Feminizing a Colonial Epic: On Spofford’s “Priscilla”

Abstract

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858) puts in dactylic hexameters a Romantic legend of the wilderness on unrequited love among the pilgrims set in Plymouth in 1620. In 1894, Harriet Prescott Spofford parodically replied to that colonial legend with a new love triangle written from the point of view of a pioneer woman who rejected the enslavement of a marriage arranged by others. By shifting her focus from the celebration of the army leader Miles to the disempowered Priscilla who stubbornly claims her freedom in love, Spofford points to the private horrors of colonization in an exemplary feminist apologue filled with domestic sentiments which partakes of what Alide Cagidemetrio defines as a “usable past.”