Brown’s Mary comes to a new understanding of gendered relationships, and modes of parenting, too. During the long days of arduous hiking through unforgiving terrain, Mary has plenty of time to think about the things she has been taught, and about how irrelevant those teachings now seem. She also finds herself in a matriarchal society, quite a contrast to the patriarchal life she has always led. Journeying with the Indians, she discovers a freedom she had never known before. Back in puritan Lancaster, she was never allowed to be outdoors alone.
The trek itself is rigorous, with little food and recurrent storms, but Mary finds herself enjoying the natural world they travel through. Expecting violence and cruelty, she instead finds unexpected kindness and even friendship. Her trek with her captors exposes her to entirely different attitudes.
Wife of a strict, patriarchal, puritan minister, Mary has a rather constricted view of man’s relationship to the natural world and of a woman’s place in a world of men.
Absent during the raid, her husband arrived home to find his property devastated, his family missing, and his life irrevocably changed.īrown’s version of Mary’s captivity adheres to the historical timeline but is quite creative in its vision of Mary herself. One of her daughters soon died en route, while her other two children, separated from their mother, were led elsewhere. Mary and her three living children were among those marched out of town and then north. In February 1675, a marauding band of natives attacked Lancaster in what is now western Massachusetts, burning houses and barns while killing some residents and kidnapping others. Like the many captivity narratives that would follow, this one sets a pattern that emphasizes faith in God in the face of unspeakable savagery.Īmy Belding Brown’s novel, Flight of the Sparrow, without benefit of puritanical oversight, reimagines Mary Rowlandson’s ordeal as the captive might actually have experienced it. Apparently, Mary Rowlandson gave a draft of her recollections to Increase Mather, who edited it extensively and added puritanical scriptures and life lessons. Scholars consider this account the prototype of the many such “captivity narratives” that followed, first-hand reminiscences of men and women (mostly women) abducted by “savages” in America, then later returned to “civilization.” That particular book, however, seems to have been a somewhat imaginative reconstruction of what really happened. Mary Rowlandson, in 1682, published a narrative longwindedly titled The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed, Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 published narrative of her abduction by “savages.” Flight of The Sparrow, Amy Belding Brown’s fresh and non-puritanical retelling of Mrs.
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