Choosing Death
The Making of Martyrs in Early American Criminal Narratives
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9596162 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Mary Kathleen Eyring, Mary Eyring (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 91 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 691-719 |
| Publication date | 2019-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-9831 • E-ISSN: 1527-2117 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00029831-7917272 |
| OpenAlex | W2994394749 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 21 |
In 1701 Puritan minister John Rogers published the criminal narrative of Esther Rodgers, who had been convicted of infanticide and executed. Esther Rodgers appears in Rogers’s Death the Certain Wages of Sin not as a depraved criminal or even a repentant sinner but as a courageous Christian martyr. Much of the productive recent scholarship on Rodgers studies the way her criminal status operated in the public sphere generally or print culture specifically, but the literary construction of her legal criminal status reveals a larger negotiation over marginalized individuals’ ability to consent and dissent in early New England and an unexpected orientation toward choice in early American literature. Rogers and his contemporaries engaged the conventions of the early modern criminal narrative to organize the chaos of maternal tragedy according to fictions of choice and the conventions of ancient and antique scripture to recast execution as a prelude to salvation. But in the ill-fitting spaces between the criminal’s story and the forms to which these authors suited it, readers could see a character who was something more—or less—than murderer or martyr: a sympathetic victim granted the ability to consent only in order to certify her legal culpability, religious conversion, and complicity in the macabre spectacle of her own public execution
Art · Complicity · Confession (law) · Criminal law · Criminology · Dissent · Innocence · Literature · Martyr · Narrative · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Spectacle · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Mormonism, Religion, and History
A midwife's tale
The Oracle and the Curse
Damned Women
Rites of Execution
Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace
Deborah’s Ghost
Entertaining Satan
Entertaining Satan. Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England
Under Household Government
Law and Liberty in Early New England
The Diary of Samuel Sewall
The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638
Negotiating Theology and Gynecology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |