Puritan Heritage Research Articles

"Pembroke": A Script of Decadence

The article is an interpretation of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s novel Pembroke (1994). Even though it is set in the third decade of the 19th century, the year of publication suggests that it just as well refers to the condition of New England after the Civil War. Hit by a complex crisis, concerning demography, economy, and mores, after 1865 the region entered a stage of decadence. Wilkins Freeman diagnosed its symptoms, such as the collapse of interpersonal communication and the hypertrophy of individual will, showing that the portents of the decline of Puritan heritage had its roots in the first half of the century. With time, the symbolic system of New England culture collapsed and gave way to a new social order.

Will to the Original: Platonism in Henry James’ Roderick Hudson

Will to the Original: Platonism in Henry James’ <i>Roderick Hudson</i>

Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination by Kenyon Gradert

Reviewed by: Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination by Kenyon Gradert Kate Culkin (bio) Abolitionism, Puritanism, Slavery Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination. By Kenyon Gradert. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 256. Cloth, $50.00.) [End Page 310] In this nimble, innovative monograph, Kenyon Gradert makes a compelling case for the role Puritans played in the rhetoric and imagination of American abolitionists. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he traces the complex ways a diverse group of reformers and authors invoked a vision of their ancestors—literal and figurative—as fiery, principled warriors to push for the end of slavery. Along the way, he makes notable contributions to the fields of nineteenth-century American literature, the history of abolition, and the use of historical memory. Central to Gradert's argument is the claim that abolitionists' Puritans differ dramatically from the twenty-first-century vison of dour, conservative, and repressed forefathers developed out of Cold War and New Americanist analyses. For the abolitionists, he claims, "the Puritans' militant zeal acquired a new value in light of an increasingly belligerent slave power and a complicit North" (7). They reached to the past to frame their cause as a holy war and add it to a timeline for the country that stretched from Puritans' principled stand through the American Revolution and towards a glorious future. For Gradert, the accuracy of their portrayal is not important; the significance lies in how these reformers chose to depict Puritans and what that depiction reveals about their thought-process and their time. Gradert combines biographical detail, historic context, and literary analysis while focusing on figures ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Harriet Beecher Stowe to Henry Highland Garnet. The most compelling sections address the people who aimed to invoke Puritans' passion and moral character, while wrestling with what they knew to be a more complex heritage. In his discussion of Lydia Maria Child, for instance, Gradert traces how her attempts to maneuver her frustrations with the patriarchal limits of her Calvinist upbringing, the reserve of her Unitarian contemporaries, and the pressures of lobbying for abolition while trying to support herself and her husband through her writing led to The Kansas Emigrants. Calling it a "novella best described as half feminist Western and half Puritan errand into the wilderness," he argues that, in this understudied work about New England abolitionists in the midst of Bleeding Kansas, Child "rechannels the Puritan spirit away from New England and into women's heroism as the settlers continue their ancestors' unfinished errand" (64, 66). For James Russell Lowell, abolition offered a way to give his life as a poet meaning, and poetry gave him a way to reimagine Puritan heritage as a "powerful resource for a progressive democracy," but the death of his two nephews in the Civil War caused him to grow [End Page 311] wary of unmitigated zeal, even for a righteous cause (112). In the final chapter, Gradert explores how Black authors such as Garnet invoked both the Mayflower and the slave ship to claim their place in American society. Tracing the Puritan influence through such varied written works, in addition, allows Gradert to bring new insight to well-studied moments in abolitionist historiography, such as the schism in the American Anti-Slavery Society and Emerson's turn towards antislavery. The book is well-written and well-organized, and there is a clear logic to the chapters' groupings, done variously by genre, gender, race, and, in the case of the Beechers, family. Disrupting these silos, however, might have been powerful. Some of Gradert's most interesting observations come through his comparison of how Child and Emerson navigated similar territory, but he puts Child in the chapter with members of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and Emerson with male orators, limiting the space for this exploration. However, the chapter on Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, grouped because of their family relationship, leads to insightful comparisons of the approaches of and options for a male minister and a female novelist; they take different routes to arrive at the same end, using Puritan images to espouse a communal vision of religion quite unrecognizable as the Calvinism...

