English Army to this River, and saw the
smoak of their Wigwams, and yet this River did put a stop to them. God did
not give them courage or activity to go 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.... (54-55)
Before concluding her narrative with the details of her restoration to her
loved ones, Rowlandson interrupts "The Twentieth Remove" to enumerate "a few
passages of remarkable providences I took special notice of during my
afflicted time." High on her list is the failure of the English Army. "But
what shall I say? God seemed to leave his people to themselves and order all
things to his holy ends" (81). The episode at the Baquaug River is still
especially worrisome. "I can but admire to see the wonderful providence of
God in preserving the heathen for farther affliction to our poor Countrey"
(82), she observes ruefully. Although Rowlandson's religious interpretation
of this event as an instance of God's mysterious will certainly adheres to
doctrine, it does not sufficiently close the matter the first time so that
she does not have to return to it again in a place in the story that signals
its rankling significance. Even VanDerBeets considers the incident an
instance of a breach of faith and describes Rowlandson's explanation as
rationalization (Indian 6).
If appeal to philosophical precedent cannot provide a fully satisfying
causal explanation, according to Johnson and Hawpe, circumstances solicit an
explanatory appeal to conjecture based on past experience of human behavior:
when there "are no socially validated rules which could apply unambiguously
to such incidents," a strategy of inferential "hypotheses" provides another
option (118). As a twentieth-century reader of Rowlandson's text I cannot
accept a providential explanation; I account for the fact that the Indians
could get across the river while the English failed by citing the
demonstrable skill and determination of the fleeing Indians on this
occasion. My own cultural and personal experience equips me with a sense of
human behavior upon which to base this hypothesis. But for Rowlandson this
explanation is unavailable. She, no doubt, recognizes the concepts of skill
and determination. But she cannot recognize Indians within these human
categories, because within Puritan ideology the Indian is not human, an
issue to which we shall return. Thus the mode of explanation based on human
reference is logically unavailable to her.
The narrative of the incidents of the Banquaug River, for example, defines
the English in the characterological terms of "courage" and "activity,"
while the Indians, desperate, loyal, practical though they be, are never
described as such. Instead of adjectives, the text provides an account of
serial actions through which occluded categories are represented but not
designated. Thus by focusing her account on the travel story Rowlandson can
present as experience what she cannot articulate as ideological or social
concept.
According to narrative theory,
When a person confronts a novel situation for which no ready-made category
is available, the occurrence remains unsubstantiated, unclassified, or
unassimilated until a class or category is located or invented. The
recognition of partial similarity on some dimension or construct provides
the basis for analogy, and if linguistic translation is necessary, is
expressed as metaphor. (Sarbin 4)
Born of the need to account for experience which outstrips her strategies of
causal relation, Rowlandson's travel account is developed as just such
metaphor: the unassimilable existential events and psychological responses
of Mary's captivity are cast as the incidents of a confusing journey.
Cognitive Mapping
As Ulrich Neisser observes, "perceiving is often most effective during
motion" (109). Noting that spatial organization provides an array of
metaphors for mental process, he turns to his definition of the "cognitive
map" as an "orienting schema," an "active, information-seeking structure"
(110-111): "When we go around a corner or through a door, we obtain whole
new vistas that were previously hidden. This means that every opaque object
- indeed, every occluding edge - defines a region that could be brought into
view by some movement" (109).
What Neisser discusses as biological and psychological operation, Fredric
Jameson applies to social understanding. Extrapolating from Kevin Lynch's
discussion of cognitive maps in The Image of a City, Jameson posits a
post-modern "gap between phenomenological perception and reality" that is
comparable to the inability of Lynch's subjects to map a modern city and
calls for an "aesthetic of cognitive mapping" to address political problems
("Cognitive Mapping" 353).
Something like cognitive mapping as aesthetic strategy in Jameson's sense
and as exploratory schema in Neisser's sense is at work in Rowlandson's
travel narrative. Cognitive mapping, as psychologists understand the term,
is the mental process of becoming acquainted with a new physical
environment, an experimental effort to determine routes and identify
landmarks until the area becomes familiar.(14) Mary has been forced by
circumstance into radically unknown territory - not the geographical region
of New England, which she can identify roughly with reference to the names
of rivers and settlements, but an existential space well beyond cultural
bounds. In order to survive she must learn to negotiate an alien world. The
practices of Indian communal life are areas of experience not easily
accessible through Mary's Puritan "maps" of reality. Her reports of
geographical movement certainly record her literal journey but also serve as
metaphoric commentary on the confusing psychological reorientation necessary
to her survival in a new social space.
