SOURCE: “Mary Rowlandson's Great Declension,” in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 24, No. 5, 1995, pp. 427-39.

In the following essay, Dietrich argues that by being allowed to write her story, Rowlandson moved beyond the traditional Puritan expectations for women and that the experience changed her into a self-reliant person in some ways.

Mary Rowlandson spent eleven weeks and five days in captivity among the Wampanoag, Nipmuck, and Narragansett Indians; during this time she traveled over 150 miles. Her captivity narrative, A True History of the Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, was published in 1682 and is considered the archetype of the genre. Scholarly reactions to captivity narratives inevitably focus on the genre's dramatization of the Puritan emigrant's guilt for leaving the mother country and ambivalent feelings about life in exile in the New World.¹ The unwilling captive represents the entire Puritan community enslaved by the English...