The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards by Ava Chamberlain (review)

The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle tells the story of Jonathan Edwards’s paternal grandmother, who left no written records of her own. Her name appears in a very few annals of colonial Connecticut, which record her birth in 1645, her marriage in 1667, the births of her children, and her husband’s ultimately successful attempt to divorce her in 1691. (The date of her death is unrecorded.) In spite of this relative paucity of archival detail, Elizabeth Tuttle has recurred over three centuries as a figure in the lore focused on her famous grandson. Yet the absence of her own voice and story consistently reduced her to an old family scandal, a madwoman in the attic, “a straw man dressed in cap and petticoats” (2). In an ambitious attempt to counter both a long-standing mythology and a supremely minimal historical record, this book tries to flesh out the story of Elizabeth Tuttle’s life as she might have lived it.

In order to reconstruct such a life in detail and significance, The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle gathers its textures by moving backward and forward across four generations and several afterlives. The first chapters recur to Elizabeth’s father’s generation, narrating the circumstances that could have led him to leave the English Midlands and relocate to colonial New Haven. It also tells the parallel (though not congruent) story of her future husband, Richard Edwards, whose father, William, moved from east London to Hartford, Connecticut, where Richard was born and married a woman somewhat above his status. The middle chapters detail scandalous episodes in the lives of Elizabeth’s siblings—when in 1676 her younger brother Benjamin murdered their sister Sarah in a fit of rage, and when in 1691 her youngest sister Mercy, in an uncanny repetition of their brother’s crime, murdered her own eldest son. Such violent acts damaged the reputation of (and relations within) the prominent Tuttle family, and the enormous strain contributed to the dissolution of Elizabeth and Richard’s marriage. The penultimate chapter demonstrates the mythmaking (at Elizabeth’s expense) that enabled Richard to overcome the scandal of divorce and establish his family in a manner that created the conditions under which his grandson would be reared, educated, and established in the mid-eighteenth century. In the final chapter, we learn that this book is by no means the first attempt to recover Elizabeth Tuttle from historical obscurity—that, in fact, she had emerged in the early twentieth century as a major figure in the antieugenics movement before eugenic science was discredited following World War II. This final chapter is simply breathtaking for what it lays bare about the distance between the historical figures we conjure and the historical lives they may have led.

The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle will certainly be of interest to scholars of gender relations in early America. While the book makes relatively few theoretical pretenses, its descriptions of marriage and manhood in late seventeenth-century colonial Connecticut paint with much of the dynamism for which more theoretical accounts are celebrated. At the same time, the book commits hardly any sins of theoretical projection, nor does it imagine that gender matters most to seventeenth-century life when it is a site of resistance or subversion. Instead, its project is to reconstruct ordinary lives with ordinary dignity, and to wrest meaning from “the fragments of lost humanity that lie beneath” the flotsam of archival miscellanies (5).

Any reader should appreciate the book’s careful writing and proficient storytelling. The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle is peppered throughout with a number of finely calibrated sentences, which propel the pleasure one takes in the narrative. In perhaps my favorite example, on the subject of Mercy’s attempted murder, we read: “Believing she was the only one who could protect her son from a terrible fate, she acted as any loving mother would and split...