Captivity canons

The captivity narrative genre is alive and well in the American academy. Mary Rowlandson’s foundational text of 1682 is probably being taught in more college courses than ever before, as it now not only appears in many anthologies, but is also available solo as a classroom text. ¹ In 1993, Twayne added a volume entitled The Indian Captivity Narrative to its United States Authors Series, a bellweather of canonization. The three books examined here represent a major resurgence in literary scholarship on captivity narrative, even as they challenge the historical definitions of the genre, and argue for its connections to sentimental fiction. While the three works differ somewhat in methodology, all include analyses of Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, and all agree on the continuing presence in film, fiction, and autobiography of the tropes of racial and cultural prejudice fundamental to the captivity drama. Ebersole offers brief interpretations of five films, including Little Big Man and John Ford’s The Searchers. Castiglia includes a fascinating chapter on Patty Hearst, examining a film about her, her autobiography, and her roles in two of John Waters’s films. Burnham concludes her examination of the motif of tears in sentimentality with a reading of Terminator 2, in which cyborgs are distinguished from humans by their inability to cry.

All three writers also agree on the inseparability of fiction and non-fiction in the genre. Previous studies have established a periodization from the religious-typological captivities of the Puritan era, to sensational propagandist texts produced during the Revolution and Seven Years War, and finally to manifestations of the genre in novels after 1790. ² In these new books, however, there are few inquiries into a captive’s veracity, no exposés of hoaxes or embellishments. The transition of the captivity genre into the novel is accepted as a natural process; Burnham writes that “by the late eighteenth century many of these texts . . . are virtually indistinguishable from sentimental novels” (49). The issue becomes not separating true narratives from fictional ones, but correcting earlier critics’ claims of which novels deserve analysis for their captivity plots. Castiglia and Burnham appear to have reached a consensus that Edgar Huntly and The Last of the Mohicans should yield to a new canon of captivity romances by women: Ann Eliza Bleeker’s The History of Maria Kittle, Susanna Rowson’s Reuben and Rachel, Harriet Cheney’s A Peep at the Pilgrims, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie. Both books include interesting readings of these four texts, and Ebersole’s also discusses Maria Kittle. Burnham and Castiglia embrace the recent recuperation of the sentimental novel, but also point out some flaws in the “separate spheres” theory, which sees nineteenth-century American life and literature as divided by gender and genre. Castiglia argues that the captivity romance genre’s “refusal to follow either a ‘masculine’ or a ‘feminine’ plot has ensured its invisibility in both traditional and revisionist considerations of American literary history” (134), and that by her courage, fortitude, and even violence, the female captive rejected stereotypes of domesticity and entered a wilderness realm usually reserved for men.

Behind the new, broadened vision of the captivity genre is not simply a desire to bring it up-to-date with the film era, but a reexamination of what constitutes captivity. Burnham and Castiglia both limit their studies to texts by or about female captives, and expand the very meaning of “captivity” to include aspects of women’s confinement by men. To suggest that any daughter or wife is a potential captive may seem a stretch at first, but the tradition of...