Singing and Survival: Empowering the Female Voice in Harriet Prescott Spofford's "Circumstance"

Abstract

While Young Goodman Brown maintains his faith, he faces a life of insular misery after his experience, estranged from family and community. The protagonist of “Circumstance” emerges from the woods with little concern for her spiritual salvation, embracing her family who has survived the fate of their small settlement that has been destroyed by Indians. The difference in the tenor of the ending is reflective of the different intentions of the stories and the difference between the male and female visions of the dark night and its consequences.

“Circumstance” is a story of the strong female pioneer who challenges the literary tradition of the silent and acquiescent women of the more sentimental and male-authored literature of the Nineteenth Century. After altruistically nursing a neighbor, the protagonist of “Circumstance” must make her way home passing through the woods. She is visited by an omen, a winding shroud-like sheet that warns her about entering the woods; however, she does not shrink away, having no choice but to return home to her domestic duties and the loving relationships she shares with her husband and child. The heroine of “Circumstance” is pragmatic and “believes not in hallucinations” (269). She knows her mind, is rational and resourceful, is capable of acting on her own and, most importantly, has a voice. Rather than the silent women, Spofford gives us a woman who finds power through her voice. Here, voice is not used to seduce or betray man, as is often traditionally found in literature. Rather, voice has the power to save both the heroine of the tale and later her family.

Much of the criticism of Spofford’s “Circumstance” (1860) considers the story within the captivity tradition. For instance, Judith Fetterley recognizes the captivity story in “Circumstance,” and Jacob Frechette and Jon Adams (2) trace this element to Spofford’s recollection of her great grandmother being pinned by a panther for a night in the woods (2). But, as Robert Coleman remarks, the captivity story is primarily a genre of a previous century (18). Fetterley (262) and Dalke (74, 77) agree that the piece is metaphorically about the trapped women writing or creating—an erroneous comment considering the protagonist does not write, as does the protagonist of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” or create any original art, as does Lily in To the Lighthouse. Lisa Logan (124) and Anne Dalke (80) contend that the story deals with the breaching of domestic spaces, connecting it with other women’s literature of the time. According to an archetypal Judeo-Christian approach, the story can be interpreted as one of spiritual reawakening. Spofford’s “Circumstance” resembles Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” published in 1835. Twenty-five years after this now-canonical story about a young man’s dark night of the soul appeared, Spofford’s story appeared as a female revision: there are many structural similarities, though most striking are the differences in reaction and resolution. A dark night of the soul story is about a protagonist who strays from the path of faith, has a dream or experience that rekindles faith, and then returns to the world and community reinvested with faith. Both Hawthorne’s and Spofford’s protagonists must enter the woods alone at night—what Dalke calls “a surreal world that is about the internal [psyche or character] rather than the external real world” (81)—though for different reasons. Both meet a satanic character, mention the Indian Devil as a forest danger who endangers life and soul, and have their relationships to their spouses redefined by the experience, as well as their relationships to the community. While Young Goodman Brown maintains his faith, he faces a life of insular misery after his experience, estranged from family and community. The protagonist of “Circumstance” emerges from the woods with little concern for her spiritual salvation, embracing her family who has survived the fate of their small settlement that has been destroyed by Indians. The difference in the tenor of the ending is reflective of the different intentions of the stories and the difference between the male and female visions of the dark night and its consequences. Many critics do indeed choose to read “Circumstance” as a spiritual awakening. However, to read the protagonist’s calling on her Methodist faith and making peace with God as the source of her salvation is to misread the story. As her works of this time attest, Spofford was not strongly invested in her Methodist, faith (xxii): “[Spofford] was not a particularly devout or fervent Christian during this part of her life” (219, n.2). The heroine clearly does not want to die, and while she would accept eternal life, she would prefer it not be at this moment. She is elated when her husband finally appears: she readily and gladly shifts her “eyes, so lately riveted on heaven [to] seeing all life-long bliss possible” (277) back to her spouse, child, and the earth below. It is clear which she would and does choose. Spofford seems to be uncomfortable with solely spiritual resolutions. In “Circumstance,” Spofford refuses to abandon the significance of the mortal world, particularly the bonds between husband and wife and mother and child, insisting that these are “sacred” (277) to the end.

