Mary Rowlandson and the Phenomenology of Patient Suffering

Abstract

John Williams's Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion (1707) succinctly defines captivity as "trial to our persons." The phrase suggests that captivity is less an issue of the body's freedom being suspended than of the person's identity changing and of that change being endured rather than enacted. The existence of a power to resist captivity would contradict the very notion of captivity, and so the captive, according to Williams, only suffers -"patiently suffers" -afflictions that try his or her self, unsettling its boundaries and thus causing shifts in identity. 1 Hence the basic and aporetic logic of captivity: while being forced into passivity -held captive -the self actively changes. Because mutations of the self were often violent and swift, they seemed to seventeenth-century captives miraculous effects of wonder-working providence. But this initiation into a new state of being operated for them -inexplicably, since it was contrary to the goodness of God -as a "counter-conversion." In contrast to the serenity and joy induced by religious conversion, New England captives were introduced to a state of being that was a product of fear, irresolution, emptiness, and anxiety.