SOURCE: "Mary Jenison and Rebecca Bryan Boone: At Home in the Woods," in The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860, University of North Carolina Press, 1984, pp. 68-89.

In the essay that follows, Kolodny examines the conflict between the nineteenth-century ideal of white womanhood and the captivity narratives authored by "Indianized" women.

Always disturbing to a white society determined to replace the forests and their native inhabitants with "a civilized Manner of Living" was the specter of white children, once having experienced Indian ways, forever attached to them. At a prisoner exchange between the Iroquois and the French in upper New York in 1699, Cadwallader Colden observed that "notwithstanding the French Commissioners took all Pains possible to carry Home the French, … few of them could be persuaded to return." "The English had as much Difficulty. No Arguments, no Intreaties, nor Tears of their Friends and...