Across contested territory, symbolized by the woman's body, concepts of race and sex have helped shape the evolving American identity.
Faery shows that the colonizers' desire for land fused with their desire for Native women.
Using Mary Rowlandson's 1682 captivity narrative and the Pocahontas stories introduced in chronicles of early seventeenth-century Virginia, Faery demonstrates how the two female figures have been invoked and elaborated in numerous texts and settings as America's image of itself has evolved through three centuries. The imaginative sweep of the text presents the reader with a fresh look at the political, racial, and sexual implications of stories about white women captured by Indians and about Indian women captured, colonized, and reinterpreted by Anglo culture. Placing racial and cultural conflict in context, Faery illuminates the origins and evolution of America's persistent attempts to assert itself as a white nation. Rebecca Blevins Faery teaches in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.