Book Review

The capture, imprisonment, and occasional escape of women, in Michelle Burnham's exemplary account, worked to mobilize American readers' sentiments for almost two hundred years. Cotton Mather described weeping over captivity narratives; Burnham asks what those tears reveal and argues that the tears they elicit distinguish those narratives as culturally and politically significant. In the widely dispersed accounts of Jane McCrea's famous death, for example, the motives behind her brief captivity and murder convey ethnic strife as well as marital constraints. Such early narratives, defining territory from the colonial frontier to slavery's borders, have long performed both tutelary and religious instruction. They produce almost ecumenical versions of spiritual narratives. Her attention to nationalism, race, and sexual shame leads Burnham to reexamine writers such as Mary Rowlandson, whose dismay at finding a woman controlling men informs her complaints about the favorite wife of the chief who nominally holds Rowlandson captive.

. . .