Trapped by society, imprisoned in the wilderness: Captivity in American literature, 1680-186

One way that a country defines itself is through its literature, and it is at first surprising that the United States should have a literature so preoccupied with captivity. Two types of non-fiction narratives that have had a vital influence on American literature, Indian captivity narratives and slave narratives, both focus on captivity experiences, and prison narratives, too, are inspiring a growing number of works. This study examines the earliest of these non-fiction genres, the Indian captivities, as well as novels and narratives about captivities to aborigines written by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allen Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, and Herman Melville. I argue that American writers used the theme of captivity to reconcile two ideas: that America is a haven of freedom surrounded by hostile savages, and that America is not as free as it might be because it continues to deny liberty to its own individualists, blacks, and Native Americans.;Nineteenth-century American authors develop two paradigms. In the first, a rescuer frees a young white captive, who represents America, from savages in the wilderness, thus reenacting America's deliverance from captivity to Europe and justifying the subjugation and removal of non-whites. In the second paradigm, the protagonist escapes from an American society he finds entrapping and runs off to the wilderness, only to find himself captive to barbarians who threaten his life. He eventually escapes again, but with a better understanding of freedom gained from living among the savages. This type of captivity story is more critical of American society's oppressiveness, but like the first paradigm, it also has patriotic and ethnocentric overtones. It extols American society for granting individualists the opportunity to escape to a wilderness, and it suggests that America has no choice but to restrain blacks and Indians when they endanger white Americans.;I conclude that these captivity patterns together express the tensions between the conservative desire to ensure America's safety and the progressive aspiration to expand individual freedom. Both paradigms are limited, however, by their ethnocentrism and their implied assumption that a person can find freedom only while escaping from an entrapping community.