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1、CHAPTER 1 Colonial America American Puritanism The settlement of the North American continent by the English began in the early part of the seventeenth century. The first settlers who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them Puritans. They came to America out of va
2、rious reasons, but it should be remembered that they were a group of serious, religious people, advocating highly religious and moral principles. They carried with them to America a code of values, a philosophy of life, and a point of view, which, in time, took root in the New World and became what
3、is popularly known as American Puritanism. A dominant factor in American life, American Puritanism was one of the most enduring shaping influences in American thought and American literature. It has become, to some extent, so much a state of mind, rather than a set of tenets, so much a part of the n
4、ational cultural atmosphere that the Americans breathe, that we may state with a degree of safety that, without some understanding of Puritanism, there can be no real understanding of American culture and literature. Although the English government saw the colonization of the North American continen
5、t as a means of alleviating its own problems, a large number of the settlers themselves left home in the first years of the seventeenth century in earnest quest of an ideal of their own. It is true that they wished to escape religious persecution - and the English government regarded its American co
6、lony as an ideal dumping ground for the undesirables, but they were also determined to find a place where they could worship in the way they thought true Christians should. When they arrived and saw the virgin forests, the virgin land, and the vast expanse of wilderness that stretched miles around b
7、efore them, they became aware that God must have sent them there for a definite purpose and that, as Gods chosen people, they were meant to reestablish a commonwealth based on the teachings of the Bible, restore the lost paradise, and build the wilderness into a new Garden of Eden. Whatever they tho
8、ught might jeopardize their endeavor to build their City of God on earth was, therefore, not to be tolerated. Hence, for instance, the ruthless persecution of dissenting individuals and denominations for their heresies. The American Puritans, like their brothers back in England, were idealists, beli
9、eving that the Church should be restored to the purity of the first-century Church as established by Jesus Christ Himself. To them, religion was a matter of primary importance. They made it their chief business to see that man lived and thought and acted in a way which tended to the glory of God. Th
10、ey accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement (or the salvation of a selected few) through a special infusion of grace from God, all that John Calvin (1509-1564), the great French theologian who lived in Geneva, had preached. It was this kind of
11、religious belief that they brought with them into the wilderness. There they meant to prove that they were Gods chosen people enjoying His blessings on this earth as in heaven. In the grim struggle for survival that followed immediately after their arrival in America, the character of the people und
12、erwent a significant change. Pushing the frontiers with them as they moved further and further westward, they became more and more preoccupied with business and profits. They became, in a word, more practical, as indeed they had to be. The very severity of the frontier conditions taught the American
13、 Puritans to be tougher, to be ever ready for any misfortune and tragic failures that might lie in wait for them. To say that the American Puritans were an admirable group of people is not really saying much. Commenting on the distinct personality of the American Puritan, Perry Miller writes: He was
14、 a visionary who never forgets that two plus two equals four; he was a soldier of Jehovah who never came out on the losing side of a bargain. He was a practical idealist. He came to New England to found the perfect society and the Kingdom of the elect and never expected it to be perfect, but only th
15、e best that fallible men could make. His creed was the revealed word of God and his life was the rule of moderation; his beliefs were handed down on high and his conduct was regulated by expediency. He was a doctrinaire and an opportunist. A doctrinaire opportunist came perhaps closest to the Americ
16、an Puritan ideal for man. Although the Puritans did their best to help build a new nation and a new culture out of the wilderness, their descendants have not always been grateful. All through the nineteenth century and especially in the first few decades of the twentieth, American Puritans came unde
17、r violent and often virulent attacks for their religious intolerance and bigotry, for their austerity of taste and killjoy way of life, for the very heritage they bequeathed to the new nation. The very term, Puritanism, evoked, for a time, antipathy and disgust in the minds of many people including
18、pre-eminent critics like Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963) and H. L. Mencken (1880-1956). Even today one cannot say very safely that a consensus has been reached, and the recognition, long overdue, has been given only grudgingly. In this connection we may venture to make a comparison between American Puri
19、tanism and Chinese Confucianism. There are indeed elements in Confucianism, which awaken abhorrence and even invoke a curse among the Chinese, and often in modern history a revolutionary was he who proved himself first an energetic iconoclast. Both the wrath and the action were justified, though the
20、 fact still remains that Confucianism alone has been the most powerful shaping factor in the cultural maturity of the Chinese nation. It has, through the centuries, for better or for worse, burned its way into the very fabric of Chinese social life, and way down into the Chinese consciousness, so th
21、at even the most incorruptible anti-Confucianist cannot escape its influence. Such is the force of a tradition that one tends to realize, however slowly, that one will do better to make a pact with it and give the devil its due. Thus it is that when the mists of time have cleared away, traditions su
22、ch as American Puritanism and Chinese Confucianism will receive, as they are already receiving, the kind of rehabilitation they so well deserve. It is a critical commonplace now that American literature-or Anglo-American literature - is based on a myth, that is, the Biblical myth of the Garden of Ed
23、en. This literature is in good measure a literary expression of the pious idealism of the American Puritan bequest. The Puritans dreamed of living under a perfect order and worked with indomitable courage and confident hope toward building a new Garden of Eden in America, where man could at long las
24、t live the way he should. Fired with such a sense of mission, the Puritans looked even the worst of life in the face with a tremendous amount of optimism. All this went, in due time, into the making of American literature. If Emerson saw the American as Adam himself reborn, standing simple and since
25、re before the world, if Thoreau portrayed himself as an Adam in his Eden, and Whitman felt rapturous at the sight of the Americans bustling with activity as the children of Adam restored to their lost paradise, and Henry James talked, especially in his early career, about the innocence and simplicit
26、y of his Americans as so many Newmans, and if the spirit of optimism burst out of the pages of so many American authors, Chinese students of American literature should not be unduly surprised: the optimistic Puritan has exerted a great influence on American literature. Neither should they experience
27、 anything like amazement when they detect a mood of frustration or despair in the works of especially later periods. For, always at the latter end of weal stands woe. When the dream did not materialize, and when only a Gilded Age came instead of the anxiously expected Golden, what else can one feel?
