AML 4213: Journeys to America
Spring 2012

WHY ROWLANDSON’S MEMOIR WILL BECOME A FAVORITE TEXT:

At first, it will take you sometime to get oriented to Rowlandson, who seems to be quoting the Bible in every other paragraph.

So, the first tip is to see that she’s desperately trying to match her life with exemplars from the Bible.  And the match-up, although giving her solace sometimes, ultimately leaves her vexed in the wilderness.  Read between the lines, try to sense her emotional travail every time she cites scripture.

The second tip is just to hear how human and touching her story is!  Imagine traveling, in the dead of winter, wounded yourself, with a dear child in your arms, mortally wounded. You are really, really angry, but you can’t get angry at God, and you can’t demonize the Indians too much because, after all, you have to survive and learn their ways.

The third tip is to keep in mind the oddity or “trick” of all autobiographies: they take you through chronologically the life-story of the author in real time, and yet are also written in hindsight.  This means the beginning of the narrative is, in a sense, the ending of the narrative; and it means that everything written, consciously or not, is written for rhetorical effect.

Note, especially, how she begins by demonizing the Indians but in due time gives us a much more complicated (almost anthropological) perspective.

Note, how she has to tell an “official” story (of the Christian soul in and redeemed from the wilderness) but how, ultimately, inadequate that story is.

Note, especially towards the end, when she meditates, in the stillness of the night, upon her whole ordeal, weeping in joy for her endurance via faith, weeping in grief, for her lost child—if you are not moved, you have a heart of  stone.

I’ll leave it to the very competent introduction to our edition to chart out the historical context of King Phillip’s War and genre of captivity narrative. I will only add this is one of the very best pieces of recollected experience you will ever read; you are in for a treat.

SOME STUDY QUESTIONS, PROCEEDING ROUGHLY SEQUENTIALLY THROUGH THE TEXT:

A. IMAGES OF INDIANS

1. How does she initially regard the Indians (keep in mind the trick about autobiographical writing above, in which the beginning is the end): are they always bestial and hellish, wasteful, and deceitful; or does she, a little way in, humanize them (example: they have difficulty fleeing with their aged tribe members); or does she, in a more “meta” level, stumble over seeing them as diabolical and yet also agents of God?  Or all of above?

2. Cotton Mather (one of those Puritians who was into burning witches) saw King Phillip as the ant-christ; but note how, when Rowlandson actually meets the Indian leader, she describes him as being rather civil!

3. Note, how the narrative proceeds, detailing the realities of her experience in the wilderness, Rowlandson becomes increasingly “anthropological” or even “novelistic”: she gets specific about Indian customs of cleanliness and even offers (it’s a somewhat obscure episode) a satiric scene of jealousy when her “master” seems too involved with her.  Do you see how there are different genres competing: the allegorical story of a good Christian in the heathen wilderness, but also the novelistic genre in which there are superfluous novel-like dialogue/descriptions (this, before the “novel” existed).

B. WHY DOESN’T SHE TRY TO ESCAPE? IS SHE PASSIVE?

1. I don’t want to spell out too much here, because this is a potential paper topic.  But consider: maybe she is passive because her affliction might be a punishment (in her mind); maybe she is passive per my hospital analogy in the previous Puritan lecture (put yourself in the hands of God, as if to be in captivity is to be held captivated by God, Job-like); maybe she isn’t passive at all and becomes self-reliant, but has no vocabulary to state such because “feminism” is about two centuries+ in the future (her husband isn’t going to say “go girl, go!”)?

2. Maybe “we” cannot really understand her at all; just as the “Indians” are a puzzle to her, Puritan culture in the 17^th century is ultimately alien to us? This one of the BIG literary-philosophical questions: do we assume “great” texts are universal and trans-historical—good for all ages; or do we need to respect the historical “otherness” and really, really do our homework to fathom such … thus New Historicism in the Literary Theory tip in the last lecture?

