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Harriet Prescott Spofford's short story "Circumstance" narrates the experiences of a colonial woman walking home through the Maine countryside. She is seized by a panther, borne into the boughs of a tree, and held by the panther through the whole of one long wintry night. First published in May 1860 in the Atlantic Monthly and later reprinted in a collection entitled The Amber Gods and Other Stories (1863), the story confirmed Spofford's status as a rising young literary talent. From Emily Dickinson to William Dean Howells, many of her contemporaries commented on the fascination the story provoked in its readers (Bendixen x). Today, the story is widely anthologized and thus likely to meet with new generations of readers, but it has not yet received the sustained critical attention its complexity warrants.(1)
Perhaps most striking to a modern reader is the imagery of sexual violation that pervades the story. The panther seems quite obviously to be a predator of the sexual variety familiar to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century parlance.(2) While remaining attuned to the imagery of sexual violation, I will argue in this essay that interpreting the encounter between woman and panther as primarily a sexual one obscures the recognition of another significant set of images within the story, those suggesting that the woman figuratively gives birth while in the tree. By uncovering the childbirth imagery in "Circumstance," I explore how Spofford complicates feminist understandings of the ways the history of motherhood -- and more particularly, childbirth -- has been suppressed in the literature of preceding centuries. Patricia Yaegar, for example, notes that "the invisibility of gestation and parturition" is "one of our most persistent cultural myths" (263). She calls for feminist scholars "to make these repressed stories visible" by conducting "an investigation into the literary tropes and principles that preside over the presentation, deformation, or concealment of the story of reproduction in literary and cultural texts," resulting in an increased attentiveness to what she calls "a poetics of birth" (263, 264, 269). Critics who have focused on the rape imagery in "Circumstance" to the exclusion of the birth imagery have perhaps unwittingly participated in what Yaeger has identified as a "copulative politics" beyond which she believes critics must move (263).
By turning my attention...