Diane Purkiss
Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall 1998), 235-253

This essay discusses the 1650 account of Margaret Muschamp, an eleven-year-old girl afflicted with fits, paralysis, speechlessness, and inedia. While we might today regard such a child as simply ill, this article illustrates how Muschamp’s illness polarized her North England community because it suggested alternately divine inspiration or demonic possession. Further, this essay demonstrates that Muschamp herself may have developed the web of meanings identified with her physical state to dramatize her ambivalent relationship with her mother in an extraordinarily public way. She projects her hostile feelings toward her mother onto a miller’s wife, Dorothy Swinow, who as a result of Muschamp’s accusations was hanged as a witch. Contributing yet another level of ambiguity to the relationship between public and private in this story, Muschamp’s mother, Mary Moor, published an account, Wonderfull News from the North, of her daughter’s extravagant and grandiose illness. Just as her daughter harbored ill will toward her, Moor was not altogether enamored of her strangely prescient child. Thus the article wonders, do the events surrounding Muschamp represent a soap opera gone awry, or a tale of visionary innocence? The essay leaves this question unanswered, remaining true to a text that speaks through its silences and ambiguities.

Katharine Gillespie
Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall 1998), 213-233

This essay analyzes the writings of preacher and polemicist Katherine Chidley, arguing that Chidley’s 1641 and 1645 tracts on religious toleration encode arguments for female political authority. In so doing, this essay counters scholarly work that portrays Chidley as uninterested in the plight of women and as solely committed to advancing Independency, the Puritan movement that advocated voluntary church membership rather than the mandatory parochial affiliation traditionally required by the government. Chidley’s case for the separation of church from state reinvents the private realm, typically identified as the female sphere, as a site of authority. Just as individuals should follow the command of God and not state officials in matters of religious belief, so individual women should attend to God’s call and predicate their actions upon God’s word. The private sphere thus becomes a site of individual political and spiritual self-determination.

Laura J. Murray
Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 1999), 91-111

This essay investigates the problematic (post)colonial collaboration between Native Canadian writer Maria Campbell, white actress and playwright Linda Griffiths, and theater director Paul Thompson, as they strove to produce Campbell’s play, Jessica, in the 1980s. This article breaks important new ground in demonstrating Thompson’s central role in this collaboration and in analyzing the play from within the context of Campbell’s relationships to Griffiths and Thompson. Though Campbell’s autobiographical Halfbreed (1973) is generally perceived as heralding the beginning of Native Canadian literature, this article offers one of the first interpretations of Jessica. This essay argues that, from the start, Griffiths, Campbell, and Thompson understood their exchanges of experience in contradictory ways: in terms of the feminine gift economy parallel to the capitalist economy, in terms of a traditional native gift economy, and in terms of a trade economy. When these contradictions rose to the surface and when the more utopian and ongoing models of exchange, giving, and trading came into crisis with the contract, it was hardly surprising that talk would turn to stealing, for stealing has been the ground metaphor for relations between Native or Metis people and white people since the first treaties were made and broken.

Victoria Rosner
Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 1999), 59-89

This essay scrutinizes Doris Lessing’s reconstructions of home in her autobiographical writings through the lens of early twentieth-century pamphlet guides to Southern Rhodesian settler culture and architecture. The essay considers more specifically the ways the architecture of the mother-daughter relationship is constructed in the context of empire and motherhood is materially reproduced in relation to the family home. Inspired by the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, Lessing’s family set out to produce a colonialist homestead of their own. Lessing subsequently imagines her adolescent rebellion as an emigration, a journey out of the mother country to parts unknown. Moreover, while women generally have seemed extraneous to the process of colonialism, Lessing shows, on the contrary, the unexpected reciprocity of maternity and colonialism, a relationship most clearly played out in border skirmishes fought by mother and daughter across the house/bush boundary.

Sara E. Quay
Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 1999), 39-58

This article focuses on Susan Warner’s popular novel of 1850, The Wide, Wide World. Rooted in Warner’s own loss when her family moved from New York City to Constitution Island, the novel reflects a broader sense of cultural dislocation in America at this time. As this essay argues, homesickness is the affective corollary to the literal and figurative longing for home that shaped so much of mid-nineteenth-century American culture as the newly established American middle class tried to develop both from a collection of nationally and geographically diverse individuals into a coherent group and from the utilitarian Age of Homespun to a consumer culture. Home stands as a metaphor for the middle-class search for its identity. Warner’s novel suggests that when an individual invests objects with affect, by imagining them as repositories of emotion connected with her home—that is, by creating keepsakes—she can overcome the pain—the nostalgia—of modern life. This paper demystifies the ways in which domestic fiction, more generally, copes with nostalgia and change: standing at the juncture between these two distinct cultural definitions of material things, keepsakes became the focus of middle-class life because they represented emotional continuity in the face of great personal and social change—keepsakes including, not least, attachment to books like Warner’s that evoked and even encouraged their readers to feel nostalgia for home.