Out of Her PlaceAnne Hutchinson and theDislocation of.docx

Out of Her Place:
Anne Hutchinson and the
Dislocation of Power in
New World Politics
Cheryl C. Smith
A seventeenth-century woman used her voice
freely and forcefully and, as a result, was de-
stroyed by political maneuvering. However, be-
fore looking at the colonial American communal
structures that could lead to the demise of the
renowned Antinomian, Anne Hutchinson, it is
helpful to turn briefly to the words of a contem-
porary woman with a powerful voice. The 2004
winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, Austrian
writer Elfriede Jelinek, argues in a New York
Times interview that modern women remain
trapped in just the kind of double bind that
Hutchinson falls into when it comes to success.
Jelinek maintains that if women win public ac-
claim, they lose their sexual appeal and, conse-
quently, a large degree of their social influence.
The interviewer asks how Jelinek can espouse
‘‘such dated stereotypes when [she herself is] ac-
claimed for [her] intellect.’’ The author responds:
‘‘A woman is permitted to chat or babble, but
speaking in public with authority is still the great-
est transgression . . . . A woman’s artistic output
makes her monstrous to men if she does not know

how to make herself small at the same time and
present herself as a commodity. At best people are
afraid of her’’ (31). Jelinek’s words resonate with
the following story and the lenses which are used
to make sense of it, for Hutchinson is the quint-
essential transgressor in colonial America: unwill-
ing to merely chat or babble, incapable of making
herself small, and repeatedly framed in terms of
monstrosity by her detractors.
Unfortunately, Hutchinson did not meet with
what Jelinek asserts is the best possible outcome
for a public woman: fear. If merely fear had de-
fined the response to Hutchinson’s outspoken
role in the Antinomian controversy, then perhaps
she would not have faced exile and scholars would
be studying her writings rather than her words
filtered through trial transcripts and community
leaders’ accounts of her downfall. The contro-
versy that made Hutchinson famous unfolded in
the Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638
when a group of colonists, deeply dissatisfied
with the teachings of several church leaders, began
to publicly express their discontent. Hutchinson
and others argued that preachers were promoting
a covenant of works rather than a covenant of
grace, wrongly communicating the idea that an
individual could be saved by obedience and duty
Cheryl C. Smith is an Assistant Professor of English and the
WAC/WID faculty coordinator at the City University of New
York, Baruch
College, where she teaches courses in early American literature
and writing. She has published articles on implementing writing
across the

curriculum and teaching environmental literature, and is
currently working on how questions of ethics in contemporary
American life
intersect with the politics of university teaching and the
evolution of English studies.
437Out of Her Place � Cheryl C. Smith
The Journal of American Culture, 29:4
r2006, Copyright the Authors
Journal compilation r2006, Blackwell Publishing, Inc.
rather than solely by the redeeming grace of the
Holy Spirit. They wanted a clear endorsement of
the covenant of grace, which minimizes the value
of works; according to the covenant of grace, if
the Spirit has not already deemed an individual
saved, no act on his or her part can rescue the
soul to heaven. The reaction inspired by the
Antinomians, and especially Hutchinson, quickly
evolved into something far more insidious than
mere fear, as is often the case when leaders feel
threatened.
In part, the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s re-
sponse to Hutchinson can be attributed to the
particular strains on the community: dramatically
removed from the comforts of the familiar, striv-
ing to survive in a foreign and frankly threatening
landscape, and subject to inexperienced rule. As a
means of containing their new environs, leaders
took a severe approach to civil management,
which literary critic Phillip Round specifically
links to a colonial impulse to control women’s

voices: ‘‘In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where
the governing class’s efforts to establish religious
orthodoxy and discursive hegemony were directly
related to their handling of women’s voices, the
situation surrounding women’s discourse became
particularly crucial. In recent years it has come to
be generally accepted that New England male
elites sought social status, self-understanding,
and village order through their manipulation of
women’s voices, both in public and in print’’
(108). It may be true that controlling women be-
came tantamount to political success in the New
World project, but one must consider another fac-
et of the dynamic that could lead to Hutchinson’s
demise. Back in England, special appeals were
made to women to emigrate, dangling the sug-
gestive lure of potential freedom before female
adventurers in search of a better social station
(Williams 64). Because of these appeals, as well as
the general novelty of the colonial experience,
women in the early decades of English settlement
in America may have been particularly apt to
challenge the established order. New World
propaganda capitalized on the range of possibil-
ities out there, and the evolving landscape, while
threatening, expanded into a broad and open stage
upon which someone with a sharp intellect and
driving sense of mission might attempt to take on
a more powerful role in her community.
Onto such a stage walked Hutchinson. Her
story depicts a woman rallying for change—pos-
sibly with the energy of the newly sanctioned—
and coming up against an intolerant leadership
promoting rigid adherence to authority. In the

process of the push and pull between a hoped-for
and even expected transformation and the oppo-
sition to it, the experience of dislocation that
came from living in new and untried territory
was mobilized beyond fear into a fanatical fight
to determine social relationships by figuring
female influence specifically as sexual transgres-
sion. Hutchinson’s judges sought to simultan-
eously control her freedom of vocal and physical
expression in order to delimit her social power—a
way of dealing with an uncomfortably command-
ing female presence by sexualizing it that, accord-
ing to Jelinek and many feminist critics, persists
today. The outcry against Hutchinson demon-
strates the way the body politic can recast public
female dissent as sexual malevolence through dis-
torting both a woman’s voice and body.
Significantly, the distortion, rather than the
woman’s original words themselves, reveal a great
deal about the social structures and limitations at
work; such distortions are most important here.
The trials Hutchinson faced for relaying pro-
phetic visions and holding public meetings in her
home regarding church teachings, both acts of
performing a role of religious sage that elevated
her to a position of community leader, illustrate
how colonial women, try as they may, were not
liberated from the early modern social demands of
silence and chastity any more than they were lib-
erated from the symbolic weight and correspond-
ing restrictions of the female body. Indeed, their
speech and bodies were relentlessly aligned in a
manipulation of the status of women in the com-
munity that delimited the space available to them
to assert authority. For Hutchinson to step onto

any socially sanctioned stage—even one sheltered
by religion, like her home-based religious meet-
ings, or one to which she was coerced, like the
public hearings investigating her crimes—was to
438 The Journal of American Culture � Volume 29, Number 4
� December 2006
step into a fray of controversy. Her troubles be-
gan when what could (possibly) be tolerated in a
woman’s private life got too public for the com-
mon good.
Thus, Hutchinson’s story is about more than a
long-past Puritan intolerance of women; it exposes
the central role of gender in both determining and
threatening social status that continues to resonate
in political matters today. The Antinomian crisis
that instigated Hutchinson’s trials, while vilifying
many men, clearly grappled with gender difference
as a central issue in village rule. Further, the
Antinomian assertion of grace over works would
become a major point of political contention in a
community that depended on its members to en-
dorse the value of works by contributing to the
building and defense of colonial hegemony.
European outposts in the New World quite
directly faced the threat of attack. They did not
benefit much from the ineffable quality of grace;
they desperately needed works. In such a situation,
Hutchinson and her supporters could take down
the whole town by questioning the ministers’
preaching of works. As Hutchinson grew in im-
portance in the controversy, the Antinomian threat

to the political security of the community got
rearticulated in specifically sexualized terms.
Community leaders started to worry that if they
could not keep her religious/social dissent under
control, all the women and even many men could
end up like her: hyper-sexual and distinctly anti-
Puritan—more like the savage Indians who em-
bodied the colony’s vulnerability than one of the
privileged flock who could secure it.
That Hutchinson could fall to such a low
would have been hard to imagine only a few years
before. She was, by all accounts, a good citizen in
England and a well-respected and productive
member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, loved
and esteemed by many and of a high social sta-
tion.1 In New England, she lived in an elite
neighborhood, her home directly across the street
from John Winthrop, a central figure in colonial
government. Further, she possessed valuable
expertise in healing and childbirth, making her
an asset to the community and an important,
admired resource among the female population. A
mature woman in her forties by the time she
emigrated, Hutchinson had borne fourteen chil-
dren and was seen as wise and experienced. In her
case, however, respect, wisdom, and station
worked against her. Because her position in the
community afforded her some degree of power,
colonial leaders more quickly labeled her a ‘‘verye
dayngerous Woman’’ (Hall, Trial 353). Her pos-
ition gave her influence with both women and
men in the community, which in turn gave au-
thorities all the more reason to put her in her
place.

If she were not a woman, she probably would
not have been construed as so much of a threat to
village stability; by and large, she was vilified
much more harshly than the male Antinomians.
However, it was not merely the wrongfulness of a
woman advising townsfolk on spiritual questions
that fueled her prosecution. Her judges specific-
ally condemned her religious beliefs by repeatedly
invoking the seductive resonance of her tongue
and body, to the point where the religious ques-
tions became completely obscured. The Antinom-
ian controversy, supposedly about spirituality and
church dogma, all too quickly surpassed the con-
fines of religious dissent when Hutchinson took
center stage. Her flesh more than her faith, and
her act of speaking more than the specific words
themselves, played the leading role in a battle
fought to fix political power, not to resolve reli-
gious principles.
Hutchinson’s detractors decried her speech
acts a number of ways during the course of two
interrogations—a civil examination in November
of 1637, at which she was pronounced banished,
followed by a church trial in March of 1638, at
which she was officially excommunicated—as
well as in numerous tracts and commentaries
written during and after the main events. Indeed,
the majority of the transcripts of the two trials,
which could not be called trials at all in the mod-
ern sense as they were not meant as an oppor-
tunity for Hutchinson’s defense (although she
took them as such) but rather as a means for the
woman to be ‘‘reduced,’’2 are filled with her ac-
cusers’ testimony and diatribes. For instance, at

