Puritan and Protestant Traditions in Literature

Background

Originally, “Puritan” was a derisive term for one who opposed compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism in Elizabethan England. The term was later applied to one who claimed to be using pure forms of Christianity. The claimed pure practices of Christianity included congregational organization, faith in the Bible as literal truth, and a rejection of ritual in religious practice. Protestants are members of any of a large number of Christian groups that are not Catholic; these groups trace their origins to the Reformation.

The Puritan tradition in literature has been most influential in the United States, largely because of the political and philosophical impact of the Puritan immigrants. Two Puritan groups were among the first Europeans in New England. The Plymouth colony was established in 1620 near Cape Cod, Massachusetts; their numbers were small and they produced only one notable writer, William Bradford (1590-1657), whose History of Plymouth Plantation remained unpublished until 1856. The Plymouth colonists believed in separation from the Church of England and had little contact with English society. The Plymouth colony had relatively little lasting influence politically; they have, however, maintained a mythic presence in American literature and culture, although their image was romanticized in such works as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858). Far more influential than the Plymouth colony was the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the Boston area, the first settlement of which took place in 1630. The Massachusetts Bay colonists did not believe in separation from England and maintained closer ties with the political movements of the time. Massachusetts Bay produced a number of important writers, including John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, and Edward Taylor.

Puritan Beliefs

The Puritan movement was attractive to those who felt shut out of the economic life of the seventeenth century, including second sons, who were precluded from inheriting property, and small businessmen and landlords, who were adversely affected by English population growth. For these groups the idea of a strict spiritual and secular order was extremely attractive.

Unlike the Church of England, which believed in a hierarchy with the English monarch at its head, Puritans believed in independent congregations with elected ministers. They also believed that God had already chosen those who would be saved from damnation. These people were the “elect.” Although this choice had already been made, the Puritans also believed in the covenant of grace: the idea that Christ would save all those who believed in him and that people might prepare their hearts for the experience of this grace.

The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay also believed that they were divinely selected to play a pivotal role in world history, serving as an example of an ideal society. Their concept of this ideal is shown in John Winthrop’s famous sermon A Model of Christian Charity (1630), delivered while the colonists were en route to America. In his sermon, Winthrop described an exemplary future in which the colonists would join together in a utopian community, sharing their burdens and joys and demonstrating their perfect understanding of the divine intention. Winthrop described this community as a “city on a hill,” a model that would be studied by the entire world.

That such an ideal was unobtainable became apparent to the colonists almost immediately; however, Winthrop’s sermon has several attributes which characterize the Puritan worldview. First was a tendency to see parallels between the Puritan experience and such archetypes as the Israelites’ journey into the wilderness. This tendency allowed the Puritans to invest their history with great symbolic significance and to find meaning in the most mundane occurrences; it also encouraged them to believe that their experiences had a divine purpose. This tendency also prevented the Puritans from seeing the indigenous people of America as human beings—if the “unsettled” areas of the New World were a “howling wilderness” under Satan’s power, then the inhabitants of that wilderness must be Satan’s agents. The Puritans thus considered the Native Americans to be “savages” and “animals,” and the land on which they lived to be unoccupied.

Winthrop’s sermon also demonstrates a dilemma at the heart of Puritan philosophy: The Puritans believed that they must reject the attractions of the world and live only for the rewards of the heavenly kingdom which was to come, yet they also believed that people should work diligently in their earthly pursuits, whatever they might be, and that this diligent work would ultimately produce material success. Thus, the Puritans were torn between the need to reject the world’s attractions and the need to succeed on the world’s terms, and this contradiction created strife and disagreement almost from the beginning.

Puritan Literature

The Puritans were an intensely utilitarian society and thus believed that all literature should serve a purpose. Nonetheless they produced a sizable corpus of history, personal narrative, biography, and even poetry, and their attitudes and beliefs have had a profound influence on American literature in general.

Autobiographies, conversion narratives, and biographies were important Puritan documents because Puritans believed that the life of the individual was a microcosm of the life of the group. Thus, the conversion experience, the individual’s journey from doubt to belief in the experience of grace, reflected the hoped-for journey of society from chaos to perfection. More important, the individual conversion narrative became a literary model and psychological pattern for a variety of other genres, following a trajectory of doubt and spiritual struggle leading gradually to growing confidence and final assurance, although even the elect experienced periodic lapses into despair. This classic Puritan experience can be seen in various diaries and personal narratives from Puritan writers such as Thomas Shepard, Michael Wigglesworth, Increase Mather, and Jonathan Edwards. The general pattern of the conversion narrative continues in such disparate literary forms as self-help books and celebrity biographies.

In following generations in the Puritan community, there was a move from autobiography to biography, from the description of the self to the description of previous members of the community as archetypes of the Christian citizen. In Puritan biographies such as Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americani (1702), people are held up as models for the community to demonstrate how the first generation of Puritans fulfilled the charge laid on them by God. That such pictures were in fact romanticized versions of earlier disputes did not lessen their significance as exemplars for a society which continued to fall short of the ideals proposed for it by Puritan philosophy.

Puritan history was influenced by Saint Augustine’s City of God and by the idea of history as an indication of God’s plan in recorded events. Puritans attempted to see divine meanings in the past, much as ministers sought hidden truths in biblical passages. Historians such as Edward Johnson in Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour in New England (1654) compared historical events and current events directly with Old and New Testament occurrences, citing parallels that they felt demonstrated that divine intents were being carried out in Puritan history. Such reassurance was particularly sought as Puritan society became more secular and lost more of its connection with the original fervor of Winthrop’s mission.

