I.1. Settlement of English Colonies in North America
the finding of a direct route which could lead to gold and spices.
the discovering of a way to penetrate into the “rearguard” of the Islam realms.
Portuguese seafarers were the first to get an advantage in Atlantic exploration.
But in 1479, the Spanish Catholic Kings recognized the Portuguese dominium over the African coastline
this obliged them to find an alternative route to the Far East.
At the end of the 15th century, the Spanish Monarchy acquired sovereignty over the Canary Islands, which served as a stop for Christopher Columbus in his way to America, or what he thought was the coast of China.
French Monarchy started to promote the exploration of North America.
Jacques Cartier, sponsored by Francis I founded the first settlements of the future Canada.
English traders however continued to do business with the North of Europe. Even during the kingdom of Henry VIII (1509-1546), English priorities were addressed to their rupture with Rome and the consolidation of his dynasty on the English throne.
Only with Queen Elizabeth I did the English Monarchy begin its strategy of colonial deployment.
2 causes
POLITICAL-RELIGIOUS:
When Phillip II decided to stop by force the Protestant riots in the Netherlands, Elizabeth opted to give support to the rebels.
bc she had proclaimed the Anglican faith of her kingdom in 1585
the growing Anglo-Spanish hostility had its projection in the Atlantic politics of the English Monarchy.
ECONOMIC:
the war in the Low Countries helped to aggravate the English economic crisis.
Therefore, English traders searched for new markets in the Baltic, the East Mediterranean, and Africa,
as well as began to participate in the lucrative slave trade between Guinea and the Caribbean Sea.
In the 1570’s, the English Monarchy started to practice two new strategies:
the corso (stealing of treasures from the Spanish ships)
and the establishment of colonies, mainly in order to find gold and silver mines.
Sir Humphrey Gilbert made the first attempt to establish English colonies in North America.
colonization should accomplish a double instrumental role:
GEOGRAPHICAL: to serve as bases from which to attack the Spanish dominions & to allow for the stopover of English ships in transit to the Asian coasts.
For Raleigh, his half-bro:
RELIGIOUS: to convert the Indians to Anglicanism;
POLITICAL, to attack the Spaniards;
SOCIAL, to give shelter to the unemployed and the dissidents.
—> Raleigh commissioned two failed attempts at colonization in Roanoke(Virginia) first in 1585 to Richard Greenville, and later in 1587 to John White; from here on, Raleigh moved his attention to the South of America (Guyana and the Orinoco region).
First Colonies:
The promotion of colonization (carried out by Raleigh until 1590) was executed now by privileged trade companies, the joint stock companies. To these, the English Monarchy gave the monopoly of trade with a certain distant region.
two groups of shareholders joined to form the Virginia Company.
One of these groups was based in Plymouth (New England) (Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s relatives) and supported by fishing, fur and sassafras (thought to cure the plague and the syphilis) trading.
The other group was headed by Richard Hakluyt and constituted by London traders.
Elizabeth Tudor had died in 1603 and James I Stuart brought the war with Spain to an end in the London Treaty (1604), which preserved the rights of England to found colonies away from the Spanish influence.
In less than a year, the Plymouth group failed in its intent because of
its deficient organization,
the hard climactic conditions,
the hostility of Indians in that area.
The London group arrived in Chesapeake Bay (Virginia) in April 1607. 100 survivors founded Jamestown—> mainly interested in getting riches, not in developing agriculture/ evangelization of Indians —> In less than a year, 75% of the men had died,
200 new men arrived in Virginia in 1608, commanded by the Captain John Smith, and only the sporadic help of the natives (Pocahontas episode) made possible the survival of the colony.
colony was almost at the edge of extinction until 1619.
contradiction between the company projects and the colonists’ wishes:
while the companies wanted to build a flourishing agricultural community to export raw materials to London,
colonists objected to working the land and centred their hopes in searching for precious metals.
This problem was finally coped with in 1618-1619, when Edwin Sandys found a solution in the combination of three factors:
1. tobacco -imitating the curing method of tobacco used by the Indians (Pocahontas)
2. private property
3. women
To promote the break up and improvement of land, Sandys offered large expanses of land to the different investor groups of the Company, so that they could in turn redistribute them among the planters, who travelled to Virginia.
1. private property: head-right land distribution
Most of the colonists arrived in America as servants, subject to contract, indentured servants.
1618-1619, Edwin Sandys, head-right land distribution
Only after a period of 4 to 7 years, could the servant acquire the right to settle on his own.
implied a handing over 50 acres at the end of the contract
this authorization of private, autonomous plantations, led by different groups of shareholders stimulated the appearance of sub-colonies =hundreds
2. tobacco
constituted by a group of farms, and dispersed, rustic country estates devoted mainly to tobacco cultivation.
In 1619 began the arrival in Virginia of the first contingent of women, contributing to the idea that the colonists would end up taking root in the New World.
4. legislative assembly: House of Burgesses
In 1619 the Dale Laws were derogated and a legislative assembly was erected = House of Burgesses.
assembly constituted 22 elected members
was presided over by a Governor and his Council
elected by the landowners.
chronic malnutrition
high mortality,
expansion of land to the cost of Indian territories with the consequent Indian attacks
12y. truce between Holland and Spain was coming to an end (1609- 1622), thirty English Puritans exiled in Leiden started to think about the option of finding refuge in America.
Along with another group of London Puritans, thesePilgrim Fathers arrive in 1620, mooring in Cape Cod.
