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Moving Memories: The Puritans We Need

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 90; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00029831-7208584

1527-2117

Kathleen Donegan,

Philippine History and Culture

I grew up memorializing Puritans, maybe more than most. In 1976 in Massachusetts it was not just John Hancock and Samuel Adams who were in our elementary-school classrooms but also the Puritans, those pious rebels who, as we learned, gave birth to the American Revolution. It was not any particular Puritan. It was the Puritans, our Puritans, and anything we needed to learn about being American would start with them. At school, we girls sewed bonnets and learned quilting, proving that our hands “a needle better fit” after all. On field trips, we went to Old Sturbridge Village and walked through small doors into dark kitchens that smelled of smoke and stone. We watched as a woman tended iron pots hanging from hooks over a deep hearth. We visited the blacksmith; we practiced dipping candles; we hushed ourselves up and sat down in pews. On the bus ride home, the Mass Pike was dotted with iconic signs of that big buckled Pilgrim hat with the Indian arrow shot straight through it. Come November, we owned Thanksgiving, proud of what our simple, ardent forefathers showed a grateful nation. Our Puritans were stalwart. They were freedom seekers. They were humble and weighty as the rough clothes they wore against harsh winters. Most of all, they were knit together in a sacred bond, and we were knit to them. When it came to writing a third-grade essay, under the title “Footsteps of History,” I chose Anne Hutchinson as my subject, so taken was I by her extraordinary spirit, her courage, her resolve. And now in California, I try to evoke for my students a November afternoon in Massachusetts, how the ground is cold and hard and months of winter lie ahead, how it gets dark at four o’clock and Anne Hutchinson has been standing all day. Our Puritans die hard.On a recent trip to Boston, I took my children Ezekiel and Mercy (yes) on a short detour from the Freedom Trail to Copp’s Hill Burying Ground to see Cotton Mather’s grave. We brushed the snow off, looked, and no one cared but me. So we turned back around to the Old North Church to see where the two lanterns had hung the night the British were coming. The short walk that connected a Puritan grave to the Freedom Trail traced exactly the path of exceptionalism that this issue breaks with so boldly. Nonetheless, this is precisely the path still taken by so many: just a short step from settlers to revolutionaries, Pilgrims to patriots, freedom fighters all. Just listen to these lines from “America, the Beautiful”: “Oh, beautiful for Pilgrim feet / Whose stern, impassioned stress / A thoroughfare for freedom beat / Across the wilderness!” (Bates 1893). Listen to Ronald Reagan (1989), who bid farewell to the nation by invoking John Winthrop “an early Pilgrim, an early ‘Freedom Man.’” Listen to Barack Obama (2006), looking over a sea of diverse faces at a commencement in Boston, reflecting that those students believed “like those first settlers that they too could find a home in this City on a Hill.” The message is that from the beacon of that shining city to the statue who lifts her lamp beside the golden door, the eyes of the world have always been on us.For nearly thirty years, early Americanists have worked to dislodge this stubborn trajectory that plots the colonial period as the seedtime of the nation. The “colonial origins” theory claims that long before the American Revolution, a special status for the nation started with the early New England settlers—those who made the “errand into the wilderness” to fulfill the Puritan mission and lay the foundations for a model society. It has proven a remarkably steadfast vision—that the religious, intellectual, and social quest of these serious Puritans was essentially, and successfully, a quest for America. If early American studies has emerged from under the long shadow of nationalism, it has done so by changing its sight lines: seeing early coastal communities within broader Atlantic and hemispheric frames; seeing beyond New England to the Chesapeake, the West Indies, and the global South; seeing the English in the context of imperial agendas that include the French, Spanish, and Dutch; seeing the creolization rather than the “development” of culture; seeing complex relations with and among indigenous peoples with diverse histories; seeing the geopolitics of slavery throughout the market exchanges and domestic affairs of colonial America; seeing the commons as well as the printing house; seeing appropriation as well as knowledge production; seeing, finally, out from under bonnets and buckled hats. These shifts make the teleological view of Puritan exceptionalism much harder to maintain, if possible at all. They also make Puritans into puritans. No longer those central actors with the enviable archive, no longer the “people of the book” who stand at the opening chapter of every book of ours, puritans are simply some among the people of colonial America, not first among them.Is this not enough, then, to decenter Puritanism and to effect what Ivy Schweitzer (2001, 578) once called the “salutary decouplings” of the national from the colonial, the colonial from New England, and New England from Puritans? Is it not enough, that is, to recontextualize Puritans? Perhaps it is not. Perhaps we should leave them alone for a while. They have already dominated a good deal of our attention, to say the least. It is true that revisionary studies depart from old ideas about orthodoxy and religious and civic consensus. “The phantasm of a universal, monolithic Puritanism shaping the development of a cultural ethos has been exorcised,” David Shields (2000, 636) declared almost twenty