Mary Rowlandson and the invention of the secular
  From Early American Literature

by Bryce Traister.

Source:Early American Literature 42.2 (Spring 2007): p323(32). (12703 words) Full Text :COPYRIGHT 2007 University of North Carolina Press

At the end of the Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), Mary Rowlandson tells us that since returning from captivity, she does not sleep well at night:

I can remember the time, when I used to sleep quietly without
workings in my thoughts, whole nights together, but now it is other
ways with me. When all are fast about me, and no eye open, but His
who ever waketh, my thoughts are upon things past, upon the awful
dispensation of the Lord towards us; upon His wonderful power and
might, in carrying of us through so many difficulties, in returning
us in safety, and suffering none to hurt us. (365)

Memory and its reconstruction as confessional and spiritual autobiography have not yet released her from the grip of a traumatizing past. To be sure, it is not at all clear that Rowlandson intended her text to fulfill the expurgating function assigned to female autobiography in modern life-writing criticism. Nor can it be said unequivocally that her text attempts primarily to reassert her part in English or female community. These two distinctly modern understandings of life-writing depart from the genre of seventeenth-century “spiritual autobiography,” even as we can provisionally observe that her narrative’s memorial reconstruction of her often harrowing captivity implies a desire to understand and thereby contain that past in the past. (1) As a mental portrait, however, the passage sketches an itinerant mind roving from the narrative present ("I can remember"), to the remote past of unconscious life ("used to sleep quietly"), back to a present radically different from that past ("but now it is other"), and then back to a past identified as a haven from the turmoil of her sleepless present ("my thoughts are on things past"). It is in her past that her “redemption” took place; it is in her past that the “wonderful power and might” of God exerted itself on her behalf; it is to that past her mind returns when left alone in the nocturnal present with a God who, like her, does not seem to sleep much.

And what is the noise that Mary Rowlandson, even in the comparative tranquility of her redemption, cannot switch off? As any insomniac knows, it is the knowledge, first, that everybody else is asleep. In her condition of wakefulness, the insomniac registers her difference from unconscious community as a simple matter of Being-Awake. Mary Rowlandson’s “restoration” is imperfect; her sleeplessness registers the incompleteness of her redemption, testifying simultaneously to her desire to thank God for her rescue from captivity, and to her ongoing spiritual search for the assurance that God’s wondrous power has indeed provided for her restoration to English community, if not for her spiritual redemption. The need to resume her place within her community thus remains unfulfilled, as the “restored” woman’s nocturnal watch renders her extraordinary at precisely the moment when it is the ordinariness of life she craves. She remains self-consciously singular when absorption into community is the goal. Additionally, as Susan Howe observes, “[w]hen Mary Rowlandson can’t count sheep, she lets counter-memory out” (125). Rowlandson’s insomnia gestures to a gap between exemplary and extraordinary experience: between her representative role as redeemed sufferer and her unique identity as a traumatized individual whose memories remain, to borrow a term from Cathy Caruth, “unassimilated” (4). The experience Rowlandson must claim as her own--the experience, we might rather say, that claims her--to some extent refuses the terms of hermeneutical assimilation. Extraordinary individuation follows from traumatized consciousness. Her text, therefore, only partially assumes the communal hermeneutic of pious exemplarity. In the grip of a persistently individuated trauma, she dissents, however inadvertently, from the directives of pious imitability Increase Mather defines as the interpretive horizon of this text. (2) The text, if not its author, refuses to consent to the terms of representation established either through the orthodox interlocution of Increase Mather, or through the biblicist typology of lob, to name two of the more prominent hermeneutical frameworks within which this text most obviously invites itself to be read. The stubbornly personal life of Mary Rowlandson persists alongside its desired abstraction into the demonstrable terms of Protestant devotional pedagogy. To gloss the text’s 1682 title: the text’s secondary title, the Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, refuses to subordinate to its titular abstraction, The Soveraignty and Goodness of God. (3)

One of modernity’s truths is that few of us cannot understand the psychological extremis experienced in the condition of insomnia, and it is modernity’s recognition of Mary Rowlandson as one of us that will serve as this essay’s largest claim. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God represents human suffering in a recognizably modern vocabulary of human psychology, which is to say that even as her text displays the Protestant inheritance of affliction’s divinely purposive nature, it gestures suggestively toward a modern--indeed, secular--understanding of the human encounter with pain and trauma, “a human condition,” Talal Asad has recently observed, that modern “secular agency must eliminate universally” (67). In the Protestant-Calvinist framework, affliction becomes meaningful within a rendering of saintly perseverance, whereas modern secularity defines human suffering as the definitive challenge to modern civilization. Under Rowlandson’s narrative control, personal suffering stubbornly resists its translation into the Protestant allegory of divinely appointed affliction. As the salvational narrative of redemptive suffering stalls, the religious epistemology both defined and sustained by afflictive meaning begins looking like the more secular account of suffering in which pain’s metaphysical ambitions falter.

This is not to argue that what I am calling Rowlandson’s “invention of the secular” replaces a wholly religious with a wholly secular epistemology: far from it. With Asad, I suggest in this essay that Rowlandson’s text neither adheres to nor radically breaks from a wholly religious pre-modern sensibility. Rather, her text’s simultaneous commitment to both representative and personal orders of suffering’s relation to meaning anticipates the relational structure of secular and religious identity in Western modernity: “The secular,” Asad maintains, “is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it ... nor is it a simple break from it.” Rather, the secular “brings together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life” (25). What is so gripping about Rowlandson’s confessional piety is not merely its religious intensity--her thoroughgoing self-abandonment to the incomprehensibility of her God, that is to say--but also the way in which this self-abnegation functions to assert the primacy of her interpretive and representational agency as a constitutive feature of religious authority in an “enlightened” eighteenth-century modernity. In the individuation of piety her text advances as the ultimate struggle of faith, Mary Rowlandson depicts a form of religious subjectivity entirely consistent with modern secularity’s purported consignment of religious life to the irrelevant marginality of individual and typically feminine “privacy.” Enveloped in the secular, we might say more broadly, is a letter written in the language of the sacred, and it is this thoroughly modern package that, somewhat paradoxically, carries religion into the episteme of an eighteenth-century modernity whose recognition of religion as its discarded other defines that modernity as a by-product of religious agency itself. Mary Rowlandson’s difficulty in assimilating her past experiences into her present thus becomes symptomatic of Western modernity’s understanding of religion as an unassimilable, because discarded, emblem of its past. (4)

SECULARIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Given the significant (and, for many, alarming) role of conservative Protestantism in contemporary United States federal politics, it may seem counter-intuitive, if not just dumb, to propose that we live in a secular world defined as such by the separation of organized religion and the constitution of the modern democratic nation-state. Yet theologians, historians, sociologists, and cultural theorists have been making claims of this sort for years now, and together they have contributed to what we have come to call the “secularization thesis.” It is a “fact,” Claude Lefort has recently argued of the modern, secular condition, that “religious beliefs have retreated into the realm of private opinion” (215). Religion’s retreat into “the private” more or less anchors most of the familiar narratives of the Anglo-European Enlightenment: the emergence of a civil society premised on human cognitive capacities and the rational “public sphere” rather than sacerdotal prescriptions and the incapacity of human effort to significantly alter the world or humanity’s relation to it; the ascendancy of the “individual,” particularly in the wake of Locke, and the emergence of a liberal subjectivity premised on notions of freedom, autonomy, democracy, and choice; and a new ethic of the “nation” fuelled by liberalism and by a mercantile, expansionist political economy. The “Protestant work-ethic” notwithstanding, none of these narratives of post-Enlightenment historiography requires the presence of God for their acceptance, and even Weber’s critique of Protestant Christianity’s complicity with capitalist labor theory reduces religion to little more than social allegory.

These oft-retold bedtime stories of modernity’s edifice rising atop the ashes of a premodern religious zeitgeist hardly need rehearsing here, but one of the more recent versions of this narrative deserves a closer look. According to Jurgen Habermas and his many disciples, the steady decline of personal beliefs about God vitiated a comprehensive civic function of religion just as the political economies of Europe enfranchised increasing numbers of “ordinary” (i.e., male) citizens. Democratic self-awareness meant that increasing numbers of subjects and citizens understood political life to be separate from the smooth functioning of the civic sphere: that the function of the nation, in other words, was a separate operation from the exercise of political agency and debate, a separation that provided the conditions of openness, egalitarian speech, and rational discourse that would lead to the emergence of the democratic nation-state. (5) In the narrower field of early American studies, Michael Warner has extended the insights of Habermas to eighteenth-century Anglo-American coloniality, arguing that a burgeoning culture of print capitalism articulated a crucial vocabulary of republican political practice which, in turn, mediated the emergence of a public sphere in which individuals could imagine themselves “the abstract subject of the universal (political or economic) discourse” (63). In this reading, a public sphere predicated on the material conditions of print capitalism and republican political ideology could be said to have replaced a religious understanding of the transcendental, as “belief” in the new universality of print republicanism replaced a fading belief in the divine “unitary authority” (56) a religious culture both worshiped and required. The new public sphere and the older religious structure it replaced co-existed over the course of the eighteenth century, eventually leading to “a separation of church and state that would mark a key victory for the cultural forces of the public sphere” (58), and to a version of political subjectivity defined in opposition to this earlier, and now discarded, religious past.

This version of the secularization thesis implies that modern culture’s symbolic order was a gendered one as well, and feminist critique has usefully identified some of the shortcomings of the Habermasian thesis. (6) One influential approach to the public-private dyad of eighteenth-century cultural politics has argued that “the modern individual was first and foremost a woman” (Armstrong 8). Relying on Foucault’s account of modern subjectivity as one primarily structured within a disciplinary matrix of power/ knowledge, Nancy Armstrong has identified gender as “the metaphysical girder of modern culture” (14). Reading the novel as a crucial agent in the establishment of such modern ideas about women (and, by implication, men as well), Armstrong identifies the solitary reading woman as subject of/to the novel as discipline, as a vast array of “secular” media (including novels, conduct literature, diaries, and letters) constructs the feminine and its values as the discursive effects of reading. Although marginal in terms of public identity and power, women were in some ways central to the establishment of modern bourgeois identity, as the proliferation of newer print media like novels depended so manifestly on the consumption practices of women, practices that simultaneously established their power as agents even as they limited that power to the precincts of domestic life.

Where the Habermas argument declines to account for the experiences of women in the new modernity of the English speaking eighteenth century, Armstrong claims a centrality for women that depends on a disciplinary gaze that would contain female agency within carefully scripted narratives of social possibility. Neither Habermas nor Armstrong has much to say about religion’s place (if any) in these modern epistemes, whereas Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has recently argued that the public sphere in which masculine subjectivity emerges simultaneously “constructs women’s privacy and relies upon this privacy to articulate the narrative emergence of the masculine liberal subject at the same time” (25). Woman’s privacy, in this revisionary account, serves as “the back formation of a masculinized public agency” (19) and, moreover, comes into being as a consequence of Protestant religion’s insistence on the autonomy of private religious conscience serving as a “proto-liberal” version of subjectivity (52). In her reading of the seventeenth-century Antinomian Crisis and its construction of Anne Hutchinson, Dillon argues that Hutchinson and her followers “used Puritan theology to authorize a new form of private subjectivity” and, at the same time, practiced and thereby proposed a form of a “non-state identified public sphere” agency (54). Rather than serving as the historical precursor to a nonreligious modern Enlightenment, Protestantism functions here to produce and thereby become part of modern discourses of liberalism. As such, according again to Dillon, “Puritans st[ood] on the cusp of the divide between early modern and modern concepts of gender and subjectivity, and thus competing versions of these concepts operate at the same time” (107-8). If, according to Armstrong, to be a modern individual meant to be a woman, then, according to Dillon, it meant also to be religious, which is to say that feminine privacy and religious agency authorize a modernity we have somewhat inaccurately been describing as “secular.”

As the religious culture of Protestant New England evolved from its early civic and quasi-institutional practices of Congregational orthodoxies into an increasingly ritualized and sectarian polyglot of Protestantisms, religious devotion became increasingly experiential and, if considered only demographically, increasingly female. (7) We might say that female piety in early America came to occupy a dual, and paradoxical, position within this modernizing culture of New England. Female piety became a prominent location of authentic religious experience and could, even in its marginalized “private” configuration, be legitimately viewed as one of the signs of modernity itself. Particularized in the experiences of Mary Rowlandson, radical female piety paradoxically signals the modernity it would deny.