This settlement remained out of Virginia’s jurisdiction—> the pilgrims decided, through the Mayflower Compact, to take control
named William Bradford their Governor.
had the financial support of the Council of New England, which reserved the land property and the exploitation profits during the first seven years.
In 1621 the Company disappeared
privatised the land for to the Plymouth survival, which continued as an independent colony until 1691, when it was annexed to Massachusetts.
In 1623 the Council of New England gave permission to a group of adventurers to establish themselves in Massachusetts Bay. In 1628, a group of puritan traders created the Company of New England to finance the settlement of puritans in Salem, a religious refuge.
in 1630 a group of 2000 puritans left for Massachusetts, where they grew thanks to their pilgrim fathers, spreading all around to cities such as Charlestown and Boston.
In 1634, Massachusetts would create two councils (houses): low, constituted by all city representatives, and a high one, consisting of a Governor and the Salem Council, all of them sanctioned by a property qualification.
The Massachusetts colony differed from Virginia in that these were not adventurers searching for fortune, but a group of people united by their religious faith. They were not poor and uneducated people, but literate traders, farmers and craftsmen. All these characteristics led to differences in the economic structures of both areas. While Virginia became mostly a plantation colony (tobacco), New England adopted a mixed agriculture that allowed their sustenance through other resources such as fishing, furs, timber, etc., and trading with them too.
Religious tensions were the main reason for pushing some dissidents away from the colonies, giving birth to new settlements. For example, Roger Williams denied the legality of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, because the property had been usurped from the Indians and also because he claimed for the separation of church and state. He found refuge among the Narragansett Indians, learned their language, and in 1636, acquired lands to found Providence, in Rhode Island. Likewise, Ann Hutchinson and her husband founded Portsmouth, William Coddington, Newport, and finally, Samuel Gorton, founded the city of Warwick. The whole colony was named Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
In 1636 the puritan Minister Thomas Hooker, whose idea of political order was more democratic and participative than that of the Massachusetts governors, founded Hartford, in the Connecticut valley. The yearning for peace and harmony between the different towns contributed to the writing of the first constitutional text, Fundamental Rules of Connecticut, which conferred upon it a government similar to Massachusetts. In 1662, the New Haven confederation was incorporated, founded by radical puritans in disagreement with the “relaxed” moral and political atmosphere.
The puritan Minister, John Wheelwright, decided upon exile from these lands and founded the city of Exeter, origin of New Hampshire. Soon many Puritans and Anglicans arrived and this contributed to its prosperity, and in 1677 New Hampshire became a royal colony.
The Catholic Colony:
Lord Baltimore explored the land between the Delaware and the Chesapeake bays with the intention of finding the perfect site for a refuge for the English Catholics. Up to 1634 the majority of the first colonists arriving were Protestant. From 1640, the Calverts promised to reward with land families that crossed the Atlantic as “servants subjected to contract”, according to the head-right system, already attempted in Virginia. Here the freemen enjoyed more political rights than in the rest of the colonies. This similarity with Virginia caused the colonists to specialize in tobacco crops and saw the introduction of slave labour for its production.
Culmination of Colonies:
The English Restoration of the Stuarts, after the proclamation of Charles II, began a new phase in colonization, which covered the gap between New England and the Chesapeake region and extended the British sovereignty further south, up to the limits of the Florida peninsula, Spanish possession from the 16th century.
The “Carolana” (Carolinas, 1663) in honour of the king Charles I, was first a refuge for French Huguenots, but the project never succeeded, because the rich promoters of colonization were mainly interested in the cultivation of agricultural products such as oil, wine or silk for exportation to the Mediterranean countries and in the “hunger for land”.
While in the north colonists established small farms where they cultivated tobacco and bred pigs, in the south the early implantation of slave labour and the perfect adaptation of rice (later indigo and cotton) to the climactic and edaphic conditions of the region, quickly transformed the economic and social structures. They also began to trade in buying slaves from the Indians to the point that in 1708 there were 1400 Indian slaves in South Carolina.
I.10. Culmination of Colonies: from Restoration to George II (II)
In New York (1664), from the beginning of the 17th century, Dutchmen had explored the Hudson River, and in 1621 they founded the colony of New Holland, embracing the whole Hudson valley and Manhattan Island (and Long Island). Thanks to the fur trade with the Iroquois Indians, the city of New Amsterdam flourished to concentrate most of the colony’s inhabitants by the beginning of the 1660s.
Due to geopolitical reasons, the British invaded, without violence. Long Island and New Holland became divided into two regions: the northern part called New York, and the Southern one called New Jersey. From here on, New York (1664) now received thousands of immigrants from the British Isles, France, Flanders and Germany, creating a peculiar crucible of races and religions.
In New Jersey (1664), there was not such a huge immigration and Lord Berkeley sold in 1674 his eastern part to a Quaker congregation (the Friends’ Society), and Carteret his western part in 1682 to William Penn and other Quakers.
In Pennsylvania, the principal aim of Penn was to create a “community of saints”, a paradise of tolerance where the Quakers, not only English but from all Europe, could live in peace. The second objective was to increase his family’s fortune through the selling of lands, which produced the exodus of many English and Welsh Quakers as well as German Protestants.
In the first third of the 17th century, the first Europeans to inhabit Delaware were Swede and Dutch, though they received well the British conquest in 1664.
