2.5 Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay - Representations

Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay produced foundational texts

Features:

  • repertoires about stereotypey of New England

  • exceptionalism

  • rhetorical acts

  • shifting from about to from America

  • Anglo-Saxon, white, male → Exclusive

  • community ex-verbo (texts as core of community)

Puritan style of writing:

  • Plain style: no decorations, functions as expressing relation to god

  • Typology: illuminates history, quotation of (repetition) of old testament

  • Religious → Communal

  • Wilderness, errand and trial

Forms:

  • life writing

  • Historiography (e.g. by William Bradford, John Winthrop, …)

  • Sermons, jeremiad (= political purpose and speech not to fail and follow orders in New England)

  • Poems

  • ….

Puritan poetry

Contradiction between

  • informare and movere (religious information/affect) vs. delectare (entertainment)

→Poem as fields of tensions:

  • collective expectations vs. individual voice

  • timeless doctrine vs. everyday details

  • prescribed forms vs. individual deviations

Authors for example: Michael WIgglesworth, Anne Bradstreet

Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)

  • born in England, came to America in 1630

  • “the tenth muse, lately sprung up in America” London 1650

  • “Several poems” 1678, 1758

  • “The works in Prose and Verse” 1867 edited plus Andover manuscript

→ The tenth muse

  • “the prologue”

  • reflections on poetics and gender roles → Women can also do that

  • Similar: “The Author to her book”

Importance of e.g. “Upon the Bunring of our hose” or “Before the Birth of one of her Children”: Puritine doctrins <--> Individual perspective; tension

  • prescribed roles and collective attitudes vs. individual desires and personal feelings

→ Intimate poetry beyond plain acception of fate and expectations, secular perspective

Puritan Captivity Narrative

→ Stories written by white captives by Native Americans

  • sites of memory/acts of remembering → Interpretations

  • three parts:

    • Starting point (violence)

    • Main part (unvoluntarily living there)

    • ending (rescue and return to civilization

  • journey pattern (to their culture)

  • bipolarity (innocent victim <-> Native American)

  • hybrid form (mix of conventions, e.g. autobiography, adventure story, …)

  • Precursor of American novel

→ Puritan perspective:

  • didactic

  • seen as God's will → Indians as tools to punish them

  • collective significance: example for community

  • ministers edited narratives → religious intentions

e.g. Narrative of Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson 1682

→ Preface: “brutal, catastrophy, connected to god, exemplary value” → othering, suppressing perspective, ethnocentric

BUT: Rereading shows:

  • personal and individual → don't accept it as god's plan

  • secular

  • different image of indigenous identities, more human

  • transgression of intercultural borderlines (she begins to participate in culture)

  • ambivalent ending: questioning stereotypical performance

→ Conclusion: Rowlandson's text

  • which breaks Puritan conventions

  • in which woman's voice disrupts conventions

  • ndigenous and white relations are questioned

  • Was also popular during revolution → Paralled and adapted to liberate captive America from Britain