Narrative Of The Captivity And Restoration Mary Rowlandson Summary

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 people. 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
“At first they were all against it, except my husband would come for me, but afterwards 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 tool 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.”