American Literature

Both Elizabeth Ashbridge in  Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life  and Mary Rowlandson in A True History of the Captivity and Restoration present early American women s narratives that enlighten readers to the time period of the works.  But both women transcend the genre of a women s narrative and turn their true life accounts into an almost epic journey of religious struggle and personal tragedy.  For these two religious women, affliction is a common theme and their gender is not posed as a reason for their struggles, instead affliction as they see it is a type of darkness of the soul that is present when God has seen some flaw in the world.  This darkness can manifest itself by personal pain or by unexplainable acts that are inflicted by outsiders, as was the case with both women.  Each woman not only questions here own role in being afflicted, but also the whole of their religious community and they search both their souls and their respective societies for answers.  Both pieces are excellent in that they go beyond a historical woman s narrative to immortalize the writers in their epic and tragic struggle against affliction.

Both writers struggle with their inner peace and also show intent to guide other young women lest they not be afflicted.  Ashbridge spent many years of her life in servitude and tells the tale of years of cruel and berating treatment by her Master.  Though she chronicles her years of servitude in America making her work a historical woman s narrative, it is additionally and arguably a spiritual epic told in a way that sets the tone for a quest that must be undertaken for the narrative to reach consonance.  Ashbridge talks about her affliction as being in a dark and Godless place and being tempted by Satan to end her own life.  It was by a vision of light and supposed goodness that she was relieved of her affliction and attack by her enemy, Satan.  However, her writing is very unlike what would be expected of the truly pious of that time period and the piece only tells about the beginning of her life in America and the path to becoming a Quaker.  Her epic struggle with spirituality seems to end with her dedication to being a strong Puritan woman and finding the Utopian society that she has envisioned.

Mary Rowlandson is able to provide insight into the probably more typical pious woman whose servitude was the beginning of her epic struggle of faith, as she was already a Puritan when she was kidnapped.  She already had the luxury of at least having a high and respected status in a religious community while Ashbridge had no status whatsoever.  When Rowlandson was captured by Native Americans, this is where her epic journey begins as she goers from a firm foundation to a very shaky situation with her kidnappers as she saw as Godless.  These Godless people were thought by her and by other Puritans to be sent by God to cleanse the land for the sins that had been committed.  Rowlandson, herself struggles to find what went wrong in her spiritual life or in her religious community to cause her to be afflicted with the deaths of those close to her and also of her kidnapping.

Unlike Ashbridge, Rowlandson does not have a true ending to her epic journey of faith as she seems to vacillate between accepting her fate as God s will and not understanding why a woman of such high standing and honor would be treated in such a way.  Her story is therefore very different from Ashbridge s in that she has lived in a Utopia of her community s making and is later forced to see the savage cruelties of life while Ashbridge chronicles a hard life that ended with the discovery of the Utopia of her Quaker community.  Ashbridge also goes from having no status to being respected while Rowlandson experiences the opposite, making Rowlandson s chronicle all the more telling of how Puritans viewed God and his wrath.  She also uses the theme of light versus darkness to illustrate this epic struggle of goodness versus evil and the religious person as a hero for staying faithful.  Similarly, both narratives read more like a tragedy with the element the death of a child, Ashbridge also must deal with issues of the abandonment by her family and husband.

      As far as the tragedy of each woman s affliction, Ashbridge presents herself as sinful until she saw the light and emerged out of darkness, taking total blame for her horrors in life.  Rowlandson also sees affliction as something that has been brought on to her, but in the form of her captors that are sending a message to her and her community for reasons that she struggles to find in her experience.  Her affliction and the possibility of more tragedy is something that stays with her, however while Ashbridge seems to believe that she has endured an amount of suffering equal to her sins.  To Rowlandson, though, the role of God in punishing sinners for sins unknown is confusing and demoralizing, as is her experience in captivity.  It is as though she believes that God wants her to feel demoralized and uses this experience of affliction as a test of faith.

In closing, both of these narratives transcend the genre of a woman s narrative into more of a classical and religious epic tragedy with heroes made out of these women for their endurance of faith through the trials they faced.  The tone of their work is a common theme in all of history with battles waged between good and evil, light and dark, and God and Satan.  Ashbridge seems to find a Utopia after years of servitude and abuse while Rowlandson is thrust from her religious group into her own personal hell.  Both women demonstrate their struggles for their respective souls and in the end, it seems that there is a moral theme that if all appears to be lost at least one s soul can be saved if God wills it to be so.