In the fall of 2013, the New York Times Review of Books published a short essay entitled “Dark Places” by renowned literary critic Elaine Showalter. She discusses a handful of recent memoirs that follow the same narrative arc: a female narrator describes her abduction by a stranger, who holds her captive in squalid conditions for months or even years. She escapes or the police come to her rescue, and she takes up the pen to chronicle her experiences and to reflect on her reintegration into mainstream society. According to Showalter, these texts are real‐life renderings of John Fowles's 1963 novel The Collector, and share striking similarities with Indian captivity narratives, which were popular during the colonization and western expansion of the United States. Showalter also writes briefly about Jaycee Dugard's 2012 memoir A Stolen Life, and at the end of the essay, she urges Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, and Gena DeJesus to commit to paper their stories of abduction by Ariel Castro. Turning her attention to her readers, Showalter tells them that they should not feel ashamed when they are drawn to these violent memoirs, as they are examples of “triumphant survival in the face of overwhelming odds” (Reference ShowalterShowalter 2013, 1). This essay is significant for a number of reasons: Showalter is the first critic to identify a striking trend in Canadian and American literature, as memoirs featuring this narrative trajectory are increasingly common and widely read. These now include Josefina Rivera's Cellar Girl (2013), Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus's Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland (2015), as well as Michelle Knight's Finding Me (2014), and Elizabeth Smart's My Story (2009). Despite the popularity of these memoirs, however, Showalter's brief essay is the only scholarly discussion of these texts.

These memoirs offer enormous potential for fruitful feminist analysis. Women are the sole authors of these texts, and the graphic depictions of violence, narrated from a first‐person point of view, reveal important information about the ubiquity of violence in our current social climate. Nevertheless, Showalter's formulation of these memoirs as sites of authorial empowerment does not account for some of these texts' most significant themes and plot points. Although I do not necessarily dispute her analysis, the authors listed above are often critical of the American public (and thus indirectly, of their readers) for seeking out the details of their traumatic captivity. They tend to situate their memoirs as responses to overwhelming and intrusive public attention after they escape. They also interweave graphic depictions of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse with mediations about their reluctance from the outset to take up the pen and divulge these details. This tension foregrounds the authors' economic precarity: with few exceptions, these women were abducted at the onset of adolescence, have little formal education, come from economically deprived areas, and in the wake of their captivity, have few vocational opportunities. These memoirs thus grant the authors a means of financial support once media outlets turn their attention elsewhere following their escape. In this context, taking up the pen is also a means of financial support and an attempt to find privacy, inviting us to consider the multiple and contradictory functions of these memoirs beyond simply empowering the authors. This article begins to engage with these realities, and extends Showalter's discussion by situating memoirs by Smart, Berry, DeJesus, Knight, Rivera, and Dugard as examples of the Foucauldian confession, the hallmarks of which I will discuss in the sections below.

Foucault's work is an ideal point of departure for this analysis, as feminist thinkers have argued that his discussion of sexual knowledge and his theorization of discursive subjectivity are integral to their analysis of valid or empowering utterances (Reference HengeholdHengehold 1994, 88). One of my aims in this article is to look beyond the logic that a confession is either empowering or not. Foucault's analysis attends to the multiple factors that motivate these women to chronicle their experiences, and to those that allow the broader public to consume them with such voracity. In this article, I will draw from Foucault's discussion of the confession, the sexual confession, and his theory of subjectification to complicate and extend Showalter's analysis. I contend that contemporary memoirs of abduction and prolonged captivity operate as important venues where survivors develop new capabilities, write back to the dominant center that distorts their experiences, and articulate a deeper understanding of the matrix of power and privilege that gave rise to their abductions. First, I will attend to the social factors that motivate these women to take up the pen. After this, I will map the ways memoirs enable the authors to voice their understanding of the social and economic factors that both gave rise to their plight and inform media discussions that blame them for their suffering. I will ultimately argue that although memoirs function as a public venue to resist or reject these dominant interpretive frames, memoirs simultaneously reaffirm the ubiquity of these lines of thinking.

