Pre-colonial & Puritan

## Early America

The American continent possessed major pre-Columbian civilizations, with a deep heritage of culture, mythology, ritual, chant and poetry. Many American writers, especially recently, have looked to these sources as somethitg essential to American culture, and the extraordinary variety and vision to be found there contribute much to the complexity and increasing multiethnicity of contemporary American experience.

But this is not the originating tradition of what we now call American literature. That came from the meeting between the land with its elusive and usually despised "Indians" and the discoverers and settlers who left the developed, literate cultures of Renaissance Europe, first to explore and conquer, then to populate, what they generally considered a virgin continent-a "New World" already promised them in their own mythology, now discovered by their own talent and curiosity. They brought their ideas of history and the world's purpose, their language and, above all, *the book*: both The Bible and a general instrument of expression, record, argument and cultural dissemination.

The main direction of the recorded American literary imagination thereafter was formed from the intersection between the European Renaissance mind and the new and wondrous land in the West the settlers found ―between the myths they brought and those they learned or constructed after they came.

### 17th Century

When the first permanent English settlement was founded at Jamestown in Virginia in 1607, it had its recorder, Captain John Smith. Smith's mapping, both actual and written, of American possibilities was recorded in *A Description of New England* (1616). Sent by the Virginia Company to explore the coast farther north, he gae it the name "New England," and attached British names to many of its unsettled areas.

Smith's book was also full of American promise, defining a heroic and even divine mission for those who would undertake the great task: "What so truely suits with honour and honesty as the discovering things unknown: erecting towns, peopling countries, informing the ignorant, reforming things unjust, teaching virtue, and gain to our native mother country a kingdom to attend her."

The English colonies Smith speculated about soon multiplied: Plymouth Plantation (1620), Massachusetts Bay (1630), Maryland (1634), Rhode Island (1636), New York (1664), Pennsylvania (1681).

#### Puritanism

Among these settlers were some who truly believed this was the new beginning, a fresh start for history and religion. They were the Puritans, who, determined to maintain the purity of their separatist Protestan faith, did aim to begin anew and find in that process of erecting towns, peopling countries, teaching virtue and reforming things unjust a truly fresh start.

Though they wrote first for themselves and their colonial successors, they also, like Smith, had in mind readers in Europe; they were still writing for English eyes, seeking to convert English minds. The plot was providential; God guides these encounters between the traveler and the not yet written New World. The myth remains shaped by European sources, but now one source above all, the Bible, and especially its opening chapter, Genesis and Exodus, the tale of the Chosen People and the Promised Land.

For the Puritans the essential tale was a religious one, with the Lord's guidance in a quest of a high purpose and a millennial history. When Puritans wrote they told nothing less than the tale of God's will revealing itself in history.

Just as the new colony acquired its own printing press it sought to establish its own literary style, and there was no shortage of opportunity for expression. The hundreds of journals, sermons, devotional works, histories, accounts of church and social polity and volumes of religious controversy indicate a remarkable vitality. The sermon was essential native form, as well as a central event of Puritan life. It was a form of providential communication and communion.

For the Puritan, word and world alike were the shadowing forth of divine things, coherent systems of transcendent meaning. In this, Puritan thought anticipated many aspects of Romanticism, especially that brand of it called Transcendentalism.

#### The Journal

Besides the history and the sermon, there was the journal, the recording of the individual life. Each day's experiences could be scrutinized for indications of God's will and evidence of predestination, and so the story of individual lives grew in the pages of diaries and journals in much the way historians shaped their accounts of historical crises and public events.

This commitment to self-scrutiny and conscience give, in the many jourals, a remarkable access to the Puritan's inward life, their balance of self and society.

The main part of the abundant literary expression from the Puritan period is not what would now be called imaginative literature. History, travel record, the diary, the sermon —these were the central expressions of the American Puritan mind. Theater was condemned, and prose fiction, in the age when the novel was finding itself abroad, was deeply distrusted. Poetry, though important, had a rigorously defined place.

#### Captivity Narratives

One form of prose story, arising directly out of the Puritan trials in the wilderness, did reach a striking level of creative energy: The Indian-captivity narratives.

In the struggles with the landscape and climate, and above all in the battles with the natives, the Puritans found themselves in direct encounter with America. In the providential plan, it was here they would confront "Satan," where the Gospel had not yet reached. These narrative became a prototype of popular American writing, dominating publication suring the last years of the 17th century and serving as essential source for much later American fiction.

