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Legacy 18.1 (2001) 108-109



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Book Review

Cartographies of Desire:
Captivity, Race, and Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation


Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race, and Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation. By Rebecca Blevins Faery. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. 288 pp. $39.95/$18.95 paper.

Rebecca Blevins Faery's Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race, and Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation builds on Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land and The Land Before Her to show how America's physical and ideological landscapes have been mapped on--and at the expense of--the female body. Faery's specific focus is how the stories of two women, Pocahontas and Mary Rowlandson, have functioned in the ongoing struggle to define America as a white, male, Christian nation. What distinguishes Cartographies of Desire from previous scholarship on Pocahontas and Rowlandson is Faery's inspired decision to study them together. The coupling makes sense, for like Rowlandson, whose 1682 captivity narrative is heralded as the prototype of an American literary genre, Pocahontas experienced captivity in the "New" World, a fact suppressed in most versions of her story. Kidnaped by English colonists in 1613, Pocahontas was used as a pawn in struggles with her father over land; her baptism and marriage to an Englishman took place during her three-year captivity. Faery's goal in studying Pocahontas and Rowlandson side-by-side is "to see the two figures as connected in the cultural work they have been made to do and to consider the ways the two figures have cooperated and intersected in the work of producing an evolving racially inflected and gendered nationalism" (13).

The pairing of Pocahontas and Rowlandson succeeds on many levels. Faery's insights into early constructions of racial difference and the myth of whiteness depend on the juxtaposition of an Anglo-woman's story with a Native American woman's. Sensitive to the places where their stories diverge as well as intersect, Faery's nuanced analysis of Pocahontas and Rowlandson answers the call for closer attention to race and gender as overlapping discourses. The limited focus leads to some repetition throughout the book's three chapters, but Faery's examination of an impressive array of sources and contexts ensures that Cartographies of Desire is never a dull read. A model for cultural studies scholarship, its focus shifts with ease from Puritan sermons to cereal boxes to Hollywood westerns, from John Donne's poetry to children's books to the marketing of the Gulf War. It moves gracefully from the seventeenth century through the twentieth to show how the friendly Indian maiden and the white woman held captive by hostile Indians function in the Revolutionary era, in struggles over Indian removal and African slavery, after both world wars, during the Civil Rights movement, and in recent debates over multiculturalism (15).

Faery makes this study even more provocative by locating the legacies of Pocahontas and Rowlandson not only in the dominant culture [End Page 108] but also in counter-narratives that seek to undermine its authority: attempts by writers such as Louise Erdrich, Michelle Cliff, and Bharati Mukherjee to liberate the captive bodies of white and Indian women from the colonialist gaze. Further, Faery unearths in Rowlandson's and Pocahontas's stories elements that call into question the very divisions and hierarchies they have been used to support. Puritan leaders framed Rowlandson as the passive white female in need of vigilant protection, for example, but the woman in her narrative is actually an active "mapper," rather than "the mapped" (65). Similarly, Pocahontas's effective "mimicry of Anglo identity" is a reminder that "such an identity was never given, but always made" (155).

The subversive potential of Rowlandson's and Pocahontas's stories helps account, perhaps, for their popularity. If so, then Faery's remapping of American cultural landscapes is more successful than even she seems to realize, for the key to solving a dilemma Faery highlights in one of the book's eloquent and effective autobiographical...

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