Night Journeys: The Power of Dreams in Transatlantic Quaker Culture (review)

Abstract

Night Journeys: The Power of Dreams in Transatlantic Quaker Culture. By Carla Gerona. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Pp. x, 290. Cloth, $35.00.)There is something deeply private about dreams, and while they have been used for years by psychologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars map the mystic terrains of mind and culture, have remained peculiarly passive, elusive, and resistant historical analysis. a fascinating new book, Carla Gerona seeks rectify this situation, inverting the usual approach dream analysis by examining the social and political dimensions of early modern night journeys and their importance in actively shaping the culture of American Quakerism. Gerona's chief insight is this: are not only models of culture, they are models for it. Rather than understanding as simple (or complex) reflections of internal psychological states, she convincingly demonstrates that in Quakerism, as least, were a collective endeavor (12).Building upon the insights of Phyllis Mack, Mechal Sobel, and Susan Juster, Gerona offers a trenchant analysis of the evolution of Quaker from revolutionary England postrevolutionary America, illuminating the dynamic tension between the implications of direct revelation and the social demands of group membership-or less subtly, between individual agency and social control. The Society of Friends, she notes (in familiar fashion), emerged from a revolutionary milieu in which a belief in the prophetic potential of was ubiquitous, and Friends exploited this potential its fullest, leveling a critique against the state and established church. More than any of their sectarian peers, Quakers developed a uniquely intense practice of recording and circulating their prophetic within their meetings and beyond, each minister sharing in the discussion and interpretation, each dreamer and each auditor imparting his or her own shades of meaning, dialectically, collectively shaping a common Quaker identity in the process.Favoring the historical Weber over the ahistorical Freud, Gerona demonstrates that despite the egalitarian ethos of early Quakerism, not all interpreters were created equal. Following the Restoration, weighty Friends pioneered ways of doing dreamwork that controlled the sect's most radical elements, shifting the interpretive focus of dreaming from church and state onto individuals and the Society (50). Particularly among women, became moralistic, increasingly concerned the regulation of behavior and self (110). Particularly in America, ministers seized control of dreams, encouraging those that instilled a sense of internal restraint and discipline in a widely scattered flock.It is here, when examining the American experience, that Gerona's book is simultaneously at its most provocative and most in need of greater nuance. Her otherwise persuasive narrative is at times held back by a suite of terms that defy easy characterization-empire, radicalism, and privacy among them. America, she argues, became maps for an imaginary (and sometimes tangible) New World, enabling Quakers to structure experiences diverse peoples, especially Native Americans and Africans and develop the cultural characteristics now regarded as peculiar Friends. In short, she argues, Quakers turned dreams into mental maps that guided their expansionist movements, sometimes literally, enabling them deal creatively the new multicultural world into which they had entered, and put a unique stamp on British imperialism (71-72, 129).Yet the unique imperial role Gerona claims for Quakers requires additional attention. The assertion that Quakers were complicit in imperial expansion, pressing forward, as she writes, with much blood and at the expense of indigenous peoples, Africans, and less fortunate Europeans, seems both too obvious and too simple, and Gerona never adequately plumbs what she admits is an ambiguous relationship between Quakers and the state (5, 82). …