The Lesson of the Storm Shipwreck, Providence, and American Identity in the Great Lakes Fiction of Constance Fenimore Woolson

American popular mythology claims that on the deck of the ship that carried them across the ocean in 1630, John Winthrop delivered the sermon, "A Modell of Christian Charity," which charged early American colonists to remember that they had entered into a serious covenant with God. If successful, the colonies would become a "citty upon a hill," an image Winthrop borrowed from the well-known Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5.14) in which Jesus promises blessings for those who please God through mercy, humility, and peace. On the other hand, according to Winthrop, breaking the covenant by failing to labor together in the spirit of unity and peace would result in "shipwracke," a symbol of disaster, loss, and incomplete journeys:

Thus stands the cause betweene God and us. We are entered into Covenant with Him for this worke. Wee haue taken out a commission. The Lord hath given us leave to drawe our own articles. … Now if the Lord shall please to heare us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath hee ratified this covenant and sealed our Commission, and will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it; but if wee shall neglect the observation of these articles … the Lord will surely breake out in wrathe against us … and make us knowe the price of the breache of such a covenant.

Now the onely way to avoyde this shipwracke, and to provide for our posterity, is to … be knitt together, in this worke, as one man, wee must entertaine each other in brotherly Affeccion[,] … allwayes haueing before our eyes our Commission and Community in the worke, our Community as members of the same body, soe shall wee keepe the vnitie of the spirit in the bond of peace.¹

Winthrop's sermon is just one in a long line of shipwreck and sea-deliverance narratives in American culture. For American colonists, these accounts reinforced core values that sustained the colonial agenda, providing evidence for the belief that "America was the last act in the drama of salvation."² These accounts narrate events in which readers see "deliverance and catastrophe as manifestations of the Divine Will" and as "sure signs of God's ratification of the covenant with New England."³ The providential view of history includes the possibility of affliction (and the expectation that affliction will be accepted with gratitude); even so, providential literature of early America is characterized by the assumption of exceptional status of New England and confidence in "the matchless favors of God unto New England."⁴ Postbellum American literature presents a different view. The horrors of chattel slavery and the devastation of the Civil War are striking symbols of the dissolution of "brotherly affection" and the subsequent retributive shipwreck.⁵ Ironically, during this postbellum era, public interest in shipwreck accounts grew. Rather than reinforcing colonial values, Robin Miskolcze claims that public obsession with shipwreck after the Civil War "expose[d] national anxieties about the fragility of America's definition of itself as exceptional."⁶

Constance Fenimore Woolson came of age in America during the Civil War, and consequently, much Woolson scholarship focuses on the impact of the Civil War on her work. Victoria Brehm and Sharon Dean point out that Woolson's writing repeatedly returns to "the conflicted political and cultural discourses that transformed America after the Civil War."⁷ The most obvious examples are found in Woolson's "Southern" sketches and novels in which Civil War and Reconstruction-era concerns are direct and clear. Unfortunately, Woolson's Great Lakes work is most often minimized as nostalgic regional writing concerned primarily with the failure of easterners to appreciate the frontier setting of the Great Lakes region. While these themes are most certainly a common aspect of Woolson's Great Lakes narratives, the texts are strongly shaped by and concerned with post–Civil War national identity, as can be revealed through a careful analysis of Woolson's use of shipwreck metaphorics. In fact, Woolson uses shipwreck narratives to critique and question the providential...