Anna Trapnel's Window on the Word: The Domestic Sphere of Public Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Nonconformity

• Published in: Bunyan studies Vol. 7; no. 7; p. 49
• Main Author: Gillespie, Katherine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Bunyan Studies 01.01.1997; Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); English literature
• ISSN: 0954-0970

Stallybrass acknowledges that 'We are not of course addressing here ... women's resistances ... both collectively and individually, but the production of normative "Woman" within the discursive practices of the ruling elite'.4 When he does address resistance, he turns to the fictional Emilia from Shakespeare's Othello who, Stallybrass argues, 'subverts the enclosed body'.5 But Stallybrass' s use of a character from Shakespeare as an example of resistance overshadows his own invocation of the collective and individual acts of resistance that real women consciously mounted against the figure of the normative woman. [...]while his analysis is helpful for apprehending how dominant or elite cultural forms sought hegemony, it is less helpful for historicizing differences between ideologies of female conduct and the actual, oftentimes non-normative social and political practices through which non-fictional women represented their lives and their selves in print. For the Puritan household consisted of a male and female who were structurally identical, positive and negative versions of the same attributes.48 While Armstrong demonstrates that even within so-called patriarchal structures - or perhaps because of them - women were able to generate publicly significant political power from their positions as domestic women, she accepts the 'complementary' model of 'Puritan' gender identities and argues that all seventeenth-century women did, as she puts it, 'talk with few' and 'boast of silence'. [...]she does not acknowledge the mid-seventeenth-century presence of female sectarians such as Trapnel whose (what we might call) 'radical domestic' writings and practices challenge Armstrong's chronological dismissal of Puritanism's ability to define the household as an 'independent and self-generated source of power' . Rather, the subtitle's reference to 'scattered' seems to refer more to the fact that this sections consists of a 'mixture' of messages addressed from Trapnel to God and from Trapnel to the public head of state, Oliver Cromwell.54 Finally, the quote cited above comes at a moment when Trapnel is defending preaching and independent worship by those that others had dubbed 'mechanics' from attacks by Cromwell and an implied 'Lord' of a state-mandated religion. [...]her address is not merely 'singular and personal' but is directed at authences who are defined collectively by class and political affiliation. [...]Trapnel's words represent a critique of the more 'bourgeois' champions of Presbyterian Puritanism and other forms of centralized or 'uniform' religion.