Mother and the Other: Situating New Zealand Women’s Captivity Narratives in a Transcolonial Settler Culture of Anxiety

This article analyses nineteenth-century women’s captivity narratives in the white settler colony New Zealand. It asks how white femininity and indigenous masculinity are represented and how these notions relate to representations of white masculinity and indigenous femininity. Moreover, the article examines the relationship between colonial gender identities and British bourgeois ideals of respectable gender images. By comparing the New Zealand case with the early modern North American narrative of Mary Rowlandson and the Australian Eliza Fraser stories, the author argues that New Zealand can be included in a transcolonial culture of captivity, as it shares a transcolonial repertoire of discursive rhetorics, strategies and anxieties.