the November event, Hutchinson is shown to
speak almost entirely in one-line retorts, mostly
trying to figure out what she is being charged
with. Her wrongs are a combination of the
women’s meetings, called conventicles, that she
held in her home to discuss religious principles;
her critique of some of the ministers for preaching
a covenant of works; and her support of the im-
passioned Antinomian ‘‘Fast-Day Sermon’’
preached by John Wheelwright, her brother-in-
law. She continually denies the charges, arguing
that her conventicles were not unlawful, ‘‘I con-
ceive there lyes a rule in Titus, that the elder
women should instruct the younger and then I
must have a time wherein I must do it’’ (Hall,
‘‘Examination’’ 315), and challenging the other
charges: ‘‘I pray Sir prove it that I said they
preached nothing but a covenant of works’’ (318).
The transcripts show the interrogations to pro-
ceed thus, evolving into longer and longer
speeches by her judges punctuated by Hutchin-
son’s repeated requests for proof of her wrongs.
Frustrated with her refusal ‘‘to acknowledge the
error of [her] way so that [she] might be reduced’’
(326), Governor Winthrop finally calls a recess.
The next day of questioning continues in the
same vein at first, although the dialogue centers
on Hutchinson’s desire that her accusers swear an
oath before stating their allegations. This request
causes a long debate and some uproar that she

should be so bold as to question the men’s word;
after much dismayed discussion, they refuse to
swear an oath—one of many instances in which
her defense gets undermined. Next, Hutchinson’s
beloved minister from England, John Cotton, is
called to testify to what Hutchinson said about
the other ministers; surprisingly, he defends her,
rejecting the notion that Hutchinson ever de-
famed the others as ‘‘not able ministers of the new
testament’’ (Hall, ‘‘Examination’’ 336). Still, the
court pushes him for some disparaging details,
implicitly questioning his character as they ques-
tion his version of the events. Seeing Cotton thus
pressed, Hutchinson interjects: ‘‘If you please to
give me leave I shall give you the ground of what I
know to be true’’ (336), launching into her first
substantial speech and inadvertently providing the
disparaging details that the court craved.
It seems as if her desire to protect the young
minister inspires her to speak before having her
request for an oath fulfilled, but in an effort to
take the damning spotlight off Cotton, she turns it
on herself. Her account of what she ‘‘knows to be
true’’ included her claim to direct revelation, ‘‘the
voice of [God’s] own spirit [spoke] to my soul’’
(Hall, ‘‘Examination’’ 337), as well as the defiant
assurance of God’s protection: ‘‘I do here speak it
before the court. I look that the Lord should de-
liver me by his providence’’ (338). The governor
flatly sums up the courts response to such asser-
tions: ‘‘The case is altered and will not stand with
us now’’ (339), and following Winthrop’s lead, the
court shortly declares her ‘‘banished from out of
our jurisdiction as being a woman not fit for our
society’’ (348).

Why are her contentions that she hears the
Lord’s voice and receives ‘‘immediate revelation’’
so troublesome? Why is her admission of a pro-
phetic connection to God so heinous to Winthrop
that he sees it as a gift from heaven, proclaiming,
‘‘We have been hearkening about the trial of this
thing and now the mercy of God by a providence
hath answered our desires and made her to lay
open her self and the ground of all these distur-
bances to be by revelations . . . and that is the
means by which she hath very much abused the
country’’ (Hall, ‘‘Examination’’ 341)? Hutchinson’s
claim to prophesy in effect frees up her judges be-
cause it is so bold a privilege for a woman to assert.
Winthrop responds so decisively because, in de-
claring that she has prophetic powers, Hutchinson
enacts a reformation of church law, recasting the
Protestant Reformation in gendered terms. The
Protestant Reformation allowed that man could
have a direct relationship to God, unmediated by
the Pope; Hutchinson claimed this kind of imme-
diate access to God’s word for herself. Clearly, her
attackers cannot see their way to accepting this
direct relationship for a woman: she is therefore
pronounced guilty of recklessly inciting religious
dissent, community tumult, and general mischief
by releasing her followers from a dependence on
ministry (and implicitly casting the ministers as
popish mediators). If God speaks directly to her, a
mere woman, he could speak to anyone, putting
� December 2006

the ministers out of business and destabilizing their
spiritual and political leadership.3
While her specific words do contribute to her
undoing in this instance, it is important to note
that they offer the men—apparently surprised and
stymied by her cleverness throughout the inter-
rogation, as well as her unwillingness to admit any
wrongdoing—a valuable excuse to end the insuf-
ferable back-and-forth debate with her. Her reve-
lations are indeed a problem, but her clever speech
is as much, if not more, of an issue. That she an-
swers back to her detractors at all makes her sin-
ful, for her speech is read as willfully performative
acts of self-representation. Of course, this makes
her interrogations tricky ground for her to nav-
igate. Both what she says to warrant the trials in
the first place, her original sin of speaking openly
about church doctrine and practice, as well as
what she says to defend herself during her trials,
her subsequent sin of explanation, get posited as a
horrible menace to the colony. Indeed they are a
menace—to a small but influential group of ter-
rified, rigid men. Hutchinson quickly recognizes
the double bind she is in, asking her judges, ‘‘Do
you think it not lawful for me to teach women
and why do you call me to teach the court?’’ She
receives a swift and telling answer: ‘‘We do not
call you to teach the court but to lay open your-
self’’ (Hall, ‘‘Examination’’ 315). Hutchinson’s
view of the examination as an opportunity to
explain her perspective and assume the role of
teacher, and her judges’ opposing demand that she
lay herself open, point to a primary tension that
plagues her court declarations. Both her home-

based religious teachings and her official testi-
mony before the judges are experienced as such
threatening speech because of the illicit ways they
cross out of the private and into the public realm,
accessing people of standing in the community.
Her judges do not want to hear her offer explan-
ations of her ideas, pedagogical maneuvering they
consider grossly inappropriate to her station.
They want her to lay herself open, admit her
deep, inner weaknesses and failings, and repent
and submit to their rule and righteousness.
Hutchinson notes a discrepancy in these de-
mands put upon her and the charges against her;
she asserts that certain private conversations were
not a breach of conduct and should not be entered
into evidence, arguing ‘‘it is one thing for me to
come before a public magistracy and there to
speak what they would have me to speak and an-
other when a man comes to me in a way of
friendship privately there is difference in that’’
(319). Again, her interrogator flatly dismisses her
by countering, ‘‘This speech was not spoken in a
corner but in a public assembly, and though things
were spoken in private yet now coming to us, we
are to deal with them as public’’ (Hall, ‘‘Examina-
tion’’ 319). Her judges endeavor thus to take the
power of the public out of her hands by publi-
cizing her private self on their terms for the cause
of reducing her and returning her all the more
effectively to the unproductive, obscured corner
of the private realm. And their attempts to do this
are all the more insistent as they watch her first
examination become a subversive event. They
want to bring her in and reduce her, tamp her

down, and bring her back into the submissive
fold. She (maddeningly) wants her trials to be a
platform for her defense, something her judges
view as both intolerable and dangerous.
At the church trial, held after the pregnant
Hutchinson was kept prisoner for the winter, the
men focus on undoing any damage caused by her
speech acts. Her qualities of self-possession and
intelligent reasoning get mobilized into attacks on
her that suggested a form of community disloca-
tion where wrong wrenches right out of place:
low ranking individuals knock leaders down to
claim illegitimate roles of authority and female
boldness consumes the properly feminine quality
of modesty. Finally then, Hutchinson’s acts of
social influence are read as testament not only to
the wrongfulness of her opinions but also to the
crucial need to contain and remove a destructively
public woman before she flouts authority too
much and pushes the already dislocated Bay
Colony, at such a scary distance from home, be-
yond its ability to recover. In his Short Story,
Winthrop reflects on the early days of the
Antinomian turmoil, figuring the crisis in terms
of an aberrant repositioning of players. He pro-
claims that in the church, ‘‘all things are turned
upside down among us,’’ and from the halls of
religion ‘‘it spreads into the families, and sets div-
isions between husband and wife, and other re-
lations there, till the weaker give place to the

stronger’’ (253). In his figuration, where the
weaker element (the wife) takes the place of the
stronger (the husband), Winthrop closely echoes a
well-known indictment of Hutchinson just before
the pronouncement of her excommunication:
‘‘[Y]ou have stept out of your place, you have
rather bine a Husband than a Wife and a preacher
than a Hearer; and a Magistrate than a Subject’’
(Hall, ‘‘Trial’’ 382–83).
One telling detail that starts to come across in
this and other admonishments in the trial is that
Bay Colony magistrates see Hutchinson as having
stepped out of her place in a very specific way: by
stepping up. Shortly before the Salem minister,
Hugh Peter, frames her disobedience as a stepping
out of her place, Hutchinson’s once beloved men-
tor John Cotton reprimands her for her puffed up
pride, announcing: ‘‘I have often feared the highth
of your Spirit and being puft up with your own
parts, and therefore it is just with God thus to
abase you and to leave you to these desperate falls
for the Lord looketh upon all the children of pride
and delights to abase them and bringe them lowe’’
(Hall, ‘‘Trial’’ 372). The men who condemn her
regarded Hutchinson’s impudent, solid sense of
personal righteousness in terms of a plainly and
most wrongfully heightened self worth. As she
raises herself into a role of importance in the
community, stepping onto a stage of public dis-
course and performing the role of town leader, the
prospect of men perversely falling under a
woman’s dominance comes closer to reality, set-
ting off the alarms of patriarchal authority.
Indeed, a man literally being under a woman

was broadly interpreted in the seventeenth cen-
tury as sexually perverse and punishable by God.
One explanation for a deformed or miscarried
birth, for example, was that the woman had
mounted her partner during conception. Her un-
natural sexual appetite was seen to have caused
the hideous and visible mark of a misbegotten
birth.4 As a result, not only did women have to
worry about surviving the rigors of childbirth,
they also had to defend themselves against suspi-
cions that birth defects reflected maternal wrong-
doing, an issue of concern to be discussed later. It
is important to emphasize, however, how the
woman’s physical dislocation in space, her liter-
ally being above her husband in sex, is just the
first step in rising above men in matters of do-
mestic governance as well as broader social rule.
Also significantly, the myth about the woman’s
position during coupling communicated a very
specific message about agency: it isolated sexual
perversion in the woman. What were seen as the
damning effects of perversity bore no relation to
male influence. Men were seen to provide qual-
ities of character and social standing to their
progeny while being conveniently unaccountable
for unhealthy births. This one-sided interpreta-
tion of events helps illuminate both the terms of
dislocation that get mobilized in attacks on
Hutchinson—she has stepped out of her place,
or is actually dislocated in her community and
most likely her marriage bed—as well as the pro-
tective cloak of blamelessness that her male
accusers assume. Cotton, who apparently decides
to radically distance himself from Hutchinson

during the months between the civil examination
and church trial, reimagines the judge’s role by
removing the men who sit in judgment of
her from a position of agency, making them trans-
parent purveyors of God’s bidding. They are not
the ones who condemn and ultimately bring cast-
ing her out; it is God’s will that she be brought
low. Her accusers denounce her acts in terms of
her turning her back on God’s ordinances (Hall,
‘‘Trial’’ 388); thus, according to His law and by
nothing more than their logic or interpretation of
that law, she has to be pushed out of the colony.
In addition, events that will occur shortly after
her exile—the birth of her deformed, stillborn
baby and her death—will be read as divine pun-
ishment, serving to further emphasize how her
downfall was God’s will. It is understandable that
Cotton would want to remove himself and the
others from the role of judge and jury. In the
November interrogation when Hutchinson first
revealed her revelations, she conveyed a message
from God: the Bay Colony would pay the price
� December 2006
for any actions against her and the other Anti-
nomians. Hutchinson proclaimed, ‘‘. . . and if you
go on in this course you begin you will bring a
curse upon you and your posterity, and the mouth
of the Lord hath spoken it’’ (Hall, ‘‘Examination’’
338). What if she does turn out to be a genuine
prophet? Who would want to be in the path of the
impending doom that she warns will befall them?

