Reading and Study Questions for Week Five: Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and
Goodness of God
1. How does Joseph Rowlandson illustrate the appropriate relation between Man and
God? What does that tell us about the connection between family and State (in this case the Puritan nation, or God's "People") and how those associations are structured?
(160-62) Parallels gender and generational hierarchy within the family to the relation between humans and God; the family is a model for the State, understood here in spiritual terms as the Elect, but manifest in the world as the Puritan community.
2. What happens to Rowlandson's family at the beginning of the narrative? At the end?
How does that reflect what happens to Rowlandson's relation to the Puritan community generally, and to God? (1 st and 20 th Removes) Family is dissociated at beginning, reassociated at end. MR's easy confidence in physical and spiritual place (or identity) is shattered at beginning and restored in a deeper form at the end. Note, however, that her daughter Sarah is dead and is left buried in the wilderness.
There is no corresponding spiritual lack reported by MR, but I will suggest that
Sarah's absence is a physical reminder that the re-association is not perfect, that contact often results in an imperfect restoration of prior stability.
3. Why did Rowlandson originally want to be afflicted? How did affliction change her mind? In what way does she say it was good that she was afflicted? How does it alter her place in the community? (111-12) She was complacent before her captivity and wanted to be tested to show how strong her faith was. She now realizes how dependent she is on God at every moment for her physical and spiritual well-being. Her attention has turned from wordily association/community to spiritual.
She has become an example to the whole community, but also now different from them: while they sleep, she weeps.
4. Why does Rowlandson persuade another captive not to escape when she has the chance, and why doesn't Rowlandson herself escape when she has the chance? (77,
107) Too dangerous, and she should wait for the Lord to free her = predestination.
How does that compare to Hannah Dustin's attitude? (165-68) HD clearly believe in self-reliance, but note that Mather excuses by saying she was in a situation
"where she had not her own Life secured by any Law unto her," so it was ok to kill her captors, and he cites scriptural precedent (167). MR might have asked him just where is it that God's law does not protect us, and we should rely on it?
5. How does Rowlandson explain the kindnesses the Indians show her from time to time? Is she consistent about that? Given her attitude, could such kind gestures be interpreted as a "social instinct" to form a new kind of association across cultures? (93,
79) She attributes many signs of concern or generosity by the Indians as the
Lord’s intervention. However, she does not always do that, and at times portrays such actions as arbitrary or personal idiosyncrasies of individual Indians. As such, the kindness is stripped of its larger significance because it is not part of a

2 social system/form of association. She does not even consider, explicitly, the possibility that some new social form might emerge as Indians and English take care of one another in the wilderness; does she intuit that at any point without being able to articulate that possibility? (Cf. below, similar resistance to seeing similarities in the ways Indian and English mothers grieve for their dead babies.)
6. Are there any ways in which Rowlandson and the Indians do "associate" as if they were part of the same society or culture? (83, 87) MR makes Indian clothes and sells them to the Indians for a knife and food. Economic exchange is one form of association on which States are based. She also is invited to dinner by Metacom, and she invites Weetamoo and Quinnapin to dinner (though that does not go well). More generally, some Indians do take her in, she sleeps in their wigwams, etc., but she is usually careful--though not always--to translate the situation into scriptural terms.
7. What can we learn about Indian families from these accounts of Metacom’s War?
What happened to many of those families after the war? (37, 91, 166-67, etc.) Indian parents love and care for their children, home life similar in terms of eating together and discipline, mothers mourn the loss of their babies. When captured by the English, Indian families often split up, males sold into slavery in the West
Indies, women and children taken into English homes as indentured servants, etc.
8. What do the Indians do when Sarah dies? Why? (75, 86, 91) They bury her, apparently as part of their own customs; cf. Weetamoo's reaction upon returning from burying a papoose. The point here is a parallel between family bonds with children and they are manifest in this custom of mourning (not to mention as a possible motive for Weetamoo being so upset on coming back from the funeral).
9. According to Joseph Rowlandson, why do the Indians attack the Puritans, and what does that tell us about the kind of association that forms the Puritan State or Nation?
(156-58) God is punishing them for breaking their covenant with him, which constituted them as his People; NB contractual language of p. 156, which forms the basis of the Puritan Nation as God's People, and the image of attacking a city on p. 158, an obvious allusion to Indian attacks on Puritan villages. Does
Rowlandson agree? (40, 69-71, 101, 105, ) According to Rowlandson, why can't the
English army catch the Indians and rescue her? (105, 106) Mary Rowlandson portrays the Indians as agents of the devil attacking God's people at the beginning, (Indians as devils pp. 101, 69, 71), and then she turns to the punishment theory at the end of her narrative God holds back the English army so the Indians can torment his backsliding people a little longer. (105). These alternatives will be discussed in lecture. They are not mutually exclusive: since
Satan acts only at Lord’s will, his attack on God's people is in fact another way
God punishes his people. However, the alternatives have very different implications for community: God's punishment suggests disruption within the

