Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative as Environmental Literature with a Window into the Puritan Belief System about the Wilderness
Mary Rowlandson’s village was raided by Natives in 1676 during King Philip’s War (Anderson 602-606). The Native’s captured Rowlandson and her daughter and took the pair with them when they moved through the forest to camping spots where they could hide out from the English. Rowlandson wrote and published her narrative about six years after her husband ransomed her from the Natives for 20 pounds in silver. The narrative overtly had a mission of telling other Puritans how God saved her from the “heathens” in the wilderness. She was to witness to other Puritans just how God worked, using the Natives in fact, to bring her back home. Many historians and other academics used Rowlandson to show how women acted in history, how Natives acted in history, and how Puritans acted in history. However, few academics chose to examine the narrative as a piece of environmental literature. It is very full of environmental descriptions that have her Puritan connotations attached to them. The main belief system that Puritans held onto was that the wilderness was evil and in need of taming. Once the wilderness and all of its inhabitants were tamed, the devil could no longer reside there.
Sezgin Toska opined that nature was a feature of American literature from the onset (424). Toska reported that the Puritans “saw nature as God’s unfinished creation, thus, nature needed to be completed through conquest” (425). Puritans got their view of wilderness from their interpretation of the Bible. One of the scriptures describes Jesus going out into the wilderness for 40 days and nights. While there, the Devil says to Jesus that if Jesus would just do one act of worship to the Devil, he would give all the world to Jesus. Jesus turned him down. Moses also had the Jews wandering the desert for 40 years and they encountered all sorts of trials. What happened to believers in the wilderness was not good. Puritans believed superstitiously that the Devil resided in the wilderness. Some Natives made their homes in the forest, therefore, they were Devils. Over and over, Rowlandson refered to the Natives as heathens. She does not fully trust “praying Indians” either even though they are her brothers in faith (Rowlandson 3).
Andrew Light illuminates more on the word wilderness. He said that there are two different meanings and the type of wilderness Puritans dealt with has the classical meaning rather than the romantic description. He relayed the meaning Puritans attached to the word is the “wilderness is a place that is always marked as the realm of the savage who is . . . thought to be cognitively, or mentally, distinct from the civilized human. The savage is always marked as the thing . . . outside of the classical wilderness, we civilized people, are not” (Light 17). In other words, by thinking Natives are savage, it makes the Puritans believe they are a better class of people. The word divides the civilized from the uncivilized, the Godly from the ungodly. Light goes on to relate that the Natives use the romantic description of the wilderness. They would not think it a place of evil but a place that sustains life and gives shelter. Examining the word wilderness proves just how far apart the Puritans and Natives were from each other. The Natives disliked the Puritans’ encroachment on to their land. At the same time the Puritans wanted to tame the wilderness and the people who lived in it.
Rowlandson had to prove she was untainted by the wilderness when she returned home. Her narrative showed how she did not “become native” but she upheld her Christian beliefs during some of the most trying times. Some other women who the Natives captured decided to stay with the group who kidnapped them. Rowlandson seemed to have Bible verses pop into her head when she needed them so that she could keep focused on surviving and returning to her husband. Since she had spent time in the wilderness, she did have to be purified to enter the congregation again. In the end, Puritans would win the war of 1675-1676. King Philip would die and more Native land taken and tamed. Over time, Natives lost a lot of land and were treated more savagely by Anglos than Natives treated the English.
Works Cited
Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. “King Philip’s Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of
Livestock in Early New England.” JSTOR.
Light, Andrew. “The Metaphorical Drift of Classical Wilderness.”
Rowlandson, Mary. “A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.”
Provided by client.
Toska, Sezgin. “From ‘Howling Wilderness’ to ‘Holy Wilderness.’” Humanitas, 2017.
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