Compelling Captives to Confess

Although Showalter situates memoirs of abduction and prolonged captivity as sites of authorial empowerment, the authors' perceptions of their texts are not necessarily congruent with her formulation. Knight, Berry, DeJesus, Rivera, Smart, and Dugard have ambivalent relationships with their memoirs, and by extension with their audiences; many of these authors express a reluctance to take up the pen. For instance, in A Stolen Life, Dugard writes, “when I was first found I was adamant that there would be no book, no one would ever know what happened” (Reference DugardDugard 2011, 49). In describing her writing process, she asserts: “this has turned out to be a very hard book to write. Part of me does not want to continue. To reenter the state of mind I was [in] at that age is difficult and twists my insides. The more I write, the harder it becomes … this is something I have worked hard to put behind me and to write about it in such detail years later is difficult” (42). Dugard explains that she acceded to the public's demand for a memoir because she felt that keeping the details of her captivity private would protect her captor, Phillip Garrido, who held her in his backyard for eighteen years (42). Michelle Knight similarly explains “I've never revealed why I spoke to the man who came up to me in the store or the creepy feeling I had when we left. … I've never told my whole story. Until now” (Reference KnightKnight 2014, ix). Knight's fellow captives Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus begin their co‐authored memoir Hope by explaining, “we have written here about terrible things that we never wanted to think about again,” and continue that they wrote a memoir because they “wanted people to know the truth, the real story of our decade as Castro's prisoners” (Reference Berry and DeJesusBerry and DeJesus 2015, v). Smart opens her memoir My Story by explaining that some aspects of her experience are “burned into my mind” such as “terror that is utterly indescribable, even to this day” (Reference SmartSmart 2009, 3). Taken together, these assertions foreground a problematic double bind: Knight and her contemporaries can either publicly discuss intimate details of their trauma, or “protect” their captors (and thus hide the truth) by refusing to speak. In either case, they are subject to intense public scrutiny. This is compounded as public debate about these abductions tends to blame these women for failing to escape; as Moscowitz and Duvall explain, “in the case of child abductions involving teenagers such as Elizabeth Smart, speculations about whether she invited sexual attention from her attacker or chose to stay with him rather than escape builds on myths that girls are ‘asking for it’ when they are kidnapped” (Reference Moscowitz and DuvallMoscowitz and Duvall 2011, 149). These accusations work in tandem with the authors' desire to “set the record straight” to reflect dominant discursive patterns surrounding domestic violence. We must note that the cases I discuss differ drastically from other manifestations of spousal abuse, but the passages above suggest that we make sense of long‐term captivity using the same interpretive frames that we deploy to discuss domestic violence: when a woman acts in a counterintuitive way and returns to her partner (or does not leave in the first place), we attribute these actions to the victim's character flaws or personal weakness (Reference ShoosShoos 2003, 62). We hypothesize that women consented, or even enjoyed, the abuse. As a result, we blame the victims, and erase the complex psychological, social, and economic factors that prevent women from leaving violent relationships (63). This logic is so ubiquitous that should Smart and her contemporaries refuse to acquiesce to the public's call for traumatic details of their experiences, they risk being accused of protecting their captors.

The content of these memoirs also reflects this climate, and many of these authors describe the sexual and physical abuse they endured, and then situate this violence as a factor that made them long for their freedom, but which simultaneously impeded their escape. In every case, the author speaks directly to the logic described above. Elizabeth Smart writes that when Brian David Mitchell abducted her from her family's opulent Salt Lake City home, she was certain that he would kill her loved ones if she called for help. She addresses her readers directly: “let me be clear about that. I spent nine months under his control. Every day that I spent with him made me more and more convinced that this man was capable of killing. He would have struck me down in an instant. There is no doubt and there never was” (Reference SmartSmart 2009, 26). Smart also refutes allegations that her sister Mary Katherine, who was nine years old at the time, waited too long to inform her parents of Elizabeth's abduction from the bed they shared:

Smart then addresses criticisms that she did not try hard enough to escape, and explains that over the course of her nine‐month captivity, “Brian David Mitchell would rape me every day, sometimes multiple times a day. He would torture and brutalize me in ways that are impossible to describe, would starve and manipulate me like I was an animal” (46). She demands that her audience carefully reconsider the notion that she consented to her captivity, and says “if you haven't been in such a situation, if you haven't felt the kind of stone‐cold fear that cuts you to the core—few people really have—its impossible to imagine what it does to your thinking, to your emotions, to the way your heart and brain begin to work” (51). She returns to this theme multiple times over the course of her narrative, and in one case writes “People wonder … why didn't I cry out for help? Why didn't I scream to escape when, finally, I had the opportunity? The answer is difficult to explain, but it comes down to fear. Fear for my life. Fear for my family. Fear of the pain and humiliation” (100).