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Puritan community as they wander from their spiritual path, whereas a Satanic attack is a threat from the outside that unites the Puritans in their adversity.
10. What does Rowlandson eat, how, and why? Why are food and eating so important to Rowlandson in her narrative? (79, 81, 83, 85, 93, 96, 101, etc.) She was starving for much of the time and winds up eating things that would have disgusted her earlier (horse and bear). She even eats the parts of those animals that the Indians consider disgusting because she has nothing else. Often she "feeds" rather than eats because she is so hungry and fears that the food will be stolen if she does not eat it quickly.
MR also uses her taste in food and the degeneration of her table manners to measure the change she has undergone in captivity--i.e., her dissociation from the English/Puritan way, but not to suggest acculturation or re-association in a new form with the Indians. Rather, the change is in her spiritual awareness, and it reinforces her connection to the Puritan community. That’s why it is doubly appalling that she steals food from and English child (96): not only is she eating savage food savagely, she is stealing it from "her" people. NB p. 101, where she sits down to dinner with her Indian hosts with the bloody clothes of Englishmen piled behind her, and her only comment is on the good pork a Squaw prepared for her. Such moments portray her as neither English nor Indian, but caught between the two cultures.
11. Why are the Indians often disgusted by Rowlandson? (83, 93, 96) She violates their manners and social mores, usually out of ignorance, sometimes out of desperation; the Indians see her various faux pas as markers of her difference from, and inferiority to, high-class Indian life (93), or even basic hygienic standards (Metacom asks her when she last bathed (96).
12. What were Praying Indians, and what was their role in the relations between
Indians and English? What does Mary Rowlandson think of them? (23, 98) PI’s were hybrids therefore complicated cultural boundaries and the value systems that reinforced them. They often served as go-betweens (translators, scribes, messengers, etc.) and were distrusted by both sides that relied on them. MR hates them as hypocrites, but they are essential to negotiations for release of hostages and other interactions between the English and Indians.
13. How does Rowlandson describe the way Indians dress, and how is that related to forms of association among the Indians, and between Indians and the English? (97,
103; cf. 94) Rowlandson recognizes fancy dress as a marker of social class and hierarchy (97), and it is clearly used as display to reinforce cultural identity and ritual, perhaps partly for the Englishman Mr. Hoar who has come to negotiate
MR's release (103). MR gets very upset when the cultural boundaries marked by clothes are violated (94). Is MR attracted to Weetamoo's fancy dress, which appears in the narrative right after she says Metacom told her to take a bath and gave her a mirror so she could see what a mess she had become (96)?

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14. When Rowlandson sinks so far into despair that she cannot express how miserable she is, how does she describe that experience? (78) She finds--the Lord provides--a scriptural passage that applies to her case. That application indicates the typological parallel between her case and Jeremiah, thereby revealing the true meaning of her experience.
15. Why does Rowlandson write her narrative? To what motive does she fear others will attribute her writing? (67, 107) She writes to make an example of herself for the community, and to praise God. She suspects others will think she writes to aggrandize herself, i.e., not behave the way a woman should.