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Mary Rowlandson Sovereignty And Goodness Of God Analysis

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An Obfuscation Between the Binary of the Uncivilized and the Puritans In her narrative “Sovereignty and Goodness of God,” published in 1682, Mary Rowlandson, for the benefit of the afflicted and for the dearest of friends, offers to readers an unforgettable vision of the experiences she witnessed under the captivity of the Native Americans during the late 1600s in the New World. Over the course of eleven weeks in captivity across eighteen different communities, Rowlandson recounts her experiences of learning about the values and culture of the Native Americans, as she desperately searches for food and shelter. This experience of living amongst Native Americans provides Rowlandson with the opportunity to forge a strong connection between the natural world and herself. In turn, Rowlandson fuses a Native American and Puritan perspective, which begins to dissolve a barrier of difference between the two clashing cultures and ideologies. Rowlandson embodies the qualities of a Native American while simultaneously deconstructing the Native/Puritan binary, allowing the experience of captivity and a strong belief in God to bend her emotional and mental capacity towards accepting and assimilating into Native American cultures. Rowlandson’s assimilation into Native American society and the deconstruction of the binary are illustrated in the …show more content…

The captivity and savage behavior forced upon her makes her gradually alter her Puritan view of the world, ultimately dissolving the barrier between the two clashing ideologies. As Rowlandson forges a strong connection with the natural world of the Native Americans, she suggests that, at a fundamental level, both cultures and ideologies share many

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The narrative offers an account which can be used to describe the particularly puritan society based on the ideals of Christianity and the European culture. It offers a female perspective of the Native Americans who showed no respect to the other religious groups. The narrator makes serious observation about her captors noting the cultural differences as well as expectations from one another in the society. However, prejudice is evident throughout the text which makes the narratives unreliable in their details besides being written after the event had already happened which means that the narrator had was free to alter the events to create an account that favored her. Nonetheless, the narrative remains factually and historically useful in providing the insights into the tactics used by the Native Americans

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