In Spofford’s story, the heroine has no choice but to endure her adventure, falling victim to a massive devilish figure of incredible strength that “seized and borne [her] aloft” (269). She fears for her mortal life. Her captor is described as Indian, devil, and panther, and her capture is made all the more terrifying by the descriptive language suggestive of rape: the beast lies on her and “licks” her, and “she feels “his flaming balls” (272) against her body. Such a violation, in many cultures, including contemporary America, has been treated as tainting and sullying the victim, who is sometimes even blamed for inviting the violence, especially in earlier centuries. Rape is a violation of spirit as well as flesh. Fetterley argues that this rape-like scene is symbolic of the harsh circumstances of the woman artist in an oppressive masculine culture: the panther’s aggression is metaphorically equated with male violence, as is the damage the husband is capable of inflicting by his gun. It might be wise to distinguish between male violence directed toward women and that used to protect women. Such a reading tries hard to make the heroine symbolize the artist, although she never identifies with a female writer or artist and instead sings the songs of others.

Instead of focusing on a male figure, Spofford’s story is centered on the captive young woman, who, after having her flesh torn and seeing her own blood, finds her voice. What keeps her alive through the whole night is not faith, for her songs turn to God only as she runs out of secular material and the night wears on. What is emphasized as pervading the whole of the night, and saving her, is the act of singing. She hears the sweet sounds of nature and “did not think at this instant to call upon God” (270) but “came by reason”(270) upon a memory of how “music charmed wild beasts” (270). She proceeds to sing man-made music “from people from age to age” (273), beginning with a cradle song or lullaby, a song appropriate for a mother in her domestic sphere. She is reminded of her baby and her husband. Her next songs still evoke memories of the domestic abode, songs that her husband played on the fiddle, forsaking the wild sea songs and national airs and “wild war-tunes and drifted into the half-gay, half-melancholy Rosin of the Bow” (271). Her songs are accompanied by vivid visual memories of the hearth and her bonds to her husband and child. Her songs eventually move beyond the domestic sphere including far off lands and seas, but those that comfort her are those of home.

When her songs reach beyond the domestic sphere, she recounts experiences that transcend both space and time: “weeping wailing tunes, that sob among the people from age to age, and overflow with otherwise unexpressed sadness,—all rude, mournful ballads, —old tearful strains, that Shakespeare heard the vagrants sing, and the rise and fall like the wind and tide,—sailor songs” (272). Most often written and sung by men, this material is not a simple record of domestic experience but a record of social and ancestral memories, marking the fact that women can be the receptacles of the same knowledge of heritage and history as men. While memories of hearth, family, and domesticity sustain her—elements rarely found and valued in literature by intellectuals and scholars before the later half of the Twentieth Century—the protagonist also proves and uses her knowledge of the male tradition of song.

Spofford’s story is a distinctively female experience defining not only how a woman might deal differently than a man when confronted by a deadly attacker or mortal force but also reassessing the strengths of a woman faced by crisis, as both an individual and member of a family. Here, we have the endangered body of a woman, flesh and blood bared to the reader. Alisa Clapp observes in Elizabeth Gaskell’s English novels that music of the Nineteenth Century “relied on live performance . . . and the consequent exhibition of the human body—especially women’s —was complicated” (115) by the watching and listening audience. In “Circumstance,” the audience’s response, the backing off of the panther, is actually the heroine’s salvation. Cixous would claim “saved only by voice, “this is woman la[id] bare,” “inscrib[ing] what she’s saying [as] all of her passes into her voice” (881). Her voice is the only thing maintaining her fragile frame when “she s[ings] for her life to an Indian Devil” (271).

In “Circumstance,” the female voice is distinctive. First, consider the tonality: the protagonist’s success is only possible because she soothes and distracts her captor. In this rape-like scene, the female victim likely does not possess the low-toned bass of a man—a voice that is perceived to be authoritative and challenging. Rather, she likely possesses the higher, lighter lilt of the female voice, which pleases and pacifies the beast. Her singing is not an act of female creativity, as Dalke and Fetterley claim, because she is singing mostly the songs and verses by men; however, by singing and using them, she appropriates their power. If one were to try and compare this singing to writing, it would make more sense to say the protagonist is like the woman who reads aloud. She does not create, only Spofford creates.

In early American literature, woman’s voice is often absent or elusive. Women’s singing in public was prohibited in the Eighteenth Century, and it was still something of an issue in Spofford’s lifetime. Public speaking was disapproved of, and what Spofford does, according to Logan, “by shifting the heroine’s singing from home to wilderness [is] suggest that a woman’s voice might be heard in other spaces than the home” (120). Folk songs and traditional hymns were most commonly sung in rural communities and by women as well as men throughout the century (Clapp 121). During the second half of the Nineteenth Century, a few women were beginning to write hymns (Rothenbusch 178). By the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Karen Petersen observes, “suffragist music . . . [stood] as the historical precedent for women-identified music” (205). While the protagonist in Spofford’s story is not in a public performance hall, her singing is clearly for an audience outside the home. The heroine’s decision to sing is therefore a profound choice. The performance is strictly feminine as is the ingenuity and composure she shows in reasoning that, under the circumstances, singing is her only available method for preserving her life.