The last of the thirteen colonies was Georgia, whose birth dates from 1732. The authentic leader of colonization was James Oglethorpe, who planned to colonize this territory with convicts accused of debts. He ruled a military regime, until the 1750s, when Oglethorpe’s laws were annulled and the colony really started to grow, from 5000 to 9000 in only a decade. A third of these were slaves devoted to the cultivation of rice and indigo, as in the neighbouring South Carolina. Finally, the whole territory between the French Canada and the Spanish Florida was inhabited and under British sovereignty.
By the time of the Restoration of Charles II in England in 1660, Puritan New England had developed into a relatively prosperous, stable, and independent colony. Puritan villages proliferated, and different local governments, customs, and economies, replicated the various peasant cultures of places such as Yorkshire, Kent, East Anglia, and the West Country of England. On the whole, travelers in New England in the 1650s describe flourishing agricultural communities of pious hardworking families, where the churches and the state appear to cooperate in governance.
In larger cities, such as Boston and Salem, there aroused a merchant class based upon manufacturing, the fishing industry, and foreign trade, while the rural villages remained dependent upon farming. Open-field farming continued in some areas until the late seventeenth century, but most land was converted into small individual holdings.
As church and congregational power expanded, those seeking admission had to testify publicly about their conversion experience, and in some cases their spiritual relations had to conform to a complicated morphology of conversion established by the clergy. Such tests discouraged applicants, though perhaps not by design.
During the 1650s a group of ministers led by Richard Mather and James Allen explored ways of modifying membership policies to respond to the problem of the unconverted children of the saints. In the 1630s, the clergy had decided that the children of the saint could be baptized in infancy on the assumption that as children of the elect they would surely experience conversion, and become full church members. This was called the Half-Way Covenant in the 1662.
According to a Boston Synod, doctrine was revised allowing the grandchildren of the founders to be baptized, but still didn't solve the problem of the unconverted parents. The same conflict recurred throughout New England during the second half of the century, and the themes of Thomas Brown's preaching against the "rising generations" were repeated in sermons now called Puritan jeremiads. Taking the texts from Jeremiah and Isaiah, these orations followed and re-inscribed a rhetorical formula that included recalling the courage and piety of the founders, lamenting recent and present ills, and crying out for a return to the original conduct and zeal. In current scholarship, the term jeremiad has expanded to include not only sermons but also other texts that rehearse the familiar tropes of the formula such as captivity narratives, letters, covenant renewals, as well as some histories and biographies.
Natural events, including fires, floods, droughts, earthquakes, and the appearances of comets; internal conflicts such as renewed fighting with the Indians, increasing occurrences of Satanic possession and witchcraft, and growing secularism and materialism; external intrusions like the arrival of numbers of Quakers and Anglicans; the revocation of the Massachusetts Bay charter by the London Court of Chancery; and finally the installation in 1686 of the Anglican royal governor, Edmund Andros gradually, insistently, these events and the internal tensions present from the 1630s unraveled the Puritan community.
The tradition of opening the annual General Court in May with an election sermon began in Boston in 1634 and continued until 1834. Most of the best known ministers gave at least one election sermon, and beginning in 1667, the sermons were printed yearly with few exceptions. The election sermon followed the standard three-part division used for most sermons. It opened with a biblical text followed by an "Explication", which closely examined the meaning of each of the words of the text. Often the preacher would review the biblical events that foreshadow the text, and his audience knew to look for typological parallels to the current New England situation, which the preacher would make explicit in the later "Application".
In the second part of the sermon, the "Doctrine", the preacher announced the general laws and lessons that he perceived to be the basis of the text, and then divided some larger principles into "Propositions" and "Reasons". The third section, the "Application", demonstrated how the Doctrine and Proposition pertained to contemporary New England. Here, the preacher expanded upon several uses on the analogy between the biblical past and recent experiences.
From the late 1660s through the early 1690s, gloomy prospects and catastrophic fears of the imminent failure of the holy experiments led most ministers to construct their jeremiads as mournful dirges. Overall, the jeremiads had a complicated seemingly contradictory communal function. On the one hand, they were designed to awaken a lethargic people, on the other hand, in their repetitive and ritualistic nature, they function as a form of reassurance, re-inscribing proof that the saints were still a coherent body who ruled New England in covenant with God, and other His sometimes chastising and yet ultimately protective hand. The tensions between these competing, yet finally reconciled purposes, gives the jeremiads their literary complexity and power.
Often held to be the prototype of the form is Samuel Danforth's (1626-74), A Brief Recognition of New England's Errand into the Wilderness, which was preached in 1670 and published the following year. Throughout the 1670s and in the early 1680s, especially preachers used election days, fats days, funerals, executions, and any special events to perform the jeremiad ritual, and more often than not, the younger or "rising" generation was the chosen target. Increase Mather proved masterful in his exploitation of the form, and with four sermons each, he and his son Cotton preached more election sermons than any other ministers. In addition to his Day of Trouble is Near (1674), Increase's jeremiads included: A Renewal of Covenant the Great Duty Incumbent on Decaying and Distressed Churches (1677), Pray for the Rising Generation (1678), and A Call from Heaven to the Present and Succeeding Generations (1679).
Whether the clergy continued to preach jeremiads in the middle to late 1680s at the rate they did in the 1670s is not certain, but fewer such sermons were printed in those years. The sermons that were published were on the whole more reassuring, less occupied with the young and with the decline of religion. Perhaps the specter of perceived external enemies in the form of Indians and the royal governors with their Anglican brethren, serve to unify the Congregationalists and shift blame to external scapegoats.
