Responding to God's Will: Individualism (or Its Absence) in Mary Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative Anonymous College

People distinguish themselves through their individuality, their uniqueness, the ways in which they are their own self and no one else. However, a remarkable woman of the late 1600s did not herself fit the typical construct of an individual; in A Narrative of the Captivity, Sufferings, and Removes of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, author Mary Rowlandson reveals how she found herself combined with God, rather than on her own. This paper will prove that Rowlandson did not view herself as an individual that also happened to worship God, but rather as the inferior half of one entity made up of herself and the Divine: she subsisted as a physical counterpart to God’s incorporeal presence, the duo entangled throughout the unpredictable progressions of her mortal life.

Rather than finding her own path in life, as the common individual would, Rowlandson found herself continuously guided by the compass of God’s will. In her narrative, she recognizes that this indication of direction pointed her towards fulfilling a personal covenant with God when she writes “The Lord hereby would make us the more to acknowledge his hand, and to see that our help is always in him” (6). She understood that God was looking to protect her, should she persist in...