Puritan poetry struggled with difficulties not encountered by other literary forms, since Puritans generally distrusted the senses and the imagination, as well as the use of literary language. Yet by the 1650’s, a shift in thinking allowed Puritan authors to use sensual imagery and eloquence more freely. Puritan poets such as Edward Taylor and Richard Baxter used poetry for meditation, employing poetic language and metaphor to describe religious experience. Other Puritan poets such as John Josselyn and William Wood celebrated the beauty of the natural surroundings in New England. Yet the most famous Puritan poet of her time was undoubtedly Anne Bradstreet, a member of the ruling class of Massachusetts Bay. She wrote poetry that not only described her spiritual experiences but also reflected her struggles in balancing her passion for the material world—particularly her love for literature, her home, and her family—and her acknowledgment of the Puritan demand for its renunciation. Bradstreet was also keenly aware of the strictures against women in her society, reflected in the criticism her own writing received because of its having been written by a woman.

Puritans and Identity

The Puritans’ contribution to identity rests on their view of themselves as a special people with a divinely derived mission and on their emphasis on the individual experience. The Puritans looked for symbolic significance in every event, no matter how trivial. All history could be seen to have a pattern that could be interpreted correctly. This tendency to see symbolic significance in every occurrence is echoed throughout American literature, from the scarlet A reproduced in the heavens in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) to the mysterious letter v in Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1963). Puritan influence may also be seen in the importance given in American literature to written signs and symbols. The Puritans were literalists in their biblical interpretation, and the New Testament emphasizes the power of the Word.

The Puritans believed that the individual psyche was capable of rebirth in conversion, renewing one’s view of the world. Intellectual and emotional protest were channeled into a quest for spiritual awareness, the attempt to remake the self into a new consciousness. Puritan thinkers such as Jonathan Edwards recorded their rebirth in the experience of grace and the subsequent renewal of their perceptions. Some of their successors, the Transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, believed that a renewed perception could renew the world itself, could make nature itself a new experience. The ultimate effect of this concentration on self-renewal is a literature of self-consciousness: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and Edith Wharton are typical of a literature in which the psyche is the main area of interest, and in which the development of the spirit and the consciousness becomes of more import than the development of a more perfect society.

The Puritan emphasis on the inner journey as emblematic of the outer experience and on the development of the self as more important than the development of society has marked American literature ever since, for good and for ill. On one hand it has led to a literature that is masterful in its depiction of the triumphs and travails of the individual consciousness. On the other, it has produced an occasional lack of interest in society itself, a denial of the idea that the individual consciousness is in fact part of a complex whole, and that the connections within that whole demand at least as much attention as the experiences of its individual parts.

Puritan Representation in Literature

In subsequent American literature, Puritans largely became synonymous with intolerance, zealotry, and authoritarianism, particularly where differences of faith, sex, and race were concerned. They were often caricatured in mid-nineteenth-century American writings. Arguably the most famous critique of Puritanism comes from Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter (1850), about an illicit affair between a Puritan minister and an unwed woman and the ostracism she and their child face. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Margaret Atwood's vision of a gendered, puritanical totalitarian state in the novels The Handmaid's Tale (1986) and its sequel, The Testaments (2019), encapsulated the popular imagination of historical Puritanism. Atwood's contemporary Marilynne Robinson, the author of the Gilead series of novels, has challenged the notion of Puritanism being unforgiving and intolerant, and instead emphasized its beliefs in divine grace and universal sinfulness.

The 1692 Salem witch trials have particularly provided much fodder for the historical, speculative, and coming-of-age fiction, inspiring hundreds of works of fiction, drama, poetry, film, and television. Among the most famous is Arthur Miller's 1953 play The Crucible, a satire of the Communist witch hunt in 1950s America. A number of contemporary young-adult novels set during the witch hysteria explore race relations between white Puritan settlers and American Indians or enslaved Africans, largely drawing on traditions related to the historical figure of Tituba.

Bibliography

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Puritan Imagination: Essays in Revaluation. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1974. A more contemporary reassessment of the Puritan influence to augment the work of Perry Miller. Extensive bibliography.

Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. The Cambridge History of American Literature. 2 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Contains an overview of Puritan ideas and major authors.

Caldwell, Patricia. The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. An overview of this influential Puritan literary form.

Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. New York: Macmillan, 1939. The starting place for critical study.

Miller, Perry, and Thomas H. Johnson, eds. The New England Mind: From Colony to Province. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953. A classic consideration of the Puritan influence on American literature.

Miller, Perry, and Thomas H. Johnson, eds. The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings. 2 vols. 1938. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. A collection of many of the major Puritan writers, with selections from their principal works.

"The Salem Witch Trials, or Still Raking It in after All These Years." New England Historical Society, 2018, www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/salem-witch-trials-raking-after-all-years. Accessed 27 Sept. 2019.

White, Peter, ed. Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth Century American Poetry in Theory and Practice. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985. An anthology of Puritan poets, major and minor.

Wilkinson, Alissa. "What Two Fictional Gileads Can Teach Us about America." Vox, 15 July 2018, www.vox.com/culture/2018/7/12/17555996/handmaids-tale-gilead-marilynne-robinson-margaret-atwood. Accessed 27 Sept. 2019.