Mary Rowlandson and the Psalms: The textuality of survival
Early American Literature; Chapel Hill; 1997; Dawn Henwood

Volume:
32
Issue:
2
Start Page:
169-186
ISSN:
00128163
Subject Terms:
Literary criticism
Religion
Exegesis & hermeneutics
Bible
Personal Names:
Rowlandson, Mary White

Abstract:
Mary Rowlandson's "A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary
Rowlandson," an account of her painfully literal combat with the wilderness during her
nearly three-month forced trek through the New England bush, is examined.

Full Text:
Copyright University of North Carolina Press 1997

[Headnote]
[God] gave [David] the "shield of his salvation," and girded him with strength to barrel; and gave him the
necks of his enemies, that he destroyed those that hated him. Therfore he gave thanks unto the Lord
among the nations, and sang praises unto his name, awaking up his glorie, awaking up his Psalterie and
Harp, awaking himself early, to praise the Lord among the peoples, and to sing unto him among the
nations. Henry Ainsworth, Annotations upon the Book of Psalmes (16l7)
And here I may take occasion to mention one principal ground of my setting forth these few Lines; even
as the Psalmist says, To declare the works of the Lord, and his wonderful power in carrying us along,
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 comfortable and suitable Scriptures in my distress.
Mary Rowlandson, A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (i682)

Shepherd, soldier, singer. Lover, giant-killer, king. Poet, penitent, prophet of the
Messiah. As one of the most colorful and diverse characters in the history of the
Old Testament, David, son of Jesse, has the potential, typologically speaking, to
bear a shifting spectrum of emblematic meanings. When the New England
Puritans undertook the combat with the wilderness to found their New Jerusalem,
Israel's poet-hero sounded for them the call to battle, the cry for help, the
prophecy of victory, the music of consolation. His Psalms,' the record of his own
spiritual "wilderness experience" (Guruswamy 294), constituted the material for
the first book printed in the wilds of America, the Bay Psalm Book (The Whole
Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre) of 1640.

Not surprisingly, then, Mary Rowlandson, in her painfully literal combat with the
wilderness during her nearly three-month forced trek through the New England
bush, turns most often to this first book of the New England Puritans to relieve her
anguish. Approximately one-third of the Biblical references that pervade
Rowlandson's narrative of her captivity among Wampanoag Indians come, David
Downing estimates, from the Psalms (Downing z55). The peculiar
double-voicedness of Rowlandson's text, the split narrative self that intrigues so
many critics,2 seems to emerge, to a large extent, out of the multivalent voice(s)
of David's songs. In the Psalms, Rowlandson finds a context for her misery,
spiritual assurance, and emotional release.

Rowlandson, as Teresa Toulouse has pointed out, is well aware of the
complexities and contradictions of Biblical voices and often exploits them to her
own ends.3 Biblical language does not necessarily act, as many critics have
assumed,4 as a restrictive mold superimposed on Rowlandson's personal
authorship. On the contrary, it often provides her with a sanctioned means of
expressing her emotional torment, especially her anger. Kathryn Derounian is
right, I think, to suggest that self-expression is crucial to Rowlandson's
psychological survival of her ordeal (Derounian 9I). However, whereas Derounian
and others have portrayed the Biblical text as inhibiting Rowlandson's ability to tell
her own tale, I argue that the sacred Psalms render publicly legitimate, even
righteous, the captive's very human frustration and rage and thus enable her, as
well as the communal vision she is a part of, to survive.

In Writing a Woman's Life, her provocative discussion of the female tradition of
autobiography, Carolyn Heilbrun asserts that "above all other prohibitions, what
has been forbidden to women [writers] is anger" (I3). Surprisingly, though, anger
was not forbidden to Puritan women, so long as they turned their rage to heroic,
communal uses. As we shall see, Rowlandson in her narrative manages to find an
outlet for her own frustration by taking her anger public and communicating it
through the language of a Puritan Biblical hero-David, the Psalmist. Rowlandson
finds in the Psalms a reserve of hope as well as an arsenal of curses against her
enemies. Both sources of emotional sustenance prove essential to her spiritual
survival in the wilderness, where the captive must marshal all her personal
resources-her faith and her rage-in order to keep sane and sacred her own
identity.

For the Puritans, anger, like sexual desire, was not necessarily an evil in itself.
Properly channelled, the one into righteous indignation and the other into the
marriage bond, both human frailties had their divinely appointed uses (Porterfield
35). Cotton Mather's famous tract on proper feminine behavior, Ornaments for the
Daughters of Zion or the Character and Happiness of a Vertuous Woman (I69z),
forcefully illustrates this apparent paradox. Mather's ideal "vertuous woman" is,
quite predictably, meek, mild, and mum, until, that is, she turns to divinely inspired
authorship. When a pious Puritan woman takes her place beside her Biblical
precursorsMather names Deborah, Hannah, Huldah, and Mary-as one of the
female "Scribes" of God's spirit, she speaks God's truth with aggressive fervor.

Asserts Mather: "They to whom the common use of Swords is neither Decent nor
Lawful, have made a most Laudable use of Pens; and they that might not without
Sin, lead the Life which old Stories ascribe to Amazons, have with much praise
done the part of Scholars in the world" (Ornaments 6, 5). If women cannot be
battlefield Amazons, they can, as authors, number among "the Amazons of Zion,"
those female saints, both ancient and modern, whom Mather extolls in a later
essay on female comportment, Tabitha Rediviva (Tabitha Rediviva z4). They can
also, as acknowledged speakers of "the most sure word of Prophecy," become
female Jeremiahs, voicing the anger of God's awakened wrath. Although directed
to purge all unfeminine "dross" of their "own wrath" from their individual speech,
Puritan women writers are free to use their prophet's privilege to impersonate the
masculine anger of a vengeful God (Mather, Ornaments 6, 30).

