Society of Early Americanists

The Society of Early Americanists Newsletter, Vol. 12, n. 2

The Ink Glass

hat the Petrarchan lyric both reflected and fostered the imperilist transformation of the New World is the thesis of Roland Greene's Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago UP 99). Like the lover in the lyric, the New World explorer pursues an object of desire that proves to be elusive, an experience that further increases the value of the Other. If at first Petrarchan lyric influenced early exploratory encounters, eventually political, economic and cross-cultural New World experiences influenced the lyric.

Although Puritans invited dialogic discourse when recounting conversion experiences, their ideological emphasis on a fixed knowable truth insisted that nothing true could be learned from listening to opposing viewpoints. As a result, Patricia Roberts-Miller argues in Voices in the Wilderness: Public Discourse and the Paradox of Puritan Rhetoric (U of Alabama P 99), they promoted a monologic public discourse without rhetoric or persuasion. American culture is still inclined to prefer such failed monologic discourse, with its promise of stability and certainty, instead of dialogic discourse, which accommodates multiple points of view. The successful, if sometimes troubled, collusion between ministers and magistrates who mutually supported each other's elitist power provides the focus of Darren Staloff's The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals andlntelligentsian Puritan Massachusetts (Oxford U P 98).

Erik R. Seeman provides a different emphasis in Pious Persuasions: Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New England (Johns Hopkins U P, 99), which focuses on occasions when lay piety disrupted clerical standards. Seeman assesses private spiritual journals, deathbed relations, ecclesiastical participation, and engagement in forbidden practices to disclose a community-oriented popular piety. That the pre-Great Awakening laity played a significant role in the shaping of church government is also the chief finding of Tenacious of Their Liberty: Tile Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts (Oxford U P 99) by James F. Cooper, Jr.

English colonists managed the scarcity of servants by acquiring Native American female captives. These colonists, Michael L. Fickes further indicates in "'They Could Not Endure That Yoke': The Captivity of Pequot Women and Children after the War of 1637" (New England Q. 73 [00]: 58-81), believed they were protecting these servants from barbarian treatment. Numerous runaway captives, however, clearly preferred Native American society to such servitude. Native Americans, Allan Greer observes in "Colonial Saints: Gender, Race, and Hagiography in New France" (William & Mary Q. 57 [00]: 332-48), sometimes played saintly roles in discourses that traditionally depended on a dualism derived from racial difference. The usual gender dichotomy of these hagiographic works was also subverted whenever colonial mystics or martyrs were not portrayed in relation to customary male and female attributes.

The decline of both women's independence and family economics resulting from the rise of post-Revolutionary coastal capitalism is detailed in Elaine Fonnan Crane's Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630-1800 (Northeastern U P 98). The rise of a feminist sensibility interests Rebecca Larson, whose Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700-1775 (Knopf) identifies a number of the 1,300 or so female clergy who tested the boundaries of theocratic convention.

In "A Prophetess in Her Own Country: An Exegesis of Anne Hutchinson's 'Immediate Revelation"' (William & Mary Q. 57 [00]: 349-92), Michael Ditmore explores the meaning of Hutchinson's trail testimony. Hutchinson, Ditmore finds, referred to sortes sanctorum (biblical divination) ratherthandirect divine communication; she emphatically suggested that the authorities at her trial might be the false teachers warned against in I John 4: 1-3; and she ran afoul of both theological and rhetorical conventions, including her substitution of mascu- line for the prevailing feminine spousal imagery when speaking of her Spirit- influenced soul.

Kimberly Latta observes in "'Such Is My Bond': Maternity and Economy in Anne Bradstreet's Writing" (Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature, 1650-1865, ed. Susan C. Greenfield and Carol Barash [U P of Kentucky, 99], pp. 57-85), that by embracing motherhood Bradstreet asserted spiritual and creative authority. Such generation, however, includes a sense of illegitimacy because of a gender-neutral fear that what comes from within her may have no spiritual value. Nonetheless, with a theocratically transgressive sensibility, Bradstreet prized both her children and her art simply because they derived from her. How the representation of a woman's body as a functioning organism scientifically subverts the standard association of heat with both masculinity and superiority is the subject of "'Now Sisters ... Impart Your Usefulnesse, and Force': Anne Bradstreet's Feminist Functionalism in The Tenth Muse (1650)" (Early American Lit. 35 [00]: 28). The poet also revises the querelle des femmes genre when she keeps gender at the center of the debate conducted in the quaternions. The steady devaluation over centuries of both body and language as markers of female spiritual authority is detailed in Susan Juster's "Mystical Pregnancy and Holy Bleeding: Visionary Experience in Early Modem Britain and America" (William & Mary Q. 57 [001: 249-88). Basing her analysis on case studies, Juster finds that whereas at one time women's visionary episodes were related in rich detail that included the reactive body, later female spiritual accounts generally become more perfunctory (like male relafions) and exhibited a detachment from the body (with occasional moments of linguistic eruption).

