The Ink-Glass

Female identity under assault is detected by Bethany Reid, whose "'Unfit for Light': Anne Bradstreet's Monstrous Birth" (New England Q. 71 [98]: 517-42) concludes that the poet legitimized her verse by speaking of it as an illegitimate deformed child. In "Queer Theory and Publication Anxiety: The Case of the Early American Woman Writer" (Early American Literature 34[99]: 103-12) Rosemary Fithian Guruswamy associates several features of Bradstreet's verse with Renaissance poetic traditions, including her preference for manuscript over book form, her use of the metaphor of literary parturition, and her strategy of self-deprecation. That several personal records of early American women are actually 19th-century counterfeits is the concern of Mary Beth Norton's "Getting to the Source: Hetty Shepard, Dorothy Dudley, and Other Fictional Colonial Women I Have Come to Know Altogether Too Well" (Jr. of Women's History 10[98]: 141-54).

Although early New England women lived in a paternalistic society, they were to some extent able to exert public power. But, Mary Beth Norton further observes in Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (Knopf 96), in the South women lived in a proto-Lockean society that situated them in individual households. During the 18th Century this southern colonial disfranchisement of women from the public sphere would spread to the North. In "The Marriage Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts," one of 16 essays in Women and Freedom in Early America, ed. Larry D. Eldridge (New York U. P. 97, pp. 229-43), Elizabeth Dole concludes that John Winthrop's emphasis on the family lessened the strict subordination of women below men, even as Richard Mather's stress on a voluntary covenant implied a reciprocity between the sexes. In the same volume Karin A. Wulf's "'My Dear Liberty': Quaker Spinsterhood and Female Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania" (pp. 83-108) documents Susanna Wright's supportive response to Eliza Norris's decision not to marry.

That gender and English culture mattered more than religion to Anne Bradstreet as an author is one of the supporting claims of By Nature and By Custom Curse: Transatlantic Civil Discourse and New England Cultural Production, 1620-1660 (U. P. of New England 99), in which Phillip H. Round argues that colonial authors were social agents who sought recognition through performances (gestures) designed to legitimize their work by identifying it with authorizing people or social institutions. This effort was complex, as is evident in the merged religious and civic interests of a lyric poem by Edward Johnson; this poem reflects the pervasive colonial discomfort that resulted from attempts to derive authority from the traditions of old England and at the same time to promote the truth of the Reformed vision of New England.

In Authorizing Experience: Refigurations of the Body Politic in Seventeenth-Century New England Writing (Princeton U. P. 99) Jim Egan also emphasizes the colonial effort to preserve their English identity (including traditional social hierarchies) even as they endeavored to instate the authority of their experience in the New World (potentially fraught with disorder). John Smith defended colonial experience but limited its authority to the New World; William Wood implied that colonial encounters made men more than average Englishmen; John Winthrop (as a result of his experience with the Antinomians) offered the domestic regulation of a sexual hierarchy as a way to preserve the traditional common body (cf. Elizabeth Dole's opposite conclusion, above); and Anne Bradstreet rejected such a discourse based on experience, particularly Winthrop's sexual hierarchy, and instead advocated a sexless spiritual community that suggests an alternative view of colonial experience.

Captivity tales exerted a significant influence on the novel, observes James D. Hartman in Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature (John Hopkins U. P. 99), but there was a still older ancestral literary type: stories of supernatural occurrences on earth. These providence tales, epitomized by witchcraft relations of demonic possession (captivity), mutated as their English authors combined the tradition of recounting miraculous occurrences with the empiricism of the new science in order to convince an increasingly skeptical readership. Dramatic sensationalism (violence, sentimentality, and melodrama) also became an element of the hybrid providence tale, now at once scientific, moralizing, and entertaining. These contradictory features of the hybrid providence tale are identical to those of colonial witchcraft accounts and captivity narratives, works that provide a literary transition from the late Reformation to the Enlightenment.

James Printer, a converted Native American who had been taken captive by other Nipmuck Indians, tried to negotiate the release of Mary Rowlandson and later set type for her captivity narrative. In The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (Knopf 98) Jill Lepore also discloses that attention to racial differences emerged during and after the war, resulting in a cultural amnesia (in books such as Rowlandson's) concerning both Native Americans taken captive and Indian efforts on behalf of the colonies. The sermons, letters, and diaries of a Mohegan schoolteacher who studied under Eleazor Wheelock are collected in To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751-1776,ed.LauraJ.Murray(U. of Massachusetts P. 98).