Michelle Knight also responds to these accusations, and writes that Castro threatened to shoot her if she screamed (Reference KnightKnight 2014, 105). Jaycee Dugard reminds her audience that her captor Phillip Garrido abducted her when she was only eleven years old. She then tells her audience: “to truly understand what it was like, you [would] have had to be there, and … I wish that on no one” (Reference DugardDugard 2011, xii). Dugard explains that her captor became her only source of human contact, and she “depended on him for food, water, my toilet … I craved human contact so much by then that I actually looked forward to him coming to see me” (26). Like Smart, she addresses her reader directly, in this case when she discusses accessing the internet during her ordeal: “I know what people are thinking, and the answer is yes—yes, I did think about using the internet to find my mom, but Phillip told me and convinced me that he was monitoring everything I did on the internet and he would find out each and every thing I did on it” (138–39). Given her total dependence on him to fulfill her needs, the young age at which she was abducted, and the egregious sexual violence she endured, it is unsurprising that Dugard was too afraid to call for help online. Similarly, Amanda Berry tells her readers that she was too frightened to call out when Castro's sister came to the house where he was holding her captive (Reference Berry and DeJesusBerry and DeJesus 2015, 24). She rejects allegations that she identified with her captor or enjoyed his attentions, and explains that she feigned feelings for him so that he would subject her to less brutal rapes and beatings. Berry decided: “I might as well try anything to get better treatment. I can pretend to like him. That's going to be my new strategy” (106). In an interesting twist of fate, Berry learned about Jaycee Dugard's escape during her own captivity, and recalls feeling shocked by the widespread allegations that Dugard did not try hard enough to escape. Berry anticipates the public's response to her own return home and writes:

Like many other women in abusive relationships, Berry fears for her child's safety, and privileges that over her own needs.

Josefina Rivera also deploys this strategy in her memoir Cellar Girl, and uses the same strategies as her peers to “set the record straight,” because “thousands of words have been written about what happened—some true, some not” (Reference RiveraRivera 2013, 3). There are important distinctions between Rivera and other captives: the women I have previously discussed confront allegations that they consented to their captivity, whereas Rivera refutes accusations that she was Heidnik's accomplice. I will discuss these differences in depth below, but for now, it is important to note that Rivera adopts the same strategy as her contemporaries, and graphically describes Heidnik's cruel beatings, such as an incident when he perforated her eardrum with a screwdriver (83), and the day when Heidnik brought her upstairs to show her the head of one of her fellow captives bubbling in a pot on the stove (135). After she has firmly established herself as a terrified victim, she divulges a survival strategy that is similar to Berry's: she pretends to fall in love with her captor so that he grants her more privileges. After this, Heidnik began to trust her, and she was able to help her co‐captives escape (127). The narrative pattern that characterizes these texts suggests that memoirs of abduction and prolonged captivity are more complex than being empowering or disempowering. Even though authors express a reluctance to divulge intimate details of their experiences, the public forum of the memoir grants them a platform to addresses inaccurate assumptions about their relationships with their captors. Looking beyond questions of empowerment thus foregrounds a set of assumptions that informs these memoirs: that it is better to speak publicly about trauma than not, and that a survivor must confess, or else they are “hiding the truth” and are complicit with those who abuse them. These are striking aspects of this collection of texts, which are better understood in relation to Michel Foucault's seminal discussion of the sexual confession.