This shift from literal to psychological report is very apparent in the
first sentences of many of the Removes:
Now away we must go with those Barbarous Creatures, our bodies wounded and
bleeding, and our hearts no less than our bodies ("The First Remove" 45)
We went on our travel. I having got one handfull of Groundnuts, for my
support that day, they gave me my load, and I went along cheerfully (with
the thoughts of going homeward) having my burden more on my back than my
spirit.... ("The Fifteenth Remove" 70)
We took up our packs and along we went, but a wearisome day I had of it. As
we went along I saw an English-man stript naked and lying naked on the
ground, but knew not who it was. ("The Eighteenth Remove" 72)
Anger, disappointment, optimism, even curiosity are states of mind linked
here to reports of the journey. For Rowlandson, to report on movement is to
create the occasion to report on Mary's shifting state of mind. The travel
is consistent, but Mary's reactions change constantly in contrast to the
doctrine of certainty invoked in the Puritan passages. Such changes of mind
are, of course, vital to Mary's survival, which is a result of her ability
to adapt to the demands of her surroundings, but they run counter to the
static conviction sought through her orthodox faith and the entrenched
immobility of imperialist ideology endorsed by her culture. It is no
accident that the last sentence of the narrative, after Mary rejoins her
religious and social community, re-establishes the cessation of movement.
Rowlandson quotes Exodus 14. 13: "Stand still and see the salvation of the
Lord" (90).
Haphazard Motion
As a result of the conflicting demands of experience and culture, movement
is coded paradoxically throughout the text. Despite Rowlandson's familiarity
with the region, she can only experience her location through features of
landscape and describe routes of travel. She never articulates the achieved
order of a new cognitive map, either geographical or psychological. The
Indians' journey, in actuality an army's aggressive and evasive movements,
is represented from Mary's point of view as erratic motion, an ethnocentric
figure also noted by Ivy Schweitzer in Roger William's presentation of the
seemingly aimless wandering of Narragansett hunting parties in implicit
contrast to the purposive pilgrimages of American Puritans (213-15). If Mary
is expecting to go to Albany, her captors unexpectedly remove to another
destination (59). If she desires to go "toward the Bay," they arbitrarily
change direction and proceed "five or six miles down the River into a mighty
Thicket of Brush" (63).
This dominant figure of haphazard movement is well exemplified in a passage
from the beginning of "The Eighth Remove":
On the morrow we must go over the River, i.e. Connecticot, to meet with King
Philip; two Canoos ful, they had carried over, the next Turn I my self was
to go; but as my foot was upon the Canoo to step in, there was a sudden
outcry among them, and I must step back; and instead of going over the
River, I must go four or five miles up the River farther North-ward. Some of
the Indians ran one way, and some another. The cause of this rout was, as I
thought, their espying some English Scouts who were thereabout. In this
travel up the River, about noon the Company made a stop, and sate down; some
to eat, and others to rest them. As I sate amongst them, musing of things
past, my son Joseph unexpectedly came to me.... (56-57)
The Indians' change of plan is fully motivated in the passage by the
observation of the English scouts, but the dominant rhetorical impression
conveyed by the diction is of senseless activity: "Some of the Indians ran
one way, and some another." Mary's perspective of "musing" dignity rooted in
her recollection of a meaningful "past" distinguishes her from the apparent
helter-skelter motion of her captors. Yet Mary is also a part of the Indian
community. She sits "amongst them." Indeed, her reward of an unexpected
visit from her son who is the captive of another group suggests the value of
haphazard movement which the rhetoric of Rowlandson's presentation would
dismiss as an inferior property of Indian behavior.
