The Cultural Dynamics of

The Cultural Dynamics of American Puritanism
Author(s): David M. Robinson

Source: American Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Winter, 1994), pp. 738-755
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/489963
Accessed: 10-08-2016 08:26 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American
Literary History
This content downloaded from 136.186.1.81 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 08:26:12 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
The Cultural Dynamics of
American Puritanism
David M. Robinson
The Long Argument: It can no longer be said that all studies of American Pu-
English Puritanism and ritanism are a series of footnotes to Perry Miller. An extraor-
the Shaping of New
dinary outpouring of work in the past decade has established
England Culture,
1570-1700 Puritan studies, always among the most demanding of fields,
By Stephen Foster as one of the liveliest as well. Miller's success as an interpreter
University of North of Puritan culture arose from his ability to command a diverse
Carolina Press, 1991 audience of literary scholars, intellectual historians, and theo-
logians; the current renaissance of Puritan studies has the same
Female Piety in
Puritan New England:
interdisciplinary quality. David D. Hall has cataloged the trib-
The Emergence of utary discourses in recent Puritan scholarship, noting that his-
Religious Humanism torians, literary critics, and seminary historians have all con-
By Amanda Porterfield tributed not to a consensus but a reframing of important
Oxford University questions about Puritan history.' Moreover, Puritanism has
Press, 1992
been displaced from the central role once accorded it as the
foundational movement of American culture and increasingly
understood as one of many elements of a quite diverse colonial
society, one best understood, in many respects, as a colonial
society rather than an incipient nation-state (see Gura,
"Study" 307-10, 337-41). But this displacement of Puritan-
ism has not resulted in its neglect, nor has it in any way di-
minished the fascinating complexity of its internal politics,
social ethics, or theology. New work, it seems, always stim-
ulates newer work. Stephen Foster's The Long Argument and
Amanda Porterfield's Female Piety in Puritan New England,
both under review here, offer important investigations of the
role of Puritanism in American cultural studies, examining in
different ways the social and political issues always near the
surface when "Puritanism" and "America" are brought into
conjunction. Foster's book offers us a remarkably original and
comprehensive narrative of New England Puritanism's rise and
fall, emphasizing the seamless connection between English
politics and the fate of the New England Puritan movement;
Porterfield's study raises important questions about the role of
gender in the work of theological and artistic expression in
Puritan culture.
Puritanism was in its essence a religious movement, and
American Literary History 739
its doctrines and spiritual practices were of course crucial to

the course of its development. Both these studies remind us,
however, that to understand Puritanism, one must recognize it
as an evolving movement, struggling internally to maintain
order and continuity and responding constantly to external
pressures. To the teacher of American literature, the nature of
Puritanism as a religious movement and its close link with
Calvinist theology have too often rendered it a static monolith;
we tend too often to reduce Puritanism to a distant "context"
against which a particular author's achievement, or some later
cultural or artistic development, might be measured. But in the
process of American cultural development, religion has been
no unmoved mover. The reassessment of Puritanism now un-
derway reminds us of the extent to which religion in America,
or to be more precise, America's various religions, have been
evolving and often unstable conjunctions of intellectual belief
and social practice, the more influential because of that evo-
lutionary instability. Miller's assertion that "certain basic con-
tinuities persist in a culture" (184-85), a tacit assumption of
all formative American studies work, typifies the way that we
have tended to use "Puritanism" as a point of departure for
later cultural developments. But the closer we look at the Pu-
ritans, the less likely we are to see anything like a cohesive
whole. As Philip F. Gura reminds us in his study of the di-
versity of Puritan radicalisms, Miller's description of the Pu-
ritan "synthesis" has tended to obscure "the full complexity
of the New England mind in the seventeenth century"
(Glimpse 6), a complexity that Gura illustrates in his study of
the dissenting radicals to whom the Puritan clerical leadership
was constantly forced to respond. The Puritans were, we must
remember, in hot debate with those outside their movement,
but also in debate among themselves, very often about who
could be counted for inclusion with them. They left England
in disputation and resumed it with little or no delay in the
New World, a situation that, when considered fully, weakens
our impression of a stable Puritan theological hegemony in
New England.
Part of the explanation for our slow comprehension of

Puritanism as a movement, which developed historically under
the constant pressure of modification by strong centrifugal
forces, is the Puritans' own version of their history, centering
740 The Cultural Dynamics of American Puritanism
on the "declension" from an original, utopian myth of piety

