It requires recognizing that her experience, if we want to understand it rather than simply appropriate it for our own contemporary frameworks, has to be engaged with on its own terms — which means taking seriously the religious dimension that her contemporaries found most significant.

And the practical dimensions — the gun, the bears, the survival skills she developed — can coexist with the religious dimension without either canceling the other.

Human beings operate simultaneously in multiple registers of experience and meaning, and Marguerite de la Rocque was no different.

What The Island Gave Her

It would be a mistake to frame Marguerite de la Rocque’s island ordeal as entirely a story of taking away — of the deprivation and loss that defined her years there.

The ordeal also gave her something, and the literary tradition that has preserved her story has sometimes recognized this.