Behind The Times: Virginia Woolf in Late-Victorian Contexts by Mary Jean Corbett

Reviewed by: Behind The Times: Virginia Woolf in Late-Victorian Contexts by Mary Jean Corbett Jane de Gay BEHIND THE TIMES: VIRGINIA WOOLF IN LATE-VICTORIAN CONTEXTS, by Mary Jean Corbett. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. 312 pp. $48.95 hardback; $23.99 ebook. Virginia Woolf's relationship with the Victorians has long attracted interest, as critics have questioned her claims that "on or about December 1910, human character changed" to show that she had a complex, ambivalent attitude towards an era she never fully laid to rest.1 In Behind the Times: Virginia Woolf in Late-Victorian Contexts, Mary Jean Corbett makes a nuanced contribution to the discussion by showing that Woolf's relationship with the Victorians was not a matter of periodicity but one of generation, attitude, and temperament. Corbett shows that late Victorians and modernists coexisted in the same time and occupied the same spaces: Woolf was born and brought up in the late-Victorian era, an era of progress and radical thinking that saw the New Woman, increasing frankness around sexuality, and an acceleration in the suffrage movement. Yet Woolf denied the existence of this radical previous generation, instead taking mid-Victorians like Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot both as foils and points of reference in order to present the Victorians as passé and highlight the innovations of her own generation. Building on the work of Alison Booth, who showed that Woolf deliberately underplayed past women writers, and Marion Dell's analysis of Woolf's ambivalence towards her mother and aunts, this book fleshes out the picture of the generation that Woolf ignored.2 Concentrating on Woolf's nonfiction, including diaries, memoirs, essays, and journalism, but also with discussions of The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), and The Years (1937), Corbett explores Woolf's reaction to women writers and activists who remained active into the modernist era but whom she pushed into the past. These include the novelist Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837-1919), who was her aunt; prolific novelists Lucy [End Page 406] Lane Clifford (1846-1929) and Mary Augusta (Mrs. Humphry) Ward (1851-1920); and the feminist New Woman writer Sarah Grand (1854–1943), who outlived Woolf by two years. Corbett also sets these women within their interconnecting circles, so the book encompasses a wide range of writers, including Alice Meynell, Vernon Lee, Clementina Black, and Elizabeth Robins. This elegantly structured book has five substantive chapters bridged by short interludes highlighting particular concepts. The introduction critiques the distinction that Woolf attempted to draw between the antiquated world of her upbringing in South Kensington and the experimental world of Bloomsbury, showing that Woolf lived alongside radicals in the former and that in moving to Bloomsbury, she and her siblings were not blazing a trail but entering a space where earlier generations had experimented in art and life. Ritchie, the author of Old Kensington (1873), was one such figure, so chapter one, "Gender, Greatness, and the 'Third Generation,'" explores Woolf's complex relationship with this popular writer whom she wanted to relegate to the past. In a reading of Night and Day, Corbett shows how Woolf's rejection of Ritchie by representing her as the comical Mrs. Hilbery goes alongside a turning-away from late nineteenth-century women writers who had "grappled with the representation and the regulation of sexuality" (p. 63). An interlude on Grand highlights the politics of the New Woman to lead into a chapter on Woolf's engagement with debates on social purity in The Voyage Out. Corbett sets this novel, with its story of sexual ignorance and experience and its guarded references to prostitution, in relation to the work of Grand and her precursor Josephine Butler. This discussion fills an important gap in Woolf's work, though it would have been useful to provide some touchstones with more familiar material, for example by exploring how this relates to Woolf's discussion of shame and its connection with her Puritan heritage in her memoir essay "A Sketch of the Past" (1939). Woolf's moral qualms do come to the fore, however, in chapter three, "'Ashamed of the Inkpot': Woolf and the Literary Marketplace," where Corbett explores Woolf's discomfort with the...

