Mary Rowlandson Analysis

Author Mary Rowlandson wrote a narrative describing her captivity by the native Indians during 1670s. Her book then published in 1774. She organized her thoughts by grouping them into various “removes” which was her displacements with the Indians. The overall structure flows chronologically from the first remove to the twentieth one. Before she jumpstarted to the first remove, she gave a brief introduction of how it began. Upon close reading her texts, I will divide the analysis into four main components namely the structure, context, content, and the abstraction.
The structure of this text as mentioned earlier is followed the chronological order from the first day of the captivity to the last remove. The author acts as a narrative describing
In other words, what drives her to write her experience was. In each remove, she wrote down what the Indians did to her followed by her belief in her religion. I believe that what happened to her was one of the worst things she had ever confronted. She lost everything such as her wealth, her husband, and her children. The fact that she could calm herself down and tried to make sense of those lost is to use her belief in God. Her work is not about how God tortured her by putting her and her family in those circumstances, but to show us how he saved her from various possible deaths. In the second remove page 135, she describes how she almost died by travelling with extreme difficulty. However, she could managed it by the glory of God. She wrote “….I must sit all this cold winter night upon the cold snowy ground, with my sick child in my arms, looking that every hour would be the last of its life; having no Christian friend near me, either to comfort or help me. Oh, I may see the wonderful power of God that my Spirit did not utterly sink under my affliction: still the lord upheld me with His gracious and merciful spirit, and we were both alive to see the light of the next morning” (Rowlandson,
First, I could imply that the society at that time was religion-base, anarchy, no humanity, filled with racism. As mentioned above, the main part of her work is about how God saved her from those tragedies. Her work acts as a testimony for other believers. Besides this, she describes how people at that time killed each other without dealing with laws or jail. They murdered each other like a piece of cake with no sympathy at all. The victims were chopped on the heads with the hatchet, stripped naked and many more. Her use of words also demonstrate how she discriminate the Native Indians with her white races. She called them “barbarous creatures”, “black creature” and that their living “resemble as hell”. Overall, we might question how this literature tells about Americans as whole. It tells us that our society has changed from those situation to a place where freedom, humanity, and sympathy occurs. Nobody could kill anyone and live freely. They must confront with our laws. Though religion still plays a key part in everyone’s