Studying the editing procedures of William Rand in 1757, Erik R. Seeman concludes in "Lay Conversion Narratives: Investigating Ministerial Intervention" (New England Q. 71 [98]: 629-34) that virtually none of the words of lay testimonials were reported verbatim. Ministers revised such personal documents to create instructive texts for other parishioners. The ministerial and magisterial use of accounts of infanticide as a means of social control and as an expression of racial prejudice serves as a case study in Sharon M. Harris's "Feminist Theories and Early American Studies" (Early American Literature 34 [99]: 86-93).

In The New England Knight: Sir William Phips, 1651-1695 (U. of Toronto P. 98) Emerson W. Baker and John G. Reid apply the term projector, Daniel Defoe's word for someone who is poor yet also ambitious in pursuit of schemes that might enrich him. Self-promotion rather than scruple guides such a person in his quest for personal enrichment, an attitude especially fostered by the imperialistic policies of Phips's day. Materially disadvantaged, an outsider of humble frontier birth, and always impeded by his limited mastery of reading and writing, Phips felt little or no compunction about entering legal gray areas and sometimes crossed the line of rectitude in the course of his self-advancement, including the shadowy boundary between commerce and piracy.

The attitude of ministers toward the proper commercial use of material goods and the ways in which an accommodation of economic resources fostered the development of New England Puritanism are the main subjects of Mark A. Peterson's The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford U. P. 97). In chapters that advance chronologically and alternate between Boston and Westfield, Massachusetts, Peterson details the experiences of two church communities responding to various economic forces between 1660 and 1740. The Third Church of Boston, Peterson finds, embraced the implications of Samuel Willard's metaphor of an ecclesiastical garden and evinced an evangelical relationship to the world. In contrast, the frontier church of Westfield, hindered by the implications of Edward Taylor's metaphor of an ecclesiastic building, featured an exclusivist attitude toward outside circumstances. The former community was liberal, the latter conservative, with the result that the Boston church prospered from a nurturing collective identity whereas the Westfield church suffered from divisive internal conflicts.

That Taylor became more circumspect about his celebration of alcoholic consumption as a metaphor for spiritual intoxication is the thesis of Jon Miller's "'Heavens Good Cheer': Puritan Drinking in the Meditations of Edward Taylor, 1682-1725 " (Dionysos 8.2 [98]: 30-44). In "Puritan Ethos in a Renaissance Garden" (English Language Notes 36: iv [99]: 45-55) WJS focuses on "Meditation 1.28." The playful treatment of inebriation in relation to the submerged symbol of the artificial garden in this poem expresses a mode of authorial self- fashioning. Edward Taylor's theatrical persona and his appreciation of human artifice are both allied more to his Renaissance legacy than to his Reformation theology.

At the turn of the 17th Century, Alan J. Silva explains in "Increase Mather's 1693 Election Sermon: Rhetorical Innovation and the Reimagination of Puritan Authority"(Early American Literature 34[99]: 48-77), there was a shift in New England ministerial rhetoric. Instead of a traditional emphasis on the general responsibilities of Puritan citizens to their communal errand in the wilderness, election sermons now highlighted political leadership by "representative men," as anticipated by Mather's confessional public persona. In "The Unifying Pauline Sub-Text of Nathaniel Ward's The Simple Cobler of Aggawam" (Early American Literature 34[99]: 32-47) Patricia L. Bradley points to correspondences between religious, political, and social issues in the lst-century church and 17th-century England. The unsettledness of dogma in colonial New England, as exemplified by the debates in 1631 over the problematic lineage of Puritanism, is documented in Timothy L. Wood's "'A Church Still by Her First Covenant': George Philips and a Puritan View of Roman Catholicism" (New England Q. 72[99]: 29-4 1).

