Response: Postexceptionalist Puritanism: Rocking the Foundations

Abstract

Many important insights enrich all five of these essays, which I will elucidate below, but the two that particularly stand out to me as rocking not only the foundations of Puritan exceptionalism but as having wider implications for post-American exceptional historiography are these. First, the conclusion Molly Farrell draws from her comparison of discourses of disgust that overtook the so-called antinomian controversy in 1636–38 and the so-called partial-birth abortion debate in 2003: “In the seventeenth century, intense affects conjured through scrutiny of women’s bodies attended colonial and global economic transformations, elucidating the potential work of disgust in the present. Identifying rogue bodies, rogue midwives, and rogue obstetricians—and in the process heightening the disgust they inspire—are activities integrally related to conceptions of sovereignty, both then and now.” If we attend to the working of disgust across historical moments, then, Farrell concludes, “historicist approaches to Puritan texts make way for feelings that persist, and connect, and discharge, across vaster coordinates of space and time.” This is a provocative linkage of literary and cultural discourses and global economics.And second, Jordan Alexander Stein’s finding that “textual editing has been an unacknowledged but decisive force in undoing the queerness of early American literature” and his broader argument concerning “how many of the ordinary labors associated with recovery and publication—the scholarly acts that stand, ultimately, behind nearly any interpretation of any literary text—often sustain an unrecognized sexual politics that shapes not only texts and editions but, furthermore, the scholarly debates about how to interpret the texts scholars and students read in those editions.” Both arguments impugn a historicism that is narrowly bounded and that closes down rather than opens up avenues of analysis and connection to other times and places. And both invoke affective and experiential approaches that require not just a consideration of bodily experiences but an attention to specific bodies, to the specificity of bodies, and to their material implications.We should not conclude from these two insights that the “new Puritan studies” rests on a retreat from history. Even though Farrell herself voices the need to “free” her discipline from the shackles of historicism, her analysis benefits immensely from a deeper historical understanding of the discourses of disgust, the circulation of stories of monstrous births, and colonial American Puritanism’s grounding in transatlantic intellectual and affective cultures. It is what she does with this historicist grounding that provides the foundation-shaking effects. Likewise, Stein argues for a different kind of historicism that acknowledges “the archives of sexuality” that do not “erase nonnormative sexualities from the historical scenes of Puritan writing,” so that queerness “bears an undue burden of historical proof.” Although these seem like seismic events in our field, they are part of a shifting set of critical paradigms that move away from both the tyranny of narrow forms of historical contextualization and hegemonic masculinist forms of knowledge production.Why does early American studies always seem to be late to the game? I remember asking this question as I was starting my career in the 1980s, when conferences on early American topics were not only dominated by men with at least three names and often a suffix but were decidedly antitheory, especially anti–French high theory. I absconded to meetings on English Renaissance and early modern topics and texts, where we could bask in the Continent’s glow and gab on about gynesis, abjection, and deconstruction to our hearts’ content. Then, women and their supporters asked this question again in the 1990s, eager to bring feminist, gendered, and multicultural perspectives to the study of early America. This push launched the Society of Early Americanists, which gave the field an institutional home and a hospitable space for trying out new approaches. The latest incarnation of Puritan studies began with the decentering of New England from the narrative of American origins and proceeded with an embrace and extrapolation of transatlantic and transhemispheric approaches, a global, planetary perspective, and post-Enlightenment affective, experiential, materialist, and posthuman turns.One response to the question of the field’s belatedness has sometimes been: there are few/no women in the early canon, few/no people of color, few/no queers. But we all know how specious this argument is: one doesn’t need a female author to mount a feminist critique or a queer author to mount a queer or queer of color critique. Another response is the field’s fear of “presentism,” the mistaken idea that texts can be accurately read only in terms of their moment of composition. Several recent studies, notably Cristobal Silva’s Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of Early New England Narrative (2011), make anachronism a productive means of illuminating the “entanglements” of coloniality. Rather, it is safe to say that early American studies—Puritan studies in particular—is burdened with the dubious and distorting honor of representing if not the entry point for an American cultural and intellectual tradition, then at least an entry point of importance. So much ideological baggage attends this mythology one needs a magic lantern to see around or beyond it.One tactic of the new Puritan studies for addressing this issue of origins has been to reverse it, which seems a bit like kicking it down the road. Rachel Trocchio hints at this position in her conclusion to a discussion of Thomas Hooker’s theory of memory and his program of spiritual preparation: “Attention to Hooker’s memorial style, I am suggesting, reanimates a long history of scholarship that has placed American Puritanism at the end of a European intellectual inheritance, rather than as the start of an American telos. The Puritans were immigrants, they were English, and Hooker’s use of a memorial style was not an innovation but a continuity.” Fair enough. But if American Puritanism is the “end of a European intellectual inheritance,” then what develops in its place?Might it be more precise to think of American Puritanism as the “afterlife” of the European Reformation, living on in ways that its parent traditions might not recognize or champion? On this question, it might be helpful to recall Wendy Brown’s (2010, 21) insight about “post-ness”: “The prefix ‘post’ signifies a formation that is temporally after but not over that to which it is affixed. ‘Post’ indicates a very particular condition of afterness in which what is past is not left behind, but, on the contrary, relentlessly conditions, even dominates a present that nevertheless also breaks in some way with this past. In other words, we use the term ‘post’ only for a present whose past continues to capture and structure it.” Farrell illustrates this particular “afterness” in her depiction of the virulent afterlife of discourses of disgust as tendencies of a past that we, in the present, want to feel like we have broken from based on an idea of progress but that continue to “capture and structure” our ways of feeling and believing.If we rethink American Puritanism as an end, then we are bound to talk about “beginnings,” which raises all sorts of problems. This brings me to one more general comment on the larger project these essays engage. One area that remains unilluminated in the present gathering of essays is a recognition of the salience of Native American literature, orature, textuality, and culture to early American and Puritan studies. I will have more to say about this in my discussion of individual essays, but it behooves us to acknowledge the entrenched Western-centrism of even these critical interventions that are meant to offer ways out of our blinkered exceptionalism. To locate Puritans within Atlantic and hemispheric frames as part of the larger Atlantic empires is necessarily to involve them in the colonial and imperial activities that purported to “discover,” “name,” and “conquer” the many and diverse Indigenous peoples and nations across the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and later in Africa and Asia.In their call for papers, the organizers of this cluster asked, “Can we talk of Indigenous or African Puritanisms?” Perhaps those essays have not yet been written, but that begs the question of Eurocentrism. American Puritanism is inextricably entangled with Indigenous cultures, not least of all in terms of cohabitation, genocide, and conversion. What happens when Native epistemologies meet nonseparating Congregationalism in geographies completely foreign and seemingly hostile to the latter? Puritans talked a good game about conversion, but when war threatened their fledgling economies in the 1670s, they went first for the “praying towns” of Native American converts as hotbeds of spies and traitors, and slaughtered the lot. Mohegan activist and Christian minister Samson Occom (1723–92) represents a crucial node in this cultural network. Although ordained in the Presbyterian church, that was only for convenience. He was converted by New Lights minister James Davenport, educated by New Lights Congregationalist Eleazar Wheelock, published a book of religious hymns he authored in the style of Isaac Watts, and preached, missionized, and ministered in what we can call a late flowering of a tradition of Native Puritanism. We need to hearken to what figures like Occom and his contemporary Phillis Wheatley, a poetic prodigy and African slave, have to tell us about the racial and cultural inflections of colonial Puritanism.Christopher Trigg’s essay, “Islam, Puritanism, and Secular Time,” makes several notable moves that we see across these five essays. First, he argues for reading Puritan texts in terms of a “deeper” form of historical contextualization, one that opens out across time and space and challenges inherited ideas about Puritan beliefs. This, then, leads us not only to reconsider the legacy of early colonial Puritan thought but to show how it was specifically constructed by later generations of scholars to promote a