Trauma and Transformation: The Political Progress of John Bunyan (review)

This elegant volume emerged from the Third Triennial Conference of the International John Bunyan Society (2001). Each essay has been expanded to the credit of the congenial Ms. Camden. The result, a quality higher than many such collections, makes it a sure standby of Bunyan studies for years to come. Ms. Camden’s introduction precedes eight essays (including one of her own): three psychoanalytic, three on gender and sexuality, and two that make unique contributions to our understanding of Bunyan’s place in political history and theology. The “Political Progress” of the title pertains only loosely; this is no exposition of Bunyan the Revolutionary or Bunyan the Monarchist. “Trauma and transformation” is apt, since these essays paint a complex, human portrait.

Perhaps most intriguing in a book so psychoanalytic is that Lacan does not appear in the Index. Peter Rudnytsky’s “Dissociation and Decapitation” redeploys Eliot’s theory of the “dissociation of sensibility” in seventeenth-century English poetry, supplementing it with Freud, meditation on the regicide of Charles I, and reexamination of works by Milton and Marvell. “The execution of Charles I was experienced as a trauma not simply by Royalists but by English society as a whole,” writes Mr. Rudnytsky; “Eliot’s theory, therefore, despite his Royalist politics . . . retains its validity as an account of the collective transformation undergone by the ‘mind of England’ during the seventeenth century.” Bunyan is curiously absent, but the essay’s real contribution is the subtle way it links political meanings with latent psychological ones, without making one the palimpsest of the other. This is not a point that David Norbrook appreciates. In “A Response to Peter Rudnytsky,” he criticizes psychoanalytic approaches and defends a purely political, dialectical view of the regicide’s aftershocks. In the end, Mr. Norbrook finds “mapping [the] unconscious dimensions” of political events “an exciting but very difficult task”—one that Eliot’s theory is not up to. The third essay, Ms. Camden’s, makes a better companion to Mr. Rudnytsky’s, ruminating on “Bunyan’s silence about the regicide within the context of his otherwise vivid, though spare account” of his early years. It is deeply satisfying. Following the lead of Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther, Ms. Camden delves into Bunyan’s psyche, his earnest faith, his literary imagination. This psychoanalysis is lucid, fresh and free, and also deeply historical without being historicist, a worthy supplement to Richard Greaves’s monumental analysis of Bunyan’s depression in Glimpses of Glory.

Introducing the essays on sex and gender, Margaret Ezell’s “Bunyan’s Women, Women’s Bunyan” corrects the commonplace that women figured marginally for Bunyan; she renders particular women and his relation with them vividly. I found myself waging heated theological disputes with Thomas Luxon’s “One Soul Versus One Flesh: Friendship, Marriage, and the Puritan Self,” a provocative piece that takes a relentlessly critical view of Christian marriage, Christian theology, Christian views of sexuality, Christian politics, and even what he perceives as the virtual impossibility of Christian imagination of “the second self embraced across difference,” at least since Scholasticism. While much can be learned from a thorough deconstruction and psychoanalysis of the binary logics that undergird Bunyan’s theology and many others’ besides, the painting of all Christianity with that brush is an error, one to be remedied by what I call “the Jaroslav Pelikan history of Christianity.” The angst I felt reading Mr. Luxon’s essay dissolved in the comic relief of Michael Davies’s “Bunyan’s Bawdy: Sex and Sexual Word-play in the Writings of John Bunyan.” This essay beautifully marshals each sexual pun not to reveal a sexually repressed Bunyan but to surprise us with a Bunyan whose “wordplay seems to be securely pastoral in purpose and indeed framed by the traditional aims of a ‘Christian pastoral’ endeavor in general.” Enjoy it.

Roger Pooley’s “Bunyan and the Antinomians” is an invigorating, multifaceted engagement with the heart of Bunyan’s spiritual life, the agon between law...