Early American Literature

Awarded to: Rebecca Rosen

Honorable Mention: Camille Owens

From the magnificent volume of essays published in volume 57 of Early American Literature, the 2022 Richard Beale Davis Prize is awarded to Rebecca Rosen for "'The Voice of the Innocent Blood Cries Aloud from the Ground to Heaven': Speaking and Discovering Infanticide in the Early American Northeast." The prize committee gives the distinction of Honorable Mention to Camille Owens for "'I, Young in Life': Phillis Wheatley and the Invention of American Childhood." These essays are exemplary for their originality as well as their archival heft and acumen—most of all, for bringing to the fore underexamined topics now certain to have their due in the field owing to the remarkable groundwork of these investigations.

In her riveting study "'The Voice of the Innocent Blood Cries Aloud from the Ground to Heaven,'" Rebecca Rosen examines cruentation (the belief that a corpse bleeds in proximity of the murderer) as a form of testimony in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century infanticide literature. Known as "the blood cry," cruentation functions as a postmortem method of investigation joining the corporeal expressions of blood and speech. A sign from God, the blood cry becomes incontrovertible legal evidence that privileges the voices of deceased infants over and above the voices of accused mothers "in a move anticipating fetal personhood claims of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries" (86). In effect, Rosen argues, infanticide sermons and their cultural narratives raise the status of dead infants to public speakers and citizens while relegating women suspects to nonentities. Among its many strengths, Rosen's essay draws attention to the dead body as authoritative material evidence after the Salem Witch Trials, earning cruentation a place in Puritan judicial inquiry tantamount to the [End Page 7] spectral evidence in the trials. Rosen's attentiveness to the archive of infanticide sermons and other execution literature, as well as her commitment to reading her sources against the louder words of the famous Mathers, demonstrate the force of the blood cry in stifling condemned women or else permitting their speech only in acts of self-condemnation. Above all, the essay skillfully recontextualizes and historicizes Christian investments in voice as a metonymy for subjectivity, tracing how those investments in future children have long come at the cost of care for the adults, usually women, responsible for bearing them. For the committee, this work could not have been more powerful or timely.

Camille Owens's article, "'I, Young in Life," centers Phillis Wheatley in the social and political invention of early American childhood. Owens traces Wheatley's formative role in shifting cultural perceptions of white children from the unsentimental figures of previous centuries to cherished beings imbued with innocence and dependent on maternal comfort and care. Perhaps the most compelling feature of the essay is its exposure of "childhood's foundational role in the Anglo-American racial order" and its illumination of Wheatley's "strategic awareness of childhood's emergent power" (729). Through personal and poetic prowess, Owens argues, Wheatley challenges the racial hierarchy by commanding the racial politics of childhood, including her claim to the Lockean blank slate, a privileged state of impressionability granted to white children but denied to Black children and to be nurtured by the education further denied to Black children. Ultimately, Owens shows the political stakes of Wheatley's efforts to revalue the Black child and to frame Black children and Black families as "key sites in the struggle between tyranny and freedom" (744). Even as the white supremacist politics of sentimentality could not countenance her subversive sentimental depictions of Black children, these depictions would become an important legacy for African American literature. In recovering Wheatley's interventions in the culture of American childhood, Owens's essay makes a fresh and dynamic contribution to both Wheatley studies and childhood studies. [End Page 8]