and social integration. The myth of declension conditioned all
versions of change with a depiction of origins that cut the
movement away from its English past, as if the Atlantic mi-
gration were the seven days of the biblical creation. The im-
mense value of Foster's The Long Argument is to remind us,
in persuasive detail, that "the sailing of the Winthrop fleet of
1630 is still another link" in a long chain of events extending
before and after it; "[i]n no sense is it a terminus, much less
a beginning" (138). But the Puritans' inclination to think of
it as an origin, at least when they presented their own history,
coalesced with another interest, that of later Americanists to
trace "the attainment of an American identity" (x). Foster's
patient explanation that "migrants crossed the Atlantic, not the
Lethe" (151), thus fulfills the building promise of a "trans-
atlantic" history of Puritanism and restores it as a movement
constantly in process. It must be understood less as the artic-
ulation of a distinctive theology or ecclesiastical polity than
as a series of cultural conflicts, negotiations, and intellectual
repositionings rooted in the interplay of English politics and
American social conditions.
The Puritanism of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods
combined, sometimes uneasily, an element of populist radi-
calism with a conviction of being an intellectual vanguard.
"[A] sustained criticism of institutionalized privilege" was
"[w]oven into the fabric" (51-52) of this reform impulse, Fos-
ter argues, and as English politics would eventually show, the
Puritan threat to the establishment was real. But the Puritans
were also deeply motivated by a desire for a new order, the

opportunity for which was seemingly provided for them in
New England. The Atlantic migration thus transformed their
populist anti-institutionalism into what their clerical leadership
eventually came to see as a dangerously destabilizing force.
The result was the wrenching attempt of the clergy to force a
social cohesion from people who had a decided inclination
toward contentiousness. After all, one's very presence in the
Puritan movement suggested some history of, and commit-
ment to, dissent. But these populist tendencies within Puritan-
ism did not erase its identity as a loose network of committed
intellectuals whose aim was less to express the will of the
people than to educate that will. "Puritans as a group had little
use for pious simpletons" (70), Foster remarks. Their first aim
was a reformulated church, but that was only preliminary to
the larger goal of a better educated, more orderly, and more
responsible populace.
Foster thus offers us a portrait of Puritanism in which

doctrine, conceived as a statement of belief, is less important
than the trajectory of the reforming energy of the movement,
which was itself in a constant state of quandary about its iden-
tity and in a continual process of self-reinvention. The result
is a movement that "resists denominational taxonomy and can
be described only in historical terms, by reference to various
successive challenges" (5). The Puritans' sense of being a
"vanguard" was at times supplanted by their sense of being
a "remnant," an internal dialectic that made each turn in the
political turmoil of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century En-
gland apocalyptically significant. English political events,
most notably the failure of their reform program in Parliament,
threatened the Puritans' fragile self-perception, weakened their
cohesiveness, and at the time of the migration, fueled their
growing alienation from English society. The abrupt denial, in
the suspension of Parliament, of what had seemed to them to
be a triumph within the system was for many a final, devas-
tating blow: "one could only pray and endure or fly before
it" (137).
This experience informed the actions of the New England
Puritans, and continued to do so as the English turmoil in-
creased and new immigrants arrived. Foster is particularly in-
sightful in describing the Puritan state of mind at the time of
the American migration and in taking note of the varied shades
of emphasis brought by later immigrants with different expe-
riences in the English tumult. John Winthrop left for America
with the conviction that "England was Sodom, too corrupt to
be saved, or at best Jerusalem in her last moments before the
destruction of the Temple" (Foster 109). He exemplified the
"increasingly exhilarating despair" resulting from the "abrupt
collapse of parliamentary politics in 1629" (108-10), a failure
that represented to many the destruction of all hope for the
establishment of a reformed moral order in England. The leg-
acy of English politics to American Puritanism was, in this
sense, the desire to establish and maintain a church and a civil
order of the kind that they had failed to effect in England, and
also to cultivate and protect the quality of sainthood that had
proved itself inimical to the established powers in England.
That sainthood was increasingly seen to be the foundation of
the new order that they sought. The history of New England
Puritanism, as Foster tells it, is largely a struggle to balance
these sometimes conflicting demands.
The horrified fleeing from the drift of English society as
a whole, not merely the English church, underlines the appar-
ent feeling of urgency in the departure of the first wave of

Puritan immigrants, their sense of witnessing a culture beyond
their influence. These concerns transcend any narrowly theo-
logical definition, and Foster quite effectively presents them
as forms of broadly based cultural dissent. Winthrop had wit-
nessed with dismay the drift of English culture and deplored
the "overall moral climate that allowed and encouraged pur-
poseless, unreflective egotism" (112). He fled from a nation
in a steep and precipitous moral decline. But the immigrants
who followed later in the 1630s had experienced more severe
persecution under Archbishop William Laud, and they infused
the movement in New England with an "embittered extrem-
ism" (163). Foster argues that Laud's persecution "divided the
English Puritan ministry to an unprecedented extent and in-
criminated the more moderate wing in the eyes of the godly
as mere collaborationists" (143). Those coming to New En-
gland were thus much less inclined to any form of compromise
or accommodation. One manifestation of such extremism was
the effort to accord privilege to the self-declared "saints" of
the movement, particularly in the enforcement of the stringent
theological requirement for church membership. Because of
the English situation they were fleeing and the distance from
any external restraints, the growing tendency of the Puritan
leadership was "toward a definition of the church that gives
first thought to the calling of the saints and deduces the terms
of the Puritan mission from their needs and privileges" (158).
The pressure for this increasing extremism was augmented by
the successive arrival of immigrants who had witnessed not
only political defeat but religious persecution and were more
deeply embittered and suspicious as a result. The result was a
form of civil governance linked closely to church membership
and clerical leadership, coupled with a dauntingly severe stan-
dard for that membership based on a public profession of a
conversion experience that was persuasive to those already
counted among the elect. Even the road to academic tenure
strikes us as less arduous. Conversion testimonies were part
of English Puritan culture in the 1620s and 1630s, but their
importance was magnified by their institutionalization as a cor-
nerstone of New England church polity.
The Puritans did not perceive conversion as an instanta-
neous change in the orientation of the soul, as it would later
come to be seen in the American evangelical movement. Con-
version was instead the product of a long and disciplined pro-
cess of struggle and growth, one that required that the believer
have access to a wide range of "means"-the various insti-
tutionalized forms of education, support, and nurture-that

