Mary Rowlandson and the Phenomenology of Patient Suffering

Abstract

This article is a contribution to the fifth part of the Common Knowledge symposium on forms of quietism. Responding to a sense that prior installments of the symposium had overlooked the phenomenology of quietism, of patient suffering, the essay details the daily life of Mary Rowlandson's captivity during King Philip's War in the 17th century and, in particular, her strategies for surviving the breakdown of every basic taxonomy that had until then structured her life in Puritan New England. Refusing either suicide or rebellion and thus reduced to maintaining “bare life,” Rowlandson demonstrated by her resilience that quietist strategies can result in kinds of triumph.