Mary Rowlandson's A Narrative Of The Captivity And Restoration

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In “A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration”, Mary Rowlandson portrays her captors in more than one way. Rowlandson shifting from describing all of her captors to be similar to savages, to describing a few captors that exhibit kindness to Rowlandson. This variation of the captors’ portrayal demonstrates the differentiation between writing a conversion narrative to writing an objective survival story. When Rowlandson writes about her first days being a captive, she describes the natives with an extremely negative tone. Rowlandson describes one day: “Now away we must go with those barbarous creatures… which made the place a lively resemblance of hell” (271). Because of her great suffering, from being separated from her children to the loss …show more content…

This, however, is not the case, according to Rowlandson’s writing later in the narrative. On page 280, Rowlandson describes a relationship that helps her survive: “There was a squaw who spake to me to make a shirt for her sannup, for which she gave me a piece of bear” (280). Rowlandson is able to feed herself by doing “women’s work” (sewing) and trading with various Indians for food. This shows that not all of her captors were absolute savages as she previously mentioned. Moreover, some of her captors do not treat her cruelly at all, some even treated her with kindness. On page 281, Rowlandson describes a squaw that was so kind to her: “...there found a squaw who showed herself very kind to me, and gave me a piece of bear… and gave me some ground nuts to eat with it: and I cannot but think how pleasant it was to me” (281). This shows that some of the captors showed kindness to Rowlandson, differing from Rowlandson’s previous description of “barbarous creatures”. Rowlandson includes these anecdotes in her narrative to demonstrates some of the kindness shown to her through the providence of God, which somewhat conflicts with her previous motive to show her immense suffering, because Rowlandson was attempting to be observant and show her readers also an objective view of her

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