Abstract
Harriet Prescott Spofford’s 1860 tale, “Circumstance,” demonstrates the uncanny power of regionalist fiction. Set before the U.S. Revolution, in the “eastern wilds of Maine,” “Circumstance” has often been misread as a variation on the classic American-Gothic captivity narrative, in which a white, Christian heroine finds spiritual victory in her encounter with a monstrous, dark Other. But the Maine wilds of “Circumstance” are not mere synechdoche for the fledgling nation; indeed, the story complicates nationalizing interpretations when we focus attention on Spofford’s treatment of locally specific anxieties. The tale’s Loyalist-Methodist protagonist and its frontier setting are uncanny, seemingly representative of American character, yet also peculiar, different, and irreconcilable with the nation’s myth of origins.
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Notes
- 1.
In his 1919 essay “The ‘Uncanny,’” Sigmund Freud defines the uncanny as that which is both intimately familiar and deeply alien.
- 2.
Halbeisen provides an account of the story’s origins as a family legend (12).
- 3.
See Halbeisen (12). Anna Livingstone Hitchings is identified as the wife of Josiah Hitchings by Moore (19).
- 4.
Fetterley offers a sexual-violation reading (261–267). For a reading of the story as an allegory of childbirth, see Gaul. Chevrier-Bosseau also views the story as a treatment of the “monstrous creation” of the female author (1).
- 5.
Busch writes that “widespread persecution of the cougar led to its early demise from many parts of eastern North America by 1900,” with the last Massachusetts cougar shot in 1841, and the last in Vermont slaughtered in 1881 (98).
- 6.
For discussion of U.S. Gothic as a national mode especially preoccupied with race see Smith, Weinstock, and Goddu.
- 7.
On the British Gothic and its characteristic anxieties pertaining to pre-Enlightenment barbarism, see Botting.
- 8.
I am indebted to Halbeisen for her research on the Spofford family background.
- 9.
Spofford is also omitted in the regionalism studies of Donovan, Campbell, and Ammons and Rohy.
- 10.
Fetterley writes, “At the end of the story, [the heroine’s] faith is vindicated and the wisdom of God made plain” (Provisions 267).
- 11.
For a history of hymnody in America, see Marini.
- 12.
See Hart (94–98) and Bynum (160–161).
- 13.
Stokes argues for the centrality of Arminianism to nineteenth-century American women’s sentimental fiction (47–55). While Spofford’s work more closely aligns with realism than sentimentalism, “Circumstance” may well reflect the influence of the Arminianism of antebellum writers such as Sedgwick and Stowe.
- 14.
See Allen and Pilsbury (55–60).
- 15.
See Moore (20).
- 16.
See Moore (16).
- 17.
See Moore (20) and Cogswell (418) on the New Brunswick settlements of Josiah Hitchings and his brother-in-law William Moore. Methodism arrived in New Brunswick even later than in New Hampshire, first gaining steam when Bishop Francis Asbury made a journey there in 1797. See “The United Methodist Church at New Brunswick,” www.umcnb.org/our-history/.
- 18.
In analysis of other works, Paula Kot similarly concludes Spofford to be a “cultural theorist” (12) who critiques the “engrained” religious bigotry of New Englanders (2).
- 19.
See also Acheson (19).
- 20.
One descendent of the New Boston families writes, “Our Presbyterians, on arriving at their new homes, found themselves surrounded by the Puritans, a people equally as fond of liberty, and rigid in their notions as themselves; still, they disliked them, and there was a rank jealousy between them” (qtd. in Cogswell 95).
- 21.
See Acheson (20).
- 22.
“Although the Congregational church erected in 1826, was intended to accommodate all who might desire to attend public worship,” according to nineteenth-century historian Isaac Case Knowlton, “yet there were many intelligent and influential citizens in town, who did not believe in Calvinism nor enjoy hearing it preached” (120).
- 23.
See Ahlstrom 401.
- 24.
Recent scholarship has complicated readings of the story’s ostensibly racist content. See Bode (3–5) and Kot (12).
- 25.
That Indians attack a mid-eighteenth-century Maine settlement is also an anachronism. Spofford herself notes that war with the Indians in Maine ended in the 1720s (see “Newburyport” 167).
- 26.
While the tale never explicitly identifies the species of the “Indian devil,” Spofford refers to the story’s setting as “the wilderness untrodden save by stealthy native or deadly panther tribes” (84). Wildlife biologist Bruce Wright attributes the first print usage of the moniker “Indian devil” to Abraham Gesner, who writes in 1847 of “Felis concolor, panther, painter or catamount—better known in the Province [New Brunswick] as the Indian devil” (12). Springer identifies the “Indian devil” as a “species of the catamount” (133) in Maine, while Thoreau calls it a “cougar.” Wright observes that the coastal Micmacs knew the animal as “Lhoks” and the Abenakis, “lunxus” (8), a term Thoreau takes “to mean the cougar and not the Gulo luscus,” or wolverine (128). Despite the linguistic similarity with the English word “lynx,” which refers to a smaller species of wildcat, the “lunxus” or “Lunk Soos” typically connotes felis concolur, the Eastern Panther (Wright 8). The US Fish and Wildlife Service declared the species extinct in 2011 (see https://www.fws.gov/northeast/ecougar/ecougar_newsrelease.html).
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Sweet, N. (2021). The Uncanny Regionalism of Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Circumstance”. In: Elbert, M., Bode, R. (eds) American Women's Regionalist Fiction. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55552-8_2
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