The Borders of Things

The Polymorphous Puritans

It is dangerous to paint in broad strokes when depicting the Puritans. They themselves were a most fastidious of people, divided from dividers ecclesiastically, separated among themselves in various denominations, distinctions, theological variations, differences enhanced by geographical locations. Salem was not Plymouth, which was not Massachusetts Bay, and they were definitely not Shakers, Quakers, Anglicans, “Papists,” or maypole dancing free-lovers like Thomas Morton. To generalize about their experience, their thought, their sense of who they are and their place in the world, then, is highly risky. But it is clear that they were precise, amazingly thorough, and caught up in a linguistic and material experiment that led them into numerous contradictions and complications, the descendents of which are still haunting America today.

While Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana may be the most famous account, it is a third-generation apology and prophecy after the fact, a looking backwards-forwards (as Sacvan Bercovitch points out) that both establishes the religious and cultural legitimacy of the puritan project and pro-jects that legacy into the future, an unprecedented bringing together what Bercovitch calls redemptive (divine, the story of the people of God) and providential (the secular world, ordained by God but not the sanctified by the redemptive plan) histories. Mather, the grandchild, writes Puritan self-imagination, a people both “sacred” and “secular,” divine and political, church and state, participants in both the divine and human economies. Thus, the first broad stroke one might venture to make: the Puritans brought together what had been apparent opposites; they mapped two vast universes on top of each other.

Such marriage of apparent contradictions is evident well before there was the Magnalia, visible in the first generation accounts of persecution, exile, and colonization. Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation offers one of these accounts, but in no way does it deserve the title story. It is a beast of a text, a literal palimpsest which was revised throughout Bradford’s life, a re-writing not of historical facts but of the glosses given to those facts. At times providence is not readily seen, just as redemption can appear as loss. While we may lump it under the name of “travel narrative,” it’s journey is epic, and thus it resists any simple name: part history, part theology, part edifying tale, part testimony, part constitution, part political theory, part book of church order, part plat book, part military history, part ledger (Bradford literally includes copies of receipts and documents the fur trade), part sermon. It is as if there is no detail that does not deserve inclusion, no minor history that cannot be annexed by the redemptive-providential tale.

Which is precisely what the Puritan marriage of opposites produces: a true multiplicity, a narrative structure that seeks to name everything. Bradford is not alone in this. Mather’s other (in)famous text, The Wonders of the Invisible World, reveals a trial process for the identifying of witches that is as morbidly thorough as it is judicially and ethically reprehensible. Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, at times, reads like a Weight Watcher’s diary, recounting the number of ground nuts a particular captor gave her on a particular day, and how they tasted. All of these details, material, gritty, at times violent, are, for Rowlandson, Mather, and Bradford, witnesses to the Divine. God, by ordaining everything providentially AND redemptively, is the force behind everything, even those things that appear evil. Grace (such as a gift of ground nuts) even in the midst of suffering (being taken captive and having your youngest child die in your arms) is still grace, while the suffering is designed to more fully integrate you into the redemptive plan. EVERYTHING fits into this frame, and thus nothing is lost to those who are setting out to capture the story in language.

For this reason, the rhetoric and language left by Puritan New England carries with it a complication to the theological frame that justified that rhetoric. Where they were, theologically speaking, radically spiritual, the Puritans were also, linguistically and cognitively, radically materialists. The physical world was more than simply illustrative of a divine plan, it was where the divine plan manifested itself, was carried out, where the Word became Flesh. A journey to the New World wasn’t simply allegorically parallel to the Israelites crossing of the Red Sea; it was, instead, a physical, material, literal redemption. Being carried into the wilderness by the native peoples wasn’t a metaphor for the lost soul, but a physical means by which the lost soul was sanctified. The divine is so immanent, in everything, that the physical, material world becomes the focus of a tremendous amount of attention, a place for experience and interpretation. Accounts of God’s redemption are accounts of beaver pelts, ground nuts, and river banks.

Is it no wonder, then, that 200 years later the Transcendentalist descendents of these puritans would fall back on a similar spiritual-materialist language? The New England attention to the materiality of the world as an expression of divine in the human recreates, and perhaps generalizes, the Puritan ethos. Since it was no longer tied to a specific creed or the concrete redemptive-providential narrative of the failed theocracy, materialist theology could spread into Walden Pond (optimistically) and into the White Whale (pessimistically). One could even say that the nineteenth century literary works simply literalized the puritan’s language, made the accounts of the material world which were already there self-conscious, took the axioms of mediation which were unacknowledged and made them visible.