years ago. Although that kind of Puritan history was “comfortable in the mouth from frequent repetitions” (635), Shields claimed, it could no longer be considered “a congenial truth.” In new works, Puritans appear in unfamiliar garb as cosmopolitan and capitalistic, scientific and sympathetic, barbarous and bodily. Puritans are being extracted from a position that simultaneously constrained their character and created persistently limiting interpretive traditions that long defined the field. Our puritans have changed. But with all the many stories of early America left to tell, is it too soon to put Puritans so deliberately back in the mix? Truth be told, readers of this volume might be surprised to see them so prominently on the scene.But as to this question of bringing them back, I think they never truly left. While even a cursory look at the field’s recent bibliography testifies to a vigorous engagement with new subjects and approaches, Puritans still come tumbling from our syllabi: William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Mary Rowlandson. The old-school roster persists, and although many have revised their surveys of the seventeenth century, more I think have a hard time leaving behind the capital P Puritan past. Although the courses have changed, these old texts have remarkable staying power, no matter the methodology. On the one hand, we see clearly that when puritans no longer constrain early American studies, those studies travel farther, wider, and more freely. Why, then, recur to strictures? On the other hand, it is fully possible to read puritans differently and to pursue study that is newly mobile, as the articles in this issue so powerfully attest. Temporal shifts especially can dislodge puritans from their originating position and move them into what Molly Farrell calls “vaster coordinates of space and time.” When puritans are loosed from their seventeenth-century moorings, it is difficult to make the argument for origins or even for the privilege of “earliness” and the implications underpinning that chronology. Nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century puritans lose their status of “beginnings” and begin to show up where they are least expected.The Puritans in these pages would be utterly unrecognizable to the daughter of New England I was in 1976. Indeed, they are new even now. You might say that deeply rooted memories of Puritans like those of my childhood were not so much stuck in time (after all, these were the people who secured the American ethos and justified both its history and its future) as they were stuck in kind. Like the frequent use of the “City on the Hill,” the Puritans did move forward but always with a stern, impassioned stress. The puritans in these pages move, too, but with a difference. For Rachel Trocchio, they move back to classical forms of memory and move laterally to English debates about its faculties. For Daniel Grace, puritans move into abolitionist discourse as infidels, their mythic transatlantic journey reversed by Frederick Douglass, who crossed the ocean to find freedom in England. Jordan Alexander Stein’s critique of modern editing practices rediscovers a poetics of transformation in Edward Taylor’s verse, one that moves Taylor into the space of possibility for queer readings. Farrell’s reading of the antinomian controversy’s monstrous births moves all the way forward to the political invention of “partial-birth” abortion, carried along by the affect of disgust at female reproduction. For Christopher Trigg, moving Roger Williams’s millennialism alongside today’s expectation for Muslim immigrants’ assimilation redefines religious tolerance as hidden hegemony. There is no narrative continuity here between past and present but rather a series of challenges to the piety that would cast the old Puritans onward, the backward gaze that would cast them as progenitors, and the aversion that would cast them aside. Each article is a provocation to reconsider what puritans might mean now that their very long exceptionalist era has passed. And, to no small extent, this issue marks that passing. It shows new reading practices in which puritans are part of contemporary praxis. These authors are neither reading over puritans, nor reading past them, but they are reading through them anew.However, the question about popular memory remains, not that we think of it too often. It is no surprise to us that as scholars our work is often at odds with what people want to hear. But while many in the humanities are conjuring their “publics,” we early Americanists often find ourselves in the position of addressing eager listeners. There are many people interested in founding. But how should we introduce the complexities of these new puritans, puritans who are currently in a state of deep revision? How do we present the case to a curious, story-loving people who are surprisingly protective of American pieties? In the classroom we often encounter a different audience, one with ingrained images of grim-faced, cobweb-covered Puritans, Puritans they don’t want to read. These two camps not only carry misconceptions, but they also carry forms of memory—in one case a loyalty to the people who faced down the “wilderness” to secure national freedoms, in the other case a skepticism that debunks a supposedly godly people who actually did such harm. For some, the memory of puritan history can mean vision or myopia, pride or humility; for others, it simply doesn’t register at all. Whether willingly or not, the scholar in public faces all these kinds of memory, while hoping to refine and revise what people take as given. A simple reversal of the given is neither wise nor possible, since there are so many versions of the Puritans out there. Each of these memories of the Puritans has lasted because within different cultural contexts they serve purposes for those who hold them. We