The content of the sermons published during the late 1680s indicates that the clergy were approaching their congregations with more assurance and discussing the accessibility of communion. As increasing numbers of younger people became full church members in the 1680s, the clergy may have recognized that what they have perceived to be a decline in piety was more like a myth, and appearance generated by youthful humility and spiritual temerity, and by community need for internal reasons to explain difficult times.
After the witchcraft delusion in the 1690s, the number of jeremiads increased again, but not to the level or frequency of the earlier period or with the emphasis on the failures of the young. Although jeremiad preaching never returned to the fury of the 1670s, the ritualistic form had become firmly established in the culture, and groups of immigrants coming to America in the centuries to follow would rehearse the familiar sequence: idealism and dreams of success, followed years later by feelings of disillusionment, loss and disappointment, especially with complacent children, thereby keeping the jeremiad resonant with the American imagination. Some examples of jeremiad-like literary works are Moby Dick, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Life in the Iron Mills, Walden, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, or Gravity's Rainbow. These works and many others have all been called jeremiads, because they seem to call for a return to a former innocence and moral strength that has been lost.
Captivity narratives usually follow the jeremiad design with the victim reflecting upon the period of his or her life, preceding the capture and discovering personal fault that have brought on God's punishment. During the time of captivity, the repentant victim searches within the self and vows to return to earlier piety. A decision that appears to be rewarded when the captive is freed. Mary White Rowlandson's captivity narrative, the first and most famous can be read as such a jeremiad.
Cotton Mather (1663-1728), was the author of the grandest, indeed, epic jeremiad, and the most controversial figure of late Puritan New England. Born in Boston in 1663, the first child of Increase and Maria Cotton Mather, and the grandson of the eminent founders Richard Mather and John Cotton, third generation Cotton, was practically destined from birth to go to Harvard, and to become a leading divine. Today he is best known Puritan minister partly because of his prolific authorship of over four-hundred publications, and because of the persistent though unjustified myth that he was the most severe and self-righteous of Puritans. He is most identified with his works on witchcraft, Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions (1689) and The Wonders of the Invisible World. Observations as well as Historical as Theological upon the Nature, the Number, and the Operations of the Devils (1693).
With the burden of upholding the reputation of the two most prominent clerical families of New England, precocious Cotton was a pious and studious, but unhappy, youth who mastered Latin and Greek well enough by the age of eleven to pass Harvard's entrance exam. With visitations of angels to inspire him, and a consciousness of divine to drive him, Cotton frantically wrote, preached, ministered, prayed, wept, fretted, counseled, taught, and campaign for various causes throughout his life, winning the admiration of some and the enmity of others. For all of his seemingly ceaseless and frenetic activity, he always felt that his deeds were inadequate, and that his performance failed to fulfill the promise of his name. Although Mather did bring many hardships upon himself, through his dogmatism as his sense of superiority, he also endured many unexpected personal sufferings.
Though Mather is often thought of as one of the harshest and most ideologically rigid of Puritan theologians, he was actually somewhat liberal and opposed his father's conservatism on many issues, i.e. opposing his father, Cotton convened study groups to instruct young people on Christ's free grace and to encourage their assurance of salvation.
In his biography of Anne Bradstreet, he warmly praised her intelligence, talent, and piety. However, he was especially disturbed by impious women and was particularly venomous toward the memory of Anne Hutchinson. Also, he invoked imagery of the female body negatively in discussions of sin and error; doctrinal adultery, wombs of misconception, monstrous fetuses of heresy, and similar tropes appear throughout his works.
Certain contradictions also exist in Mather's life and writings in regard to matters involving Africans and Native Americans. Mather often publicly denounced the cruelty of the African slave trade. In regard to Naive Americans, Mather learned the Iroquois language (in addition to his six other foreign languages) and he worked to integrate the local Indians into white society. Of course, he did not recognize that this very process demonstrated a lack of respect for the native cultures.
Mather also wrote the first general book on science in America, which he sent in manuscript to the Society in 1714, and had published as The Christian Philosopher in 1721, followed in 1722 by his important Medical Text: The Angel of Bethesda ... an Essay upon the Common Maladies of Mankind ... and direction for the Preservation of Health. His research work was admired throughout Europe, and he was elected to the Royal Society. Perhaps Mather's most important contribution to science came in the field of medicine, a subject he pursued avidly all of his life. In 1721, during one of the smallpox epidemics that ravaged New England, about every twelve years, Mather recommended the use of inoculation, which he knew was being tried in other parts of the world.
Of Mather's many publications, the one that has generated the greatest number of modern interpretations is his Magnalia Christi Americana; Or, The Eclesiastical History of New England form Its First Planting in the Year 1620, unto the Year of Our Lord 1698. Running to over eight hundred pages, the complex book is divided into seven books: the settlement of New England, the lives of the Governors, the lives of the
Leading Ministers, Harvard College and the lives of its important graduates, Puritan Church Polity, "Remarkable Divine Providences," and problems that arose with heretics, Indians, Satan, Edmund Andros, and others. It contained several poems, notably elegies, by such writers as Benjamin Tompson. In spite of this seeming fragmentation, the overall effect is as a unified, epic jeremiad. In the text, Mather as his father had tried through narrative to reconstruct the devastations of King Phillip's War as spiritual victory, Mather similarly attempted to mystify the shattering of the Puritan synthesis, which never really existed, as the ordained fulfillment of sacred history.