liberal, pluralistic mythology of our colonial beginnings. Perhaps if we gain a more accurate understanding of the intellectual and theological foundations of our “cherished ideals,” we can imagine fairer and truly just bases on which to proceed. In framing his investigation of the touted religious tolerance of Roger Williams with contemporary debates about fundamentalist “Puritan Islam,” Trigg shows, as do the other essays in this group, that Puritanism as a cultural disposition or discourse is not a thing of the past but very much the stuff of our present lives, if different in location and personnel. Finally, Trigg echoes the other essays by widening his scope from Williams in the seventeenth century to a broader critique of the universalism of American secularism. This represents a strong challenge, not only to our scholarly perspectives but to our national foreign policy and our standing in the world. Does the Islamic world need saving? Or do we need to be rescued from our narrow, narcissistic savior complex?Trigg ably demonstrates that Williams’s vision of religious tolerance, when seen in the light of his millenarian views, is inclusive only because it is provisional. When the end comes, Trigg finds, Williams holds that all those who believe differently will come to see the truth of the Protestant path and the “saved” will be comfortably homogeneous again. Despite these views, which render Williams “as close to a figure such as Donald Trump as to Trump’s [liberal] opponents,” contemporary philosophers like Martha Nussbaum and contemporary politicians invoking freedom of religion as the American way lionize Williams as the so-called apostle of liberty. Trigg asks if, perhaps, “the provisional, temporary quality of American pluralism were the key to its longevity?” But in tracing the present turbulence over the West’s attitudes toward Islam, he finds that “a higher time of projected homogeneity,” which we inherit from Williams’s Puritanism, though it has lost much of its religious garb, “is central to certain contemporary constructions of citizenship and nationhood” and to a notion of universalism and “civil secularism.” He concludes, wisely, that expressions and ideas of tolerance should be “set aside,” as does “the belief that Western secularism constitutes the culmination of history . . . since it implies that those outside the Judeo-Christian tradition have nothing to offer posterity.”Trigg’s conclusions about the limits of tolerance echo but do not go quite as far as Brown’s claims in her study Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (2008) in which she argues that especially since 9/11, discourses of tolerance equate intolerance with barbarism and are, paradoxically, underwriting the continued imperialism of the West. While I applaud Trigg’s argument and his successful transhistorical connections, I question some of his formulations. He attributes our present anxiety over the integration of Muslims to a “lingering desire for moments of transcendence,” which are inevitably contaminated by Puritanism’s legacy of “projected homogeneity.” Can he—can we—imagine a “higher time” of nonhierarchical differences? Trigg examines only the conservative and liberal visions of tolerance, but there are other visions of inclusivity out there, progressive and radical visions that are not beholden to a Puritan legacy: José Esteban Muñoz’s (2009) vision of queer futurity in his book Cruising Utopia, to name only one. Finally, feminists have addressed some of these issues and presented alternatives. Trigg quotes anthropologist Saba Mahmood (2015), who grounded her critique of Western secularism on a rejection of the notion of rights based on individual autonomy and freedom. It is worth recalling that on November 17, 2001, First Lady Laura Bush gave a radio address to the nation justifying our bombing of and intervention in Afghanistan on account of the plight of women and children under that regime: “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women” (Bush 2001). Another anthropologist, Lila Abu-Lughod, published a much-discussed essay, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” in which she suggests using “a more egalitarian language of alliances, coalitions, and solidarity, instead of salvation” (2002, 789).Daniel Grace’s essay on the early oratory of Fredrick Douglass and its vehement criticism of Protestant Christianity for its refusal to reject slavery makes interventions similar to those in Trigg’s essay. Most prominently, Grace shows how Douglass built his repudiation of American antebellum Protestantism on an attack of its roots in New England Puritanism and, thereby, cast suspicion on the burgeoning mythology of Puritanism as a champion of religious liberty. Such a mythology materialized through the popularity and reprinting of George Bancroft’s 1834 history, in which a regional account of colonial struggles took on national and originary import. Williams makes a cameo appearance in Douglass’s colorful illustration of Puritanism’s “collective” intolerance (though whether that included Williams is unclear). He observed dryly: “Roger Williams found more toleration among the Indians