Swept into Puritanism: Emerson, Wendell Phillips, and the Roots of Radicalism

This essay charts how Ralph Waldo Emerson and Wendell Phillips found common ground in militant abolitionism through a reimagination of their Puritan heritage. It argues that in embracing their ancestors as Cromwellian spiritual warriors, they depart from usual “concepts of Puritan ancestry” and offer a way to heed calls for new literary histories.

Loving God's wildness: the Christian roots of ecological ethics in American literature

Analysing writings ranging from the Puritans to the present day, Loving GodAEs Wildness traces the effects of Christian theology on AmericaAEs ecological imagination, revealing the often conflicted ways in which Americans relate to and perceive the natural world. When the Puritans arrived in the New World to carry out the colonii??zation they saw as divinely mandated, they were confronted by the American wilderness. Part of their theology led them to view the natui??ral environment as oa temple of Godo in which they should glorify and serve its creator. The larger prevailing theological view, however, saw this vast continent as othe DevilAEs Territorieso needing to be conquered and cultivated for GodAEs Kingdom. These contradictory designations gave rise to an ambivalence regarding the character of this land and humanityAEs proper relation to it. Loving GodAEs Wildness rediscovers the environmental roots of AmericaAEs Puritan heritage. In tracing this history, Jeffrey Bilbro demonstrates how the dualistic Christianity that the Puritans brought to America led them to see the land as an empty wilderness that God would turn into a productive source of marketable commodities. Bilbro carefully explores the effect of this dichotomy in the nature writings of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Willa Cather, and Wendell Berry. Thoreau, Muir, Cather, and Berry imaginatively developed the Puritan theological tradition to propose practical, physical means by which humans should live and worship within the natural temple of GodAEs creation. They reshaped Puritan dualism, each according to the pari??ticular needs of his or her own ecological and cultural contexts, into a theology that demands care for the entire created community. While differing in their approaches and respective ecological ethics, the four authors Bilbro examines all share the conviction that God remains aci??tive in creation and that humans ought to relinquish their selfish ends to participate in his wild ecology. Loving GodAEs Wildness fills a critical gap in literary criticism and environi??mental studies by offering a sustained, detailed argument regarding how Christian theology has had a profound and enduring legacy in shaping the contours of the American ecological imagination. Literary critics, scholars of religion and environmental studies, and thoughtful Christians who are concerned about environmental issues will profit from this engaging new book.

Harry S. Truman and the errand of sacrifice: 1945–1953

In the aftermath of the Second World War, President Harry S. Truman employed the domestic self-narratives of a puritan heritage and American exceptionalism in his foreign and domestic policy speeches to elicit and secure public support for his administration's action abroad. At the same time, the use of this language helped to construct an image of the West synonymous with certain core lineaments of American national identity. The West during this period came to mean the USA and its sphere of influence. Moreover, the West served as an intellectual framework that helped integrate America and Western Europe. The main purpose of this paper is to examine this language, particularly as it related to foreign policy objectives in Europe, but also in the global arena.

The French Face of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Monsieur de l'Aubépine and His Second Empire Critics

