IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN a Restoration comedy.1 In the spring of 1663 John Rolfe, a Newbury fisherman, went off to Nantucket, leaving behind a comely and “merily disposed” young wife named Mary. Being “a verie loving husband,” Rolfe arranged for Mary to “live Cherfully as he thought and want for nothing” in his absence. Betty Webster, a single woman in the neighborhood, agreed to stay with Mary. Betty’s stepfather, Goodman John Emery, promised to be a father to both. But Rolfe’s careful arrangements proved a snare. No sooner had he sailed out of Newbury harbor than two strangers from old England sailed in. Henry Greenland and John Cordin, physicians and gentlemen, came to lodge at the Emery house.
Mary confided to Betty Webster that “Mr Cording was as pretty a Carriadg man as Ever shee saw in hir life.” But Greenland proved more interesting still. He was uninhibited by the pious manners of the Newbury folk. At supper, before Goodman Emery could half finish prayer, “Mr Grenland put on his hatt and spread his napkin and stored the sampe and said Com Landlord light supper short grace.” Mary was both enticed and troubled by his attentions. When he pulled her toward him by her apron strings, she resisted at first, only giving way, as she said, “to save my apron.” One minute she rebuked him for acting “an uncivell part.” The next she was laughing and eating samp with him out of one dish and with one spoon.
Late one night Betty was in bed with Mary, who was nursing her baby, when Henry Greenland knocked on the window. Frightened, the women made no answer. “Bettye, Bettye,” Greenland called. “Will you let me stand here and starve with the cold?” Betty answered that they were already in bed, that they would not let him in, that they were afraid of him. When he continued to plead, protesting that he “would doe them noe hirt, but desired to smoke a pipe of tobacco,” Betty let him in. Still in bed, Mary told her to rake up the fire to give Mr. Greenland some light. While the maid bent over the hearth, Greenland pulled off his clothes and climbed into bed with Mary, who fainted.
“Sir,” cried Betty, “what have you done? You have put the woman into a fitt.”
“The Devell has such fitts,” said Greenland, scrambling out of bed. “It is nothing but a mad fitt.”
“What offence have I have given that you should speke such words?” Mary exclaimed. Seeing that his conquest was conscious, Greenland jumped back into bed. “Lord help me,” she cried.
At that moment Henry Lessenby, a neighbor’s servant, just happened to walk by. He had earlier observed Greenland’s attentions to Goody Rolfe. Hearing the cry, he ran to the Rolfe door and knocked loudly. “Lye still,” whispered Greenland, “for now there are two witnesses, we shall be tried for our lives.” But Lessenby was not to be discouraged by silence. He climbed through the window, stumbled into the room in the dark, and felt his way to the bedside. In the dim light from the fireplace he discerned a gentleman’s clothes on a box by the bed. Reaching for the pillow, he felt a beard. Just as he suspected, it was Greenland.
Lessenby might have raised a commotion, but he chose instead to act the part of the stage servant who, loving a secret, is drawn through vanity or cupidity into the intrigues of his betters. As he later reported it, “The woman and I went adore [outdoors] to Consider what was best to be done so we thought becas he was a stranger and a great man it was not best to make an up Rore but to let him go way in a private maner.”
Here the plot calls for deeper entanglements, for pacts between the gentleman and the maid, half-kept promises whispered on the doorstep in the dark, and finally the return of the cuckolded husband. But this little drama was not enacted on the London stage but in a Massachusetts village. In this case the young wife was rescued by an old wife, the husband was avenged, and the denouement was played in the county court. Goody Rolfe had a pious mother and an observant sister. At meeting on Sunday, Sarah Bishop saw that Mary had been crying and alerted their mother.
Goody Bishop visited the Rolfe house the next morning. As she approached, she met a boy rushing out with a glass—to get liquor for Dr. Greenland, he said. For two hours she sat in the house, watching and observing and waiting for Greenland to leave. Finally she had a chance to question Mary, who seemed to fear telling her mother all that had happened. Mary admitted that the gentleman had “with many Arguments inticed her to the act of uncleanness,” but she insisted that “God had hitherto helped her resist him.”