had evolved as part of the Puritan movement in England. Con-
version was the culmination of a long effort, centered in the
soul of the individual but nourished by a much larger spiritual
context that the Puritans were hoping to establish more widely.
The generation of New Englanders born in England had had
access to these means; their children and grandchildren did
not. What the Puritans perceived as the declension of piety
was in part a self-generated myth but also in part the conse-
quence of their provincialism. The intense individual struggle
of a Puritan soul for salvation might wither outside the "plen-
itude of means" (183) that had been available in England.
The question of church membership, and its required pro-
fession of a saving experience, thus occasioned the first Amer-
ican generation gap. Foster notes that in Puritan practice it
was difficult for a younger person to reach the stage of pro-
fessing a credible saving experience, even though one was
officially eligible for church membership at age 16. "Religious
experience was ordinarily a long-drawn-out process culminat-
ing in a degree of assurance only when full psychological
autonomy was attained in general," typically in the thirties.
This effectively excluded the children and grandchildren of
the first immigrants. "The first generation of New England
ministers had prepared for themselves and their successors a
situation in which a very large portion of their audience was
nominally eligible but practically incapable of the most sig-
nificant ordinance of their churches, the conversion narrative
and the acceptance of the believer into the fellowship of the
saints" (183). While this requirement helped maintain doctri-
nal standards and lent increasing affirmation to the spiritual
worthiness of those already accepted as regenerate, it was poi-
sonous for the long-term institutional viability of the churches.
This was not only a spiritual crisis for the Puritans, but
a crisis of civil order as well, for the church was the corner-
stone of their hope for a reformed society. Having choked their
own process of culture building by their stringent expectations
("Their ladder to heaven was long, yet it lacked rungs" [183]),
the Puritan ministry eventually moved to bolster that foun-
dation with the device of the Halfway Covenant of 1657. Its
provisions affirmed full "church membership" (187) for chil-
dren of church members, while denying them access to the
Lord's Supper and a vote in church affairs until they estab-
lished themselves as recipients of saving grace. This attempt
to shore up both church and community did address a growing
local problem within the New England Puritan community, but
Foster also argues that it responded to a wider context, "the

internecine conflicts that were then destroying the Puritan
movement in England" (188). New Englanders had had a taste
of such dangers in the antinomian controversy two decades
earlier, and the fear of sectarian chaos made the Puritan rage
for order stronger.
The Halfway Covenant's extension of church influence