This book collects—and translates into English for the first time—six substantial review essays about Nathaniel Hawthorne that were published in France during his lifetime. Hawthorne's fanciful French nom de plume, Monsieur de l'Aubépine, the imaginary author of “Rappaccini's Daughter” and other works, steps unexpectedly into reality in the composite French impression of Hawthorne that results.The French Face of Nathaniel Hawthorne contributes to the current critical interest in “the complexities of transatlantic cultural exchange in the nineteenth century” by documenting Hawthorne's “surprisingly intelligent critical reception in France” (3, xii). Few scholars of nineteenth-century American literature will be familiar with these essays, though they were published in reputable French journals—three of them in the Revue des Deux Mondes. Even Hawthorne specialists who may have known of their existence will be grateful to the editors, Michael Anesko and N. Christine Brookes, for making this “unknown—or forgotten” (xi) body of criticism readily accessible to English-language readers.The six essays appeared between 1852 and 1864 (the year of Hawthorne's death): one by Paul Émile-Daurand Forgues (1852), two by Louis Étienne (1857, 1860), and three by Émile Montégut (1852, 1860, 1864). Because none of these writers is well-known today, Anesko and Brookes provide useful background information on their lives and careers in an excellent historical introduction. The three critics have some things in common. For one, they are surprisingly well informed about Hawthorne, characterizing his work with examples drawn from throughout his career. All three emphasize Hawthorne's Puritan heritage as well as his affinity for Emerson and transcendentalism. They all pointedly stress Hawthorne's originality, implicitly refuting the European prejudice against colonial (and postcolonial) products as necessarily imitative. Each translates into French long passages of Hawthorne—sometimes several pages in length—to convey the unique flavor of his style and point of view. (Anesko and Brookes, in their introduction, assess in detail the strengths and weaknesses of each critic as a translator of Hawthorne.)These French critics also represent, in their disagreements, an interesting range of judgments on Hawthorne's achievement. Montégut and Étienne (like Herman Melville) make much of Hawthorne's blackness, his obsession with sin and guilt, his pessimism, his gift for allegory in the Puritan line. Forgues, however, charmed by Hawthorne's genial prefaces, finds him essentially a gentle humorist. All three prefer Hawthorne's short stories. Of the novels, Forgues and Etienne judge The House of the Seven Gables the best, while Montégut (reversing an earlier negative review) ultimately awards the palm to The Marble Faun. For Montégut, The Marble Faun is Hawthorne's “last great work” (285), embodying a bittersweet message of Christian redemption. Étienne, in contrast, finds it a purely transcendentalist novel exemplifying Emersonian pantheism. These disparate readings raise issues that continue to engage Hawthorne's critics today.The historical introduction carefully contextualizes these essays, taking into account the particular political affiliations and prejudices of each critic as well as the contemporary socioeconomic developments in France that affected the literary marketplace. Writing from the perspective of the European class system, these critics viewed with fascination the American experiment in democracy, and they found in Hawthorne's fiction evidence to support their own progressive (Montégut) or conservative (Étienne) ideas about social reform.Perhaps the most interesting revelation in this book is that Émile Montégut's insights have had a “direct impact” in shaping our modern understanding of Hawthorne. This is true, the editors argue convincingly, because Henry James drew extensively (and without full acknowledgment) on Montégut's 1864 essay in writing his own, influential Hawthorne (1879). (Anesko published this discovery in the Henry James Review: “Is James's Hawthorne Really James's Hawthorne?” 29, no. 1 [2008]: 36–53.) The editors demonstrate that James was “if not an outright plagiarist, then at least a transparently deceptive appropriator of another distinguished critic's work” (71). James's “selective (and sometimes misleading) quotations, his misrepresentations of [Montégut's] conclusions, his silent appropriation of critical ideas” all suggest that “James's Hawthorne is not altogether his own but rather a plagiaristic amalgam of insights” (73). This aspect of Hawthorne's “French face” has been hiding in sight ever since.Anesko and Brookes's translations are clear and a pleasure to read, though I do not know French well enough to judge their accuracy. The thorough annotations are helpfully placed at the end of each essay rather than together at the end of the book. The French Face of Nathaniel Hawthorne is a welcome resource for scholars of nineteenth-century American literature.

