The Eradication of American proto-feminism: The re- conceptualizing of gender in the Indian Captivity Narrative

Clear-cut gender roles as depicted in the early “Indian Captivity Narratives, ” a genre that represented “arguably the first American literary form dominated by women’s experiences as captives, story-tellers, writers, and readers, ” could be seen as literary precursors to Richard White’s “Middle Ground ” theory.1 Although White is not primarily concerned with the role of women on North American frontiers, his philosophy affords Native Americans – a group traditionally perceived as comparably disenfranchised – as playing a far more active role in their economic, environmental and social dealings with European settlers than historians had usually permitted before the 1970s. Although evidence of the Middle Ground is less apparent in the more confrontational “frontiersman ” accounts of the nineteenth century, the formative captivity narratives penned by female authors – the “prototype of popular American writing, dominating publication during the last years of the seventeenth century and serving as essential source for much later American fiction ” contain elements that serve as definite antecedents of White’s model.