From Whore to More...

The female subject of the Panther Narrative is indeed almost a different creature than the beaten-down, stigmatized woman that Cotton Mother preaches about. Though, in terms of relative historical length, these texts are not far apart, their context and views of women represented in these narratives are worlds away.

The first texts we focused on, principally the witchcraft tales of Cotton Mather, were filled with high-flow, religious language that was developed to be a moral guidance to the reader. However, it is evident through the outrageousness of the literature (the descriptions of specters torturing victims and girls coughing up crooked pins) that these were also meant to be entertaining. The primary goal however, is to preach to an audience about the evils that are befalling the New World because they did not live up to God’s expectations. The fantastical elements only serve to draw the reader in and to show the otherworldliness and evil of the “witches.” These texts are didactic tools and warning reproaches of fallen women. The female characters are given little characterization rather than evil, supernatural deeds from the witches and fits of hysteria from the afflicted girls. The audience of these texts was, at least in Mather’s view, God-fearing folk who wanted a reason of why these “evils” were befalling Puritan America. He suspected that these people believed heavily in the devil and the wrath of God.

The next set of historical works that we read were categorized into infanticide narratives and confessionals. Women in these texts were much more colorful than in Mather’s prose, however they too are confined to a limited set of feelings. Though these texts were supposedly written by women, the complex stylistic devices and lack of emotionality about difficult subject matter seems to suggest otherwise. The infanticide narratives track the journeys of wicked women who killed their young babies, and were subsequently punished for it. These women often trace their evil ways to childhood and their seemingly simple faults there, and then in a slippery-slope manner they fall into a life of debauchery. Another pattern in these texts is that the women all come to a realization before their execution and come to repent their fallen ways. The same is true for the confessional narratives, where the women have committed other crimes as wickedness other than (though perhaps including) infanticide. The language after their conversion is very high-flown and overdone. Their newfound religiousness is sudden and overwhelming, suggesting that the authors believed that there were only two types of women: saints and whores. It can be concluded that these texts were also largely didactic in nature, especially the early ones. This can be seen through the intense religious overtones and the fact that the women always see the error of their ways and are redeemed through a gracious God. However, these texts are also sensationalist and were written to “shed further light” on infamous female criminals of the time. They were capitalizing on the notoriety of women convicts and writing fake confessionals for them. These male authors were writing for an audience that wanted the dirt on female convicts, and the authors took advantage of this hunger to feed them stories about repentance and the glory of God.

These earlier texts are marking a small progression in their view of the audience and of the fallen woman. However, the Panther Narrative, also known as “A Very Surprising Narrative of a Young Woman, Who was Found in a Cave” is a drastic change from the previous texts we have read. For the first time we are seeing a woman who has some degree of agency in her own life. Though the female pirate’s tale was imbued with a sense of more dynamic femininity, this tale represents a more drastic demarcation. The young woman leaves society and ends up alone in a cave for nine years. She must protect her chastity against a savage giant (who in later editions turns into an Indian, then a Negro), and kills him and chops him up in defense. This female is also quite wild is some ways, disobeying the will of her harsh father and living in the wilderness. But she is not a total change from the previous accounts of women: the audience still gets the feeling that she is a fallen woman. She does not follow societal norms exactly, but she does not fully depart from them. The young woman is remarkably well kept for living in the wilderness, and she tries to domesticate her cave. In the end, she returns to civilization. The lesson the audience receives is somewhat ambiguous, but it can be interpreted that society triumphs in reclaiming the wild woman. Her return must be acknowledged, because even though the text is by no means condemning of her, she is not allowed to continue to dwell outside the constraints of society. Even when she is in the wild she is domesticated and feminized. This is a narrative written to be fantastic and entertaining to an audience that was apprehensive about the effects of travelers moving westward. They were also an audience that craved sensational tales and entertainment. The audience is not quite ready for a fully independent, assertive and transgressive woman. This is evidenced through the ending of the Panther Narrative. But it is definitely a step in a more feminist direction. The fallen woman is no longer the object of such strict social stigmatization or religious reprobation as she was in the past.