Fundamentos de la Literatura Norteamericana
1. Mary Rowlandson
Mary Rowlandson was born in 1637 and died in 1711. She was a colonial American
woman who was captured by Native Americans during King Philip's War and held for
11 weeks before being ransomed. Six years after her ordeal, The Sovereignty and
Goodness of God; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary
Rowlandson was published. This text, is considered a seminal American work in the
literary genre of captivity narratives. It went through four printings in 1682 and
garnered readership both in the New England colonies and in England, leading it to be
considered by some of the first American "bestsellers".
Mary White Rowlandson was born in 1637 in England. The family left England
sometime before 1650, settled at Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and moved in
1653 to Lancaster. There, she married Reverend Joseph Rowlandson in 1656. Four
children were born to the couple, with their first daughter dying young.
On February 1675, Lancaster came under attack by Narragansett, Wampanoag and
Nashaway/Nipmuc Indians. During the attack, which was anticipated by residents
including Mary's husband, Joseph, the Native American raiding party killed 13 people,
while at least 24 were taken captive, many of them injured. Rowlandson and her three
children, Joseph, Mary and Sarah, were among those taken in the raid. Rowlandson's 6-
years-old daughter, succumbed from her wounds after a week of captivity.
For more than 11 weeks, Rowlandson and her children were forced to accompany the
Indians as they travelled through the wilderness to carry out other raids and to elude the
English militia. In Rowlandson's captivity narrative, the severe conditions of her
captivity are recounted in visceral detail. Mary Rowlandson and her children moved to
Boston, where she is thought to have written her captivity narrative, although her
original manuscript has not survived. It was published in Cambridge, Massachusetts in
1862, and in London the same year. At one time, scholars believed that Rowlandson had
died before her narrative was published, but she lived for many more years. On 1679,
she married Captain Samuel Talcott and took his surname. She died on 1711, outliving
her husband by more than 18 years.
Following her ransom, Rowlandson is thought to have composed a private narrative of
her captivity recounting the stages of her odyssey in 20 distinct journeys. During the
attack on Lancaster, she witnessed the murder of friends and family, some stripped
naked and disemboweled. Upon her capture, she travelled with her youngest daughter
Sarah, suffering starvation, injuries and depression, to a series of Indian villages. Sarah,
aged 6 years, died on route. Mary and other surviving children were kept separately and
sold as property, until she was finally reunited with her husband. Passages from the
Bible are cited numerous times within the narrative and function as a source of
Rowlandson's solace. The text of her narrative is replete with Biblical verses and
references describing conditions similar to her own, and have fueled much speculation
regarding the influence of Increase Mather in the production of the text.
