Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative. Dissent And Liminality
MARY ROWLANDSON’S CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE.
DISSENT AND LIMINALITY1
Andreea MINGIUC
In a Puritan key, the beginning of what was going to be the American identity
presents itself as a scenario in which the American Adam was thriving in the
wilderness whereas the American Eve was staying safe at home. In other words,
there was, from the very beginning a clear cut distinction between gender roles
leading to the binary oppositions male/female, active/passive to which
Christian/Indian was added. As Anette Kolodny points out, a woman’s journey
through life was marked by two essential moments – the beginning
as the dutiful daughter of loving but guiding parents and than the assuming of a
central role in a household of her own, serving there as the keeper of the
symbolic hearth, spiritual guide to a loving husband and teacher and moral
arbiter to their obedient offspring. (110)
However, even if confined within the limits of a domestic role, women
wrote and sent their heroines to the woods and, by using the captivity narratives,
portrayed another kind of liberating wilderness; they unveiled a world that was
not centered on male individualism and exclusive whiteness. Women seemed to
have had a better sense of the wilderness and they were the ones to create an
access channel to it for the entire community and thus shape up a new
dimensions of the collective imaginary regarding the Indians as the ultimate
Other and the frontier as the mythical space of the in-between.
Such writings drew from the tradition set by Mary Rowlandson’s
captivity narrative. The author, born Mary White around 1637 in Somerset,
England, in a community of non conformists, reached the shore of the New
World in 1638 together with her parents and her siblings. The earliest record
shows the father, John White, as a land proprietor in Lynn and the mother, Joan,
1
This work was supported by the European Social Fund in Romania, under the responsibility of
the Managing Authority for the Sectoral Operational Programme for Human Resources
Development 2007–2013 [grant POSDRU/88/1.5/S/47646].
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ANDREEA MINGIUC
was one of the women who spoke regularly in church meetings and helped
create and strengthen the Wenham congregation in one of the towns that the
Whites lived before moving to Lancaster where Mary married Joseph
Rowlandson and was subsequently taken captive (Derounian Stodola “A Note
on Mary…” 70-72). Her three-month captivity among the Narragansetts,
Nipmucks, and Pocassets during the second year (1676) of the so-called King
Philip’s War (aka Metacom’s War or Metacom’s Rebellion) was the basis of her
famous account first published in 1682 and which became was one of the first
best-sellers in America, with four editions published in 1682, with estimated
minimum sales of around 1000 copies (Derounian Stodola “The Indian
Captivity Narratives…” 37). Written in what she called Removes the story,
which begins in medias res2, follows her sufferance as she is taken farther and
farther hence removed from her community, but, at the same time, brought
closer to her self. In the narrative, Mary talks between the lines and with great
subtlety, about another kind of captivity, that of the sin on one hand and that of
imperialism and patriarchy on the other. It is a potentially subversive narrative
parenthetically contained by male interference – the preface written most
probably by Increase Mather, member of the ministerial elite, and Joseph
Rowlandson’s, her husband, death sermon. Both aim at establishing the key in
which the text should be read and its communal meaning internalized by the
reader. In Derounian Stodola’s view, it also reveals
the fact that women were doubly victimized: first they were captured by Native
Americans as casualties of American expansionism, then they were exploited
by clergy and society on their return for the purpose of producing propagandist
texts that rationalized white superiority. (“The Indian Captivity Narratives …” 33)
In the preface to the reader, Amicus (the prefatorial introduction is signed
Per Amicum), underlines the purpose of the writing act - the author comes into
the public only to pay her vows to God, to give an example, to offer a Christian
model to society. Even if Mary Rowlandson is the one who has written and
experienced captivity, her name is not once mentioned in the preface. She is
called “Gentlewoman” six times and also “consort”, which defines her through
the relation with her husband (“the dear Consort of the said Reverend Mr.
Rowlandson” (qtd. in Schrager Lang 28)) but the name is only in the title where
there is also the main element defining her social identity – a minister’s wife. On
the other hand, the husband is fully named – “Reverend Servant of God, Mr.