A crisis of community: the trials and transformation of a New England town, 1815-1848

In the first decades of the American republic, Mary White, a shopkeeper's wife from rural Boylston, Massachusetts, kept a diary. Woven into its record of everyday events is a remarkable tale of conflict and transformation in small-town life. Sustained by its Puritan heritage, gentry leadership, and sense of common good, Boylston had survived the upheaval of revolution and the creation of the new nation. Then, in a single generation of wrenching change, families, neighbors, church, and town descended into contentious struggle. Examining the tumultuous Jacksonian era at the intimate level of family and community, Mary Babson Fuhrer brings to life the troublesome creation of a new social, political, and economic order centered on individual striving and voluntary associations in an expansive nation.Blending family records and a rich trove of community archives, Fuhrer examines the age of revolutions through the lens of a rural community that was swept into the networks of an expanding and urbanizing New England region. This finely detailed history lends new depth to our understanding of a key transformative moment in American history.

Book Review: Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination

Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination. By Linda Freedman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1-107-00617-1. Pp. x + 210. $90.00. In the past decade there has been a small resurgence of interest in the part that Christian theology plays in the thinking and writing of the major poets of nineteenth-century America. In Emerson (2003), Lawrence Buell writes: it or not, there's no getting rid of religion as a force in affairs. If you think it's nothing more than the opiate of others, you're likely to misunderstand yourself as well as them. Especially if you're trying to come to terms with so religio-centric a culture as the United States was in the early nineteenth-century--and indeed still (Buell 159-60). it comes to Dickinson studies, however, the conversation about religion and theology is fraught with caveats and uncertainties. This is due, in part, to Dickinson's own attestations of unbelief, none more famous, perhaps, than wry poem about staying home from church (to the frustration of father): Some keep the Sabbath going to Church--/I keep it staying home-- (Dickinson 106). More seriously, as a girl Dickinson refused both baptism and the chance to profess faith in front of school. In light of these various attestations, she has been recently praised by Helen Vendler (Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries 2010) for her defiant critique of Christianity and uninhibited scrutiny of its concepts [which was] unequalled among the other poets of day (17). All this may lead the reader of Dickinson criticism to believe that the primary way in which Christian theology affected the poet was negatively. She can emerge--especially from Vendler's readings--looking like an anti-Christian poet. How refreshing it is, then, to find Linda Freedman engaging with the biblical and theological elements of Dickinson's verse and thought, especially those elements that are not explicitly anti-Christian. Freedman begins by taking seriously the Puritan heritage and atmosphere of the Amherst in which Dickinson grew up, steeped as it was with the thought of the orthodox Puritan Jonathan Edwards and emerging liberal, Unitarian tradition of William Channing. Whereas critics like Vendler have emphasized those aspects of Dickinson's thought that fall in line with Channing's criticisms of Edwardian Puritanism, Freedman argues that Dickinson shares with Edwards a belief in the religious power of language: Though Dickinson repeatedly cast ironic eye on the Puritan preoccupation with sin, she was fascinated from an extremely early age by the role of language in affective religion.... Like Edwards, Dickinson was aware of the problems of false conversion and insincere emotion. Her strong skepticism may well have been why she was able to remain an enthusiastic observer (rather than an enthusiastic participant) of the Visible Church in the years when she still attended. Like Edwards she turned to the authenticity of embodied experience in order to negotiate the problem of falsity. (24, 26-27) This concern with embodied experience that Dickinson shares with Edwards becomes for Freedman a guide through the oeuvre of the poet. Revealing Dickinson's deeply biblical imagination, Freedman sees the prime example of embodied experience in Dickinson's poetry, time and again, in images of Christ. It is Christology--especially Puritan Christology--that provides us with a key to reading Dickinson's poems that feature Christ: When Dickinson invoked Christ's body, she did so in full awareness of its importance to the theological claims that Christ was not only human (28). A little later she clarifies that Dickinson makes the Puritan God-man rather than the Emersonian man-God a stronger basis for poetic imitatio (30). Further, it is not, according to Freedman, merely the nature or the divine nature of Christ that fascinates Dickinson, but rather the hypostatic union of the two natures. …