EXTRAORDINARY EXEMPLARITY: THE DOCTRINE OF AFFLICTION

Ever since Anne Hutchinson outsparred her male interrogators in the late 1630s, American intellectual authority has construed religion in problematical relation to femininity. Amanda Porterfield has argued that with the changing demographics of church participation--in which female congregants, by the end of the seventeenth century, had come to outnumber their male brethren--female piety became a more prominent fixture of colonial devotional life, and ultimately symbolized the life of New England Protestantism more generally (116-53). One reason for this “rise of the feminine” within New English religious life derives from the thematics of femininity residing within the house of Protestant theology. From the “Spouse of Christ,” to the need for self-abasement before the authority of patriarchal divinity, to the emotional vitality of contemplative interiority, it is not difficult to appreciate the fit between such religious values and practices and their gendered social performances. The ascetic interiority of Protestantism--its antiworldly ambition to force the self to imitate the Word--could also be “feminine” insofar as self-renunciation was central not merely to Protestant redemption theory but to the patriarchal ordering of women’s individual place and social role. Ascetic and patriarchal discourse together created the conditions for potentially abjected female subjectivity. (8) Cotton Mather’s Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, published in 1692, describes the concomitant social and individual performance of female piety this way: “A vertuous woman labours to Please and Serve the great God, with the greatest of her cares ... Let her be of never so High Rank, she thinks it no stoop for her, to be a Servant for that Lord, who has all the Angels in Heaven for His Ministers” (Mather, Ornaments, 25). Ivy Schweitzer observes that Puritan conversion “affirmed the existence of a new kind of interiority, of a private, unique, inner space--the space of self-consciousness, of subjectivity--only to demand its sacrifice, renunciation, and occupation by Another” (23). Asceticism thus provides a gloss on the idea of female exemplarity lodged at the heart not merely of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative but of the religious culture her narrative was designed to represent and reflect. As Geoffrey Harpham has argued, ascetic discourse shows “the way in which a human being can become imitable, how he can meet what are sometimes called the conditions of representation” (xiv). The discourse of asceticism proceeds as a “bodily act that points beyond itself, expressing an intention that forms, and yet transcends and negates, the body” (xiv-v). By denying the body/world in favor of imitable form, the ascetic can “anchor oneself in a community of imitation which both temporally and spatially exceeds the boundaries of the individual life ... by situating the self in systems that exceed the self” (xiv). In its denial of individual selfhood as the privileged location of cultural authority, the ascetic body reflects the communitarian containment of individuation. In the worldly self’s dissolution into a system of representation--Mather writes that “The whole World is a Book, and all Creatures are the Letters in it” (20)--the ascetic gestures necessarily outside herself, a gesture that undercuts the authority of the integral self at the heart of modernity’s developing metaphysics of individuation. The ascetic self, like the mystic, is fundamentally selfless. As such, asceticism construes an array of cultural associations with feminine subjectivity in which the disciplinary relation to the repudiated, fleshly body might be considered one of the conditions of Protestant culture itself. (9) The female body, that is to say, itself becomes a metaphor for the practices of self-denial and bodily negation required of Protestant subjectivity in general. And in the ascetic body’s transformation into imitable representation, we see the conditions of exemplary possibility laid down not merely as the basis for communal self-definition, but as the foundation for extraordinary female subjectivity at the same time.

Mary Rowlandson’s text of female suffering and community redemption has for good reason been considered in terms of its exemplary cultural work, and modern scholars continue to privilege her text within American literary history as a pious exercise in seventeenth-century New England Congegrational and political orthodoxy. (10) Intended by its author(s) to provide a means for members of a threatened and internally fractured religious culture to understand their experiences in a singularly paradigmatic way, the text shows how New England readers might witness the sustaining hand of God, the necessity of faith in affliction, and the need for genuine penance, to say nothing of reviving a biblicist culture through an aggressive typological narrative. Read as such, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God becomes its own hermeneutic: it provides the markers and signs by which Mary Rowlandson can understand her part in her own and her society’s Protestant redemption narrative; it simultaneously provides the tools for its readers to understand Rowlandson as an exemplary model by which they might understand themselves and their experiences. The text, if not its acknowledged author, aspires to the status of abstraction itself, enacting in its replacement of experiential particular with paradigmatic generality, the drama of Protestant conversion, whose substitution of the Spirit for the sinful self was the sine qua non of redeemed subjectivity.

Mitchell Robert Breitwieser’s American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning offers a powerful corrective to Rowlandson’s orthodox exemplarity and the “lucid essence” of a Puritanism that her text unproblematically reflects. Breitwieser observes that, “despite her best intentions” to fulfill the exemplaristic expectations for her narrative, she “comes across significances that have teleologies leading, primarily, to mourning, rather than to faith as it was constructed by Mather and the other members of his cadre” (8). The particular object reference of her mourning--her daughter’s death--leads Rowlandson to open up an interrogation of Puritanism’s “attempt to sublimate mourning, to block and then redirect its vigour to various social purposes” (8). The entire process of memorial and witness--the foundation of Rowlandson’s narrative energy--thus carries her out of the timeless abstraction that the exemplary experience would reflect and promote, and into the rougher terrains of history, personal loss, memorial insufficiency, and the libidinous particularities whose loss these alternate psychic renderings register as much to instruct as to mourn. For Breitwieser, Rowlandson’s unintentional commitment to personal grief anticipates Hegel’s mid-nineteenth-century reading of Antigone’s defiance of the prohibition against mourning her dead brother. Hegel’s critique of mourning “takes up the quandary that ate away at and therefore defined American Puritanism: the arduous task of reconciling ... [the] extreme hostility toward institutional objectifications of devotion that instigates radical Protestantism, on the one hand, with the legitimation of a sociolegal apparatus on more than merely pragmatic grounds on the other” (21). As such, Breitwieser’s Rowlandson “challenges the fundamental premises of Puritan exemplaristic typology ... and the social project they were intended to justify and sustain” (29), a social project Hegel would later theorize as the realization “of a total Christian society, transparent, permeated in all its parts by a single compository vision” (21).

