Early in The American Adam, R.W.B. Lewis wrote that

narrative art inevitably...stains ideas with restless ambiguity. For the experience of the aims and values of an epoch is apt to be more complex and even more painful than the simple statement of them; and narrative deals with experiences, not with propositions. The narrative art, moreover, dramatizes as human conflict what is elsewhere a thoughtful exchange of ideas; and art projects — in a single packed dramatic image — conflicting principles which the discursive mind must contemplate separately and consecutively. (My emphases)

Ideas can be conveyed in the form of a story or in the form of a series of propositions. And as all alert English majors know, form is never completely independent of content. The content is always in some way “stained,” as Lewis puts it, by the form. (Compare this idea to Marshall McLuhan’s contention that “the medium is the message” and Susan Sontag’s argument in “Against Interpretation” that content is actually an aspect of form rather than the opposite of form.)

Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur could have said what he had to say about America in the form of a nonfiction essay. He could have expressed his thoughts in a series of propositions, say, like this:

On the one hand, America holds out tremendous promise of freedom and equality, and for many that promise is coming true. While I was in rural New York I observed people of a sort never seen before, indeed not even possible to imagine, in Europe. On the other hand, even though Americans champion the ideal of freedom, they seem oblivious to the reality that many of them still own slaves….

But Crèvecoeur didn’t use the essay form. He chose instead to express his ideas in a narrative form, in the form of fictional letters written by an ordinary American farmer to a British correspondent. So what we get are passages like this:

[W]here is that station which can confer a more substantial system of felicity than that of an American farmer, possessing freedom of action, freedom of thoughts, ruled by a mode of government which requires but little from us? I owe nothing but a pepper corn to my country, a small tribute to my king, with loyalty and due respect; I know no other landlord than the lord of all land, to whom I owe the most sincere gratitude. My father left me three hundred and seventy-one acres of land, forty-seven of which are good timothy meadow, an excellent orchard, a good house, and a substantial barn. It is my duty to think how happy I am that he lived to build and to pay for all these improvements; what are the labours which I have to undergo, what are my fatigues when compared to his, who had every thing to do, from the first tree he felled to the finishing of his house? Every year I kill from 1,500 to 2,000 weight of pork, 1,200 of beef, half a dozen of good wethers in harvest: of fowls my wife has always a great stock: what can I wish more? My negroes are tolerably faithful and healthy; by a long series of industry and honest dealings, my father left behind him the name of a good man; I have but to tread his paths to be happy and a good man like him.…

The general idea seems to be that the freedoms enjoyed by Farmer James and his father permitted them to profit from the fruits of their own labor, gradually amassing wealth to pass on to their posterity. Under such conditions work becomes a joy rather than a burden.

Because he’s writing fiction, and because good fiction demands concrete, lifelike details, Crèvecoeur fleshes out this picture of felicity-and-prosperity-through-freedom with a detailed accounting of Farmer James’s wealth: this many acres, this much beef, that much pork, and so on. This list functions to make Letters from an American Farmer more believable, helping us to willingly suspend our disbelief and also seducing us into its ideology — at least until, near the end of this list, we read that bit, so casually tossed in, about “my Negroes.”

Wait a minute, we find ourselves thinking. How can it possibly make sense to mention one’s slaves in a testimony to the marvels of freedom? And then we might notice the rather dark irony of phrases like “industry and honest dealings”: whose industry? And what’s so “honest” about slavery? Then there’s the idea that all Farmer James has to do to be a “good man” like his father is to do as his father did — including, presumably, to continue to arrogate to himself and his heirs the wealth produced in part by his slaves. Undermining Farmer James’s ideal of freedom is the reality of slavery, not only in the present but projected into the future.

The fictional form of Letters demands the enumeration of concrete details, but among those details are some that “stain” the book’s “ideas with restless ambiguity” — in this case, by suggesting that the freedom under discussion is not freedom for all but only freedom for some.

What are some of the other ways Crèvecoeur’s choice to convey his ideas in narrative form “stain his ideas”? That is, what are some of the ways in which Crèvecoeur seems to be trying to tell us one thing, but is prompted by the Letters’ form to tell us other things as well? Read more!

The captivity narrative as a genre and captivity as a trope have been prominent at least since biblical times. (Think of how much mileage the Jewish national mythology gets out of the Egyptian and Babylon captivities.) Today the idea of captivity circulates through pop culture (think of Gwen Stefani singing “Just a Girl” or The Melodians reworking Psalm 137 into “By the Rivers of Babylon”) and periodically dominates the news (e.g., Elizabeth Smart and Jaycee Dugard).

In this post I want to focus on Rowlandson’s Narrative of the Captivity as a powerful work of theodicy — that is, an attempt to reconcile belief in the goodness of God with the fact of suffering in the world. Consider Rowlandson’s description, long after her captivity has ended, of her continuing misery:

I can remember the time, when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts, whole nights together, but now it is other ways with me. When all are fast about me, and no eye open, but His who ever waketh, my thoughts are upon things past, upon the awfull dispensation of the Lord towards us; upon his wonderful power and might, in carrying of us through so many difficulties, in returning us in safety, and suffering none to hurt us.

Suffering none to hurt us! This from a woman who watched her youngest child die in her arms. Rowlandson continues:

I remember in the night season, how the other day I was in the midst of thousands of enemies, and nothing but death before me: it is then hard work to persuade myself, that ever I should be satisfied with bread again. But now we are fed with the finest of the wheat, and, as I may say, with honey out of the rock: instead of the husk, we have the fatted calf: the thoughts of these things in the particulars of them, and of the love and goodness of God towards us, make it true of me, what David said of himself, Psalms 6.6. I watered my couch with my tears. Oh! the wonderful power of God that mine eyes have seen, affording matter enough for my thoughts to run in, that when others are sleeping mine are weeping. (175)

I find passages like these tremendously moving, but I’m not sure the book as a whole succeeds as a theodicy. In fact, when Rowlandson insists on “the love and goodness of God towards us” I’m not sure she believes her own words.

