The complete essay of Susan Vanderveer, Josh Brockland, and Brian Ross
Our project aims to map the ground on which Mary Rowlandson stands, both physically and emotionally. Throughout her capture narrative, Rowlandson experiences cognitive dissonance, which stems from her inability to claim ownership of her American identity. Although she is physically in America, she holds tightly to her English heritage, othering the American land, and its people, as a result. Collectively, our project will address the effects that this othering of the land and the Native Americans had on Rowlandson's telling of her story. We aim to map the textual breaks closely in Rowlandson's narrative; Places where her role shifts from religious rhetoric to active participant in remembering the trauma that threatens her ideological position, one that displaces her personal experiences within her writing.
Mary Rowlandson creates a textual break by defining her identity through her previous culture and not her physical, permanent location. Throughout her removal, Rowlandson denies any lineage of American identity. In a more modern sense, she felt that she was strictly an English woman. Rowlandson's notion that she is an English woman first and an American woman second is valid but fabricated. She immigrated to America when she was only two years of age, landing her with the title of being a second-generation immigrant, in our Modern understanding (Baym). To look at this textual break properly, we need to go further than simply addressing the physical land on which Rowlandson stood. Race relations were a critical part of influencing her identity or instead was the lead component in what drove her to fabricate a new identity for herself. Throughout her capture narrative, we see Rowlandson, again and again, reference the English system and its authority; However, she does not mention the American. The otherness that she prescribes to her captors directly influences her inability to identify and claim ownership of the ground on which she physically resides. Mary isn't "standing" on American land; Mary is floating over a textual break which serves as a false sense of distance between her and her captors. (Susan)
One key identity Rowlandson has is her identity as a Christian. This relationship begins as a wholesome belief in God only doing the right thing and being by her side regardless of the things that happen to her. She goes through suffering, but justifies it as holy punishment. When good things happen to her she sees it as mercy or providence. Sometimes these two completely opposite justifications will be right next to each other in the text. For example in the third remove Rowlandson says “...how many Sabbaths I had lost and mispent, and how evily I had walked in Gods sight; which lay so closs unto my spirit, that it was easie for me to see how righteous it was with God to cut off the threed of my life, and cast me out of his presence for ever. Yet the Lord still shewed mercy to me, and upheld me; and as he wounded me with one hand, so he healed me with the other.” She’s convinced that she is simultaneously deserving of punishment, being punished, and being shown mercy. As her journey continues onward it’s clear that holding those things to be true becomes more and more difficult for her.
Later on in the text, towards the end of her journey, Rowlandson seemingly becomes more and more doubtful of God’s intentions. Her justifications and claims of providence begin to disappear. The balancing act of believing that God is on her side, while also believing all the horrible things she has gone through begins to fall apart. Instead we see a more cynical Rowlandson, one whose faith in God seems to have not waned but her trust in God has. She begins to notice how everything seems to go wrong for her, and everything seems to go right for the native Americans. She doesn’t even try to justify this and instead just accepts that God decided it to be so. In the final remove she even goes as far as to say “But what shall I say? God seemed to leave his People to themselves, and order all things for his own holy ends...It is the Lords doing, and it should be marvelous in our eyes.” Clearly she has no explanation to why God could be doing this to her and her people, and in that explanation’s place we have a simple acceptance instead. God has left us and it is so. This leaves Rowlandson not only in isolation from her family, her people, her home, and her God, but her core beliefs as a Christian as well. One interesting theory on this is from Margaret Davis’s paper Mary White Rowlandson's Self-Fashioning as Puritan Goodwife. In it she describes Rowlandson’s submission to God as an act of following the gender norms at the time. There was a belief that women should be submissive in relation to men and especially to God (Davis, 1992). I think this is a valid approach to view Rowlandson’s thoughts and writings in this fashion, but I personally did not see it that way. I would tie this view of God to her religious identity rather than her gender identity. She had a very strict faith in God, and I think her submissiveness came from her faith in God superseding her belief that herself and the English were God’s chosen people. (Josh)
Another aspect of Rowlandson’s narrative which we see occur in profound contrast to its empirical, rhetorical style is the displacement of her personal commentary and feelings within the text. WE see the dichotomies between her two voices, one in the form of empirical narration — which defines Rowlandson’s role within the events, while rhetorical narration obscures and replaces her personal doubt and guilt with detached, impersonal commentary. This can most clearly be seen in her account of her daughter’s death.
Rowlandson is still haunted by the death of her child, as her use of the non-gendered pronoun proves thinking about Sarah as a person rather than a character is unbearable to her. And yet, she structures the narrative to intentionally deceive both the reader and herself, making it seem as though she has accepted Sarah’s death. She writes as though she views her capture and suffering as a test of virtue and faith in the most biblical sense; she can accept Sarah’s death on a one level — the religious — and yet she cannot process it as an individual, as “evidence of the survivor syndrome keeps breaking into the work's otherwise consistent tone to suggest the emotional strain of maintaining an ideologically required position” (Derounian 92).
In examining Rowlandson’s capture narrative, we notice that her identities range from American to English, from active participant in tragedy to distant author. This serves both as a function of her inability to reconcile her past — both English and participant — with her status as American author, resulting in a failed attempt both at closure and reconciliation. Like ink bleeding onto the next page, Rowlandson’s true character, however suppressed by her imagined identities subconsciously finds its way to the surface of her text. (Brian)
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