Following Breitwieser’s lead, I would add that Mary Rowlandson’s presentation of her experiences at times threatens to exceed what we might call the Puritan doctrine of imitability, an idea displayed at the conclusion of Increase Mather’s prefatorial introduction to Rowlandson’s text in which he enjoins the reader to “Read therefore, peruse, ponder, and from hence lay by something from the experience of another against thine own turn comes, that so thou also through patience and consolation of the scripture mayest have hope” (322). Rowlandson’s example is worthy because another might imitate her piety. And of course, what should more “peculiarly concern” (320) her readers is the “wonderfully awful, wise, holy, powerful, and gracious providence of God towards that worthy and precious gentlewoman” (319). The text is significant, in the exemplary reading, for the ways in which it points away from its author, her body, and her experiences, and toward the invisible power of God. Although her text’s narrative reveals the providentially motivated interventions on her and her community’s behalf, those interventions are ultimately “about” God himself: about the manifestation of His will, “God’s acts ... his wonderful Works” (321), which her text communicates. Mary RowlandSon’s affliction, the piety displayed in her remarkable fortitude, and her deliverance from captivity, each and all witness the “strange and amazing dispensation” (319) of God inasmuch as they tell us something about Mary Rowlandson herself. If Rowlandson’s “alternate teleologies” lead away from timeless imitability and into the particular terrains of personal loss, then her own narrative, when read in the exemplaristic mode, could be said to dispense with her as its own object concern. The libidinal source of the text’s mourning can be traced not only to Puritan theology’s careful denial of the significance of human sadness but to the emotional residue of the woman, Mary Rowlandson, whose text has, in effect, dispensed with her as its primary subject. Considered in the language of ascetic discourse, Rowlandson’s self-denial makes possible the imitable text. Yet the self’s denial remains incomplete, and in its incompleteness, the text permits the continued circulation of the fragments of personal experience that refuse translation into Protestant imitability: a dead child, embittered faith, female rivalry, and uncompensated loss. The scandal of this text is not so much its persistent mourning of personal and material loss as it is the more extraordinary proposition that, in or around 1680, there is female self whose losses are worth mourning at all. (11) Where Breitwieser maintains that Rowlandson’s aggrieved subjectivity sustains its dissent from the proto-Hegelian ambitions of Calvinist Protestantism’s realization as a new Jerusalem, I propose that the female self commemorated in 1682 would become the voice not only of a post-Puritan Protestant femininity, but of eighteenth-century New England Protestantism more generally.

THE INVISIBLE HAND

In addition to detailing a mourning problematical because too personal, the text reveals a potentially contradictory relation between experience and interpretation that deepens (rather than resolves) the conflict between personal grief and doctrinal hermeneutics. While none, to my knowledge, have ever seriously questioned that Rowlandson was the primary author of The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, the text’s divided structure has attracted some comment over the years. Kathryn Zabelle Derounian proposes a distinction between “empirical narration (the ‘colloquial’ style)” and “rhetorical narration (the ‘biblical’ style)” ("Puritan Orthodoxy” 83). Lisa Logan pushes a bit further, arguing that Rowlandson’s construction of a “narrative self” renders her “subject to others’ agendas,” in this case the agenda of Increase Mather, who “functions in an authorial manner in the production of Rowlandson’s text” (264). Although Logan’s discussion focuses on Mather’s prefatorial positioning of the text, its attempt to “co-produce” the text by “delineating its proper significance and stabilizing interpretation” (265), the text’s divided narratorial status and attempted prefatorial containment together compel further assessment of the narrative’s ostensible authorship. While we should be careful, given the lack of a corroborative archive, to assert an account of the text’s creation in which authorship is held to be shared by Rowlandson and Mather together, I will exploit the tension between empirical and rhetorical narratives, identified by Derounian and others, to argue that some measure of the text’s theological crisis can be taken by considering more particularly the relation between Rowlandson’s recorded experiences and the exegetical uses to which they are put in the text. Whether considered “spiritual” or “profane” as she makes her way through the memory of her captivity, the text at times imperfectly registers its attempted scriptural management. By drawing out some of these dissonances between experience and exegesis, we can better hear the sounds of a still deeper theological clash between a corporate model of exemplaristic representation, and one more recognizably a narrative of modern individuation.

To state the question bluntly: did Mary Rowlandson or Increase Mather insert all those Bible references? Scholars have for a variety of reasons been reluctant to speculate on the extent of Increase Mather’s participation in the crafting of the Sovereignty and Goodness of God. The most obvious reason, of course, is that there is no empirical evidence to support such thinking. Most assume, with David Richards, that Mather encouraged Rowlandson to write the story shortly after her return from captivity, saw the text through publication in 1682, and supplied the infamous “Per Amicum” preface. (12) Lacking any textual archive by which editorial emendations and collations might indicate either singular or plural authorship, and assuming the biblical literacy and intelligence of Mary Rowlandson (to say nothing of not wanting to diminish her achievement or gender by questioning her text’s composition), we have stayed away from precisely this sort of speculative skepticism. I am less interested here in the gendered politics of authorship--a problem that others have approached successfully--than in the complex interpretive spaces that might be opened by questioning, rather than assuming, a harmonious fit between what Mary Rowlandson recalls and how her text construes memory in relation to its biblical emendations. (13) And while the sorts of dissonance to be heard in the text might imply a more intrusive Matherian presence in the composition of the text “proper” than scholarship has been thus far prepared or able to concede, the composite authorship question can be bracketed in favor of considering the cultural work performed by the text in its mediation of Puritan authority’s relation to a vernacular account of piety.

Consider the following moment, recorded during the Fifth Remove, and describing the escape of Rowlandson’s captors from the pursuing English army:

For they went, as if they had gone for their lives, for some
considerable way, and then they made a stop, and chose some of
their stoutest men, and sent them back to hold the English army in
play whilst the rest escaped: And then, like Jehu, they marched on
furiously, with their old and with their young: some carried their
old decrepit mothers, some carried one, and some another. Four of
them carried a great Indian upon a bier; but going through a thick
wood with him, they were hindered, and could make no haste,
whereupon they took him upon their backs, and carried him, one at a
time, till they came to Baquag river. (332-33)