make the Puritans we need.Whether in academic or public work, the first instinct is usually to sweep away old premises. In the academic case, these premises are themselves the curated memories of our field. These, too, once served their purpose, just as our work does today. Instead of cleaning house, however, it is valuable to work with memory more consciously and not in the mode of simply calling it outdated or calling it out. We might think instead that remembering is the complex basis of our scholarly production. For it is pressing against memories of critical rootedness that allows us to launch a critical mobility, pressing against memories of exceptionalism that makes for postexceptionalism, pressing against memories of Perry Miller, Sacvan Bercovitch, and the like that makes our studies new. Even while surpassing outdated models, we can note that our puritans are built on a long history of scholarship that claimed them as fundamental. To revisit and revise our puritans requires some kind of reckoning. Miller and Bercovitch don’t need to keep appearing in our pages (for we are a long time “post-” them by now), we don’t need start way back when, but we can work with the fact that puritans come with sacks full of intellectual and cultural baggage that is ours to unpack, however we choose.The point is not to rehearse memory but rather to take on the charge of its work. How? Each of the pieces in this issue does the work of memory as well as the work of deep revision. Trocchio takes memory itself as her subject, showing how the puritans stood at the end of a long tradition and not at the beginning. Memory shapes the other works too. For Grace it is the culturally driven hyper-memory of puritans as founders that prompted Douglass to expose corruption in all the nation’s churches. For Stein it is the way editorial choices shape a sanctioned critical memory of Taylor, forestalling opportunities to read him otherwise. For Farrell it is the long political memory of revulsion around female reproduction that links the antinomian to the abortion crisis. For Trigg it is the memory of a man we thought tolerant, who sheds strange light on the politics of immigration today. I have said these articles are newly mobile and that their mobility is a great part of their dynamism, but as works about puritans they can’t help but carry an outsize memory. So, mobile they are, but they also do a lot of heavy lifting. This is part of what makes them so impressive. They neither close off the past nor leave it behind as ruined and irredeemable. In my reading, they unfix the relation between past and present, which is a way of realizing that our work is also about memory, its purposes and repurposing. If we can mark the places where historical records open and where they close, if we can invest ourselves in exploring those gaps, then we realize there is still something to say beyond reversal or refutation. As Paul Ricoeur (1999, 8) reminds us, it is possible to tell it in a different way. The stories we tell about the past are neither objective nor relative. They are relational and, therefore, subject to change.By the time I got to high school, where The Scarlet Letter was our Great Gatsby, the puritan past was fixed in my memory. There seemed no different way to tell it. It didn’t move, and it didn’t move me. I was tired of them, these punitive men. But many years later, I read these words: Now it is other ways with me. It is one of the last haunting lines in Mary Rowlandson’s Indian captivity narrative, and it places her in a sleepless bed. All are fast around her; not an eye is open; slumber has enclosed a house newly furnished with love. But what is the tranquil deep for others is the “night season” for Rowlandson; it holds no peace for her: “I can remember the time when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts, whole nights together, but now it is other ways with me” (1997, 111). With these words, Rowlandson writes beyond the frame of her redemption, beyond even her reintegration into a godly community of friends. She brings the reader to her wakeful pillow, where she is kept keen in the night. Her open eye stares at a fearsome mystery. And there she confides a privacy: now it is other ways with me.For me, the puritan world opened up again. What, in colonial America, did it mean to be “other ways”? As I read it, it was “other ways” with Rowlandson not only because of the raid on her town, or her forever-dead child, or her sorrowful marches, or memories of all the other shocking days. It was all that, but it was something else too. “Other ways” was the colonial experience, the fissures within it, the vigilance and the catastrophes, the improvising, the brutality, the bewilderment. “Other ways” was also knowing that it was other ways, that it was an unsettling, unforgiving new world for all. And finally “other ways” meant finding other ways of writing all this, ways that could make the hoariest stories present, ways that could make memories move. Exceptionalism was supposed to make a small, zealous group of people always relevant, but it required creating rigid boundaries around the meaning of their world for ours. For a long time, that worked. Postexceptionalism offers something more pliable, something that retains possibility. A goal, it seems to me, is that articles like the ones in this issue come to seem less surprising but no less novel for that. Despite its remarkable transformations, its expansion and intellectual vitality, the field of early American studies still carries the weight of origins and still needs to lose what used to be its bearings in other ways, without the stern, impassioned stress. New relevance is available even for those texts that seem most ideologically fixed, as we advance something we are beginning to know, namely, how we might think and write differently about the puritan past, and its present.