Therefore, the men manipulate the case to frame
her defense as evidence of an impudent tongue so
excessive, so offensive, that God himself has to
intervene.
During her second trial, her offensive, God-
inciting impudence is exemplified at one point by
Hutchinson’s interruption of Cotton during a
lengthy condemnation of her (five full pages in
the transcription). When Cotton finishes his dia-
tribe, another Hutchinson detractor, the Reverend
Thomas Shepard, makes public note of the
woman’s disruption. Addressing Cotton, he con-
fesses: ‘‘It is not little Affliction nor Grefe to my
Spirit to hear what Mrs. Hutchinson did last
speake, it was a Trouble to me to see her interrupt
you, by speaking in the midest of her Censure;
unto which she ought to have attended, with fear
and Tremblinge’’ (Hall, ‘‘Trial’’ 373). What Hutch-
inson actually says could hardly be the issue, at
least not yet. Her interruption is mild-mannered—
‘‘I desire to speake one word befor you proceed:
I would forbar but by Reason of my Weakness.
I fear I shall not remember it when you have
done’’—and apparently acceptable to Cotton him-
self, as he gives her ‘‘Leave to speake.’’ She proceeds
to make a simple assertion: ‘‘All that I would say is
that I did not hould any of thease Thinges before
my Imprisonment’’ (372). Later, the men will use
statements like this as examples when they accus
her of dissembling and prevaricating, of saying
‘‘one Thinge today and another thinge to morrow’’
(384). At the moment, however, what rankles
Shepard is that she interjected her words into
the middle of Cotton’s lecture. The immediate
concern is not what Hutchinson said but how she

spoke, out of turn and therefore in a manner
symptomatic of the general anarchy that marks her.
Again and again, her accusers relate Hutchinson’s
speaking—discussing scripture and church teaching
in her home, defending herself in trial, prophesiz-
ing—to a potential for bedlam. They frequently
accuse her of ‘‘answer[ing] by circumlocutions’’
(Winthrop, ‘‘Short Story’’ 306) and ‘‘continually
say[ing] and unsay[ing] things’’ (Hall, ‘‘Examina-
tion’’ 347), emphasizing the horrible unreliability
and instability of her speech. To Puritans, such
volatility of language lends itself to a larger threat
of community unrest and even violence;5 it repre-
sents, in Winthrop’s cogent description of
Hutchinson’s speech, ‘‘vomit’’ (Short Story 310):
uncontrollable, physical outbursts meant to expel
an internal poison that, in this case, boils over with
Hutchinson’s vile ideas.
Since anything Hutchinson says is seen so
negatively and reacted against so harshly, she is
continually stymied in her efforts to cite scripture
and argue her cause. As a result, Hutchinson
changes tactics in the second trial: she repeatedly
admits that she may have misrepresented herself
and frequently apologizes for misspeaking. It is
possible to read such demeanor as a sign of in-
creasing exhaustion and a resulting loss of anima-
tion. But even in her more acquiescent moments,
Hutchinson continues to cleverly advocate for
herself, as when she concedes:
As my sin hath bine open, soe I thinke it
needful to acknowledge how I came first to
fall into thease Errors. Instead of Lookinge

upon myselfe I looked to Men, I know my
Dissemblinge will doe no good. I spoke
rashly and unadvisedly. I doe not allow the
slightinge of Ministers nor of the Scriptures
nor any other Thinge that is set up by God
. . . . It was never in my hart to slight any
man but that only man should be kept in his
owne place and not set in the Roome of
God. (Hall, ‘‘Trial’’ 376–77)
Not surprisingly, given her devout nature, she
never did slight anything set up by God; her need
to defend herself against such an accusation de-
rives more from the reactionary interpretation of
her speech than from her own rash tongue. But in
her admission of rashness she has the opportunity
to adopt the terms of dislocation that have been
used against her repeatedly throughout her exam-
ination and trial. By maintaining that she only
hopes ‘‘that only man should be kept in his owne
place and not set in the Roome of God’’ (Hall,
‘‘Trial’’ 377), Hutchinson uses two important self-
preservation strategies. First, in stating that man
should be kept in his own place, she concurs with
her judges, but with a twist: not woman setting
herself above man but man setting himself above
God disturbs the order. Thus, she issues a veiled
warning to her listeners, who she has already
suggested put themselves above God by denying
His direct revelations to her, making them sus-
ceptible to His promised curse.

Second, by distinguishing between what she has
said and what she believes (what is in her heart),
she separates herself from her words that the men
deemed so unruly and dangerous. She will shortly
proceed to underscore this point by differentiating
between her expression and her judgment, insist-
ing, ‘‘I confes my Expressions was (sic) that way
but it was never my judgment’’ and then repeating,
almost immediately, ‘‘my Judgment is not altered
though my Expression alters’’ (Hall, ‘‘Trial’’ 378).
Perhaps coming to grasp with the way Bay Colony
rulers see her crimes—embodied less in what she
says and more in how she says it, that is, openly
and publicly—Hutchinson tries a new late-stage
defense: to disavow the power and accuracy of her
speech. Implicit in this defense is the suggestion
that her public speech might be fallible but her
more private beliefs are pure; in thought, she con-
forms. However, the damage done during her
preliminary examination, when male witnesses
testified to being subject to her teachings and she
claimed the gift of prophecy, proves irrevocable.
Cotton characterizes her effort to distinguish her
expression from her judgment as an example of
how ‘‘she doth prevaricate with her words,’’ to
which another judge quickly adds, ‘‘God will not
bare with Mixtures of this kind’’ (386). By decrying
her language as a bad mixture—an improper coup-
ling of truth and suspected falsehood—the men
undo her attempts to walk the fine line between
defending herself while disempowering her own
speech. Further, her statement about proper place-
ment of man beneath God gets turned back on her
when one of her accusers argues that her goal ‘‘. . .
was to set up [her] self in the Roome of God above

others that [she] might be extolled and admired
and followed after, that [she] might be a great
Prophites’’ (380–81), once more highlighting what
they see as her offensive upward dislocation in the
Puritan community.
Again, it is this problem of prophecy that most
forcefully discredits her. It constitutes the ulti-
mate boldness in a woman to claim a direct link to
God’s word, thus cutting out, or at the very least
undercutting, the role of the minister in the com-
munity. Ironically, she inaugurated the conventi-
cles in order to assimilate to colonial life.
Hutchinson attests in court: ‘‘when I first came
to this land because I did not go to such meetings
as those were, it was presently reported that I did
not allow of such meetings but held them unlaw-
ful and therefore in that regard they said I was
proud and did despise all ordinances, upon that a
friend came unto me and told me of it and I to
prevent such aspersions took it up, but it was in
practice before I came therefore I was not the
first’’ (Hall, ‘‘Examination’’ 314). Therefore, her
troubles in the Bay Colony stem from Hutchin-
son’s attempt to secure her own proper placement
in colonial society, an effort to bring herself
down from a perceived position of heightened
pride. Unfortunately, she embraced her role at
the conventicles too enthusiastically and enjoyed
too much success. Hutchinson biographer,
Eve LaPlante, describes how women began to
bring their husbands and other freemen and
because of the passionate response to her reading
and interpretation of scripture, she increased the
number of meetings she held to two every week.

LaPlante paints a vivid picture of these gatherings:
‘‘Her audiences . . . often numbered eighty men
and women—estimated as nearly one in five of
the adults in Boston—who stood or sat on
benches or on the floor. Anne Hutchinson al-
ways had a chair, which set her apart. When [then]
Governor Vane attended, an extra chair was
found, and he sat at her right hand’’ (47). As
Winthrop reports in his Short Story, the other
conventicles and even Hutchinson’s own early
ones were ‘‘not so publick and frequent’’ (267).
The implication behind her meetings being called
so public was that they came to include men. The
� December 2006
mere fact that she developed a following of men,
thereby increasing the public nature of her efforts,
redoubles the accusation of self-aggrandizement
that Hutchinson initially strove to avoid.
Of course, her public following had another
function: it drew attention back to her. And once
called to task for being noticed for things she has
said at the conventicles—most notably, her criti-
cism of the ministers whom she identified as
preaching a covenant of works instead of a coven-
ant of grace, as well as her personal scriptural in-
terpretations—she openly testified to having those
prophetic visions, sealing her fate. But while
Hutchinson may have appropriated ministerial
authority by claiming prophetic powers and criti-
cizing sermons, the Antinomians even more