It is an important scene in several ways, not least because Rowlandson returns, toward the conclusion of her narrative, “to mention a few remarkable passages of providence, which I took special notice of in my afflicted time,” including this moment of providentially authorized escape by the “enemy” when the English were close enough “to destroy them” (358). Yet, Rowlandson surmises, “God seemed to leave his people to themselves, and order all things for his holy ends” (358). In what at first seems to be a familiar, even routine (my students would probably say “rote") gesture, Rowlandson compares the “furious” march of the Indians to Jehu’s driving of his army to the gates of Jezreel to overthrow the corrupt house of Ahab, worshipers of Baal. But exactly what sort of typology is being established here? Jehu’s victory over the house of Ahab temporarily re-established the one God of Israel and an anointed king over Israel and Judah; he is, that is to say, one of the military heroes of Old Testament, a scourge of polytheism, idolatry, and sin, whose subsequent inability to follow the law of God (2 Kings l0: 30) diminished his star considerably. Jehu provides an ambiguous referent for typological thinking: on the one hand, he exemplifies the figure of the holy warrior by fulfilling the terms of his sacred anointment without question; on the other, he serves as a cautionary figure who fails to sustain his side of the covenant by allowing Israel to slide back into idolotry and religious malaise (the so-called sin of Jereboam). In its reference to failed promise, the casual Jehu reference seems Jeremiadical. Given Increase Mather’s desire to read the war as God’s judgment on the failures of New England/Israel, we might construe the Jehu reference as a Matherian gesture, one designed to draw attention to New England’s status as simultaneously anointed and sinful, the chosen remnant sliding further into a darkness ever more stygian precisely because the promise of glory was once so bright. As Rowlandson’s husband, Joseph, puts it in his sermon on Jeremiah 23:33, “The point is to be understood of a people that are visibly and externally near and dear to him, and these may be totally and finally forsaken of God” (Joseph Rowlandson 9). Whether or not Mather actually “wrote” the Jehu typology into the text, we can understand the hermeneutic established by the gesture: that New England will either make good on the failures of the Old Testament heroes by upholding their side of the gospel covenant’s renewal of the special contract between God and his chosen people, or it will go the sorry way of Old Israel, and return to an interrupted sequence of covenant-breakage, yet more national sin, and, therefore, more divinely ordered retribution. Finally, there is good reason to suppose that Rowlandson herself, a minister’s wife and professing Congregationalist, would have accepted this Jeremiadical reading of the failures of the English army to follow through on its initial victory.

This doctrinal reading of Jehu (and the text as a whole), however, does not account for another way of thinking about the typology established therein. The passage explicitly compares the flight of the natives to Jehu’s driving of his tattered army to the gates of Jezreel; the typology, as grammatically and logically constructed, compares the experiences of an Old Testament military hero to those of a starving, desperate band of an indigenous and Godless people trying to escape from a pursuing foe. To make the typology “work” would be to understand that both Jehu and the Wampanoags share a kind of desperate nobility, an acceptable reading given the sacrificial heroism of the defending warriors, to say nothing of the text’s frequent (if unintended or begrudging) depictions of native endurance and even heroism in the face of a persistent yet ineffective English military aggressiveness. Following this logic, a second reading suggests itself: that the natives, like Jehu, are the newly anointed scourge of the unbelieving Israelites. The Lord’s smile shines upon their efforts to punish the sinful English. This alternate reading is one that The Sovereignty and Goodness of God solicits, and, at various points, sustains. We might, for example, point to the marked similarity between the inscrutable, apparently arbitrary and even capricious mind of the Puritan God--"Thus all things come alike to all: none knows either love or hatred by all that is before him” (319)--and the equally baffling, totally unpredictable behavior of Rowlandson’s captors: “Sometimes I met with favor, and sometimes with nothing but frowns” (340). By not excluding the possibility that God has decided to switch sides, the undenied mimesis of divine with native unintelligibility signals a new and exclusive covenant with the natives rather than the usual Puritan confusion of divine instrumentality with divine unknowability (one thinks of Bradford’s Squanto, for example). The text’s readers, in other words, can encounter the “savages” as something other than mere tools of God’s scourge. In the concluding movement of her text, Rowlandson remarks “the wonderful providence of God in preserving the heathen for further affliction to our poor country” (358-59); and then again: “yet how to admiration did the Lord preserve them for his Holy ends, and the destruction of many still amongst the English” (359); and then again: “Though many times they would eat that, that a hog or a dog would hardly touch; yet by that God strengthened them to be a scourge to His people” (359); and then again: “I can but stand in admiration to see the wonderful power of God, in providing for such a vast number of our enemies” (359). Although the text attempts to manage the ontology of the natives back into the toolbox of divine instrumentality, the compulsive repetition produces its own counter-orthodox resonance: “Strangely did the Lord provide for them,” Rowlandson interjects, “that I did not see (all the time I was among them) one man, woman, or child, die with hunger” (359). God “feeds and nourishes them up to be a scourge to the whole land” (359), a claim which, on the face of it, asserts the instrumental claim, even as the rhetoric of natives as divine affliction characterizes that relationship in terms of God’s compassion for them. Additionally, the rhetoric of divine nourishment and cultivation clashes with the reality of starvation experienced by the natives and the English during the long 1677 winter. Jehu’s anointment as scourge to the unbelieving house of Ahab does not limit him to merely instrumental status; in similar fashion, the typologizing of the natives in relation to Jehu can be understood as part of a wider crisis within the corporate covenant.

In one significant way, then, these two readings of the Jehu typology (that either the English or the Algonqiuans are like Jehu) are similar: they both imply an insufficient English commitment to the terms of anointment and covenant, and regardless of whether Indian or Englishwoman occupies the privileged typological position, the perils of vitiated faith and incompleted holy task are writ large. Yet these two typologies are quite different, and even incompatible: they advance opposed understandings of what cultural work the typology will perform in its reception by a New English audience. By positing several hermeneutical frameworks, the Jehu typology undercuts any monological regard of the text as being the only teleological endpoint of a historical narrative begun in the Pentateuch, partially fulfilled in the New Testament, and carried through into the historical promise of a New Israel in seventeenth-century New England. The multiple reading, we might say, paraphrasing Foucault, produces a multiple author function. Whether or not this multiplicity implies the presence of a multiple author misses the larger point here: that the text invites several readings and, indeed, makes the case for an individual reading practice residing at the heart of any biblical hermeneutic. (14)

