The Need for Strangeness: Captivity Narratives and Issues of Race and 
Gender in Early America
 
According to Richard Slotkin, Captivity Narratives from Early American 
literature involve a single individual, usually a woman, standing "passively under 
the strokes of evil, awaiting rescue by the grace of God" from a forced captivity 
or kidnapping by Native American tribesmen. Gender issues as well as racial 
ones are implicit to the form. On an allegorical level, the suffering woman 
"represents the whole, chastened body of Puritan society" from which she is 
temporarily estranged. The most commonly anthologized Captivity Narrative is 
The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson by 
Mary Rowlanson (1682) but there are others, and as a genre the Captivity 
Narrative is put to use for a variety of religious and political purposes, 
sometimes reinforcing the rule of religious authority, sometimes used as a 
political justification for westward expansion and the doctrine of Manifest 
Destiny. Some of the abductions, of which the Captivity Narratives are 
purportedly first-hand reports, were quite notorious in there time, and there 
are contemporary second-hand reports which provide a rich source of cultural 
material. Mythically, such forced estrangement may have been fortuitous: the 
myth of "Love in the Wilderness" (Pocahontas and numerous other real-life 
examples) or the Myth of the Good Companion. Ethnic stereotypes are 
reinforced, both for the Native Americans and for the European colonists: 
While the Spanish see the Natives as brutish beasts, the French see them, in 
Jesuit terms, as souls in need of redemption. The English are split: Those of the 
Puritan Northern colonies see the Natives as a Satanic threat, while those of 
the Anglican colonies to the South see them rather as "innocent exotics". Thus 
we can perceive the true role of the Captivity narrative: while overtly it 
attempts to present ethnic stereotypes of the Natives, it seems more 
successfully at reinforcing stereotypes of the Europeans themselves. 
Surprising, perhaps, from both a racial and a gender point of view is the absence 
of rape or the threat of rape. Instead we have the offer of marriage: 
apparently a real option in Colonial times but quite removed from Anglo-to-
Indian relations during the Eighteenth and later centuries. Here the Captivity 
Narrative shows that racial divisions were constructed not imported, since we 
see these divisions and the assumptions behind them increase and change 
drastically by the nineteenth century.