During the thirty-two years I taught college-level American literature I homed in on two academic specialties: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American women writers and the literary form called the captivity narrative. Mary Rowlandson’s (c. 1637-1711) famous account of her three-month captivity among the Nipmuck, Narragansett, and Wampanoag Indians combines my two research interests, and I published widely on it (fig. 1). As a good Puritan—a minister’s wife, no less—Rowlandson used biblical rhetoric and precedent to channel her terror at being taken from her home in Lancaster, Massachusetts, and forced into what she called “the vast and desolate Wilderness.” She composed her narrative shortly after she had safely returned to the fold, and in its exquisite final paragraph, she tried to reach the spiritually assuaging but psychologically wrenching conclusion that God loved her so much He had sent a horrific trial to test her. Yet all was not well. Spiritual security eluded her and she continued to suffer from nightmares and insomnia.
When I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2014, I too was abruptly removed from a familiar, comfortable life (“in health, and wealth, wanting nothing” as Rowlandson says) and dumped into a desolate thicket. Surprisingly, it seemed to me that the conditions of cancer and captivity shared physical, emotional, and spiritual correspondences. Like Rowlandson, I wondered whether my faith would sustain me and whether my affliction was truly god-sent. I’m a liberal Episcopalian so my theological frame of reference is, of course, radically different from that of a late seventeenth-century Puritan woman. Yet Rowlandson’s reflections on the redemptive role of affliction in her conclusion reached me viscerally as a sister-in-suffering. And her repeated attempts to convey her pain and guilt at the end of her account through the nouns “affliction” (which she used six times), “trials,” “difficulties,” and “troubles” and the verbs “chasteneth/chasten,” “scourgeth/scourge,” “afflicted,” and “troubled” particularly moved me.
In my many re-readings of Rowlandson’s narrative over the years, the following sentence in her last paragraph had always rankled, “And I hope I can say in some measure, as David did, It is good for me that I have been afflicted” (fig. 2). After my cancer diagnosis, her words assumed a profoundly personal significance. They haunted me during my treatments until, one day, I burst out, “No! It is not good for me that I have been afflicted and I am not a better person for it.” I tend to see Rowlandson’s finale as a capitulation to Puritan orthodoxy despite narrative tensions elsewhere that hint at her rebelliousness. But some other scholars assert that her words do not affirm providentialism as much as they question or even reject it.
In the twenty-first century, a belief in the positive role of suffering is not confined to people of faith. There’s a secular version too. We’ve all heard family or friends say that a trauma, especially a serious illness, changed their life for the better. Not immediately, perhaps, but as they reflect on their experience, they discern a clearer sense of priorities that rationalizes what happened to them and helps them to accept it. It’s as if the kaleidoscope of life shifts into new patterns and colors. Several people I know who also went through cancer treatments came right out and said, “I am a better person now.” They apparently assumed that I would agree with them about cancer’s role in self-improvement.