Both Mary Rowlandson, a 17th-century Puritan, and Elizabeth Ashbridge, an 18th-century Quaker, sought spiritual enlightenment and conversion in colonial America. Rowlandson recorded her experiences in her captivity narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, and Ashbridge recounted her struggles in her Autobiography. Physical travel is a central component in each woman's spiritual journey. After Rowlandson was abducted from her home in Lancaster, Massachusetts, she traveled some 150 miles with her Indian captors into western Massachusetts and modern-day Vermont and New Hampshire. After Ashbridge's elopement and estrangement from her family in England, she traveled to Ireland, took passage to America as an indentured servant, and then traveled extensively throughout the colonies, in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. Both women were pursued by men, with Rowlandson eager to return to her husband, and Ashbridge trying to escape from hers, and both used their experiences to describe a different form of travel, the journey toward God.
Although both Rowlandson and Ashbridge desire spiritual conversion (albeit in different forms), neither achieves that result even though both women shape their experiences into the traditional narrative form of the spiritual autobiography. By examining the religious allusions and Biblical types in both narratives and by closely reading each tale in terms of the traditional conversion genre, we see that constant travel and relocation disrupts the spiritual motives of the two authors. Travel provides these two women with an opportunity to imagine their identities apart from their husbands and societies. As such, Rowlandson's and Ashbridge's accounts downplay spiritual conversion and magnify domestic strife and emotional disquietude. Spiritual conversion is not an inextricable component of the Puritan and Quaker imagination. Spirituality is a function of the community to which one belongs; were it solely a feature of one's intellect or emotions, such radical revisioning of spirituality would not take place when one was removed from a community. As one would imagine, traveling physically detaches Rowlandson and Ashbridge from their communities, but it also spiritually uproots the two women and does not allow for spiritual conversion to take place. As both women move away from their communities, they simply cannot spiritually "travel" toward God; conversion requires a fixed location. Physical travel allows both women to arrive at a new sense of self and to discover the voice that speaks it.
Elizabeth Ashbridge chooses to undertake her journey, not only to flee her husband, but to create an opportunity to experience spiritual conversion. Rowlandson, as a captive, has no choice in undertaking her journey, but she also writes the narrative as if it is an "opportunity." She now has the chance to be "afflicted" by God, a requisite condition for spiritual conversion. Rowlandson and Ashbridge are thus far more similar than they are different: each sees travel as a test of their faith and as a rite of passage into a new sense of self. They lose, however, this spiritual focus because traveling puts them in contact with other religious and cultural practices. As is customary in a travel narrative, each writer encounters other people not of her own culture. These persons of different faiths and cultures allow Rowlandson and Ashbridge to gain perspective on their own religious and cultural insularity. Both also become fascinated with strange physical environments and peculiar habits and traditions of others, thereby giving the customary tinge of adventure and exoticism to their travel narratives. But this very fascination allows each writer to reflect personally on the secular role that she could play in her own culture. Rowlandson and Ashbridge see new possibilities on the road that draw out more of their personal thoughts on domestic life and fewer and fewer insights into their spiritual selves.
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