Introduction
Puritanism encompasses the belief that every human is vulnerable to sin, as every human from Adam and eve is born sinful. It holds the concept of salvation, but only through chosen ones, who possess the authority to change God’s will. Puritans believe in repetitive natural phenomenons through historical cycles, evident from floods, striking, thunder etc. While Puritans have adopted the main features of Calvinism and Augustinian theology, contemporary Puritanism is often applied to various manifestations of American life. That’s why we often see Puritan traits in the lineaments of later America who maintained that an actual connection exists between later American development and its Puritan culture and heritage.
The philosophical orientation of Puritanism initiated in America in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, where Puritans philosophy of life and code of values became one of the continuous factors in American life reflected in American literature. It would not be wrong to say that the inventory of the traditional elements that have gone into the making of the ‘American mind’ have commenced while relating particular literature to Puritanism (Waller, 1950, p. 4). Literature has been the elementary force in forming this religion or movement, which has been accentuated because it was the first to articulate the traditional factors to inspire certain traits which have persisted long after the vanishing of the original creed. Waller (1950, p. 5) mentions that the way Puritan has acquired the reputation of having been blind to all aesthetic enjoyment and starved, shows that the architecture of the Puritan age has grown in the esteem of critics and the household objects of Puritan manufacture and furniture, has achieved prohibitive prices by their appeal to discriminating collectors.
There are many sects that have arisen out of Puritanism and many authors believe they have betrayed their rebellion against the true spirit of their source by attacking upon the ideal of a learned ministry. Many literary authors through their works have indicated that Puritanism was a religion based upon complex, subtle, and highly intellectualized affairs. For these reasons we can see that contemporary artists have strenuously attempted to humanize this religion, so as to smooth over hard doctrines at the cost of hard headed realism and invincible logic. Puritan not only emerged as a religious creed, but a theology and a metaphysic that attempted to organize man’s emotional and intellectual life, to the extent which has never been sustained by any denomination stemming from it.
Anne Bradstreet analysis in “The Prologue” and “Contemplations”
Anne Bradstreet’s role in the cultural literary movement was not more than a female poet, striving hard to achieve her identity in a male dominated Puritan society. “The Prologue” is one of the attempts of Bradstreet on the way to the development of American history and culture, which helped her to identify the loopholes of Puritanism to transcendentalism and ultimately landed to modern feminism. Her personal and artistic conflicts and challenges have been reflected in this magnum opus and are clarified by the understanding of the larger cultural context of her life. Literature reveals that despite of the theological framework that supported Bradstreet’s daily life to believe every injustice to feminism, she sometimes questioned the validity of the Puritan voyage and doubted the existence of God. But she was bound to adopt the timely Puritan society by controlling her agonizing scepticism and committing herself to the religious values of her culture (Martin, 1984, p. 4).
This poem functions as an apology to the readers for being ‘foolish’ and acts as an indirect defense of her artwork. Anne Bradstreet apologizes to the people for being so unfair at writing and being unfair to the society for being a woman poet. Her apology seems as a note to anticipate her feminism for confronting challenges pertaining to the gender roles within her society. Since she is the poet of Puritan society, she is well aware of the fact that it is not possible for the male readers to welcome her wholeheartedly as a poet, even accept her artwork. Therefore, she tries her best and utilizes the best of her poetic skills of vindication, verbal irony, and sarcasm to avoid threatening the male audience. However, through her poetic efforts she remained able to some extent to address her views on the treatment of women in a patriarchal society.