of Rhode Island than among the Puritans of Massachusetts” (1979, 556–57).In addition, Grace spies a strategy in Douglass’s oratory and critique of Protestantism that informs his postexceptionalist approach. He cites the work of Cody Marrs (2013, 463), who observes about Douglass’s transnational politics that “transcending the state is, immediately and generatively, a labor of reimagining the links between the past, the present, and the future.” Then, in close reading an arresting passage from a speech Douglass gave in New York in 1847, fresh from his European tour, Grace exhorts us to recall “the rhetorical context of America” and “Marrs’s call to view, as did Douglass, the concept of context as something other than a temporally static phenomenon.” Temporal fluidity as a contextual strategy gains potency when we see how, in his speech, Douglass produces “remarkable geographical and temporal reconfigurations”—positioning himself as both “American Puritan and British religious imperialist,” effecting “a reset of the nation’s religious founding” and, along the way, describing in frighteningly prescient details the rationale Trump offers today for a border wall with Mexico! In a way, and despite some of the more troublesome aspects of Douglass’s early oratory, such as its Islamophobia and unacknowledged imperialism, we might think of “the intellectual power of his transatlantic critique of American exceptionalism” as part of a long reassessment that eventuates in the late twentieth century’s exfoliation of layers of rhetoric and myth.Rachel Trocchio’s recontextualization of Thomas Hooker’s theology of preparation in light of the European debate between Giordano Bruno’s Renaissance theories of the “memory palace” and Petrus Ramus’s attempted replacement of “rhetoric” by “dialectic” is elegant and erudite. Its contextualization partakes of the “deeper” rather than the “temporally fluid” form. Her explicit intervention is to encourage us to think about “Puritanism as a theology” that is not part of a high intellectualist history but rather part of a devotional practice that authorized certain cognitive ordeals that real people, including Hooker himself, endured. She focuses on memory and how it informed Hooker’s theory of preparation for grace, and her goal is rescuing Hooker from “legalism” and memory from faculty psychology. Trocchio argues: “We do well to remember that ‘the experience of grace’ was not somehow apart from the experience of thinking.” In turning our attention to “the experience of thinking,” Trocchio stakes out a materialist approach, paying renewed attention to bodies and embodiment.Hooker is a towering figure in Puritan New England’s history not only as a minister concerned with the spiritual state of souls but as a dissenter from the hegemony of the Massachusetts Bay and founder of the Connecticut colony, which had one of the earliest written constitutions that granted expanded suffrage. He took on a major problem in Puritan devotion, iconoclasm: the need to think about God, grace, and glory not in images or pictures. Bruno’s memory palaces were chock-full of images, many of them of a lubricious bent; what better way to engage the senses and, thus, the memory? Ramus designed his dialectic of branching categories of generals and specifics as a method to escape potentially titillating picture-thinking and, thus, idolatry and heresy. While Hooker’s emphasis on preparation of the soul for grace made him party to a “mechanistic” notion of “works,” Trocchio challenges a considerable historiography that has chiefly granted to John Cotton knowledge of the power of the spirit. To show that Hooker’s preparationism courted the experiential and affective ruptures the binary between legalism and spiritualism Janice Knight so elegantly drew in her study Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (1994). As said above, it also allows Trocchio to posit American Puritanism not as telos but as continuity of European thought. By understanding Hooker’s “memory as compositional activity” rather than merely “computation,” Trocchio places it “nearer (though in no way proximate) to the creative work of God”—that is, an element informing the creation of literature. Tracing “the distinctly Calvinist ordeal of how to particularize without images” reveals “that one’s coming to grace exceeds the achievement of intellectual memory. It constitutes an emotional event” and one “linking the cognitive to the affective, the experiential, the devotional, and the theological.”Elegant as this argument is, it could be usefully expanded by considering other, more local and hemispheric contexts that Hooker encountered in the Americas. At one point, Trocchio comments: “When Hooker uses a late sixteenth-century memory debate to explain preparation, we see him as a thinker who strove with enormous creative energy to reckon with the theological convictions of his time and place and who in the process was of many times and places.” How might the debates revealed here change or mean otherwise if we also take into account the times and places of the Indigenous peoples around the Massachusetts Bay Colony and in Connecticut, where Hooker