Early American Literature

The prize committee of the Modern Language Association Forum on Early American Literature is pleased to name Stacey Dearing's "Remembering Dorothy May Bradford's Death and Reframing 'Depression' in Colonial New England" as the winner of the 2021 Richard Beale Davis Prize for the best essay published in volume 56 of Early American Literature (56, no. 1, 2021, pp. 75–104). Though the committee read many distinguished essays, Dearing's work stood out for its innovative research and capacious rethinking of the possibilities of colonial scholarship.

Dearing's essay revisits the death of Dorothy May Bradford, who drowned in Cape Cod after falling off the Mayflower in the winter of 1620. Though Bradford's death often appears as a footnote to the founding myth of Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock, Dearing shows that Bradford's death and the centuries of scholarship about it have always been an important historiographic object in their own right, forming an image of the prototypical Pilgrim woman as hobbled by mental anguish. Dearing carefully tracks the transmission of Bradford's story across archives of scholarship and cinema, showing how depressed women have stood as counterparts to settler men, and suggesting that our understanding of Puritan history has been shaped as much by narratives about women's mental health as by stories of colonial founding. The essay is a marvelous reconstruction of how historiographic traditions are shaped by deep-seated assumptions about gender and mental health. Yet it also offers a new possibility for understanding the colonial past, a "psychohistory" of mental health and its implication in historical knowledge (75). Ultimately, Dearing suggests scholarship should abandon speculative attempts "to solve the mystery of Bradford's death" and instead embrace a sense of historical actors as figures whose emotional complexity resists attempts at explanation. Such an [End Page 319] approach, Dearing urges, might help us see that "depression and suicide are a central part of the national origin story and deserve critical attention" (94). We believe that this essay, in addition to advancing knowledge about the social history of early Anglo-American settlement, participates in and enhances historiography more broadly by modeling more sensitive, self-conscious attunement toward the opacities and lacunae of other peoples' interiority, both in the past and beyond it. [End Page 320]