The ironies implicit in Mather's notions of virtuous female authorship are, of
course, reflected on a much larger scale in his culture as a whole. As Amanda
Porterfield has persuasively illustrated in her recent study, Female Piety in Puritan
New England, virtues conventionally prescribed to women -humility, self-control,
self-sacrifice, submissiveness-formed the basis of the New England Puritan's
relationship to God and society, regardless of gender. Nonetheless, while Puritan
ministers manifested what Porterfield calls a "fixation on anger," they delivered
sermon after sermon urging their congregations on to offensive warfare against
the indigenous population (Porterfield 42). The manipulation of personal anger
into publicly justified outrage was one of the philosophical accomplishments of
colonial Puritanism. Thus Hannah Dustan, who slew and scalped her Indian
captors with a tomahawk, could become a Puritan heroine, and Mary
Rowlandson, who uses the Psalms to both assuage and exploit inner turmoil,
could become a best-selling author in a devotional tradition.

The Psalms furnish Rowlandson with a public, liturgical language that centers her
experience in the communal sphere of meaning but also empowers her to speak
passionately of her own grief, confusion, and anger. They provide a vital means of
self-expression under conditions that threaten to obliterate the captive's identity
and even her sanity.5 As Rowlandson, dazed and disoriented, struggles to cope
with an unstable Indian world that nearly engulfs her in terror and madness, she
turns to the familiar language of the scriptures, especially the Psalms, to reassure
herself that her suffering has meaning and that her identity as one of God's
chosen is therefore still intact.

Finding the means of emotional self-assertion becomes a complicated survival
strategy in a situation in which open displays of grief are typically punishable by
death. As David Sewell has documented, for many white prisoners of the Indian
wars, the psychological trauma of captivity was aggravated by the emotional
repression enforced by the natives (4o).

Rowlandson is no exception to this trend: at the beginning of her captivity, she
lives in constant terror that her young child, who cannot control her moans of pain,
will be slain for being a nuisance (Rowlandson 36), and she is kept from her other
daughter, Mary, because the child angers the Indians by bursting into tears every
time her mother tries to visit (37). Mary Rowlandson is, however, above all a
survivor, and it is her rhetorical resourcefulness as much as her bartering and
sewing skills that enables her to come out of her wilderness ordeal with her self
and sanity preserved.

As a captive and as a narrator of captivity, Mary Rowlandson wrestles with
"sorrow that cannot be exprest" (34). On top of her captors' prohibition of
emotional outbursts, she initially finds herself too shell-shocked, too "astonished,"
to give vent to her own emotions. And so, despite heartbreak, dizziness, fatigue,
stinking wounds, and unrelenting hunger, Rowlandson does not succumb to
weeping until the eighth remove, more than a quarter into her narrative. She
describes the scene as follows:

then my heart began to faile; and I fell a-weeping; which was the first time, to my
remembrance, that I wept before them. Although I had met with so much Affliction,
and my heart was many times ready to break, yet could I not shed one tear in
their sight; but rather had been all this while in a maze, and like one astonished;
but now I may say, as Psal. cxxxvii.I. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sate down,
yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. (42)

When Rowlandson finally finds release from psychological numbness, she
captures the pathos of that moment and its conflicting emotions in the language of
the Psalms. Her memory of the sacred songs, the hymns of civilization, plays a
key role in restoring her sense of self. Throughout her narrative, Rowlandson
consistently mines the riches of the voices of the Psalms. In her struggle to find a
language to express both private anguish and public doctrine, she exploits a wide
range of the Psalmist's moods and the Biblical voice she adopts is by turns
repentant, suffering, chastizing, thankful, praising, vengeful, angry, even cursing.
Rowlandson realizes textually the epigraph to the Bay Psalm Book: "Let the word
of God dwell plenteously in you . . ." (Col. 3: I6). In the plenteousness of the
Psalms, the captive finds a richness and diversity of human expression that
speaks to and for her emotional need and thus becomes her own.

As a churchgoer, Rowlandson would have been accustomed to hearing psalms
read or sung both before and after every sermon she attended (Hambrick-Stowe
III). She would have sung psalms in family devotions and incorporated them in her
private meditations. Moreover, she would have recognized in David's collection of
spiritual songs a Biblical precedent for the public conversion narratives required
for church membership (Swaim 36). If, as Patricia Caldwell has suggested, the
first New England authors were able to move "through the Bible, almost as
through a physical space" (Caldwell 3I), the Psalms provided one of the most
familiar and trustworthy Puritan paths through the scriptural landscape.

According to the preface to the Bay Psalm Book, the traditional reliance on
scriptural psalms in worship is largely owing to their abundance and variety of
expression. The Psalms, according to the author of the Preface (probably John
Cotton; Harastzi 19-27), "the Holy-Ghost himselfe in infinite wisdome hath made
to suit all the conditions, necessityes, temptations, affections &c. of men in all
ages." Paradoxically, at the same time that the plentiful expression of the Psalms
gives voice to every facet of human experience, it also prohibits the invention of
new forms of expression. The passage quoted above continues: "by this
[supplying of psalms for all conditions] the Lord seemeth to stoppeth mens
mouths and mindes ordinarily to compile or sing any other psalmes . . . seing, let
our condition be what it will, the Lord himselfe hath supplyed us with farre better."
There is, for the Puritans, a fine line between personal expression and heretical
expression,7 and the language of the Psalms played an important role in helping
navigate the narrow space between.