“Will you venture to lay under these temptations & concealed wickedness?” exclaimed the mother. “You may Provoak God to Leave you & then you will come under Great Blame.”
“I know not what to doe,” Mary sighed. “Hee is in Creditt in the Towne, some take him to be godly & say hee hath grace in his face, he have an honest loke, he have such a carrige that he deceive many: It is saide the Governer sent him a letter Counting it a mercy such an Instrument was in the Country, and what shall such a pore young woman as I doe in such a case, my husband being not at home?”
Goody Bishop was troubled. “These things are not to bee kept private,” she insisted. “Goodman Emery beeing grand Jury-man must present them.” But when confronted, Goodman Emery proved unwilling to act the part of moral guardian. (Had he seen too much “merriness” on Mary’s part?) He promised to keep closer watch on Greenland, to lock up the hard drink, and to see that the Doctor stayed home when half drunk, but he felt matters were best kept quiet for the moment. He could see no harm done.
Goody Bishop was not to be soothed by promises. On her way home she encountered Goody Emery and explained to her all that had happened. The wife proved more sympathetic than the husband. Together the two women returned to the Rolfe house, pressed Mary and Betty further, and concluded that Greenland’s actions had been “more gross” than they had first believed.
“I dare not keep such things as these private upon my owne head,” said Mary’s mother as the two women parted.
“Doe wisely,” answered her friend.
That night, having asked for God’s direction, Goody Bishop revealed all that she knew to a “wise man” in the town, asking for his advice. He directed her to the magistrates. Henry Greenland was tried by jury at his own request, perhaps counting on his good reputation in the town, but was convicted of attempted adultery and fined the whopping sum of £30. The citizens of Newbury supported the pious mother against the dazzling stranger. John Rolfe returned from Nantucket avenged.
To understand this village morality play, we must determine the historical meaning of the characters. That they do not represent the classical stage triangle—husband, wife, and lover—is in itself significant. What can we make of a plot which casts a mother as moral guardian, a dashing Englishman as assailant, and a pretty young bride as victim?
One obvious interpretation would make Puritanism the real protagonist.2 Surely Goody Bishop represents the community surveillance characteristic of the rule of the saints. As Mary Rolfe’s mother, she upheld a morality thundered from the pulpit and enforced by the court. As for Henry Greenland, the libertine Englishman, he was a Thomas Morton (or Tom Jones) caught in a society he did not understand, incriminated as much by his attitude as by his acts. How many of his reported boasts—that it didn’t matter that he had a wife in England, that Mary need not worry about consequences, that he could afford two wives—were in jest? He insisted that he meant no harm, but in Newbury his carefree words condemned him. In this view, Mary Rolfe hardly matters. The real conflict was between two cultures—Puritan Massachusetts and Merry England.
Yet a close examination of the case suggests that the most serious division was not between the town and the stranger but within the community itself—and perhaps in the mind of Mary Rolfe. Dragged into court by outraged neighbors, John Emery angrily reported that before the fateful night someone had put “fig dust” (tobacco shavings) and pebbles in Greenland’s bed. Had Mary Rolfe surreptitiously invited the pretty gentleman to rap on her window and ask for a light? Had Betty Webster or someone else in Emery’s family been playing tricks on them both?3
Since the 1930s, discussion of sexual behavior in New England has focused on the relationship between religion and repression. Despite the efforts of Edmund S. Morgan to dispel the stereotype of the “sad and sour” saints, historians continue to ask, “How ‘Puritan’ were the Puritans?”4 Michael Zuckerman insists they were hostile to the flesh.5 Philip Greven says that some of them were.6 For our purposes, the question is badly put. To understand the historical drama in Newbury, one must give less attention to ideology than to gender, taking the characters pretty much at their surface value. Goody Bishop was an old woman. Mary Rolfe was a young woman. Henry Greenland was an aggressive male. The really crucial issues are exposed in the action itself, with all its confusion and apparent inconsistency. Mary Rolfe was obviously attracted to Greenland. She was also afraid of him. She openly flirted with him. At the same time, she was troubled by her own feelings and by the potential consequences of her behavior.