C. HOW DOES SHE EVALUATE HER AFFLICTION?

1. Again, many interpretive options: perhaps she deserves her punishment…. She claims to have neglected the Sabbath, indulged in tobacco, and in general has been careless in her ways towards God.

2. Hmmm. Regardless of above, is she really satisfied with an “afflicting” God? Does she ever seem impatient with God; is she masochistic for more affliction; does God, perversely, both script her ordeal and provide succor?

3. At a key moment she turns to the Bible to explain her predicament; and the passage she stumbles upon says, in brief, (God speaking): “my ways are not your ways; you can’t figure me out, live with it!”

D. WHAT GETS IN THE WAY OF OFFICIAL MESSAGE?

A whole lot….

1. If the Indians turn out to be humanly complex, they cannot exactly be Satanic agents (or agents of God).

2.  She lost a child, and yet doesn’t dwell on her mourning a lot in the wilderness; she is repressing grief and anger perhaps.

3. She keeps returning over “strange” providences, and cannot get over at all how inept the Puritan men were in coming to the rescue (at the end of her narrative).

4. And finally, she suffers intense insomnia: she can’t stop thinking: she is perplexed or amazed at God’s ways; everyone else is, if you will, psycho-theologically asleep, but she is awake and rather special in the still hours of the night; she is special because she had been afflicted, she is deeply angry because she has been afflicted.

 Literary Theory Tip:

Rowlandson has been approached over the last two decades from a diverse array of literary theory perspectives—New Historical, Deconstructive, Feminist, Marxist (in the sense that she encounters a different type of economy and system of trade when she lives with the Indians).  Here, rather than give you a tip about theory per se, I want to emphasize a readerly skill. 

You are an English Major, or like taking English literature classes, for a reason I will presumptuously articulate for you (!): you like nuances of the heart, you like to analyze the human condition, you like, even more fundamentally, to make a lot out of a little.  Is that not what analysis is—looking at an art object or text, and whipping up an interpretation? 

So, as an exercise, focus on the last pages of Rowlandson’s narrative when she is pondering late in the evening, awake when everyone else is asleep.  Could you write 4 pages analyzing these several paragraphs?  How about 10 pages?  How about a whole scholarly treatise (such has been done).  I ask you, in essence, to stare hard: meaning happens the harder and the more devotedly you look.  Don’t start from big themes (SparksNotes bs!); look at what is before you… read the nuances between the lines, make connections between one singular passage and a galaxy of other passages, learn to say much about the most miniscule (seemingly so, under the sun).  When you learn to do that, your own inward subtly will expand and blossom.

Second exercise: after you’ve done above, try the following.  Choose a number between 10 and 50.  Now turn to page xx of Rowlandson (the number you chose). Put your finger in the middle of the page.  Could you write 2 pages on the passage beneath your finger?  Yes, you can let the passage resonate with other passages, yet the trick is to see that interpretation is not, ultimately, about the “meaning” of the passage, but the “meaning” you bring to the passage. That is what it means to be human: to make the inert meaningful.  I’m getting rather philosophically ponderous here, but I mean what I say.  To be human is not to analyze something, but to analyze nothing, if you get the drift. Zen saying: the sharpest sword is your intellect.  Learn to appreciate it and trust your capacity to come up with meaning. 

Third exercise: let me introduce the rhetorical and philosophical notion of dialectical thinking.  Thesis… antithesis… synthesis.  You make a statement, complicate it with its opposite, and then seek a resolution.  Example: I love my mother because she loves me; I hate my mother because she smothers me with affection (she doesn’t allow me to be independent); I respect my mother because I understand she has to, implicitly, struggle in the vexed son/mother relation.  Now, translate that dialect way of thinking to Rowlandson: she hates the demon Indians; she must live with the demon Indians, and to that extent, “appreciate them”; she cannot sleep because her moral system has been transfigured or learns autonomy/power of her own by living with the Indians.  Got it…. Build your analysis/essays around an emergent tension/opposition.  Once you get the hang of this, any English paper you will have to write will become a breeze. (well, sort of…)