In a religious reform of Puritans, Anne Bradstreet authorized self-subordination to God by investing her artistic skills in numerous roles, among which the most evident ones were not only limited to dutiful daughter and a devoted wife, but also as a Puritan, she was a great mother, grandmother, poet, admirer of nature, and advocate of women’s worth (Blackstock, 1997). Blackstock (1997) mentions that despite conducting numerous attempts to privilege one of these positions over others, Bradstreet disclosed the ‘real’ Anne Bradstreet, but with simplifying her complexity. Many literary reformers like Ivy Schweitzer places the onus of displacing feminism on the shoulders of Puritanism, that has not only created valorous theology among women through post-modern theory, but has also neutralized cultural traditions which differ in many crucial ways (ibid). In the response to the blame of Puritanism that post-modern theory is committed to deconstruct feminism, Bradstreet cultivates her identity through multiple modes of self that are both deliberate and complex. Bradstreet has gone through a phase in Puritan literature where she has underestimated her work in the eyes of the patriarchal society. Her poems, though quaternions comprise of deep performances of her distinct characters which were somehow linked to form related identities, both in the sense of performing and reality. “The Prologue” is among one of them constituting no particular ontological status, other than creating role-playing sense that conceptualizes and underlines her male assertion and aggression toward unity within and among females. She presents feminist characters in a ‘masculine’ behavior to compensate and react against patriarchate Puritanism. Such a forbidden integration was hard to imagine in the 1650s and Bradstreet dared to integrate a literary form of denial reflecting men’s unfair treatment. Hammond (2000, p. 54) suggests that the Puritan imagination formed a culture that differed from ours in many ways, and that is what Anne Bradstreet highlighted in the first generation with an aim to embrace the artificial surface of the pastoral whose wide reading is fully evident in “The Prologue”. Nonetheless, because the poem was penned on behalf of human impulses that have not changed beyond recognition in Puritan reform, it also offers points of similarity that are frequently obscured by its distracting surface.
Martin (1984, p. 17) mentions what Puritans accepted as doubt and confusion about faith and conversion as part of the gruelling process of weaning the affections from earthly attachments, but Anne Bradstreet’s resolute efforts to be worthy of God’s grace intensified her uncertainty about the promise of eternal life. This is revealed in “Contemplations” in which she has successfully demonstrated her confused emotions, published in the second edition of ‘The Tenth Muse’, which is considered as her best poem. In “Contemplations” Bradstreet again accepts what nature reserves for mankind while acknowledging the vanity of life on earth. But this time she does not feel to apologize to nature, rather she is drawn by the immense beauty of nature to experience and celebrate her plenitude and the generative power of the elements, which Puritanism restricts indirectly. This is so because the poem demonstrates the interweaving of nature to celebrate a desire for eternal life. Bradstreet mentions that the conflict between nature’s power to enlighten the world and God’s supremacy is resolved when sensory pleasure is accepted as emblematic of eternal joy. Bradstreet’s ultimate decision to reject earthly pleasures is achieved by reminding herself that though the nature is powerful, but since it is finite, it never allow us to forget what God’s omniscience has decided in the Holy scripture.
Michael Wigglesworth “The Day of Doom”
One of the favorite subjects for Puritan authors was the day of judgement, for which the enormous popularity of Michael Wigglesworth, as a Puritan epic dramatized the second coming of Christ and separation of all souls into elect and perverse sheep and goats (Konkle, 2006, p. 35). This extension of typology from Biblical hermeneutic to progressive theory of history also hold ramifications for the political organization and operation of the colonies, particularly the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Many scholars believe that to this day the Puritans waited to establish a Holy Commonwealth and a political rule by church leaders. Wigglesworth has demonstrated in “The Day of Doom” a structural typology, when applied to the Old and New Testaments of the Bible or American history or literature, ends up in cyclical and linear, both archetypal and progressive cyclical patterns, approved by Puritans.
Reed (2001) mentions that “besides the Bible, The Day of Doom sold more copies than any other book until Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth”. The poem was used to teach and analyze young children in the doctrines and beliefs of Puritanism, and so well used was each volume that today, it is rare to find a copy preceding the seventh printing (Reed, 2001). However, the popularity graph was due to the ballad meter in which it was written in a meter more suitable for songs of love and death, often readers have found ballad meter unsuitable to the sacred level of the religious beliefs of the Puritan religion. Therefore, Wigglesworth like Bradstreet remained successful in reshaping Puritans style of worshipping that the ballad meter tends to lower the divine, thus giving the poet the same measure of control over his God, over the Oedipal figure present in the centre of Puritanism (ibid).
