Visual Representation as a Method of Discourse on Captivity, Focused on Cynthia Ann Parker

Abstract

The burgeoning field of captivity narrative studies has produced many dynamic and diverse analyses, from historians, literary critics, and feminist writers to ethno-historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and theologians. This rich seam of scholarship has highlighted multiple meanings and issues such as racial imperialism, gender, stereotyping, miscegenation, expansion, and nationalism, which have become enmeshed in the colonial discourses of power between Europeans and American Indians. The illustrations within the narratives, mostly consisting of woodcut engravings, are an obvious source of material for visual analysis, but the wider field of American art also provides appropriate and relevant works to study, from history painting and sculpture to landscapes. The artistic genres used to represent captive subjects and their captors provide useful information on differing stylistic depictions, particularly when those involved were white European females and Indian males, and how such visual constructs inform the overall written history (Truettner 1991).

Our own existence cannot be separated from the accounts we give of ourselves. It is in telling our own stories that we give ourselves an identity. We recognize ourselves in the stories that we tell about ourselves. It makes very little difference whether these stories are true or false; fiction as well as verifiable history provides us with an identity—Paul Ricoeur.

—Ebersole 1995 p. 190