The heroine in “Circumstance” is not the composer of the melodies or lyrics; they are identified as being authored by men. Thus, the text draws attention to the woman’s voice as instrument and how it can serve women differently than men. While written by men, when appropriated and sung by women, “the musical sounds of a performance of folk songs and hymns,” Clapp asserts, “provide spiritual comfort” (116) and “emotional comfort . . . in times of conflict and change” (122). Looked at linguistically, the medium is marked: singing keeps the beast at bay while speaking will not. The tonality and pitch of a woman’s voice are higher, and the panther does not fear or feel challenged by it. Rather, it responds at times like a baby, lulled and soothed by her song. The medium and tonality are most important because the panther has no understanding of the words the woman is singing. Her audience is indeed atypical, and how she uses her voice—her music—is also distinctly different than her husband’s playing of his fiddle. His instrument is used for entertainment; hers buys her both time and her life.

Spofford’s motives are not those that would be chosen by a man. She is using compliance and distraction, even acquiescence, to her advantage. Joan Radner and Susan Lanser suggest that the heroine’s singing takes the beast’s mind off her, his intended victim. This young woman subverts power norms (15–16). The very aspects of womanhood attacked in the Nineteenth Century as making women weak—compliance and patience, as well as ones usually overlooked, fortitude and endurance, or mistakenly attributed to men alone, reason and composure—are shown to be the sources of female strength. The protagonist’s rational choice not to resist but to appease the panther as her voice “gr[ows] under her control and subject to her modulation” (270–71) allows her, not him, to emerge as the victor. Margaret Fuller, according to Annette Kolodny, would praise this as a form of female “self-reliance or self-dependence . . . in which a woman uses her own ‘independence’ of mind to ‘search their own experience and intuitions (W vi)’ to accomplish her survival” (“Inventing” 376). One does not doubt that a man would have been mauled to death within the hour.

The only words sung aloud are a verse about Lady Margaret followed by verses of hymns. As noted above, none is authored by the protagonist. The words of the previous songs are not uttered for us, existing in silence; instead, the nature of her voice is foregrounded. The words would not alter her tenuous situation in any way. More to her credit, she escapes the accusation of using her voice to tempt or seduce as daughters of Eve are often accused of doing, like sirens and mermaids who lure men to their deaths, or even like the seemingly innocent maiden trying to attract a husband. The words recorded as sung by the heroine begin with a verse from the romance of Lady Margaret. While the verse is clearly about Margaret’s death, those familiar with the ballad would also know it that is about how she was called by the dead lover for whom she grieves, to die on his grave, so they can be reunited. In context, it is a song about a reunion of lovers in death. Similarly, the protagonist, facing death, longs for reunion with her loved ones.

Recalling that she too is close to death, she turns to traditional hymns. The hymns that have been sung by women also recall personal memories and relationships, “hymns with which her mother had lulled her, which the class-leader pitched in the chimney corners” (273). They affirm her relationship with nature as well “high and clear through the frore fair night, the level moonbeams splintering in the wood” (273). Amidst the memory of her communion, she considers “the scent of delicious perfume . . . looking through the windows where the sky soared blue” (274), and she experiences a “divine rapture” (276) that is not simply spiritual but complemented by a sensory, earthly experience evoked by the very presence of the forest surrounding her. Now the first psalm is sung, as “neither prayer or petition” (273). Spofford clearly tells us “she had no comfort or consolation, such as had sustained the Christian martyrs. . . . [S]he was not dying for her faith” (275). Her songs have moved from the expanses of the earth to rise and include heaven and the divine, as if she now has an all-inclusive vision that is fused with the present moment and surrounding nature itself: “What whisper of dawn now rustled through the wilderness” (275). That rustle is caused by the movements of her husband and reminds us that the hoped for reunion is her preferred resolution.