That the modem ovum hypothesis, implying a functional equality between men and women, could co-exist with the pre-modern hierarchical belief that the female body is an inferior version of the male body is Ava Chamberlain's finding in "The Immaculate Ovum: Jonathan Edwards and the Construction of the Female Body" (William & Mary Q. 57 [00]: 289-322). Chamberlain also detects a transition of attitude toward gender in the "bad book" episode, which she reads as an indication of the Northampton community's favorable disposition toward the newer ("othering") construction of female anatomy. Gerald R. McDermott's "Jonathan Edwards and American Indians: The Devil Sucks Their Blood" (New England Q. 72 [99]: 539-57) discloses a change in Edwards' disposition during the last decade of his life, when he better appreciated both the Native American capacity for spirituality and their eschatological destiny. Edwards' pragmatic concept of Being inaugurated an American tradition, Elisa New indicates in The Line's Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight (Harvard U P, 98, pp. 54-63). Edwards approached existence as the affective perception of beauty, which is the realization of divine glory. The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader, ed. Wilson H. Kimnach et al. (Yale U P 99), presents 15 pastoral and lecture discourses, including 5 printed in this collections for the first time. The Introduction, which places Edwards in the tradition of 17th-century metaphysical poets, situates the minister in his time and describes both the aims and the techniques of his preaching.

An overview of the career of Edwards' ambitious, vain and possibly myopic grandson is presented in John R. Fitzmier's New England's Moral Legislator: Timothy Dwight, 1752-1817 (Indiana U P 98). Post-Awakening religious enthusiasm, Janet Moore Lindman reports in "Acting the Manly Christian: White Evangelical Masculinity in Revolutionary Virginia" (William & Mary Q. 57 [00]: 393-416), may have flirted with spiritual egalitarianism but it actually fostered male dominance and white supremacy in the early South. However, the effect of the Great Awakening on slave spirituality, Erik R. Seeman discloses in "'Justice Must Take Plase': Three African Americans Speak of Religion in Eighteenth-Century New England" (William & Mary Q. 56 [99]: 393-414), resulted in personal narratives that show the appeal to slaves of the evangelical concept of spiritual equality. These authors, in turn, interpreted the Bible in terms of their personal revival experience.

Keith Arbour's "The First North American Mathematical Book and Its Metalcut Illustrations: Jacob Taylor's Tenebrae, 1697" (Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 123 [99]: 87-98) profiles the poet and almanac maker whom Benjamin Franklin eulogized as the "Ornament and Head of [the printers'] Profession." In "Politics and Culture: The Dr. Franklin--Dr. Johnson Connection, with an Analogue" (Prospects 23 [98]: 59-105) Neill R. Joy acknowledges that these two men held different ideas about many matters; but they agreed that biography should celebrate the ordinary private life of personal satisfaction as a social goal based on the bourgeois validation of work.

Alternative readings of a place at once pacific in appearance and riven by conflict between planters and slaves are featured in Kay Dian Kriz's "Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies in Hans Sloane's 'Natural History of Jamaica"' (William & Mary Q. 57[00]: 35-78). Repressed violent history and scientific conventions in representing Otherness both exert a resistant pressure that prevents either visual or verbal representations of nature from conveying a sense of order in Sloane's early 18th-century volumes. In "Samuel Davies and Calvinist Poetic Ecology" (Early American Lit. 35 [001: 29-50) Jeffrey H. Richards discloses multivalent responses to nature--at once Reformed, Newtonian, Augustan and Romantic--as revealed in the popular Miscellaneous Poems (1752).

How an inclusive southern creole identity presents an alternative to the New England exclusive version of nation formation interests Jim Egan, whose "The Colonial English Body as Commodity in Ebenezer Cooke's Tlte Sot-Weed Factor" (Criticism 41 [99]: 385-400) concludes that the poet combines two antithetical definitions of Englishness. A new manuscript that reveals the range of a southern litterateur's sexual behavior appears in K. J. H. Berland's "William Byrd's Sexual Lexicography" (Eighteenth-Century Life 23 [99]: 1-1 1).

