A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America (review)

This volume brings together a range of new work on the history of the body in colonial North America. Some essays are contributions to ongoing conversations, such as Elizabeth Maddock Dillon's discussion of the feminized qualities of the Puritan male convert's imagined body, or Tarter's exploration of the performative aspects of Quaker women's bodies. Others frame new discussions, often employing familiar source material but finding fresh insights. The book is admirably interdisciplinary in the range of its contributors, of which this review focuses on three.

Kathleen M. Brown explores the meanings of cleanliness and filth in Puritan New England. In 1691, Elizabeth Emerson was convicted of infanticide, and executed. Cotton Mather preached the execution sermon. Brown shows how Mather's images of uncleanness drew upon ideas about hygiene very different from ours. She combines a cultural reading of such images with a social-history analysis of Mather's career predicament at the time. The Salem witch trials had just been quashed; Mather and the other ministers who maintained their beliefs in the supernatural did not enjoy public support. Reveling in the language of filth and nastiness, Mather's sensationalist sermon afforded him re- possession of the high moral ground. Brown brings to her work both a rich appreciation of the nuances in Mather's language and a careful assessment of his career problems and potentials in the 1690s.

Mather also preached a sermon about Emerson's better-known sister, Hannah Duston, and he incorporated her tale into his history of the 1690s. Teresa A. Toulouse analyzes the various meanings submerged in Mather's account. In 1697, Duston was captured by Abenaki Indians and marched 150 miles north after her newborn infant was killed. One night as her captors slept, Duston and two other captives slew all seven Abenakis, took their scalps, and walked back to her home in Massachusetts. Duston's story fascinated her contemporaries as much as it does historians today. Toulouse analyzes the contradictions and barely submerged desires that Mather's text struggles to contain. At times, her literary analysis can be frustrating. How can we know whether, as Toulouse suggests, the text's description of the Indians who tortured and killed a small child can also represent the sadistic feelings of New England children against their fathers/rulers? Such moments of disciplinary unease aside, Toulouse brilliantly shows how Mather's account resounds with complex and contradictory messages about the family in New England, both in its domestic aspects and in the larger contexts of generations of settlers and political relations with England.

Robert Blair St. George brings an anthropological perspective to yet another kind of unruly New England female body. His essay, drawing upon his Conversing By Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (Chapel Hills, 1998), explores how houses and bodies were understood as emblematic of each other. St. George pays special attention to the three-dimensional structure of New England houses and the gendering of house parts. He suggests that the practices of witchcraft symbolically disrupted not only houses but bodies and society itself. The house and its parts served as a kind of middle metaphor between body and society. Through his careful mapping of symbol and practice, St. George suggests how the Puritan spiritual struggle to make everyday details manifest God's plan intersected with ideas about gender in the material form of the house, making domestic practices profoundly meaningful.

The editors might have devoted more of the introduction to exploring how their authors' disciplinary allegiances led to different kinds of accounts of the body; readers will have to perform the task themselves.