Fruitful in the land of my affliction: Narratives of captivity and female self-fashioning, 1666--1824 (Mary Rowlandson, Mary Jemison, Margaret Cavendish, Sarah Fielding, Madame de Grafigny, France)

The importance of the trope of captivity to the development of the female self comes from the absolute cultural immersion that necessarily attends the captive situation. In non-fictional accounts such as Mary Rowlandson's and Mary Jeminson's it forces the total reconstruction of a subjectivity based on relationship to, rather than difference from, and the resulting flexibility in the subject allows for and at times forces actions that under normal circumstances would be abominations. These fact-based narratives also allow a freedom of movement otherwise inaccessible to women, which in fictional captivities such as Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World, Francoise de Graffigny's Lettres d'une peruvienne, and Sarah Fielding's Ophelia, can translate into an ability on the part of the writer to construct not only the subjectivity of the speaker, but the very cultural situation (or what Charles Taylor refers to as cultural "landmarks") upon which the subjectivity is based. This allows the construction of subject positions with an autonomy and flexibility previously made impossible by the restrictions of the society in which the authors wrote. The possibilities thus enabled by the new cultural milieu empower authors-particularly female authors-to build and rebuild themselves (and their characters) as autonomous speaking subjects.; Rowlandson is forced into the unstable captive situation and adapts to it; Cavendish, de Graffigny and Fielding all create it for themselves, in order to use the subversive potential it creates. Jemison, on the other hand, seems to embrace it, initially out of necessity, but in the end out of a desire to stay in the Indian culture because its recognition of identity as cultural rather than racial is, in the end, comfortable and natural for her.