Moving targets: The travel text in A Narrative of the Captivity and
Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
Essays in Literature; Macomb; Spring 1996; Wesley, Marilyn C

Volume:
23
Issue:
1
Start Page:
42
ISSN:
00945404
Subject Terms:
Women
Travel
Literary criticism
Autobiographies
Personal Names:
Rowlandson, Mary White

Abstract:
Mary White Rowlandson's narrative "The Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of
Mrs. Mary Rowlandson" is both an account of her spiritual progress and a travel narrative.
Her maiden voyage serves to introduce women's travel as a generic means of indicating
alternative possibility.

Full Text:
Copyright Western Illinois University, Department of English Spring 1996

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 principall 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. (571 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 lifethreatening 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.'

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
Indian7 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'ss 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 paradigmlo 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 problemsolving: "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,ll
Mary Rowlandson must "reinterpret" for herself, and ultimately for her readers,lz
the events that deprived her of her six-yearold 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
winterswollen 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 ....
J54-551

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"
181). 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" 182J, 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. j"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 .... 156-57) 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 2).15, is

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.l6 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," "hellhounds" (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 benefactors, Rowlandson
withhold as similar attribution. Only once does and compassion use adjectives te"
(88). Yet despite the life-saving an Indian. of numerous her difficult Indian
benefactors, Rowlandson withholds similar attriss as "severe" and "proud" by
comparing Only once does Rowlandson use adjective regalia to define toilet of a
high-born English woman. 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.ls 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. 170)

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 unnaia.ie: t1espize [epu me consio .111[ant
appearance . . . Ul woman, me sjence 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 onehundred-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
improprietyl9 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.

[Footnote]
NOTES

[Footnote]
I 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

[Footnote]
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).

[Footnote]
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).
lo 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

[Footnote]
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

[Footnote]
live" lAlthusser 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.

[Footnote]
II 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.
Is Most historians believe there were forty-two people in the house at the time of the attack /Kestler
121, 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).

[Footnote]
ls 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.
ls 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 .
. ." 117).
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.

[Reference]
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