ended his days, along with their oral methods of preserving memory and history?These Indigenous peoples wrote and thought in picture languages like those used on the incised birch-bark scrolls of the Midewiwin, dry-rock petroglyphs, or, much later, the wood-splint basket Occom created, decorated, and sent back to his sister in Connecticut detailing his move to the Brothertown settlement in northern New York. Further afield are the great codices of Mesoamerica like the Popol Vuh or, most appositely, the quipu, a complex system of knotted string the ancient Incas used to collect and preserve data and keep records about such things as tax obligations, census information, and military organization. Quipu served as memory devices, comparable in complexity to Bruno’s memory palaces or Ramus’s dialectic, and some scholars argue that they also served as writing systems to preserve literary works, since Quechua, the Inca’s spoken language, had no scribal form. When the Spanish invaded the Inca Empire, they destroyed most of the quipu and strove to eradicate this far-reaching system as evidence of civilization. Puritan memory work, understood much more fully now in its transatlantic terms and engagements, becomes another thing again when placed in a hemispheric setting, where European techniques of memory take shape in the midst of many different methods and technologies spread across the Americas.1Molly Farrell’s essay is ambitious and enlightening. Finding connections between the discourses of the antinomian controversy and the contemporary antiabortion debates, she pursues a reconfiguration of time and space similar to what Douglass achieved in his early anti-Protestant oratory. But her approach is not simply about finding repeating narratives or figures; rather, it is about “attending to our feelings.” In fact, Farrell exhorts us not to imagine “the Puritans as progenitors of contemporary US political culture” because, she argues, this “reaffirms teleological views of history and beliefs about American exceptionalism. Rather, “a truly postexceptional Puritan studies must find a way to continue to work diachronically without drawing a straight line.” Working “diachronically without drawing a straight line” is, perhaps, my favorite image in these five essays, a tall order that entails investigating what she calls “the nexus of affects and politics,” with an emphasis on the word nexus, a series of interlacing and layered connections that are both in time but move across and through it. From this process, we can gain “insights about how discourse about our own bodies facilitates hegemony in the present.”By widening the geography of her investigation, Farrell’s analysis can also encompass a wider temporality. The example that clinched her argument for me was her comparison of the standard tactics of right-wing and Christian evangelical activists, who demonize anomalies and border crossings that challenge their relatively monolithic worldview, and the canny misogyny of John Winthrop. Both “disgust the reader by presenting something familiar and then following it with something grotesquely out of place,” so that what we find monstrous constructs by antithesis and proximity what we deem to be “normal.” Thus, Rick Santorum, the poster child for the homophobic vanguard in the eyes of many, including Dan Savage, might as well be wearing a clergy band as he addresses the US Congress with “fake” facts about a misnamed and sensationalized medical procedure.Farrell’s next move, showing how the 2003 partial-birth abortion debate was implicated in “designing a form of embodiment that facilitates imperialist violence,” is a large leap but one we should be willing at least to contemplate making. Similarly we should take seriously her critique of feminists too finicky to embrace disgust in the debates about reproductive rights and her wider call for all of us to recognize that “a disgust-oriented conception of embodiment relates integrally to developments in hegemony across the globe.” I could only wish that the “global” perspective Farrell champions and brings to her analysis did not encompass just Europe. Were there discourses of disgust and monstrosity circulating among the Indigenous people who surrounded the Puritans huddled around the Massachusetts Bay? Did those discourses effect the feelings or actions of Puritans who interacted with Native people, who decried Native “savagery” yet benefited from—even survived on account of—Native agricultural prowess in “the howling wilderness” as well as Native herbal and medical knowledge?While Farrell’s essay draws its revisionist power from a deep and wide contextualization of an affective discourse, Jordan Alexander Stein’s essay takes a step back from texts per se to ask probing questions about the assumptions, often unexamined, underlying the equally often unexamined practices of textual recovery and editing—that is, assumptions about what counts as a text and how it should be presented, which inevitably shape how we read and interpret it. I deeply appreciate that he opens with the disclaimer that he is not concerned with understanding “Puritan literature as queer, for this seems