Yankees in Michigan by Brian C. Wilson

Book Reviews137 understanding the roots of the conservative political posturing that has achieved a dramatic rollback inwelfare benefits at the state and federal levels since the 1980s. C. Dianne Creagh The Pennsylvania State University atYork Paul Trap and LarryWagenaar, eds.Michigan History Directory of Historical Societies, Museums, Archives, Historic Sites,Agencies and Commissions. 12th ed. East Lansing: Historical Society ofMichigan, 2008. Pp. 127. Index. Paper, $14.95, HSM members; $19.95, nonmembers. This updated guide toMichigan's historical resources includes many organizations not listed in previous editions. Approximately seven hundred separate entries, arranged by place name, include copious information. An index also allows one to search by the name of the institution or organization. Most entries include the address and multiple ways of contacting the organization described. Readers can find the highlights of archival and museum collections and exhibits, hours during which sites are open, admission fees if any, the dates of annual special events, and meeting times of many organizations. This publication supplements themore compact HistoricMichigan TravelGuide, which is also published by theHistorical Society ofMichigan. But even users of thatguide may want to consult this directory to discover the rich variety of historical organizations operating in the places they live and vacation. Individuals seeking to join other historically minded enthusiasts and to work as volunteers should also find this directory a goldmine of suggestions. This book can also be ordered online from theHistorical Society ofMichigan. David I.Macleod Central Michigan University Brian C. Wilson. Yankees inMichigan. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008. Pp. 140. Appendices. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Paper, $12.95. At one time in the nineteenth century,Michigan was considered part of greater New England. New Englanders made up nearly half the state's population, led in politics (Lewis Cass and Zachariah Chandler), in 138 MichiganHistoricalReview business (the Kellogg family and C. W. Post), and in education, and thereby set their imprinton Michigan's cultural life.Brian Wilson tells this many-faceted story,drawing from a rich trove of scholarship that begins with Frederick Jackson Turner and includes an impressive list of manuscript collections and museums. Wilson organizes thiswork around puritan New England's sense of identity and purpose in history?that is, the story of a chosen people coming into the frontier, bringing order and civilization, and grappling with the temptations that accompany material success. This is theway the Yankees of New England remembered their pioneer ancestors and thought of themselves as they set out for theMichigan frontier.As a professor of religious studies atWestern Michigan University, Wilson understands the significance of this puritan heritage and concisely outlines its elements, tensions, contradictions, and transformations, organizing Yankees in Michigan around them. This approach works well, enabling him to explore puritan traditions that turned on community and individualism and on reform and responsibility as they translated into behavior in frontier Michigan. Wilson succinctly explores the transplantation of family and community habits, legal and political organizations, missionary endeavors, and educational institutions. If Michigan's New Englanders came with a sense of mission, they also carried their ancestors' worries that theywould be seduced by prosperity and success. Those fears become real in Wilson's story as he recounts the emergence of prosperous towns, a market economy, agricultural diversification, and the development of industry. While skillfullydeveloping this theme,Wilson does not allow it to obscure the complexity and variety ofNew Englanders. Not allwere alike: with Congregationalists came Baptists andMethodists aswell asQuakers. IfYankee culture inspired success, it also exhibited intolerance toward Native Peoples, the French, and migrants from the South. Wilson's discussion of politics, from the emergence of theRepublican Party to the Social Gospel movement, is a sensitive and, equally important, critical retelling of this complex history. Finally, ingrained puritan obsessions with decline and failure?that the "city on a hill" would fail?became reality. The arrival of new immigrants challenged Yankee hegemony and provoked anxious defenders of New England culture into aggressive attacks on parochial schools aswell as a temperance crusade. In the end, asWilson concludes, the idea of a greaterNew England disappeared andMichigan became part of theAmerican Midwest. Book Reviews 139 Yankees inMichigan is a well-crafted synthesis that provides an excellent window on part of theMichigan social...