Her dilemma was created by the coexistence in one rural village of a hierarchal social order (by no means limited to New England), a conservative religious tradition (not exclusively Puritan), and sex-linked patterns of sociability (rooted in English folkways). All three elements determined her behavior. Accustomed to deference—to her mother, to her husband, to the selectman next door—she was easily dazzled by the genteel appearance and apparent good name of Greenland. What right had she to question his behavior? Though taught to fear God, she had not yet acquired the kind of confidence in her own sense of right which propelled her mother to challenge both a popular gentleman and a respected neighbor by bringing the case to court. Finally, in her easy compliance with Greenland’s initial advances, Mary Rolfe was responding to a lifetime of instruction in femininity. Massachusetts girls, like ordinary Englishwomen everywhere, knew how to light pipes for strangers.
KEITH THOMAS HAS argued that the double standard in sexual relations is but one manifestation of a hierarchal system which included not just the subordination of one class to another but the subordination of female to male. Thus, from medieval times “the absolute property of the women’s chastity was vested not in the woman herself, but in her parents or her husband.”7 In these terms, Henry Greenland’s pursuit of Mary Rolfe was not just an attempted seduction, it was a trespass upon the “property rights” of John Rolfe, who in fact successfully sued Greenland for damages soon after his return from sea. (There was no question, of course, of Mistress Greenland suing anyone, even though she too arrived in New England not long after the case came to court.8)
Throughout the Christian world the property concept of chastity was challenged by a religious concept which upheld the value of marital purity and premarital fidelity for both sexes. Potentially at least, this opened the way for a more egalitarian legal system, though in Massachusetts reliance on the Mosaic Jaw created some strange contradictions. Following Leviticus 20, the Laws and Liberties of 1648 established the death penalty for adultery, yet defined the crime according to the marital status of the woman, effectively reinforcing the old notion of a man’s property rights in his wife.9 A married man who engaged in sexual relations with an unmarried partner risked only a fine or a whipping for fornication. A married woman who did the same risked death. The inequity could work the other way, of course. A single man who engaged in sexual relations with a married partner risked death; a single woman who did the same risked only a fine or a whipping—and pregnancy!
In practice, adultery was such a heinous crime in the Bay Colony that convictions were rare.10 Married folk of either sex were usually punished more or less equally for the lesser crimes of “attempted adultery,” “uncleanness,” or “lascivious carriage.” In prosecuting fornicators, Massachusetts courts moved even closer to a single standard. A woman’s accusation, especially if witnessed by the midwives at the time of delivery, was sufficient to convict a man, all his protests notwithstanding.11
The legal record is quite clear—in sexual matters, as in most other areas of life, New England women were subject to men, though entitled to protection. The more difficult question is determining how all of this translated into gender roles, which of course were enacted not in court but in the intimate arena of ordinary life.
Sharing rooms, beds, benches, trenchers, and even spoons, ordinary New Englanders had little opportunity to develop the elaborate sense of personal space so essential to “polite” interaction. Chairs were rare. Bedrooms hardly existed. Although in some families the parents’ bedstead was curtained for warmth or privacy, it almost always occupied “public” space.12 In many dwellings, as in Mary Rolfe’s, the front door opened on a bed.
