SOURCE: “‘My Own Credit’: Strategies of (E)Valuation in Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative,” in American Literature, Vol. 64, No. 4, December, 1992, pp. 655-76.

In following essay, Toulouse argues that an important function of Rowlandson's Narrative is to ensure the author's reintegration into the society from which she had been abducted, and she examines several strategies that Rowlandson employed to achieve this end.

After detailing God's “strange” providences to her Indian captors in the twentieth remove of her Narrative, Mary Rowlandson pauses to acknowledge a special providence to herself:

O the wonderful power of God that I have seen, and the experience that I have had: I have been in the midst of those roaring lions, and savage bears, that feared neither God, nor man, nor the devil, by night and day, alone and in company: sleeping all sorts together, and yet not one of them ever offered me the least...