Anne Hutchinson: Contribution as American Author

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      Anne Hutchinson was the first boldest American Woman writer who represented the open challenge for the Puritan oligarchy of the writers like, William Bradford and John Winthrop. She was a strong-willed being and highly eloquent. Bradford and Winthrop had to face the challenge for Anne Hutchinson-a woman whom Winthrop himself described as being ‘Of ready wit and bold spirit’. She always insisted that the good works were no signs of God’s blessings, nice the elect were the guaranteed salvation, she argued, The mediating role of the church between God and man and it became an old and outdated. This represented serious challenge to the power of the Puritan oligarchy which of course had Winthrop as its head. According to the Puritans, He committed to the way of interpreting their sermons to the others. For the opposition, she underwent a trial and banished as “leper” after a farcical trial in 1638. It could hardly be countenanced by them. So eventually they banished her. She was already a mother of fourteen children. At that time of banishment, she was pregnant. All the way, she walked with her children on foot to the Rhode Island. Winthrop, the leader of the Puritan oligarchy, argues that Hutchinson’s heresy was based on the misinterpretation of the Covenants of Grace.

      Along with Hutchinson, there were others like, Thomas Morton (1579-1642) and Roger Williams (1603-1683) who wrote about the Catholic beliefs that brought them into conflict with the Puritan establishment. In so doing, they measured the sheer diversity of opinion and vision among the English colonists, even in New England. Both Morton and Williams wrote about the personal beliefs that brought them into conflict with the Puritan establishment. In his book New English Caimon, he provides a secular version of his setting up the Mere-Mount, his arrest and subsequent banishment. It is opposite to the contents written by Bradford in his book Of Plymouth Plantation. Bradford, in his book, cajoles by saying that Morton as the “Lord of Misrule” and maintained “a School of Atheism. Williams, in his book, The Bloody Tenant of Persecution (1644) holds a dialogue between Truth and Peace; and therein, he pleaded for liberty of conscience as a natural right. He also contended that one could not intervene in the religious matters of other people; but, according to him, religious freedom does not mean ‘civil anarchy’. In his allegiance, he was more drawn towards the Native Americans. In his another book key to the Language of America, he tells that his book may unlock some of the rarities in the native language. Implicitly, the book, in some parts, stands as irony at work in great dealing of writing about the “noble savage”.

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