During King Philips' War of 1675-1676, a wave of violence between British settlers and Native Americans swept across New England. In the months following that war, Mary Rowlandson wrote her autobiography “Captivity Tale,” a timeless text that would inspire many other stories about the hardships overcome during imprisonment. Throughout his article, Rowlandson combines his experience with Puritan thought, judging his captors and the circumstances through a biblical lens. Mediated by her religion, rather than considering her captors to be totally evil, she considers them to be intentionally guided and designed by a willful God. Additionally, Rowlandson believes that Native American design is impressive and admirable, rather than grotesque. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Throughout her story, Mary Rowlandson often demonstrates her particular moral system during meals shared with her captors. In his twentieth and final extract, Rowlandson lists his final observations on the nature of the natives, making strange remarks about their eating habits and their stomach for bush meat. “Yet how admirable has the Lord preserved them for His holy purposes and the destruction of many still among the English,” she writes. “I have not seen a single man, woman or child die of hunger. » The sentiment here is surprising – for much of his story, Rowlandson describes his captors with disdain and disgust, but here we see instead something akin to admiration. There's a mix of attitudes in Rowlandson's coming confessions - but the next few sentences of this scene highlight the writer's talent for dramatized observation. Rowlandson's keen memory translates into rich details of his experience, but such descriptions are often easy to dismiss as paltry or exasperating. To emphasize his point, Rowlandson details this section with a list of what the natives eat: “They ate horse guts and ears, and all kinds of wild birds…. Turtles, frogs, squirrels, dogs, skunks, rattlesnakes; yes, the very bark of the trees. This is a pretty visceral description of the foods Rowlandson encountered during his captivity. Consider here the underuse of conjunctions (and overuse of commas)—an asyndeton—how the passage highlights a willingness to eat anything throughout its exhaustive length. By foregoing summary or conjunctions, Rowlandson highlights the breadth of the indigenous diet. As a standalone passage, Rowlandson's voice could be interpreted as disgusted and dismayed by his captors, but the rhythm of this sentence quickens the shift to a more nuanced idea: it is in his assessment of these habits that Rowlandson preaches the admiration. In the next sentence, Rowlandson writes that she finds the native people's ability to survive in harsh conditions admirable: "I can only marvel at the marvelous power of God in providing for so many of our enemies in the desert, where there was nothing to see but hand to mouth. In this paragraph, Rowlandson subverts an expectation of anger and resentment by moving toward admiration of his captors. Although Rowlandson still describes her captors as "enemies," she says their toughness is impressive. A simplified reading of Rowlandson's moral philosophy would expect her to beg. 2017.