User:Tori gardner/sandbox

Mary Rowlandson, later Mary Talcott, led a life that is described by some as long and tedious with a dash of adventure thrown in. Others describe her life as blissful and comfortable with a moment of terror. Whichever side a person is on, one thing can be agreed on: the events in her life will change who she is forever. While more time will be spent comparing and contrasting Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson and Flight of the Sparrow by Amy Belding Brown, there will also be a look at what else is going on in and around the colonies at the time and how Rowlandson inadvertently got involved in King Philip’s War.

Biography
Rowlandson was born in the year 1637 in Somersetshire, England. Her family left England for the New World around 1650 and went to Salem, Massachusetts to settle. Eventually, her family left and moved to Lancaster, Massachusetts, a small town on the frontier. In 1656, she met and married Reverend Joseph Rowlandson. The couple had four children between the years 1658 and 1669.

Historical Context/ Summary
Between the time of King Phillip’s War in 1675 and the ending of the French and Indian Wars in 1763, approximately 1,641 people had been taken hostage that were living in New England during that time. From that, numerous accounts surfaced, mostly involving a theme of redemption of the person’s faith despite their troubles and temptations of the “savage ways” that had been presented to them during their captivity. On February 10, 1675, Mary Rowlandson was taken captive after Lancaster was attacked by Narragansett, Wampanoag and Nashaway Native Americans. King Philip’s War, an armed conflict between Native American inhabitants of what is now the New England states and the colonists, was raging at the time of Rowlandson’s capture and the attack on Lancaster. For the entirety of Rowlandson’s captivity, 11 weeks, the rebellion continued. The conflict stemmed from the obvious intrusion of the colonists onto Native American land. This is an age old dispute that began with the first settlers and continued as the colonists pushed further inland and began setting up towns on the frontier. At the time, colonists were putting an immense amount of pressure on the Native Americans to sell their land and keep moving further inland on the continent, which affected other tribes and caused more tension.

Analysis of Historical Accuracy
The Flight of the Sparrow is generally historically accurate. Although Brown’s novel cannot be considered anything more than a historical fiction novel for leisure, Brown a significant amount of research into the topic and kept to the timeline and experiences the Rowlandson reported in The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. Brown portrayed the attack on Lancaster just the way historians have reported it. The portrayal also matched Rowlandson’s report that she put in her narrative. Brown looked into different aspects of King Philip’s War, the raid of Lancaster, who Rowlandson was spending her time with and also her general interaction with society. A key difference between Flight of the Sparrow and The Sovereignty and Goodness of God is the involvement with Rowlandson’s opinion of her experience. Brown’s novel is a third-person omniscient and the reader knows everything that Rowlandson is thinking. However, Rowlandson’s actual narrative is first person and she only relays the actions that took place. She does not express her opinion on any matters, nor does she explain her thoughts throughout the narrative.

Important Passages
“[S]he stands stock-still on the wide granite door stoop, holding a birdcage, miraculously unscathed. All her senses have exploded wide open. Terror has rendered the world fiercely, acutely luminous, as if even the smallest thing in it is vibrating with meaning.”

This moment is the moment that Rowlandson realizes that everything around her is falling apart. With this realization comes the bitter truth that there is nothing she can do to stop the oncoming slaughter of the people in her town, nor can she prevent being taken by the Native Americans

Stockholm?
A stark contrast between these pieces of literature, however, is the sense the Mary Rowlandson could be experiencing Stockholm syndrome. Stockholm syndrome is a psychological phenomenon that hostages experience in which they express any kind of positive feelings towards their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them. The phenomenon comes out primarily due to the fact that people have a need to survive and knowing that if they identify with their captures, they could survive the ordeal. A person that adopts the views and characteristics of their captures makes them seem dramatically less threatening. In both novels, Rowlandson eventually identified with the Native Americans and defended them in some way. Brown writes, “A wide river lies below, twisting through a long valley. ‘Quinetukqut,’ Weetamoo says. Mary realizes she’s saying the name of the river. She has done this before, offering her the names of places, as if they are gifts, a practice Mary has failed to appreciate. For the first time, she understands how these names give a shape and significance to her new life as an Indian.”

This is just one example among many that show how Brown portrays Rowlandson has begun to grow along the sides of the Native Americans. In the novel, Rowlandson willingly admits that she has become an Indian. She has become one of them and, as stated earlier, she does not wish to return to her life in the Puritan society. Rowlandson is afraid that her time among the Native Americans has made it impossible for her to go back. Rowlandson portrays the same symptoms in her narrative as well. She submitted to her captors and even bonded with the Native Americans, she mistook their lack of abuse for acts of kindness, and had a gratitude for not being killed. While Rowlandson is more and more isolated from the Puritan society, she becomes more and more invested in adapting to the Native American lifestyle. She mentions her “masters wigwam”, which only adds to her willingness to accept the sachem as her master instead of the enemy. Throughout the removes that Rowlandson writes in, she often uses ‘we’ instead of ‘I’, suggesting that bonding aspect of Stockholm syndrome and seeming to identify herself as a Native American. She also begins her narrative using harsh names towards the Native Americans and eventually her opinion changes around the Twentieth Remove.

Purity
A trial that Rowlandson had to face in Flight of the Sparrow was the increasing question of her purity. She was often faced with ridicule, people questioning if she had given her virtue in exchange for food, but there is no mention of that in Rowlandson’s personal account of her captivity. In the introduction of (Enter Title Here), Neal Salisbury explains, “There are suggestions in her narrative and elsewhere that Rowlandson also wrote in order to clear her name with respect to a number of rumors and innuendoes. Shortly after her capture, Nathaniel Saltonstall, a prolific chronicler of the war, took pains in one of his reports to dispel a rumor that Rowlandson had been forced to marry Monoco…”

There were rumors circulating, accusing Rowlandson of having sexual intercourse with Native American men in order to obtain food or other kinds of goods. Once again, someone explains Rowlandson’s innocence, “In the preface to her narrative, the author implicitly repudiates any notion that Rowlandson’s virtue had been violated.”  Rowlandson also mentions in the ninth remove that “not one of them offered the least imaginable miscarriage to me”  which also adds to her defending the Native Americans, a symptom of Stockholm syndrome.