In the seventeenth-century context of King Philip’s War, English settlers and various groups in Native American society contend for territory in the forested landscape of New England. In these conflicts, the wartime practice of holding English captives for ransom gives rise to a uniquely American genre of literature: the captivity narrative. These texts, written by settlers after returning to colonial society, are flooded with loss, grief, and the shocks of sustained cross-cultural interaction. In her 1682 captivity narrative The soveraignty & goodness of God, Mary Rowlandson writes retrospectively on her three months of captivity. Rowlandson narrates her and her captors’ journey through the woods in removes, a series of movements that she sees as more and more physically and spiritually distant from her home. The loss of all familiar things and the painful death of her injured daughter Sarah both shape Rowlandson’s narrative. Grief complicates and distorts Rowlandson’s perception of the landscape around her. While Rowlandson’s captors are familiar with the land and see the spring season as a continuation of cyclical time, Rowlandson herself cannot think in this way. Her sense of grief and loss render all the space around her a “vast and howling Wilderness,” removed entirely from her idea of civilization and home. Her perception is one informed by deep loss and continual grief. Our project maps the grief-stricken perspective of Rowlandson as she moves through the wilderness, the many psychological aspects of her grief so often overlapping.
Notes on our map’s visual component: Grief can be viewed similar to the motion of a wave, starting at a high point that falls into a low point before rising again. To cater this process to Mary Rowlandson, grief’s comparison to a wave is replaced by the comparison to a tree- the fall of its leaves and then its blooming once more. Mary experiences both a physical journey through the wilderness and a mental journey through navigating denial, then anger, sadness, bargaining, and finally moving towards acceptance. The tree begins full of leaves. Moving into anger, the leaves start falling and even the bark can start peeling. Next, the lowest point, depression, where the tree is bare and naked; this is rock bottom. Now, Rowlandson starts picking herself back up as she bargains for more leaves. She moves towards acceptance where the tree is becoming full once again. Grief is not linear, but the model of a tree and its leaves can help people understand the cycle Rowlandson experienced.
The process of grief never lays itself in a perfect linear format, though its fluctuations can be identified through periods of denial leading into anger, next depression, transitioning into bargaining, before lastly, acceptance. Beginning this crucial process to find healing from trauma is denial. Before Rowlandson can dig deep to comprehend in full her new dark emotions, first is a period of waiting, stalling, hesitancy; a tension between fantasy and reality in an effort to push back on what she did not wish to accept. This defense mechanism occurs before jumping into the deep end of her loss and grief. The first few removes have notes of denial hinted throughout. The Lord has always been one of Rowlandson’s top priorities, but her inability to accept her new reality was so far gone that she momentarily discards the value of the Sabbath. “I then remembered how careless I had been of Gods holy time: how many Sabbaths I had lost and mispent, and how evily I had walked in Gods sight; which lay so close unto my spirit.” This blindness carries over to suppress even what grounds her the most, nor could she bring herself to learn the whereabouts of her new location. “We travelled about half a day or little more, and came to a desolate place in the Wilderness, where there were no Wigwams or Inhabitants.” The loss of orientation in the landscape echoes the loss of orientation in her mind. She tries turning her focus away from this new mental state as well as this new location.
The greatest signifier of this state of denial is how she copes with the loss of her daughter, Sarah. In the beginning remove, Sarah is subtly mentioned, not even, "my child" just "one poor wounded babe" for Rowlandson cannot handle taking ownership yet. The second remove adds the word "my": “my wounded Child.” She is now able to take ownership but still not identify. In the third remove, finally, the child is revealed as Sarah, and unfortunately has become only another love for Rowlandson to lose indefinitely. Narrating this is no easy task. The denial is so blinding that she cannot see that the baby’s remaining body needs to be buried. The Native Americans, not so blinded by denial, see what needs to be done and bury the baby. Even before Sarah passed, denial was clouding Rowlandson’s judgment. The young child was suffering with no hope of resurrection. The Native Americans offered to give her a quick, merciful death instead of letting the child suffer a prolonged, miserable one. “Sometimes one Indian would come and tell me one hour, that your Master will knock your Child in the head, and then a second, and then a third, your Master will quickly knock your Child in the head,” but Rowlandson could not take the less painful route into consideration. She wanted a child with no chance of survival to live. The love for her baby was so immense and the concept of death was too intense that denial caused her to overlook what would have been better for Sarah.
This pain was so great that she could not even write her son’s reaction to the news, only, “He asked me whether his Sister Sarah was dead; and told me he had seen his Sister Mary.” Denial prevented her from including her son’s agony; it simply would have been too much. In order to protect herself, in any way she could, her heart was blocked off from acknowledging her son’s distress. As time moves forward, so does Rowlandson, and the static stage of denial transitions to the next.
