Stripped: Clothing and Identity in Colonial Captivity Narratives

This article examines the preoccupation of English colonists with their state of dress during captivity by Indians as reflected in their subsequent narratives. This concern is linked to the conflation of clothing and person, and the anxieties exhibited by the colonists during their imprisonment illustrate how important clothing was to their construction of identity, particularly in the New World, where the fear of degeneration was ever present.