Thornton Wilder and the Puritan Narrative Tradition (review)

Despite his reputation as one of America's most celebrated literary figures of the last century, Thornton Wilder has merited surprisingly few book-length critical studies. Lincoln Konkle's Thornton Wilder and the Puritan Narrative Tradition not only addresses this scarcity, but also the particular tendency among past scholars to overlook specifically American influences on Wilder's drama and fiction. Although Konkle recognizes that Wilder's rich canon owes something to the hodgepodge of literary and philosophical influences identified by previous studies (including existentialism, expressionism, New Humanism, Christianity, Platonism, and Greek and Roman mythology), he believes Wilder's location within specifically American traditions has been either neglected or misrepresented. Konkle's particular aim is to position Wilder as a significant representative of the Puritan narrative tradition, and his study extends and challenges scholarship that has identified Wilder as "puritanical" in an oversimplified or pejorative manner.

Konkle begins with a brief survey of Wilder's Puritan heritage, drawing from extensive research on the cultural, religious, and literary history of the United States as well as Wilder's personal background. Within this survey, Konkle demonstrates the common theological ground between the Calvinist theology of the Congregational Church in Wisconsin, to which Wilder belonged, and Puritan Calvinism. In this introductory section, the author provides a general overview of how the Puritan tradition in American culture is manifested within Wilder's literary canon; he then devotes each succeeding chapter to exploring in greater depth these various facets of influence.

Chapter 1 traces the origins and development of the religious and intellectual roots and formal characteristics of the Puritan aesthetic. Relying heavily on seminal works by historians Perry Miller and Randall Stewart, Konkle explicates the fundamental concepts of Calvinist/Puritan doctrine: that they were a chosen people with a divinely ordained destiny, and that human progress was inevitable despite worldly depravity. Konkle then identifies and explains significant aesthetic characteristics of the tradition, clarifying the somewhat misleadingly labeled Puritan "plain style" as "plain in the sense of clear, easily understood; it does not require that writing be aesthetically unappealing. If the best way to communicate a point about doctrine was to employ a vivid metaphor, the Puritan writer would do that; if expository writing was the best way, the Puritan writer would do that" (45). Forgoing eloquence for the sake of eloquence, Puritan plain-stylists nevertheless employed allegorical representations, abstract settings, type characters, typology, and jeremiads when those usages best served their rhetorical purposes. Konkle's analysis draws heavily from seventeenth-century Puritan minister Edward Taylor's dramatic dialogue, God's Determinations Touching His Elect, as the most representative work within the tradition. Konkle does not argue a direct influence between Taylor and Wilder, but rather identifies Wilder as representing an extension of a tradition for which Taylor is a forefather.

Konkle's second chapter focuses on the manifestation of the Puritan theme of Judgment Day in Wilder's early works, most importantly The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Chapter 3 discusses typology (the identification of characters with figures from the Bible) in selected works of the 1930s. Here, Konkle argues that Wilder's one-act play, Pullman Car Hiawatha, represents perhaps the closest modern parallel to Taylor's work: both incorporate abstract characters, Calvinistic doctrine, and a figure representing God, and both develop the notion of life as a work in progress.

Konkle devotes Chapter 4 to the use of the dramatic jeremiad, the "Puritan Rhetoric of Crisis" (128), in Wilder's three most famous plays. He identifies Our Town, Wilder's "most American play" (131), as perhaps the purest of Wilder's jeremiads in terms of its structure, which the author likens to a "sermon with illustrative episodes" (131), its "critical yet finally affirmative vision of life" (131), and its "overt expressions of lament" (134).

Chapter 5 surveys the heretofore neglected works Wilder completed after World War II, including two collections of one-act plays (The Seven Deadly Sins and The Seven Ages of Man) as...