The narrative accounts described the ensuing events but drew as well on the essential Puritan myth that shaped perception of the adventure: a chosen people crossing the sea to enter a wilderness of taint and damnation and seeking redemption in the quest for a new city of salvation.

These captivity stories tell of being taken by the natives, enduring dreadful harships, witnessing horrors, facing the cruelty of captors towrd their prisoners, then of a rescue or escape which restores the narrator and permits him or her to recount these adventures to seek out their providential meaning.

### 18th Century

Later American writing revolted against Puritanism. Critics blamed the Puritan heritage for much that seemed to limit American writing: its heavily allegorizing disposition, its failure to open out to experience or the ambiguity of the symbol, its lack of inclusiveness, its dull response to the world of nature, its rigorous moralism. Passionately reasserted as a political aim in the early years of the Republic, the conviction that Americans had a special purpose and would speak it in a special voice long after the devotion to Calvin's doctrines died.

The 18th century was a period of major change in American ideas and ideals, a change which did not so much displace the millenarian impulses so deeply associated with the American continent and American settlement as refashion them in response to the intellectual and scientific questions of the Age of Reason.

All this is eident in two remarkable American minds that flourished in the eighteenth century: Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. The two are often seen as representing the contrasting principles of eighteenth-century American life: on the idealist, the other the materialist; one the Puritan preacher, the other the man of political activism.

Edward's foremost purposes were clear, to make Puritanism viable for the eighteenth century and re-establish its main doctrines on a sound philosphical basis. His sermons and theological writings were a vivid awareness of physical phenomena and a recognition of human subjectivity. He brought a new emotional insistence to the recording and justifying of the affective force of faith. Edwards was a Puritcan whose open-minded study of doctrine led him to the psychology of subjective experience, and so to anticipation of the transcendental Romanticism of the following century.

Franklin became a man for whom the spiritual questions of his forefathers had turned to questions of ethics, self-management and public service. His rise to public success and his eventual status as a the country's first internationally acknowledged statesman reveal how far colonial life had shifted from the guiding vision of the "Pilgrim Fathers" to the historical expansion of the civilization they planted. Franklin belonged to an expanding new age of American culture, an age of travel, newspapers, bookshops, scientific and philosophical societies, magazines, theaters and universities. his best-known book, *The Autobiography* (1791) was not simply a personal narrative, but a central document of the evolutionary growth and the intellectual motion of America itself.

## Literature of the Time

* **William Bradford** - *Of Plimouth Plantation* (1630): A personal journal completed in 1650 but not printed until 1856. Bradford is, he says, determined to render his account (of departure, voyage, arrival, settlement, development and lasting dedication to God's purpose in history) "in the plaine style, with singular regard unto the simple truth in all things."
* **Edward Johnson** - *A History of New England* (1653): Formal history of American settlement. Johnson interprets history as the work of God carefully attending the daily events of New England.
* **Michael Wigglesworth** - *The Day of Doom* (1662): 224 eight-line stanzas of singsong doctrinal verse, it displayed the threat of the Day of Judgement and the Calvinistic doctrines of damnation and reprieve with three apparently contending aims: to instruct, to delight and to terrify.
* **Cotton Mather** - *Magnalia Christi* (1702): Accounts for the religious development of colonies in New England from 1620 to 1698. Cotton has come to seem the embodiment of American Puritanism. A man of great learning, with a major library that displayes the density of the culture New England had developed and its access to European thought and science. Cotton's book seeks to assert the presence of God's spirit in the colonies.
* **Anne Bradstreet** - *The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung in America* (1650): Perhaps the first major woman poet in the English language. The poetry she produced between domestic duties is not about great political, historical or theological matters. Her strongest subjects are drawn from the stuff of daily life, many are poems of love and grief and others mourning the death of loved ones. They have a metaphysical wit and texture that anticipate the work of Emily Dickinson. This comes in part from the struggle between dissent and acceptance in the life of a strong-willed woman living in a commonwealth which recquired souble submission: to domestic and divine duty.
* **Mary Rowlandson** - *The Soveraignty and Goodness of God...* (1682): An account of her actual captivity. It became a prototype, immensely popular, frquently reprinted, much copied. Rowlandson's tale is an adventure story which never forgets the experience's transcendental meanings.

## Sources

Ruland, Richard and Malcolm Bradbury. *From Puritanism to Postmodernism*. Viking, 1991.