Mary Rowlandson's 'Restauration' and the English Restoration

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 11; p. 46
• Main Author: Gillespie, Katherine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2003
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); English language; English literature; Rowlandson, Mary White (ca 1635-ca 1678)
• ISSN: 0954-0970

Nonetheless, Breitweiser's categories reify a showdown between a highly codified Englishness on the one hand and an autochthonous, affective, and uncodified or 'barbaric' force of anti-ideology on the other. [...]even as he focuses intently upon the violence that was wrought upon native populations by King Philip's War, Breitweiser's profile of Rowlandson as a woman whose unending grief disrupts her community's ideological quest serves to ever so slightly distance her from the bloodshed that accompanied that conflict. According to Mark Knights, the 'material relevant to politics and opinion' that dominated the renewed pamphlet wars at this time consciously recalled the 'long-standing [and still smoldering] disputes' that had ignited the first 'civil intestine war', as did the very idea of a pamphlet war.15 These themes included the succession crisis which 'reinjected vigor' into debates over 'toleration or comprehension of [religious] dissenters, about the right of resistance and about the fundamental relationship between King, Parliament and the people', and the exclusion bill controversy which 'centered on how to interpret the constitution' and hence 'gave new life to debate about the rights of subjects and the origins and extent of royal prerogative' as well as to long-standing strains of anti-Catholicism (p. 185). [...]as Royce Macgillivray notes, the hope and the fear that renewing Civil War-era tensions would influence public opinion one way or another in the early 1 680s at times took the form of writing actual histories of the Civil War. Conventionally, the Royalist press 'took as its favorite narrative the defense of a castle or, even better, a mansion by its genteel owners'. Because royalist texts recalled 'narratives of chivalry, of the gallant and high-born champion defying and overcoming a multitude of evil opponents', they were able to emphasize the 'social theme' of 'a monarchy upheld by its 'natural' supporters, the aristocracy, with all other ranks of the nation, down to the meanest kitchen scullion, united under its command to protect the traditional order.