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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Havens And Covens: Pregnancy, Witchcraft, And Female Power In Cotton Mather’S “Retired Elizabeth”, Brittney A. Hatchett
Havens And Covens: Pregnancy, Witchcraft, And Female Power In Cotton Mather’S “Retired Elizabeth”, Brittney A. Hatchett
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
Over the decades, scholars have been holding two adjacent conversations about witchcraft and gender in Cotton Mather’s works that surprisingly have not been put in dialogue. On the one hand, they have examined Mather’s witchcraft ideology and motivations for involving himself in the Salem witch trials. On the other hand, scholars have discussed how Mather seeks to exert control over women spiritually and physically. However, no one has yet explored how these conversations might converge. I suggest that we can see how Mather intertwines discourses of witchcraft and gender in the section titled “Retired Elizabeth” in The Angel of Bethesda. …
Reexamining Virtue In Arthur Mervyn, Clarissa Mcintire
Reexamining Virtue In Arthur Mervyn, Clarissa Mcintire
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
Though Arthur Mervyn focuses primarily on the deadly 1793 invasion of the yellow fever into Philadelphia and humanitarian responses to it, the novel’s juxtaposition of contemporary societal attitudes towards fever victims with those towards unchaste or fallen women underlines striking similarities between the two. In this article I claim that, when applied to unchaste women, the novel’s argument for improved treatment of diseased and infected persons also establishes the unreliability of sexual purity as a standard of respectability due to the potential for a woman’s virtue to be taken from her. Therefore, because Arthur’s society judges the respectability of individuals …