English Lit week 2 forum posting

americancolonialliteraturelecture-11.ppt

Colonial Literature

Plymouth was started by people who wanted religious freedom. In September 1620, they sailed on a ship called Mayflower for more than two months. They signed the Mayflower Compact as an agreement that they would live peacefully.

In March 1621, Squanto met the Pilgrims. Squanto showed the Pilgrims how to plant corn, catch fish, and get syrup from maple trees. The Pilgrims thought Squanto was sent by God. Squanto’s whole tribe died while he was in England.

Pilgrim and Puritan colonists came to the “desert wilderness” of America to “seek God’s way.” Christians in Europe felt that the church “had strayed from its original mission and become corrupt. Protestant reformers argued that Scripture, not an institution or its trappings, was the essence of Christian life” (McQuade, 1999).

The Puritans and Pilgrims believed that they were chosen by God to be recipients of His grace; they would arrive at a state of grace through much physical and emotional hardship and by constantly examining their inner lives.

Unlike the English social systems of the time, the Puritans believed that “one person was as good as another, no matter what that person’s social station was” (McQuade, 1999). Though women were still expected to perform traditional roles, like cooking, cleaning, and caring for children.

The Puritans and the Pilgrims were nonconformists, refusing to accept an authority beyond that of the revealed word.

But the "Puritans considered religion a very complex, subtle, and highly intellectual affair," and its leaders thus were highly trained scholars, whose education tended to translate into positions that were often authoritarian (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/PURITAN/purhist.html#pur).

There is an inherent fear of nature; dark, demonic forces were often believed to reside in the deep woods. American Indians were often considered part of these dark forces. The Puritans wished to convert the American Indian to Christianity.

Early colonists commonly believed in supernatural elements, and they were intolerant of dissent.

In 1692 in Salem Village, Massachusetts several girls started to behave strangely.

The girls accused three women of hurting them. Soon, the panic and hysteria had brought hundreds of men and woman to prison.

The Accused Details

The Accusers Age

Native Americans believed that every component of the earth was connected; spiritual forces were everywhere and could change form at any time; “no such concept of land ownership or private property entered into Native American thought” (McQuade, 1999).

But, the Puritans felt themselves ordained to pave the way for God, so they felt it their “legal right to possess New World property in a state of godly authorization” (McQuade, 1999).

According to Richard Slotkin, "In [a captivity narrative] a single individual, usually a woman, stands passively under the strokes of evil, awaiting rescue by the grace of God. The sufferer represents the whole body of Puritan society….In the Indian's devilish clutches, the captive had to meet and reject the temptation of the Indian’s way of life. To partake of the Indian's love or of his equivalent of bread and wine was to debase, to un-English the very soul.”

Possible Native American Reasons for Captivity:

Purposes for Popularity of Captivity Narratives:

(http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/captive.htm

Themes within Many Captivity Narratives:

Fears of cannibalism
Fears of scalping
Hunter-predator myth: captive as cultural mediator between savagery and civilization
Myths
a. Myth of Love in the Woods (Pocahontas and John Smith)
b. Myth of Good Companions in the Wilderness (Cooper's Natty Bumppo)
Abruptly brought from state of protected innocence into confrontation with evil.
Forced existence in alien society.
Unable to submit or resist.
Yearns for freedom, yet fears perils of escape.
Struggle between assimilation and maintaining a separate cultural identity.
Condition of captive parallels suffering of all lowly and oppressed.
Growth in moral and spiritual strength.

Pattern of Captivity Narratives:

Separation: attack and capture
Torment, ordeals of physical and mental suffering
Transformation (accommodation, adoption)
Return (escape, release, or redemption)

(http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/captive.htm

Towards the Revolution, the Enlightenment affected American thought. Deism weakened traditional religious authority. Deists “deduced the existence of God from the structure of the universe [‘the simplicity of nature’], not from the Bible” (McQuade, 1999). In contrast to Pilgrim and Puritan view that one is born either good or evil, Deists believed that each human is a blank slate or tabula rasa.

The Great Awakening “emphasized liberation from traditional authority and…anticipated the eventual severance from England” (McQuade, 1999). In the decades leading up to the Revolution, the colonists became increasingly resistant to British policies.