Immediately following the third remove where she loses Sarah, anger begins to seep in, not explicitly stated but released in other forms. She dives into a heated rant about the Native Americans’ poor treatment towards another pregnant woman. “Amongst them also was that poor Woman before mentioned, who came to a sad end . . . vexed with her importunity, gathered a great company together about her, and stript her naked . . . sung and danced about her (in their hellish manner) . . . they made a fire and put them both into it.” While the action is worth ranting about, the intense aggravation is not matched anywhere else. It is clear she took this as an opportunity to let out some pent-up anger without having to comprehend the root of her rage. Sometimes a person consumed by anger may struggle to find the words to describe how they feel, and this is no less for Rowlandson. “I cannot express to man the affliction that lay upon my spirit.” She is not an angry person in nature, yet the anger she does not like to acknowledge affects her through lack of words. Though not directly stated, her anger can be identified in the removes following the loss of Sarah.
Throughout Rowlandson’s strenuous journey, she experiences intense feelings of depression. One of the main causes of this depression stems from the loss of her children, both through death and through physical distance. At the beginning of her journey, Rowlandson expresses her thoughts as constantly “heart-aching” due to her endless memories of her children. She is terrified for her children as a result of them, in her view, being “scattered up and down among the wild beasts of the forest.” Her depression is a never-ending cycle because she is unable to be reunited with her children, and her thoughts are filled with nothing but what could potentially be happening to them. Her emotional state is incredibly unstable, and she “sat down and wept” over the incredible destruction she has endured. Due to this emotional trauma, her body begins to suffer the effects as well. She describes her head as being “light and dizzy” with her knees feeling “feeble.” Rowlandson is in a constant state of depression, and due to this, her body begins to get weak. She explains how her body felt “raw” all throughout the “night and day” and she feels as though it is beginning to not support her anymore. Resulting from the deep sorrow she has for the displacement of her children, her body is frail and vulnerable. As a consequence of Rowlandson’s harrowing and severe loss, a main emotion that takes over her mental and physical state is depression.
As Rowlandson is continually removed, she begins to bargain and process multiple dimensions of her grief by clinging to fragments of English culture through scripture and her observance of the Sabbath. The latter provides orientation in time and preserves Rowlandson’s subjective understanding of order as an English settler. The Bible gifted to Rowlandson is a similarly useful artifact, allowing her to process grief and loss through the lens of her Puritan faith. While each of these are familiar comforts to Rowlandson, they also complicate her situation in Indigenous society, particularly her contemptuous relationship with her captor Weetamoo. In the tense scene of Weetamoo throwing Rowlandson’s Bible out from the home, Rowlandson sees the text as a source of strength while Weetamoo sees a distraction that engenders weakness. As Lisa Brooks writes, Weetamoo would have been familiar with the Bible and its “constraining and containing” influence on Indigenous converts to Christianity (Brooks, 278). Rowlandson’s reading of scripture sustains her as an individual, which is precisely the problem for Weetamoo, who saw her captor as too focused on her own interior world.
Despite the many scenes of cultural clash, Rowlandson gradually bargains for a place in her captors’ society through her weaving. This serves as a form of bargaining both materially and in the abstract, as Rowlandson first barters her goods for food to sustain herself. But beyond sustenance and survival, Rowlandson also negotiates her place in her captors’ culture. She fashions a considerable quantity of clothing for the children of others, perhaps finding a way to wrestle with her own grief and loss as a mother through creation in the material realm of weaving.
During the narrative, Rowlandson finds acceptance and comfort about her harrowing journey through Scripture. Following the death of her daughter and upon finding out her son is ill, she is unable to contain her painful and crushing thoughts. Her mind endlessly races in wonder if her other daughter is safe from harm. She questions, “my poor girl, I knew not where she was, nor whether she was sick, or well, or alive, or dead.” In these dark times, she would turn to her Bible, and read the Scriptures in order to bring her some peace and comfort. She explains how she “repaired under these thoughts to my Bible” and describes how these words were her, “great comfort at that time.” Additionally, she gains immense comfort in her Bible and believes it was the “wonderful mercy of God” that she had access to it. Rowlandson believes that her “dark heart” is shown mercy every time she reads from her Bible. Lastly, she expresses boundless gratitude towards the Lord for gifting her with the Scriptures, and she explains how if she may survive this perilous and dreadful journey, she does not, “desire to live to forget this Scripture and what comfort it was to me.” As a result of keeping her Bible and Scriptures close to her heart, Rowlandson is able to gain peace and acceptance on her extraordinary journey.
As a consequence of Rowlandson’s journey, she endures the five stages of grief: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and finally acceptance. After being separated and removed from her home, she experiences fierce losses and survives many emotional and physical injuries. Through all her suffering, she is able to hold on to what gives her an identity and what gives her hope, and that is her children and her Scriptures. In the harsh experiences of her captivity and return, she transcends the overlapping five stages of grief, and ends her journey moving towards acceptance.
Comments