This paper focuses on early British and American encounters with “savages” by examining the narratives of both Elizabeth March and Eliza Bradley. Both narratives capitalize on the cruel treatment of the Moorish Other and epitomize the constructed sexual fantasies about the Other by reproducing stories of female beleaguered virtues in alien lands. By analyzing such narratives, I capitalize on the complex and the ambivalent nature of the Barbary captivity discourse as well as the problematic participation of gender to the cultural building of the western empire. In such narratives the authors claim the veracity and the truthfulness of their tales and by doing that they contribute to nurturing the Anglo-American imagination by boosting the sense of exoticism and also by celebrating British and American values and nationhood through their sense of heroism and cultural triumph. However, a close reading of such narratives reveals conflicting discourses and encounters and gives new possibilities of rereading such colonial text.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 