The Psalms, especially those written in the first-person, provided New England
Puritans with a vocabulary and phraseology that sounded from the apparently lyric
depths of private, historic experience but were publicly intelligible and hence
socially acceptable. For women, the Psalms represented a special opportunity for
public expression, since an exemption from the church rule of silence allowed
them to join in the congregational singing (Hambrick-Stowe II4).8 The Bay Psalm
Book, the first book printed in colonial America, thus served as one of the first
means of giving early American women a voice to be heard. In an important
sense, the Psalms underpin Rowlandson's entire narrative, since she uses the
Psalmist's very words to justify her literary creation:

And here I may take occasion to mention one principal ground of my setting forth
these few Lines; even as the Psalmist says, To declare the works of the Lord, and
his wonderful power in carrying us along, 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 comfortable and suitable Scriptures in my distress.
(42)

By identifying herself textually not only with Old Testament prophetsJeremiah,
Isaiah, Amos, and Micah-but also with the prophetic singer, David, Rowlandson
finds in the midst of her affliction hope and a sense of vocation. "I shall not die but
live," proclaims Rowlandson through Psalm II8, "and declare the works of the
Lord."

Very near the beginning of her narrative, Rowlandson emphasizes the strength of
her identification with David by using a fragment from the Psalms to draw the
reader into the spiritual heart of her historic ordeal. The imperative voice of Psalm
46 calls us to enter directly into the pathos of Rowlandson's situation: "Come,
behold the works of the Lord, what desolation he has made in the earth" (33).
When we consult the whole psalm, however, we discover that this poignant
invitation to lament is actually framed within a celebration of God's faithfulness.
The psalm opens with the familiar reassurance, "God is our refuge and strength, a
very present help in trouble," and closes with the confident assertion, "The Lord of
hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge." Examined in its original context,
the apparent cry of despair becomes part of a meditation on the steadfastness of
the Lord-the militant Lord of conquering armies.

Rowlandson's Biblical quotations serve as meditational signposts, directing us to
ponder their meaning in the larger Biblical passages to which they point, and the
"comfort" Rowlandson finds in her "comfortable Scriptures" (42) derives at least in
part from her awareness of the verses that frame the isolated quotation. That
Rowlandson expects her readers to share this awareness is clear from her
phrasing of her quotation from Psalm 27: "Psal. xxvii.I3. I had fainted, unless I had
believed, &c." (35, emphasis mine). Once we take into account the
comprehensive perspective, however, many of the so-called "comfortable"
Scriptures that come to Rowlandson's emotional aid during her captivity are
strangely disturbing to a modern humanist sensibility. In several of the psalms
upon which Rowlandson draws, the speaker does not stop at declaring the
wonderful works of salvation but looks forward to further works of divine
vengeance by "the Lord of hosts" upon the Enemy. Rescue is incomplete, it
seems, without bloody revenge. As C. S. Lewis says, in such psalms "the spirit of
hatred which strikes us in the face is like the heat from a furnace mouth" (23).

Such hostility is implied, if not expressed, in nearly every psalm from which
Rowlandson quotes, even those that do not appear to be particularly
bloody-minded. Rather than exploring undefinable angst or vague mental
torments, the Psalms tend to define suffering in terms of an antagonistic Other-the
treacherous friend, the wicked neighbor, the evil foe, the "floods of ungodly men"
(Psalm I8). Even at their most introspective moments, the Psalms are never
purely lyric poems (Fisch 108), and the concrete language of Hebrew poetry
consistently defies individual subjectivity by insisting on putting a human face to
oppression. In his moments of misery, David, like Daniel, to whose situation
Rowlandson also compares her own, becomes an archetypal captive, surrounded
by torturers. Thus, the "&c" in Rowlandson's citation from Psalm 27 ("I had fainted,
unless I had believed, &c") sketches a complete scenario of captivity, suffering,
and retribution that plants Rowlandson squarely in the shoes of her Biblical
model.9

Even Psalm I9, which Rowlandson quotes twice, builds its extended acrostic
meditation on the law on a scaffolding of bipolar oppositionsthe righteous speaker
struggling to obey the law and the evil enemies who harrass his efforts. When
Rowlandson declares near the end of her narrative, "It is good for me that I have
been afflicted" (Psalm II9: 7I [65]), she is reminding her readers that her afflictions
point up the lawless, persecuting heathen around her: "the proud have forged a
lie against me: but I will keep thy precepts with my whole heart. / Their heart is fat
as grease; but I delight in thy law" (v. 69-70). Her earlier quotation from Psalm II9
("I know, O Lord, that thy judgments are right, and that thou in faithfulness hast
afflicted me," v. 75 [45]) is also taken from a section of the psalm that deliberately
frames the speaker in contrast to his foes. At the same time that the suffering
psalmist prays for "merciful kindness" that he may live to continue delighting in the
law, he also prays for revenge on the enemy: "Let the proud be ashamed; for they
dealt perversely with me without a cause... (v. 78).

Of all Rowlandson's selections from the Psalms, the most seemingly lyric moment
she reproduces in her own text comes from Psalm 6 and also occurs near the end
of her narrative, in the passage in which she describes the lasting aftereffects of
the trauma she has experienced: I remember in the night season, how the other
day I was in the midst of thousands of enemies, and nothing but death before me;
it was then hard work to persuade myself that ever I should be satisfied with bread
again. But now we are fed with the finest of the Wheat, and (as I may so say) with
honey out of the rock; instead of the husks, we have the fatted Calf; the thoughts
of these things in the particulars of them, and of the love and goodness of God
towards us, make it true of me, what David said of himself, Psal. vi.6, I water my
couch with my tears. Oh the wonderful power of God that mine eyes have seen,
affording matter enough for my thoughts to run in, that when others are sleeping
mine eyes are weeping. (64-65)

Here, Rowlandson uses the Psalmist's language to paint a portrait of her own
ceaseless introspection; while others are at peace, enjoying God's plenty and
sleeping soundly, she turns restlessly inward to reflect on past sorrows. The
Psalmist here is not, as he often is, on a battlefield, at a coronation, or praising
God in the temple. Instead, this lament finds him isolated and alone, in bed,
bemoaning his grief to himself. Nevertheless, towards the end of the psalm, the
speaker sketches in the inevitable enemies encircling his couch, and the
complaint closes with a prayer for their defeat: "Let all mine enemies be ashamed
and sore vexed: let them return and be ashamed suddenly" (v. 10).

