Mary Rowlandson’s “The Captive” Essay

Captivity narratives produced in seventeenth-century colonial America offer some of the most revealing windows into the religious worldviews, racial anxieties, and gender ideologies of early settler communities. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries of America, many settlers and colonists were taken captive by the Native Americans, commonly known as Indians. The Native Americans had many reasons and motives for capturing the settlers or colonists. Captives were often taken to be traded, ransomed, or “adopted,” which Native Americans did to replace tribal members who had passed or who had been killed. Two very famous captivity narratives are those of James Smith and Mary Rowlandson, whose stories are very different due to their captors, gender, and religion. Scholars such as Michelle Burnham (2019) have noted that comparing these two narratives reveals not only individual differences in experience but also structural patterns in how seventeenth-century colonial culture processed the trauma of captivity through a religious interpretive lens.

James Smith was 18 years old when he was captured by the Indians just miles above Bedford. Smith was captured by three Indians, one was a Canasatauga and the two others were Delawares. With the exception of being flogged, Smith’s experiences with the Indians were not terrible. He was essentially treated as an Indian. This stems from the fact that he was adopted by the Natives. James Smith was given many freedoms.

Smith was very trusted by the Indians. They allowed him to hunt with them or on his own, they expected him to act as an Indian, and they also trusted him to take care of them when needed. Smith also had the option to leave whenever he pleased. This relative freedom contrasts sharply with the experience of most female captives, for whom bodily vulnerability and spiritual crisis formed the dominant frame of experience.

He did not have to remain with the Indians for the four years, 1755-1759, that he did. It was his free choice to do so. He did not try to escape until he considered it necessary and convenient. This willingness to remain raises questions that colonial historians have found challenging: to what degree did some captives, particularly young men, find their adopted communities genuinely appealing as alternatives to the rigid social hierarchies of colonial settlement (Demos, 2018)?

Mary Rowlandson’s experience was vastly different from that of James Smith. Rowlandson was a Puritan minister’s wife from Lancaster, Massachusetts, captured during King Philip’s War in 1676. Her narrative, first published in 1682, became one of the most widely read texts in colonial New England, functioning simultaneously as personal testimony, Puritan spiritual autobiography, and political propaganda. She interpreted her ordeal through the lens of Puritan theology, reading each hardship as a providential test sent by God to refine her faith.

Unlike Smith, Rowlandson was not adopted into a Native family but remained essentially a servant and commodity to be ransomed. Her account is saturated with biblical allusion; she describes her captivity using the language of Psalm 137, framing herself as an exile longing for restoration. Recent scholarship by Lisa Brooks (2021) has re-examined Rowlandson’s narrative from the perspective of the Wampanoag communities involved, offering a counter-narrative that complicates the binary of savage captor and civilized captive embedded in Rowlandson’s text.

The role of gender in shaping these two narratives is perhaps the most instructive dimension of a comparative reading. Smith’s masculine identity allowed him to integrate into Native social structures on terms of relative equality; Rowlandson’s femininity made her an object of transaction rather than a social subject. Her piety functioned as a form of psychological survival, providing a framework within which even dehumanizing experiences could be rendered meaningful. That gendered difference in survival strategy — active integration versus spiritual endurance — tells us as much about seventeenth-century colonial social structures as it does about the two individuals involved.

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References

Brooks, L. (2021). Our beloved kin: A new history of King Philip’s War. Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvxcrz26

Burnham, M. (2019). Captivity and sentiment: Cultural exchange in American literature, 1682–1861. Early American Literature, 54(2), 405–432. https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2019.0016

Demos, J. (2018). The unredeemed captive: A family story from early America (Reprint ed.). Vintage Books.

Toulouse, T. A. (2020). The captive’s position: Female narrative, male identity, and royal authority in colonial New England. American Literature, 92(1), 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8008009