Anne Rowlandson Beliefs

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The topic proposal is thoroughly evaluated through three Anne Bradstreet poems: The Author to Her Book, To my Dear and Loving Husband, & In Reference to Her Children, 23 June 1659. I’ll choose at least 9 direct quotes from this text that specifically relate to the way that Rowlandson, as a Puritan, views the intervention of God into daily affairs. For example, she writes that although God helps her to recover from the traumatic events (the death and prolonged suffering of her long child, the murder of her sister and nephew), He clearly is the cause of that suffering: “...as He wounded me with one hand, so he healed me with the other” (Rowlandson 261). This verb “wounded” conveys her view that God is the conscious, active orchestrator of human …show more content…
When the English army fails to rescue them, she explains that this is clearly because “God did not give them [the soldiers] courage or activity to go after us” (274). In other words, God could have intervened, but chose not to. This account seems at odds with many contemporary views of God’s benevolence and the idea that God gave us free will. My paper will closely examine and analyze passages from Rowlandson’s narrative that demonstrate this tendency. Ultimately, I may conclude that some elements of Rowlandson’s belief system are fundamentally different from typical modern views of God. However, there are many other aspects of her account that contemporary readers can relate to. For example, like Rowlandson, we all suffer, and we must find ways to make sense of that suffering—we must try to understand why dreadful things have to happen. We must believe that it means something. If it’s appropriate and I can make it fit, I may briefly discuss this as well. Literary Criticism Quote: Richard VanDerBeets, writing in the Journal of American Literature, states that Rowlandson’s work was popular because it conveys the “moral instruction” that was so much a part of the Puritan life at the time, particularly the “Calvinist aspect of their ideology”
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