Puritan Writing Techniques- Mary Rowlandson and Anne Bradstreet

The two short works, “A Narrative of Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson” by Mary Rowlandson and “Upon the Burning of Our House” By Anne Bradstreet were two typical Puritan style writings. These two writings show many techniques that were commonly used in a lot of Puritan writings. In these two short stories, the author describes a sort of tough time or struggle that they had gone through. In both of these stories, they wrote about how God helped them through their difficult situation. I think this is probably very typical of a lot of Puritan writings from the time because they were a very religious people. Religion was a very big part of the society for Puritan people, so they incorporated God and bible verses into a lot of the writing that they did. “But God was with me in a wonderful manner, carrying me along, and bearing up my spirit, that it did not quite fail.” (Rowlandson p. 83 par. 1). In this quote from “A Narrative of Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson”, Rowlandson speaks about how God helped her get through her tough time. She says that he lifted her spirit. In this part of the excerpt, she is very low on hope. She has been traveling for a long time and she is very exhausted. She writes about how God helped her push through this time in her life and helped her persevere through this tough time. Religion is also referenced in the short poem “Upon the Burning of Our House” by Anne Bradstreet. “And to my God my heart did cry; To strengthen me in my distress; and not to leave me succorless” (Bradstreeet line 8-10). In this passage, the author is praying to God to help her when her home burned down. Everything that she had was gone, but she had not lost hope. She was faithful to God and it helped her have a better outlook on her situation in the end. Towards the end of her poem, she says “There’s wealth enough, I need no more; Farewell my pelf, farewell my store; The world no longer let me love, My hope and treasure lies above.” Here the author is saying that none of the wealth that she used to have in this world matter to her anymore. This is not because it was all burned, but because she was faithful and had remained faithful to God through this whole situation and she believed that all the wealth that mattered to her was above, in heaven waiting for her. Other than religion being a main focus of the literature, another common factor in Puritan writing was a very unique grammar and sentence structure. I noticed that the writing style back then was more formal, but some of the words that were included in these stories were words that would not be considered “correct” if they were used today. Some examples are in Rowlandson’s writing the words “spake” and “pleasanter”. If these words were used today they would be considered bad grammar. The word “spake” would be changed to “spoke” and the word “pleasanter” would be “more pleasant”. It was strange to see these words used in a writing that seemed more formal, but I think that was probably common in a lot of Puritan writing, because that was probably the language back then. In conclusion, in the two short stories that I read, I noticed a lot of things that were distinct in the Puritan style of writing.

Bibliography

Bradstreet, Anne. "Upon the Burning of Our House." Glencoe Literature. Columbus: McGraw- Hill, 2009. 91. Print. American Literature.

Rowlandson, Mary. "A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson." Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 82-85. Print.