Sylvia Plath’s Man in Black

The male muse in the psychic territory Adrienne Rich called in 1971 ‘The Man’ represents sexualized death and phallic mourning, a concept of masculinity marked by the legacy of the 20th century’s two world wars. In the context of representations of ‘The Man’ in North American white women writers coming of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Adrienne Rich, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood), Sylvia Plath’s journal account of the Saint Botolph’s Review party, where she met her husband, and its fictional transformation in her 1957 short story, ‘Stone Boy with Dolphin’, demonstrate Plath’s examination of the Bostonian Puritan heritage and the psychic aftermath of the Second World War. Plath’s constructions of heterosexual romance as participating in the history of Fascism and her concept of writing as sexy violence coincide culturally with Lacan’s theory of phallic signification.

The Puritan Heritage in the 20th-Century English Novel

The Puritan Heritage in the 20th-Century English Novel

In Search of Monsters to Destroy? The Liberal American Security Paradox and a Republican Way Out

This article explores the dynamics between American modes of self-narration and patterns of foreign policy conduct. Pointing to the continual influence of the Puritan heritage, it joins with those who find American national identity articulated almost exclusively in what I term a liberal and missionary vocabulary. In opposition to conventional assumptions, however, the article depicts exceptionalism and liberalism as highly contradictory ways of making - and making sense of - the world and America's place within it. Furthermore, it shows how such contradictions have repeatedly defined a set of highly inflexible and ultimately destructive dilemmas in American foreign policy. Yet, the article concludes, America need not repeat itself without end: by turning to decisionalist and pragmatic strands in its past America may foster from within not only an alternative to rationalist liberalism, but also a way out of the liberal security-paradox.

Public Catholicism: An American Prospect

Interaction between Catholicism and public life in the United States is nothing new. Nor is this local church's concern for the poor. Can that concern, evident from the historical record and from public-opinion research, become a public advocacy of racial, social, and environmental justice in the U.S.? Normative and empirical considerations suggest that it is possible, but not inevitable, in view of indirect influence from the Puritan heritage upon American Catholic self-understanding.

Women and Religion in Early America, 1600-1850: The Puritan and Evangelical Traditions

Acknowledgements -- 1 Women, the Spirit, and the Reformation -- PART I -- The Puritan heritage -- 2 Wives and mothers in the colonial New England landscape -- 3 Prophesying women: pushing the boundaries of patriarchy -- 4 The devil's minions -- PARTII -- The rise of evangelical religion -- 5 Witnesses to the New Light -- 6 Gender, revolution, and the Methodists -- 7 Domestic piety: mothers, missionaries, and the Holiness movement -- 8 The reformer's pulpit -- 9 Voices and silence: women, the Spirit, and the Enlightenment -- Notes -- Bibliographic essay: further reading and research projects -- Works cited in bibliographic essay -- Index.

Notes on Obsessive Whiteness

I remember viewing the Robert Ryman exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1993. I felt as if I were surrounded by the austere puritan heritage of a Protestant church in New England. Afterward, friends asked me to critique the show, and they reacted with surprise as I described it as a profoundly ethnic experience. They only conceived of ethnicity in terms of the Other, as if there were no ethnicity to whiteness. Years later, in 1999, I remember watching Martha Stewart during her daily CBS morning show, presenting her very Polish mother making pierogis. It was a mildly embarrassing moment for the queen of upper-middle-class whiteness, but a daughter's love allowed her pristine whiteness to crack briefly and show a working-class immigrant ethnicity.