The Phips biography anticipates Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, the Horatio Alger stories, and later fictions engaged in American self-fashioning. Moreover, it suggestively illustrates how Mather and his Magnalia Christi Americana performed at the intersection between two conflicting visions of America --one spiritual and one materialistic-- that he was attempting to reconcile, while recognizing that each mythology threatened to dismantle the other.
This motivation finds corresponding thematic resonance with one of Mather's most enduring works, his Bonifacious, an Essay Upon the Good (1720). Of all of Mather's writing, this was the text that most inspired Franklin. It also displays the liminality of Mather's intellectual situation as he slipped into an eighteenth-century mentality, recommending good works for their practical worldly values and proposing common sense as the way to salvation and wealth.
The New England world of the 1710 was a very different one from that of 1678, when Mather had graduated from Harvard, and there was probably no other person in 1710 who wanted so much to be able "To return unto that [Golden Age that] will make a Man a Protestant, and I may say, a Puritan." Mather passed on to these very men the Puritan dream he had struggled to keep alive, and in 1727, just the year before Mather died, Jonathan Edwards, the grandson of the Mather's old antagonist Solomon Stoddard, was ordained pastor of the Church at Northampton. There Edward would live a spiritual renewal that the Mathers had prayed for, and anticipated for five decades.
ANN BRADSTREET
Poetry was one of the most cultivated genres in the America of this period, as it was also in the Old World. Even though the poetical topics gathered any worry generated by the daily life, it is the puritanical poetry of religious character the one that most proliferated and major popularity reached. In this type of society, religious dogmas constituted a fundamental matter of literary expression and, as in other artistic areas, the Bible was the principal source of motives and images, itself model and justification of the tasks of versification; thus the didactic doctrinal shape of the 17th-century poetry and the thematic uniformity of the production of this period. If the poem dealt with the individual and of his relation with God, the Value of the composition resided in the divine revelation and not in the experience of the poetical subject.
There were several types of poetical compositions. In the first type predominates the didactic rhetoric and encloses a basically mnemonic end (learning the alphabet by means of rhymes). The second group devoted to the versification of historical contents considered too heroic to be treated in prose (Edward Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence). The third type was formed by the elegies written in commemoration of the death, of important persons or of less famous others in which the reader was reminded of the briefness and the senselessness of one’s life. A fourth type grouped the translations in verse of books or Biblical fragments. The fifth type is formed by the compositions of a basically didactic topic as Michael Wigglesworth’s The Day of Doom. Finally, it is necessary to emphasize a sixth group of poetical compositions in which fits the most personal, meditative and reflexive poetry that found its most important cultivators in Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor.
The advocates of Ann Bradstreet continue to construct an image of her as a cultural rebel, who produced poetry in spite of religious and social forces against her as a woman, and as a Puritan. Similarly, when the poems of Edward Taylor were discovered and published in the late 1930s, many literary historians explained that his self- conscious artistry violated Puritan doctrines, and that his poetic impulses suggested that, he was by temperament more Catholic or Anglican than Puritan.
Bradstreet's productions were attributed to the leisure available to a woman of her high social standing, and Taylor's to the quiet life of his wilderness parish of Westfield, Massachusetts. To be sure, there are many valid historical reasons for assuming the term Puritan poetry to be an oxymoron.
Scholars generally agree that the three most productive and important poets in seventeenth-century New England were Anne Bradstreet, Michael Wigglesworth, and Edward Taylor. Anne Bradstreet's (c. 1612-72) The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America, published in London in 1650, remains the first extant book of poetry by an inhabitant of the Americas. Born in Northampton, England, Bradstreet was educated by her father, Thomas Dudley, steward to the Earl of Lincoln, in the earl's library, where father and daughter read extensively the classics as well as the writers of the English Renaissance.
_____________________________________________________________________________________ US Literature 1 UNIT 3.5 Prof. Eusebio V. Llàcer
Sailing aboard the Arbella with John Winthrop in 1630, the Bradstreets and Dudleys experienced great hardships during the three-month journey, which continued during the first years in New England. Shocked at the difficult conditions in Massachusetts and by the high rate of sickness and death among the colonists, Anne confided to her diary that she missed the comforts of England and that her "heart rose" with resistance to the new world and new manners" of America. Bradstreet at the time counted 18 years of age, and from a life of certain luxury and social and cultural sophistication came to know the adversities and big penuries of the colony. Both his Father and his husband became governors of Massachusetts. Although Bradstreet had eight children, it is necessary to underline the hostility with which the puritanical society considered the women who dare show some intellectual or literary interest. Bradstreet was conscious of the frame in which she lived, as her verses testify in "The Prologue".
Bradstreet was always a devoted and dutiful Christian, but she often questioned and privately rebelled against certain dogmas of Puritanism and the strong patriarchal authority in New England.
One source of personal frustration for Bradstreet and a context for illuminating certain subtleties of her poetry is the situation of women in seventeenth-century New England and England. From medieval times, the church and state has systematically subordinated women through both custom and law, and the Protestant revolt was especially male-centered, as demonstrated by the rejection of the Catholic's emphasis on the importance of the Virgin Mary.
If the social and economic aspects of the Puritan revolution had provided an opportunity for women to gain in social and political status in Massachusetts, that opportunity was dashed with the antinomian affair in 1630s, for Anne Hutchison became a symbol for decades after of the dangers of a woman's intellectual and verbal powers. Similar opinions about the necessarily finite role of women remained fixed well into the end of the century, and found frequent expression during the Salem witchcraft trials.
Given this limiting context, it is remarkable that Bradstreet was able to write poetry, have it published, and be reviewed for her talent during her time. Perhaps her unusual degree of freedom was the ironic result of having the influence of two political figures in her immediate family, her father and her husband.
