Octavio Paz, a famous Mexican poet, called Puritan culture the culture of exclusion. Comparing the character of Mexicans and North Americans, Paz stated that the North American society is based on ideas of the beneficial effects of asceticism and the cult of work (24). A Puritan sees every contact as contamination: the germs of impurity are in foreign bodies, customs, and ideas (Paz 24). A person of moral purity is imprisoned by certain principles constantly repeated everywhere (Paz 25). Therefore, North Americans deny their body and desires (Paz 37). Investigating the works of American Puritans, researchers found all these peculiarities of exclusive culture: exclusion of leisure, emotions, imagination, and exclusion of foreigners.
For Puritans, the main question of life was the pursuit of God’s will. Therefore, there was no place for carefree entertainment. Every pious settler should make the recordings of their lives to find the signs of God and follow the path of predestination (Ruland et al. 15). Examples of such journals are Bradford’s and Winthrop’s, accountings of the Reverend Thomas Shepard and Spiritual Travels of Nathan Cole, Cotton Mather’s volumes, records by Samuel Sewall, Personal Narrative of the great divine Jonathan Edwards (Ruland et al. 15-16). The most remarkable example of American utility doctrine is The New England Primer (1683?) – a textbook for children that suggested learning the alphabet with the help of dogmatic mnemonic rhymes (Ruland et al. 18). The dutifulness and practicality demonstrated in the stated works reflect the typical Puritan approach to life.
There is no place for imaginative literature in the Puritan world: historians found plenty of history and travel records, diaries, and sermons, but no prose fiction and theatre plays. Even recognizing the importance of poetry, Puritans rigorously limited it to the world of providential and transcendental things (Ruland et al. 16). While the seventeenth century in Britain was a plentiful age in writing, North Americans utilized the “plain style” (Ruland et al. 17-18). Puritans suspected “pictorial, musical and verbal creations” as something made for distraction and sensorial pleasure (Ruland et al. 18). For instance, Cotton Mather, in his Manuductio ad Ministerium (1726), warned about a “devil’s library” that contained many modern novels, plays, and poems (Ruland et al. 18). Michael Wigglesworth’s The Day of Doom (1662), a famous poem of New England, had a utilitarian purpose: instructing what to do on the Day of Judgment (Ruland et al. 18). The works of Anne Bradstreet, the first prominent woman poet in the English language, are restrained by their nature, reflecting the double submission of a woman to divine and domestic duty (Ruland et al. 20). Thus, Puritans declared the exclusion of inappropriate emotions and imagination.
Foreigners for Puritans are Indians, terrible enemies from the wilderness. The Indian-captivity narratives used the crucial myth about people chosen by God to cross the sea and encounter suffering in the land of devils, redeem their sins, and find a new world (Ruland et al. 24). The adventure in the prose of a pious settler adopts a shape of allegory as it happened with The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) (Ruland et al. 25). Rowlandson drew strong parallels to Old Testament, comparing Indians with the servants of Satan and her sufferings with the sufferings of Chosen People during their way to the heavenly kingdom (Ruland et al. 25). She intentionally averted her eyes from exploring the culture of Indians (Ruland et al. 26). The heritage of Puritans is limited to moralism and allegory; it fails to embrace the natural world and be open-minded to native traditions and customs.
Thus, the lack of inclusiveness is a remarkable characteristic of Puritan literature. It reveals itself through a limited scope of favored literary genres, a tendency to explain life exclusively from the point of view of Christian morality, suppression of emotions and pleasures, and fear of the outer world of blasphemous wilderness. With its principle of exclusion, Puritanism influenced not just the literary works of New England settlers but also the writings of further generations.
Works Cited
Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude: And the Other Mexico; Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude; Mexico and the United States; The Philanthropic Ogre. Vol. 13. Grove Press, 1985.
Ruland, Richard et al. From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A history of American literature. Routledge, 2016.