Rhetoric in the Wilderness

Abstract

Sacvan Bercovitch. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. 240 + xvi pp. Robert Daly. God's Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. 253 +ix pp. Cecilia Tichi. New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. 290 + xii pp. The dominance of seventeenth-century Massachusetts in the American mind is still unchallenged. It is true that modern scholarship—scholarship since Perry Miller, that is—has largely replaced the simplistic emotional attachment with serious debate over theology, politics and culture, so that Hawthorne and The Crucible (the old hard-line of interpretation) may seem quainter than Increase Mather or The Day of Doom. These three excellent and important books can, in their different ways, survey aspects of Puritan rhetoric and letters with an urbanity that would have been impossible thirty years ago. But even in these works something of the ambivalent passion, the love-hate relationship, remains. Longfellow placed the tale of John Alden and Priscilla in a rebirth of the "pastoral ages, Fresh with the youth of the world," but his New England Tragedies show the "errors of an age long passed away," which is happily buried "Beneath the fresher writing of today." In the popular tradition, there are still twin images coexisting: the grim zealot and the universal forefather moved by the same passions as his modern heirs. The first remains more potent, but evidences of the second are more eagerly sought after. So Robert Daly can speculate (p. 130) that the poet Michael Wigglesworth "leapt all to nimbly from the grief to the spiritual profit it afforded him," while allowing that "such a reaction.. .would be both uncharitable and beside the point." Cecelia Tichi observes that Edward Johnson has "personally human sympathies" and "parental compassion," ! "But Gortonist and other heresies inimical to a saintly New England provoke Johnson's most vituperative, illiberal language. 'Heale not lightly the wounds that Wolves make, 'warns his Christian herald, lest from their festering teeth a Gangrin make"' (pp. 40-41). Sacvan Bercovitch speaks of New England sermons: "Not that they minimised the threat of divine retribution; on the contrary, they asserted it with a ferocity unparalleled in the European pulpit, But they qualified it in a way that turned threat into celebration" (p. 8). Bercovitch's strong language, Tichi's irony, Daly's assumption that a literary critic needs charitably to judge the emotional reactions of a long-dead poet, all testify to the remarkable vitality of the Puritan image, ambiguous perhaps, but not to be taken lightly.