Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature (review)

In his informative 1999 study, Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature, James D. Hartman ironically argues that American literature was more the result of a "unique literary collision" than it was of a birth (162). When science and religion collided in seventeenth-century providence narratives, the impact brought about the "germinal forms of early fiction," which were particularly developed in both witchcraft and captivity narratives (162). Combining "sensationalism and empiricism," writers of Anglo-American providence tales developed a new mode of writing that "produced increasingly more dramatic and believable prose narratives" (162). The strength of Hartman's study is the way it thoroughly and persuasively examines how providence tales combined the sensational with the empirical, the supernatural with the material, and ultimately how they influenced the development of imaginative prose. Although more Big Bang than birth, the genesis of American print culture that Hartman traces indeed is closely related to the older English genre of stories depicting God's actions on earth, stories narrating confrontations between deity and humanity.

There is no question that both witchcraft and captivity narratives are not only closely related to providence narratives but are also first developed as types of providence narratives. In his collection of providence narratives, An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (1684), Increase Mather published numerous accounts of both witchcraft and captivity, and it has long been accepted that he is the "Per Amicum" who wrote the preface for Mary Rowlandson's narrative, which clearly frames the text as a "memorandum of God's dealing with her." In her "Twentieth Remove," Rowlandson gives equal emphasis to divine participation when she pauses to comment on the "remarkable passages of providence" she encountered during her captivity. Throughout this period of jeremiads and perceived declension, Mather was actively collecting both witchcraft and captivity narratives as examples of God's dealing with New England, and clearly Cotton Mather followed his father's example in collecting and narrating similar tales as dramatic examples of divine presence on earth. Like Rowlandson, dozens of captivity narrators remark on the "special providences" that shaped their experiences; in fact, so many comment on "God's providence" that such references became a rhetorical convention in narratives published a century or more later.

Yet Hartman joins many recent scholars in discussing American print culture as a transatlantic phenomenon. In arguing that the providence narrative provided a model for witchcraft and captivity narratives, he carefully examines how the genre evolved in response to the changing cultural contexts of the seventeenth century in England and Europe and how these responses in turn developed new methods of narration. According to Hartman, in response to the cultural forces of empiricism, skepticism, and materialism, English ministers began to adapt the providence narrative "toward the purpose of defending themselves" (1). In order to reassert divine authority, and thus reaffirm their own ministerial authority, writers such as James Janeway, Richard Baxter, Thomas Beard, Samuel Clark, Joseph Glanvill, and Emmanuel Poole began to appropriate "the empirical methodology of the new science" and as well the "violence, sentimentality, and melodrama" of Grub Street in order to create "a new hybrid providence tale" (1, 2). Since truth could no longer simply be decreed from the pulpit, writers of providence narratives had to prove the truth of their tales empirically using a plain style, descriptive details, and believable plots, settings, and characters. Their efforts resulted in "new ways to tell exciting stories in prose," which somewhat paradoxically intended to be "both sensational and factual" (20).

In discussing captivity narratives as "a variant of an English form,"Hartman rejects the standard view that such texts decline during the eighteenth century, becoming racist, sensationalistic, and propagandistic vehicles of hatred and titillation (34). He states that "[c]aptivity narratives do not, as declensionist critics maintain, decline rapidly into mere propaganda" (34). Similar to "the providence tales' imperative to shock readers' emotions and senses," later captivity texts use "vivid and shockingly violent details" in order to display "God...