“And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou?
Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the
earth, and from walking up and down in it”
(Job 2:7).
Pure
Prejudice: A Study of Mary
Rowlandson’s Captivity
by
Scott Chastain
On February 10th, 1675 the town of Lancaster, Massachusetts
was besieged by certain indigenous tribes.
Mary Rowlandson, a well-to-do Puritan housewife, was taken hostage by the
Native American enemy. During her
captivity (which lasted eleven weeks and five days) she described her ordeals in
detail. I intend to argue, based on
her own writings, that her zealous religious beliefs tainted her perception of
her captors in the resoundingly negative to the point she dehumanized them as
animals and demons. More
specifically, how this view blinded her from seeing these tribesmen as human
beings, despite the many kindnesses they bestowed upon her.
There are many comments describing her captors as devils, but first we
shall explore her views of the Native Americans as beasts.
She states, “I chose to go along with those (as I may say) ravenous
beasts,…Now away we must go with those barbarous creatures” (325), “…we
both fell over the horse’s head, at which they like inhuman creatures laughed,
and rejoiced to see it” (327), “Oh!
the outrageous roaring and whooping that there was” (330), “…and
the very next week the enemy came upon our town, like bears bereft of their
whelps, or so many ravenous wolves, rending us and our lambs to death”
(358).
As we can easily see she paints the aborigines as inhuman animals with an
unhealthy appetite, perhaps for human beings!
When we speak of a beast as ravenous we typically mean that it is a
carnivore and probably one that could or would eat a man if given the chance.
There is little discourse in literature about ravenous cows, to
illustrate the point. The use of
“roaring” and “whooping” are sounds made by beasts.
Lions (ravenous beasts) “roar,” and apes “whoop.”
She reiterates the word “ravenous,” this time with a specific animal
in mind.. the wolf. During this era
wolves were linked to violence against humanity, as the legend of the werewolf
attests, so we find support here
for my claim that by “ravenous beasts” Rowlandson intended to depict the
Natives as carnivorous, cannibalistic animals.
Another interesting commentary, on this line in particular, is her
reference to the English children as “lambs.”
Lambs are the offspring of sheep, and if the English children were lambs
then the English adults must be sheep (a frequent prey of the wolf).
Considering her people as “sheep” indicates she meant to infer that
the English were gentle, innocent, and Christian.
Of these three descriptors the latter is the only one resembling fact.
The use of “wolves” and “lambs” here also ties into the
demonizing of the aborigines. In
Christian literature Satan is often described as a “wolf” and Christians as
“sheep or lambs.” Thus we see
here a subtle example of her belief that the “Indians” were diabolical in
the most literal sense. Why she
bothered with such coyness is itself an enigma… as she was certainly less shy
about vilifying the Native Americans throughout the text.
Consider when she describes these folks as, “So like were these
barbarous creatures to him who was a liar from the beginning” (344).
This was an allusion to John 8:44, “Ye are of your father the devil,
and the lusts of your father ye will do. He
was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is
no truth in him. When he speaketh a
lie, he speaketh of his own; for he is a liar and the father of it.”
The image she paints of them sweeping into Lancaster depicts to the
reader a horde of fire-spewing demons, “Thus, these murderous wretches went
on, burning, and destroying before them” (323).
Of course that depiction pales in comparison to this lively Lovecraftian
portrait, “Oh the roaring, and singing and dancing, and yelling of those black
creatures in the night, which made the place a lively resemblance of hell”
(326).
Rowlandson thus described her captors from the inhuman animal to the
chthonic and diabolical. It is
little wonder that she failed to see them for what they really were, another
group of fellow homo sapiens, albeit with a drastically different culture. It may seem intuitive that we should allow somewhat for the
nature of her culture, especially as the English were strangers in a
strange land, and it might be somewhat ethnocentric to judge her beliefs by our
own modern standard. However I do
not intend to wax philosophical in this essay, and therefore will let the actual
events judge themselves.
The actual events indicate that the multitude of kindnesses they poured
upon her were regarded by her as divine intervention and against their natural
“inhuman, and many times devilish cruelty to the English” (360).
For example, she notes how the Native Americans gave her food no matter
how scarce it was, “yet the Lord suffered not this wretch to do me any hurt;
yea, instead of that, he many times refreshed me…” (354).
Even in the face of this man’s kindness she calls him a wretch!
That example also provides us with the personage whom Rowlandson believes
to be behind the many graces of the ‘Indians’... God. She even notes that they provided her with shelter during a
rainy night, while many of themselves slept in the rain: “When night came on we sat down; it rained, but they
quickly got up a bark wigwam, where I lay dry that night.
I looked out in the morning, and many of them had lain in the rain all
night, I saw by their reeking. Thus
the Lord dealt mercifully with me many times, and I fared better than many of
them” (347). Again she attributes
this to God rather than wanting to believe that her masters weren’t innately
evil.
Despite the cultural influences of her time I find it complicated to
explain this obvious bigotry away. I
think that Rowlandson was not unintelligent nor imperceptive, considering the
detailed accounts of her tribulations. Examine
the detail in the following passage: “About
two hours (according to my observation, in that amazing time) they had been
about the house before they prevailed to fire it (which they did with flax and
hemp, which they brought out of the barn, and there being no defense about the
house, only two flankers at two opposite corners and one of them not finished)
they fired it once and one ventured out and quenched it, but they quickly fired
again, and that took” (323). This demonstrates her “amazing” powers of perception
during what must have been a terribly affective event.
It is therefore more difficult to answer for her blatant lack of noting
the plain.
To add insult to injury, Rowlandson was herself less generous than the
Native Americans in this account. During
an incident where she had been given a small piece of tough horse meat, she
quickly devoured the morsel. Upon
seeing an English child having difficulty chewing the meat, she resolved
the matter by snatching the food out from the starving child’s hands
and ate it herself! She seems to
feel no remorse for this action but instead finds a biblical passage to justify
her eating such wretched meat, but does not comment on how wrong it was for her
to deprive a famished infant of food (350)!
The power of prejudice in this entire work is overwhelming, and perhaps
the most grotesque examples are not in so much the outward defamations, but this
mistranslation of action from the doer to God.
While I would not fault a Puritan (or any Christian) from giving praise
to God, I do think that to believe that the only way a person can act in
kindness and humanity is by the intervention of a deity is perhaps an insult to
that deity, and certainly to the people you are defaming.
If I had the opportunity to speak with Rowlandson I would probably chide
her with the ninth commandment: “Thou
shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” (Exodus 20:16)!
