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Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
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Broughton, Candace. "Gendered Justice: Emma Wimple and the Story of Murder Hill," University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, February 2004.
The world of nineteenth century rural women convicted of violent crime has been little studied. In 1875, Emma Wimple (1855-1917), aged twenty, the mother of two, and five months pregnant, was arrested at her home outside Little Valley, New York, and charged with poisoning her husband. The case struck a social nerve. There seemed to be little, if any, doubt regarding her guilt in her community; and she was, in fact, pronounced guilty. This study interrogates not only the official record of her trial, but also the (dis) continuity of the story as legend, oral history, landscape feature, and myth. While the primary theoretical foundation is feminist, human lives do not observe disciplinary boundaries; thus, a range of theoretical perspectives inform the paper, including hermeneutics, medicine, law, the murder tale, sociology and criminology. Perspectives borrowed from folklore, oral and local history, and cultural geography converge in the discussion of history, memory, narrative, and tradition. Writings on the analytical tensions between local and academic historiography have also proven useful. Investigation into the local, regional, and national historical context reveals considerable social unrest in this period of rapid modernization, including the rise of socializing institutions such as mental hospitals. Women’s struggles for equality in particular aroused passionate responses on both sides. Certainly, during this period the specter of the poisoning wife haunted many levels of society. Victorian ideologies of separate spheres differentiated women in ways that often followed class lines and carried serious consequences for those women less well placed. Historically this phenomenon is known as legal chivalry. This dissertation relies on primary as well as secondary sources. Information derived from newspaper accounts, legal documents, and oral tradition is used to examine the narrative and its apparent inconsistencies, as well as its historical context.
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