Fourteen essays on such topics as children and happiness comprise Thomas Jefferson and the Education of a Citizen, ed. James Gilreath (Library of Congress 99). Included is "Binding Ties: The Public and Domestic Spheres in Jefferson's Letters to His Family" (pp. 28-47), Frank Shuffelton's consideration of how epistolary values shaped Jefferson's conception of family and personal character. Shuffelton has also edited Notes on the State of Virginia (Penguin 99).

Relying on Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer as a representative text, Grantland Rice detects a post-Revolutionary alliance between political economy and aesthetic theory. In "Cognitive Patterns and Aesthetic Deformations in Post-Revolutionary American Writing: A Preliminary Inquiry," (Reciprocal Influences: Literary Production, Distribution, and Consumption in America, ed. Steven Fink and Susan S. Williams [Ohio State U P 99], pp. 13-23) Rice concludes that the central ambiguity in Cr6vecoeur's work derives from a belief in American writing as socially directed and at the same time somehow not disruptive to the present social order.

Helen F. Thompson's "Gothic Numbers in the New Republic: The Federalist No. 10 and Its Spectral Function" (Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography, ed. Glennis Byron and David Punter [St. Martin's P 99, pp. 140-60) points to James Madison's inability to determine the actual elements of his American subject and his reliance on an imaginary virtual representation of nationality.

The use of conflicting features of Aztec and Inca histories to celebrate the indigenous Enlightenment of the new nation, proclaimed to be distinctly different from Europe, is assessed in Danielle E. Conger's "Toward a Native American Nationalism: Joel Barlow's The Vision ofcolumbus" (New England Q. 72 [99]: 558-76). In Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature (Cambridge U P 1999, pp. 17-90) Eric Wertheimer likewise considers Barlow's poetic appropriation of Colombian history to provide the new nation with a usable past. Even more than Philip Freneau, Barlow relied on South American history to fashion epic claims for American exceptionalism without realizing how this very material challenged his racial constructions.

Concerned with antinomian "primitive energies" that are expressed in the uncontrolled margins of society, Nancy Ruttenberg's Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford U P 98) points to the crisis in authority evident during the Salem witch trials and the Great Awakening as occasions when the "democratic personality" claimed a transcen- dent legitimacy that in effect exempted the individual from social accountability. In Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland Ruttenberg finds an equivocal response to the democratic personality, specifically an uncertainty concerning whether it will subvert social order or be domesticated to serve a national identity and literature. Brown's Edgar Huntly, Jeannette Idiart and Jennifer Schulz conclude in "American Gothic Landscapes: The New World to Vietnam" (Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography, ed. Glennis Byron and David Punter [St. Martin's P 99], pp. 127-39), exhibits anxieties over the claim for equality predicated on the silent exclusion of "inferiors" that informs the US Constitution. Moreover Brown doubts the ability of any narrative, including the Constitution, to establish social cohesion, and he worries that it may infect the popular mind. In novels such as Brown's Arthur Mervyn libertines and authors are mutually identified as creators of fictional narratives designed to foster male interests. So finds Bryce Traister, whose "Libertinism and Authorship in America's Early Republic" (American Lit. 72 [00]: 1-30) concludes that this identification represents a post-revolutionary conflict between radical independence and submission to institutionalized social patterns. A related concern informs Mary Chapman's introduction to her edition of Ormond (Broadview 99, pp. 9-31). Chapman highlights Brown's blurring of conventional boundaries, especially between the public and the private, to suggest the impossibility of such separate spheres in a successful democracy.

The use of stereotypical characters in plays by Thomas Forrest and William Dunlap is the subject of "Brogue Irish Take the American Stage, 1767- 1808" (New Hibernia Review 3,iii (1999): 47-64), in which Jeffrey H. Richards highlights the function of underclass figures as a device to reassure elite audiences that the new nation will maintain a social hierarchy. Such underclass characters, these plays imply, will always be safely identifiable and self-marginalizing. The use of food to politically celebrate the emerging nation is observed in "The First American Cookbook" (Eighteenth-Century Life 23 [991: 114-22), in which Glynis Ridley also discloses Amelia Simmons' anti-British sentiment and her rationale for the Revolution. The use of animals to reinforce prevailing notions of both human worth and social values is the subject of Brett Mizelle's "'Man Cannot Behold It Without Contemplating Himself': Monkeys, Apes and Human Identity in the Early American Republic" (Pennsylvania History 66 [991: 144-73); such textual representations, however, also implicitly raised unsettling questions about race, gender and culture.

Teaching the Literatures of Early America, ed. Carla Mulford (MLA 99) includes 21 essays that convey the diversity of colonial American studies. Most of the chief European colonial interests are considered, as well as both traditional and more recent perspectives on various issues, themes, genres and methods pertaining to the field. There are 5 model presentations of specific course designs.