Divine Judgement: Intelligent Design in Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative

During King Philips War of 1675-1676, a wave of violence between British colonists and Native Americans crashed over New England. During the months following this war, Mary Rowlandson penned her autobiographical “Narrative of Captivity,” a timeless text that would inspire many other tales of odds overcome during imprisonment. Throughout her piece, Rowlandson pairs her experience with Puritan thought, judging her captors and circumstance through a biblical lens. Mediated by her religion, rather than understanding her captors as wholly evil, she sees them as intentionally guided and designed by a willful God. What’s more, Rowlandson evaluates the design of the native Americans as impressive and admirable, rather than grotesque.

Throughout her story, Mary Rowlandson often demonstrates her peculiar moral system during shared meals with her captors. In her twentieth and final remove, Rowlandson lists her final observations on the nature of the Natives, making odd remarks on their eating habits and stomach for bushmeat. “Yet how to admiration did the Lord preserve them for His holy ends, and the destruction of many still amongst the English,” She writes. “I did not see one man, woman, or child die with hunger.” The sentiment here is surprising — for much of her story Rowlandson describes her captors with disdain and disgust, but here we see something more like admiration. There’s a mix of attitudes in Rowlandson’s confessions to come — but the next few sentences in this scene highlight the writer’s skill for dramatized observation.

Rowlandson’s acute memory translates to rich details of her experience, but such descriptions are often easy to write off as derisive or infuriate. To accentuate her point, Rowlandson details this section with a list of what the natives eat: “They would eat horse guts and ears, and all sorts of wild birds…. Tortoise, frogs, squirrels, dogs, skunks, rattlesnakes; yea, the very bark of trees.” This is a pretty visceral description of the foods that Rowlandson encountered during captivity. Consider the underuse of conjunctions (and overuse of commas) here —an asyndeton— how the passage highlights a will to eat anything through its exhaustive length. By forgoing a summary or conjunctions, Rowlandson highlights the breadth of the Native diet. As an isolated passage, Rowlandson’s voice could read as disgusted and appalled by her captors, but the pacing of this sentence speeds the passage into a more nuanced idea — it’s in her evaluation of these habits that Rowlandson preaches admiration.

In the following sentence, Rowlandson writes that she finds the Native’s capacity for survival under harsh conditions admirable:

“I can but stand in admiration to see the wonderful power of God in providing for such a vast number of our enemies in the wilderness, where there was nothing to be seen, but from hand to mouth.” 

In this paragraph, Rowlandson subverts an expectation of anger and resentment by moving towards admiration of her captors. While Rowlandson still describes her captors as “enemies”, she declares their hardiness impressive. A simplified reading of Rowlandson’s moral philosophy would expect her to beg God to starve her imprisoners, rather than feed and nourish them — but here she does the opposite. As no surprise, Mary Rowlandson’s puritan worldview informs this judgement.

Rowlandson’s admiration for the physical condition of the Natives stems, of course, from the bible. She quotes, during this passage, that:

“It is said, ‘Oh, that my People had hearkened to me, and Israel had walked in my ways, I

should soon have subdued their Enemies, and turned my hand against their adversaries.”

(Psalm 81.13-14) (296)

Here Rowlandson implies that a good Lord would subdue man’s mortal enemies, and act as a divine intervention. The quoting of scripture throughout Rowlandson’s narrative outline a few of her ideas on God – that he is all knowing, that God is all powerful, and that God provides “strange providence” — an omniscient and benevolent force for her people. However, Rowlandson also brings nuance to this belief in the following sentence, writing that:

Our perverse and evil carriages in the sight of the Lord, have so offend Him, that instead of turning His hand against them, the Lord feeds and nourishes them up to be a scourge to the whole land.

These two sentences show a biblical quote and an added interpretation. The caveats here demonstrate that the writer interprets the bible through a punishing, Puritan lens — in which God does not only help his people but aid their enemies to blight them for their sins. Furthermore, her interpretation furthers Rowlandson’s description of the Natives as a moral tool, rather than a wrathful people.

To put her moral evaluation in perspective, consider how the bible guides Rowlandson’s ethics in earlier scenes. Rowlandson many times reads personal and social defeat as God’s punishment, as man failing to live up to his word and commands, attributing the Native American conquests as divine punishment. Towards the beginning of her story, Rowlandson does not shy away from descriptors like “barbarous savages” for her captors — there is certainly a surface level disdain for the natives. But as her narrative shifts and develops, Rowlandson appreciates the natives outside her theory of intelligent design as well, acknowledging their generosity, language, and habits. It’s in this sense that Rowlandson’s moral system not only manifests a Puritan worldview, but reflects a personal growth towards the end of her journey.

Works Cited

• Rowlandson, Mary. “Narrative of Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volumes A&B. 269 – 301. W.W Norton. 2017.