directly attacked church leaders, adding to the ur-
gency of the Bay Colony leaders’ cause. The con-
troversy incited some of the populace to take
degrading action against the ministers, including
ambushing them in the streets and flinging dung at
their faces (Norton 398). Further, Hutchinson’s
sway with some of the men made them less likely
to follow ministerial, and thus political, directive.
For instance, she opposed colonial aggression
against the native tribes in the Pequot War and
convinced most of her male followers not to par-
ticipate. This is precisely the kind of situation in
which the Antinomian controversy acquired heady
political significance: colonial leaders, in a state of
vulnerable isolation, needed to emphasize and en-
courage ‘‘works’’ from town members. They re-
quired actual labor and service and did not
especially benefit from the indefinable, uncontrol-
lable quality of grace. In effect, Hutchinson’s in-
terpretation of scripture assured colonial women
and men that they did not have to serve God—or
country—to be saved. Such political dominion in a
woman not only challenged the status quo but also
threatened the entire colonial mission.
So while Hutchinson rose to new levels of re-
spect and influence in the community, the once
revered preachers fell to new and dangerous lows,
forced to wipe dung from their faces as a woman
they identified as a vile ‘‘imposter’’ and ‘‘insinu-
ator’’ drew their power away from them. They
encouraged works, and she reiterated the promin-
ence of grace. They advocated aggression, and she
supported peace. As Hutchinson stepped onto
center stage, the once prevailing men were crowded

out into the wings, a location of absolute subjection
where their commands could be disregarded and
the most cogent markers of their individuality and
personhood, their faces, were marked and identi-
fied with filth: smut that they became desperate to
fling back onto Hutchinson.
Indeed, the trial transcripts show that they
manage to redirect the smut onto her in a number
of ways. One is by figuring her usurpation of
power in terms of infection and disease; the other,
as we will see later, is to suggest that she was sex-
ually deviant. The mess, they proclaim, is insti-
gated not by their preaching but her insidious
tongue. The dung should not be flung at their faces
but associated with her speech. Her ‘‘corrupt opin-
ions’’ swell ‘‘to the infection of many’’ (Hall,
‘‘ Trial’’ 353); they ‘‘frett like a Gangrene and spread
like a Leprosie, and infect farr and near, and will
eate out the very Bowells of Religion, and hath soe
infected the Churches that God knows when they
will be cured’’ (373). Hutchinson’s ideas are cast as
consumptive agents. Like gangrene or leprosy,
they rapaciously devour, methodically eating their
way through first one area of the colony (the
weakest, the women, succumb first) and then an-
other (the men), until the very innards of the
church will be felled by the disease of her tongue.
Moreover, Cotton instructs the townswomen that
if they have heard Hutchinson say anything good,
they should guard those lessons. However, he
warns, ‘‘if you have drunke in with this good any
Evell or Poyson, make speed to vomit it up agayne
and to repent of it and take [care] that you do not
harden her in her Way by pittyinge of her or con-
firminge her in her opinions’’ (370). The women

are identified as especially susceptible to becoming
carriers. Just as Hutchinson vomited forth her
opinions in the first place, all her female compat-
riots have to vomit them back up, purging them-
selves of Hutchinson’s poison to do their part to
cleanse and cure the town.6
This imperative to purge Hutchinson becomes
more crucial as the path that her ideas travel
lead into increasingly public arenas. Her speech
insinuates itself into women’s hearts and men’s
minds and from there migrates into the most
sacred recesses of the church. In figuring her
opinions as disease, the magistrates betray a fear of
the not always visible yet deeply affecting and
penetrative power they saw Hutchinson as having
acquired. They need the job of penetrating the
hearts and minds of community members to be
distinctly theirs. And not only does she take on
the masculine role of insinuator, she blocks the
ministers’ power to posses the most, or most
sought-after, knowledge—a politically empowered
possession through which they control the public
sphere and its discourse. In the Bay Colony, min-
isters were the ones who got to monitor the secrets
of others, especially women who, unlike men,
testified in private sessions with church leaders in
order to gain entrance into and ultimately submit
to the authority of the church. A Puritan woman
was called to lay herself open to governing offi-
cials in a submissive posture that theoretically left

no room for her to contain, conceal, or otherwise
control her life, spiritually and otherwise.
Hutchinson did not comply with this impera-
tive. At times, she boldly proclaimed her thoughts
and opinions and at other times, she guarded secret
knowledge. A noteworthy example of Hutchinson’s
part in keeping secrets involved the tale of Mary
Dyer’s ‘‘monstrous and misshapen’’ birth, which
surfaced during Hutchinson’s trial. This baby girl,
whom Hutchinson helped tend to, was (according
to legend and Winthrop’s account of it) grotesquely
malformed, with a distorted face, a turned about
body, and a back ‘‘full of sharp prickles, like a
Thornback’’ (Short Story 280). According to
Thomas Weld in his preface to Winthrop’s Short
Story, the still-born infant combined: ‘‘a woman
child, a fish, a beast, and a fowle, all woven together
in one, and without an head’’ (214). Winthrop also
reported the strange story, emphasizing how the
women stood up for one another in both defiance
and silence and urging the solution of reliable, male
witnessing:
. . . for it was that very day Mistris Hutchin-
son was cast out of the Church for her mon-
strous errours, and notorious falsehood; for
being commanded to depart the Assembly,
Mistris Dyer accompanied her, which a stran-
ger observing, asked another what woman
that was, the other answered, it was the
woman who had the Monster . . . this coming
to the Governours eare, hee called another of
the Magistrates and sent for the midwife . . .
who at first confessed it was a monstrous

birth, but concealed the horns and claws, and
some other parts, till being straitly charged,
and told it should be taken up [exhumed],
and viewed, then shee confessed all, yet for
further assurance, the childe was taken up,
and though it were much corrupted, yet the
horns, and claws, and holes in the back,
and some scares, &c. were found and seen
of above a hundred persons. (Short Story
281–82)
When the baby’s ill-fated birth came to light dur-
ing Hutchinson’s trial and the body was exhumed
for examination, it offered evidence of several
evils in the Bay Colony: Dyer’s deranged soul,
Hutchinson’s spreading influence, both symbol-
ized and punished by the birth defect, and the self-
protective, mutual silence and subsequent power
of the female community, maintained through the
woman-centered medium of child bearing and
rearing.
The evidence mounted when, shortly after her
exile, Hutchinson herself ‘‘was delivered of a
monstrous birth,’’ as Winthrop readily reported
( Journal 146–47). Again in the preface to Short
Story, Weld immediately connects and then differ-
entiates the Dyer and Hutchinson births:
‘‘[Hutchinson] brought forth not one, (as Mistris
Dier did) but (which was more strange to amaze-
ment) [thirty] monstrous births or thereabouts, at
once; some of them bigger, some lesser, some of
one shape, some of another; few of any perfect
shape, none at all of them (as farre as I could ever
learne) of human shape’’ (214). For Weld, the crit-
ically unique aspect of Hutchinson’s deformed,

stillborn baby is its compound nature, which
serves to further confirm the infectious nature of
her evil: it spreads and multiplies. Moreover, the
specific number of babies appear significant to
him: ‘‘. . . for looke as she had vented misshapen
opinions, so she must bring forth deformed mon-
sters; and as about 30. Opinions in number, so
� December 2006
many monsters; and as those were publike, and
not in a corner mentioned, so this is now come to
be knowne and famous over all these Churches,
and a great part of the world’’ (214). Here, Weld
reminds his readers that Hutchinson’s opinions
were ‘‘not in a corner mentioned’’ and emphasizes
the importance of making the women’s dirty little
secrets widely known, killing two birds with one
stone: he subsumes both Hutchinson’s utterances
and the female realm of childbirth under a damn-
ing declaration of fallen womanhood, warped pri-
marily through having women in empowered
positions.
Winthrop further appropriates the threatening
and secretive world of childbirth by, like Weld,
writing at length about Hutchinson’s baby, cap-
italizing on the highly explosive and supposedly
revelatory nature of the birth. It is all the more
enticing because it produces what he sees as fur-
ther pejorative evidence against Hutchinson,
justifying the Bay Colony’s actions. In his jour-
nal, Winthrop includes a lengthy transcription of

the news from a doctor summoned to assist
Hutchinson. Doctor John Clark, an Antinomian
who had left Boston for Portsmouth, Rhode Is-
land, related his professional opinion to Winthrop
thus:
I was called in to see it, where I beheld in-
numerable distinct bodies in the form of a
globe, not much unlike the swims of some
fish, so confusingly knit together by so many
several strings (which I conceive were the
beginning of veins and nerves) so it was im-
possible either to number the small round
pieces in every lump, much less discern from
whence every string did fetch its original,
they were so snarled within one another. The
small globes I likewise opened, then per-
ceived the matter of them (setting aside the
membrane in which it was involved) to be
partly wind and partly water. ( Journal 147)
The governor, ‘‘not satisfied with this relation,’’
requires further detail from Clark, who apparent-
ly padded his initial description:
The lumps were twenty-six or twenty-seven,
distinct and not joined together; there came
no secundine after them; six of them were as
great as his fist, and the smallest about the
bigness of the top of his thumb. The globes
were round things, included in the lumps,
about the bigness of a small Indian bean, and
like the pearl in a man’s eye. The two lumps
which differed from the rest were like liver
or congealed blood, and had no small globes

in them, as the rest had . . . ( Journal 147)
The journal entry does not mention if the gov-
ernor was satisfied with the addendum, but in
relaying the account, Winthrop positively revels
in the details of Hutchinson’s misfortune. His re-
cord of Clark’s report is Baconian in its compre-
hensiveness and its drive to study the singularly
curious and, through extensive and honed obser-
vations, assert a plausible explanation. The more
meticulous and inclusive the observations, the
more accurate the conclusion, and the closer
it comes to the ideals of modern science and
truth. To provide proof of Hutchinson’s sin, to
make their case against her scientifically sound,
Winthrop and Weld publish accounts that exploit
the inflammatory and gendered figure of physic-
ally deformed births as irrefutable evidence.
Increasingly in the seventeenth century, the
female-centered rituals surrounding childbearing
were construed as a threat to communal integrity
and male hegemony.7 Occurring in secluded quar-
ters from which men were excluded, customs of
childbirth were seen, with some reason, as foster-
ing secretive measures. Already in the first half of
the seventeenth century, two generations before
the witchcraft hysteria would grip Salem and target
women and midwives with special vehemence and
more than a century before the decimating decline
of midwifery in both Old and New England, mid-
wives were being regarded with damaging suspi-
cion. For instance, the midwife who delivered
Dyer’s baby, Jane Hawkins, clearly made colonial
rulers nervous. Shortly after the exhumation of
Dyer’s ‘‘monster,’’ Winthrop reports in his journal:

