When I was two stanzas into this poem, I was reminded of the events of the Salem Witch Trials, where women were hung and burned at the stake for accusations of being a witch. However, once I finished the poem, I had a completely different understanding of the message of it. It is a cry for justice, for help, for the barbaric torture women receive from men for “unladylike” actions: adultery. Even though the body from the bog was thousands of years old, the speaker of the poem could still make out exactly how she was punished. The speaker calls the body a “little adultress” (line 23), which to me speaks of her innocence. It was entirely possible that the girl knew nothing of the tribe’s unwritten law against adultery and became their “poor scapegoat” (28). She was simply punished to create an example, a show of hypocrisy among the tribe’s “betraying sisters” (38). For me, this poem shows the standard that women are held up to since the construction of social laws and norms, how they are shown to stay and sit pretty with the man they were pressured or forced into being with, and how rare true love was… even if it existed at all in ancient times. The killing of adulterers, especially instances of husband killing the wife or the other man, has been in practice for centuries. According to Krista Kesselring’s article “The Short History of the Infidelity Defense in England,” men could easily escape the death penalty of murder by claiming self-defense and other instances, while women could not escape capital punishment. Kesselring explains in her article that over the centuries in England, the blame of the murder is often always on the adulterer, and chalked up as crimes of passion, which happened more and more frequently in the nineteenth century leading up to the twentieth. According to Kesselring, “What we see in the nineteenth century is a greater sense of the harm done to a cuckolded man, and a shifting of the blame from the male lover to the adulterous wife.” I think “Punishment” is a spotlight on the cruelty towards women that attempt to escape their entrapment with their husbands, and all of the underlying, deeper issues that cause the adultery in the first place. The unfairness of standards and unspoken and unwritten laws towards women has always been an issue, and I do hope that it does not always remain so.
Check out Kesselring’s article: https://legalhistorymiscellany.com/2016/08/08/infidelity-defence/
3 Comments
Desiree Hayton
6/12/2020 01:51:18 pm
Julia,
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6/14/2020 02:40:33 pm
I always find it interesting to read views that are contrary/different from mine. In my read through I also thought of unjust persecution from other literary stories but you were able to make a connection to the real world events like the witch trials. The one major difference was that I viewed the narrator as unsympathetic and caring more for the events leading to the incident as opposed to the victim. I think one of the phrases that is most skewed with analysis is "little adultness" which you interpreted as a way of marking her innocence while I thought of his use of the word "little" as a demeaning, insulting, and sarcastic phrasing. I totally see where you are coming from and perhaps my read-through is a reflection of my cynicism toward the topic. I think you expressed your views really well and I'm glad that I was able to learn from your analysis!
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Yasel R.
6/14/2020 09:59:13 pm
I was shaken by this poem, I wasn't really aware that they punished women in such ways for simply being intimate with men who were either married or were soldiers (according to the footnote). Throwing hot tar on women or drowning them for such things sounds so horrifying. I can certainly understand your connection toward the witch trials. I had mixed feelings about the narrator, I wasn't sure if he was being downright gross (for being aroused by her punishment) or if he felt sorry for her (maybe both!).
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