Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System Stephen Shapiro (bio) Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System. Michelle Burnham. Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2007 232 pp. Michelle Burnham’s Folded Selves: New England Writing in the World System is one of the works that will help redefine twenty-first-century colonial American studies, especially as it speaks to current concerns for locating American Studies within a wider geographical and intellectual perspective. Her first monograph, Captivity and Sentiment (1997), was quickly recognized for its useful consideration of sentimental discourses throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and with the increased deft of Folded Selves, Burnham reveals herself as a scholar whose personal development gauges her discipline’s collective strength. Beyond the substance of the monograph’s arguments, Burnham’s writing style also merits praise. Her chapters are an ideal prose for their legibility, balance of textual readings against conceptual frameworks, and concision. Any contemporary graduate student, regardless of her or his specialty, would do well to study them as a model of forensic equipoise. As a study of relatively canonical Puritan-era texts by and about William Bradford, Thomas Morton, Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and the Salem witch trials, Folded Selves makes a series of significant interventions. First, Burnham shows that “because the literary historical narrative of New England has been utterly dependent on the opposition between commerce and continuity, between economic and spiritual gain . . . studies of colonial and early national America have tended to either disregard or demonize economic concerns in context” (10–11). Yet it is often the case that the period’s British American texts, like Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, mainly focus on economic affairs. In a quick gesture, Burnham reveals that all too often prior scholarly readings promoted so highly manicured [End Page 738] a reading that they deserve to be labeled as frankly ideological, in the negative sense of bordering on censorship, especially during the Cold War period that abbreviated these texts for smooth digestion within mass market anthologies. Burnham reveals that a “declension” model of colonial New England, associated with Perry Miller, saw New England agents as free from the economic motivations that would later contaminate the spiritual ideals that America was founded upon and thus silenced the regional actors’ implication within and formation by an emerging capitalist world system based on grasping accumulation strategies and exploitative labor relations. Such a paradigm broadly helped underwrite a justification for postwar American imperialism as disinterested, where colonizing New England through “good intentions” was felt to be analogous to twentieth-century interventions in other global terrains. Using a set of keywords—investment, merchants, inflation, equivalence, debt, and event—as chapter headers, Burnham reads her texts as filling out a set of differing, yet linked, perspectives and strategic positions within the New England regional subunit and the developing Atlantic mercantile economy. Of Plymouth Plantation, for instance, expresses the uneasy relationship between “the Plymouth planters who settled the colony and the London merchants who provided the capital for the venture” (49). This was not a conflict against economic interests, but one between different responses to the problem of creating (surplus-)value. Burnham reads this as a “profound clash between the still largely feudalist ethos subscribed to by the farmers and artisans of Plymouth and the mercantile capitalist orientation” (61) of Bradford’s antagonists, the merchant adventurers who invested money in the colony in hopes of reaping future profits. The tension arising from the settlers’ dependence on overseas financiers, while desiring to be free from their control, involving the effort to separate the present condition from its structural conditions, results in the “plain style” of Bradford’s prose. The plain style is Bradford’s rhetorical strategy against the colony’s (or its leadership’s) foreclosure by London creditors. Bradford prefers an ostensibly unadorned language to what he denounces as that emanating from local merchants’ sly complaints about the colony’s financial mismanagement to overseas authorities. By damning the London financial agents through accusations of dishonesty and prevarication, Bradford’s frank admission of the colony’s poor yields stands as a due diligence of transparent accounting of finances that might...