‘‘The midwife, presently after this discovery, went
out of the jurisdiction; and indeed it was time for
her to be gone, for it was known that she used to
give young women oil of mandrakes and other
stuff to cause conception; and she grew into sus-
picion to be a witch’’ (140–41). Hawkins ‘‘went out
of the jurisdiction’’ because she was prohibited
from practicing midwifery and banished. Women’s
provinces, where both their skills and autonomy
could be exercised, were beginning to give way to a
fear of the female power that they implicitly al-
lowed. In their place, male-dominated science
would begin to prosper.8 Even in Hutchinson’s
colonial New England, the promises of advances in
science were insinuating themselves into what had
historically been women’s travail, foreshadowing
the radical changes on the horizon. Due to the
superstition attached to women’s bodies and tra-
vails, childbearing—an arena that had fostered an
empowering social network for women—was
being turned into obstetrical medicine—a field
quite removed from female practice and authority,
at least for the first two centuries of its develop-
ment. At the time, society turned to science to
separate women from their bodies, identifying
their reproductive powers with evil.9 Meanwhile,
Hutchinson’s fate saliently suggests that the more
terrifying evils included ignorance, power mon-
gering, and misogyny.
As the men appropriated the stories of the

Dyer and Hutchinson babies, the sad and ex-
haustively examined details became a public cen-
sure of Antinomian ideals, embodied especially in
Hutchinson’s mysterious reproductive powers—
as uncontrollable as grace itself. In the magis-
trates’ minds, the deformed babies both figured
and castigated the woman’s deformed opinions. In
addition, the men related the events to symbol-
ically enact what the governor asserted during
Hutchinson’s examination when he told her what
they would do with the evidence of her preaching
and prophesizing: as her religious teaching ‘‘was
not spoken in a corner but in a public assembly,
and though things were spoken in private yet now
coming to us, we are to deal with them as public’’
(Hall, ‘‘Examination’’ 319). To turn women’s cor-
ners into public property was the first step in
transferring female-centered traditions into the
realm of male privilege, which in turn subverted
women’s claims to any sort of communal inter-
change or semi-public discourse gained through
those traditions. As evidenced by the swelling fear
of midwives, the accusations of witchcraft some
midwives therefore endured, and the subsequent
demise of midwifery and rise of obstetric science,
making women’s private occasions into more
public, male-dominated events was a way of con-
trolling female selfhood. The control came from
either demonizing or appropriating women’s bod-
ies and then relegating them to their proper place,
far from the public stage of social access. Such
policing of women was a way of physically cor-
nering them, removing them from positions of
influence and forcing them into submissive pos-
tures, finally debunking the potency and author-

ity of both their acts and speech.
At the extreme end of these policing tactics of
women are accusations of witchcraft, which
Hutchinson could easily have faced, given that
the language used to condemn her was not far
from that used against witches. Carol F. Karlsen
explains how witches were regarded in the New
World, painting an image that uncannily captures
how Hutchinson’s judges saw her: ‘‘Witches were
enemies not only of society, but of God. When
confronted with witches in New England, minis-
ters in particular worried about the Devil’s success
in recruiting people to destroy Puritan churches’’
(4). Since Hutchinson countered God’s ordinance
by disrespecting town authority, He punished her
with a miscarried, monstrous birth, the details of
which could be interpreted under the incontro-
vertible and protective cloak of science to signify
her evil. And the bad birth was only the first of
what colonial rulers saw as two Godly indict-
ments against the dame’s insolence; the second
was her tragic, post-exile slaying at the hands of
American Indians. Her excessive pride, a fault
identified as one possible motivation for a witch’s
spells and other misdeeds (Karlsen 6), warranted
God’s wrath, so why should it not warrant colo-
nial condemnation?10 Unfortunately, given the
attitudes toward outspoken women, it should
come as no surprise that of the three most prom-
inent female players in the Hutchinson affair—
Hutchinson, Hawkins, and Dyer—all faced exile
and one, Dyer, was eventually executed. After
going into exile with Hutchinson, returning to
England, becoming a Quaker, and finally return-
ing to New England as a missionary, Dyer was

� December 2006
hanged for her religious beliefs on Boston Com-
mon in 1660 (LaPlante 253).
Women like these—women with the convictions
to take a public stand—could only be understood
in colonial terms as so excessively proud as to be
physically damaged. In a woman, public presence
equaled a big head, which equaled an engorged
sexuality; the slippage may seem extreme, but it
bears out in Hutchinson’s tale. While her case of-
ficially began as an investigation of the appropri-
ateness of her conventicles, the real energy of the
trial got expended in examining the appropriateness
of her physical being. Hutchinson’s infractions
turned into crimes of seduction and she ended up
having to defend her sexual reputation. That by the
end of her trials she would have been visibly preg-
nant would have made this defense especially hard
for her to manage. Forcing the exhausted woman to
stand for hours in the midst of a difficult preg-
nancy, eyeing her swollen belly, her accusers com-
mand her ‘‘not to prostitute her faith to any one’’
(Hall, ‘‘Trial’’ 359) and label her ‘‘a most daynger-
ous Spirit . . . likely with her fluent Tongue and
forwardness in Expressions to seduce and draw
away many’’ (365). Phillip Round comments: ‘‘With
this sort of language in the air, the trial soon de-
generated into a sexual defamation case, its doctri-
nal points submerged beneath the language of
reputation, credit, and sexual license’’ (140).

Finally, when the weary Hutchinson asserts a
strong opinion on religious doctrine in the midst of
her questioning in church, ‘‘I doe not thinke the
Body that dyes shall rise agayne’’ (Hall, ‘‘Trial’’ 363),
her judges vent their amazement at her ideas not by
directly debunking them but by attacking her sexual
morality with unrestrained vehemence. Cotton, her
once trusted minister and protector, despairs:
Yea consider if the Resurection be past than
you cannot Evade the Argument that was
prest upon you by our Brother Buckle and
others, that filthie Sinne of the Comunitie of
Woemen and all promiscuous and filthie co-
minge together of men and Woemen without
Distinction or Relation of Marriage, will ne-
cessarily follow. And though I have not herd,
nayther do I thinke, you have bine unfayth-
full to your Husband in his Marriage
Covenant, yet that will follow upon it, for it
is the very argument that the Saduces bringe
to our Savior Christ against the Resurrection:
and that which the Annabaptists and Fami-
lists bringe to prove the Lawfullnes of the
common use of all Weomen and soe more
dayngerous Evells and filthie Unclenes and
other sines will followe than you doe now
Imagine or conceave. (Hall, ‘‘Trial’’ 371–72)
In Cotton’s opinion, her thoughts on religious
doctrine create a site of dangerous slippage. For
all he knows, she has been a faithful wife, but the
revelations about monstrous births will shortly
suggest that he and the other ministers know less

than they thought. And regardless, her infidelities
are imminent, bound to fall on the heels of her
radical ideas communicated by a tongue too free
in a woman. One improper behavior breeds fur-
ther perversions of gender roles. The logic may be
curious, but Cotton presents it as a direct and
indubitable correlation: ‘‘if the Resurection be
past than you cannot Evade the Argument that . . .
all promiscuous and filthie cominge together of
men and Woemen without Distinction or Rela-
tion of Marriage, will necessarily follow.’’ Because
her speech and opinions infect the community so
rankly and insidiously, her own sexual indiscre-
tions—that to the minds of her attackers inevit-
ably parallel such forceful speech in a woman—
will likewise leak into more widespread sexual
anarchy. She will inevitably birth a monster and
the evils will multiply should she be allowed to
remain.
To the extent that Antinomianism signified the
imminence of actual violence to Bay Colony
rulers, and to the extent that the colony already
existed in continual fear of attack or internal col-
lapse, they responded swiftly: Antinomianism and
its primary fuel, female (sexual) power, were re-
moved from the arena of religious and social in-
fluence. Hutchinson’s attempts to test the bounds
of authority in the New World and perform the
role of spiritual leader inspired an attack on her
authority: fueled by the fear of Antinomianism but
quickly reaching beyond it, barely heeding the
doctrine Hutchinson espoused and instead positing
her act of speaking itself as sexually aggressive. Her

words quite rapidly became irrelevant. That she
spoke to an audience was enough of a crime, one
that called up images of disease, copulation, and
childbirth gone awry: the domestic sphere in crim-
inal disarray, threatening to impinge on the public
at every turn. Such images served to demonize and
silence Hutchinson, pushing her off the public
stage and into the increasingly disempowered
spaces of house arrest, imprisonment, and finally
exile—but not before she was compelled to speak
in her interrogations, during which her words were
mostly unheeded, often reappropriated and re-
worked, and always roundly condemned. In this
way, Hutchinson’s fate underscores some of the
ways that women and their bodies could be ma-
nipulated into compelling explanations for com-
munity instability. Forced to explain herself, she
watched any explanations she offered get inter-
preted as rank examples of her wickedness. Dis-
torted into a vehicle for explaining failed church
and political dogma, Hutchinson quite easily could
be identified as antihegemonic—even anti-Ameri-
can. She had to go.
In Puritan society, the proper posture for a fe-
male body was closed and contained unless the
church called for a woman to open herself, at
which point her full submission would be expect-
ed. Hutchinson’s fate emphasizes how maintain-
ing this closed submission in women became
tantamount to preserving social order. In his jour-
nal, Winthrop recounts numerous incidents in the
Bay Colony where individuals were brought up

on charges of adultery. The matter always rests on
if there was penetration of the woman in question,
if she had been ruined by illicit opening of her
most private parts. Again and again, as Winthrop
dutifully reports them, cases turn on whether or
not it can be proven that there was ‘‘entrance of
her body’’ (195). This detail of penetration even
arose in the case of a young man ‘‘found in bug-
gery with a cow upon the Lord’s day . . . he con-
fessed the attempt and some entrance, but denied
the completing of the fact’’ (197). In this case, the
defendant’s argument that he did not fully con-
summate ‘‘the fact’’ did not save him from being
found guilty. The young man achieved some en-
trance of the cow and, according to common
opinion, was ‘‘a very stupid, idle, and ill-disposed
boy’’ (197) not apt to learn from instruction and
repent of his sins. Furthermore, he ‘‘remained stiff
in his denial’’ (197) that nothing else had occurred,
refusing repentance and giving his judges suffi-
cient grounds to condemn him to death. On the
day of his hanging for the ‘‘foul fact,’’ (197) he
stood silently on the scaffold until his partner in
crime, the cow, was brought forward and slain
before his eyes, at which point ‘‘he brake out into
a loud and doleful complaint against himself’’
(198). His perversions were matched and reflected
in the deviant cow he chose for a companion;
upon witnessing her death, he finally acknowl-
edged and lamented the darkness in his own soul.
This ill-fated young man’s choice of partner,
while fascinating, is hardly as significant as the
issue of penetration that, once established, war-
ranted the deaths of both the defiled and defiler;

