Anne Hutchinson and the Consequences of Misreading :: Anne Hutchinson Essays

Anne Hutchinson and the Consequences of Misreading METHODOLOGY Literary historicism, in the context of this discussion, describes the explanation of literary or historical texts with respect to the cultural and temporal conditions in which they were produced. This means that the text not only catalogues how individuals respond to their particular circumstances, unless also chronicles the movements and inclinations of an age as expressed in the empty talkal devices of its literature. Evaluating the effort of Anne Hutchinson within such a theoretical framework means speculating on the genesis of her theological beliefs with recourse to prevailing theories of gender, class, and interpretation. Because texts are self-contained spheres of discourse, nuanced interpretations of them place be undertaken with greater assiduity than in the case of individuals whose private experiences bear on largely concealed from the interpreters knowledge. A historical analysis of Anne Hutchinson h erself is hence, in the comprise discussion, secondary to the analysis of how she comes across in textual discourse as a palimpsest of seventeenth century gender controversy. According to David M. Carr, the history of biblical interpretation indicates that religious texts are popular candidates for reinterpretation and, as such, are spaces wherein the in-person identity of the reader frequently inscribes itself at length It is the reader and his or her interpretive community who attempts to impose a unified reading on a given text. Such readers whitethorn, and probably will, claim that the unity they watch over is in the text, but this claim is only a mask for the originative process actually going on. Even the most carefully designed text can not be unified only the readers move taming of it. Therefore, an attempt to use seams and shifts in the biblical text to discover its textual precursors is based on a fundamentally faulty assumption that bingle might recover a stage o f the text that lacked such fractures (Carr 23-4).I do not so much wish to emphasize the deconstructive rhetoric of this approach as the fact that religious texts lend themselves to creative readings that bulge out in the readers experiences or historical circumstances. In other words, the history of biblical interpretation exemplifies the texts role as a space where emerging ideologies may be refigured and incorporated into an authoritative cultural tradition. One may regain of the genesis of such readings in terms of Harold Blooms notion of literary season as an act of creative correction, the difference in this case organism that Anne Hutchinsons creative act involves reviewing the Scripture itself and deriving spiritual knowledge from a finite textual canon (Bloom 30).