The Captive Woman Trope
Kidnapping as Romance?
The trope of captive women has been getting a lot of attention thanks to the explosion of “Dark Romance Girlies” on BookTok. However, the captive women trope can be found in any genre and is usually an excellent source of tension, plot escalation, and yes, sensuality.
If you’ve read any of my novels, it will come as no surprise that it’s one of my favorite tropes.
And to be clear, I will be talking about the TROPE of captive women and not the Dark Romance genre. This is because Dark Romance has a unique (ADULT) readership intentionally looking to have boundaries pushed. As such, those books break the rules I'm about to tell you. Intentionally.
This is not that.
The captive woman trope involves kidnapping, intentional isolation or stranding in a remote place, or hostage situations involving a woman as victim and a male as perpetrator. It’s often seen in thriller genres like in Mary Kubica's The Good Girl, which used it and relied on audience expectations of the trope to conceal the twist ending. It was fantastic and I super recommend it if you haven't read it.
If you can believe it, the trope works in comedy too. For instance it was used to great comedic effect in 1987 movie Overboard—one of those movies that could never be made today. But it was funny, romantic, and it worked.
Last but not least, it is a staple of romance, which I don't normally gravitate to. But when the TV movie Stolen Women, Captured Hearts, aired on CBS in 1997 when I was fifteen, let's just say it made an impression. I wasn't the only one who loved it, either, as demonstrated by the fact it's still in rotation on Lifetime. Because it's awesome.
Where was I?
Being Careful with Captive Women
Using this trope does have its landmines and, if you're not careful, you can alienate your intended audience or, worse, disappoint them. To illustrate the rules, I’ll largely be using Richie Tankersely Cusick's 90s-era novel Scarecrow, since it's just a perfect encapsulation of how to do things right… and how to do things wrong.
Choose your time period and location carefully
Captive women are taken either by stealth or by force. Force is self-explanatory. We're talking kidnapping or hostage situations and honestly, the time period and setting don’t need that much thought. The weapon of choice will change depending on your setting, as will law enforcement and surveillance capabilities. But overall, the setup of a by-force captive situation is pretty uniform.
Being held captive by stealth means that it takes a little while for the woman to realize she is, in fact, being held against her will and it requires more planning. This is particularly true in modern settings with cell phones, ubiquitous internet, and people living pretty close to each other in most communities. Ask yourself how you can make it reasonable that the woman can't leave when she finally realizes something is wrong.
In the case of Scarecrow, our captive woman is Pam and she is held in a stranger's house by injuries initially, and then the unforgiving landscape. Her car was demolished in a crash, she cannot walk out of there, even after she starts to feel better, and there is no modern technology in the Apalachin house of her supposed rescuers, even though the story takes place in 1993.
Pam senses early on there is something very, very wrong in that house, despite how kind the women in the house are to her. No matter how they assure her that the gruff man of the house is all bark and no bite. But at the beginning, she doesn't think she's a hostage. The house and its vibe are creepy but she can't leave, not even when the dying starts.
Keep your age group in mind
Richie Tankersley Cusick is largely a YA author. In my younger days, I read all her books but could never track down Scarecrow, so I actually read it for the first time last year. Thank you, Kindle.
In reading it, I see now why I couldn't find it as a kid. This is an adult novel. It is definitely true YA and adult fiction are getting closer these days, but I don't necessarily approve of that trend and you might find your young audience doesn't either. In selecting the age group of your audience, it’s important that your cover and your blurb set up expectations appropriately.
Scarecrow's cover, both the original and the new one, do not establish that this book is for adults. They don't tell us that there's anything different about this one vs RTC’s other novels. They certainly don't tell us that Pam is in her early thirties and has lost a husband and a child, as opposed to the sixteen years olds in all her other books. Scarecrow was still good, I honestly loved it… mostly. But if I had actually found a copy as a teen, I don't think I would have liked it. At all. Audience matters.
Be very clear on consent
Like I said, YA and adult books are becoming indistinguishable from each other, with both including swearing, substance abuse, sex on the page, and sexual assault. In my opinion, there’s only one benefit to this loosening of standards: The ability to actually provide details of an encounter allows you, the author, to make it very clear to the reader whether this encounter is a clumsy hookup or an assault… even if it is not clear to the character in the book.
Back in the 90s, this wasn't the case, and boy did it cause a problem in Scarecrow. The first sexual encounter with Seth, to me, seemed like a straight-up assault, complete with yelling NO. But in the next scene, Pam is kicking herself for "betraying" Rachel, Seth's wife, as if this was something she chose to do. This guilt continues over the rest of the book as Pam and Seth get increasingly cozy. I was left not sure what happened. Maybe it was Pam victim-blaming herself. But leaving such an important element of the story to a reader's personal interpretation is bad writing. So make sure your intent comes through loud and clear.
If there's anything we don't need more of, it's the idea that even if a girl fights at first, she'll come to like it. No thank you. No thank you to all of that.
Be clear on how you want your audience to feel about the captor at the end
In Scarecrow, there's a huge twist at the end, one I didn't see coming. It made sense of all the weirdness in that house and it showed that Seth had extenuating circumstances for his behavior. This is common when an author wants the reader to come away with a positive feeling for the captor.
In Mary Kubica's The Good Girl, the captor is actually one of our POV characters, so we know right off the bat that this guy, in his own misguided way, genuinely thinks he's saving Mia from a terrible death. Yes, he is brutal in confining her at the beginning, but he thinks worse will happen if he delivers her to where he was hired to deliver her. By the end of the book, we feel positively about him, and honestly a bit sorry for how things ended for him. It was very well done.
In Scarecrow… things weren't so clear. Seth also had extenuating circumstances, and they were not minor. However, they were largely self-inflicted. So if he and Pam had ended up together, that would have been a severe WTF moment for pretty much all readers. The good news is that RTC obviously intended the reader to walk away with ambiguous feelings about Seth and she set that up perfectly.
Yes, we saw he was in a terrible situation, compounded by personal guilt. But we also saw he had other options of dealing with it. Pam's escape and happy ending came with a clear-eyed view of him, which was a satisfying way to end the book.
Authors have a tendency to fall in love with their alpha males, and that's all well and good. But don't push to make him into a good guy at the end if it doesn't work with the story as you've told it.
Don't ask your readers to overlook mass murder, no matter how smoldering he is (ahem, Kylo Ren!). If there are extenuating circumstances in the captor's behavior, do they fully justify his actions?
Don't get so caught up in the chemistry of it all that you forget the suffering your captor has inflicted. A price must be paid, at least if you want your audience to stay on board with you.
If you like the non-romance variety of the trope, you can check out my Mason Timeline series.
In Book 2, Sunder of Time, our captive woman is Isabella, a 22nd-century woman being held as a slave in Saxon-era Britain by a fine-looking Thane.
Book 3, Fissure of World, incorporates themes of Stockholm syndrome and watches our captive woman, Shannan, be forcibly confined with her interrogator, even after he finds out everything he needs to about where she's from.