The First Linguistic Turn

Abstract

The First Linguistic Turn David Waldstreicher (bio) Jane Kamensky. Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. xi + 291 pp. Tables and index. $35.00. In one of the most luminous passages in American historical writing, Richard Hofstadter described colonial America from the perspective of a seafaring man with a good sense of smell: It is now hard to imagine, but it is a matter of record that a mid-eighteenth century mariner approaching the American strand could detect the fragrance of the pine trees about 60 leagues, or 180 nautical miles, from land. Before landfall he might thus be reminded, even after more than a century of white settlement, of the essential newness of the New World. On landing he could hardly escape fresh remembrances: he could see the trees themselves, arrayed in such formidable ranks that they were attacked and felled in careless numbers by settlers eager to get at the untilled soil beneath; he could see beaver pelts and deerskins brought to market, tokens of a teeming animal life in the interior; he might hear about the fish, spawning in such numbers that the ease of catching them had become a legend and a joke. 1 Nature, markets, and men who can count: these are the facts of early America, worthy of a poetry of fragrance and vision. It is only after sniffing and seeing for himself that Hoftstadter’s mariner enters a world of discourse, hearing and talking about something below the surface. Sight and appetite rule over insight and language, so that even before setting his feet on the ground the representative American reveals less a sense of spirit, or any ideological commitment, than an eye and a nose for the main chance. With this protocol Hofstadter debunked the myths of origin that began with liberty or religious commitment in Plymouth or Massachusetts Bay. Yet while shifting the scene and the sense—from the New England mind to the Atlantic seaman’s nose and eyes—Hofstadter retained the perceiving, solitary man as the subject of history, and New World nature as the tableau for that man’s less theological than accumulative speculations. Jane Kamensky bespeaks a different myth of origins. Her ship is the Arabella, and the faculties at work are not eyes and noses, they are ears and [End Page 14] mouths. John Winthrop’s famous shipboard oration needs to be seen—or heard—in the context that produced it: the speech of the men and women on deck whose despairing remarks provided the occasion for an inspired talk and a written covenant. New England begins with a chorus of complaint, a welter of whimpers. Not silent smelling, or “fresh” Proustian memories of abundance, but a charged dialogue between leaders and followers—and between women and men. Of course Kamensky is too much a product of her time to insist on one beginning, and too dedicated to precision to insist on the need for typicality, much less a Plymouth Rock-like moment. Her interpretation of Winthrop and his fellow passengers is just one of many delightfully told examples in this innovative reworking of culture and communication in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. In addition to reanimating new and old debates in early New England studies, her outstanding book also testifies to the possibility of taking the linguistic turn without leaving readers awash in a sea of jargon. In this work—and we may hope, in future works of social and cultural history—a sensitivity to language in history complements the author’s sensitivity to language in the writing of history. The result is a powerful example of why the vaunted return to narrative, which among colonialists has emerged most prominently in examinations of individual experience and interiority, is not the only way of being attentive to stories and their power. 2 Stories, here, find their origins less in personal crises, the psychology of memory, domestic traumas, or small group dynamics than in the socially bound practices of everyday, public speech. Language, in public and private, is something we need to see rather than “see through” (p. 10). “You could have heard a pin drop in seventeenth century...