Christianity Upon Jane Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative And Frederick Douglass’s Slave Story
Both A Narrative in the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Martha Rowlandson and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass are first-person nonfictional accounts of the person’s encounter with an ‘other’ that reflects them and holds these people hostage. Rowlandson’s 17th 100 years narrative tells of her kidnapping by Natives during Full Phillips’ Battle and her eventual return to white civilization. Douglass was developed a slave in the 19th century American South and inhabited the ‘double consciousness’ of African-Americans. Unlike Rowlandson, he had not any memory of a world through which he was a social similar, rather having been told almost from beginning that he was inferior and belonged to another human being as property, never to himself. Both equally authors work with religion because an important hooking up thread inside their narratives nevertheless Rowlandson opinions her captivity and discharge as an example of God’s providence while Douglass views slavery as exemplifying the institutions’ perversion of Christianity and Christian norms of behavior.
Rowlandson remarks how one of the Indians gave her a Bible, which she relation as a direct sign by God. Regardless of severe her trials, even if she considers her “poor children, who had been scattered down and up among the outrageous beasts in the forest, inches when the girl “opened my own Bible to read” and sees what “they shall come again from the property of the enemy” (Jeremiah thirty-one. 16)” your woman views The almighty as supplying “a fairly sweet cordial” to her that enables her to keep working at it (Rowlandson 4). Rowlandson by no means blames The almighty for her plight, she merely thanks him for the comforts they can extend her. Rowlandson’s frame of mind to examining the Holy bible is one of forbearance in the face of suffering while God directs her to certain paragraphs to read to maintain her emotional strength while Douglass details the spiritual songs of slaves since “a testimony against captivity, and a prayer to God pertaining to deliverance via chains” (Douglass 14).
Rowlandson believes this lady has little alternative other than to simply accept her captors’ actions and trust in the providence of God: “Oh, that we could believe that there is nothing too hard for Our god! God confirmed His electricity over the heathen in this, when he did over the hungry elephants when Daniel was solid into the den” (Rowlandson 20). Unlike the passive Rowlandson, Douglass recognizes slavery while perverting the souls of