Nevertheless, Mary herself practices haphazard movement. In "The Ninth
Remove" she obtains permission to visit her son who she has heard is in an
encampment about a mile away from her. When she becomes lost, "travelling
over Hills and through Swamps," she has to turn back. Upon her return, she
asks directions of her "Master," sets out once again, and finally locates
Joseph (60). Obviously motion, however disorganized it may appear at first,
eventually effects positive results. It is the power to move in order to
secure survival that characterizes the Indian in Rowlandson's narrative, but
active exploratory movement is also the strategy that Mary adopts for her
own survival. When she is not traveling with her captors, she is in constant
motion in the camp - visiting the English who come into her vicinity,
bartering her needlework for provisions, or going from wigwam to wigwam to
obtain food and warmth from whoever will provide them. Even when her
"Mistriss" censures her for "begging" and threatens her life, Mary refuses
to cease moving about to enlist the aid of anyone who will help her: "I told
them, they had as good knock me in the head as starve me to death" (73). On
the one occasion when she is confined because the Indians suspect her of
plotting escape with an English boy, Mary comments on her alternatives: "If
I keep in, I must dy with hunger, and if I go out, I must be knockt in the
head" (67). Throughout her captivity, Mary understands that the more
dangerous course is stasis and acts accordingly. And even after her release,
she makes use of this random pattern of exploratory motion. When, without
any exact information about her children's release, Mary and her husband
ride eastward without destination to try to discover their whereabouts, they
recover both son Joseph and daughter Mary. The trope of haphazard motion
implies, however, the cultural contradictions that movement activates, not
in Mary, the captive who understands that only movement can secure survival,
but in Rowlandson, the author of the text.
In broad terms, movement is the political issue underlying Rowlandson's
narrative. According to contemporary accounts collated by Frances Roe
Kestler in The Indian Captivity Narrative: A Woman's View, there was ample
warning of imminent attack. As early as January of 1675, the magistrates of
Plymouth had been warned of the large-scale war that broke out that June and
did not end until October of 1676. About seventeen thousand Indian warriors,
a loose confederation of various tribes, eventually participated in what
Ezra Stiles described as the most important of the New England Indian wars.
Lancaster, a small frontier settlement on the outskirts of the first
skirmishes, fortified itself by building six garrisoned houses, one of them
the home of the minister Joseph Rowlandson, to which the whole community
could retreat in case of battle. By January of 1676, the governor of
Massachusetts had heard rumors of a planned siege of Lancaster, and by the
first of February an outlying farm in that area had been burned. Shortly
thereafter, the Reverend Rowlandson, Mary's husband, went to Boston to try
to secure military assistance, while Rowlandson herself remained with her
family. Indeed, troops from Cambridge, having obtained on the eve of the
attack intelligence of a raid planned for February 10, marched to Lancaster,
but they were too late to protect the company of about forty gathered at the
Rowlandson home (7-12).(15)
In typological terms, the arrival in America ended the wandering in the
desert by the Chosen People; settlement was the achievement of the promised
land. And as evidenced by the reaction of the Lancaster community to
intelligence of imminent attack, colonial imperialism demanded entrenched
immobility as the correct response to credible threat of war. Domestic
occupation was to be fortified rather than abandoned, with women and
children serving as entrenched tokens of tenancy. In the politics of Puritan
settlement, defense was conceived in terms of stasis; movement was to be
resisted at all cost. This coding is twice symbolically expressed in a
passage from the Introduction as impeded and indecisive motion:
... Now is the dreadful hour come, that I have often heard of (in time of
War, as it was the case of others but now my eyes see it). Some in our house
were fighting for their lives, others wallowing in their blood, the House on
fire above our heads, and the bloody Heathen ready to knock us on the head,
if we stirred out. Now might we hear Mothers and Children crying out for
themselves, and one another, Lord, What shall we do? Then I took my Children
(and one of my sisters, hers) to go forth and leave the house: but as soon
as we came to the dore and appeared, the Indians shot so thick that the
bullets rattled against the House, as if one had taken an handfull of stones
and threw them, so that we were fain to give back....
As Rowlandson describes the scene, the domestic space is aflame and can no
longer provide a sanctuary to the dying mothers and children forced out of
it, but advancement also poses a deadly threat, so those engaged in escape
are temporarily forced back. Although movement is evidently necessary, it is
also marked in narrative presentation by deep ambivalence.
Occluded Identity
To present Indian movement as erratic in the face of English consistency is
to falsify the actual events, as the example of Rowlandson's troubling
experience at the Banquaug River clearly indicates. But it does more. Within
a Puritan philosophy of divine sovereignty and providential intervention,
the personal agency implicit in the Indian model is debarred; therefore, the
idea of "haphazard" motion establishes a putative Indian "Other" in contrast
to the determinant stasis of Puritan doctrine and the politics of colonial
settlement. Such a classification is consistent with other binary
definitions that constructed the Indian as the agent of the devil in
opposition to the Puritan as the "saint" chosen by God, and the Indian as
the Caananite to be cast out of the Promised Land to make way for the new
Israelites of Puritan typology.(16) As Francis Jennings contends, the
"constant of Indian inferiority" in all colonial-Native American relations
was based on the myth of Indian inhumanity in contrast to European
civilization, an imputation that authorized inhumane treatment (59). But
with regard to the characterization of the Indian, Rowlandson's travel text
tells another story.
