The Columbia History of the American Novel

As documents that defined the boundaries of life and behavior in the Puritan community, American seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury spiritual narratives were mechanical in pattern and restricted in subject matter, and promoted the idea that their writers had the presence of grace in their experiences. Since conversion was not an issue, it was never questioned. Each text was a testimony to the effect that the experiences of its subject conformed to the patterns of feelings and conduct permitted within the confines of the Puritan ethic. It bears mentioning that Puritan spiritual autobiography was not exclusively confined to prose narrative. Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, who also wrote short first-person prose statements, are among those who wrote poetry that falls within the boundaries of this genre.

In their historical and cultural contexts, from the late seventeenth through the middle of the eighteenth century, Indian captivity narratives occupied religious, propagandistic, and sentimental spaces in early American autobiography. The first ones tended to focus on the religious dimensions of captive experience, while later ones became a vehicle for promulgating white hatred of Native Americans and made -31- an argument for Indian removal. The Puritans, believing themselves God's chosen people on a mission to establish the New Zion on this continent, equated Native Americans with the devil, creatures for them to exterminate from the land in a righteous cause. Infusions of melodrama into captivity narratives in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries made them factually exaggerated sensational horror fictions. In The Indian Captivity Narrative: An American Genre (1984), Richard VanDerBeets notes that the compelling pattern in the Indian captivity narrative, regardless of emphasis, is of the Archetypal Hero on an initiation journey from Death to Rebirth. The narratives follow a pattern of the subject's Separation from his/her culture (symbolic death), Transformation (through ordeals that ensure the movement from ignorance to knowledge and maturity), and Return (symbolic rebirth). The focus in Mrs. Mary Rowlandson's narrative is on the religious dimensions of the genre, but the pattern held for all captivity narratives.

On February 10, 1676, Narragansett Indians raided the English settlement of Lancaster, Massachusetts, destroying the town, killing seventeen of her family members and friends, and taking Mary Rowlandson, wife of Lancaster's minister, Joseph Rowlandson (away in Boston at the time), and her three children captives. She was immediately separated from her two older children, ages ten and fourteen, while the youngest, six years old, having been wounded in the raid, died a week after the capture. For eleven weeks Mary Rowlandson lived and traveled with her captors, before she and her two children were released in exchange for Ł20.

In 1677 the Rowlandsons moved to Wethersfield, Connecticut. A year later Joseph Rowlandson died, and in another year Mary, having remarried, dropped out of public view. A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson appears to have been written in 1677, but was not published until 1682. Under the title The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, the narrative was an instant success. A True History established the pattern for the early texts in this tradition: a confirmation of the election of God's people, the piety of the captives, and the justification for Indian removal. Mary Rowlandson's narrative went through four editions in its first year, and twenty-three by 1828. To date, at least forty editions have appeared. -32-

A True History, a story intended to instruct rather than exploit the stereotype of the savage Indian, focuses on Christian affliction. On the superficial level, Rowlandson tells the story of her 150-mile journey with the Narragansetts, but it is the interior journey that holds our attention; the symbolic landscape more than the literal one; and the darkness of the forest that represents that of the soul when God turns his face away. For Rowlandson, her capture was a rupture in the pattern of the daily life of the Puritan mother and marked the loss of everything that gave meaning to her life. Although her Indians are 'murtherous' captors, 'merciless Heathen,' and 'a company of hellhounds,' because she is a faithful Puritan she transcends that symbolic death by finding meaning in her afflictions. In this way she recreates herself, and in the process of transformation seeks to discover what failings led to her punishment. Her duty in captivity is to concentrate on submitting to God's will. Among other things she learns how to provide for herself. During this period, her voice in the text is that of a Christian in the wilderness crying out to God. Her release from captivity assures her of having gained redemption and the promise of salvation. The return is fully accomplished in the writing of her story.

Although admirable for the dignity that its author displays in the face of a terrible ordeal, this text does not inform readers of the author's personal reactions to her trials. Like all spiritual autobiography of its time, A True Story reveals more about the strength of Puritan culture than about the true characteristics of Mary Rowlandson. In a time when women led socially restricted lives, she told her story publicly because it was the end of a process, and those who were able to draw the prescribed lessons from such ordeals were obliged to pass them on to others for their moral instruction. In her words, 'one principall ground of my setting forth these lines is to declare the Works of the Lord, and his wonderful power in carrying us along, preserving us in the Wilderness, while under the Enemies hand, and in returning us in safety again.' Clearly, the narrative was not her story. Her place in the flow of events in eighteenth-century Puritanism was to stand still and wait on her Lord.

Another interesting autobiography of that time was The Journal of Madam Knight, by Sarah Kemble Knight, the only text of its kind in the American genre. Although written in 1704-5, it was not pub-

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lished until 1825. Acting in her own business interests, Knight describes with humor and bravado her arduous and even dangerous journey from Boston to New Haven at a time when women seldom traveled alone. Her story is one of self-confidence and nonconformity to conventions of her day. At the end of each day she made entries in her diary. These reveal inner resources that enabled her to cope with the obstacles she encountered. The trip took her exactly five months, including a winter spent with relatives in Connecticut. Knight was not the typical woman of her time, but she was also not alone in her independence from conventions that restricted women's lives.

Knight's journal is especially important because of how openly she expresses her fears, misgivings, and loneliness on the road. She was not always alone, however, for she hired guides and met other travelers in the places where she stayed. Although little is known about her outside of her journal, some critics believe that she wrote, not for publication, but for the amusement of close friends. Not unaware of the religious beliefs of her day, she appears to have had little concern about them, and her journal did not follow the pattern of the spiritual quest found in most diaries of her time. Only at the end of the journal, in her expression of gladness over returning home safely and finding warm welcomes from friends and loved ones, does she express gratitude to the 'Great Benefactor' for giving his 'unworthy handmaid' safe passage during her months abroad.

But if Knight was more secular than religious, she also took class distinctions seriously. A small- businesswoman, she was mindful of treating those of higher social standing than herself with deference while she was condescending in her treatment of country people, African Americans, Native Americans, and others of lower status. Her journal reveals a robustness of taste and a love of good stories. She records several of these. She was also a satirist who wrote in many voices, using the language of colloquial modes of expression, neoclassical diction, and contrasting genres, mixing poetry, dialogue, and fiction into her personal prose. Because of this journal, Knight has a prominent place in travel literature, and it establishes her as a satirist representing significant themes and character types in the tradition of American humor.

The single most well known and often-written-about eighteenth-34- eighteenth- American autobiography (frequently characterized as the bridge text between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century) is that of Benjamin Franklin (written between 1771 and 1790). For Franklin the man is the model American hero and patriot. Born in Boston in 1706 of humble Puritan parentage, he lived a life that was the stuff of national legend. In his teens, Franklin rejected the religion of his parents for Deism, then popular among eighteenth-century intellectuals. At age seventeen he ran away from Boston to Philadelphia, and soon went off to England. Back in Philadelphia in 1726, he did well as a printer, bought and reformed a newspapers, The Pennsylvania Gazette, opened his own stationer's shop, and became the public printer for the colony. Financial prosperity led him to involvement in local politics. He established a fire company, a lending library, the American Philosophical Society, and proposed an academy that later became the University of Pennsylvania. In 1748 he retired from business to spend his time in politics and science. In the latter field, his discoveries in electricity brought him international fame.

In the world of politics, Benjamin Franklin became a leading member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, and in 1757 he went to England to represent the Assembly in its complaints against the British. He returned to America in