Even where the text explicitly interpolates biblical excerpt, whether in historically typological or more generally theological modes, Rowlandson’s remembered experience threatens to squirm out of an orthodox hermeneutical straightjacket. In the Third Remove, when Mary’s daughter, Sarah, dies and the mother is forced to leave her daughter’s lifeless body in the wilderness, she describes her attempt to cure the wound she took during the Lancaster raid. “Then I took oaken leaves and laid to my side, and with the blessing of God it cured me also; yet before the cure was wraught, I may say, as it is in Psalms 38.5-6. My wounds stink and are corrupt, I am bowed down greatly, I go mourning all the day long” (328). Quoting from one of the so-called Lament psalms in which the psalmist’s cry for divine comfort takes on a desperate and wholly unrequited edge ("Hasten to my help,” the psalm concludes), Rowlandson appears to position her experience within the context of psalmic desperation, even as she reports receiving comfort from her oaken field-dressing. Indeed, her text registers the dissonance between medical and scripture comforts, as it acknowledges that the outcome of her “cure” is more than Psalm 38 would give her grounds to expect. Her experience of mourning--"I sat much alone with a poor wounded child in my lap” (328)--accords with the melancholy lament of the Psalm, even as the exemplaristic demands of the corporate hermeneutic require her text to gesture toward a redemptive account of suffering. Her presentation of the Psalm recasts her experience--"yet before the cure was wraught"--so as to accord with the exhortational mode of her piety. Despite its commitment to a corporate rendering of representative affliction, the text’s vernacular theology envelopes Protestantism’s individuation of faith into the bargain as well, potentially, and at times explicitly, undercutting the federal impulse pressuring Rowlandson and her audience to read her experiences a certain way. Like Lot’s wife, she keeps looking back, and even as her text routinely attempts to press experience into a scriptural leaf, the backward glance strays off the page and into the murky domains of fathomless interiority.

Per Amicum’s/Increase Mather’s preface to the text introduces us to the figure of Lot, one of the central typological references of Rowlandson’s narrative. Mather bewails the “sad catastrophe” of the Lancaster raid, and observes, “Thus all things come alike to all: none knows either love or hatred by all that is before him. It is no new thing for God’s precious ones to drink as deep as others, of the cup of common calamity: take Lot (yet captivated) for instance beside others” (319). But even the interpretive frame Mather provides here pressures the exemplary reading, as the case for omnipotence derived from Lot’s captivity and redemption--"all things come to all"--threatens to compromise the distinction between saint and sinner otherwise maintained in the Lot story. Blessed affliction, this is to say, carries with it not merely the potential to be misunderstood by the sufferer, but also by the reader(s) for whom the sufferer stands in. The hermeneutic of affliction places a heavy demand on its interpretive community, not least because Christ’s passion itself demonstrated the possible outcome of saintly suffering: the inculcation of unbelief at the very moment of atonement. The seemingly random acts of divine arbitration visited on Old Testament hero and Puritan captive alike, while undoubtedly contributing to the typological reading of the text, its author, and the society of chosen Christians for which she stands, nonetheless lodges interpretive ambivalence inside the text’s case for the redemptive powers of divinely ordered human suffering. To put the matter in terms of communicative theory, we might say that in order for ordered affliction to be successful, its meaning must be comprehensible to the sufferer. If divine suffering fails to indicate something other than the mental or physical experiences of pain--if suffering fails, in other words, to be something other than cruelly identical to itself--then the epistemology of religious belief divine affliction would inculcate is lost; human suffering becomes its own end, rather than an avenue to transcendence. Elaine Scarry has suggested that physical pain “has no referential content” and so resists its “objectification in language.” Physical pain and, at times, “a state of consciousness other than pain ... deprived of its object” (Scarry 5) can shatter the self’s relation to the object world, thereby producing the peculiar self-referentiality of suffering with which Rowlandson struggles. Suffering becomes meaningless, in this reading, when it fails to indicate transcendence. Pain becomes, following Asad, a signpost of the secular itself, the removal of which constitutes a central ethical imperative of modernity’s desire to eliminate human pain and suffering precisely because it has lost its anchor in the oceanic divine.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF AFFLICTION

Consider more closely the key moment in the text when Mary Rowlandson compares herself to Lot’s famous wife:

I went along that day mourning and lamenting, leaving farther my
own country, and travelling into the vast and howling wilderness,
and I understood something of Lot’s wife’s temptation, when she
looked back: we came that day to a great swamp, by the side of
which we took up our lodging that night. When I came to the brow of
the hill, that looked toward the swamp, I thought we had been come
to a great Indian town (though there were none but our own
company). The Indians were as thick as the trees: it seemed as if
there had been a thousand hatchets going at once: if one looked
before one there was nothing but Indians, and behind one, nothing
but Indians, and so on either hand, I myself in the midst, and no
Christian soul near me, and yet how hath the Lord preserved me in
safety! Oh the experience that I have had of the goodness of God,
to me and mine! (334)

Breitwieser quite rightly makes much of this passage, observing that “Rowlandson’s identification with models such as Job and Lot’s wife discovers subdogmatic complexities in the Bible, a plurivocality that echoes with the tensions of grief and thereby establishes an intertextual rather than a didactic typology” (l04). Rowlandson proposes to understand her affliction not merely in terms of a doctrinal rendering of Old Testament prefiguration but also in terms of her interpretive relation to an object world whose missing components--children, houses, spouses--produce a narrative “promising minutely mimetic repair” (l05) rather than one subjoined to a corporate typology of salvation which demands an ascesis of material objecthood. Alongside the abstractions of self demanded by her culture’s exemplaristic Protestantism, she stacks the details of her experience. Like the bewildering proliferation of Indians whose numerous ubiquity refuses to recede into the background of the forest’s face, Mary Rowlandson’s memories of captive experience resist their conversion from memory to monument, from wife of faith to pillar of salt.

Considered as a doctrinal typology, Rowlandson positions herself as a latter-day Israelite, lost in the wilderness, threatened by imminent destruction, and longing to return to New England’s fold; yet, there is a remarkable critique of New England at play in this passage. For if Mary Rowlandson reads herself into Lot’s narrative of divine affliction and reward (such as it is), then what kind of typological analogy emerges between the two communities here? Is her Lancaster, or New England more generally, a latter-day Sodom? If the temptation to look back implicates the chosen in the sin of unbelief, then the historical destruction of Sodom just as surely places New England under a similarly final sentence. Of course, such a critique of corporate failure would be in keeping with the reading of Rowlandson’s text as a Jeremiad. But it is worth observing that the voice of this critique is that of a lonely, distressed, and formerly captive Englishwoman. Moreover, her possible critique of New England as a latter-day Sodom from which she has been taken perforce separates her ensuing narrative of affliction and redemption from that of New England’s own. (15) In the concluding moment of the narrative, the insomniac Rowlandson’s “separate” status is painfully self-evident. Her implied criticism of New England establishes the sovereignty of Mary Rowlandson not just as an author-recorder of her own captivity but as a person claiming a personal religious experience independently of a New English orthodoxy whose religious integrity, by virtue of the war’s visitation, has been seriously compromised. (16) A latter-day Sodom, New England as a culture has turned away from God, its final vestiges of belief scattered, like Lot and his family, into a wilderness exile which amplifies Rowlandson’s individual piety in a way which her apostocizing home culture cannot. The point here is less that Rowlandson dissents from the New England Way than that she relocates the significance of faith into a private rather than social register.