"'Incarnate Excellence': Jonathan Edwards and an American Theological Aesthetic"(Religion and the Arts 2[98]: 443-66) presents Donald L. Gelpi's case for the implications of Edwardsean Christology. Edwards's understanding of conversion implies an aesthetic experience, a Christian imagination of anagogically transformative perception, that responds to the sacramentality of creation. Leon Chai's Jonathan Edwards and the Limits Of Enlightenment Philosophy (Oxford U. P. 98) compares Religious Affections and John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, The Nature of True Virtue and Nicolas Malebranche's De la Recherche de la Verité, and Freedom of the Will and Gottfried Liebniz's Nouveaux Essais sur 1'entendement humain. Chai's goal is to identify the contradictions that ensue from Edward's interest in a mode of rationality. Numerous scholarly sources, including Enlightenment critique, influential to Edwards's private commentary on the Bible are identified in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 15: Notes on Scripture, ed. Stephen J. Stein (Yale U. P. 98). And The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 16: Letters and Personal Writings, ed. George S. Cleghorn (Yale U. P. 98) presents 236 missives, a diary, a series of resolutions, a meditation on Sarah Pierpont, and the "Personal Narrative."

What happened to Edwards's paradigm for narrating religious experience interests Rodger M. Payne, whose The Self and the Sacred: Conversion and Autobiography in Early American Protestantism (U. of Tennessee P. 98) indicates that discursive formulae often embody more than their users intend. Although spiritual autobiographies reveal an authorial desire to lose a sense of self, this mythic pattern peculiarly coexists with a contradictory sense of an historically situated, individualized selfhood.

In "'I Heare It So Variously Reported': News-letters, Newspapers, and the Ministerial Network in New England, 1670-1730" (New England Q, 71[98]: 593-614) Sheila Mclntyre discloses how newspapers steadily displaced ministerial letters as a public medium for reporting recent events. Ministers, however, welcomed the press, and in response to it their letters became more personal and often provided interpretive commentary on what was reported by the press. That the shift from the spoken to the published word as authoritative was complex, that in fact individuals could rely on one or the other as the occasion required, is Leon Jackson's finding in "Jedidah Morse and the Transformation of Print Culture" (Early American Literature 34[99]: 2-31).

The displacement of the influence of sermons by the new rhetorical strategies of newspaper journalism and lay orations, the replacement of ministers by lawyers as authority figures, and the diversity of sources used by people who came to believe in an informed citizenry comprise the subject of Christopher Grasso's A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (U. of North Carolina P. 99). Not neatly sequential in their manifestation, the changes behind the new strategies were embedded in concurrent contending forces encountered by overlapping audiences. Such crosscurrents are especially evident in the political rhetoric of John Trumbull and in the moral rhetoric of Timothy Dwight, Jonathan Edwards's grandson. Edwards's attempt define the terms of religious argument was prone to an ambiguity that his New Divinity followers tried to resolve, albeit at the cost of widening the gap between clergy and laity.

The effect of the Great Awakening on slave spirituality interests Erik R. Seeman, whose "'Justice Must Take Plase': Three African Americans Speak of Religion in Eighteenth-Century New England" (William & Mary Q. 56[991: 393-414) presents several personal narratives. These works show the appeal of the evangelical concept of spiritual equality to slaves, who in turn interpreted the Bible in the light of their personal experience. That Franklin and other printers benefited from publishing notices of fugitive slaves is one element in David Waidstreicher's "Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic" (William & Mary Q. 56[99]: 243-72). Focusing on references to clothing, employment skills, linguistic ability, and skin color in runaway-advertisements, Waldstreicher emphasizes the ability of fugitives to mimic printers and confidence men by assuming a role or identity in a society where to be white was not necessarily to be free and where to be black was not necessarily to be a slave.

The pressure women exerted to maintain racial boundaries is noted in Thomas N. Ingersoll's Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718-1819 (U. of Tennessee P. 99). New Orleans was not as anarchistic as legend suggests, but was instead a relatively ordered society with a continuous development fostered by the attraction of wealth. The lives and fortunes of a 17th-century free couple are documented in Melinde Lutz Sanborn's "Angola and Elizabeth: An African Family in the Massachusetts Bay Colony" (New England Q. 72[991: 119-29).