Sexual experience had not yet acquired the ceremonial sanctity of a separate setting. Even if the notion had suggested itself, there was little possibility of segregating sex in the larger sense from the daily round of life. Procreation was everywhere, in the barnyard as well as in the house. Since sleeping quarters were crowded and darkness provided the only privacy, many children must have gained their first awareness of copulation from half-muffled sounds and shapes in the night. For a wife there might be advantages to all this crowding. When Abigail Willey of Oyster River wanted to prevent her husband from “coming to her,” she planted her two youngest children in the middle of the bed, rather than pushing them to one side as usual. The night John Bickford slept with her mother, seven-year-old Judith Willey told a New Hampshire court, the bed “crakled” so she could not sleep.13 Goody Willey’s extramarital affair was deviant, but the context in which it occurred was not.
There were proprieties, of course. A respectable woman did not undress before her male servants, nor did she lie under the covers with a man not her husband, but she might sleep in the same room with either.14 She did not sing and drink with strangers in the tavern, though out of common hospitality she would certainly smoke at her own hearth or doorstep with any of her husband’s friends.15 She did not sit on her neighbor’s lap or kiss him in the barn, but with good conscience she could share his horse.16 Lynn folks were shocked when Goody Leonard stood laughing at the millpond where a group of servants were skinny-dipping, forcing the “more modest” of the men to put on their shirts in the water, letting them drop “by degrees” as they came out.17 But relatives at Ipswich as well as friends at the Isles of Shoals were just as surprised at the jealousy of William Row, who became angry if any man “saluted” his wife with a kiss, a custom which was apparently as acceptable in New England as in old.18 Even the sermon literature stressed the affability of the good wife, a quality expressed in the very word “consort.” From childhood, daughters were taught to please, to smile and fetch and carry, to stand on the table and sing.19 If for some women affability translated into accessibility, the distance was shorter than we might think.
Such evidence is easily misinterpreted, however. Twentieth-century readers, enjoying the “earthiness” of seventeenth-century court records, may mistake verbal openness for an easy and matter-of-fact attitude to the flesh. The opposite was often nearer the truth. In premodern societies sexual tensions are close to the surface and frequently vented in bawdy stories or in epithets hurled across a fence in anger. To impugn a person’s sexual integrity was a particularly potent form of slander in early New England, suggesting that the values enshrined in formal law were widely acknowledged but tenuously held.
How else can one explain the “presentation” in York County Court of Goody Mendum of Kittery, whose crime consisted of calling Mistress Alice Shapleigh “a pedlers Trull”? In a less close-knit society a wild accusation flung at the wife of a town official would hardly deserve the dignity of attention. In seventeenth-century Kittery it called for a forced retraction, not only in court but in church.20 Because this was a society which still depended primarily upon external rather than internal controls, many New Englanders responded not so much to guilt as to shame. The opinion of one’s neighbor was everything. As Goody Bishop expressed it, a body might as well take an axe and knock one of her cows on the head as to take away her daughter’s good name.21
Whore. Jade. Bawd. Strumpet. Trull. Such words came quickly to the tongues of village gossips. They meant everything and nothing. Certainly there were loose women in most country towns, women like the widow Sarah Stickney of Newbury, who had more than one illegitimate child and little reputation to lose. When Samuel Lowell rode by in a cart, she called, “A you roge, yonder is yor Child under the tree, goe take it up and see it,” an action that did not prevent her from successfully suing for child support from John Atkinson, a married father of nine. When Goody Atkinson railed at Sarah and called her “an impudent baud,” she spat in her face.22 In their wider application, however, the epithets turned not on specific behavior but on an underlying ambiguity surrounding sexuality. This is partly explained in religious terms. For Calvinists, the old proverb “There but for the Grace of God go I” had a literal meaning.23 Because the potential for evil was innate, lust might break out anywhere. But for many New Englanders, religion was but a thin overlay on a traditional fatalism, an inability to see oneself as in any sense a shaper of events. Such an attitude affected both sexes, of course, but in the traditional world fatalism and femininity were powerfully linked.24