Rowlandson’s text exploits this tension between Lot’s wife’s conflicting obligations to the Word and the world. When she confesses her partial ("something of") understanding of Lot’s wife’s desire--her refusal to accept her home’s destruction without this act of witness--she is also making a claim about divine retribution: that the punishment doled out does not fit the crime. Moreover, her partial identification with the wife’s apparent doubt suggests that, for Mary Rowlandson, the terms of New England’s affliction and punishment are somewhat unclear as well. She registers not merely the undeniable tug of grief but the divine obfuscation of the logic informing her loss. The potentially meaningless death of Lot’s wife--she meets the same end as the Sodomites, albeit by more “humane” means if one accepts in theory that salinization is a method of execution preferable to incineration--and her monumentalization into static, exemplary lesson quite closely parallels Rowlandson’s own experience as helpless captive, redeemed Englishwoman, and nocturnal insomniac. In her uncomfortable typology, she reveals the distress prompted, rather than settled, by the act of faith in the face of uncertain divine intention, thereby revealing just how fine the line between faith and doubt could be in a spiritual universe defined by the utter sovereignty and necessary goodness of God.

This slippage between credible faith and incredible doubt appears in a variety of Rowlandson’s remembered experiences. Late in the Thirteenth Remove, one of the longer segments of the narrative, Rowlandson recounts the following:

My mistress’s papoose was sick, and it died that night, and there
was one benefit in it--that there was more room. I went to a
wigwam, and they bade me come in, and gave me a skin to lie upon,
and a mess of venison and ground nuts, which was a choice dish
among them. On the morrow they buried the papoose, and afterward,
both morning and evening, there came a company to mourn and howl
with her: though I confess I could not much condole with them. Many
sorrowful days I had in this place, often getting alone; like a
crane, or a swallow, so did I chatter: I did mourn as a dove, mine
eyes all with looking upward. Oh, Lord, I am oppressed; undertake
for me, Isaiah 38.14. (346)

One of several scenes in which Rowlandson records her conflicted relationship with her “mistress,” the formidable squaw-sachem Weetamoo, this passage has struck readers as a callous, if practical, response from one bereft mother to another predicated largely on Rowlandson’s ethnocentric antagonism toward her female owner. (17) When she goes on to “confess” her inability or refusal to “condole,” the cool pragmatism becomes even more marked, as Rowlandson rejects the invitation to participate in the communal act of mourning, choosing instead to “pass many sorrowful days ... often getting alone” (346). Rowlandson’s consequent recounting of “the sorrow that lay on my spirit” (346) indicates quite clearly that the papooses death has triggered a new bout of mournful distress and self-examination. Proceeding to read her sadness hermeneutically--she concedes her “careless” demeanor and excessive share of creature comforts--she concludes her sudden descent back into melancholy with what appears to be a predictable flourish: “Yet that comfortable scripture would often come to my mind, For a small moment have l forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee” (347). Rowlandson introduces this swerve to scripture-comfort with the conditional “would often,” thereby revealing that, at the time of this particular sorrow, the passage may not actually have come to mind. The text does not identify the scripture, possibly because it is so well-known a verse from Isaiah 54, in which God reassures the faithful that Israel will be rebuilt. Even more tellingly, Isaiah 54 begins with an address to childless women: “Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear: break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord” (Isaiah 54.1). To be sure, the psalmist’s point here is that it is better never to have delivered a child than to have labored and delivered a sinner (as did Weetamoo), and no doubt the Puritan elect would accept the passage’s implication that few, indeed, are the saved* But even granting Rowlandson’s genuine desire to read her experience within the appropriate theological framework, it would be difficult not to recognize the bitter irony Isaiah 54 produces when read in the context of Rowlandson’s recent experiences: that given the death of her daughter, she would prefer to be in the position of barren women who, never having to contemplate the loss of a child, are in a position to “break forth into singing and cry aloud.”

As one of many moments in the narrative when recalled experience and scriptural figuration fail to cohere seamlessly, the epigrammatic interpolation of Isaiah 54 also opens a space for a radically personal understanding of suffering. Far from extending a tradition of female exemplarity and afflictive redemption into the latter half of the seventeenth century, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God introduces a recognizably modern understanding of “personal life” into the reading culture of New England. In the penultimate paragraph of her narrative, Rowlandson writes: “I have seen the extreme vanity of this world: One hour I have been in health, and wealthy, wanting nothing. But the next hour in sickness and wounds, and death, having nothing but sorrow and affliction” (365). Taken alone, Rowlandson’s world-weary perspective recalls several of the text’s theological preoccupations: the corruption of the world and its sinful participants; the apparently random visitations of blessing and curse upon a chosen yet still sinful people; and the challenge to faith--"having nothing but sorrow and affliction"--posed by her covenant with a wrathful God whose actions, while always justified and sovereign, are nonetheless baffling in terms of causality and merit. In the succinct recollection of these themes, the text appears poised to return to the doctrinal folds, inviting its readers to contemplate, with its chastised author, the difficult life of faith in a sinful world, and the need for the faithful to remain steadfast in the course of designed affliction. Yet in the next, this time the final, paragraph of the text, she writes: “Before I knew what affliction meant, I was ready sometimes to wish for it” (365). Read as narrative introjection, this passage calls attention to the text’s construction as witness not merely to the past but to the present condition of its first-person author. Now in the apparently sure possession of the meaning of her affliction, she appears less ready to want more of it; her present understanding of the signification of divinely appointed suffering makes the prospect of such notice less rather than more appealing. Her old self, the pre-afflictive self, well-trained in the doctrinal understanding of divine affliction, wanted what she had never had in order to measure the strength of her covenant, and the likelihood of her ultimate salvation. To conclude that her narratives resolution incoherently asserts the doctrine of saintly affliction would be to miss the more important point here: that Rowlandson claims to have figured out one of the more enduring mysteries of Christian religious faith and that, in doing so, she’s not really sharing that knowledge with the rest of us. If one of the points of Puritanism’s doctrine of saintly affliction is to offer a coherent epistemology of suffering to those experiencing the glorious scourge, then Rowlandson’s text subverts that doctrine by relocating the understanding of suffering outside of a communal register and into one more intensely private and so, finally, opaque. Having struggled, Job-like, with the sorrows of divine challenge, she comes to terms with that experience by vitiating its communal meaning, by shrouding it, so to speak, behind the mask of representation. In the imperfect mimesis established between written word and personal faith--between exemplary representation and individual particular--the text honors the integrity of female piety even as it attempts to abstract such belief into a usable theory of public religion.