and discipline was part of a strategy of coalescence that even-
tually found leadership in Increase Mather, the figure who
stands above all others in Foster's account of Puritan devel-
opment. Foster's Mather was the first master politician in
America; in 1675 he abruptly switched from "outspoken op-
position to the Halfway Covenant to equally emphatic
support." "Such turnabouts," Foster remarks, "were almost
the rule with him" (212). Mather made his about-face when
he came to realize how the Covenant might serve to extend
church authority and to maintain and enhance the political
power of the clergy. His program for revitalization, ideologi-
cally expressed in the jeremiad's call for a return to abandoned
first principles, emphasized the practice of a ritualized renewal
of the church covenant by which the baptized but noncom-
municant members of the church, beneficiaries of the Halfway
Covenant, could be brought more closely under clerical con-
trol. "Covenant renewing gave the children of the church what
they most needed: an alternative to the conversion narrative
by which they could make a dramatic and visible statement of
commitment" (226). The Reforming Synod of 1679-80, en-
gineered by Mather, ratified covenant renewal as New En-
gland's principal weapon against any besetting cultural evils
and thus reestablished the church and its ministers as the fun-
damental unit of cultural identity and social cohesion. Church
membership (as opposed to professions of salvation) thus be-
came the only "meaningful exercise of citizenship," function-
ing as "the ordinary way the people of the town affirmed their
allegiance to New England" (238). On this basis, Mather
worked to resist, or co-opt, the forces pushing New England
into the secular sphere for the next two decades.
Foster's fundamental argument, that New England Puri-
tanism was continually shaped and reshaped by its English
context, is borne out trenchantly in his discussion of Mather's
maneuvers to insure that the "New England Way" would "be-
come the New England identity" (237). He led the New En-
gland response to the threat posed by the appointment of royal
governors for the colony, locating in the churches and the
clergy a base of resistance through cultural cohesion. "As di-
rect rule from England became more likely [in the mid-1680s],
leading ministers in the Bay began to take precautions against
the awful time when the churches might not be permitted to
continue openly" (240). Sermons and theological writing took
on the identity of "survival manuals" in a "projected guerilla
warfare" (240-41). Mather thus engineered a situation in
which a perceived threat to the New England churches was
taken as a threat to New England's cultural identity. His influ-
ence was at its zenith in this period of crisis, a prelude to his,
and New England Puritanism's, gradual decline in influence
after the Salem witch trials. Foster reminds us that it was
Mather who actually halted the trials with his Cases of Con-
science Concerning Evil Spirits (1692), a treatise that attacked
the viability of spectral evidence, which had become the key
theological and legal issue in the trials. But the four-month
delay between Mather's return from England in May and his
circulation of the work in October was crucial. "[B]etween 2
June 1692 and 22 September, 19 people were tried, convicted,
and hanged, and on 19 September one man was pressed to
death for refusing to plead. If Increase Mather had the power
to stop these murders," Foster asks, "why did he take so long
to use it?" (255). He suggests that the answer can be found
in Mather's political ties to lieutenant governor William
Stoughton, the most influential judge at the trials. "In this
volatile situation the Mathers had too much of what they had
gained for New England tied up in the reputation of Stoughton
and his associates. They could not afford an open breach with
these new allies and so moved by degrees only, while the rest
of the ministry followed their lead" (260). The result was an
expedient gradualness that in the long run did irreparable po-
litical damage both to the leadership of New England's clergy
and to the church. The witch trials thus accelerated the trend
that Mather had resisted, the process of secularization by
which New Englanders gradually ceased to think of them-
selves as "people of God" and came to recognize their iden-
tity as "colonists" (270).
The most decisive blow to Puritanism would come some
50 years later in the guise of an attempt to revive it, the Great
Awakening. Because of his intellectually rigorous rehabilita-
tion of Calvinism, we have customarily accorded Jonathan Ed-
wards the key role in the Great Awakening, conceiving his
work, as he would have considered it, as a crucial extension

of Puritanism. The intellectual origins of American religion
have been traced to Edwards, as Miller's influential genealogy
"From Edwards to Emerson" suggests (ch. 8).2 But Foster
emphasizes the importance of a quite different figure, the itin-
erant revivalist George Whitefield, whose work in the Great
Awakening was less the revival of Puritanism than its destruc-
tion. "The twenty-five-year-old Whitefield, cocksure and any-
thing but knowledgeable, set the actual terms of the debate
over the New England Way" by preaching a doctrine of im-
mediate conversion that was a repudiation of "the spread-out
Puritan pilgrimage, with its dry periods and 'freshenings' mea-
sured out over the course of a lifetime" (295). Whitefield's
enormous impact would have been impossible without the Pu-
ritan ministry's long cultivation of a spiritual sensitivity
among their congregations, but his message of immediate, ex-
periential religion undercut the foundations in practical divin-
ity and in institutional order that had given Puritanism its par-
ticular identity in New England. "After all the near misses of
the previous century," Foster argues, "New England Puritan-
ism had finally succumbed to its own centripetal forces"
(303).
Foster's study, which emphasizes the nature of Puritanism
as a movement in continual process, thus ends at the point of
a transition so pervasive that it must be reckoned an end-
and also a beginning of an important new phase in American
religious history. Nathan 0. Hatch's recent account of the
emergence of the many forms of Protestant evangelicalism in
the early national period certainly underscores Foster's sense
that the Great Awakening blew the lid off the religious ener-
gies that the Puritan clergy had kept bottled up so well. As
Hatch points out, anticlericalism was a prominent aspect of
that phenomenon of emergence, even among the clerical lead-
ers of the various movements such as the Baptists and Meth-
odists. In this respect, Foster's book takes us beyond the Pu-
ritan movement, offering a basis for a fuller explanation of
the complex phenomenon of American religious development
in the nineteenth century.
Porterfield's study of the function of the cultural image

of female piety within Puritanism complements Foster's broad-
er description of Puritanism as a dynamic social movement by
isolating for closer scrutiny one aspect of the ideological glue