As Puritans were taught to do, Bradstreet frequently examined her conscience to discover her sins and shortcomings. When she did not have a child between 1630 and 1633, she was convinced that her own spiritual failings had caused God to make her barren. What is clear in her poetry, however, is a frequent tension between a passion for the material world, natural beauty, books, home, and family, and the countervailing Christian dictum that the world is corrupt and vile, and vastly incomparable to the love of Christ.
Her collection of poems, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, was published in London by his brother-in-law, in 1650, without her knowledge (consent), and the
second edition, with some added poems entitled Several Poems with a Great Variety of Wit, appeared in Boston six years after her death.
Though her poems follow Elizabethan models and show the influence of Edmund Spenser, Philip Sydney, Guillaume Du Bartas and Walter Raleigh, in her process of maturation as poet and specially in the deep poetical reflection on Nature of "Contemplations", Bradstreet left behind these poetical models and outlined what for some critics turned out to be luminous glimpses of the English romanticism and the North American transcendentalism.
The poems that nowadays may appear to be more attractive are those that delve into domestic, familiar and loving topics. The principal reason is that in these a clear faith struggle is revealed, an agonizing ambiguity of the poetical voice before the doctrinal dogmas and her own emotions of the heart. Therefore, in the life of the poetess, his domestic vicissitudes turn out to be important poetical topics, since they rise over its literality and serve to justify the God's presence.
Though warmly received in London, the volume, The Tenth Muse actually contains none of the poems, on which Bradstreet reputation currently depends. She composed her more complex poetry over the next two decades, and these works were collected six years after her death, in a volume entitled Several Poems (1678).
The first section of the Tenth Muse includes four long poems, known as the quaternions and titled "The Four Elements", "The Four Humors of Man", "The Ages of Man", and "The Four Seasons." Demonstrating Bradstreet's broad learning, these works engage a range of historical and philosophical discourses and include elaborations on anatomy, astronomy, cosmology, physiology, and Greek metaphysics.
The second and expanded edition of her works, Several Poems (1678), provided the first publication of what had become Bradstreet's best known poems. Although she died before this work was published, she was able to correct many errors that had appeared in those works first published in the hastily produced Tenth Muse, and she added a new open, "The Author to Her Book". In "The Author to Her Book", Bradstreet notices her reaction before the publication of The Tenth's Muse. In this poem she uses metaphors inspired by the maternity to express the distress and dissatisfaction with his political creature, to which noble and well-meaning friends have stolen of her side and showed to the world, without bearing in mind that it was “dressed in rags”.
In Several Poems, there are verses relating to her personal illnesses, elegies on the deaths on her grandchildren and daughter-in-law, love poems to her husband, and a poem on the burning of her house.
As the century progressed, Puritan poets strayed from the didactic imperative, and Bradstreet later poems reflect this development. Her love poems to her husband are in fact completely free of religious instruction, and frankly acknowledge her desire for him when he is abroad. In "To My Dear and Loving Husband", she expresses the love for
the husband with sensual and mundane images, reaching in some moment passionate extremes that have not much to do with the puritanical dictums relative to the matrimonial love, as John Winthrop proposes in "A Model of Christian Charity": "I wish my son may never set, but burn / Within the Cancer of my glowing breast," and in another, "I, with many a deep sad groan / Bewail my turtle true ... Return my Dear, my joy, my only Love / ... Let's still remain but one, till death divide."
Many of Bradstreet's later poems also reveal the tension and anxiety she felt when she had to accept with pious resignation the tragedy of the death of a loved one or the loss of her property. Her sense of resentment toward God is barely concealed in some of these poems although her speaker always becomes reconciled to divine justice in the end. The poem she wrote after her house burned down in 1666 reveals most clearly the conflict between human attachment to the things of this world and the indifference required by Puritan doctrine. In "Here Follows Some Verses upon Burning Our House", she recalls in detail a whole series of dear material possessions, destroyed in the fire of her home. Along almost 30 verses she lists all the lost objects, mute witnesses of her existence, until, before the danger of being carried out by the nostalgia of earthly things and, therefore, of the ephemeral things, she stops to think about the pretense of the mundane things.
The reader cannot help but suspect that the next time the speaker passes the ruins she will dream again of the times and treasures she had "loved". In her meditations, Bradstreet correspondingly reflected on her difficulty in rejecting the physical world, concluding that only the knowledge of death rather than religious doctrine compels people to look forward to eternity.
In "In Reference to Her Children", 23 June, 1659, she suggests not only the idea of the maternal love towards his children, but the mother's concept as God. Here the poetical voice of the Mother does an inventory of the destination of the different sons and daughters, since they have been born until they leave the maternal nest to fly and to discover new worlds by themselves. She never mentions the existence of the Father. It is she who raises and educates them, and the one that expects to be remembered after her death. The surprising thing is that according to the puritanical conception it is the father and not the mother the representative figure of the authority and divine power.
In these poems, Bradstreet seems to use the poetry as the only means of transcending, more than of expressing, the daily reality that stifled her in her woman's condition of writer. What actually counts is the personal history of the poetical voice: the marital love, the children’s births, the filial love, and death. It is true that she writes within the frames of a puritan aesthetics in which the value of the poem only resides in its doctrinal efficiency. Her major achievement, nevertheless, is to trespass this threshold to become the first poetical voice of the North American literature.
