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A frontier woman in early Maine journeys home after tending a sick friend. Setting out at dusk, she is surprised by the ghostly vision of a "winding-sheet" and the sound of a "spectral and melancholy voice." Three times the voice cries, "The Lord have mercy on the people!" Hurrying on, the woman refuses to let herself be unsettled by such "fancies and chimeras." But as she enters the woods, she is attacked by an animal called the "Indian Devil" and is swept as its prey into a tree. Through the long night, the heroine prolongs her life by singing to the beast. At dawn she is rescued by her husband. Just as the husband has rescued his wife, however, so has the wife saved her husband and child. In their absence, their small settlement has been attacked by the Indians and, like Adam and Eve at the end of Paradise Lost, the members of this small family find themselves standing alone, facing an unknown future. "The world was all before them, where to choose" (Spofford, "Circumstance" 85, 96).(1)
This, briefly summarized, is the plot of Harriet Prescott Spofford's remarkable story, "Circumstance." First published in 1860 in the Atlantic Monthly, the story was based on an event in the life of Spofford's maternal great-grandmother, Mrs. Josiah Hitchings. Only the bare outlines of Mrs. Hitchings's experience appear to have been preserved by family legend.(2) But Spofford had no difficulty re-creating the experience with the kind of lavish poetic detail that had become the trademark of her early fiction. She not only describes the harrowing circumstances that beset the heroine throughout her night in the forest, but also dramatizes the inner workings of the heroine's consciousness as she moves from her fear of a horrific death by mutilation to a transforming experience of evangelical Christian renewal. Spofford specifically grounds the heroine's religious experience in the singing of Methodist hymns, based largely on scripture, and in the memory of her first communion.(3) She also reveals that the ecstatic spiritual experience that results from the singing of hymns has prepared her heroine for a future that, as the passage from Milton suggests, is as limitless as the uncharted wilderness.
Although "Circumstance" depicts the liberating potential of Christian revelation for a...