28、 Thus in either way American literature was from the outset conditioned by the Puritan heritage to which American authors have been the most communicative heirs. Nor is this all. The American Puritans metaphorical mode of perception was chiefly instrumental in calling into being a literary symbolism
29、 which is distinctly American. Puritan doctrine and literary practice contributed to no small extent to the development of an indigenous symbolism. To the pious Puritan the physical, phenomenal world is nothing but a symbol of God. To him the world was, in the words of Charles Feidelson the critic,
30、instinct with meaning by reason of Gods concurrence and susceptible of interpretation by reason of Gods salient acts. Physical life was simultaneously spiritual; every passage of life, en-meshed in the vast context of Gods plan, possessed a delegated meaning. The world was, in a word, one of multipl
31、e significance. If one cares to read the writings of the early settlers such as William Bradford (1590-1657) and Cotton Mather (1663-1728), it is impossible to overlook the very symbolizing process that was constantly at work in Puritan minds. This process became, in time, part of the intellectual t
32、radition in which American authors were brought up along with their people. If Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) saw nature and even the Bible as radically figurative, if Emersons Nature is like a continuous monologue, to quote Feidelson again, in which the genesis of symbolism is enacted over and over,
33、and if, with Hawthorne, Melville, Howells and many others, symbolism as a technique has become a common practice, it is indeed as it should be. This peculiar mode of perception was an essential part of their upbringing. With regard to technique one naturally thinks of the simplicity, which character
34、izes the Puritan style of writing. Here the Puritan seems to need some form of rehabilitation, too. The Puritans have been abhorred for their austerity and rigidity in matters of taste, notorious, in a manner of speaking, for their distaste for the arts and for any manifestation of sensuous beauty.
35、Although there is an amount of truth in all this, it is necessary to note that the popular image of the early seventeenth-century American Puritan, a teetotaler, gaunt, lank-haired, wearing a black steeple hat, is perhaps too much a distortion of the historical fact to remain creditable to thinking
36、people. The fact of the matter was, probably, this, that the Puritans drank and dressed themselves in all the hues of the rainbow (as Perry Miller tells us), and that they built schools, encouraged learning, and loved reading, making New England and the east seaboard, which they came to settle first
37、, centers of culture comparable in more ways than one to England and Europe. With regard to their writing, the style is fresh, simple and direct; the rhetoric is plain and honest, not without a touch of nobility often traceable to the direct influence of the Bible. All this has left an indelible imp
38、rint on American writing. Thus American Puritanism has been, by and large, a healthy legacy to the Americans. The Literary Scene in Colonial America American literature grew out of humble origins. Diaries, histories, journals, letters, commonplace books, travel books, sermons, in short, personal lit
39、erature in its various forms, occupy a major position in the literature of the early colonial period. There was the famous John Smiths description of New England as a promising virgin land, which came to the attention of many people in England and Europe and drew many of them over to the New World.
40、There were William Bradfords history of the colony (Of Plymouth Plantation) that he established after he led the Mayflower settlers across the Atlantic and John Winthrops speech that he made on his way leading his fleet of emigrants from the Old World over to America, A Model of Christian Charity, -
41、 both of these illustrate the religious zeal of the first settlers of the North American Continent. Early poetry, such as The Bay Psalm Book (1640), The Day of Doom (1662), and New England Primer (1683) were all ponderously religious, and early poets like Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) and Edward Taylo
42、r (1642-1729) were in fact servants of God. In content these early writings served either God or colonial expansion or both. In form, English literary traditions were faithfully imitated and transplanted. We begin with a brief account of the writings of John Smith (1580-1631), William Bradford (1590
43、-1657), and John Winthrop (1588-1649). Captain John Smith was one of the first early 17th-century British settlers in North America. He was one of the founders of the colony of Jamestown, Virginia. His writings about North America became the source of information about the New World for later settle
44、rs. One of the things he wrote about that has become an American legend was his capture by the Indians and his rescue by the famous Indian Princess, Pocahontas. Another thing he wrote about that became historically important is his description of the fertile and vast new continent in his A Descripti
45、on of New England. His narrative reveals the early settlers vision of the new land as something capable of being built into a new Garden of Eden. William Bradford led the Mayflower endeavor and became the first governor of the Plymouth Plantation that he established with his group of pilgrim fathers
46、. His Of Plymouth Plantation records, along with other things of a historic nature, the deliberations that the first settlers of North America had regarding their colonizing undertaking. In chapter IV, Showing the Reasons and Causes of their Removal, Bradford states the fourth reason for their depar
47、ture for the new world when he says that his people had a great hope and inward zeal to do the spadework for disseminating the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in the new world and they were even willing to be stepping-stones for others in doing this great work. The religious and idealistic nature of
48、 their adventure into the unknown world is self-evident. This is made clearer and more eloquent in John Winthrops A Model of Christian Charity. The first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony states in this speech of his that there was the cause between God and his people who entered into a coven
49、ant with God for this work of building a new Garden of Eden in the new world: .the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and He will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of his wisdom, power, goodness, and truth than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies. for we must c