While Mary encounters "Heathen" (43), "Barbarous Creatures," "hell-hounds"
(45), and "Pagans" (47) in introductory passages, generally her captors bear
more the neutral epithet, Indians. As her exposure to the Indian community
lengthens, individuals emerge who define themselves through their
distinctive actions. Small and significant deeds, especially those of
generosity to Mary, are frequently noted, and some few of the Indians
briefly emerge as rounded characters.
For example, in describing her Master, Quonopin, to whom she was sold by the
"Narrhagansett" Indian "who took me when first I came out of the Garison"
(49), Rowlandson comments, "After many weary steps we came to Wachuset,
where he was, and glad I was to see him" (73). On this occasion, Quonopin
demanded that she be fed, and he fetched water himself so that Mary could
wash "and gave me the Glass to see how I lookt" (71).(17)
The Puritans who have financed Mary's release are defined as "tender-hearted
and compassionate" (88). Yet despite the life-saving acts of numerous Indian
benefactors, Rowlandson withholds similar attribution. Only once does
Rowlandson use adjectives to define an Indian. Mary depicts her difficult
Indian Mistriss as "severe" and "proud" by comparing Wattemore's festive
regalia to the toilet of a high-born English woman:
A severe and proud Dame she was, bestowing every day in dressing her self
neat as much time as any of the Gentry of the land: powdering her hair, and
painting her face, going with Neck-laces, with Jewels in her ears, and
Bracelets on her arms.... (74)
While the ironic usage recinds human attribution (Christians are, while
Indians only do), the report of Indian action nevertheless inscribes, rather
than names, the complex humanity of the Indians Mary encounters.(18)
The most significant problem of occluded identity addressed by the travel
account is, however, that of the protagonist. Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, the
Puritan matron, reinstates her priority at the end of The Captivity and
Restauration as the author of its concluding platitudes: "The Lord hath
shewed me the vanity of these outward things" (90). After her release in May
of 1676, Rowlandson spent the following winter in Boston, accompanied her
husband to a new pastorate in Wethersfield, Connecticut in 1677, and was
voted a widow's pension by that community the next year. In the absence of
definite information, commentators assumed that Rowlandson's own death
occurred shortly after that of her husband, but Kestler's recent publication
updates the history of a woman fully determined by family relationships
throughout her long life. In 1679, Rowlandson married a widower with eight
children. After his death in 1691, she made her home with her son Joseph
until her own death in 1710 in her seventy-third year (17-18).
Yet in the travel text we glimpse an alternative identity, that of Mary.
During "The Third Remove" Mary encounters Goodwife Joslin, a Puritan matron
whom the Indians later put to death. Pregnant and terrified, Mrs. Joslin
evidently gives way to emotion and vexes her captors "with her importunity"
by bemoaning her situation and begging for release. They strip her, dance
around her and the child in her arms, kill both of them, and burn their
bodies as an example to other captives (52). Joslin's fatal hysteria
contrasts Mary's stoic suffering.
During the first days of her captivity, Mary functions in stunned silence.
Wounded herself by the same bullet that ultimately kills her child, she
nonetheless bears her dying "Babe," a six-year-old daughter, over the winter
landscape without nourishment and without complaint for nine days. That the
Indians respect her comportment is evident in the fact they put mother and
child on one of the horses, eventually bury the child, and take Mary to see
the grave (46-49). Mary does not even cry in front of her captors until "The
Eighth Remove," whereupon she receives the assurance that "none will hurt
you" and is given a "half pint of Pease" and "two spoon-fulls of Meal to
comfort me ..." (58).
Whereas Joslin is overburdened by her pregnancy and the child she has with
her, Mary is functionally childless during most of her captivity. Joslin
behaves like an English woman; Mary comports herself like an Indian, an
opposition that is not coincidental. It implies that in Mary's
circumstances, to retain the role of the Puritan matron of the salvation
text would be disastrous. Her survival depends on her ability to conform to
Indian values and practices.