The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. New England ministers did not berate women for the sin of Eve. In fact, in referring to the transgression in Eden they almost always spoke of the “sin of Adam,” perhaps unconsciously assuming male pre-eminence even in evil but at least sometimes intentionally countering the ancient misogyny.25 Eve’s sin was in one sense hardly a sin at all. Her transgression was an inevitable consequence of her nature—weak, unstable, susceptible to suggestion. She was “beguiled.”26
There was no question of one sex being more or less sinful than another. Outside of family and community government, males were carnal, sensual, and devilish. Puritan writers were amazed at the sexual restraint of Indian men, who never raped their captives. They could only attribute this amazing preservation of New England women to divine intervention.27 No, both sexes were culpable. But they were different. Men required restraint, especially when drunk. Women needed protection, not because they were innocent but because they were not. They were physically and sexually vulnerable, easily aroused, quick to succumb to flattery. Widows were considered especially susceptible to temptation. Their humble—and frequent—confessions in court and church reinforced folk wisdom: “He who wooeth a widow must go stiff before.”28
As might be expected, the vocabulary describing the sexual misbehavior of women was richer and more direct than that for men. Even the epithets cuckold and pimp turn on female rather than on male promiscuity. The opposite of whore was rogue, a term which mixed sexual and more general meanings.29 For a woman, sexual reputation was everything; for a man, it was part of a larger pattern of responsibility. A whore bestowed her favors indiscriminately, denying any man exclusive right to her body. A rogue tricked or forced a woman into submission with no regard for consequences. The words mirror traditional gender relationships. A woman gave; a man took. Because the female role was in its nature more ambiguous, less clearly active without quite being passive, a woman could lose her reputation simply in being attacked. “Whore! baud!” Patrick Morrin shouted at Mary Water when she ran from the house after an attempted assault.30
So Mary Rolfe smiled when Henry Greenland pulled on her apron strings. She ate out of his dish and laughed at his jokes, and perhaps enjoyed the game of conquest and resistance. When the plot grew more serious, she found herself confused. To call for help would be an admission of complicity. Who would believe her story against a man in credit in the town, especially when everyone knew she was young, pretty, and “often merrily disposed”? Her only recourse was to petition the court and confess herself “a poor young woman and in an aflicted Condition.” The same vulnerability which led to her trouble might save her from it.
If the role of Mary Rolfe was clear, so was that of Goody Bishop. She had earned her position through experience. In New England, ultimate authority to police sexual behavior was given to men—to justices, juries, ministers, and elders. In reality, primary responsibility for controlling female sexuality was in the hands of women. The formal role of midwives in fornication cases grew out of a larger and more pervasive system of informal justice. Just as Goody Bishop instinctively turned to Goody Emery in determining her course in response to Henry Greenland, so older women throughout New England acted as advisers, counselors, and ultimately as judges, though sometimes their visible role was intentionally muted.
In September of 1664 Elizabeth Perkins, Sr., and Agnes Ewens of Topsfield sent word to the Essex County Court that “they did not desire to testify but would depose if called.” They explained that
what had brought them forth was the busy prattling of some other, probably the one whom they had taken along with them to advise a young woman, whose simple and foolish carriages and words, having heard of, they desired to advise better.… They desired to be excused from testifying because what was told them was a private confession which they had never to that day divulged, and the woman had never offended since that time but had lived gravely and soberly.31
In this case the two women assumed a kind of “professional immunity” from the inquisitions of the county officials. Their consciousness of their own importance is striking, but the role they had played was not unusual.
A hierarchal social structure which made female chastity the property of men, a religious tradition which demanded morality from both sexes, and patterns of feminine behavior rooted in traditional fatalism and in the rhythms of village life—against this backdrop men and women in northern New England played out an old drama of conquest and seduction.