that held the tension ridden movement together. Porterfield is
less concerned with the actual practice of piety by Puritan
women, as her title might imply, than with the Puritans' cul-
tivation and uses of the ideal of female submissiveness and
self-effacement. This presumably "masculine" culture was
surprisingly "feminine" in many important respects, and the
direction of its development was guided in part by "feminine"
virtues. As Porterfield argues, "female piety" was a standard
to which, in the final analysis, all Puritans, male and female,
were held. The concept was, in particular, a powerful agent in
the Puritan move to give authority to domestic life.
Porterfield argues that the ministry suffused the Puritan
movement with a "view of marriage and family life as the
proper context of religious life." The resulting "ideal of af-
fectionate, hierarchical marriage" became a "normative social
construct" (3), contributing to the development of a "religious
humanism" that linked "social structure and religious feeling"
and emphasized the "importance of intentionality in all judg-
ments about religious experience" (6). The Puritan insistence
on the religious value of marriage, that is, opened that rela-
tionship to moral scrutiny, transforming domestic life into a
scene of religious trial and potential religious attainment. In
this context, women gained an indirect but nonetheless im-
portant form of power.
Porterfield's argument is revisionist in its capacity to
complicate any simplified notion we might have of Puritanism
as a patriarchal hegemony, a conception that might seem log-
ical given the distribution of public power in Puritan culture
and its espousal of a stringently "masculine" theology cen-
tering on a fatherlike God whose dictates on the fate of the
human soul were immutable. If Puritanism was not a "mas-
culine" culture, where then can we find one? In this respect,
Porterfield's study raises by implication, although it does not
explore, the question of the origins of sentimental culture in
America, a discourse that has been conducted largely in the
context of the early nineteenth century. Porterfield's analysis
of the element of the feminine in Puritan culture inevitably
brings to mind Ann Douglas's The Feminization of American
Culture (1977), with its influential description of the rise of a
"feminized" sentimentalism in the struggle of liberal theology
against the "masculine" and virile Calvinism of the eighteenth
century. One has to be struck with the very different faces of
Puritanism portrayed by Douglas and Porterfield, Douglas bas-
ing her argument on Calvinist doctrine as it was preached in
a period of attempted revival and Porterfield focusing on the

imagery and metaphor of the first generations of Puritan
preachers.
Reading Porterfield through the lens of Douglas therefore
raises a fundamental question in feminist cultural studies: how
far should the oblique or indirect exercise of power by women
be celebrated? For Douglas, the lack of direct power, and the
manifestation of that lack in sentimentalism, was disabling for
the culture as a whole and for the individuals, both men and
women, in it. For Porterfield, whose work can in some respects
be read in relation to that of feminist scholars such as Nina
Baym who have offered a different reading of the sentimental,

power was a much less univocal thing, and the construction
of the sentimental was in some respects a testament to the
genius and perseverance of women.3 Porterfield's view of the
achievement of some Puritan women-Anne Hutchinson and
Anne Bradstreet are her primary examples-emphasizes their
accomplishment, or attempted accomplishment, within the re-
strictions of Puritan culture and the impact of values that their
culture had identified with women and femininity. How, then,
do we consider the origins of sentimentalism as a form of
feminine power in American culture-was it there almost from
the beginning, perhaps even aboard the Mayflower?
In her most revisionist move, Porterfield traces the in-
creasing prominence of the image of female piety in Puritan
culture by describing its uses not only in the unofficial but
nevertheless influential lives and examples of two prominent
women, Hutchinson and Bradstreet, but also in the sanctioned
intellectual leadership, the ministry. Her discussion of the uses
of female piety by Puritan ministers, as represented in the very
different cases of Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, and John
Cotton, emphasizes "their use of female imagery to define
humility" (40) and illustrates the varying effects that the cul-
tural sign of feminine humility had on their psychological de-
velopment and spiritual experience and careers. These discus-
sions are, it seems to me, based on a problematically
speculative construction of a psychic economy for Hooker,
Shepard, and Cotton, dictated by an assumption of the cultural
impact of the image of female piety. I will summarize these
psychological portraits in more detail, for many readers will
be more willing to grant speculative license in such issues than
I am. I found more persuasive Porterfield's account of Hutch-
inson and Bradstreet, in which she explores two instances of
women's attempts to find means of expression within an em-
phatically gendered social hierarchy.
Porterfield argues that the representation of the female

played a crucial role in the psychic equilibrium of Hooker,
Shepard, and Cotton. For Hooker, who struggled with an "im-
pulsive aggressiveness," the "scriptural promises of God's
love" offered a means of restraint (43). "Hooker used female
images to describe the humility that stabilized his emotional
life and empowered him in relation to others" (43), Porterfield
argues, noting that examples of "female devotion" served him
as "symbols of the receptivity to God he associated with
Christian humility," while "images of female infidelity rep-
resented the uncontrolled impulsiveness that humility was de-
signed to control" (46). Hooker's struggle for self-control, ex-
pressed through female and marital imagery, yielded a rhetoric
subtly charged with sexuality. Such language was, through its
implicit reference to the sexual gratification of marriage, se-
ductive; it was also a tool of social control, reinforcing the
power of the institutions of marriage and family, with their
rigidly defined gender roles. Hooker "used the seductive ap-
peal of espousal language" as both a form of attraction to
Christianity and a means of enforcing "the constant obligation
of emotional sincerity that characterized Puritan life" (44).
Within that marital frame of reference, Hooker reveals his own
psychological conflict. He "maximized the eroticism of Chris-
tian life by associating it with the thrill of violence," Porter-
field argues, but always used that seductiveness within strict
limits, placing "aggressive eroticism at the center of an oth-
erwise sober picture of self-control" (44). Hooker's use of the
concept of female piety as a means of self-control thus mir-
rored the larger Puritan efforts to enforce social restraint and
achieve communal harmony, efforts that centered on the in-
stitution of marriage with its concomitant emphasis on do-
mestic life.
Thomas Shepard used "images of female humility to