also critical was the perpetrator’s lateness in re-
penting of his crimes. Hutchinson’s misdeeds and
failure to properly repent paralleled the young
man’s transgression—and strangely, the cow’s,
which also suffered the severe censure of death.
If Hutchinson’s words and acts were not already
sexually deviant, they were at least predeviant.
And since in her judges’ minds she showed no
repentance but instead attempted to explain and
defend herself, she warranted especially strident
censure. The consummation of her perversion oc-
curred at the moment she impudently opened her
mouth; that before long she would improperly
open her legs was a reasonable expectation in the
minds of her accusers. Finally then, Hutchinson’s
speaking imaginatively dislocated her in one of
the most odious ways possible in the Puritan
community: out of her marriage bed and into a
den of iniquity that put her only steps away from
unseemly cattle prodding.
The notion to underscore with this parallel is
shame. The shame of intercourse with a cow, a
type of sexual expression that most people would
not hesitate to label as repellent or at least laugh-
ably desperate, reflects the shame Hutchinson’s
accusers attached to her. In order to make that
shame stick, they fixed her wrongdoings—what
they saw as her errors—to an imminent sexual
� December 2006
misconduct so heinous that it was monstrous: de-

formed and deforming, diseased and infectious.
Hutchinson biographer LaPlante, a descendent
of Hutchinson, directly identifies shame with her
ancestor’s story. She admits feeling embarrassed in
high school when Antinomianism and Hutchinson
were studied: ‘‘the ferocity and moral fervor I
associated with her were attitudes I disliked in my
relatives and feared in myself’’ (xx). Much later in
her book, LaPlante returns to interrogate this issue
of shame, inquiring why women are such a mi-
nority in the highest public offices and why, for
example, Hillary Clinton is made more appealing
if her power is mediated by an understanding of
her as a victim—the long-suffering wife. LaPlante
wonders, that is, why shame is so soundly asso-
ciated with powerful women that some fault or
frailty has to enter into the equation to make her
power more palatable. She asks, ‘‘Could John
Winthrop be correct in observing that it is not
proper or comely for a woman to hold power? No
wonder as a little girl I associated my ancestor . . .
with shame’’ (243). LaPlante’s questions echo
Elfriede Jelinek’s statements that open this study
about how a woman’s public acclaim degrades her
value as a woman. This was Hutchinson’s reality.
Could it possibly be ours now?
Certainly, contemporary western women do
not face the same kind of social restrictions today
that existed in Puritan America; however, mech-
anisms for inducing shame in public women still
exist and women may face the unenviable choice
to either eschew the public sphere or mediate
their association to it with images of weakness,
vulnerability, or some other distinctly feminine

trait. What we see in a theocratic society like
Puritan New England then is a heightened, exag-
gerated reflection of ourselves: a social network
wedded to antiquated gender roles and responsi-
bilities, fearful of challenges to the status quo, and
simultaneously aroused and horrified by sexual-
ity—especially in its moments of transgression—
creating an environment resistant to change and
rife with possibilities for shame. Jelinek outlines
one outcome of such an environment in the New
York Times. When her interviewer asks about the
sexual politics of her novels, Jelinek explains, ‘‘I
describe the relationship between man and
woman as a Hegelian relationship between mas-
ter and slave. As long as men are able to increase
their sexual value through work, fame or wealth,
while women are only powerful through their
body, beauty and youth, nothing will change’’
(31). What Jelinek asserts to be our contemporary
situation, where we live by specifically gendered
codes of power, proves to apply in Hutchinson’s
case. In the Bay Colony, the restriction of social
influence to men—where only masculinity could
be properly expressed and empowered through
public venues—contributed to a tactic of shaming
public women through exposure of their bodies,
not as desirably contained vessels of femininity
but as physical expression gone horribly awry. In
projecting Hutchinson’s ideas into a bodily realm
and then showing her body to be debased and
monstrous, Bay Colony rulers turned her intel-
lectual influence and power into a vivid account
of dislocated and distorted physical postures ex-
panding into evil. In such a register—where
women’s voices get twisted into aberrant bodies

and public attention is used to brand female ar-
ticulations of authority as disgraceful—the con-
demnation, ‘‘you have stepped out of your place,’’
takes on an especially shaming and chillingly cur-
rent resonance.
Notes
1. While she was largely respected in the Bay Colony, there
were
ripples of discontent early on. During the sea voyage to the New
World, she had had spirited and angry exchanges with two men,
William Bartholomew and Reverend Zechariah Symmes, who
imme-
diately reported her impertinence upon arriving on American
shores.
Thus, her opinions and penchant for communicating them freely
were
becoming an issue with the governing elite in Massachusetts
before she
even set foot on New England soil. See Norton (365–66).
2. See Hall (‘‘Examination’’ 312) for one of many uses of the
term
‘‘reduce’’ against Hutchinson. The Oxford English Dictionary
notes
several compelling uses of the word ‘‘reduce’’ that deviate from
the
most common modern usage—to decrease or lessen—and could
be
operative in the context of Hutchinson’s trial. The most
immediate is
a usage that the OED identifies as being ‘‘very common’’ in the
seventeenth century: ‘‘To lead or bring back from error in
action,
conduct, or belief, esp. in matters to morality or religion.’’ Also

common in the seventeenth century was the figurative context
of a
meaning that strongly suggests physical dislocation: ‘‘To lead
or
bring back (a person) to, into, from, etc., a place or way, or to a
person.’’ And finally, the sixteenth century saw the rise of two
uses of
the word that resonate for Hutchinson. First, it was used to
signify
‘‘To make subject to one; to cause to give obedience or
adherence to;
to bring under one, into or under one’s power, within bounds,
etc.’’
Second, it became common in the context of war: to capture a
fort-
ress or ‘‘To bring (a person) under control or authority, to
subdue,
conquer.’’ Therefore, by opening her first examination by
telling
Hutchinson that they had brought her to trial to reduce her,
Win-
throp immediately establishes the terms of dislocation and
subjection
that will persist throughout the hearings.
3. For insight into the resonance and impact of female prophecy
in the seventeenth century, see: Phyllis Mack; Norton,
‘‘Husband,
Preacher, Magistrate’’ in Founding Mothers and Fathers, Round
(es-
pecially 119–21); Hall, Worlds of Wonder (especially 95–102);

and
Westerkamp, ‘‘Prophesying Women: Pushing the Boundaries of
Patriarchy’’ in Women and Religion.
4. Phyllis Mack discusses the various interpretations of a de-
formed child, highlighting the slippery rationalization of male
agency
and innocence in the act of reproduction: ‘‘Learned opinion
empha-
sized the dominance of the father’s role in procreation, both in
bi-
ological terms (the male seed was thought to determine the
child’s
character) and in social and economic terms (lawful paternity
deter-
mined inheritance). Nevertheless, a prime explanation for the
birth of
a deformed child was that, despite all this male input, as it
were, a
woman’s volatile imagination, infused by evil forces, was
sufficient to
transform the fetus into a monster; or the monster might be the
result
of her wanton, unnatural behavior in sitting astride her husband
dur-
ing intercourse; or the woman might simply be the unwitting
vehicle
for the expression of cosmic wrath for the sins of the nation’’
(39).
5. In examining women and prophesy in colonial America,
Marilyn J. Westerkamp delineates the link between female
speech
and the crumbling of social mores: ‘‘In general, the only women
who
did speak publicly in church were those called to answer for

their
sins; women’s speech was being transformed into a symbol of
sin and
disorder’’ (38). Of course, Hutchinson fits this formula. Round
also
discusses how ‘‘both ministry and magistracy attempted to turn
Hutchinson’s outspokenness to their own advantage by casting
it as a
form of disorder’’ (136).
6. Jim Egan devotes a chapter, ‘‘Discipline and Disinfect,’’ to
tracing how the metaphors of the (grotesque) body and infection
are
mobilized to discredit and purge the Antinomians in New
England.
See pages 66–81.
7. The monstrous issue of the birth becomes that figure for the
monstrous ideas of Hutchinson and her followers in the way that
Hutchinson, or more specifically her gender, is the figure for
Ant-
inomianism. Jim Egan argues that in the charged political
atmosphere
of colonial New England, leaders urged an understanding of the
governing body as literally—and not just figuratively—male.
Simi-
larly, Antinomianism was imagined and lambasted as a
grotesque and
specifically female body. In such an environment, Egan
explains,
‘‘any space where women might escape the watchful eye of
male
authority was a place where they were likely to stir up trouble.
Such
a space within the body politic was an inversion—or antibody,
if you

will—capable of undermining the health of the body politic
from
within’’ (74). So, Egan asserts, it is not surprising that
‘‘Winthrop
traces the Antinomian contagion back to the birth room’’ (74).
Win-
throp’s location of the origins of evil dissent in pregnancy and
labor
is not an anomalous choice.
8. As historian Doreen Evenden reports, in London, ‘‘By the
1750s midwives’ traditional, practical skill proved no match for
the
claims of the male midwife, waiting in the wings with his shiny
instruments and promises of ‘scientific expertise’’’ (175).
Laurel
Thatcher Ulrich explains that the fledgling United States
quickly
followed suit: ‘‘By 1800 ‘male science’ had diverged
dramatically
from ‘female tradition’ and midwifery was under strenuous
attack’’
(134). The rise of science in the seventeenth century, inspired in
large
part by Bacon’s method of close observation, transformed ways
of
seeing the human body in the expanding realm of the natural
world
and inspired women to defy customary limitation and venture
out of
socially designated places. But it also contributed to a counter
trans-
formation that put the work of reproduction firmly in the hands
of
male medical experts of obstetrics.