Gorgeana, Province of Maine, 1650. For more than a year Jane Bond had been troubled with “fat Robert,” who came to her house on at least four occasions when her husband was away “to the East.” The first time he “strived with her but hardly knew hur boddy fully.” Six months later he came again. When he tried to crawl through the window, she opened the door and let him in. “Robert Collins leave my company and medell not with me,” she told him. “If not I will make you a shame to all New England.” But though she tried, she “could not save hir selfe.” Whether this had anything to do with alcohol is not clear, but when he came the third time at twilight and sat on her doorstep, she would not open the door. “I would have given you some drinke,” he said. She answered, “I know not what is in it.” About midnight on a May evening as she was making a cake to leave with her children, who would be alone the next day, Collins again came to the door, this time pushing the door almost off the hinges. He asked her to move her youngest child out of the bed and lie with him. She refused. He forced her.
“Put your finger but a littell in the fier you will not be able to Induer it,” she told him, “but I must suffer eternally.” Then she added, “You burn in your lust.”
The next day Jane went to her neighbor Mary Tappe. Her heart was heavy, she was troubled to be so much alone, she said, and she was afraid to live so. Someone had been at her house the night before.
“It might be cattle,” the neighbor answered.
“Noe,” Jane said, “it was not cattell.” Who then had been there? Jane simply repeated over and over again, “Alase I am but one, I dare not reveale it.”
“Why did you not cry out?” Mary asked.
“Alase,” she answered. “I may Cry tell my hart ake.”32
Salem, Essex County, 1672. Elizabeth Goodell was careful to tell the justice of the peace that the language and actions of her brother-in-law John Smith “were such as most tend to the way of his calling in dealing with Cattel and not so like unlawful dalliances tending to uncleanness.” No attempted rape—just continual and persistent annoyance. The record is never more specific, but the unbrotherly kisses, the meaningful looks, and the well-placed pats are easy to picture. These “assaults” and “affronts” had been going on for years, ever since her son Zachary was a little boy. Smith approached Elizabeth at her sister’s house when he was there digging a well, at Giles Corey’s house while Goody Corey was bringing in the linen from the bushes, and once at her own house on the Lord’s day while her husband was at meeting. He became so insistent as they rode together to his wife’s lying-in that she was forced to jump from the horse. Working in a swamp near her dwelling, he called for fire. When she refused to stay and smoke with him, he chased her up a hill.
Why didn’t she complain? A male neighbor testified that he had come into the room after one alleged assault. If there was really a problem, she should have said something then. All he could see was “laughing and smoking.”
Female neighbors said that Elizabeth was afraid. She told them that Smith was “an ugly rogue” and she was frightened that if she told, he would kill her or her children or “hurt her creatures.” Even if he were tried and convicted, she explained, “what a sad life should I have with my Husbands relations.”33
Kittery, York County, 1710. When John White, the tinker, came to Mary Jenkins’ house asking to borrow a canoe, she was glad to see him. Her husband, Rowland, was frequently at sea and she was afraid of Indians, who had taken captives in her own neighborhood. She told White that if he would stay the night, she would go with him to Mr. Kelley’s house in town to get the canoe. He stayed. She sent to a neighbor’s house for a pipe and tobacco, and the two of them sat up most of the night talking and smoking, “on two chairs,” she said. Near morning he threw her on the bed and said he would “have his will of her,” keeping his face so close to hers she could not scream. “I was in Souch a fit,” she told the court, “that I do not know all hee dead or how Long hee Stayed.”
About daylight Mary’s mother knocked on the door. White answered. “Your Daughter would not Lett me come away,” he explained. “She was afraid of the Indians.”
