Short Response Paper #2

Gonzalez-Garcia 1 Cristina Gonzalez-Garcia English 215 B Dr. Paula Kot September 23, 2007

Benjamin Franklin and Mary Rowlandson: Personal Identity and Responses

In A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration, Rowlandson had identified her hardships that she experienced as a captive during the King Phillips war. She had made the realization that her struggle had caused a liminal and unstable personal identity and felt as if she had to prove to her readers that the changes she faced, only made her a better puritan mother. Benjamin Franklin encountered an identity crisis as he grew up and changed from a impoverished background to become someone fit being imitated. (Franklin 473).Each writer responds to their alteration/ loss of identity according to their historical contexts, lifestyles and beliefs. Benjamin Franklin grew up in Boston the former core of the puritan and religious civilizations in a time where Puritanism was now dead and secularism was on the rise. He had written his autobiography in two major time periods, before and after the Revolutionary war. These pre and post writings were genius as it leaves the autobiography to become an allegory for the young sons of America, as well as a conduct book. Unlike Benjamin Franklin, Mary Rowlandson used her situation to better herself spiritually and was generally unconcerned for the fate of her material possessions and status in life. She maintained the ideal that god was stripping the puritans of their material values to in order to strengthen their faith and test what was left of spirituality in an increasingly corrupt

Gonzalez-Garcia 2 world. This is exemplified when she writes in the Third remove “The Lord still showed mercy to me, and upheld me; and as He wounded me with one hand, so he healed me with the other” (239).

Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. 7th Ed. Ny; WW Norton and Co, 2007. 472-586.

Rowlandon, Mary. A Narrative of the Captivty and Restoration. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. 7th Ed. Ny; WW Norton and Co, 2007. 236-267.