Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of Dissent in New England Literature by Amy Schrager Lang (review)

84Rocky Mountain Review approach, and even value as critical tools. A few chapters are little more than a catalog of names, titles, and dates. The section on Brazil is too short, in comparison to others, for the great literature it represents. Foster has done an admirable job of translating all articles, some originally written in French, Spanish, and Portuguese, to English. All titles in all articles are translated to English, even if no translation of the work exists. The text is surprisingly free of typographical errors — only a few remain (page 447 is a complete repetition of the previous page). But aside from these infrequent lapses, the bibliographical information is very accurate. The Index indicates that nearly 2,000 names are mentioned in the text. Handbook is not likely to hold sufficient interest to be avidly read from cover to cover (this critic did, however); it will be used as a serious reference work. At the beginning of the book Foster includes a short section of "General References," 44 well annotated entries. Each country essay concludes with mention of a few general reference works specific to its literature. These, too, are annotated, adding to the usefulness of the Handbook. The essays all take a historical approach to writing; literature is examined as a social document, a popular trend in literary criticism in the mid-1980s. Most of the individual critics of the volume have made an obviously purposeful attempt to include many women writers. More bibliographic attention is paid to drama than in most general criticism of Latin American literature. As might be expected, there is relatively little in-depth analysis and almost no value judgment. Several of the articles (on Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, Paraguay, etc.) talk of a diaspora in their national literatures, an indication of continued political repression and literary censorship. The book is a valuable tool, the most up-to-date reference for the ' 'boomed" and now blooming literature of Latin America. TED LYON Brigham Young University AMY SCHRÄGER LANG. Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem ofDissent in New England Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. 237 p. It is the "Point of View" of Kenneth Arnold, director of the Rutgers University Press, that a new spirit is abroad in scholarly publishing, a reaction against excessive and sterile specialization (Chronicle ofHigher Education, 29 July 1987). It would seem that Prophetic Woman — embracing three centuries of texts in a variety of genres in a broad "exploration of the strategies Americans used to contain antinomianism" (10) — is in the vanguard of that reaction . On the grounds that an admitted "wealth of historical data and literary conjecture does relatively little to advance our understanding of the symbolic value of the story of Anne Hutchinson," Prophetic Woman proposes to focus "instead" on "the cautionary tale" of Hutchinson (6). Exemplified by an 1830 Hawthorne sketch, this ' 'cautionary tale' ' is shown to unite such diverse texts as, for instance, John Winthrop's Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruine of the Antinomians, Familists, and Libertines (1644), Charles Chauncy's Book Reviews85 Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (1743), Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Woman" (1855), and Eliza Buckminster Lee's Naomi; or, Boston, Two Hundred Years Ago (1848). Separate chapters on The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) elaborate the general hypothesis of "a continuing tension in American culture between the public and private realms expressed concurrently in the figures of the antinomian and the 'Woman' " (11), and finally, the description of a statue accepted by the state of Massachusetts from the Federated Women's Clubs in 1923 confirms a persisting American concern even with the figure of Hutchinson herself. To be sure, the specialist will discover little here that is new in materials or approaches, any more than he or she will find the most comprehensive or current reviews of scholarship or the most self-conscious interpretations. Puritan studies, for example, are scarcely advanced by the suggestion that "the antinomians, in other words, rejected the idea of a federal covenant" (33), or Awakening studies, by the observation that "the Great Awakening set in conflict two fundamentally different religious attitudes" (79) (not...