Book Description

Christopher Castiglia gives shape to a tradition of American women's captivity narrative that ranges across three centuries, from Puritan colonist Mary Rowlandson's abduction by Narragansett Indians to Patty Hearst's kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Examining more than sixty accounts by women captives, as well as novels ranging from Susanna Rowson's eighteenth-century Rueben and Rachel to today's mass-market romances, Castiglia investigates paradoxes central to the genre. In captivity, women often find freedom from stereotypical role attributes of helplessness, dependency, sexual vulnerability, and xenophobia. In their condemnations of their non-white captors, they defy assumptions about race that undergird their own societies. Castiglia questions critical conceptions of captivity stories as primarily an appeal to racism and misogyny and instead finds in them imaginative challenges to rigid gender roles and racial ideologies. Whether the women of these stories resist or escape captivity, endure until they are released, or eventually choose to live among their captors, they emerge with the power to be critical of both cultures. These compelling narratives, with their boundary crossings and persistent explorations of cultural differences, have significant implications for current investigations into the construction of gender, race, and nation.