Joseph Rowlandson, the faithful Pastor of the Church of Christ” (qtd. in
Schrager Lang 28) which points to the fact that Mary was only seen as an
2
“On the tenth of February 1675, came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster“ (298).
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Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative. Dissent And Liminality
instrument through which God worked and not as a woman with her own
(literary) identity. As we learn in the same preface, “This Narrative was Penned
by this Gentlewoman her self, to be to her a Memorandum of God’s dealings
with her” (qtd. in Schrager Lang 29). “Penned by her self” stresses on Mary as
the Subject who authors her own text.
Rowlandson’s journey through the (physical as well as spiritual)
wilderness follows the accepted Puritan model, the movements of the spiritual
autobiography, from sin to total communion with God, and the pattern of the
communal moral example that such a narrative is supposed to offer while
accompanied by the author’s double dissent – the obvious one from the
worldview shaped by the Indian captors’ perspective and the more subtle one
from the Puritan manner of relating to the Indians and of categorizing women
captives as passive, patient victims. Having descended herself from a
community rooted in the tradition of dissent, Mary voices her own from the
contact zone, from the “in between”. In this paper, I intend to investigate this
opposition that characterizes her personal dissent - the refusal of the Indian
world by the Puritan goodwife on one hand and, on the other, the openness that
allows her to observe its mechanism and values while presenting herself as a
non-passive captive. The article aims at highlighting those “sites”, which show
the female author subtly escaping culturally imposed meanings in order to
unveil her own understanding.
REFUSAL OF THE NEW STATUS
The first aspect that signals the mechanism of dissent is her refusal of the new
status and there are two strategies employed in this respect. One implies Mary’s
use of a discourse related to her high social status. Her being called a
“Gentlewoman” (as she is also referred to in the Preface) is not primarily related
to her being married to Joseph Rowlandson, but rather to her previous material
situation: her father, John White, was the wealthiest man in Lancaster. Being in
such a position, both materially and spiritually, helped Mary Rowlandson
publish her work but also motivated her decision to do so. We are recurrently
reminded of her status through language. In the Twelfth Remove she complains
of the Indians’ “insolence” which “grew worse and worse” (Rowlandson 312)
during an episode when she is hit by her mistress for claiming not to be able to
carry the heavy load given to her. In such circumstances the complaint seems to
be rather naïve; Mary is a captive, a mere servant, but she does not internalize
her new position; she still feels special and socially superior for being a
minister’s wife and the rich John White’s daughter. Later, in The Nineteenth
Remove, Philip/Metacom, is the one who actually recognizes her social position:
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“two weeks more and you shall be mistress again” (Rowlandson 319). By giving
weight to Philip’s statement, Rowlandson introduces the hierarchical structure
that is familiar to her in the Indian community: there are those who are insolent
and then there are “the better” ones who respect her superior social status. Mary
remains in a liminal position, more precisely in an initial stage of this process,
not accepting the new culture and, what’s more, trying to reshape it according to
her views and the cultural meanings of her community. The other strategy used
for affirming her social status and thus refusing the new position is related to her
“religious specialness” (Toulouse “My Own Credit…” 668). This specialness is
authenticated through a body that shares some of the main characteristics of
womanhood: weakness, passivity, endurance. It is worth mentioning here that
she does not, as we will see later, internalize the passivity of the captive, but
rather uses the martyrdom discourse which testifies for the contingency of
existence in order to claim her merit. The martyrdom discourse centers on the
body and its testifying about the contingency of existence. In fact, it is through
this physical trial that the captive achieves the moral status that increases her
authority. The emphasis here falls not necessarily on the movement from
captivity to restoration as in any other jeremiad, but on the specificity of the
affliction and its meaning. By the end of her captivity, Mary already knows she
is special: “It is good for me that I have been afflicted” (Rowlandson 329).
Being afflicted more than anyone else gives a stronger feeling of self-worth and
the certitude of being more favoured by God hence entitled to offer herself as a
spiritual model; and the offer becomes more authentic as it is through the writing
of her own hand.
