Hope Leslie

Christopher Castiglia (Essay Date Fall 1989)

SOURCE: Castiglia, Christopher. "In Praise of Extravagant Women: Hope Leslie and the Captivity Romance." Legacy 6, no. 2 (fall 1989): 3-16.

In the following essay, Castiglia presents an analysis of Hope Leslie as a frontier romance that subverts racial and gender stereotypes.

The many exploits of the American Adam are by now well recorded. Adam is the quintessential adventurer, devoting his life to what Thoreau in Walden calls "extra-vagance": "I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced.… I desire to speak somewhere without bounds" (240). Life beyond limits, beyond restriction, lived by a wandering hero unencumbered by the mundane details of home and society—this is the nineteenth-century Adam's American dream...