The Secret and the Silence in Memoirs of Prolonged Captivity

Showalter's discussion is guided by the assumptions that it is preferable to speak (or write) about one's traumas rather than remain silent, and that speaking in this context is empowering. These notions are congruent with the logic that guides contemporary manifestations of the confession. According to Foucault, the ritual of confessing, that is, voicing our inner desires, traumas, and transgressions, is so integral to our social organization that “we have singularly become a confessing society. The confession has spread its effects far and wide, one confesses … whatever is most difficult to tell” (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1978, 59). Foucault continues:

These memoirs share many aspects of Foucault's formulation: the authors state explicitly that their experiences are tremendously difficult to commit to paper, but that speaking/writing brings them a sense of closure. The similarities between the Foucauldian confession and these memoirs extend beyond the retelling of traumatic secrets, as Foucault argues that the most privileged form of confession is the sexual confession (61), in part because people in the modern West situate sexuality as a central facet of human identity, and thus an important mechanism in the production of truth (56). The sexual confession relies on the assumption that people have an inner secret (that is, sexuality, sexual practices, or sexual transgressions) that they must verbalize, which gives rise to and continuously reinforces “the vast tyrannical cult of confession” (Reference RoudinescoRoudinesco 2009, 139) that lies at the heart of contemporary discussions about sexuality. These confessions play out through “the detailed whipping up of sexual desire by a detailed description of what happened, the production of the ‘truth,’ the construction of the innocent child as the victim, the isolation of a single culprit and, above all, the discovery of sex as the beginning and the reason for all pathologies in the individual and in society” (Reference HaugHaug 2001, 64). Within this context, we come to understand sexuality as a privileged site of identity (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1978, 21), or, our sexual acts (consensual or not) and sexual identities (self‐identified or not) become a fundamental component of our personhood. Powerful social institutions such as medicine, the church, and the penal system outline which practices are permissible, which are abhorrent, and continuously classify individuals within this framework.

Memoirs of abduction and prolonged captivity follow Haug's formulation: the authors tend to foreground their sexual naïveté and youthfulness at the time of their abduction, and understand their captors as sexually perverse men who systemically steal their innocence. Gina DeJesus evokes the image of the innocent child when she describes the first time Castro raped her, writing

Similarly, Smart explains that before her abduction, she was “still a little girl” who “didn't understand the world” (Reference SmartSmart 2009, 8). She felt intense guilt every time Mitchell raped her because she “had lived a sheltered life. In my faith, and in my family, a great deal of emphasis is placed on sexual purity, waiting until you are married for those kinds of relationships” (48). Jaycee Dugard recalls that before her abduction, “my only reference to sex was what I had seen on TV or movies and then acted out when playing Barbies, which would be in the form of Barbie and Ken lying in bed together side by side” (Reference DugardDugard 2011, 15). Dugard explains that Garrido told her that he abducted her to “help him with his sex problem” (150), and that he was under the control of angels (187). Rivera writes that her captor lacked “the things that mark us out as humans, a natural sense of right and wrong, an instinctive aversion to pain and suffering, was missing from him” (Reference RiveraRivera 2013, 171). These descriptions of their captors' perverse or evil nature are interspersed with graphic depictions of the sexual abuse these women endured, which, following Haug, reaffirms sexual deviance as a point of departure for other pathologies. Rivera writes that Heidnik planned “to keep ten women down here and get us all pregnant, and then we're all going to have his babies down here in this basement” (93). Dugard recalls that Garrido shaved her pubic hair (Reference DugardDugard 2011, 19) and then devotes three pages to graphic descriptions of her sexual abuse she endured when he first abducted her (51–54). Michelle Knight describes the multiple rapes Castro subjected her to the day he abducted her, but unlike Dugard who describes sexual acts at length, she withholds the graphic details of these assaults, writing “what he did over the next three hours is still hard for me to think about. He didn't just rape me the way he had upstairs. He murdered my heart … he forced me to do things that are still too painful for me to describe. Things that I had never done and would never do again” (Reference KnightKnight 2014, 90). Similarly, Smart describes learning about female sexual organs when Mitchell forced her to watch an “anatomy lesson” (Reference SmartSmart 2009, 79) he performed on his accomplice Wanda Barzee, and explains that Mitchell subjected her to “a certain sexual practice” (141) that she found deeply traumatic. Smart's and Knight's omissions stand in stark contrast to Rivera's and Dugard's graphic depictions, and this contrast reminds the reader that the subject matter they consume is deeply personal and potentially traumatizing to recount. Following Haug's discussion, this simultaneous telling and withholding fuels the sexual frenzy that characterizes the confession: these authors pique the reader's curiosity by divulging details of sexual violence, but simultaneously fail to satisfy that craving for endless sexually explicit details. If we put these texts in conversation with one another, this pattern of telling and withholding problematizes the imperative to confess, while inadvertently fostering the conditions that demand these confessions.