The second aspect related to her personal, individual dissent from
traditional perspectives regards the refusal of the status of the passive victim. As
Teresa Toulouse states, the image of the passive captive woman was one that
offered support to the other members of the community and an example to be
followed. By using this image, the old ways of the fathers could be displayed
and defended (Toulouse “The Captive’s Position…” 38). Mary does not seem to
internalize the role of the traditional image of the female captive – she is not
quite passive. Her womanly strength is proved first of all by the fact that she
tests her own behaviour under duress against that of three other women: her
elder sister, Elizabeth Kerleey, her companion captive, goodwife Joslin, and her
captor mistress, the Indian squaw sachem Weetamoo. She is symbolically
situated between Elizabeth who asked to die and was gunned down and Joslin
who despaired (a mortal sin) and was also killed. As we can read at the
beginning of her narrative, Mary chooses to go with the Indians: “I chose rather
to go along with those (as I may say) ravenous beasts, than that moment to end
my days” (Rowlandson 300). Choosing here seems to run counter the Puritan
conviction of the predestination of the human beings. The woman accepts the
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trials of captivity by choice. Even if the other alternative was death, her act still
proves strength and determination. From now on, she will have to overcome the
physical dangers of abuse and starvation, the spiritual dangers of pride and
despair and the psychological dangers of permanent emotional damage, depression
and guilt (Derounian Stodola, “Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives” XXII).
She does not seem to be the sort of person to stand still and passively wait on
God’s deliverance. She is aware of the fact that one must fight to get
redemption.
At the opening of the narrative we find Mary Rowlandson, Puritan wife
and mother, suddenly alone, without the elements that offered her a place in the
world as woman: “my children gone, my relations and friends gone, our house
and home and all our comforts-within door and without-all was gone (except my
life)” (Rowlandson 300). Her ordinary life is deeply disturbed, her identity
blurred, her familiar surroundings destroyed and she finds herself in the situation
of recreating herself, outside Christian male authority. In such a conservative
world in which the identity of the woman was shaped by her being married and
having children, and, in Mary’s case, also by having a high social position, this
brutal change constitutes a most terrible challenge. Nevertheless, we find
Rowlandson courageously taking her new life as it is and trying to survive and,
as Amy Shrager Lang points out, “in making a new self she moves simultaneously towards submission and self – sufficiency” (21). In fact, her whole
experience in captivity is caught between two conflicting images: that of Mrs
Rowlandson, a mistress in her house, the wife of a Puritan minister and that of a
servant for an Indian family, this time being herself regarded as an outsider.
A spiritual journey asks for patience but survival makes different
demands. That is why the prisoner tries to find a place among the “heathens” in
a literal and spiritual wilderness. The inner voice tells her to follow Job’s model
but still, another voice argues the necessity of accommodating to the Indian life,
one elevates her to symbolic significance – she is a type of the spiritually
redeemed by God, and the other one is a mere gut level response to her wolfish
appetite and her weakness (William 6). However, not one moment does she
forget to highlight the meaning of her afflictions. Physical sensations of satisfied
hunger are placed on a higher level signaled by the recurrent quoting from the
Bible: “I was fain to take the rest and eat it as it was, with the blood about my
mouth, and yet a savoury bit it was to me: For to the hungry soul every bitter
thing is sweet” (Rowlandson 307). By the Sixth Remove, we come to find out
how she cleverly uses her skills as a housewife in order to survive. Her knitting
work is one of the essential helping elements. She starts making shirts, caps,
stockings and gets, in turn, money or, more important, food. She is also aware of
the value of what she does and calls for her payment when this is not done.
Thus, as Annette Kolodny observes, she managed “to carve out an economic
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niche for herself with her knitting skill” (18). Thus Mary refuses an orthodox
selfhood while trying to state her own autonomous identity and her capacities
independent of external requests. As a result of employing her strength and
resourcefulness during captivity, Mary experiences a disjuncture with the gender
expectation of her culture. Moreover, Bryce Traister points out that on the
hermeneutical level, “the text if not its author, refuses to consent to the terms of
representation established either through the orthodox interlocution of Increase
Mather, or through the biblicist typology of Job” (323) which accounts for what
the same author calls Mary’s secularism. The concept would account for Mary’s
difficulty in assimilating the disturbing past experiences as paralleled with the
way modernity understands religion as an emblem of the past which cannot be
assimilated. This would thus be another layer of the dissent Rowlandson voices
through her narrative. In such an interpretative key, the textual voice is first of
all a personal one3, it belongs to the afflicted captive and her post-trauma
insomnia4 and only then a story for the communal use of ever self-scrutinizing
Puritans.
