Out of Her Place: Anne Hutchinson and the Dislocation of Power in New World Politics

A seventeenth-century woman used her voice freely and forcefully and, as a result, was destroyed by political maneuvering. However, before 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 contemporary 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 acclaim, they lose their sexual appeal and, consequently, a large degree of their social influence. The interviewer asks how Jelinek can espouse "such dated stereotypes when [she herself is] acclaimed for [her] intellect." The author responds: "A woman is permitted to chat or babble, but speaking in public with authority is still the greatest 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 quintessential transgressor in colonial America: unwilling 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 defined 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 controversy 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 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 response to Hutchinson can be attributed to the particular strains on the community: dramatically removed from the comforts of the familiar, striving 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 became tantamount to political success in the New World project, but one must consider another facet of the dynamic that could lead to Hutchinson's demise. …