9. James D. Hartman points out that witchcraft, like childbirth,
invited the imposing judgment of scientific truth: ‘‘Witchcraft
made a
useful subject for Baconian analysis. Proofs of the existence of
in-
visible creatures required more than the usual amount of
convincing
evidence. In addition, witchcraft was an especially popular
subject
for writers influenced by Bacon’s call for an examination of
prodi-
gies, of the unusual and the bizarre, of facts which did not fit
with
preconceived axioms and theories’’ (72).
10. Historian Kathleen M. Brown examines how community
members dealt with witches and other bad women: ‘‘In the
accu-
sation of witches, as in the ducking of scolds, carting of whores,
and
riding of adulterous women, community residents revealed their
image of womanhood: unless tamed, subdued, and mastered,
women
tended toward promiscuity and evil, both of which destabilized
marriages, households, and communities. Although Puritans
expli-
citly rejected many of these community traditions for shaming
and
punishing women, they encouraged the prosecution of sexual
mis-
conduct and witchcraft. Most important, however, they
articulated a
widely held vision of the good woman as good wife, whose per-
formance of her subordination—through her silence, her
clothing,

and her chastity—was crucial to the social order’’ (32).
Works Cited
Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious
Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia.
Chapel
Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996.
Egan, Jim. Authorizing Experience: Refigurations of the Body
Politic
in Seventeenth-Century New England Writing. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1999.
Evenden, Doreen. The Midwives of Seventeenth-Century
London.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular
Religious Belief in Early New England. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1989.
Hall, David D., ed. The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638.
Durham: Duke UP, 1990.
———. ‘‘A Report of the Trial of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson Before
the
Church In Boston.’’ The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638.
Durham: Duke UP, 1990. 349-388.
———. ‘‘The Examination of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson at the
Court in
Newtown.’’ The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638. Durham:
Duke UP, 1990. 311-348.
Hartman, James D. Providence Tales and the Birth of American

Literature. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.
Jelinek, Elfriede. Interview with Deborah Solomon. New York
Times
Sunday Magazine. 21 Nov. 2004. 31.
Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman:
Witchcraft in
Colonial New England. New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
1987.
LaPlante, Eve. American Jezebel. New York: Harper Collins
Publishers, 2004.
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Mack, Phyllis. Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in
Seventeenth-
Century England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.
Norton, Mary Beth. Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered
Power and the Forming of American Society. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1996.
Oxford English Dictionary. CD-ROM Version 2.0. Oxford:
Oxford
UP, 1999.
Round, Phillip H. By Nature and Custom Cursed: Transatlantic
Civil Discourse and New England Cultural Production, 1620–
1660. Hanover: UP of New England, 1999.
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the

Lives
of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
Weld, Thomas. Preface. A Short Story. The Antinomian
Controversy,
1636–1638. By John Winthrop. Durham: Duke UP, 1990.
201–19.
Westerkamp, Marilyn J. Women and Religion in Early America,
1600–1850: The Puritan and Evangelical Traditions. London:
Routledge, 1999.
Williams, Selma R. Divine Rebel: The Life of Anne Marbury
Hutchinson. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981.
Winthrop, John. The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649. Ed.
Richard S. Dunn and Laetitia Yeandle. Cambridge, MA:
Belknap-
Harvard UP, 1996.
———. A Short Story. The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–
1638. Ed.
David D. Hall. Durham: Duke UP, 1990. 199-310.
McCarthy, Patrick. "The Mountain Man and American
Anguish." Journal Of Popular Film & Television 24.4 (1997):
165. Academic Search Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.

MESSERS. EDITORS: You, no doubt, desire to hear from all
parts of the world and the West, the extreme West
among the number. We will soon have to yeild [sic] up the
privilege we once had of being entitled Western Men--the
limits will soon be passed, and a more distant region attempted
by the hardy and adventurous pioneer.... Today the
Oregon and California Companies [wagon trains] rendezvous at
Sapling Grove [Missouri], to make arrangements for
their departure.... Mr. Fitzpatrick [a famous mountain man] is
expected to be elected Captain, and take the
superintendence of both parties for some distance. . .
--anonymous (Daily Missouri
Republican, 19 May 1841)
Over the past 150 years, the historical figure of the mountain
man--the fur trapper and/or trader of the United States
of America's nineteenth-century trans-Mississippi West--has
been depicted in innumerable artifacts of American
culture: 60 Hollywood films or "westers," 20 documentary
films, filmstrips marketed in catalogues, numerous
television beer commercials, early radio programs, musical
recordings, famous western paintings, countless drawings
and sculptures, as well as hundreds of books, including dime
novels. As a result, the mountain man is a premier

cultural hero. Or is he?
Among the major themes that identify the mountain man's
characterization are threads ostensibly linking him to
power--anarchic freedom, animalism, bravery, instinct (or loss
thereof), the return to nature, the search for paradise,
sexual potency, staunch individualism, stoicism, and
wanderlust, which in actuality is agonized restlessness. The
mountain man portrayed in American culture attracts those
projections because historians and mountain man
aficionados have viewed the historical trapper as sui generis--an
entity who lived without social restraints. In reality,
the historical trapper belonged to a long line of "masterless
men" who lived on the periphery of society over the
ages.( n1)
Underlying psychological themes tied to the trapper, as
characterized in American culture, reveal a figure whose
inner state is the opposite of his persona; he is beset by
powerlessness and intoxicated by themes relating to
dominance and punishment: absence of relatedness, isolation,
masochism, misogyny, sadism, self-victimization, and
all forms of violence (including emotional--threats, harassment,
verbal abuse). Those "darker" qualities, which can
ultimately be connected with punitive patriarchy, are seldom

recognizable to the general public because the
psychological makeup of the historical mountain man and his
counterpart in American culture has not been examined
by historians and/or culture watchers. Too, punishing behaviors
are often overlooked be cause they are equated with
paradigmatic masculinity and venerated by mainstream culture
as well as American subcultures.
In "Welters, Not Westerns," an article appearing in the fall 1995
issue of the Journal of Popular Film and Television,
the demonic heart of the archetypal Wild Man offered a glimpse
into the figure of the historical mountain man as
portrayed in a particular type of film. Dealing with the demonic
meant explicating threads relating to animal kinship,
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bestial violence, and the unconscious as primordial space. As
extensions of welters, other cultural artifacts that depict
the trapper also conceal a layer of dark, repressed energies that
are traceable to the contemporary mind and current
issues. To access those issues, I will pair sociocultural criticism
with other types of archetypal criticism--ones
traceable to Jungian interpretations and the psychology of
scapegoating as developed by Jungian analyst and scholar

Sylvia Perera.( n2)
One of two archetypes most applicable to this discussion is the
Shadow. Jung said the Shadow is "the thing a person
has no wish to be."( n3) Accordingly, there exists in each
person an archetypal Shadow, the collective outgrowth of
which is the nation's Shadow. William A. Miller explains that
the collective Shadow is "comprised mainly of material
that is taboo to the larger culture and society in which one
develops."( n4) Americans projected their Shadow--
persecutions and prejudices--via scapegoating the televised
trapper. I will analyze television programs about this
character, or "telewesters," as sociocultural artifacts of the post-
Vietnam era--from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s.
My analysis starts with the immediate post-Watergate years and
ends with the fourth year of Bill Clinton's presidency.
As a reservoir of conflictual material, the scapegoated trapper,
or mountain man, has several definable qualities to
keep in mind. He lives in hellish exile in the American West;
his stoicism is actually misery because he cannot
experience loss. He takes on society's pathology, notably
carrying collective evil and guilt. As a figure who shoulders
society's dissociative tendencies, the televised trapper has two
overriding attributes: In the course of "wandering

precariously" in the wilds, he searches for a home base, which
he never finds; his wanderlust reveals that he is
condemned to the wilderness, wherein the space of the West, is,
in truth, a curse. Most important, the mountain
man is a carrier of opposites of the archetypal scapegoat, being
both a pariah and a savior.( n5) Maxine Harris notes
in her book the psychosocial meaning of scapegoating:
Historically, one of the ways in which we have dealt with
violence and aggressiveness is to assign those tendencies
to single individuals. We contain our own violence and
destructiveness by aggregating it and projecting it out onto
one or two people who come to be known by name and to
embody evil and destructiveness for the rest of us.( n6)
How the familiar western landscape was inverted and turned
into the "extreme West," and how the televised
mountain man has been scapegoated over the past 20 years in
television programming are traceable to five added
themes occurring in society from the early 1970s to the mid-
1990s:
1. trapper symbolizes the Vietnam combat soldier
2. repression of effects from the Vietnam War
3. men view themselves as having been victimized by war,
government, and women

4. fear and/or hatred of women 5. loss of individual liberties
Enter the mountain man on the small screen. From 1951 to
1955, handsome Bill Williams starred in 104 episodes in
the series The Adventures of Kit Carson, which was set in the
1880s--an element that made the series more related
to the cowboy era than to the mountain man. In 1957 to 1958,
the Walt Disney Company released a six-part
miniseries, The Saga of Andy Burnett, in which Jerome
Courtland played a mountain man who heads west from
Kentucky. Just as a "big blow" signals a change of seasons in
the mountains, the mountain man was swept off the
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television screen in the late 1950s and did not appear again
until the early 1970s. Although the culture of the Cold