Rowlandson, in fact, insinuates circumstantial similarity between Mary and
the Indians through the terms of a shared comparison. At the beginning of
the narrative Rowlandson describes the Indian marauders through a
conventional reference: "It is a solemn sight to see so many Christians
lying in their blood, some here, some there, like a company of Sheep torn by
Wolves ..." (45). In "The Fifteenth Remove," Rowlandson returns to the
central motif of Mary's appetite by making this observation:
I cannot but think what a Wolvish appetite persons have in a starving
condition: for many times they gave me that which was hot, I was so greedy,
that I should burn my mouth, that it would trouble me hours after, and yet I
should quickly do the same again. (70)
Both Mary and the Indians behave at times like predatory animals. The
condition of starvation that Mary shares with her captors effects an
equivalence between them, with the necessary changes in her dietary habits
representing a total reorganization of customary values. During her first
week of captivity Mary was unable to eat, and although she suffered the
pangs of hunger during the second, "yet it was very hard to get down their
filthy trash." But by the third week, "Though I could think how formerly my
stomach would turn at this or that ... such things ... were sweet and
savoury to my taste" (54). This significant shift to determination of values
and behavior by circumstance rather than by principle is well exemplified by
the hospitable meals Mary enjoys with an Indian benefactor although his
wigwam contains the "bloody Cloaths with Bullet-holes in them" belonging to
the Englishmen her host has recently murdered in the battle at Sudbury (77).
Moving Targets
Of the women captives of Indian unrest during the early period - Mary
Rowlandson, Hannah Swart, Hannah Dustan, and Elizabeth Hanson - only
Rowlandson had the erudition to write her own story. The educated clergy who
transcribed and revised the unlettered women's narratives shaped form and
content to support their own beliefs. Even Rowlandson's narrative was framed
between a preface, probably written by Increase Mather, and a sermon by her
husband (Breitwieser 18-19). Such silence and control was standard by Mary's
day. As Patricia Caldwell notes in her study of The Puritan Conversion
Narrative, although the direct relation of conversion experiences by women
did occur in some early New England churches, the dominant pattern was for
ministers and elders to report to congregations in behalf of female
applicants, a practice becoming more general after Anne Hutchinson was
condemned in 1638 for the dangerous expression of heretical views. Mary
Maples Dunn reports in her study of women in early colonial churches that by
1660 female silence in relations of conversion was the rule (34).
If Puritan practice imposed female silence, Puritan ideology enjoined
feminine passivity. As Ivy Schweitzer demonstrates, the extensive
appropriation of the "bride of Christ" imagery to masculine religious
experience in sermons and meditations served to restrict Puritan women. As
scripted by this gendered figure, conversion was imagined as the passive
feminine soul ravished by the active male deity. Its effect was to emphasize
an imaginary ideal of feminine submission, leaving actual female activity
unimaginable: "Despite the constant appearance ... of 'woman,' the silence
and absence of the concerns of women are conspicuous" (17). Margaret W.
Masson's study of Puritan preaching from 1630 to 1730 reveals that the type
of feminine submission never included any model for exertion, initiative, or
choice (311).
Except for the reluctant publication of Anne Bradstreet's poetry, Mary
Rowlandson's unprecedented account of women's travel is the only conspicuous
breach of the Puritan ideology of female public silence and private
passivity. Significantly, male-authored Puritan accounts of female captivity
omit detailed presentation of the captive's journey. For example, in Cotton
Mather's treatment of the ordeal of Hannah Dustan, whose murder of her
Indian captors serves as an exemplum in his zealous condemnation of both the
pagan Indians and the papist French, a one-hundred-and-fifty-mile trek
through the wilderness is disposed of in a single sentence ("A Narrative of
Hannah Dustan's Notable Deliverance from Captivity," from Magnalia Christi
Americana, in Vaughn and Clark 163). Among early captivity narratives, only
Rowlandson's text makes important use of the travel structure, and it is
only through this structure that her provisional deviations from dogma are
presented.
In his comprehensive survey, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the
Novel, Percy G. Adams declares that most of the travel writers before the
eighteenth century were impelled by "secular motives" rather than religious
ideology: "they were fascinated by new worlds, new people and customs ..."
(184).
