Mary Rowlandson and her use of David’s Psalms
When the Puritans arrived in New England, they saw themselves confronted with a wilderness in which they wanted to found their “New Jerusalem”. In the Psalms of David, which describe his own spiritual “wilderness experience”, they found hope and consolation. It is not surprisingly then, that these Psalms appeared in the first book printed in America, the Bay Psalm Book of 1640.
David’s Psalms appeared to be of particular importance to one Puritan woman, who – during her almost three-month captivity by Wampanoag Indians – literally struggled with the wilderness. This woman was of course Mary Rowlandson. In her captivity narrative, The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, of 1682 she uses about seventy brief Biblical references, of which approximately one-third come from the Psalms. According to Henwood, Rowlandson did this because the Psalms gave her a way of self-expression in an unstable Indian world that threatened her identity and even her sanity. He describes: “She turns to the familiar language of the scriptures, especially the Psalms, to reassure herself that her suffering has meaning and that …show more content…
In general, Rowlandson could have used David’s authorial voice to transcend her gender. Furthermore, we have seen how she used the Psalms to explain her emotions to her readers and to justify her decisions while being among the Indians. She cited Psalm 6 to express her gratitude for her safe return, or, in this case, she could also have used it to conceal her grief and guilt. She even quoted David’s Psalm 119 to express her rage towards her oppressors by implicitly cursing them. Lastly, she compared herself to David in order to justify her writing of the narrative, so that she could express her gratitude towards God’s “Soveraignty and
When the Puritans arrived in New England, they saw themselves confronted with a wilderness in which they wanted to found their “New Jerusalem”. In the Psalms of David, which describe his own spiritual “wilderness experience”, they found hope and consolation. It is not surprisingly then, that these Psalms appeared in the first book printed in America, the Bay Psalm Book of 1640.
David’s Psalms appeared to be of particular importance to one Puritan woman, who – during her almost three-month captivity by Wampanoag Indians – literally struggled with the wilderness. This woman was of course Mary Rowlandson. In her captivity narrative, The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, of 1682 she uses about seventy brief Biblical references, of which approximately one-third come from the Psalms. According to Henwood, Rowlandson did this because the Psalms gave her a way of self-expression in an unstable Indian world that threatened her identity and even her sanity. He describes: “She turns to the familiar language of the scriptures, especially the Psalms, to reassure herself that her suffering has meaning and that …show more content…
In general, Rowlandson could have used David’s authorial voice to transcend her gender. Furthermore, we have seen how she used the Psalms to explain her emotions to her readers and to justify her decisions while being among the Indians. She cited Psalm 6 to express her gratitude for her safe return, or, in this case, she could also have used it to conceal her grief and guilt. She even quoted David’s Psalm 119 to express her rage towards her oppressors by implicitly cursing them. Lastly, she compared herself to David in order to justify her writing of the narrative, so that she could express her gratitude towards God’s “Soveraignty and