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.