In the seventeenth remove, when Rowlandson reports being very near the end of
her physical and emotional strength, she quotes three deceptively contemplative,
melancholy verses from Psalm Io9 that make clear the outward-looking hostility
underlying the captive's self-pity. Writes Rowlandson: "Now may I say as David,
Psal cix. 22,23,24, I am poor and needy, and my heart is wounded within me. I am
gone like the shadow when it declineth: I am tossed up and down like the Locust:
my knees are weak through fasting, and my flesh faileth of fatness" (5z). This
poignant passage comes at a point in the narrative when Rowlandson is so
exhausted by her trials that she is reduced to eating the broth of a boiled horse
foot in order to stay alive. Her spirit must receive refreshment, however, from the
recognition-shared, no doubt, with her original readers-that as she echoes David's
groans she also echoes his extended litany of holy curses against the oppressors.
The Psalmist begs that the adversary's days might be few, that his children might
be fatherless and his wife a widow, that he might become prey to the extortioner,
that curses might "come into his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones" (v.
I8). As the title in the King James Bible reminds us, Psalm rog is not primarily a
moving prayer for deliverance but rather another instance of "God's Vengeance
Invoked on the Adversaries."

There is nothing covert about Rowlandson's expression of anger through her
incorporation of angry psalms into her narrative. Why should Rowlandson take
pains to conceal anger that she sees as righteous and that she so plainly reveals
in her two central references to the opening verses of Deuteronomy 30? The
Deuteronomy passage contains the first scriptural solace that Rowlandson finds
after receiving her plundered Bible. Here, she finds both the promise of "mercy"
and the promise of retribution (38). Near the close of her narrative, she reiterates
these two linked promises by quoting for us directly Deuteronomy 4 and 7: "If any
of thine be driven out to the utmost parts of heaven, from thence will the Lord thy
God gather thee, and from thence will he fetch thee. And the Lord thy God will put
all these curses upon thine enemies, and on them which hate thee, which
persecuted thee" (64).

The Psalmist's vindictive spirit would have been as familiar to a New England
Puritan's ear as the following opening lines from the Bay Psalm Book's
versification of Psalm 94: O Lord God, unto whom there doe revenges appertaine:
O God to whom vengeance belongs, clearly shine forth againe.

When Rowlandson quotes from this same psalm in the nineteenth remove (v. I8,
"When my foot slipped, thy mercy, O Lord, held me up" [53]), the larger, vengeful
meaning would have been clear to her readers. Coming as it does on the heels of
one of Rowlandson's indignant retorts to her Indian mistress, the pointer to Psalm
94 does not conceal but rather emphasizes Rowlandson's angry resentment. The
title the Authorized Version gives Psalm 94 is, after all, "Jehovah Implored to
Avenge his People."

Psalm 118, "that comfortable scripture" that gives Rowlandson a reason for
writing, could also be classified, according to Lewis's categories, as a "terrible"or
"contemptible" cursing psalm (Lewis 24). The psalm opens, innocently enough,
with an invitation to praise God for his constancy to his people: "O Give thanks
unto the Lord; for he is good: because his mercy endureth for ever. / Let Israel
now say, that his mercy endureth for ever" (v.1-2). The speaker describes how
God has miraculously preserved him in the past, anticipates relief from his present
distress, and finishes by praising God again for his salvation. "This is the day
which the Lord hath made," the poet exults, "we will rejoice and be glad in it" (v.
z4). Part of the Psalmist's rejoicing, however, involves gloating defiantly over the
soonto-be-conquered enemy. The dark middle section of the psalm features a
violent refrain:

All nations compassed me about: but in the name of the Lord will I destroy them.

They compassed me about; yea, they compassed me about: but in the name of
the Lord I will destroy them. They compassed me about like bees; they are
quenched as the fire of thorns: for in the name of the Lord I will destroy them. (v.
10-12, my emphasis)

In these verses, the Psalmist's sense of righteous indignation transmutes into
outright belligerence, and compassion is swallowed up in violent intentions. God
may be constant, but the angry Psalmist, who segues from adoration to
anathema, is humanly inconstant, in his tone at least.

Taken as a whole, Psalm I8 would seem to incense rather than assuage a
troubled heart. Not surprisingly, this psalm was a favorite battle hymn of
sixteenth-century European Calvinists (Reid 47). Rowlandson's "comfort" seems
strongly tied to a militant, violent spirit-a spirit that becomes more manifest in her
quotation from Psalm 5 Rowlandson lights upon the 22nd verse of Psalm ss after
her return from her visit to her son. After a physically and emotionally gruelling
journey, Rowlandson turns to her Bible, her "great comforter" (44). She reads:
"Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee, Psal. Iv.22" (44). What
Rowlandson must also read but does not quote in her retelling of the event is the
continuation of that sustaining thought. Quoted below are the complete two final
verses (verses 22 and 23) of the psalm:

Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer
the righteous to be moved. But thou, O God, shalt bring them down into the pit of
destruction: bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days; but I will
trust thee.

The vindictiveness of these concluding lines is inescapable. When we look at the
psalm as a whole, we see that the vengeful spirit of the closing verses actually
pervades the entire psalm. As the speaker prays for deliverance, he seems to
take strength from his own spite as he curses his tormentors: "Destroy, O Lord,
and divide their tongues. . ." (v. II), the Psalmist begs, "Let death seize upon them,
and let them go down quick into hell . . ." (v. I5).