control his fear of abandonment and to represent his desire for
love" (40). Porterfield argues that Shepard's eulogistic praise
of the self-effacing humility of both of his wives was in fact
a strategy through which he could convert their deaths into
something of use to him. "By admiring rather than pitying her
[his second wife's] emotional pain," Porterfield reasons,
"Shepard denied himself an opportunity for the very intimacy
he craved" (65). Hooker's struggle against aggression was
thus mirrored in Shepard's struggle against isolation. Porter-
field's psychological portrait of John Cotton is somewhat dif-
ferent, stressing a cultivated meekness through which "Cotton
embodied in his demeanor the Puritan ideal of femaleness"
(66). In Cotton's meekness, Porterfield identifies the paradox-

ical quality of powerful weakness with which the Puritans im-
bued their ideal of the feminine, for she reads Cotton's per-
sonality as the result of a calculated self-construction.
"Cotton's meekness was not timidity but a dramatic form of
self-presentation that exerted real influence over others and
corresponded exactly to the air of privilege that Puritans as-
sociated with wifely service" (66). This assumption of power
through meekness, based on female imagery that focused on
wifely devotion and submission, had important social impli-
cations for the development of Puritan culture. The use of such
imagery, Porterfield argues, was "a means of establishing and
preserving a conservative social order based on the patriarchal
nuclear family and its core relationship, affectionate and hi-
erarchical marriage" (77).
The speculative quality of Porterfield's reconstruction of
the psyches and the ethos of these Puritan ministers became
most problematic for me when psychoanalytic interpretation
confronted historical event: her argument that Hooker "may
have displaced his anger at Hutchinson," who challenged the
role of female submissiveness, "onto the Pequods." Noting
that Hooker preached a sermon of "violent aggressiveness"
against the Pequods "[a]t the peak of her [Hutchinson's] in-
fluence in May 1637," Porterfield connects "[t]his vindictive
defeat of the Pequods" with Hooker's struggles for self-control
(50). Such an argument reduces too narrowly the complex so-
cial crisis that the war represented to Puritan culture. Porter-
field's psychological portrait of the Puritan ministerial
leadership is useful, but it must be used cautiously within a
much larger framework of social and theological analysis, lest
minor or contributing personal motivations be made to seem
more socially influential than they were.
I found Porterfield's portraits of Hutchinson and Brad-

street, women who shared the common problem of seeking
self-expression and social acceptance within the rigidly gen-
dered hierarchy of Puritan culture, a more persuasive
contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of Puritan
culture. Porterfield perceptively reminds us that "the patriar-
chal belief system essential to Puritan culture depended for its
survival on women's support" (80), an irony that is intensified
by the fact that "women predominated numerically in virtually
all congregations during the seventeenth century" (92). Porter-

field thus understands both Hutchinson and Bradstreet as un-
dertaking complex cultural negotiations on the limits and con-
ditions of female authority, making use of the valuation of
female piety and submissiveness as a means of power in a
way that was representative of Puritan culture as a whole.
As Porterfield demonstrates, the line that Hutchinson
crossed into heresy was a very fine one in Puritan culture. Her
"acceptance of the conventions of her town was the means by
which she attained religious authority" (101), Porterfield ar-
gues, and "she presented herself as a conformist who was
following both the principles of Puritan theology and the cus-
toms of Boston society" (103). Her portrait of Hutchinson's
situating herself within the norms and standards of Puritan
faith and piety confirms Foster's observation that "Antino-
mianism in America needs to be understood primarily as a
hyper-Puritanism rather than an alternative faith with deep
roots in English sectarianism" (162). The antinomian crisis
was thus a question of whether and to what extent the demands
of faith had to be adjusted to a rapidly changing set of social
conditions. It reflected the increasingly deep desire of the Pu-
ritan clerical leadership to reinforce social cohesion. Porter-
field links Hutchinson's claim to spiritual authority to her pos-
session of maternal authority within Puritan culture. She was
the mother of 15 children, and "mothers were guardians, in-
terpreters, and inculcators of Puritan culture" (94). Hutchinson
"justified holding religious meetings in her own home" be-
cause they fell "within the conventional Puritan pattern of
diffused mothering, in which older women supervised the dai-
ly lives and emotional development of young people and ser-
vants" (95). Moreover, her heretical views, which arose from
religious experience that she interpreted in terms of a dualism
between body and spirit, were "in some respects less condu-
cive to women's equality and to the elevation of women's
status" than more moderate humanistic views that minimized
the dichotomy between the physical and the spiritual (102).
The irony of Hutchinson's situation, therefore, was that her
"religious radicalism did not represent a consistent or self-
conscious bid either for her intellectual authority as a theolo-
gian or for the intellectual authority or social equality of wom-
en" (102).
Yet Hutchinson's experience, and her attempt to explain
it to others, was seen as a threat by the Puritan establishment,
which is to say a threat to the Puritan ministry. Porterfield's
discussion of Hutchinson reminds us of the complex fragility
of the social structure that perceived her as a threat rather than