Goody Muggeridge worried. Mary had given birth to an illegitimate child before she married Jenkins as his third wife. She urged her daughter not to tell her husband of White’s visit. Knowing he “did not allow of any man to Be att their house affter it was Night,” she was afraid he would “Go Neare to Kill her.” Mary decided upon half-truth. When Jenkins returned, she told him that “The Tinker Lay att there house the Night before,” but that Goody Pope also lay there, that White had refused the women’s offer to give up the bed, that he had slept on chairs, and that he was “an honest and civil man.” At a neighbor’s house next day Jenkins casually engaged Sarah Pope in conversation and found she had not slept with his wife. When Goody Muggeridge came to the house later, she found her daughter sitting under a tree. She refused to go inside, saying “she wished her selfe Dead her husband had soe Kikt her and hurt her.”34
DESPITE DIFFERENCES in circumstances, in place, and in time, the three stories illustrate common themes. In each case a woman advertently or inadvertently encouraged her aggressor. In each case she found herself unable to complain. Her fears were complex. There was the danger of beating but also the larger threat of disrupting the hierarchy of relations in which she found herself. Behind that was a deep sense of complicity in the crime.
The stories are grim in the telling, but they do not end here. When Jane Bond broke her silence, she found she was not alone. The record does not explain exactly how Robert Collins came to trial. In the formal record male witnesses predominate, as was frequently the case, but the triggering event seems to have been that first tentative confession to Mary Tappe. When questioned, six-year-old Henry Bond revealed that “fat Robert” was the man who had been with his mother. Once word was out, Henry Norton, who lived in the house next door, remembered hearing a strange sound in the night. Robert Knight thought that he had heard one too. Goody Knight was sure she had seen someone go by the house early in the morning; she thought it was Robert Collins. Pleading “not guilty,” Collins was tried by jury, acquitted of the “forcement,” which might have brought death, but sentenced to the extremely harsh punishment of “forty stripes but one,” the maximum corporal punishment ever administered in New England. In addition he was fined £10, half to go “to the cuntrey,” half to Nicholas Bond.35
The role of neighborhood women is even more prominent in the case of Elizabeth Goodell. Bit by bit, she too began to talk—to her sister, to her husband, and to trusted friends. Their advice was mixed. Some suggested a private hearing, some a formal complaint. Elizabeth went “down to towne to acquaint Major Hathorne with it but was discouraged by others and being foolish & not acquainted with the law, did forbear.” While she hesitated, the scandal quickly and inexorably “spread abroad.” Within a few weeks the magistrates were summoning her. Thus, without filing a formal complaint and perhaps without quite consciously meaning to do so, she had brought John Smith to court. She told the magistrates she was sorry about the gossip. She repented of speaking “foolishly vainly or slitely of such matters” and acknowledged it “a dishonor to the Sect of women,” but she could not “wrong the truth.” She hoped her brother-in-law would not “suffer more than he hath deserved.” The court sentenced him to be whipped on the next lecture day.36
The outcome of the third case was quite different. Although Mary Jenkins finally convinced her husband that John White had forced her, she could not convince the court. Her first mistake seems to have been in violating the trust of the female community by lying about the presence of Sarah Pope on the fateful night. When the story became known, Mary Rice and Sarah Keene went to Mary and pressed her for details. They later reported the entire conversation to the magistrates. In examination Goody Keene had been as relentless as any state prosecutor. She focused upon the “fit” which Mary had described in her complaint. “Were you sencable when the Tinker was in the vary act?” she asked.
“No,” Mary replied. But she insisted that “By what he said and the Circumstances affter ward” she knew that he had raped her.
Keene admonished her for attempting to take away a man’s life without better proof than her thoughts. “Did hee Ly with you after you where in your fitte?”
Mary said, “No.”
“Then … he Never Lay with you atole,” Keene answered. “For you said hee did not Ly with you before your fitte Nor after your fitte and in your fitte you whare not Sencebel hee laid with you.” Mary Jenkins and John White were both sentenced to fifteen stripes at the post.37
In each case the role which the neighbor women performed was traditional. In New England, however, this role had been reinforced and strengthened by the involvement of the county courts. This is why the position of young women like Mary Rolfe cannot be understood without examining the position of older women like Mary Bishop. Older women derived their authority both from their established position in the community and from gender. They not only understood enticement, they also knew its consequences—as no magistrate could. Proved in life, they were capable of recognizing and of judging sin. Experience—not innocence—was the supreme female virtue in rural New England.
