This past week for Environmental Literature, the class was assigned reading a few different environmental texts. Two of the texts, A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson and J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer: Letter III-What Is an American, have similar depictions of the wilderness. The wilderness, from class discussion, has often been depicted as a dark and evil landscape separate from civilization. Both Rowlandson and Crevecoeur’s writings share the same characteristics of how the wilderness is depicted.

Mary Rowlandson’s narrative accounts for her experience with being held captive by the Wampanoag Indians, a tribe of Native Americans. Rowlandson’s narrative goes through different periods of her captivity and the trials she had to go through while she was captive. The way of life for the Wampanoag was different to Rowlandson and she viewed it as savage. In the Second Remove of her narrative, Rowlandson described the wilderness as “vast and desolate” (Narrative of Captivity, p. 312 Second Remove). This depiction of the wilderness can be thought of to fit the motif that was discussed in class. Rowlandson’s journey was a long and harsh one as she travelled far into a place away from society under Indian captivity until she would return to society.

Rowlandson’s depiction of the wilderness is similar to Crevecoeur’s depiction of the wilderness in his writing. Crevecoeur’s writing is his idea of an American or what makes people, who live in the United States, Americans. Crevecoeur goes into great detail about different factions or groups of people who came to settle in America; he discusses their behavior and how they fit into American society. Another point he makes is about how the living in the wilderness can change a man. A person who goes into the wild adopts a new lifestyle of a hunter. Crevecoeur goes into detail how the lifestyle of a hunter can make a man “ferocious, gloomy, and unsociable” (Letters From an American Farmer, p. 7). This compares to Rowlandson’s view on the Wampanoag way of life where the Native American tribe is constantly moving through the harshest of obstacles while also hunting wild animals for their own survival.

Both Rowlandson and Crevecoeur have the motif of the wilderness in their respective texts. The wilderness is often depicted as a cold, dark, and unforgiving place away from society and it seems that both have this same view because both authors see those that live in the wilderness as savage and ill-mannered. Both authors are also assumed to be used to living in civilization as opposed to the wilderness as both see it as a location where humankind should not live in. Whether or not their views are correct is indeterminate because one could argue today that nature and society have switched roles in environmental text with nature being a positive presence and a beautiful place to be a part of while society is depicted as the opposite. Rowlandson and Crevecoeur both depict the wilderness in a similar manner and are helpful in understanding environmental literature.