an ally, and when we interrogate the nature and origins of that
fragility, Foster's account of the evolving dynamic of the Pu-
ritan movement and the emergence of ministerial authority
within that process is helpful. Porterfield persuasively argues
that Hutchinson's excommunication for heresy was an impor-
tant moment of change in the way that the Puritans conceived
religious authority: "After Hutchinson's trial, the church gave
considerably less reign to personal religious expression," a
situation that imposed "[n]ew constraints on women's reli-
gious expression." Even so, "the special reciprocity between
ministers and women fundamental to church and family life"
(104) survived this consolidation of authority in ministerial
hands and may have strengthened it. The trial of Hutchinson,
Porterfield argues, limited women's direct and public authority
and thus redirected their exercise of power. As Puritanism be-
came more institutionally conservative after the Hutchinson
trial, women were not prevented "from exercising power, but
rather confined that exercise more strictly to the indirect means
associated with humility and female submissiveness" (105).
Ironically therefore, the ministerial consolidation of public
power was accompanied by a deepened incorporation of "fem-
inine" values and virtues in Puritan culture as a whole. "This
stricter confinement limited the range of women's expression
but not necessarily the intensity of its effect on men" (105),
Porterfield argues. Her argument in this respect has clear im-
plications for our conception of the process by which the do-
mestic sphere was constructed as an arena for women's power
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Porterfield's discussion of the questions of gender raised
by Hutchinson's provocation to Puritan authority is extended
in her discussion of the poetic work of Anne Bradstreet, a poet
who achieved expression and a measure of cultural power
through her assumption of her identity as wife and mother.
"Bradstreet never presented the authority of her own experi-
ence in any way that could be perceived to challenge social
order," Porterfield argues, although she did use her poetry "as
a means of simultaneously attaining intellectual freedom and
building social respect" (106-07). It was through her control
of her language, and her use of it to articulate her experience
of women's social experience, that she succeeded in Puritan
culture where Hutchinson did not. We may wonder, of course,
whether such success is a dubious distinction, given the op-
pressive aspects of that culture, but Porterfield's implication is
that Bradstreet's achievement exemplifies the reciprocal effect
that women could have on Puritan culture, even within the

rigidly bounded limits of its patriarchal structure. "Bradstreet
went at least as far as any Puritan minister in defining grace
in terms of marriage" (110), Porterfield argues, a gesture that
had been crucial to the social dynamic of the preaching of
Hooker, Shepard, and especially Cotton. "In making her mar-
riage the ultimate referent and the covenant of grace its type,
Bradstreet brought the Puritan tendency to religious humanism
to full expression" (110).
In this respect, Bradstreet can be said to have succeeded
as a poet because of "her ability to exploit Puritan norms"
rather than "her ability to subvert them" (113). The term that
carries the most weight in that formulation and is most likely
to evoke debate is "exploit," for it suggests that the gendered
hierarchy of Puritan culture was not as rigid, or as utterly
oppressive, as it may seem. Insofar as the institution of mar-
riage was a means of social control, we might say, it exerted
that control not only on women but on men as well. Porterfield
reads Bradstreet's marital poems as revelatory of the nature of
power within the Puritan family, seeing them as simultaneous
expressions of humility and authority. Porterfield's account of
Bradstreet's capability to operate within those structures par-
allels the ongoing discussion of sentimentalism and the do-
mestic sphere in the nineteenth century-should we emphasize
the ways that sentimental culture robbed women of power or
the ways that women made use of the ethos of sentimentalism
to gain a measure of power?
Bradstreet's work thus illustrates the possibilities for ex-
pression left to Puritan women in the wake of Hutchinson's
having been silenced. Her "deft use of the Puritan convention
of wifeliness allowed her explicit claims of inferiority and sub-
missiveness to mediate her implicit and highly successful bid
for authority, accomplishment, and immortality as a poet"
(112). The boldness of her act of speaking, that is, could be
forgiven because of her reinforcement of the centrality of mar-
riage in many of her poems. Bradstreet's poems thus offer
testimony that is in some instances contradictory, correspond-
ing to women's disenfranchisement from public affairs and
their empowerment in the private and domestic spheres.
"Bradstreet's poems testify to her dependency on her husband,
to her feelings of insufficiency without him, and to her wor-
ship of the potency he represented," but our reading of them
should not stop there: "they also reflect her power to establish
the context of his authority and her efforts to control his be-
havior" (111-12).
Porterfield recognizes that Puritan culture was not static,