In "The Body into Print: Marketing Phillis Wheatley" (American Literature 71[99]: 1-29) Kirstin Wilcox studies the difference in advertisement strategies between the Boston and the London representations of the poet. Whereas in Boston proposals for publication emphasized events and persons familiar to the prospective reader, the London advertisements stressed her artistic skills in contrast to her status as a slave. In fact, the London edition differs from the unpublished Boston version, with the result that the poet achieves literary authority (especially in the context of 18th-century interest in prodigies) at the cost of her personal feelings about being a slave. In "'Ocean': A New Poem by Phillis Wheatley" (Early American Literature 34[99]: 78-83) Julian Mason presents an unfinished 1773 verse composed at different times and recording various states of the poet's mind.

In their debate over the Constitution, Republicans and Federalists alike assailed each other in terms of contemporary constructions of slavery and savagery. This is the thesis of Jared Gardner's Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787-1845 (Johns Hopkins U P. 98), which argues that the appropriation of slave and captivity narratives in The Algerine Captive displaces Royall Tyler's fears related to the formation of an American identity (pp. 25-50) and that the equation of alien and savage in Edgar Huntly anticipates Charles Brockden Brown's imperialist pamphlets calling for the extirpation of foreigners (pp. 52-80). That Royall Tyler's picturesque novel The Algerine Captive and Susanna Haswell Rowson's Slaves in Algiers critique slavery in America is observed in The Image of Algeria in Anglo-American Writings, 1785-1962 (U. P. of America 97, pp. 46-48) by Osman Benchérif. In "Boston's Theater Controversy and Liberal Notions of Advantage" (New England Q. 72[99]: 61-88) T. A. Milford details late 18th-century arguments against the ban on stage productions because they are detrimental to economic growth.

Empire's Nature: Mark Catesby's New World Vision (U. of North Carolina P. 98) includes 6 essays: an editorial introduction (pp. 1-33) by Amy R. W. Meyers and Margaret Beck Pritchard, an analysis of Catesby's skepticism (pp. 34-90) by Joyce E. Chaplin, a study of the early 18th-century patronage of natural history (pp. 91-146) by David R. Brigham, a report on 18th-century garden culture (pp. 147-83) by Therese O'Malley, an account of the impact of Catesby's plant introductions in England (pp. 184-227) by Mark Laird, and the place of Catesby's work within the paradigm of colonial expansion (pp. 228-61) by Amy R. W. Meyers. Chaplin's "Mark Catesby, a Skeptical Newtonian in America" indicates disembodiment, unsettling combinations of relation, and disorder in some of the naturalist's paintings; in these works natural phenomena resist, rather than conform to, predictable recurrent patterns of Newtonian order. Catesby's Birds of Colonial America, ed. Alan Feduccia (U. of North Carolina P. 85) is available in paperback. The Height of Our Mountains: Nature Writing from Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains to Shenandoah Valley, ed. Michael P. Branch and Daniel J. Philippon (Johns Hopkins U. P. 98) is an anthology ranging from 1612 to 1996 that includes both Thomas Jefferson and his slave Isaac Jefferson. The editors argue that these writings show how personal and cultural meanings give natural places their identity. A cautionary note is sounded by Frank Shuffelton, whose 'Tower, Desire, and American Cultural Studies" (Early American Literature 34[99]: 94-102) assesses the strengths and limitations of recent directions in cultural criticism.

"The Americanization of Clarissa" (Yale Journal of Criticism 11[981: 177-96), Leonard Tennenhouse's study of post-Revolutionary abridged editions of Samuel Richardson's novel, identifies a shift from an English emphasis on the heroine's emotions to an American emphasis on the heroine's sexuality. This shift corresponds to the cultural work of the American seduction novel, which attempts to translate actual English ancestry (the original) into an imitation of English behavior (the copy). Such cultural work, an attempt to redefine the site of Englishness by emphasizing what the heroine does rather than who she is, aims to hold together two contrary post-Revolutionary impulses: a conservative and a progressive political agenda.

Susan Manning has prepared a critical edition of Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (Oxford U. P. 97). Reiner Smolinski has compiled The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: The Millennial Impulse in Early American Literature (Kendall/Hunt 98), a thematic anthology of 50 full-length and some times heretofore unavailable texts. The lntroduction re-examines early American millennial theories and ranges from John Cotton to the Connecticut Wits. James J. Kirschke's entry on Winthrop Sargent in American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (Oxford U. P. 99 [19: 286-871) emphasizes journals, letters, and official reports in documenting this territorial administrator's "Caesar-like dramatic eloquence."

All bird illustrations in this issue of SEAN are by Mark Catesby.