Before Rowlandson turns to the curses of Psalm 55, she is restless in her spirit; to
use her words, she "went up and down moaning and lamenting" (44). After she
turns to her scriptural "comforter," her restlessness does not seem to be calmed
and a gnawing hunger remains. Immediately following the fragment from Psalm
55, Rowlandson abruptly begins a new paragraph with the brusque statement,
"But I was fain to go and look after something to satisfie my hunger" (44). The
spiritual food Rowlandson finds in the Psalms leaves her hungry because, by
encouraging angry thoughts, it provokes rather than placates her troubled soul.
On the other hand, Rowlandson's hunger for revenge, like her physical hunger,
teaches her a means of survival. Goodwife Joslin gives up the struggle to adapt to
her captive life and is consequently killed (Toulouse, " `My Own Credit"'" 66o).
Meanwhile, Rowlandson, hungry, restless, and angry, learns to barter and fend
for herself. On one level, the Psalms bolster Rowlandson in her life-sustaining
rage.

In the twelfth remove of her narrative, Mary Rowlandson acknowledges: "My Spirit
was . . . (I confess) very impatient and almost outragious" (45). At this point in her
story, Rowlandson tries to calm her admittedly violent spirit by turning once again
to the Book of Psalms. "Be still, and know that I am God," she reads (Psalm 46:io).
Psalm 46, we have already seen, is a psalm of assurance and praise (a "quieting
Scripture," Rowlandson calls it [46]), but it is also a psalm that, like so many
others, envisions victory in overtly militant terms. "The Lord of hosts is with us,"
the Psalmist declares, meaning, "The Lord of armies is with us." The God of
refuge is a God of military strength. The very verse that Rowlandson quotes in her
narrative looks forward to the actions of a conquering God. The complete verse to
reads: "Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will
be exalted in the earth." At the close of Rowlandson's narrative, this quotation will
be echoed in the concluding fragment from Exodus, "Stand still, and see the
salvation of the Lord" (65), Moses's words predicting the complete destruction of
the Egyptian army in the Red Sea.

Thus, Rowlandson appears to follow a trend of seeking solace in psalms that only
apparently soothe but actually justify her "outragious" spirit. Psalm 37, which
"revive[s]" (47) Rowlandson in the thirteenth remove, serves as another text that
could be paraphrased: "Be still, and watch God's violent judgment on the wicked."
Rowlandson quotes verse 5: "Commit thy way unto the Lord, trust also in him, and
he shall bring it to pass" (47). The tone of quiet expectancy runs through the
psalm's following few verses, as verse 7 urges, "Rest in the Lord, and wait
patiently for him. . ," and verse 8 advises, "Cease from anger, and forsake wrath:
fret not thyself in any wise to do evil." Verse iI even seems to anticipate the
peace-loving spirit of the Beatitudes with the comment, "the meek shall inherit the
earth." Nevertheless, upon closer examination, it seems that the meek shall inherit
the earth only through the Lord's violent interference in human events. The
Psalmist describes with apparent zest the impending afflictions of the wicked: they
will slay themselves with their own swords, their arms will be broken, they will be
consumed by fire like a sacrifice, they will be altogether "cut off." "Cease from
anger," the Psalmist seems to be saying, "and relish God's anger in action." Anger
and violence still find expression but agency shifts from the individual to the deity.

Rowlandson's identification with the conflicted voice (or voices) of the Psalms
seems to provide her with a temporarily liveable, if unstable, solution to a
fundamental ontological dilemma of Puritanism: the paradox of living one's own
history while sustaining belief in the unchangeable nature of foreordained events.
For Teresa Toulouse, the divided pull of this paradox creates a kind of stasis in
Rowlandson's narrative, as the captive is torn between Biblical injunctions to
remain passive in God's hands (Psalm 27, "Wait on the Lord"; Psalm 55, "Cast thy
burden upon the Lord", Psalm 46, "Be still, and know that I am God") and the
conviction that she must act (by praying, for example) in order to ensure her own
salvation (Toulouse, "Mary Rowlandson" 33-34). As we have seen, however, the
very psalms Toulouse points out as encouraging passivity actually offer
substantial psychological compensation in the form of potent threats and visions
of violent retaliation against the enemy.

The Psalmist himself draws attention to this subliminal gratification in two of the
psalms to which Rowlandson turns for assurance. Rowlandson quotes from Psalm
38, for instance, near the beginning of her narrative, as she recalls sitting, herself
wounded, holding her wounded child in her arms: "I may say as it is in Psal.
xxxviii.5,6, My wounds stink and are corrupt, I am troubled, I am bowed down
greatly, I go mourning all the day long" (36). As he bemoans his wretched state,
the Psalmist takes the deliberate stance of a patient martyr who nonetheless looks
to his God for retribution. Describing the insults hurled at him by his enemies, he
maintains: "But I, as a deaf man, heard not; and I was as a dumb man that
openeth not his mouth. / Thus I was as a man that heareth not, and in whose
mouth are no reproofs. / For in thee, O Lord, do I hope: thou wilt hear, O Lord my
God" (v. I3-I5). The martyr can afford to be reticent, to dwell on his own patient
suffering, when he is able to rest assured an active God will deliver the curses for
him. Psalm II8, the psalm that Rowlandson claims underwrites her authority as an
author, expresses the benefits of such a position even more directly. "I shall not
die but live, and declare the works of the Lord: the Lord hath chastened me sore,
yet he hath not given me over to death," quotes Rowlandson. The works of the
Lord have "chastened" the speaker yet, earlier in the psalm, the Psalmist,
scourged but not abandoned, confidently awaits further works of divine
vengeance against the encompassing foes: "The Lord taketh my part with them
that help me: therefore shall I see my desire upon them that hate me" (v. 7). Here,
the Psalmist presents himself as a passive observer of justice; he shall "see" his
own "desire" enacted, but the vengeance belongs to, and is thus sanctified by, the
Lord.