This tension between individual belief’s abstraction into representation and its sequestration into the mystery of private experience is not unique to Mary Rowlandson. Earlier in the seventeenth century, we might look to the Bay Colony’s attempt to redescribe Anne Hutchinson’s mystical piety as the heretical other to a publically authorized spiritual discipline. Anne Bradstreet’s lyrical recollection of material loss--"And here and there the places spy / Where oft I sat and long did lie: / Here stood that trunk, and there that chest, / There lay that store I counted best” (Bradstreet 292:27-30)--presents the object world of absent particulars as the “pelf” (293:56) which slows her progress into “an house on high erect, / Framed by thatmighty Architect” (292:47-48). Finally, we might look into the peculiar status of speech during the Salem Witchcraft trials, in which individual religious utterance functions simultaneously as legal accusation, religious epistemology as the production of knowledge in the civic sphere of the court. Of course, the historical narrative of these seventeenth-century examples of female piety and its relation to Puritan representative practices requires much more development than I can undertake in this essay; I offer these remarks merely to suggest that Rowlandson’s mediation of individual piety and public religion might usefully be regarded less as a singular anomaly within New England Puritan historiography, than as part of a constellation of episodes of female religious experience which together contribute to an alternate narrative of religion’s persistence on and into the advent of eighteenth-century modernity. As Elizabeth Dillon argues in her reading of Christopher Hill’s analysis of the covenant theology of English Puritanism, “Puritans individually claimed a representative status insofar as their contract with God allowed them to embody authority. In other words, Puritanism authorized the individual over and against the state and relocated public authority in the private contract with God rather than in conformity to divinely authorized state powers” (Dillon 65). As such, the demands made on Rowlandson that she and her text assume representative status for New England derive as much from Increase Mather’s orthodox hermeneutic as from Puritanism’s location of authority within the self’s relation to God. In this sense, Rowlandson’s elocutionary anticipation of modernity’s positioning of a private female self in relation to a masculine-identified public sphere might better be read as part of a longer historical narrative that starts to become visible in seventeenth-century New England.

This historical narrative offers an alternate account of modernity’s emergence than that found in the “secularization thesis,” one of whose key concepts, as we have seen, is the alignment of religion with a private and female self. The privatization of religion, as Jose Casanova has summarized this phenomenon, implied that “[t]he modern question for salvation and personal meaning had withdrawn to the private sphere of the self” and that terms like “‘self-expression’ and ‘self realization’ had become the ‘invisible religion’ of modernity” (36). (18) Where the marginalization of religion to the domain of private contemplation constitutes part of the historical narrative of modern secularity, however, it simultaneously sponsors a religious modernity that privileges female religious selfhood.

Mary Rowlandson offers not merely a text but a theory about the place of individual piety in an evolving culture of modernity. Against the imperative to exteriorize religious interiority into the didactic utility of confessional prose, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God sponsors a competing, if simultaneous, project: to uphold the sanctity of converted faith by insisting on its non-representational status. Of course, such a theology anticipates, if it does not altogether structure, the gendered divisions of modernity’s public sphere. Rowlandson’s piety, powerful because individual, can now also be called “feminine” because personal. Moreover, the account of suffering that informs her feminine piety authorizes a narrative of human pain that is curiously self-referential. She has had “nothing but sorrow and affliction”; she has, in spite of the many signs of favor God has shown her, gone “up and down, mourning and lamenting” (330, 334, 339); the final paragraph of her narrative refers to her “affliction” five times, and even as she writes in one sentence that she knows what meaning to attach to her suffering, in another she finesses this certainty into a more tentative rapprochement with her past: “I hope I can say in some measure, as David did, It is good for me that I have been afflicted” (366).

Puritans were, by default, seldom assured of much, but the concluding paragraph of the narrative elaborates a baffling logic of afflictive knowledge that takes the form of a psychological extemporizing born of a conflict over the meaning of divinely ordered suffering, yet curiously independent of the socio-cultural domain her narrative is intended to shore up. In what appears to be a predictable expression of Puritanism’s anti-worldly disposition, she writes:

The Lord hath showed me the vanity of these outward things. That
they are the vanity of vanities, and vexation of spirit, that they
are but a shadow, a blast, a bubble, and things of no continuance.
That we must rely on God Himself, and our whole dependance must be
upon Him. If trouble from smaller matters begin to arise in me, I
have something at hand to check myself with, and say, why am I
troubled? It was but the other day that if I had had the world, I
would have given it for my freedom, or to have been a servant to a
Christian. I have learned to look beyond present and smaller
troubles, and to be quieted under them. (366)

Having not merely witnessed but experienced the “shadow,” “blast,” and “bubble” of the world’s assault on the spirit, Rowlandson has learned to regard such particulars for the venalities they are. Eyes on the prize offered by “God himself,” Rowlandson regards “smaller matters” with the scepticism of painfully acquired knowledge and understanding of the right ordering of things. Even so, it is through the vicissitudes of worldly experience that her capacity for transcendence is defined and her achievement of success is measured. Without the world’s indexical relation to the invisible world it imperfectly if crucially mirrors, the believer’s induction of divine reality would be a difficult matter. In this sense, Rowlandson’s refusal to “sweat the small stuff” indicates, on the one hand, the expected disconnect from the sacred’s relation to the profane, while, on the other, it records the ongoing significance of the “shadow” world to the apprehension of divine knowledge. Her studied consideration of the value of the material world reflects the religious understanding of it as a sum of particular details any one of which might help her better understand the revelation of God’s mind.

However, her partial rejection of the vicissitudes of worldly life as having any significance to her spirituality means that she has taken up a worldview we might regard as “therapeutic.” In the therapeutic perspective, the world functions less as a map to the mind of God than as the means for an individual to cultivate the conditions of mental stability. Her religiously ordered understanding of materiality co-exists with one that we moderns might recognize as primarily “psychological”: one that is as concerned, so to speak, with spiritual as with mental health. Another way to put this is to observe that, in the denial of life