Includes bibliographical references (pages 205-214) and index.

"Why do narratives of Indian captivity emerge between 1682 and 1707 and why are these texts, so centrally concerned with women's experience, supported and even written by a powerful group of Puritan ministers? In The Captive's Position, Teresa Toulouse argues for a new interpretation of the captivity narrative - one that takes into account the profound shifts in political and social authority and legitimacy that occurred in New England at the end of the seventeenth century." "Toulouse explores how the female captive's position came to resonate so powerfully for traditional male elites in the second and third generation of the Massachusetts colony. Examining the captivity narratives of Mary Rowlandson, Hannah Dustan, Hannah Swarton, and John Williams (who comes to stand in for the female captive), Toulouse asserts the need to read these gendered texts as cultural products that variably engage, shape, and confound colonial attitudes toward both Europe and the local scene in Massachusetts. In doing so, The Captive's Position offers a new story of the rise and breakdown of orthodix Puritan captivities and a meditation on the relationship between dreams of authority and historical change."--Jacket.

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