John Smith's worldly descriptions of travel to Virginia and New England were
widely available to Puritan emigrants. In addition to mapping and describing
the geography and features of North America, he often used the encounter
with new territory to introduce the adventures of his shrewd and active
third-person hero, John Smith, a tendency also at work in the development of
Rowlandson's Mary. If Puritan theology insisted that the world was known and
determined in advance, the Renaissance travel genre which Rowlandson adapts
held out hope for an undetermined future in an unknown world in which human
choices and activity might affect outcomes. If anything, Rowlandson's
adaptation of the travel form, which is structured to emphasize haphazard
motion, exaggerates the potential for freedom inherent in the genre.
The male travel literature of the period, Puritan and secular, bespeaks
confidence and accomplishment. Both John Smith and William Bradford dare to
risk significant breaks with prevailing social opinion, Smith for love of
adventure and in pursuit of gain, and Bradford for love of God in pursuit of
a New Plantation for his people. The Narrative of the Captivity and
Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, however, unlike the travel texts of
male predecessors, intimates rather than claims a new world. Rowlandson sets
the radical freedom of the travel tradition against the absolute
determination of Puritan faith, sets her experience of Indian life against a
socially constructed Indian "Other," sets the feisty Mary against the
faithful Mrs. Rowlandson. But despite energy and spirit, neither the author
nor her protagonist nor the Indians whose actions instigate the narrative
are free of control by external circumstances. Rowlandson's denial of Indian
sexual impropriety(19) speaks to her obvious recognition of the social
pressure of her community. Ann Kibbey argues persuasively that for the New
England Puritan orthodoxy the persecution of Anne Hutchinson and the Pequot
War established the woman and the Indian as related categories of violent
oppression. Mary travels at the whim of the Indians, and they respond to the
maneuvers of the English army, both captors and captive ultimately subject
to Puritan control. Mary and the Indians are moving targets, a designation I
use to indicate their restrictions within a system and their assertive
motion in response, a tension replicated in the double structure of the
narrative.
In spite of the textual inscription of constraint, it is evident, however,
that the removes of Mary contradict Mrs. Rowlandson's political role as a
static counter in a strategy of imperialist occupation and that the active
initiative of the woman traveler of The Captivity contrasts the
representation of woman as a type of passivity in the drama of conversion as
defined by male clergy. Rowlandson's female travel text suggests that the
trope of movement may provide a structure through which women may register
contradictions to dominant ideology. By introducing an existential account
of the "removes" of Mary's experience along with her Puritan interpretation,
Rowlandson introduces a rudimentary cognitive map of the way out of a static
epistemology that could not contain the complex historical reality of its
author. As Rowlandson's narrative demonstrates, alternative identity may be
described as action, as paradoxical movement through an unknown region, well
before it can be defined as reality. Mary's maiden voyage, then, serves to
introduce women's travel as a generic means of indicating alternative
possibility.
NOTES
1 I quote Rowlandson throughout from VanDerBeets's anthology Held Captive by
the Indians because, unlike many of the available sources, this version
retains unmodernized spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.
2 See also Vaughn and Clark 1-28.
3 In his influential 1973 Regeneration Through Violence, Richard Slotkin
defines the captivity narrative as the typological representation of a
passive Puritan society "awaiting rescue by the Grace of God" (94). Jane
Tompkins contends in 1985 that Rowlandson, in fact, suppresses anything that
doesn't conform to the Puritan vision of the world. Several contemporary
scholars do, however, consider the contradictions in Rowlandson's text.
Susan Howe's 1985 poststructuralist encounter evokes the Rowlandson's
poetics of omission. In a 1988 article Kathryn Zabelle Derounian examines
the split between psychological symptoms and religious aspiration. And
Mitchell Robert Breitwieser's 1990 American Puritanism and the Defense of
Mourning: Religion, Grief, and Ethnology in Mary White Rowlandson's
Captivity Narrative posits the unresolved mourning of Rowlandson as a
project antithetical to the Puritan argument.
4 See Drimmer 8-20 on popular reception and Vaughn and Clark 11-15 on
ethnographic record.
5 I found only one other treatment of the travel account in Rowlandson's
text. Ann Stanford's "Mary Rowlandson's Journey to Redemption" (1976)
pursues this trope in support of a religious reading.
6 Vaughn and Clark list John Winthrop's "Christian Education," Thomas
Shepard's "My Birth & Life," Anne Bradstreet's "To My Dear Children," and
Edward Taylor's "Spiritual Relation" as evidence of the popularity of the
autobiographical form as model (4).
