ABSTRACT
Captivity narratives—tales of white settlers held captive by American Indians—are among the earliest and most popular literature published in North America. Most scholarship and critical writing on the captivity narrative as a genre has focused on the period before the end of the Civil War, when actual Indian captivities were still regularly occurring. However, the captivity narrative has played an equally significant role in American popular culture of the twentieth century through Hollywood filmmaking. Reading the films together as captivity narratives, rather than in relation to standard Hollywood-defined film genres or the work of a particular director, highlights the ongoing serious attention in American popular culture to issues of racial, cultural, and national identity. The opposing characters in captivity narratives are "Indians," a culturally alien, non-white native population. Captivity narratives past and present address fear of white women's sexual relations outside the purview of white male control.
