Content area
Full Text
The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder, and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards
AVA CHAMBERLAIN
New York: New York University Press, 2012 251 pp.
The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttletells the story of Jonathan Edwards's paternal grandmother, who left no written records of her own. Her name appears in a very few annals of colonial Connecticut, which record her birth in 1645, her marriage in 1667, the births of her children, and her hus- band's ultimately successful attempt to divorce her in 1691. (The date of her death is unrecorded.) In spite of this relative paucity of archival detail, Elizabeth Tuttle has recurred over three centuries as a figure in the lore focused on her famous grandson. Yet the absence of her own voice and story consistently reduced her to an old family scandal, a madwoman in the attic, "a straw man dressed in cap and petticoats" (2). In an ambitious attempt to counter both a long-standing mythology and a supremely mini- mal historical record, this book tries to flesh out the story of Elizabeth Tuttle's life as she might have lived it.
In order to reconstruct such a life in detail and significance, The Notori- ous Elizabeth Tuttle gathers its textures by moving backward and forward across four generations and several afterlives. The first chapters recur to Elizabeth's father's generation, narrating the circumstances that could have led him to leave the English Midlands and relocate to colonial New Haven. It also tells the parallel (though not congruent) story of her future hus- band, Richard Edwards, whose father, William, moved from east London to Hartford, Connecticut, where Richard was born and married a woman somewhat above his status. The middle chapters detail scandalous episodes in the lives of Elizabeth's siblings -when in 1676 her younger brother Benjamin murdered their sister Sarah in a fit of rage, and when in 1691 her youngest sister Mercy, in an uncanny repetition of their brother's crime, murdered...