Mary rowlandson

Mary rowlandson BY walker732 Mary Rowlandson: A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration In exploring, the captivity of a puritan woman on the tenth of February 1675, by the Indians with great rage and numbers, Mary Rowlandson will portray many different views of the Indians in her recollected Narrative. Starting off with a savage view of ruthless Indian violence, and then after seeing the light of God in delivery of a Bible by an Indian warrior returning from the demise of a near puritan fight, Concluding with the friendly release of her as if she almost became one of the Indian eople.

Mary Rowlandson begins the view of her captors in a negative way, as they brutally mutilate her friends, family and neighbors. On the departure of her first thoughts of captivity, she says “Now away we must go with those barbarous creatures, with our bodies wounded and bleeding, and our hearts no less than our bodies. ” (Rowlandson 130) She endures many graphic images, painted easily, with the embedment it had on her brain.

In Colin Ramsey’s critical essay of ‘Cannibalism and Infant Killing: A System of ‘Demonizing’ Motifs in Indian Captivity Narratives’ he escribes “Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative was the first in a long succession of Puritan captivity accounts that painted Indians as Satanic cannibalistic infant-killers. Rowlandson’s language conveys this message implicitly: she describes the Indians as “a company of hellhounds”, who smash out the brains of some children and shoot others. Thus we were butchered,” she writes, and all the while the Indians were “roaring, singing, ranting and insulting,”–the scene looked to Rowlandson like “a company of sheep torn by wolves”. ” (Ramsey) From this perspective was it that the Indians had no heart, no since of home training or was it a mindset of dangerous foreign enemies before they enter battle? Were these Indians so traumatized by the possibility of over looked violence inflicted on them over time, that caused such a vicious attack on the day which, Mary Rowlandson was captured.

Later in the narrative we will learn that those Indians who inflicted pain on this particular capture or killing spree were possibly the crazy Indians that had to be chosen to fulfill what the tribe required of them as warriors. Our next portrayal of the Indians was that of the delivery of a Bible by an Indian ho had Just burned down a town. Mary Rowlandson says “l cannot but take notice of the wonderful mercy of God to me in those afflictions, in sending me a Bible.

One of the Indians that came from Medfield fight, he had got one in his basket. I was glad of it and asked him, whether he thought the Indians would let me read? He answered, yes. “(Rowlandson 133) At this point Mary had a choice of thinking that it was God and God only who had brought her this Bible at such a critical time or that of the Indians to be decent human beings. From all this murder and disarray, why would anyone ake the time to bring her specifically, a Bible?

She knows this is the will of God but why show it through an enemy, though a face in which she is uncertain of good or evil. Immediately sne reads chapter 28, that ot Deuteronomy where sne thinks as it this is the last sign until the end of her life, but as she kept reading she followed the words of God to cope with the situation at hand. Upon her descent form the tribe’s custody, she encountered the Indians in a new light. At first they were all against it, except my husband would come for me, but fterwards they assented to it, and seemed much to rejoice in it; some asked me to send them some bread, others some tobacco, others shaking me by the hand, offering me a hood and scarf to ride in; not one moving hand or tongue against it. ” (Rowlandson 139) Mary, not sure if it was God’s way of granting her desire, she wanted to leave in peace with no looking over the shoulder. There was an offer to leave in the night, but she declined in which she wanted no problems but a peaceful journey home.

At this point she is viewing her capture, as an exchange or a bartering ool used by the Indians, so why flee the scene and risk further troubles. In Andrew Newman’s Critical essay “Captive on the literacy frontier” he says, “Rowlandson and Johnston both emerged with their cultural identities intact, but their experiences of captivity display the progress of over a century of national identity formation. Rowlandson manifests the raise-the-drawbridge mentality appropriate to a member of a community that already saw itself as being isolated against the World, and was further threatened with immanent extinction. (Newman) This was a ealization of a barrier that needed to be recognized of the New World, where both Indians and Puritans could live under God’s rein. If God were to provide to both races, who is it to say one doesn’t belong? All in all, Mary Rowlandson has taken this as a learning experience in which kept her on the path to God, when one minute she is living amongst loved ones enjoying life, and the next a captive, of a rival Indian tribe. Recollecting the wish of affliction on herself, now that she has experienced her share, she is glad to possess prosperity. Baym, Nina, and Robert S.