Spirited into America: Narratives of possession, 1650–1850
Abstract
My dissertation illustrates how British colonial writers and later, early national writers, created a colonial discourse of spirit possession. Stories of spirit possession in early America have traditionally been read along side of witchcraft narratives and wonder tales. This work has emphasized the particular social conditions that allowed for such fantastical narratives. Unlike witches however, the possessed did not voluntarily enter into evil, thus making possession narratives more complex and more connected to community than earlier scholarship has implied. Untangling them from other wonder tales, my reading of spirit possession narratives reveals that colonial writers used the figure of the spirit-possessed to define their own communities even as they altered the longstanding English discourse of spirit possession. Early American writers mark their colonial situation and further highlight the transatlantic spiritual dangers of possession in particular through the New World tropes of wilderness, Indians, and Africans. I read widely and draw on texts established in historical and literary criticism as well as unexplored archival texts. Inspired by scholars in cultural religion theology and feminist studies, I illustrate the centrality of "becoming colonial" to the discursive shape of spirit possession in the New World. And then I illustrate how burgeoning psychologists adopted particular colonial tropes of possession as they sought to define mania. The first two chapters, which take up the Quaker "invasion" of the 1650s and the aftermath of the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692, illustrate that while colonial authors recapitulated many of the Old World bodily tropes, they also started to draw upon the stereotypes of a wild New World besieged with devils, devil-possessed Indians, and demonic slavery. In the third chapter, I assert that early scientific depictions of madness and mania in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century texts drew on the discourse of spirit possession. In chapter four, I illustrate how the discursive approach of the project as a whole allows us to make better sense of late-eighteen and early-nineteenth century Shaker "gift songs."
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Bross, Purdue University.
Subject Area
American literature
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