7 I retain Rowlandson's designation of Native Americans as Indians.
8 I intend the designation Rowlandson to refer to the historical author,
Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, and the designation Mary to indicate the character,
Mary Rowlandson, the protagonist of the narrative.
9 For example, Rowlandson quotes Job: "Naked came I out of my Mothers Womb,
and naked shall I return: The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away,
Blessed be the Name of the Lord" (57) and "Have pitty upon me, have pitty
upon me, O ye my Friends, for the Hand of the Lord has touched me" (64).
10 Just as Rowlandson's experience exceeds the cultural categories for its
containment, it also resists standard critical approaches. A
twentieth-century reader might discover a dialectical or deconstructive
relation between the two separate accounts. In the dialectical strategy
derived from Socrates, both arguments contend from a position of seeming
initial equality until the superior argument finally predominates by dint of
logic. This is not the case in Rowlandson's narrative. While the Christian
view is emphatically stated, an alternative perspective cannot be realized
through direct presentation, hence the literal and figurative indirection of
the travel text. Thus there is no balanced dialectical engagement.
Dialectical materialism, especially as the Marxist method is reinterpreted
by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious, is closer to the case of
Rowlandson's text. Basing his system of dialectical analysis, in part, on
the Althusserian argument that ideology represents "not the system of real
relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary
relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live"
(Althusser 165), Jameson posits literature as an "imaginary" system which
struggles to resolve the predicaments posed in "real relations" through the
creation of elaborate ideological analogues. In The Captivity and
Restauration, however, the historical and material "real" remains virtually
inexpressible.
The practice of Derridean deconstruction poses one solution to this
conundrum. Under the manifest text, to borrow convenient Freudian
terminology, there is a contradictory text, which, like the unconscious, can
be approached through a series of "slips of the tongue" on the surface of
the text. Yet in The Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs.
Mary Rowlandson the contradictory text, the travel account which provides
the main body of the work, is the manifest text. Further, deconstruction as
technique rests on a philosophy of supplementarity in which the "real" does
not exist but is invented as text. Rowlandson's difficulty is not the
absence of reality, but its surfeit. Her accomplishment is to approximate
the "real" through the trope of travel from within a system that makes any
such approximation unimaginable.
11 The specifics of composition are undetermined. According to Frances Roe
Kestler, Rowlandson "composed her single, momentous work either while
waiting to be reunited with her children or more probably while in Boston"
(16), whereas for Richard Diebold "internal evidence suggests" that the
narrative was written "in Wethersfield either in 1677 or 1678" after the
Rowlandsons left their temporary home in Boston (1246).
12 Rowlandson's narrative enjoyed extraordinary popularity. Kestler lists
four editions published during her lifetime, thirty-nine altogether (68).
13 These troops were Massachusetts and Connecticut forces under the command
of Captain Thomas Savage. VanderBeets, Held 53, n. 16.
14 A good review is provided in Smyth 239-60.
15 Most historians believe there were forty-two people in the house at the
time of the attack (Kestler 12), although Rowlandson puts the number at
thirty-seven, one of whom escaped, twelve of whom died in the raid, and
twenty-four of whom were taken captive (44-45).
16 See VanDerBeets, Indian 1-4 for a summary of pertinent primary
references.
17 Quonopin's generosity here may be a result of the imminence of Mary's
ransom, but that is not the tone of its presentation.
18 Rowlandson's humanization of the Indian, however incomplete, is a
significant accomplishment. Citing J. Hammond Trumball, ed., The Public
Record of the Colony of Connecticut, I, 78, Vaughn and Clark note, "Puritan
society had abundant legal and social strictures against imitating or
admiring the Indian's 'prophane course of life.' Indian ways were to be
shunned; 'savagery' was feared and despised ..." (17).
19 In fact, according to Vaughn and Clark, "no ethnographic evidence
indicates that northeastern Indians ever raped their captives" (14). But so
strong was the taboo against miscegenation, that returning female captives
apparently needed to reassure their communities on this score. Rowlandson is
admirably direct: "not one of them ever offered me the least abuse of
unchastity to me in word or action. Though some are ready to say I speak it
for my own credit; But I speak it in the presence of God, and to his Glory"
(84-85). See also An Account of the Captivity of Elizabeth Hanson.
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Marilyn C. Wesley is currently at work on a book-length study of the woman
traveler in American literature. She is the author of Refusal and
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She teaches literature at Hartwick College.
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