What do you think — does Rowlandson believe what she says? More broadly, does her Narrative succeed in reconciling the belief in “the love and goodness of God” with the seemingly random experience of captivity and loss? Read more!

So what do you think of Anne Bradstreet’s poem “The Flesh and the Spirit”? The poem personifies these two abstractions — aka the material and the spiritual, the worldly and the heavenly — and is structured as a debate between them. But it doesn’t really seem to be a fair fight. It uses the form of a debate yet gives all the best lines to the Spirit in order to demonstrate the Spirit’s superiority. The game is rigged. Recast the poem as TV politicotainment, and the Spirit would be Hannity and the Flesh would be that perpetual punching bag, Colmes. The Flesh never makes its strongest argument. (Perhaps Bradstreet doesn’t even believe the Flesh has a stronger argument.)

After first suggesting that the Spirit is crazy (“Art fancy sick, or turned a sot?”), the Flesh suggests that it’s better to pursue honor, fame, riches, and pleasure than things known “only in mind.” Wouldn’t it have been less partial to have the Flesh argue for such material goals as the creation of a just society and the alleviation of physical suffering? The Spirit claims that people in heaven do not suffer “From sickness and infirmity,” so she obviously thinks these are bad things; why not work with the Flesh to alleviate them in the here and now of the material world? Why not try to create a little more heaven here on earth? Come to think of it, why do the material and the spiritual have to be locked in a “deadly feud” in the first place?

Also, maybe the Spirit’s case is not as strong as at first appears. After dissing material wealth (“My garments are not silk nor gold, / Nor such like trash”), she describes the beauty of heaven using images of, well, material wealth: “precious jasper stone,” “gates of pearl,” and “streets [of] transparent gold.” If material wealth is “trash,” how can it be an effective metaphor for spiritual value? It’s a bit like saying “Roses are trashy” and then saying “Ah, my love is a rose”! Could it be that the poem’s spiritual message is undercut by the force of its material imagery?

To put it another way, does the very thing (the rich imagery) that does so much to strengthen the poem as a poem work against its effectiveness as a theological statement?

To put it yet another way, is the poem’s form at odds with its content? Or do they in some sly way work together? Read more!

Every time I teach William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation I get the same complaint: it’s dull. But it’s not! Once you get used to Bradford’s Puritan “plain style,” his account of the Plymouth colony’s early years is more fun than Disneyland. Yes, it reveals the early colonists to be every bit as bigoted and theocratic as the Puritan stereotype would suggest, but it also shows them to be dedicated, gutsy, and at least occasionally funny. I would recommend paying special attention to the account of the sailor with the “lusty, able body” (on page 248); the beautiful and moving description of just how vulnerable and isolated the colonists felt upon being dropped off by the Mayflower (249-250); the heartbreaking account of the “starving time” (251-252); the hilarious description of John Morton’s rival colony at Merrymount, which ends with Morton being arrested after he proves too drunk to lift his musket (254-258) (remember, sometimes a musket is just a musket); and the explanation of the shocking, just shocking, discovery that there were “so many wicked persons and profane people” in God’s Own Colony (262-263).

A few questions: At the beginning of his book, Bradford tells us he is writing “in a plain style, with singular regard to the simple truth in all things” (247). But is the truth of the Plymouth experiment really simple? And is Bradford’s plain style really so plain? Does it really give us the unvarnished truth, or is the plain style itself a rhetorical device used to make the untrue seem true?

Is Bradford’s History really a history at all? If not, what would you call it?

As examples of some of Bradford’s literary devices, consider the alliteration and internal rhyme that give so much zip to the phrases “to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies” and “fill their sides full of arrows.” Feel the poetic rhythm of “hideous and desolate wilderness” (each of the main words is a dactyl, with one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables: hí-de-ous, dés-o-late, wíl-der-ness). Groove on the anaphora in “wild beasts and wild men.” (The original spelling is “wild beasts and willd men.”) In other words, sense the poetry animating the prose — and the poet’s heart beating inside the sober and orthodox colonial governor.

Oh, yeah — anyone who thinks the U.S. Constitution established a “Christian nation” should be sure to check out the Mayflower Compact (251) to see what the charter of a real Christian polity looks like.

As for the excerpt from John Underhill’s Newes from America, it can be difficult to read — in more ways than one. As far as I know, this book has never been published in a modern edition, and the copy in your coursepack is from a microfilm of the original. The copy quality is poor, the spelling is old-school (“seeing the Fort was to hotte for us, wee devised a way how wee might save ourselves”), and the book uses the “long-s” (which looks like an “f” with the cross-stroke on the left side only).

But the excerpt is also difficult to read because of its horrific content. It begins after the fighting at the Pequot village of Mystic is already underway. The Pequots, mostly women and children, have been caught by surprise in their “palizado” or wooden fortress but are starting to mount an effective defense. The Puritans, led by Underhill and Captain Mason and having taken a few casualties, decide not to force their way into the fort but instead to burn it down. Underhill’s account of the ensuing slaughter can be compared to William Bradford’s account of the same event in Chapter XXVIII of his History.

Both accounts can be compared to this R-rated scene from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911. What would you say are the some of the hallmarks of the language used to describe and justify the Pequot massacre? What about the rhetoric of empire more generally? And what about Michael Moore’s anti-imperialist rhetoric? Read more!