ABSTRACT
An hour after midnight, in a clearing of the forest high in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts, a young girl watches from the ground as a madwoman in strange ritual garb ascends an immense boulder. The girl is Jane Elton, the heroine of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale (1822) and the woman, Jane’s guide to this remote location, is the motley-clad vagrant, Crazy Bet, whose heart-wrung passions have to this point already disrupted several scenes in Sedgwick’s plot. For whatever is about to take place, Bet has added a shepherd’s tall staff to her customary outlandish dress, and woven fl owers and vines through her hair. In the Berkshire village where Sedgwick’s novel is set, Crazy Bet is gadfl y, prophetess, village-idiot, and sibylline oracle, but she is above all else a mourner, the “one true mourner” in an orthodox society in which mourning the dead is a cold and rote affair. Tending graves and offering the dead her “quickness of feeling” and capacious sympathy, Bet is devoted to all whom her more respectable neighbors fi nd it a moral duty to shun. Jane, who has recently lost her well-to-do parents and been whisked into the rigid hypocrisies of an orthodox Calvinist aunt’s domesticity, does not realize what she is witnessing but Bet aims to move her (and Sedgwick’s readers) out of the rigor mortis of the religious past and into a new religion of feeling and its morality based in sympathy.2
