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  • Mary Rowlandson and the Invention of the Secular
  • Bryce Traister (bio)

At the end of the Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), Mary Rowlandson tells us that since returning from captivity, she does not sleep well at night:

I can remember the time, when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts, whole nights together, but now it is other ways with me. When all are fast about me, and no eye open, but His who ever waketh, my thoughts are upon things past, upon the awful dispensation of the Lord towards us; upon His wonderful power and might, in carrying of us through so many difficulties, in returning us in safety, and suffering none to hurt us.

(365)

Memory and its reconstruction as confessional and spiritual autobiography have not yet released her from the grip of a traumatizing past. To be sure, it is not at all clear that Rowlandson intended her text to fulfill the expurgating function assigned to female autobiography in modern life-writing criticism. Nor can it be said unequivocally that her text attempts primarily to reassert her part in English or female community. These two distinctly modern understandings of life-writing depart from the genre of seventeenth-century "spiritual autobiography," even as we can provisionally observe that her narrative's memorial reconstruction of her often harrowing captivity implies a desire to understand and thereby contain that past in the past.1 As a mental portrait, however, the passage sketches an itinerant mind roving from the narrative present ("I can remember"), to the remote past of unconscious life ("used to sleep quietly"), back to a present radically different from that past ("but now it is other"), and then back to a past identified as a haven from the turmoil of her sleepless present ("my thoughts are on things past"). It is in her past that her "redemption" took place; it is in her past that the "wonderful power and might" of God [End Page 323] exerted itself on her behalf; it is to that past her mind returns when left alone in the nocturnal present with a God who, like her, does not seem to sleep much.

And what is the noise that Mary Rowlandson, even in the comparative tranquility of her redemption, cannot switch off? As any insomniac knows, it is the knowledge, first, that everybody else is asleep. In her condition of wakefulness, the insomniac registers her difference from unconscious community as a simple matter of Being-Awake. Mary Rowlandson's "restoration" is imperfect; her sleeplessness registers the incompleteness of her redemption, testifying simultaneously to her desire to thank God for her rescue from captivity, and to her ongoing spiritual search for the assurance that God's wondrous power has indeed provided for her restoration to English community, if not for her spiritual redemption. The need to resume her place within her community thus remains unfulfilled, as the "restored" woman's nocturnal watch renders her extraordinary at precisely the moment when it is the ordinariness of life she craves. She remains self-consciously singular when absorption into community is the goal. Additionally, as Susan Howe observes, "[w]hen Mary Rowlandson can't count sheep, she lets counter-memory out" (125). Rowlandson's insomnia gestures to a gap between exemplary and extraordinary experience: between her representative role as redeemed sufferer and her unique identity as a traumatized individual whose memories remain, to borrow a term from Cathy Caruth, "unassimilated" (4). The experience Rowlandson must claim as her own—the experience, we might rather say, that claims her—to some extent refuses the terms of hermeneutical assimilation. Extraordinary individuation follows from traumatized consciousness. Her text, therefore, only partially assumes the communal hermeneutic of pious exemplarity. In the grip of a persistently individuated trauma, she dissents, however inadvertently, from the directives of pious imitability Increase Mather defines as the interpretive horizon of this text.2 The text, if not its author, refuses to consent to the terms of representation established either through the orthodox interlocution of Increase Mather, or through the biblicist typology of Job, to name two of the more prominent hermeneutical frameworks within which this text most obviously invites itself to be read...

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