Literature to 1800
- 11 Literature to 1800
"Were There Any Puritans in New England?" (NEQ 74: 118–38) asks Michael P. Winship, who dismisses the widely used word "Puritanism" because it suggests nothing of an essential nature about the English origins or the characteristics of the dominant religion of the colonial North. Likewise, Philip F. Gura's "Writing the Literary History of Eighteenth-Century America: A Prospect" (The World Turned Upside-Down: The State of Eighteenth-Century American Studies at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century, ed. Michael V. Kennedy and William G. Shade [Lehigh], pp. 164–85) observes how recent scholarly work has abandoned a monolithic reading of early American culture. And, in the same vein, The Literatures of Colonial America, ed. Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer (Blackwell), represents the diversity of early American culture.
i Native Americans and Nature in the Colonial Imagination
Edited by Edward G. Gray and Norman Fiering, The Language Encounter in the Americas, 1492–1800: A Collection of Essays (Berghahn, 2000) offers 14 studies of early cross-cultural communication. Several articles, including Margaret J. Leahey's "Iconic Discourse: The Language of Images in Seventeenth-Century New France" (pp. 102–18), disclose how Native Americans applied European visual and oral communication to their own cultural and spiritual requirements. Other arguments, such as Pauline Moffitt Watts's "Pictures, Gestures, Hieroglyphs: 'Mute Eloquence' in Sixteenth-Century Mexico" (pp. 81–101), detail missionary adaptations of Native American cultural matter. At first, according to Joyce Chaplin's Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Harvard), colonists perceived Native [End Page 231] Americans as civilizable, their culture simply a more primitive stage of colonial society. With the settlers' steady acquisition of land and their better fortune in population growth, however, this notion of a kindred relationship yielded to a strong sense of biological difference. On the basis of assertion more than evidence, Chaplin concludes that settlers' confidence in the physical (biological) superiority of their bodies led to colonial racism.
In England, Heidi Hutner contends in Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama (Oxford), racism and sexism were combined to promote imperialism. The symbol of the Native American female represents the commodification and exploitation of both the resources and the inhabitants of the New World. Specific English texts, Rebecca Ann Bach correspondingly maintains in Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World, 1580–1640 (Palgrave, 2000), influenced material changes in the American colonies. Even while celebrating such transformations, English colonists feared their potential loss of English identity. But Ann M. Little considers an exception. In "'Shoot that rogue, for he hath an Englishman's coat on!': Cultural Cross Dressing on the New England Frontier, 1620–1760" (NEQ 74: 238–73) Little concludes that during the colonial period the place of clothing was a flexible marker of gender and cultural identity.
French Jesuit relations of martyrdom, in contrast, insist on traditional identity markers. As Gordon M. Sayre explains in "Communion in Captivity: Torture, Martyrdom, and Gender in New France and New England" (Finding Colonial Americas, pp. 50–63) these accounts celebrate the transfiguration of the mutilated body of the sinner into the redeemed spirit of the saint. That such early reports of Native Americans also inherently created a distance between perceiver and perceived is noted in Bruce R. Smith's "Mouthpieces: Native American Voices in Thomas Harriot's True and Brief Report of . . . Virginia, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá's Historia de la Nuevo México, and John Smith's General History of Virginia" (NLH 32: 501–17). Colonial images of Native Americans amounted to a falsified presence that effectively served imperial mapping efforts designed to claim land.
How the New World land changed both naturally and as a result of development is documented in Stephen Adams's The Best and Worst Country in the World: Perspectives on Early Virginia Landscape (Virginia). Over time, the settlers' aesthetic response to land changed as, for example, their initial regard for both the garden ideal and small hills gave [End Page 232] way to an appreciation of wilderness and mountains, both previously seen as deformities.