War had unleashed a televised trapper pressured by conformity
and unwilling to accept threats to an open society
and a rule of law caused by anticommunist hysteria, the
Vietnam War drove him deep into America's unconscious.
There he stayed, a psychic recluse, seething throughout the
1960s.
From the early 1970s to 1996, numerous television productions
about the mountain man were aired. Only a
representative number can be dealt with here, a combination of
individual programs, miniseries, series, and made-
for-TV movies (see the videography for dates): The Oregon
Trail, The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, The
Macahans, the miniseries How the West Was Won, the series
How the West Was Won, and Centennial. The trapper
nearly dropped from sight in the early eighties and appeared
briefly in Hagen, only to resurface middecade in Dream
West, Manhunt for Claude Dallas, The Abduction of Kari
Swenson, and Gunsmoke: Return to Dodge. The 1990s
produced Cry in the Wild: The Taking of Peggy Ann, Blood
River, the series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, and Buffalo
Girls.
As an ultra-mobile loner and misfit, the mountain man Kelly in
The Oregon Trail (1976) sets the stage for other

depictions of the trapper. He is a mountain man-scout-fur thief
who is piloting a wagon train west. At one point, he
takes an unauthorized leave from his duties. Upon returning, he
is grabbed and knocked to the ground by Thorpe,
the wagonmaster (Rod Taylor). Kelly responds, "I'm a mountain
man, when humanity starts crowdin' me.... [I] have
to get off by myself."
As though a hypervigilant American audience wanted total
surveillance of the West, wide-angle vistas greet the
viewer at the opening of The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams,
The Macahans, How the West Was Won, and
Centennial. The panoramic sweeps--mountains, ocean forests,
and tracts of high desert--are captured from
helicopters moving swiftly over the endless, indifferent
expanse. The terrain is impressive, but where are the human
inhabitants? The immense, extreme West swallows people and
hides what a roving eye dares to distinguish--the
inner geography of Americans as mirrored in the "lush
unconscious," the "fast-flowing unconscious," the "dry
unconscious," and the "frigid unconscious."
The lush unconscious is shown in the environmental themes that
spring from The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams,
Centennial, and How the West Was Won. The West in the
motion picture pilot The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams is

a place of harmony for living things, except for James "Grizzly"
Adams (Dan Haggerty), a hippy-like "hairhead" and
Whitmanesque figure.( n7) Adams is forced to leave his
daughter and the cabin where they lived to flee to the wilds
after being falsely accused of murder. Adams soon develops a
remarkable kinship with animals. A bear, which he
names Ben, becomes his alter ego. Despite the fairy-tale
existence of the character, the lush unconscious
camouflages the deprivation that results from loss of family and
the absence of social bonds. The only human
acceptance and comfort that Adams receives comes from a lone
American Indian, Nakoma. However, Adams endures
the rejection of society and his own self-rejection. At the film's
end, Adams stays in the wilderness despite the fact
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that he is no longer wanted by the law; authorities had found the
guilty man. At one point, Adams, as narrator, says,
"I had no people," revealing his anger and anguish, but he never
asks nor answers the question, why me? In her
book Sylvia Perera writes,
Such emotions [anger and anguish] need full acceptance, for

they mark the beginning of disidentification from the
alienated and victim aspects of the [scapegoat] complex and the
beginning of conscious, individual assertion.( n8)
In the television series The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams,
Adams gains more friends. The lush unconscious is then
represented by an adult petting zoo and a foliage-filled setting
that signifies a highly inhabitable universe for people
concerned with the environment. Yet, the landscape that the
United States obsessed about during the 1970s
hauntingly resembled Vietnam, which was on television every
night for almost a decade during the "living room
war."( n9) The lush unconscious--like all of the telewester's
Wests--was a projection of a populace in considerable
denial and pain over the long-lasting effects from the Vietnam
War.
As the river is a symbolic setting in Francis Ford Coppola's war
epic Apocalypse Now (1979), the South Platte River of
northeast Colorado is the metaphorical river of the 1970s--and
the fast-flowing unconscious--in Centennial. The
trapper team of a French-Canadian, Pasquinel (Robert Conrad),
and a Scotsman, Alexander McKeag (Richard
Chamberlain), uses the South Platte River to shuttle between
wilderness and civilization in an effort to sustain a fur-
trading operation financed by a doctor and silversmith, Herman

Bockweiss (Raymond Burr), residing in St. Louis.
Several segments illustrate the nature of the extreme West in
Centennial. When Pasquinel first goes to St. Louis to
find a financier, he encounters Dr. Butler (Robert Walden), who
asks, "What's it like out there?" Pasquinel, who has
the head of a Pawnee arrow embedded in his back, replies in
Bunyanesque fashion how the cursed West can bring
harm to anyone:
Violent . . . storms like you have never seen . . . hail the size of
hen eggs . . . tornados that tear apart everything in
their path . . . snow squalls that kill everything that is
unprepared. And inbetween the storms . . . silent, so quiet you
are certain you are going mad.... It is a land fit for savages. And
you have seen what they are like. But I have seen
worse. I have seen much worse . . . if you survive the Indians
and the elements, there are the animals, wolves, that
run in whole packs.
But Butler responds, "You found a treasure, what they fought
for in France, what my people fought for in the
Colonies--freedom." Pasquinel also tells the physician, "I am a
simple man.... Without a profession, without an
education, I know only the woods."
Pasquinel and McKeag participate in the perilous freedom that

negotiating the "primeval blue" brings them as
scapegoats trapped between progress and primitivism,
collectivism and individualism, and healing and the Vietnam
War. The South Platte on which they travel, like the river in
Apocalypse Now, represents a never-ending stream of
conflict. Both rivers are cultural signs representative of a
population whose destinies are in flux--with constant
change that brings "powerful feelings of freedom, but, at the
same time, scary visions of chaos":
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Large numbers of Americans--regardless of social class,
location, or cultural life-style-increasingly recognize that their
institutions no longer work.... At the same time, however, they
are split in their responses.... Whether left or right,
traditional or modern, secular or religious, the one thing that
ties so many Americans together is their common
refuge in ambivalence.( n10)
In Centennial, the emphasis given the lifeways and religions of
Native Americans draws attention to subsurface

American ambivalence toward foreign lands and the allied topic
of women. In Centennial Pasquinel marries Lisa
(Sally Kellerman), the doctor's daughter. At the wedding
reception he is confronted by guests who question his
relationship with Indians.( n11) Pasquinel denies that he is a
civilizer of Indians, saying, "No one here can teach the
Indian anything that is important to him."
However, Pasquinel is torn between two worlds; in this scene he
dons a tuxedo--a trapping of civilization--while in his
heart he embraces the Native American ways of living. As
someone who uses the river to navigate his split
consciousness, he signifies 1970s society that was fractured by
the Vietnam War, divided over effects of rapid
change, and fragmented over social turmoil. By the end of the
1970s, Americans were filled with a sense of
helplessness and a lingering despair. Film analyst William
Palmer says the 1970s (the "Me Decade") "was not a
decade of optimism or progress or prosperity or hope." It was
one of "insecurity."( n12)
Repressed America especially surfaced in Pasquinel's dark
impulses. He kills treacherous Pawnees who stalk him and
does not object to Pawnee allies scalping riverboat pirates.
Trader, capitalist, riverman, cultural middleman, scalper,
and killer, Pasquinel epitomizes the scapegoat, who lives

between two worlds, never stopping long enough to cement
any permanency in his life. Perera further explains this stance:
To scapegoat-identified individuals, the wilderness is an image
expressing their existential experience of profound
alienation and exile.... They [Pasquinel and McKeag] live with
an omnipresent sense of danger and an awareness of
the shadow that others around them do not wish to see.( n13)
Places--not intimacy or relationships--guide the ambivalent
Pasquinel in his quest for personal identity. He abandons
Lisa and their daughter to live again with his first wife, the
Arapahoe Bending Reed and their two unruly sons in the
wilderness. Returning to this relationship brings him closer to
the fast-flowing unconscious and his aspirations.
Eventually, gold lures him back to the West because he "wants
to be more than Pasquinel, the trapper." At a
mountain man rendezvous, Pasquinel reunites with McKeag,
who removes the Pawnee arrowhead--a cultural symbol
of imbedded pain--from Pasquinel's back. After leaving the
rendezvous, McKeag and Pasquinel separate. Pasquinel
discovers gold, but at the same moment, Indians attack and kill
him just as McKeag arrives on the scene. Pasquinel
succumbs to one of the whims of the fast-flowing unconscious--
greed.

Pasquinel, McKeag, and the wilderness zookeeper Grizzly
Adams personify the "savior" half of the scapegoat complex
because they have interpersonal relationships, which are
indicative of relatedness, and possess moral codes. Perera
asserts that the savior aspect is a "potent, but hidden and
compensatory aspect" of the scapegoat complex.( n14) To
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Miller, the savior would represent opportunities that people
often fail to see as part of the "golden shadow."( n15)
Savior mountain men, then, possess some redeeming values and
bring a sense of wholeness to their world.
On the other hand, discernible in Centennial, The Macahans,
and How the West Was Won is the pariah aspect of the
scapegoat complex.( n16) Misogamistic, misogynistic, and

unalterably homicidal, the "pariah" is among the dregs of
humanity. They are criminal elements whom a saloonkeeper
refers to as "outlaws and renegades [who] own the
deed." In telewester sequences, their portrayals amount to "rites
of aversion and riddance" that are needed to
cleanse the nation of Shadow material in the hope of avoiding
"its dreaded pains and guilt."( n17) Pariahs appear in
another setting of the extreme West--the dry unconscious, a
foreign land stripped of vitality and humanity, and
empty of dense vegetation.
In Centennial, the pariah is mountain man Sam Purchas (Donald
Pleasence). Hired as a guide by a small troop of
emigrants heading West, Purchas--labeled "squaw killer" by the
overlanders--kills two Pawnee scouts because, he
says, they "ain't real people like you and me." He also tries to
rape overlander Levi Zendt's wife. A carrier of
diabolical energies, Purchas represents a demonic scapegoat
whose unbridled sexual impulses and uninhibited,
aggressive instinctuality have been defined negatively by
society, custom, and law.
The Macahans and the miniseries How the West Was Won
feature Zeb Macahan (James Arness)--"a roughcut
mountain man--untamed as the land he roams."( n18) Zeb
confronts two pariahs, Dutton (Gene Evans) in The

Macahans and Cully Madigan (Jack Elam) in How the West Was
Won. The shows' austere, spare, and harsh
environment constitutes an underworld where chaos greets
every traveler.
In The Macahans, Zeb and his friend Billy Joe rescue Dutton
from the Sioux, who are bent on torturing and killing
him for taking Indian scalps. After they take him to a military
post for trial, Dutton escapes and kills and scalps Billy
Joe. Soon thereafter, Zeb locates Dutton seated next to a
campfire in a forest clearing:
DUTTON: Wasn't too long ago you and I rode a lot of rivers
together. Kinda like to stay up here....
ZEB: What happened, Dutton, when you turned wolf?
DUTTON: World changed. No more beaver. Fur trade played
out. Rendezvous. Hadn't been a real rendezvous since
'45. Men like you and me, we had the world right by the throat,
and it would give us anything we wanted. Now it
says we gotta take on civilized. I can't do that.
Dutton grabs his rifle and starts walking away from Zeb, but
when he suddenly turns to shoot, Zeb shoots him with
his rifle, killing him where he stands.
In How the West Was Won, Cully is "more 'n' a friend" to Zeb
and is wanted by the U.S. Army for killing and scalping

Out of Her PlaceAnne Hutchinson and theDislocation of.docx

Out of Her PlaceAnne Hutchinson and theDislocation of.docx

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