Throughout the heroine’s songs, constant reminders of the present are given by references to nature: “the scare glint of stars in the shadowy roof of branches, these sacred anthems rose—rose as a hope from despair, as some snowy spray of flower-bells from the blackest mould” (273). Later, she remarks, “how gently all the winter-wrapt things bent toward her then! Into what relation with her had they grown! How the common dependence was the spell of their intimacy! How at one with nature she had become!“ (274). Spofford’s story illustrates both “the oppression of women and the despoliation of the natural environment” (49) and “women’s spiritual attunement to [and harmony with] nature” (50) that Ian Marshal finds in ecofeminist writing. The spirituality the protagonist experiences partakes of both the earth and the divine: “as the broad rays here and there broke through the dense cover of shade and lay in rivers of lustre on crystal sheathing and frozen fretting of the trunk and limb and on the great spaces of refraction, the build-up visibly that house, the shining city” (275). While making peace with God and readying herself for death, she never abandons her connection to nature, to humanity, and to the world itself. She neither offers up her life nor declares that she desires to leave her mortal body. In essence, through her voice, her instrument, the heroine reclaims the female body as spiritual, life-affirming, and bound to nature and mankind.

The continued references to the heroine’s past and nature delimits the religious ecstasy so that we see her as a woman who will accept her death, if she must, but she does not will it. Faith in harmony with nature indeed sustains her but only until her husband appears. Spofford makes mortal life, with all its ties to nature, hearth, and humanity, as valuable to her protagonist as eternity. Eternal life does have its place but only after mortal life has been lived. Her concentration on God and eternal life comes only when death seems imminent and family absent. Once her husband and baby arrive, she immediately turns her attention from God back to her family. When she is aware they are near, “the grave . . . lost its sting, she was snatched back again into the arms of earthly hope” (277). Both man and woman remain composed, and their ability to do so, to be patient and wait, affords a positive outcome.

The husband has two instruments at his command: the bow, which produced music in peaceful times in the sanctity of the home and appropriately only used there, and the gun, which provides both food and protection for his family. The woman has an instrument, too: her voice, which has protected her in her solitude and vulnerability. In addition to carrying the gun, the instrument of death necessary to destroy any enemy and rescue his wife, he carries life—his baby boy. Rarely have we seen the portrayal of a nurturing man who has tended to his baby’s needs and who has carried a child with him into the forest rather than leaving the baby with a neighbor. This is a man who also shows emotion. Spofford describes him as “half in shame” (276), wrought by his love and fear for his wife and not by any kind of cowardice. Such a portrayal, Fetterley argues, might invite criticism that he is an effeminate man (265). However, this is not a portrait of the quintessential male hero of male-written literature but man re-envisioned by a female author as a husband and father first and foremost. By having him carry both baby and gun, Spofford suggests that a man can have a nurturing, loving side that coexists and tempers his formidable, aggressive, masculine side. This point is further highlighted by making what should be an easy masculine act, killing a predator, problematic. The husband does not have a straight shot and has to worry about killing his wife. In addition, he must suppress his anger and fear while watching the metaphoric Indian monster, lying on his wife, as if about to ravish her. He stays composed. He does not experience the rage of a man whose woman may be violated by another and rush to end the situation, whether or not it costs her life, in order to spare both their reputations. Here reputation, often so important in society and literature, matters far less than his love for her and his desire to save her. In the frontier context of the story, survival takes precedence over reputation. This man breaks with the stereotypes of men in nineteenth-century literature, for he is both nurturer and protector, patient and composed, embodying both female and masculine strengths.

As the beast awakens and stretches, he sees the man, and seizing his prey, springs forth. The husband shoots, hitting his intended target. In most dark night stories, the defeated demon disappears, is punished, or dies while the protagonist triumphs. Here the demon becomes a savior, cushioning the heroine’s falling body. Spofford deliberately chooses to say absolutely nothing about God’s guiding the shot or mercifully allowing the beast to cushion her fall. The “eternal descent” from the bough with “fairy frosting” (277) is only to the ground below. Divine intervention is underplayed.

What Spofford chooses to call “sacred” (278), too sacred for the reader to watch vicariously, has nothing to do with God. What is sacred here is the reunion of husband and wife with their child. Whereas those of Spofford’s Methodist denomination considered marriage a civil union and not a sacrament in the way of communion or baptism, Spofford considers the marriage union sacred. The heroine’s spiritual awakening occurs in the forest, further minimizing the Christian aspects of the story in favor of the sacredness of family. Spofford chooses not to have the family stop to offer a prayer of thanks to God for her miraculous survival and rescue. There are no signs of a spiritual transformation in the manner detailed by Fetterley (267). Rather, the scene plays out more in the manner Dalke describes: the heroine “find[s] the first sources of her poetry in family experience, [she] is redeemed from danger by the same source and returned to family again” (81). However, I argue her singing should not be called poetry. Spofford privileges the family, the mortal, as “sacred”—an awkward word in this case because it is clearly not a reference to the relationship between God and man but rather to the relationship between man and woman. Again, Spofford shows the limits and failures of language. Its very awkwardness makes us aware of the semantic inadequacy of language—its inability to express what matters to a woman or to capture what she wishes to convey. Spofford acknowledges that some events, some acts, are so precious that they should not be tainted by mere words.

