Gender and Creativity in Mary Rowlandson's Indian Captivity Narrative

Abstract

Mary White Rowlandson wrote about her captivity experience in an autobiographical conversion narrative, A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Rowlandson was taken by Narragansetts Indians during King Philips War (1675-1680) and underwent extreme hardships, witnessing horrors and facing the cruelty of her captors toward their prisoners. After her release, her community permitted her to recount her captivity experiences and, in the recounting, to find providential meaning in them. Under oppressive Puritan patriarchy prescribing female silence and passivity, Rowlandson never forgets the experiences transcendental meaning and interweaves throughout her narrative allegories of salvation, not just for her as an individual but also for her own entire race. Through its allegoric nature, her story becomes a representative Indian Captivity Narrative. In addition to adopting the conventions of Puritan conversion narrative, Rowlandson also effectively interweaves her spiritual narrative with the travel narrative, another popular genre. Like other writers of travel narrative, she authorizes herself as a woman writer whose experience is potentially significant to men as well as women. Rowlansons use of travel writing within her narrative allows her to reveal her secular and non-Puritan dogmatic reflections in a very subtle and cautious voice. With this interesting mixture of Puritan conversion narrative and travel literature, Rowlandsons narrative initiates the tradition of Indian Captivity Narrative.