Colonial Writings and the New World, 1583-1671: Allegories of Desire (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Colonial Writings and the New World, 1583–1671: Allegories of Desire E. Thomson Shields (bio) Colonial Writings and the New World, 1583–1671: Allegories of Desire. Thomas Scanlan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. x + 242 pp., illus. As editor of The Roanoke Colonies Research Newsletter, I am excited to see new books that treat texts related to Roanoke colonization, such as Thomas Hariot's 1588 A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, especially when looked at in conjunction with the Theodore de Bry engravings that accompanied the publication of some of the editions of Hariot's work. My interest is piqued even further when such a text is juxtaposed to a discussion of the various editions of Bartolomé de las Casas's 1552 Brevissima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies) as translated into English between 1583 and 1656. Moreover, these are but two of the many items covered by Thomas Scanlan in Colonial Writings and the New World, 1583–1671: Allegories of Desire. Other texts discussed include Jean de Léry's 1578 History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil; Edmund Spenser's 1596 A View of the Present State of Ireland; sermons promoting English colonization in North America by Robert Gray, William Symonds, William Crashaw, and John Donne delivered and published between 1609 and 1623 (which Scanlan labels the Virginia sermons); Roger Williams's 1643 A Key into the Language of America; and John Eliot's 1671 Indian Dialogues. As this list indicates, Scanlan's book is broad in coverage, yet its topic is much more focused—the use of writing about native Americans in the discussion of colonial endeavors, especially those in North America, to create of a sense of English nationalism. While there are some problems with Scanlan's book, the issues he raises have enough interest and validity to make Colonial Writings and the New World a useful entry into the discussion of early American writing. [End Page 307] The value of Scanlan's work comes from two different strengths. First, it posits some interesting overarching arguments about writing in English concerning England's colonies.1 Scanlan argues that colonization "is never an end unto itself " in colonial writing (3). Instead, though telling about events in the colonies, colonial writing "must connect itself to some ultimate goal, which is inevitably removed from the colony" (3). In English colonial writing between the 1580s and 1670s, this ultimate goal, according to Scanlan, was English nationalism: "[T]he colonial project became one of the primary ways that the English used to articulate and define their own emerging sense of nationhood" (3). The most interesting element of Scanlan's argument develops a complex interrelationship between English national identity, Protestantism, and the representation of Native Americans. For Scanlan, English Protestants consistently described their relationship with native Americans in terms of fear and love—usually meaning that the Native Americans both feared and loved the English. Yet the English revealed a sense of fear and love about Native Americans themselves. What is particularly good about Scanlan's argument is his recognition that there is not just one static representation of Native Americans or of the English themselves in terms of fear and love. As objects of writing, Native Americans can sometimes stand for people to be colonized, sometimes as allegorical figures representing English Protestants, sometimes as people in need of the civilizing effects of Protestant conversion, and sometimes as being more Christian than professedly Christian, particularly Puritan, people. However, for Scanlan, these representations of Native Americans are not ends unto themselves in English colonial writing. Instead, they serve an "ultimate goal, which is inevitably removed from the colony." It is in arguments about nationhood as connected to religion that Scanlan's analysis of colonial English writing becomes its most engaging. The period that Scanlan chooses to write about is one of religious turmoil in England—from the time of Queen Elizabeth I's assertion of Protestant control over England in the late sixteenth century with its coinciding tension between more traditional Anglicans and the increasingly powerful Puritans; through to the...