Emerging from the forest, the family is unprepared for what they find: the Indians have wiped out their small settlement. Only their absence from home and the heroine’s ability to keep the panther at bay until her husband rescues her saves their small family from the same fate. Although for those living on the edges of civilization the death of innocents is a fact of life, it seems odd that the surviving family does not stop to offer a prayer or eulogy for their dead neighbors. Once more, this story is distinctive in that, rather than affirming the Christian faith of the fallen pioneers and affirming that their souls will ascend to heaven, the story remains earthbound following the survivors who will carry on. For Spofford, fragile mortal lives and human bonds take precedence over the eternal life believed to come eventually to all Christians. In addition, instead of aligning civilization with safety and wilderness with danger, as is traditional of American literature, Spofford reverses the norms. In “Circumstance,” the settlement is destroyed and “life [is found] in the forest” (278). While usually pictured as untamed and deadly, the forest offers “beneficence”(278) to the protagonist and her family. Mortality and nature, which can be both harsh and comforting, stand in the foreground while God and the immortality He offers fade into the background. This challenge to traditional values is coupled with a departure from the masculine short-story tradition of nineteenth-century American fiction. Spofford gives readers a heroic female protagonist, a male both nurturing and protective, and a savage demon who represents both death and salvation.

In the final line of the story, Spofford furthers a revisionist, female perspective by appropriating the last lines of Paradise Lost for herself as author. The story ends with a variation on the lines: “The World was all before them, where to chose / Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide” (Paradise Lost XII 646–7). Most critics call this an echo of Milton and do not consider the subtle differences. In Milton, “thir place of rest” is an appositive, the place they chose in the “World” to live out their lives. Providence, divine will, is the subject of a compound sentence that tells us that He will always accompany them, guiding the course of their lives. The difference is significant and subtle in “Circumstance.” First, poetry becomes prose: “For the rest, — the world was all before them, where to choose” (277). The main clause is repeated verbatim. However, Spofford feminizes, alters, and thereby claims male authoritative language for herself, covertly coding the lines as appropriated by women to tell stories of their experiences. In “Circumstance,” “for the rest” becomes a prepositional phrase, where “rest” refers to the remainder of their lives or story rather than a place and “where to choose” to live their lives is entirely their choice. At the same time, the divine hand of Providence, God, is clearly and deliberately omitted. The once immortal Adam and Eve, now exiled and damned with their descendants to mortality, await the coming of the self-sacrificing savior while the couple in “Circumstance” embrace the mortality they already knowingly possess, their lives affirmed by the child they already have. Mortal life matters. “Circumstance” closes not with a couple thrown out of paradise, consoled by divine insight into the future of the coming Christ but with a family unit, preserved through the survival of the heroine and having gained a heightened appreciation of their life together. Their life in “Circumstance” will likely be fraught with the same dangers as before. For women in America, Kolodny asserts, “there is no rediscovering Eden nor any fortuitously found paradise” (“To Render” 39), and the notion of making a home in America a paradise belonged to men alone, making women the more pragmatic of the two. Nor does the family in “Circumstance” find or earn a “state of paradise” in the way Dalke suggests (80). For this family, fragile mortality and the joys and harsh realities that come with it is their inheritance.

The pioneering woman of “Circumstance” not only faces western frontiers, she opens up frontiers that challenge the socially and traditionally codified image of woman. She proves her fortitude, enduring the night and keeping the panther at bay. In thereby discovering and affirming the power of her female voice, she reclaims her body as her own. The dark night of “Circumstance” has passed, fear has been overcome through song, and death has been stayed. Once beyond the forest, it is not God’s compassion but familial bonds that are affirmed. While we are alive, we are as sacred as angels.

Colleen Donnelly

University of Colorado at Denver

Colleen Donnelly

Colleen Donnelly is an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Denver specializing in medieval literature and the representation of women and women’s voices in medieval and more recent literature. She recently published The Marys of Medieval Drama: The Middle English Digby and N-Town In Translation (2016) and is currently expanding her research to work on issues of mental disorders of women and children in modern, and particularly Irish, literature.

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