and she reads the Salem witchcraft crisis as an indication of
social instability with important consequences for the perma-
nency of female piety as a representative cultural concept.
While one of the crucial cultural manifestations of female pi-
ety was the valorization of wifely submission in the patriarchal
marriage, female piety also served as an icon of patient suf-
fering, one through which the various political trials of New
England might be understood. Mary Rowlandson's captivity
narrative exemplifies the ways in which a woman's suffering
and the trials of an entire people, might be imaginatively con-
joined. But the witchcraft trials suggested that "the religious
preoccupation with female suffering had reached intellectually
unmanageable proportions," unmanageable from a social per-
spective because it "undermined the tendency of Puritan re-
ligious humanism to make suffering grist for emotional in-
sight" (144). The suffering in Salem did not seem to be
redemptive and was thus empty of the socially constructive
power that the Puritans, male and female, had attributed to
familial self-sacrifice. Insofar as the image of female piety had
signified the social cohesion of New England Puritanism, the
"bizarre" (144) manifestations of female suffering at Salem
indicated that such cohesion was fragile and had been dis-
turbed.
Both Foster and Both Foster and Porterfield offer us a Puritanism that is
Porterfield offer us a complex and not easily reduced to the theological formulas
Puritanism that is
that usually serve as our intellectual props when we negotiate
complex and not easily
reduced to the the first part of an American literature survey. After reading
theological formulas these two books, one can say very little about Puritanism with-
that usually serve as out immediately feeling the need to qualify it. Their cumula-
our intellectual props tive accomplishment, in fact, may lie in forcing us to avoid
when we negotiate the poorly considered generalizations and to reapproach Puritan
first part of an
American literature
texts in a spirit of reconsideration. The same might be said for
survey.
our understanding of the effect of New England Puritanism on
American culture, one of the oldest chestnuts of American
studies. As Foster reminds us, the history of Puritanism can
be "extend[ed] or foreshorten[ed]" to suit a number of agen-
das: "the alleged social basis of Puritanism, the explanatory
value of the term for the various aspects of New England's
colonial history, the role of New England in national history,
the dating and extent of the secularization of American life,"
or its influence on "contemporary policy, foreign and domes-
tic" (313). The clear implication is that the supposed effect
may as often as not dictate the cause, that Puritanism gets
more credit, or, as the case usually is, blame, from historians
than it may always deserve. Foster reminds us that, at the least,

the boundaries that we often establish for Puritanism reflect
other concerns that we bring to its study, and we may overlook
"the multiple constituencies and varied responses that collec-
tively and continuously make up the Puritan movement from
English coherence to American fragmentation" (313).
Notes
1. The number and quality of studies of Puritan culture since the late
1970s is quite remarkable. For another overview of aspects of new work
in Puritan studies, see Wood. For broader overviews of the field of early
American Literature, see Gura, "Study"; and De Prospo.
2. For a recent response to Miller that focuses on his treatment of the

Arminian tradition, see Robinson.
3. See Baym 14-50 for an explanation of how the sentimental mode could
serve as a means of women's empowerment.
Works Cited
Baym, Nina. Woman's Fiction: A Hall, David D. "On Common

Guide to Novels by and about Wom- Ground: The Coherence of Ameri-
en in America, 1820-1870. Ithaca: can Puritan Studies." William and
Cornell UP, 1978. Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 44 (1987):
193-229.
De Prospo, R. C. "Marginalizing
Early American Literature." New Hatch, Nathan O. The Democrati-
Literary History 23 (1992): 234-65. zation of American Christianity.
New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.
Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of
American Culture. New York: Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wil-
Knopf, 1977. derness. Cambridge: Belknap-Har-
vard UP, 1956.
Gura, Philip F A Glimpse of Sion's
Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New Robinson, David M. "The Road Not
England, 1620-1660. Middletown: Taken: From Edwards, through
Wesleyan UP, 1984. Chauncy, to Emerson." Arizona
Quarterly 48 (1992): 45-61.
. "The Study of Colonial
American Literature, 1966-1987: A Wood, Gordon S. "Struggle over the
Vade Mecum." William and Mary Puritans." New York Review of
Quarterly 3rd ser. 45 (1988): 305-41. Books 9 Nov. 1989: 26-32.

The Cultural Dynamics of

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Cultural Dynamics of

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Cultural Dynamics of American Puritanism

Author(s): David M. Robinson

its doctrines and spiritual practices were of course crucial to

Part of the explanation for our slow comprehension of

on the "declension" from an original, utopian myth of piety

were also deeply motivated by a desire for a new order, the

Foster thus offers us a portrait of Puritanism in which

ent feeling of urgency in the departure of the first wave of

tutionalized forms of education, support, and nurture-that

Foster also argues that it responded to a wider context, "the

The Halfway Covenant's extension of church influence

work, as he would have considered it, as a crucial extension

Porterfield's study of the function of the cultural image

isolating for closer scrutiny one aspect of the ideological glue

a period of attempted revival and Porterfield focusing on the

Baym who have offered a different reading of the sentimental,

Porterfield argues that the representation of the female

Thomas Shepard used "images of female humility to

(66). In Cotton's meekness, Porterfield identifies the paradox-

I found Porterfield's portraits of Hutchinson and Brad-

all congregations during the seventeenth century" (92). Porter-

of the social structure that perceived her as a threat rather than

that women could have on Puritan culture, even within the

Porterfield recognizes that Puritan culture was not static,

than it may always deserve. Foster reminds us that, at the least,

2. For a recent response to Miller that focuses on his treatment of the

Baym, Nina. Woman's Fiction: A Hall, David D. "On Common

You might also like