n preserving [her] in the use of [her] senses, in that distressed time, that [she] did not use wicked and violent means to end [her] own miserable life.” (75) I believe that the moral of this story is that god is always on the side of the godly. In class, we learned about declension, which is the decline of the puritans from being the elect by god, to focusing on material goods and greed. The foreword of The Sovereignty and Goodness of God tells the reader about Mary’s life. It says that her husband, who rose from poverty to be one of the most respected members of his community, with a title, and holding the most desired position in their society- a minister, met a lot of resistance from the public, because he threatened to go to another town if they didn’t give them more money. I believe that Cotton Mather, and Mary probably saw the Indians as a sign of god’s disfavor for Mister Rowlandson’s unholy greed.I learned a lot from this narrative. It made me sympathize more with the Indians during this time. The obnoxious and presumptuous attitudes of the colonists are more than crystal clear to me. Their greed for land and furs, as explained in the foreword, and their inability to respect a culture that is so different from their own is more than apparent. What shocked me most about this story is how Mary (Puritans in general?) felt about Catholics. When Mary spoke of the possibility of her son being sold to the French-Canadians she says “he may bless the Lord; for it might have been worse with him, had he been sold to the French, then it proved to be in his remaining with the Indians.”I would like to believe that the Mathers altered Mary’s narrative to make the Indians seem more like savages. I want to like Mary, and in order to do that, I would hope that she showed more sympathy towards her mistress when her child died, especially considering the recent death of her own child. I al...
