Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (review)

Colonial New England history, from 17th-century imperial expansion, through the revolution, to the end of 18th-century efforts at nation building, is marked by profound material, social, economic, and epistemological transformations. Contradictions saturated the social order as nascent capitalist expansion, with its stress on profit and improvement, a deep material optimism, and the growth of enlightenment sciences, coexisted with the rigid hierarchy of feudal social relations, Puritan piety, intercultural fear, and a web of divine correspondences between the body and the heavens. In Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture, historian and folklorist Robert St. George offers an explanation of how these tensions were lived that is built on a careful examination of four events (in Foucauldian archaeology, an event is a momentary coalescence of reversals in distinct discursive practices): an enclosed farmstead, metaphorical embodiments of the house, a series of house attacks, and a group of portrait and landscape paintings by Robert Earl.

St. George's treatment of these events is highly original in terms of public performance. Building on recent (and not-so-recent, i.e., Bahktin) advances in metapragmatics, St. George glosses performance as a poetics of implication. Unlike logocentric approaches to performance as spatiotemporally isolated events, the poetics of implication suggests "an open-ended skein of entangled, involved descriptive passages that loop back continually and bring normally latent tissues that tie one referent to another, and another, and another and into public view" (p. 3). Such an understanding of the performance event is well-suited to the analysis of change in colonial New England. The approach foregrounds pivots where links between local centers of power knowledge, helping to constitute temporally disparate moments of the social, are opened to public evaluation.

Consider just a few of the implications St. George sketches of the ritualized attack on Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Hutchinson's house in 1765. Hutchinson was the chief justice of the provincial Supreme Court and a native Bostonian. On the evening of Monday, 26 August, his neo-Palladian Georgian mansion located in the city's north end was attacked. The ritual began on 14 August (Sir Robert Walpole's birthday) with bonfires, rumors, and the hanging of a parodic effigy, all functioning to call the mob to action and target victims defined as morally transgressive. The effigy portrayed Stamp Master Andrew Oliver, and it was summarily torn down and paraded through town in a mock funeral. The actual path of the procession worked to both articulate Boston's public spaces to common control and evoke biblical cities of heaven. At 8:00 p.m. on 26 August, Hutchinson's house was entered, its piercings destroyed, its cupola and roof torn down, and all its possessions emptied.

The group carrying out the attack included radical artisans and Whig merchants. Artisans were reacting to inflation, high taxation and immigration rates, social stratification remarkable in such signs as the unrevealing facades of Georgian mansions, and a burdensome credit economy. Merchants, on the other hand, resented the Stamp, Sugar, and Revenue Acts that curtailed their illicit earnings base.

The 1765 attacks echoed a variety of forms of ritualized violence including the pillagings of early modern England, the Sacheverell riots of 1710, skimmingtons, rough music, and Puritan attacks on graven images. Hutchinson's own account of the house attack is notable in its resemblance to witchcraft narratives of the period and the type of Puritan captivity story recounted by Mary Rowlandson. In the latter, Rowlandson relates a parable of soul trial and redemption to a passionate account of the attack of her house by native Americans. Hutchinson describes himself as having all but resigned to the will of the crowd when his daughter comes to the rescue. St. George writes, "Having experienced the forced entry of the "mob" into his house-body, with its implications of political rape of an effeminized male body, Hutchinson felt the sting of moral...