The Psalms, with their verbal enactment of sanctified violence, are, according to
Harold Fisch, centrally concerned with effecting change. Whereas modern-day
Western aesthetics privilege a view of poetry as introspective stasis, the Hebrew
poets of the psalms saw their art as a means of action. As a psalm follows the
common trajectory from self-pity through remembrances of God's faithfulness to
imprecations against the persecutors, the poetry's prophetic power enables the
Psalmist to imagine his sufferings already overcome. "The psalms," writes Fisch,
"are not only testimonies to past and present events; they are testimonies to the
future as well. Having established or reestablished his bond with the 'Thou' who
`hast been my help,' [the psalmist] already sees his enemy vanquished; he has no
more to fear. Poetry has made something happen" (110-11).

Goodwife Joslin is a poor reader of the Psalms because she fails to recognize that
the sacred poetry has already "made something happen." When she and
Rowlandson "light" on the final verse of Psalm z7, "Wait on the Lord, be of good
courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart; wait, I say, on the Lord" (38), Joslin
seems not to grasp the psalm's full measure of encouragement. The psalm fulfills,
in effect, its own prophecy. The concluding verse urges sufferers to wait for the
Lord's deliverance, but the opening verses speak of that salvation as a thing
already past. Temporally, the psalm traces a circular path, as the first three
verses illustrate: the psalm opens with a statement of present assurance ("The
Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? [v. I]), then reflects on God's
constancy in the past ("When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came
upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell" [v. 2]), then looks to a future
that promises to repeat the past ("Though a host should encamp against me, my
heart shall not fear" [v. 3]). Goodwife Joslin fails to realize that her final
emancipation is already accomplished in the injunction to "wait," mistrusts the
prophecy, and dies a hideous death through her impatience.

In Rowlandson's narrative, the Psalms not only enable the captive to envision
revenge but also help her to perceive the meaning of seemingly inscrutable
scriptures. Rowlandson's use of the Psalms as an interpretive gloss not only on
her situation but on other pieces of scripture follows the reading pattern she
establishes when she first opens her bible to Deuteronomy. Although Rowlandson
finds in chapter z8 that "there was no mercy for me; that the blessings were gone,
and the curses came in their room," she testifies: "But the Lord helped me to go
on reading till I came to Chap. xxx, the seven first verses; where I found there was
mercy promised again, if we would return to him by repentance" (38). Each time
Rowlandson turns to a specific Biblical verse, the Lord helps her "to go on
reading"-the rest of the chapter, the rest of the psalm, or a verse from another
Biblical book.

At two particularly crucial junctures, Rowlandson turns to the vengeful vision of the
Psalms to extend and clarify her reading of difficult scriptural passages. Halfway
through her narrative, in the thirteenth remove, as she wrestles with inexplicable
tortures inflicted by an apparently righteous God, Rowlandson finally finds
something in the Bible to "revive" her: "Isaiah Iv.8, For my thoughts are not your
thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. And also that, Psal.
xxxvii. 5, Commit thy way unto the Lord, trust also in him, and he shall bring it to
pass" (47). As Toulouse has noted, the passage from Isaiah offers a dubious kind
of reassurance, for a God whose ways are not our ways is an unreadable God,
whose mysterious will can appear capricious and cruel (Toulouse, "My Own
Credit" 66z). Psalm 37, however, as we have seen, compensates for the
incertitude by holding forth to the mystified sufferer the eventual promise of a
brutally decisive victory.10

Similarly, a verse from the Psalms illuminates the baffling words from Amos which
Rowlandson quotes more than once during her ruminations on divine justice:
"Shall there be evil in the City and the Lord hath not done it?" (Amos 3:6, [5I, 59]).
In the twentieth remove, as part of her attempt to explain Providence's apparent
favor toward the Indians as part of the chastizing of God's chosen ones,
Rowlandson joins Amos's troubling interrogation of the origin of evil with a
consolation repeated from Psalm rIB: "It is the Lord's doing, and it should be
marvellous in our Eyes" (59). Here, the foundational psalm upon which
Rowlandson builds her identification with David and the spiritual testimony of her
narrative squelches a potential theological dilemma with a powerful assurance
that, as we have seen, grows out of a battle-hymn pledge of violent retribution.

In common with most Puritan captives taken by Indians, Rowlandson identifies
most readily with the angst and anger of Psalm I37 ("By the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion . . ."), the psalm
that embodies her first outpouring of the anguish of captivity. While the pathetic
eloquence of this lament echoes through many captivity narratives as a ritual wail
of the captive's grief, the well-used refrain has its fierce as well as its plaintive side
(see Appendix for complete text of the psalm). Lewis calls the cursing conclusion,
in which the Psalmist looks forward to the brutal massacre of his enemy's children,
"devilish" (Lewis 23) and even John Calvin, in his commentary on the psalm, has
to admit that "It was . . . the height of cruelty in them [the Israelites] to invite the
Babylonians to destroy their own brethren, or fan the flames of their hostility." 11
Nevertheless, according to Calvin, the Psalmist's vindictiveness is justified
because he simply acts as a mouthpiece for God's holy vengeance. Calvin
instructs us that "the Psalmist does not break forth into these awful denunciations
unadvisedly, but as God's herald, to confirm former prophecies" (Calvin 196). As
in the case of Hannah Dustan, the Psalmist wields the tomahawk, but, linguistically
speaking, God shoulders responsibility for the violence. The Psalmist evidently is
only speaking what God has spoken before. Explains Calvin: "It may seem to
savour of cruelty, that he [the Psalmist] should wish the tender and innocent
infants to be dashed and mangled upon the stones, but he does not speak under
the impulse of personal feeling, and only employs words which God had himself
authorized" (Calvin 197).

