Mary Rowlandson verses Anne Bradstreet
Mary Rowlandson and Anne Bradstreet were two different women both having strong religious beliefs. Their strong Puritan values allowed them to survive the rigorous struggles that they endured in their lives. Mary Rowlandson's struggles include her captivity by the Indians where she was removed from her family except from her ailing daughter. Anne struggled with her faith and her acceptance as a writer, since colonial women were generally not allowed to be scholars. Although their struggles were unique to their situations, both women expressed themselves and overcame their difficulties through their similar faiths.Mary Rowlandson strongly relied on her faith of God to survive her ordeal during her period of captivity by the Indians. Rowlandson, the wife of a minister, was one of twenty-four townspeople taken captive when the Indians ransacked the town of Lancaster in 1675. During her captivity she depended upon a Bible that she had found that an Indian had left behind. Her eventual redemption and reunification with her surviving children and husband affirmed her faith in the providence of her God.Rowlandson believed that God was punishing his people for breaking their special covenant
One could argue which struggle was more traumatic, but I feel they are of equal importance. Throughout the narrative, Rowlandson referred to the New England Puritans, and never the Indians, as motivation for God's actions. Bradstreet continues to tell that she finds her strength in her faith from the everyday miracles around her. Bradstreet's work seems much more lively and realistic than others, making the pieces more readily available to readers today. Her writing however, differs from that of many others interpretation both of God, and of their new lives. " In a poem, Bradstreet is honest about her feelings and not afraid to let them be known to others, even the Puritans if they were able to read it. In "The Author to Her Book," she very imaginatively characterizes her book as her own small child who has been "snatched from thence friends, less wise than true. She believed that since the colonists deviated from their covenant with God, He used the Indians as a means of punishment. This not only proved that women are more than capable of reading and understanding the classics, but it also proved that the Puritans read things outside of the Bible. " In her interpretation of God and the way He works and can be seen, Bradstreet appears very modern in her thinking and is much more likeable and believable than her slightly earlier Puritan counterparts. " Rowlandson believed that "our perverse and evil carriages in the sight of the Lord have so offended Him that, instead of turning his hand against the Indians, the Lord feeds and nourishes them. " The latter set of these poems offers such a sharp distinction to the stern beliefs of the Puritan society in which Bradstreet lived. Rowlandson's Puritan-centered perception of her captivity showed that she perceived the Indians as mere instruments used by God within the terms of his covenant with the Puritans. When pondering the escape of the Indians, weighed down with the burden of their wounded captives, from the English army, Rowlandson concluded, "God strengthened the Indians to be a scourge to His people. Without their divine devotion to God and will to survive, both mentally and physically, they wouldn't be a part of our history and we would not have learned the importance of the foundation of the world today.
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