obvious enough, but, rather, how has Puritan literature come to be understood as so presumptively otherwise?” This helps to explain my career-long fascination with an area of American literature that was largely illegible to my family and friends: what is there of interest to read in the colonial period, they would ask? Did anybody write anything? (Worth reading, was the unstated continuation of that question.) Stein’s definition of Puritan queerness—in particular, the queerness he finds so evident in the poetry of Edward Taylor—works to abate this popular illegibility: not only “Puritan forms of affiliation, attachment, desire, and bodily sensation, as well as the representation of any of these, which do not mirror modern, more squarely heterosexual or homosexual versions of similar social forms” but more simply “its attempt to bring a different self into being through the act of writing.” It is also relevant that over the forty years of his poetic activity, Taylor depicted the transformed self he aspired to, in his bid for evidence of a staunchly Puritan notion of salvation, as a passive, often feminized object to be animated, coins to be pursed, instrument to be played, looms to be woven on, and in his final poems, the bride herself to be wooed and married.As I read through Stein’s account of the twentieth-century editing Taylor’s lately “discovered” poetry underwent, with its “normative suppositions about personality” as “always inflected by normative claims about sexuality,” I could not help but think about my present project, a yearlong weekly blog about the year 1862 in the creative life of Emily Dickinson.2 Strangely, at the outset, I had forgotten that the Thomas Johnson who first edited Taylor’s work was the very same editor who in 1955 produced the first Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Before Johnson’s edition, Dickinson’s literary corpus was painfully divided between “the two houses” in Amherst, Massachusetts, each of which possessed large caches of Dickinson’s written manuscripts—her sister, Lavinia, who found the forty fascicles and other loose pages in the drawer in Dickinson’s room, and Susan Dickinson, the estranged wife of Dickinson’s brother, Austin, to whom the poet sent more than five hundred pieces of writing, poems and drafts in letters and messages “across the hedge” that separated their houses. The history of these competing houses is complex and bloody.3 Johnson did an important service to literature in finally bringing out an edition of Dickinson’s poems. And yet, as Stein notes, though the issues for Dickinson are different from those for Taylor, in both cases “the twentieth-century editing has determinedly pressed a set of textually and formally difficult writings into lyric forms that make normative suppositions about personality that are very much at odds with what the texts themselves manifestly say.” Only with the publication of Dickinson’s manuscripts have scholars like Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith (1998) been able to excavate the queerness of these texts.We can also illuminate the normative assumptions Stein uncovers in our editing procedures by including Indigenous perspectives. Some scholars believe that various Native American tribes embraced queerness through concepts of berdache and third sex. Many northeastern woodland peoples regarded the genders as complimentary, not hierarchical. Women’s councils and the important figure of the “pretty woman” as tribal arbiter gave women strong voices in tribal matters, a reality eroded as Europeans arrived and male leaders would treat only with Native American men, whom they assumed to be the leaders of their nations. In addition, many Indigenous cultures did not understand “personality” in the same way we do in the West. They embraced self-transformation, often in terms of discovering a spirit animal or guide as a requirement for inclusion in the socius. Disgust is not a prominent affect in this transformation, but such border crossings between human and animal may illuminate what Farrell means by embracing a “disgust-oriented conception of embodiment.” Furthermore, Indigenous peoples regarded identity as collective and interdependent rather than individual and discreet. As Joanna Brooks (2006) says about Occom’s fifty-year practice of journal keeping, “Identity can be understood as an exercise of responsibility, rather than primarily as the product of self-expression, performance, or affective manifestation.”The essays in this small gathering illuminate important inroads in Puritan studies and American studies. We are thankful to the organizers for opening up these new avenues of thinking about our colonial Puritan past. I predict (and can only hope) that the “rogue studies” Farrell invokes, grounded in the “roguish” beginnings of the United States with its pirates, antinomian midwives, devotional transvestites, and intercultural encounters, becomes the hottest pursuit in the twenty-first-century academy. I look forward expectantly to how scholars coming up will build on this work, expand it, and continue to bring the past to bear productively and provocatively on our present and future.