THE DOUBLE DISSENT
For the socially and spiritually superior, the Indians represented evil and
corruption. Moreover, as Cristopher Castiglia points out, stories of helpless
white women were circulated in order to justify the extermination of the natives
and the image of demonic Indians was employed in order to keep women close
to home (Castiglia 37). Even from the Preface, the reader is reminded of “the
causeless enmity of these barbarians against the English and the malicious and
revengeful spirit of these heathen” (qtd. in Schrager Lang 29). In agreement with
this view, Mary rejects at first the Indian worldview as it is foreign to the
Christian one and, faithful to the Manichean perspective of her community, she
applies the Puritan stereotypes to the captors. Nevertheless, the reader senses a
kind of duality in this respect as the captive approaches the cultural threshold. At
the dynamic beginning of the narrative, the Indians attackers are called
“murderous wretches”, “bloody” and “merciless heathen”, “infidels”, “wolves”,
“black creatures” (Rowlandson 299-300). This description situates them in the
realm of the evil, marked by “savageness and brutishness”, not only by physical,
3
4
As the same Bryce Traister puts it, “the Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs.
Mary Rowlandson, refuses to subordinate to its titular abstraction, The Sovereignty and
Goodness of God” (325).
Towards the end of the narrative, Mary confesses: “I can remember the time, when I used to
sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts, whole nights together, but now it is other ways
with me” (327).
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but also spiritual blackness; all negative features seem to go hand in hand with
being heathens, infidels, that is not Christian. Consequently, their attack against
people belonging to the Church of Lancaster takes a deep spiritual meaning,
beyond the political one. Mary views all their acts as primitive, sub-human and
demonic. Furthermore, she even has the rather naïve attempt to introduce her
perspective on social hierarchy in the Indian community and feels offended
when realizing that their social reality does not match the one she was used to,
the one considered of divine order. Any instance of Indian benevolence towards
her is interpreted as God’s benevolence, the Indian being only instruments
through which divinity communicates the perpetual protective involvement of
providence. Even when she is kindly treated, Mary is certain that this generosity
is from God. The Bible that an Indian gives her and that will accompany and
soothe her every minute, comes from God and has no relation to the man’s
intentionality: “I cannot but take notice of the wonderful mercy of God to me in
those afflictions, in sending me a Bible” (Rowlandson 304). The author’s belief
that God was behind all the events of her captivity leads to denying the captors’
humanity.
Starting with the twelfth Remove though one can sense a change of
perspective. There are instances in which Mary really stops from her perpetual
meditation and analysis of her sufferance in order to have and offer glimpses of
the Indian way of life and cultural identity. Thus, the text contains instances of
social and cultural Indian life that was unknown to Puritans at the time showing
the woman’s position in Indian community, a status different from the puritan
one. The reader finds out about fight rituals:
The manner was as followeth: there was one that kneeled upon a deerskin, with
the company round him in a ring who kneeled, and striking upon the ground
with their hands, and with sticks, and muttering or humming with their mouths.
(Rowlandson 320)
and dressing standards for ceremonies:
He was dressed in his holland shirt, with great laces sewed at the tail of it; he
had his silver buttons, his white stockings, his garters were hung round with
shillings, and he had girdles of wampum upon his head and shoulders. She had
a kersey coat, and covered with girdles of wampum from the loins upward.