Making Declarations of Her Own: Harriet Beecher Stowe as New England Historian

The reminiscence can be read as a synopsis of Stowe's mature accomplishments. The heroic impulse never diminished in her, and both her Puritan heritage and Revolutionary ideology would continue to energize her commitment to fight for the soul of her country. But, as her views on democracy shifted between the preand post-Civil War periods, the form of her declarations-her novelistic considerations of the American experience--did as well. In her three New England novels-The Minister's Wooing (1859), Oldtown Folks (1869), and Poganuc People (1878)Stowe examined the effects of revolution and nation-building

Emily Dickinson and the Limits of Logic: The Example of Her Puritan Heritage

Emily Dickinson and the Limits of Logic: The Example of Her Puritan Heritage

Brazil by John Updike (review)

Reviews John Updike. Brazil. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Pp 260. ISBN: 0-67943071 -7. $23.00. In his sixteenth novel, John Updike has shifted his gaze away from the suburban American culture with which we usually associate him and looked instead southward to Brazil. And while medievalists undoubtedly would not classify Updike among the likes ofMarion Zimmer Bradley, Sharan Newman, or Rosemary Sutcliff, they should not hesitate to explore his Brazil. In fact, Updike has long been concerned with the Tristan myth, as he showed in his New Yorker review of Denis de Rougemont's Love DecUred and Love in the Western World, as well as in many short stories and even novels such as Couples. Although noted for his sexually explicit writing, Updike has nevertheless shown a longstanding interest in the moral and the theological. Brazil is his latest — and a good — reformulation ofthe dilemmas faced in the pursuit ofEros. The novel is entertaining- especially because ofUpdike's playful, ironic gaze upon his dramatis personae. But what lies beneath the surface is darkly disturbing and provocative. Brazil presents an ideal geography for Updike's reworking ofthe Tristan myth, for as in the European versions ofthe myth, his hero and heroine move in and out of a sophisticated, modern city and a wild, uncivilized terrain. Thus we are exposed to beaches, boîtes, boardrooms, and coastal city life, while we also enter into the dark, interior jungle regions of the Mato Grosso. Furthermore, Brazil's multicultural character - with its European and African heritages added to its indigenous culture allows Updike to move beyond the conditions imposed on his usual American (USA) setting by the Puritan heritage. As in the settings ofEuropean Tristan tales, water and forest - here, the Copacabana beach and the Mato Grosso — play an essential, mystical role in the joining and separating ofthe two lovers. Updike's Brazilpushes the Tristan myth to a postmodern extreme by focusing on the binarisms black/white, primitive/civilized, male/female, third world/first world, indigenous/settler, training his eye especially on matters of race and politics by contrasting the racial features and the social situations ofthe hero and heroine. Here, Isabel is still the blond beauty, and like Isolde, she elicits the question, put by her lover to his half-brother, Angel or whore?' ButTristáo is Black. While retaining the guise of Reviews201 trickster (he isstreetwise), he has no claims to royaltylike theTristan oflegend (although for the reader there is a nagging doubt that he mayhave been die illegitimate offspring ofIsabel's rich and powerful father). And because 'husband' and 'man' are terms with, we are told, looser connotations in Brazil than in North America, Tristäo and Isabel re-present the issue of commitment: they most often consider themselves married, and they do live together as a married couple even after emerging from the Mato Grosso, eventuallywith the acquiescence ofIsabel's family. The question ofpossession and desire - theTristan dilemma, so to speak- is always in die forefront, but in newly configured ways. Tristlo is a ghetto-dwelling Black with his eye on something more; he has been seeking 'a way into the upper world.' The day he spots a golden goddess on the beach, his fate is sealed. Taken by her to her room in her uncle's luxury apartment, she gives herself to him utterly. 'Wc were brought together to prove love,' Tristlo tells Isabel, and they try to do so through murder attempts by Isabel's father's henchmen, forced separations, workin the mines, Isabel's concubinageandTristao'senslavement. Through all their adventures, Updike's Isabel is so curious and ravenous for Eros that she is willing to experience anything and everything for the sake of her love for Tristäo. Fashioning the tale oflove to the dictum that the lover aspires to become the beloved, Updike gives us an Isabel who is willingly transformed (after the six days ofCreation, as it were) by a shaman into a Black woman in order to liberate Tristäo from slavery among the Portuguese in the Mato Grosso. By that point, wé have come to see that Isabel's love is active, creative, masculine, even: the shaman himself and Isabel...