This interplay suggests that the sexual confession exists within a complex matrix of knowledge and power. The confession relies on the production of an internal secret or a hidden truth, and once the speaker voices it, this utterance becomes part of the subject's essential core (Reference ApostolidisApostolidis 2011, 189). The speaker must confess to a person who often occupies a socially important role, or, the confession exists on the condition that there is someone to hear these utterances (Reference FejesFejes 2008, 660). Once a person reveals her or his secret to a person of authority (for example, a psychologist or a clergy member), this person shapes these utterances, which creates an identity for the person who confesses (Reference MillsMills 1995, 106). Within Foucault's theorization, complementary and competing voices inform the confession: speakers who utter their secrets, and the experts who listen, evaluate, and interpret every utterance. The public demands these confessions, and broader social organizations categorize these experiences as examples of illness, pathological desires, or instances of abuse (101). Confessions (including the sexual confession) serve multiple disciplinary functions: they produce knowledge about a subject, and legitimize the institutions that these experts represent (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1978, 61–62). This creates a context where “the agency of domination does not reside in the one who speaks … but in the one who listens and says nothing” (62). Foucault reminds us that this process does not render speakers as passive entities in the formulation of their subjectivity, rather, power flows through the relationship between speaker and listener, and the listener mobilizes the interpretive power of the medical, legal, or educational institutions (Reference FejesFejes 2008, 657). Given the listener's considerable interpretive power, it is important to account for the interplay between knowledge and power at work in these memoirs.

If we return to Showalter's discussion, these memoirs empower the authors by granting them a venue in which to contest (or “write back”) the widespread logic that they consented to their captivity. “Writing back” is more complex, however, if we account for the social primacy of the sexual confession, as well as the problematic notion that women invite the attention of their abusers. This logic creates a double bind where Smart and her contemporaries can either voice their experiences of abduction and prolonged captivity, or be seen as women who are complicit with their captors. In fact, the reality that these women situate their memoirs as attempts to “set the record straight” foregrounds the taken‐for‐granted nature of this binary. It is also important to note that these memoirs (or sexual confessions) are published for an audience that is accustomed to consuming them (Reference HaugHaug 2001, 64), and memoirs have become popular within a broader social context that consistently demands why battered women remain in abusive relationships. This tactic “erects a mental wall around abuse, marking both batterers and victims as Other and reassuring us that we could never be them” (Reference ShoosShoos 2003, 62). These authors and readers thus interpret memoirs about abduction and prolonged captivity within a framework that demands a confession, blames women for their suffering, or disavows this violence altogether. For Foucault, this dominant interpretive framework ultimately serves the interests of the ruling class (Reference Foucault and GordonFoucault 1980, 100). Specifically, when Smart and her contemporaries map the strategies they used to resist their captors and survive horrific abuse, they reaffirm the centrality of the innocent child and the perverted maniac within the sexual confession. While they contest the logic that they as individuals are victims of abuse, they do not disrupt the overarching binary between “innocent” and “complicit” discussed above; they simply move their stories from one side of this binary to the other. These memoirs certainly contest misrepresentations of the authors' suffering, but they leave the factors that demand their confession unexplored.

Given these contradictions, it is important to consider these memoirs as more complex than empowering or disempowering. Some of this complexity resides in the connection between the confession and the production of truth, as Foucault explains:

The confession makes a claim to truth, particularly when one confesses to an expert who represents systems of authority that shape our experiences and actions. This is particularly true in the example of the sexual confession, as “Narratives of embodied sexual encounters carry a profound epistemological authority: to ‘know’ another through a sexual relationship is to possess a knowledge that is both intimate and beyond challenge” (Reference LaycockLaycock 2012, 102). Although the politics of the sexual assault trial and widespread victim‐blaming complicate Joseph Laycock's assertion (Reference HengeholdHengehold 1994; Reference ShoosShoos 2003), memoirs enable these women to voice experiences of gruesome sexual violence and make claims to truth that might not otherwise be available to them. Although a memoir does not make the same claims to truth as does nonfiction or scholarly material, the conventions of this genre are suited to the project of truth‐telling because memoirs are devoted exclusively to personal accounts, which Smart's aptly titled My Story reaffirms.