(Rowlandson 323)
When recounting the sudden change in the squaw attitude and the way she
embellishes herself, Mary does not apply any Puritan standards. She is rather
amazed and overcome with perplexity or attracted by womanly things rather
than judging and blaming:
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But (to my amazement and great perplexity) the scale was soon turned; for
when we had gone a little way, on a sudden my mistress gives out; she would
go no further, but turn back again, and said I must go back again with her, and
she called her sannup, and would have had him gone back also. (Rowlandson
311-312)
A severe and proud dame she was, bestowing every day in dressing herself neat
as much time as any of the gentry of the land: powdering her hair, and painting
her face, going with necklaces, with jewels in her ears, and bracelets upon her
hands. (Rowlandson 319).
The Puritan marriage covenant proves to be utterly different from the Indian
marital customs, but Mary does not share one feeling of disregard: “My master
had three squaws, living sometimes with one, and sometimes with another one
“(Rowlandson 319). Moreover, Mary, a colonist and a Puritan minister’s wife
was “Mistress” only as a counterpart to her husband’s being “Mister” whereas in
the tribe mistress (as the case of the female leader of the Pocassets, Weetamoo)
was the female equivalent of “master” (Derounian Stodola “The Indian
Captivity Narratives…” 4). Both wives and household mistresses, Mary and
Weetamoo, have authority in different degree and Mary seems to admire the
latter’s power within the tribe.
Rowlandson seems to have a real close relationship with Philip and this
is underlined by the episode when he helps her with the washing: “… he fetched
me some water himself, and bid me wash, and gave me the glass to see how I
looked” (319). This would run counter the image of the Indian as devilish,
brutal, and inhuman; especially the representation of Metacomet deconstructs
Rowlandson’s preconceptions about the Indians. In this Nineteenth Remove,
which is one stage before her final and farthest removal from the Christian
community, the city and human civilization itself, we see what Ralph Bauer
called “The European in the looking glass” (674). The glass reveals, in frontier
writings, the savage “other”, but here there is the savagery of the intruding
colonist. Seen through Lacanian lenses the episode represents the shaping up of
her new identity, beyond male authority - her identity as a Subject. There also
other statements underlining Indian good behaviour: she did not see at least one
drunk Indian and the captors showed no incivility - “not one of them offered the
least imaginable miscarriage to me” (Rowlandson 310), “yet not one of them
ever offered me the least abuse of unchastity to me” (326)5.
5
These words could be seen as both a sign of appreciation for Indian behavior and the former
captive’s intention of annihilating any suspicion coming from her family or community
members regarding her bodily integrity; she returns with the same body and an improved self,
an image that is more acceptable than a physically abused woman.
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Towards the end of the narrative, as a coda so to say, there is Mary’s
surprise at what she calls the “the strange providence of God in turning things
about when the Indians was at the highest, and the English at the lowest”
(Rowlandson 325). She talks about the “slowness and dullness of the English
army” (324) as opposed to the swiftness and great survival skills of the Indians:
I can but stand in admiration to see the wonderful power of God in providing
for such a vast number of our enemies in the wilderness, where there was
nothing to be seen, but from hand to mouth. (325)
It is worth mentioning the fact that at this point Mary singles out all the
moments that have led her to the conclusion that God’s providence is strange, by
organizing them in distinct paragraphs noted from 1 to 5. The author thus creates
a parenthesis within the story, an invitation for the reader to go back to the text
and look for clues as if having gone through a mystery story. The tone is one of
surprise and awe towards God’s intricate ways of reaching His holy ends, but
the reader may sense a touch of irony which would account for her dissent from
imperialist policies. Interestingly enough she quotes from Psalm 81 here for the
second time in the narrative6 implying a guilt that belongs to the community she
stems from. Mary uses thus her text to admonish her brethrens with her feminine
voice speaking with a jeremiad-like tone as if she were preacher.
All these examples seem to almost place her a little beyond the first
stage of the liminal status towards a possible accepting of the new culture thus
dissenting from certain Puritan ways. Signs of hybridization are though almost
inexistent and one may only speculate on her actually starting to internalize
aspects of the Indian culture. Sure is only the fact that Mary has the courage to
be another kind of captive and to make use of her experience in order to
communicate not only the expected religious message but also one meant to
adjust the Puritans’ image of the Indians. Her account, even if limited regarding
its contribution to the history of the Indian wars, becomes through its depicting
of both episodes of Indian life and cruel trials of captivity what Slotkin and
Folsom called
a uniquely human and touching document both as a record of incredible
fortitude under hardship in which the inner life is as carefully observed as the
outer and as an account of the Indians that couples genuine human sympathy
with a hatred almost unimaginable to one who has not gone through her
experiences. (304)
6
“Oh, that my People had hearkened to me, and Israel had walked in my ways, I should soon
have subdued their Enemies, and turned my hand against their adversaries” (Psalm 81. 13-14
qtd. in Rowlandson 325).