This chapter began by considering history as drama. It is perhaps appropriate that it should end by examining fiction as history. The eighteenth century has often been considered a pivotal point in the transformation from external to internal controls of sexual behavior. By the end of the seventeenth century in New England the authority of the county courts to enforce morality had already begun to slip. Fines replaced whippings, and convictions failed to keep pace with the growth in deviant behavior. Although churches continued to demand confession for fornication from members, their jurisdiction was narrow. At mid-century, family government was also under strain as parents lost the ability to control the timing of marriage for their children. The last years of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth saw the creation of a system of repression based upon internalized guilt.38
At the heart of the so-called “Victorian morality” which replaced the old “Puritan repression” was an altered concept of female sexuality. Man continued carnal, sensual, and devilish, but Woman assumed an active role as purifier of society. Female chastity became the touchstone of public virtue, purity the radiant light of the home. One of the most potent emblems of this transformation, as many historians have recognized, was Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela. Richardson took an old theme, the seduction of a maidservant by her master, and created an epic of middle-class morality. By resisting the increasingly frantic advances of Mr. B, the lovely Pamela won his admiration as well as his love.
Critics continue to argue over the meaning of the story. Was Pamela really as innocent and as artless as she appeared, or was she simply a shrewd bargainer who knew how to play her virtue as the ultimate trump, refusing to become a mistress until she had become a bride? Esther Burr (the daughter of Jonathan Edwards) didn’t like the novel. She couldn’t understand how a virtuous woman could marry her oppressor, a man who had not only kidnapped her but attempted to rape her as well.39 Most modern readers probably share Burr’s perception. In the eighteenth century, however, Pamela was wildly popular, especially among readers of an emerging middle class. It represented problems and solutions which they could understand and share. Keith Thomas may be right in suggesting that one consequence of the elevation of female chastity was the “total desexualization of women,” and in arguing that Richardson exemplified this phenomenon in his creation of an idealized heroine who was “delicate, insipid, fainting at the first sexual advance, and utterly devoid of feeling towards her admirer until the marriage knot was tied.”40
Such an analysis reads backward toward Pamela from the nineteenth century. The novel takes on a different significance, however, if we read forward from the seventeenth-century folk world which we have described. Significantly, the three main characters in the long Lincolnshire section of Richardson’s novel, like the three main characters in the Rolfe-Greenland story, are a young woman, an old woman, and an aggressive male.
The climactic struggle of the novel is between Pamela and her “rough-natur’d Governess,” Mrs. Jewkes, the old housekeeper who has been paid to watch over Pamela after she has been kidnapped and eventually to deliver her up to the lecherous master. As Robert Erickson has shown, Richardson drew upon the rich lore of English midwifery and witchcraft in creating the character of Mrs. Jewkes, playing upon the role of the old wife as a woman who mediated at the mysteries of creation and of death, and who, in traditional society as well as in literature, was capable of expanding “into a figure of great autonomous power.”41 In that final fateful scene in Lincolnshire, Mrs. Jewkes and Mr. B both stand over a prostrate Pamela, whose virtuous fainting has ironically vanquished them both.
When this scene is set against the real-life dramas from northern New England, its meaning becomes startlingly clear. Pamela’s triumph was not in retaining her virtue but in seizing responsibility for her own behavior. Facing the tempter, she was not beguiled. If chastity was property in Richardson’s novel, it belonged to the heroine, not to her father or to any other man. Using her own assets, Pamela won the title of wife. But victory over the sensual advances of Mr. B was achieved only by overcoming the governance of Mrs. Jewkes, who had failed in her role as protector. It is as though Richardson were saying that the lore of the old wife was insufficient to protect a young woman in the changing world of the eighteenth century. Bereft of parents and of guardians, she must acquire a new world of values, breaking out of the ancient community of women into the sequestered paradise of an idealized marriage.