This Puritan artwork is a warning to the soul, which Adams (1990) suggests as a rhetorical perspective that has adopted in his assessment, a metaphoric imagery that is inferior to that of his Puritan contemporaries. In this way he categorizes Wigglesworth as Ramist, who has adopted rhetorical theory depriving virtually no impact on Puritan poetics. He claims that Wigglesworth provides practical use of demonstrating a warning for Puritan readers and the logical system that serves them as a foundation for poetic form. But mentioning alone a logical manner in his poems does not make him a Ramist, instead what he has tried in this poem is to present the readers a logical metaphor, blended with rhetoric to believe in God.
Puritan narrative aesthetic and writing is too indirect an influence to argue that Wigglesworth borrowed from the Puritans, but in combination with a confusion of a residual Puritan ethos, American culture, and family heritage (Konkle, 2006, p. 24). Wigglesworth identifies the symbols of an ideal self-hood that assumes full coherence only in relation to the pages of Scripture. This represents a decidedly romantic view of tradition ultimately based upon worshipping emulation rather than artistic transcendence. Wigglesworth embed the margins of his doomsday poem with references to his biblical sources, but he notes the reinforcement of his ironic authority whose individual talent revitalizes the Puritan tradition (Hammond, 2000, p. 59). Wigglesworth’s warnings have enhanced the poet’s textual role as a mere instrument, which survives in a passage of words, God has authorized himself. Puritan poets like Wigglesworth assumed authorial power by renouncing it and confirming the consistently assumed neobiblical identities as extensions to the Puritans perception.
Puritan readers after confronting with such ‘biblical’ texts which they see as poet’s perceptions, drawn by the poet as seer, and as Puritans called the various stenographers of Scripture into full engagement with Scripture, declare the work of Wigglesworth not simply as holy but on the ground that fulfils perceptual reality. The inclusion of historical and biographical verses, indicated and remapped the reader’s perception of religion along biblical lines. The historical and cyclical parallels were endless and Puritans never tired of reflecting on them, instead they contextualize as experiential anti-types and were repeatedly warned to melt down their golden calves and persevere (Hammond, 2000, p. 60). Wigglesworth through laments reminded them that the places where they used to live were once part of our families and social groups but now they are in the heavenly Jerusalem toward which all of Scripture and history pointed.
The Puritan poetry presented an elegy to stimulate a particular subjectivity, in which the one that was apparent was the struggle between the conflict of a sinful world and a saint like next world. Though the elegy encompassed refashioning warnings in accordance with redemptive psychology, but the way it offered regulating comfort to poet and reader alike, captured the attention of millions. Puritans saw the private experience of loss as cursed in which the Puritan elegy experienced a unique response filled with the insights of judgement and could be felt through an engaged act of reading. The poem was judged by the spiritual orientation it articulated, even in a modern perspective, this seems a passive approach to grasp the concepts. But to many Puritans, the reading and literature was in its receptive textual directives which was constructed as a reverberation of the experience of grace itself. The story of salvation was presented in many forms by many authors, however the stages were clearly defined by capturing the attention on ‘historical’ faith in which the mere knowledge of salvation was available to all, characterized by the belief that the saved soul would sooner or later be ‘convicted’ in sin.
Works Cited
Adams, C. John. “Alexander Richardson and the Ramist Poetics of Michael Wigglesworth”. Early American Literature 25. 3 (1990): 271.
Blackstock, Carrie Galloway. “Anne Bradstreet and Performativity Self-Cultivation, Self-Deployment”. Early American Literature 32. 3 (1997).
Hammond, A. Jeffrey. The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study: Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, England, 2000.
Konkle Lincoln. Thornton Wilder and the Puritan Narrative Tradition: University of Missouri Press: Columbia, MO, 2006.
Martin Wendy. An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich: University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, NC, 1984.
Reed Michael. “Edward Taylor and Michael Wigglesworth: Reconciling the Divine and the Mundane in the Preparatory Meditations and the Day of Doom”. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, (2001): 182.
Waller, M. George. Puritanism in Early America: D. C. Heath: Boston, 1950.