All of these authors discuss similar experiences, however, some benefit from social privilege that legitimizes their claims to truth while others mobilize the links between the confession and the production of truth to become socially visible. On the one hand, Elizabeth Smart recalls “few stories have captured the attention as did my case, the abduction and trial being covered extensively among the local, national, and international press” (Reference SmartSmart 2009, 13–14), and her abduction gave rise to an international search (Reference WanzoWanzo 2009, 205). Amanda Berry writes that after her abduction “everybody knows my name, and they're all looking for me” (Reference Berry and DeJesusBerry and DeJesus 2015, 17). On the other hand, there were no vigils or search parties for Knight and Rivera, and their cries for help either went unanswered, or were blatantly ignored. Knight recalls that in a moment of magnanimity, Castro bought her a puppy she named Lobo. Castro soon killed her puppy, and threw its corpse over the back fence. Standing in the doorjamb between the house and the yard, Knight “screamed as loud as I could from the open door … I wanted someone—anyone—to hear me. But apparently no one did” (Reference KnightKnight 2014, 112). Knight's use of “apparently” foregrounds her suspicion that people simply ignored her suffering, which Castro cruelly reaffirms by telling her “nobody is even looking for you … there ain't been any fliers out around the neighborhood, and nothing's been on the news. I can do whatever I want to you. No one gives a crap” (95). Rivera's experience is strikingly similar: early in her captivity, she managed to slip into Heidnik's backyard. Once outside, she shouted at the top of her voice “Help! Help! Please help me! This guy's got me chained up in his basement and he's raping me. Somebody get me out of here …. this nut is gonna kill me—please help!” (Reference RiveraRivera 2013, 53–54). Like Knight, Rivera knows that other people are within earshot, but no one answered her calls.

We can attribute the contrast between Berry and Smart on one hand, and Knight and Rivera on the other, to their divergent subject positions. Blonde haired, blue‐eyed, angelic Smart is the child of similarly attractive and affluent parents. In the wake of her abduction, she came to represent the idealized American child (Reference WanzoWanzo 2009, 208), who stands in for the nation's hopes and potentiality (Reference BerlantBerlant 1997, 7). The outcry following her abduction resonated from coast to coast (Reference WanzoWanzo 2009, 193), and upon her recovery, “the whole world got her back” (Reference SmartSmart 2005, 365). Although Berry is from a socially deprived part of Cleveland and comes from a single‐parent household, she is similarly white and attractive. As a result, media outlets were more likely to privilege her disappearance over that of her racialized peers (Reference WanzoWanzo 2009, 185). In contrast, Knight and Rivera had experienced homelessness, and were single mothers who had lost custody of their children. Knight has little formal schooling, a learning disability, does not embody hegemonic beauty norms, and comes from a broken home. Rivera struggled with addiction, and was abducted while working in the sex trade. These abductions are thus unlikely to capture public attention, particularly in Rivera's case, where dominant figurations of sex workers as always consenting erase the ways this marginalized group experiences intense physical and sexual abuse. These factors worked in tandem to give rise to the widespread perception that Rivera was Heidnik's accomplice rather than his victim (Reference RiveraRivera 2013, 236). Thanks to the links between the sexual confession and the production of truth, Knight and Rivera use their memoirs to bring their experiences into view, and become visible as victims rather than as bad mothers who cause their own suffering. If we attend to these authors' divergent subject positions, we can account for the ways that voicing sexual secrets and traumatic experiences enables some marginalized women to make claims to truth that might not otherwise be possible.