As is characteristic of many psalms, Psalm 137 alternates between different forms
of address. Beginning in the first-person plural, it switches to the first-person
singular, and then to the second-person address of apostrophe. This blurring of
the distinction between the individual and collective voice plays a crucial role in
conveying the psalm's message, and also a key message undergirding
Rowlandson's composite, multi-voiced text. Personal survival is so inseparable
from the survival of the collective identity that loosening one's grasp on the
national memory is portrayed as a kind of self-cursing: "If I forget thee, O
Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning / If I do not remember thee, let my
tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth...." For Mary Rowlandson and her
compeers, the collective voice of the Psalms, which they heard as both a historical
record of and a model for the sacred history they were living, formed an important
part of the armor of righteousness that the first colonists donned to preserve intact
their personal and corporate identity.

Just as fellow Indian captive Jonathan Dickinson, stripped naked by his captors, is
at one point in his ordeal forced to use leaves from his Bible to clothe himself
(Dickinson 22), Mary Rowlandson uses her Bible to protect and project her
vulnerable self in its "wilderness-condition" (36). Long before Phillip gives her an
opportunity for visual self-inspection in his mirror, Rowlandson employs her Bible
as her spiritual mirror, her "guide by day" and "Pillow by night" (49). Rowlandson
uses this mirror of the inner self as an aid to self-realization. In her Bible,
particularly in the Psalms, she recognizes an experiential identity and finds a
public, devotional voice for her confusion, pain, and anger. As Mary Rowlandson
enters into the Psalms and relives them, they become the tool of her survival-the
key to her wresting emotional meaning out of her devastating experience and the
key to her expressing that meaning without alienating herself from the community
she re-enters. Rowlandson knows that one may be an Amazon on paper but that
a flesh-and-blood female warrior is, as Mather indicates, an indecent freak in
actual seventeenth-century New England society. The language of the Psalms
liberates Rowlandson to express anger without becoming immodest; it allows the
virtuous minister's wife to be outspoken without becoming a social outcast.

Mary Rowlandson thus finds a strategy of survival by dwelling plenteously in the
Psalms, exploiting their rich and diverse opportunities for emotional utterance.
She adopts the attitude of the typical author of an early American conversion
narrative who, according to Patricia Caldwell, "assimilates himself into the Bible
world and outlook, dwells there imaginatively, see through its windows" (I78). For
Rowlandson and her fellow Puritans, who were, as Richard Slotkin and James
Folsom emphasize, "preeminently `the people of the Book"' (39), the Bible was a
vast, roomy resource of expressive possibility-an expansive vantage point from
within which to articulate a literary fusion of personal emotion and collective
mission.

Mary Rowlandson's narrative necessarily manifests, as Toulouse says, a "textual
doubleness" (Toulouse, " `My Own Credit"'" 665) because the word of God with
which it is so replete is necessarily at least, as Saint Paul would have it,
"twoedged" (Heb. 4: iz). Thus, to view anger as undercutting or subverting
Rowlandson's public, devotional text-to attribute her frustration to prefeminist
rage, rebellious subjectivity, or survivor's guiltis to overlook the anger inherent in
the devotional voice itself. From a modern humanist point of view, what is perhaps
most disturbing about the raw, violent emotion that surges beneath Rowlandson's
narrative is that its presence is, for Rowlandson, legitimate and deliberate. It is the
anger of the righteous, God's anger. As Toulouse reminds us, Rowlandson is not
on the "outside" of American Puritanism (Toulouse, "Mary Rowlandson" 45). As
private vindication and communal self-justification work together in her text,
Rowlandson's manipulation of the Psalms reminds us that the voice of public
orthodoxy, even of Puritan public orthodoxy, is never monotone or univocal.
Discordant but not divided, Rowlandson's survival narrative stands, as did
American Puritanism, in the strength of its own determined contradictions.

APPENDIX: PSALM I37

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered
Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that
wasted us required of us mirth, saying Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall
we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my
right hand forget her cunning.

If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer
not Jerusalem above my chief joy.

Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase
it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that
rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.

Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

[Footnote]
NOTES

[Footnote]
1. Unlike modern Biblical scholars, seventeenth-century Puritans saw the many voices of the Psalms as
issuing from the mouth of a single speaker. Thus, Henry Ainsworth introduces the first Puritan
commentary on the Book of Psalms with a biographical "Preface concerning David, his life; and acts"
(Ainsworth i).
2. Recent generations of literary scholars have demonstrated a fascination with the apparent split
between the so-called "vigorous and homely style" Rowlandson uses to describe day-by-day events
and the more "elevated" rhetoric of the Biblical language she employs to comment upon the meaning of
events (Downing 252). Thus, David Minter speaks of Rowlandson's "curious and double
presentmindedness" (Minter 34I); Kathryn Derounian attributes the "empirical" and "rhetorical"
divisions in Rowlandson's narration to the author's "survivor syndrome"; Mitchell Brietwieser explores
the "realistic" fracturing of Rowlandson's narration that occurs when subjective suffering breaks through
the social codes he sees as repressing personal mourning (Breitwieser io). My own arguments build on
and seek to extend the work of Teresa Toulouse, who has probed the "textual doubleness" of a narrative
voice that "scripturally grovels" but also expresses frustration and rage (Toulouse, " `My Own Credit"'"
664-65).
3. Observes Toulouse: "instead of using Scripture only to prove her acceptance of her situation,
Rowlandson employs it also to express her anger about her own and her children's torment" (Toulouse,
"`My Own Credit"' 664). "What seems evident," writes Toulouse elsewhere, "is that the Bible provides
less a script of 'prescriptive' forms to which [Rowlandson] must conform than a variety of voices
available for her use" (Toulouse, "Mary Rowlandson" 38). 4. See, for example, Derounian and
Breitwieser. 5. Rowlandson is perplexed by the sudden mood changes of her captors, who seem to her
"unstable and like mad men" (54). Her own mental instability manifests itself in periodic bouts of
complete disorientation: "I cannot but remember how many times, sitting in their Wigwams, and musing
on things past, I should suddenly leap up and run out, as if I had been at home, forgetting where I was"
(47).

