Journeys to America

Prof. Harvey

ASHBRIDGE REVIEW QUESTIONS

1)  What are the psychological consequences of having an absent father (is there also, in this story, initially an absent Father?)?

2)  Do you think she has a manic-depressive state of mind?  Does her "dark night" of the soul sound like clinical depression? or does it just sound like marital/sexual dissatisfaction?

3)  In what ways does she seem like a "feminist" heroine?

4)  Consider these equations:

· father’s abandoning her and scorning her causes anger/guilt/desire for father

· Quaker religion = gets “Father’s” affection and submits to him = revolts from father/husband (who despise Quakers)

· relying on Quaker "inner voice" = turning inward & to a higher authority: both feminist independence and dependence

5)  In the above set of equations note how psychodynamic family stuff, psychological stuff (depression), sexual stuff, feminist stuff, religious stuff all interact.  One way of analyzing texts and one way of coming up with complex paper topics is to see how one category affects or is a solution for another: e.g., Rowlandson's crying/insomnia may come from psychological trauma, but she interprets it to herself as religious attentiveness (staying up late, thinking about God).  I tend to favor psychological interpretations (so I'm interested in Franklin's compulsiveness in the virtue chart), or the intersection of ideology and psychology (Franklin's grid is an expression of 18th-century fascination with instruments/mechanism and the desire to engineer the world, in this case, the soul/morality).