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THE CHALLENGE OF LIMINALITY FOR THE PURITAN CAPTIVE
DISSENTER
The concept of liminality implies being on both sides of a boundary (a term that
suggests a limit) or threshold (which contains the idea of transition), a definition
which accounts for the difficulty of the process and the strength of those who
have to deal with it. The narrator’s observations are written in a post-liminal (?)
stage but the captivity per se and the captive are placed in between – between
civilization and wilderness and between the status of a sinner and that of the
saved/chosen one. The captive is in the contact zone of two cultures; as Mary
Louise Pratt defined them, contact zones are
social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in
the context of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism,
slavery or their aftermaths. (33)
In a time of political friction and tough colonialism, Mary the captive has to
come to terms with a new environment and new social meanings in the attempt
of surviving without giving up the values defining her life. She is at the border
and on the threshold, in between worlds and, interestingly enough, this limitsituation offers her the appropriate context for using, even if veiled, her feminine
voice. In other words, there seems to be inter-dependence between hardships and
manifestations of feminine will. The quiet life of family worries and chores does
not provide the same testing duress as captivity in the wilderness7.
There are some instances in the text that account for her being in the
process of stepping over the threshold stage. One first sign of adjustment is
Mary’s finding a means of survival by offering her knitting skills in exchange
for money or food: “... and I was not a little glad that I had anything that they
would accept of, and be pleased with” (Rowlandson 310). Also, while at first
the Indian food is seen as unclean and awful (features that are coherent with the
general view on the Indians) it becomes savory by the Seventh Remove and this
goes hand in hand with the captive’s opening new eyes on the Indian way. She
thus becomes familiar to eating habits and human relationships customs of her
captors’ community. In the Nineteenth Remove, she records the moment when
she goes to the Sagamore council to discuss the ransom sum: “When I came I
sat down among them as I was wont to do, as their manner is” (320).
She has a liminal status, in between territories and at the same time in
between spiritual states. The split in her narrative tone accounts for this
7
The motif of the solitary pilgrim, separated from family and civilization appears also in another
best seller from across the ocean, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, to which Mary
Rowlandson’s narrative is a counterpart in this respect.
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Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative. Dissent And Liminality
threshold stage. There seem to be two voices – one recording the physical
journey and one inserting biblical quotations and the conclusions drawn from
this experience. Moreover, while one shows contempt for and fear from the
captors, the other gives detailed descriptions of the Indian life offering one of
the first “on site” portrayals of the natives and their customs and perspective on
life and death. In the same realm of contraries, the text constructs a seminal
opposition between what Katherine Gillespie calls “an ideologically encoded
and hermetically sealed English culture on the one hand and a subversive antiEnglish, a-systemic New World nature on the other” (48). Hence, a stylistic
dichotomy which, according to Michelle Burnham, frames the narrative and is
even more apparent within it “where it becomes clear that the story is neither
about her capture nor her eventual release, but about the journey between” (60).
In other words, during the three months of her captivity, Mary belongs wholly
neither to the Puritan nor to the Indian cultural system (Burnham 64). The
liminal position generates though a culturally altered subjectivity different from
the original Puritan subjectivity. The captive situated in such a zone with blurred
borders is less Puritan than Puritan-becoming-Indian, her narrative becoming
thus a site for the encounter of both stereotyped images and real and objective
ones. This paradox, which in Richard Slotkin and James K. Folsom’s earlier
mentioned words places human sympathy on the same side with unimaginable
hatred, a paradox fed by the threshold stage, is a sign of her (possibly unaware)
dissenting from the image supported by Puritan theology and typology.
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