[Footnote]
6. In her schema of female archetypes in Indian captivity narratives, June Namias classifies
Rowlandson as a Survivor (Namias z5). Richard Slotkin and James Folsom present their edition of
Rowlandson's narrative as primarily "an examination of the price of survival, of what one must learn and
of the compromises one must make merely to stay alive" (Slotkin and Folsom 309)
7. Patricia Caldwell explores this quandry in depth in her study of American conversion narratives. See
esp. 97-103.
8. In some churches, women may also have been allowed to break the rule of church silence to give
conversion narratives (Caldwell 50, n.16).
9. Toulouse reads the quotation from Psalm 27 as evidence that Rowlandson sees David's captivity
"historically re-enacted" in her own (Toulouse, "Mary Rowlandson" 38).
10. Whereas Toulouse suggests that the psalmist's language argues for "commitment and trust" and
thus "softens" Rowlandson's anger in the face of an indecipherable Providence, I read Rowlandson's
conjunction of scriptural passages here as evidence of a specious appeasement. The antagonistic
us-versus-them mentality of the psalm actually reinforces Rowlandson's outrage by redirecting it
towards her captors.
11. Ironically, in Psalm 137 the psalmist, a would-be baby-killer ("Happy shall he be, that taketh and
dasheth thy little ones against the stones"), longs to perform the very act Indian captors were so often
falsely accused of committing. For a thorough discussion of how the Puritans used charges of infanticide
to "demonize" native North Americans, see Ramsey.

[Reference]
WORKS CITED

[Reference]
Ainsworth, Henry. Annotations Upon the Book of Psalmes. 2nd ed. Amsterdam, I6I7.
Breitwieser, Mitchell Robert. American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief, and
Ethnology in Mary White Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
I99o. Caldwell, Patricia. The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of
American Expression. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, I983. Calvin, John. Commentary on the Book
of Psalms. Vol. 5. Trans. Rev. James Anderson. Grand Rapids Mich.: Eerdmans I949. Derounian,
Kathryn Zabelle. "Puritan Orthodoxy and the `Survivor Syndrome' in Mary Rowlandson's Indian
Captivity Narrative." Early American Literature z2 (I987): 8z-93.
Dickinson, Jonathan. Jonathan Dickinson's Journal or God's Protecting Providence, Being the Narrative
of a Journey from Port Royal in Jamaica to Philadelphia between August 23, 1696 and April Iv 1697.
I699. Eds. Evangeline Walker Andrews and Charles McLean Andrews. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
I96I.
Downing, David. " `Streams of Scripture Comfort': Mary Rowlandson's Typological Use of the Bible."
Early American Literature I5 (I98o-8I): z52-59
Fisch, Harold. Poetry with a Purpose. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, I988.

[Reference]
Guruswamy, Rosemary Fithian. "The Sweet Defender of New England." New England Quarterly. 63
(I990): 294--302.
Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E. The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in
Seventeenth-Century New England. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1982.
Harastzi, Zoltan. The Enigma of the Bay Psalm Book. Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, I936.
Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Writing a Woman's Life. New York: Norton, i988. Lewis, C. S. Reflections on the
Psalms. Glasgow: Collins, I989. Mather, Cotton. Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion or the Character
and Happiness of a Vertuous Woman. Cambridge: Samuel Phillips, 1692. . Tabitha Rediviva, an Essay
to Describe and Commend the Good Works of a Vertuous Woman. Boston: J. Allen, I7I3.
Minter, David L. "By Dens of Lions: Notes on Stylization in Early Puritan
Captivity Narratives." American Literature 45 (I973): 335-47. Namias, June. White Captives: Gender
and Ethnicity on the American Frontier. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, I993. Porterfield,
Amanda. Female Piety in Puritan New England: The Emergence of
Religious Humanism. New York: Oxford Univ. Press,1992 Ramsey, Colin. "Cannibalism and Infant
Killing: A System of 'Demonizing' Motifs in Indian Captivity Narratives." CLIO 24.55 (I994): 55-68.
Reid, W. Stanford. "The Battle Hymns of the Lord: Calvinist Psalmody of the Sixteenth Century."
Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies. Ed. Carl S. Meyer. St. Louis Mo.: Foundation for Reformation
Research, I97I. 36-54. Rowlandson, Mary. A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary
Rowlandson. London, i68z. Rpt. in Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women's Narratives. Ed.
Amy Schrager Lang. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1990. i2-65.
Sewell, David. " `So Unstable and Like Mad Men They Were': Language and Interpretation in American
Captivity Narratives." A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America. Ed. Frank Shuffleton. New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, I993 39-55
Slotkin, Richard, and James K. Folsom, "Mary Rowlandson: Captive Witness." So Dread full a Judgment:
Puritan Responses to King Phillip's War, 1676--1677. Eds. Slotkin and Folsom. Middletown, Conn.:
Wesleyan Univ. Press, I978.
Swaim, Kathleen M. " `Come and Hear: Women's Puritan Evidences." American Woman's
Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory. Ed. Margo Culley. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1992.
3z-56. Toulouse, Teresa A. "Mary Rowlandson and the `Rhetoric of Ambiguity."' Studies in Puritan
American Spirituality 3 (I992): ZI-5z. . " `My Own Credit': Strategies of (E)valuation in Mary
Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative." American Literature 64 (I99z): 655-76. The Whole Booke of
Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre [The Bay Psalm Book]. Boston, i640.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited
without permission.