SOURCE: “Mary Rowlandson Maps New Worlds: Reading Rowlandson,” in Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race, and Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation, University of Oklahoma Press, 1999, pp. 52-77.

In the following excerpt, Faery examines how Rowlandson's text was used in the formation of an American national character and identity founded on white male supremacy.

Reading Rowlandson

So much has been made for so long of Rowlandson's interpretive biblical voice, of her structuring use of the Bible and conventional Puritan theology to comprehend her experience, one is tempted to believe that the preface writer's directive to read the narrative as a defense of English Christian superiority over the “heathen” Indians is irresistible and that his occlusion of the colloquial elements in her text, passages that provide a view of Indians and Indian life to some extent divergent from Puritan orthodoxy, must prevail. It is certainly true that readings...