Knight is particularly interesting in this context because highly visible medico‐legal practitioners endorse her utterances as true, and affirm her identity of victim/survivor. Knight thanks television show host Dr. Phil in the acknowledgments section of her text, and writes “none of this would have been possible without Dr. Phil. He advocated for me and helped people connect with my story so that I could start a new life. I will be forever grateful” (Reference KnightKnight 2014, 251). Dr. Phil's social capital as a psychologist/talk‐show host enables Knight to access epistemological certainty and become socially visible as a survivor of violence against women, particularly as the dust jacket of the first edition of Knight's memoir prominently features the following quotation: “In my twelve years of doing the Dr. Phil show, no one has changed me like Michelle Knight and her story of survival.” This is significant because practices of confession shape desirable subjectivities (Reference FejesFejes 2008, 653), and Dr. Phil affirms Knight's status as an inspirational survivor rather than a “bad mother.” This strategy, however, does little to disrupt the logic that women must confess or else they are complicit with their captors, and although we must acknowledge that Knight has overcome significant traumas and challenges, Dr. Phil's emphasis on “overcoming against all odds” reaffirms the very neoliberal scripts that erased Knight's suffering before she took up the pen.

Subjectification, Rejecting Stockholm Syndrome, and Becoming a Survivor

Although authoritative voices interpret and classify sexual confessions, the speaker can resist these in important ways (Reference MillsMills 1995, 101). Foucault explains that resistance is possible because human subjectivity relies on a fundamental tension: we are individual subjects, but we are continuously subjected to and by disciplinary power (Reference HeyesHeyes 2006, 127). Disciplinary practices like the confession shape our subjectivities through subjection, but we develop new skills and capabilities through this process (128). Subjection and skill are inextricably linked, as “the growth of capabilities occurs in tandem with the intensification of power relations” (126). Foucault names this merging subjectification, where humans are “beings whose individuality was constituted by the self‐consistency that gave them a separate independent existence, but who were simultaneously subjected to whatever brought such self‐referential identity into being” (Reference SeigelSeigel 1990, 276). The double directionality, that is, the process where “we are both acted upon and we act—not in separate acts of domination and submission, but with submission relying on domination/mastery, and mastery relying on submission” (Reference HeyesHeyes 2006, 428) is central to subjectification. This is a useful tool to account for the pressures that weigh upon Smart and her contemporaries to take up the pen, the medical and legal practitioners who interpret these memories within already existing social frameworks, and the sites where the authors resist this classificatory process. Thanks to this double directionality, these examples of sexual confession can operate as spaces where women negotiate new identities or interpretations of their experiences, and problematize dominant interpretive possibilities.

After they escaped their captors, why these women were captive for so long became a topic of public debate. As previously discussed, the public tended to blame them for inviting the attention of their captors, but they also turned toward sites of knowledge/power to make sense of this phenomenon. Thanks to the diagnostic power and interpretive authority of psychology and psychiatry, the public came to believe that Smart and her contemporaries experienced Stockholm Syndrome during their prolonged captivity. Also known as Hostage Identification Syndrome, Stockholm Syndrome is a diagnosis that refers to a traumatic bonding between captives/hostages and those holding them against their will. Captives experience intense stress and pressure, existing in a constant state of fear for their lives. Victims are unable to prepare for life or death, but rather exist in a liminal space between the two. At the same time, victims also experience intense feelings of helplessness and loss of control, leading them to develop a wide range of coping mechanisms that bring a sense of stability to their captivity, including denial, repression, and identifying with their captors (Reference TurnerTurner 1985, 707). This diagnostic lens, and the practitioners who endorse it, exercises tremendous influence in shaping our understanding of these women's subject positions: where they were previously complicit with their captors, this diagnosis frames them as the traumatized victims of dangerous criminals, which is reaffirmed by the centrality within the sexual confession of the perverse criminal and the innocent child. Although this diagnosis and the accusation that Smart and her contemporaries consented to their captivity appear to be incongruent, these two interpretations serve the same function: they erase a woman's interpretation of her relationship with her captor, relegate her to a passive role in the process of making meaning of her experiences, and make it increasingly difficult to have meaningful conversations about gender‐based violence outside of the “victim‐complicit” framework I have discussed above.