MARY ROWLANDSON
Natural events, including fires, floods, droughts, earthquakes, and the appearances of comets; internal conflicts such as renewed fighting with the Indians, increasing occurrences of Satanic possession and witchcraft, and growing secularism and materialism; external intrusions like the arrival of numbers of Quakers and Anglicans; the revocation of the Massachusetts Bay charter by the London Court of Chancery; and
_____________________________________________________________________________________ US Literature 1 UNIT 4.5 Prof. Eusebio V. Llàcer
finally, the installation in 1686 of the Anglican royal governor, Edmund Andros -- gradually, insistently, these events and the internal tensions present from the 1630s unraveled the Puritan community.
The decades of 1660 and 1670 witnessed a series of crisis which threatened to destroy the endeavors of the first puritans; crises related to the restoration of the King Charles, to the apparent decadence of religion among the children of the first generation of immigrants and to the alliance of the Indian nations to claim the land they had been usurped. From the late 1660s through the early 1690s, gloomy prospects and catastrophic fears of the imminent failure of the holy experiments led most ministers to construct their jeremiads as mournful dirges. The principal literary consequence of these crises was the flourishing of the mythology of New England by means of the first English genre born in the New World: The American Puritan Jeremiad.
Increase Mather proved masterful in his exploitation of the form, and with four sermons each, he and his son Cotton preached more election sermons than any other ministers. In addition to his Day of Trouble is Near (1674), Increase's jeremiads included: A Renewal of Covenant the Great Duty Incumbent on Decaying and Distressed Churches (1677),Pray for the Rising Generation (1678), and A Call from Heaven to the Present and Succeeding Generations (1679).
Although jeremiad preaching never returned to the fury of the 1670s, the ritualistic form had become firmly established in the culture, and groups of immigrants coming to America in the centuries to follow would rehearse the familiar sequence: idealism and dreams of success, followed years later by feelings of disillusionment, loss and disappointment, especially with complacent children, thereby keeping the jeremiad resonant with the American imagination. Some examples of jeremiad-like literary works are Moby Dick, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Life in the Iron Mills, Walden, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, or Gravity's Rainbow. These works and many others have all been called jeremiads, because they seem to call for a return to a former innocence and moral strength that has been lost.
Cotton Mather (1663-1728), was the author of the grandest, indeed, epic jeremiad, and the most controversial figure of late Puritan New England. Born in Boston in 1663, the first child of Increase and Maria Cotton Mather, and the grandson of the eminent founders Richard Mather and John Cotton, third generation Cotton, was practically destined from birth to go to Harvard, and to become a leading divine. Today he is best known Puritan minister partly because of his prolific authorship of over four-hundred publications, and because of the persistent though unjustified myth that he was the most
severe and self-righteous of Puritans. He is most identified with his works on witchcraft, Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions (1689) and The Wonders of the Invisible World. Observations as well as Historical as Theological upon the Nature, the Number, and the Operations of the Devils (1693).
Of Mather's many publications, the one that has generated the greatest number of modern interpretations is his Magnalia Christi Americana; Or, The Eclesiastical History of New England from Its First Planting in the Year 1620, unto the Year of Our Lord 1698. Running to over eight hundred pages, the complex book is divided into seven books: the settlement of New England, the lives of the Governors, the lives of the Leading Ministers, Harvard College and the lives of its important graduates, Puritan Church Polity, "Remarkable Divine Providences," and problems that arose with heretics, Indians, Satan, Edmund Andros, and others. It contained several poems, notably elegies, by such writers as Benjamin Tompson. In spite of this seeming fragmentation, the overall effect is as a unified, epic jeremiad. In the text, Mather as his father had tried through narrative to reconstruct the devastations of King Phillip's War as spiritual victory, Mather similarly attempted to mystify the shattering of the Puritan synthesis, which never really existed, as the ordained fulfillment of sacred history.
Overall, the jeremiads had a complicated seemingly contradictory communal function. On the one hand, they were designed to awaken a lethargic people, on the other hand, in their repetitive and ritualistic nature, they function as a form of reassurance, re- inscribing proof that the saints were still a coherent body who ruled New England in covenant with God, and His other sometimes chastising and yet ultimately protective hand. The tensions between these competing, yet finally reconciled purposes, gives the jeremiads their literary complexity and power.
In the 17th century, the topics of the jeremiads abounded, apart from the sermons, in other types of works: the narratives of Indian captivity. These followed the model of the jeremiad on presenting a victim (man as woman) that, on having thought about a period of life previous to her capture, discovers the lacks that have made her deserving the divine punishment. During the time of captivity, the victim, as a reformed woman, searches in her interior and promises to return to the straight path, decision rewarded with her liberation. The narratives of Indian captivity, as the stories of slavery, are also autobiographical texts that constitute special variants of the topic of the providential history.
The most popular and influential stories of Indian captivity of the second half of the 17th century were that of Mary Rowlandson. Its complete title is: The sovereignty and goodness of GOD, together with the faithfulness of his promises displayed; being a narrative of the captivity and restoration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson... (1682). The first story of captivity that was published in New England, narrates Rowlandson's capture by the Narragansett Indians in February, 1676, during the war of the king Philip, name with which the colonists gave to the chief of the aboriginal Wampanoags, Metacomet, and
her experiences during twelve weeks that she spent as prisoner up to her being rescued through the payment of 20 pounds.
