Metaphor by Metaphor

The The Norton Anthology of American Literature,our English 2510 text, points out how The New-England Primer changed as a result of the American revolution and the influence of Puritanism (see page 354 and the footnotes on 355 especially). How similar (or different) are the changes to Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever recorded on this Flickr page? The editions compared are the 1963 and 1991.

Each bullet point below is a quotation from

Vaughan, Alden T. and Edward W. Clark. “Cups of Common Calamity.” Introduction. Puritans Among the Indians. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981.1-28. The current edition can be found here.

• Ironically, the earliest New World captivity tales must have been told by the American natives: Spaniards, not Indians, first seized hapless victims to serve as guides, interpreters, hostages, or curiosities.
• ‘Captivity narrative’ came to mean an account, usually autobiographical, of forced participation in Indian life. The literature of early American colonization is dotted with poignant and often gruesome tales of seizure, torture or adoption (sometimes both), and eventual escape or release. Such stories found a ready audience on both sides of the Atlantic, where they flourished, in one form or another, for three centuries.
• These stories were immensely popular because-like any successful literature-they served readers a hearty fare of literary and psychological satisfaction, peculiar to their time and place.
• In sum, the Rowlandsons’ publisher promised an intensely personal account of God’s testing and eventual salvation of a tormented soul, and a broad hint that her experience might foretell in microcosm the fate of all Puritans. Those were compelling attractions to the deeply pious people of seventeenth-century New England, who sought desperately to comprehend their preordained roles in God’s awesome universe.
• Puritan authors wove the captivity narrative from several existing literary strands. One strand was spiritual autobiography. . . . The New England branch of the Puritan movement . . . encouraged spiritual autobiography as a vital expression of the search for personal salvation. ‘The spiritual autobiographer is primarily concerned with the question of grace: whether or not the individual has been accepted into divine life, an acceptance signified by psychological and moral changes which the autobiographer comes to discern in his past experience.’ But the search for salvation was fraught with torments, doubts, and relapse, in almost perfect parallel to the experiences reported in the captivity narratives. In spiritual autobiographies, God and Satan wrestled for the sinner’s soul; in captivity autobiographies, the captive, with God’s help, battled Satan’s agents. In both cases, of course, God eventually prevailed; the weary pilgrim survived the ordeal because his faith wavered but did not break, and because God’s mercy was stronger than His wrath.
• ‘Redemption,’ a frequent term in captivity titles and texts, thus had a double meaning-spiritual as well as physical. Similarly, captivity stories combined individual catharsis and public admonition. Implicitly, at least, they exhorted the reader to find his or her own spiritual redemption.

• Mortality was a constant part of the Puritan’s lives; they felt death was always very close and this belief affected all the phases of each of their individual lives–not just belief but ideas of family, of career, of the worth of any human action or enterprise.
• They believed in predestination or that God had chosen his elect before they were born. Election had no connection to the need obey God. Obedience was the result of gratitude or affection for God. Puritans were not bothered that few might be elected; they rejoiced that any were elected at all.
• Puritans believe in original depravity or that they were sinners by birth.
• They felt no worldly ritual or prayer will ensure salvation; no human action or gesture of faith obliges the Almighty to respond. The idea that human works were required for salvation undercut God’s omnipotence.
• They felt religious authority came from the Bible and read it very literally. They saw the Bible as an authority and model for their own lives. Puritan writers use biblical metaphors to explain the Puritan condition.
• Puritans viewed the Bible as God’s covenant with them; they saw themselves as a Chosen People and identified strongly with the tribes of Israel in the Book of Exodus. In reading both Testaments, they concluded that God, though sometimes arbitrary in His power, is neither malicious nor capricious.
• Doers of evil suffer and are destroyed; true believers and doers of good may suffer as well, as worldly misfortune is both a test of faith and a signifier of God’s will.
• Puritan covenant theology taught that although no human being can ever know for certain whether or not he or she is among the saved, the only hope for knowing lay in rigorous individual study of Scripture; relentless moral self-examination; and active, wholehearted membership in their congregations.

Bruce Michelson and Marjorie Pryse suggest the following continuing cultural effects of New England Puritan beliefs:

• With no central religious authority, and an expectation that each member of the community should encounter Scripture and theological prose firsthand, New England Puritanism would be strongly influenced by a drive toward solidarity and consensus and by a championing of individual thought. These conflicting values would become clear in the collision between the Colony’s elders and Anne Hutchinson, less than ten years after the founding of Boston.
• An emphasis on individual responsibility, on a direct and personal relationship with God, and on the acquisition of knowledge in anticipation (or hope) of the coming of Divine Grace could be a powerful force for the education of women, and eventually for their political and social equality.
• A belief that salvation required, and would be signified by, achievement of absolute integrity among faith, worldly conduct, private life, and the spoken and written word would eventually figure centrally in the rise of abolitionist sentiment: race slavery becomes not an economic expediency or a social problem to be overlooked and eventually remedied but a mortal sin, threatening the moral condition of the society and every individual within it. The long-term effects of this kind of thinking are enormous. Nearly two centuries later, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was constructed around a similar proposition.
• A belief in a special destiny and a conviction that what was unfolding in New England was the last and best hope of the Christian world. Cataclysmic changes in London in the middle of the seventeenth century and the erosion of solidarity in the colony after the Restoration and with the passage of years would bring those convictions into crisis at century’s end.
• A special emphasis on reading correctly-not only holy texts but commentaries and the events of ordinary life. The New England Puritans were an intellectual people who believed firmly in portents, symbols, and the significance of all that happened in private and public life.