As Smart and her contemporaries are subjected to this diagnostic and interpretive power, they also develop new abilities and skills, which enable them to resist this subsequent classification. Smart writes: “there was no Stockholm Syndrome going on with me. I never formed any attachments to my captors or bonded with them in any way” (Reference SmartSmart 2009, 124–25). She returns to this topic many times over the course of her text, and asserts:

In another passage, she overtly addresses the speculation that she willingly stayed with Mitchell and Barzee: “some people wonder how I could have become so subject to Mitchell's will, so utterly submissive and obedient. But when you consider my situation, it's pretty easy to understand” (159). She then reiterates the egregious abuse she suffered including starvation, threats against her life, sexual abuse, and isolation (159–60). Smart rejects the logic that she bonded with her captor by continuously returning to how horribly her captors abused her, and the reality that she longed to return home. Smart thus mobilizes the epistemic authority of the confession, and uses it to reject the dominant medical interpretation of her actions. Although this strategy shows that she is subjected to the practice of victim‐blaming (and her strategy of telling her own story is a direct response to this practice), the confession also becomes the site where she resists the medical paradigm that shapes her experience, setting the stage for new interpretive possibilities of her plight.

Amanda Berry adopts a similar strategy, and tells her reader: “until someone has gone through this, they don't know how they would react. They can't understand that there is no simple label for what it feels like. You do what you have to do to survive, and it's multiplied by a million when you have a baby to worry about. I don't ‘identify’ with my abuser. I have just done my best to cope, every day, for thousands of days in a row” (Reference Berry and DeJesusBerry and DeJesus 2015, 184). Comparing these texts with Rivera's memoir also foregrounds the ways this diagnostic power operates along racial and class‐based lines. Diane Shoos reminds us, “popular and clinical discourses about abused women have also been structured, often in conflicting ways, by issues related to racial and class differences” (Reference ShoosShoos 2003, 63). Rivera's case illustrates this reality: she does not discuss Stockholm Syndrome at all in her memoir, which implies from the outset that the diagnostic frameworks that Smart and Berry reject do not apply to her. Rather, Rivera uses the memoir to resist claims that she was Heidnik's morally corrupt and willing accomplice, labels that adhere to her because of her race, class, and profession. Through her memoir, however, Rivera connects her experience, and the ways the broader public denied her the status of victim, to a long history of abuse and addiction. For example, Rivera reflects: “I was not really a good candidate for motherhood. I was using crack” (Reference RiveraRivera 2013, 230), and after her escape from Heidnik's cellar, she spent her time in a drug‐induced fog in order to cope with her trauma. As a racialized sex worker battling a drug addiction, Rivera does not have access to the moral scripts and diagnostic frameworks like Stockholm Syndrome that render women visible as victims. It is here that Showalter's analysis resonates most acutely: by committing their stories to paper, survivors can actively resist the very medico‐legal apparatus that demands and shapes their confessions. Through the confession, women who survive abduction and prolonged captivity develop the ability to identify and interrogate the dominant frames that shape and classify their experiences. Where some resonate with them, such as Rivera identifying as a victim and wanting to be socially visible as such, others refuse the designations that emerge from sites of authority, such as Smart and Berry rejecting Stockholm Syndrome. Thanks to the double directionality of subjectification, these apparatuses shape these women's subject positions, but the authors I discuss can also resist dominant ideologies and contest these sites of authority.

Beyond Women's Empowerment

Representing domestic violence is not the same as understanding its root causes (Reference ShoosShoos 2003, 58). As a result, feminist critics must attend to interpretive possibilities outside of the logic that these memoirs are empowering or disempowering, emancipatory or exploitative, as these readings do little to account for the root causes of this type of violence. Foucault's discussion of the sexual confession is a useful point of departure for moving beyond the formulation of representation as empowerment, as it enables us to apprehend the dialectical relationship between memoirs and the sites of authority that compel women to confess. Women who survive abduction and prolonged captivity experience intense media pressure to speak publicly about their trauma. Reporters pursue them to the extent that privacy becomes impossible. Along with this newfound celebrity, these women also confront limited vocational opportunities, and contend with the physical, sexual, and emotional aftermath of their experiences. Many of the authors I discuss in this article have written memoirs so that the public will hear their desire for privacy. This strategy has sometimes granted them a reprieve from the spotlight, but following Foucault, revealing personal details within the confession increases the centrality of the confession itself. As memoirs about abduction and prolonged captivity become increasingly common, it appears women who survive this ordeal must take up the pen rather than simply choose to write a memoir. As a result, women who shape their subjectivity in various ways through the memoir reify the conditions that make their subjectivity possible (Reference DaviesDavies 2006, 426). Foucault's theories show us that these memoirs are neither empowering nor repressive, but always both.