Mary White was born about 1637 in South Petherton, Somerset, England. Her father, John White, emigrated to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1638, and sent for the rest of the family in the following year. The family eventually moved to Lancaster, where her father, a wealthy landowner was one of the founders. She married Reverend Joseph Rowlandson, pastor of the church at Lancaster, and the Rowlandsons had four children, one of whom died in infancy. On February 10th, 1676, during King Philip's War, a Wampanoag raiding party attacked Lancaster, killing twelve citizens, including members of the Rowlandson family, burning their homes, and taking Mary and others captive. Mary's brother-in-law, eldest sister, and her sister's son were killed, and Mary's younger daughter, Sarah, whom she held in her arms, was fatally wounded by a bullet that first passed through Mary's side. Twenty-four were taken captive, and the parents were separated from their children. Despite his religious motive, it was a bold act for a woman to undertake a major prose work in the seventeenth-century England, and her text is the only lengthy piece of prose by a woman published in seventeenth-century America.
The war had devastated the population and the financial resources of New England at the very time King Charles was looking for a reason to intervene in the prosperous colony's affairs. Increase Mather's history of the wars, and Rowlandson's narrative all inscribe a spiritual construction over the brutal reality of the war, and allow Mather to assert that New England had been redeemed; thereby it seemed, the colonists acquired a divine reprieve to be left politically independent.
With personal feelings and Puritan rhetoric competing to control the text, the work is characterized by an internal tension resulting from the author's effort to reconstitute painful personal experiences in language, and at the same time to construct her narrative in accordance with the religious expectations and demands of Mather and her fellow Puritans. The economical and political reasons for the attack are either not apparent to Rowlandson, or are simply perceived as irrelevant. Even the converted natives, the "Praying Indians", are dehumanized; because some of them betrayed whites during the fighting. Rowlandson concludes that no Native American can be trusted.
As represented in the Sovereignty of the Goodness of God, the captivity period thus becomes the opportunity for Mary to prepare her heart for grace, to search out the corruption in her nature, and to rediscover the glory of God in his scriptures. Rowlandson thus becomes an emblematic public example or type --a New England Job- - reflecting the entire community's endurance of the war. She preaches the need to remember that only things and creatures of this corrupt world were lost, to accept God's just and wise punishment, and to thank Him for His cleansing fires, deliverance, and reconciliation.
The most passionate sections express her feeling about the loss of her loved ones and her new despair, for example, when Sarah died in the middle of the night, Mary did not
tell her captors that she was dead for fear that they would discard the body in the forest without a proper burial.
Rowlandson's text had to face the puritan reticence toward feminine writing. Consequently, it was published with a detailed and long title that already proclaims the orthodox dictums of didacticism and exemplary nature and justifies that the personal experience of the author is exposed for it is a God's sign. Secondly, the "preface to the reader" that precedes the story (possibly written by Increase Mather) stresses the explicit content in the title to underline that this one is a sample of gratitude of the author to God. Thirdly, in the first editions a sermon appears preached in Weathersfield, November 21, 1678, by Mr. Joseph Rowlandson, her husband, in which he comments on Jeremiah 23, 33. Nevertheless, though under the voices of indisputable patriarchal authority of the minister and husband, the extraordinary thing is that the estimation that she does of her experience among the Indians goes beyond the orthodoxy of the puritan jeremiad. The ambiguity with which the voice of the narrator observes the reality and the emotional power that reveals her vision are much more than mere religious exaltation.
Rowlandson's narrative is organized in displacements or movements (removes), according to the distance walked by the Indians during these days, in an attempt to rationalize this traumatic experience. This text is the first one of a long list of feminine responses to the reality of the New World. As other stories of captivity, it uses the trope of the captive Judea (Judea capta), the image of the Israel people under the Babylonian captivity, to narrate what can be interpreted simultaneously as a physical trip (from the civilization towards the Indian darkness) and as spiritual trip (the divine discovery in the affliction). The interpretation of the facts that happen to her is realized in typological form. The constant utilization of Biblical quotes reveals the parallelism between some figures and events of the sacred history and the narrator, who insists that God is the last justification of her actions.
Initially, Rowlandson shows a hostile and intolerant attitude towards the Indians, who are described by a whole series of own epithets of the puritan discourse. At the outset, she casts her narrative in the language of racist stereotypes that characterize white attitudes especially during and after the war. She describes the Indians as "atheistic, proud, wild, cruel, barbarous, brutish (in one word), diabolical creatures." Soon, however, her accounts shift away from the stereotypes. The Indians cease to be merely the "others" and become individuals with whom she engages in commerce and civilities. Rowlandson learns that she can use her sewing skills to make clothing and then barter for things she needs, especially food. In the text, these exchanges deconstruct Rowlandson preconceptions and indicate implicitly that the Indians are people much like herself, but with different traits and temperaments. The contact with the “other” re- educates her; even more, it manages to turn her even into something she initially condemned: in savage, being “savagery” a consciously constructed concept. This idea finds particular emphasis when Rowlandson earns a piece of bear meat for making a shirt and a quart of peas for knitting a pair of stockings.
With the postwar atmosphere of 1676, Rowlandson could not certainly assert that she found the Indians and their leaders to be more like her than she expected, but her account nonetheless demonstrates the subversive subtext of her narrative. Captivity constitutes, therefore, a test by which Rowlandson tries to consider her as an elected, interpreting her present condition as a just punishment, which expiation brings her great spiritual advantages and a lesson to the community. In addition, this reflection over her comes out as a sort of surprising personal discovery, on having interfered in a different culture, whose appraisal goes on from the condemnation without palliative to the comprehension, understanding and even the approval.
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