Reflection Blog 1

I have read A Narrative of Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. This was a pretty good story to me. It had a lot of talk about God and how Mary would look to him in order to decide her fate. The writing of this story was kind of like how the Purtian writing. They were alike by their characteristics. Mary Rowlandson would always look up to God to tell her what to do next. When her baby died, she looked up to him and asked him what should she do next. When she wrote, "I repaired under these thoughts to my Bible (my great comforter in that time) and that scripture came to my hand..." (Rowlandson 85). She speaks in this quote about how her Bible was her comforter during this hard time. Her son was sick and she needed help from God. The Puritan writing was just like this because that they also used the Bible as a model to the story. When Mary had nowhere else to go she would look at a verse in the Bible in order to guide her to her way. She would look up to god as of what to do. This story also was written as a diary which was how the Puritan's wrote some of their stories and the workings of God. Mary would put her faith into god and write it as a journal. She would take the path that God had given her. She knew that if she would die, she would have salvation. When her son was ill she wrote, "and no Christian friend was near him to do any office of love for him, either for soul or body" (Rowlandson 84). This means that when her son was ill no Christian was around him in order to pray for him and his soul. It was only her to keep him company. She said that their was nobody to give any "love for him, either for soul or body. Their was no Christian their in order to give love for his soul or body. Overall, this story was a lot alike towards of how the Puritan's writing was.

The other story that I read was the story Upon the Burning of our House. This story was about a girl who's house gets burned down. The thing is though that she is not mad that her house was burned down. Of course she is sad about all the stuff she had lost that she loved and all the things that made her happy, but then she realized that if God had given her all that stuff, he should be able to take that away. She understood that this was God's will. His will was to make her realize that none of the stuff she used to love really mattered to her anymore. He wanted to make her realize that she had to trust him. When Bradstreet wrote, "The world no longer let me love, My hope and treasure lies above" (Bradstreet 91). She says this because she realized that all the things she thought that she loved before her house burnt down were really not that important to her. What really was important to her was that she could trust God. God had given her those important things and he could just take them away. This story's characteristics were just like the Puritan's writing characteristics. They both used writing to explore their inner and outer lives for signs of working of God. Just like when her house was burned down she understood that that was the working of God and she let it go. Both of these stories showed characteristics of the Puritan writing.

Bibliography

Bradstreet, Anne. "Upon the Burning of our House." Glencoe Literature. Ed. Jeffery D. Wilhelm.

American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Co, 2009. 91. Print.

Rowlandson, Mary. "A Narrative of Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson."Glencoe Literature. Ed. Jeffery D. Wilhelm. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Co, 2009. 82. Print.