Hybrid Subjects and Fluid Identities in Women?s Indian Captivity Narratives: the Stories of Frances Slocum and Olive Oatman

摘要

During the 17th, 18thand 19thcenturies, adoptions of white children by Native American tribes and interracial marriages were extremely disturbing issues for Euro-American society. Women such as Eunice Williams, Mary Jemison or Frances Slocum chose not to return to the “civilized” territory they had been forced to abandon. For others such as Olive Oatman and Cynthia Ann Parker, their restoration was extraordinarily traumatic since indigenous culture had left a profound imprint on both their bodies and their minds. The stories of these transculturatedwomen complicate the notions of identity and “belonging” and invite us to think about modern conceptualizations of “race.” Hence, it is my intention to show how in spite of the countless efforts of the patriarchal and imperialistic stratum to use the voices of the captive women to circulate a hegemonic cultural model that relied on the superiority of the white race and the male gender, most of their stories challenge cultural expectations about whiteness and masculinity and surreptitiously debunk orthodox conceptions of ethnicity and gender. The accounts of both Frances Slocum and Olive Oatman are presented here as illustrative of those exceptional “voices” who, making use of the socially sanctioned cultural resources of their times, broke through the prevailing structures of power and authority and managed to circulate atypical stories of dauntless female figures. Their narratives unveil much about how white women experienced and revised the binarisms on which Western ideologies of race, class, and gender relied.