Flight of the Sparrow by Amy Belding Brown

How does she initially view the natural world and what inspires this change? Compare her experience of the natural world to your own. While living with the Indians Mary begins to find beauty, peace, and sacred mystery in the wilderness. What role does the sparrow play in the author’s exploration of those ideas? Compare their behavior toward her to the cruelty and kindness shown her by her husband, Joseph, and other members of English society.ĭiscuss the various forms that freedom and imprisonment take in the novel. Mary experiences both cruelty and kindness at the hands of her Indian captors. Can you think of any modern-day equivalents? Identify those constraints, discuss how they might have helped or hurt the Bay Colony’s survival, and discuss how women might have found meaning in life despite them.Īs an Indian captive, Mary feels freed from the constraint of “mutual watch,” the “relentless scrutiny of each other’s conduct required of all church members.” Discuss the idea of mutual watch as it plays out in the novel, and what it might be like to live under such a system. Mary Rowlandson lives in a society ruled by men in which women were allowed few of the freedoms that we take for granted today. What does she give and what does she receive from each relationship? What was your overall response to the novel? What did you feel? What did you learn?ĭiscuss Mary Rowlandson’s relationships with the three men in her life-Joseph, James, and Samuel. Now, having lived on the other side of the forest, she begins to question the edicts that have guided her, torn between the life she knew and the wisdom the natives have shown her.īased on the compelling true narrative of Mary Rowlandson, Flight of the Sparrow is an evocative tale that transports the reader to a little-known time in early America and explores the real meanings of freedom, faith, and acceptance. All her life, Mary has been taught to fear God, submit to her husband, and abhor Indians. To her confused surprise, she is drawn to her captors’ open and straightforward way of life, a feeling further complicated by her attraction to a generous, protective English-speaking native known as James Printer. Battling cold, hunger, and exhaustion, Mary witnesses harrowing brutality but also unexpected kindness. Now, her home destroyed, her children lost to her, she has been sold into the service of a powerful woman tribal leader, made a pawn in the ongoing bloody struggle between English settlers and native people. Even before Mary Rowlandson was captured by Indians on a winter day of violence and terror, she sometimes found herself in conflict with her rigid Puritan community. She has learned to live in a new, free way….

She has seen vistas that have stolen away her breath. She suspects that she has changed too much to ever fit easily into English society again.

Flight of the Sparrow by Amy Belding Brown