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The New England Renaissance and American Literary Ethnocentrism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Lawrence Buell
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Extract

Just as patriot orators invoked the spirit of Puritanism in their remonstrances against British tyranny, just as the nineteenth-century cult of Pilgrimism taught all America to look back upon the Pilgrim fathers as everyone's fathers, so modern American intellectual history has proclaimed the Puritan origins of the American way. The result has been a scholarly upsurge, during the past half-century, of “Puritan legacy” studies, of which Perry Miller was the prime mover and Sacvan Bercovitch is the leading contemporary theorist. So far as the interpretation of literary history is concerned, these studies have given a new authority and depth to the old New England-centered map of American literary tradition first drawn up by the Yankee-oriented genteel intellectual establishment of the late nineteenth century that presided over the literary institutions whose prestige had been built upon the reputation of the perpetrators of the antebellum New England Renaissance. The old-fashioned interpretation of American literary history and the new-fashioned interpretation of American civil religion as a nationalized version of Puritan ideology have combined to create a strong presumption, at least for specialists in New England Romantic literature, that theirs was the key formative moment in American literary history as a whole.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 10 , October 1985 , pp. 409 - 422
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

NOTES

1. I have in mind especially the essays in Miller, 's Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956)Google Scholar and Bercovitch, 's The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975)Google Scholar and The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).Google Scholar

2. On this subject see especially Jones, Howard Mumford, The Theory of American Literature (1948, rev. ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965), pp. 79–117Google Scholar; and Hubbell, Jay B., Who Are the Major American Writers? (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1972), pp. 75–114.Google Scholar

3. This matter is dealt with at length in Chapters 8–11 of my forthcoming study New England Literary Culture: From Revolution Though Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press).

4. In this regard see especially Spengemann, William's review essay in Early American Literature, 16 (1981), 175–186.Google Scholar

5. Garland, , Crumbling Idols, edited by Johnson, Jane (1894; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cassidy, Frederick, “American Regionalism and the Harmless Drudge,” PMLA, 82 (1967), bibliography issue, pp. 12–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For perhaps the strongest statement on record against the position I am about to take toward the New England Renaissance authors, see Walcutt, Charles Child, “The Regional Novel and Its Future,” Arizona Quarterly, 1:2 (Summer 1945)Google Scholar, “Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne have nothing to say about New England regionalism. Concord, America, the World, and the Cosmos are concentric circles of meaning” (p. 17).

6. Spencer, , “Regionalism in American Literature,” Regionalism in America, edited by Jensen, Merrill (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951), p. 224Google Scholar; Spencer, , The Quest for Nationality: An American Literary Campaign (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1957), p. 264Google Scholar. The latter is the most authoritative study of American literary nationalism, the former the best survey of literary regionalism in historical perspective. The Jensen volume still stands as a monument of interdisciplinary study of the regional concept. For its most important predecessor, see Odum, Howard W. and Moore, Harry Estill, American Regionalism: A Cultural-Historical Approach to National Integration (New York: Holt, 1938)Google Scholar. For two of its most important successors, see Zelinsky, Wilbur, The Cultural Geography of the United States (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973)Google Scholar; and Gastil, Raymond D., Cultural Regions of the United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975)Google Scholar. For a readable if impressionistic description of major literary culture regions, see Burke, John Gordon, ed., Regional Perspectives: An Examination of America's Literary Heritage (Chicago: American Library Association, 1973).Google Scholar

7. Fuller, , Letters, Vol. 2, edited by Hudspeth, Robert (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press), p. 131.Google Scholar

8. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 5, edited by Emerson, Edward W. (Boston and New York: Houghton, 1903–1904), p. 151Google Scholar. Cited hereafter as EW.

9. Emerson, , “Oration and Response,” in Brainerd, Cephas and Brainerd, Eveline Warber, eds., The New England Society Orations: Addresses, Sermons and Poems Delivered Before the New England Society of New York, Vol. 2, (New York: Century, 1901), p. 379Google Scholar; Emerson, , Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, Vol. 13, edited by Gilman, William H. et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960–1982), p. 286Google Scholar. Cited hereafter as JMN.

10. Spencer, , The Quest for Nationality, p. 264Google Scholar; The Flowering of New England (New York: Dutton, 1936), p. 528Google Scholar. Cf. Simms, 's Dedication to The Wigwam and the Cabin (New York: Armstrong, 1856)Google Scholar: “No one mind can fully or fairly illustrate the characteristics of any great country; and he who shall depict one section faithfully, has made his proper and sufficient contribution to the great work of national illustration” (p. 4). Not until the 1850s did the New England Romantics go that far, although at that point one hears echoes of Simms in such remarks as Hawthorne's to Horatio Bridge (1857) that “the States are too various and too extended to form really one country. New England is quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in” (Bridge, , Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne [New York: Harper, 1893], p. 155).Google Scholar

11. History of the United States, Vol. 7 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1858), p. 38.Google Scholar

12. Holmes, , Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Lothrop Motley (Boston and New York: Houghton, 1906), p. 88Google Scholar. Holmes's provincial frame of reference becomes wholly apparent in the next sentence, which begins “Nothing like it had been heard in the halls of Harvard since….” For some of the cultural implications of New England's expansion see Power, Richard Lyle, “A Crusade to Extend Yankee Culture, 1820–1865,” New England Quarterly, 13 (1940), 638–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. See Speeches of the Hon. Robert Y. Hayne and the Hon. Daniel Webster (Boston: Carter & Hendee, 1830).Google Scholar

14. Thoreau, , Walden, edited by Shanley, J. Lyndon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 4.Google Scholar

15. Royce, Josiah, “Provincialism,” Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems (New York: Macmillan, 1908), p. 61Google Scholar. Quoted with general approval by Turner, Frederick Jackson, in Craven, Avery and Farrand, Max, eds., The Significance of Sections in American History (New York: Holt, 1932), p. 45Google Scholar; and by Bingham, Edwin R. and Love, Glen A. in their introduction to Northwest Perspectives (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), p. xv.Google Scholar

16. “Ethnicity in Complex Societies: Structural, Cultural, and Characterological Factors,” in Coser, Lewis A. and Larson, Otto N., eds., The Uses of Controversy in Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1976), p. 200.Google Scholar

17. For the Southwest, see Calvin, Ross, Sky Determines (1934; rpt. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1965)Google Scholar; and Perrigo, Lynn I., The American Southwest (New York: Holt, 1971)Google Scholar. For the Northwest, see Northwest Perspectives and Chittick, V. L. O., ed., Northwest Harvest: A Regional Stock-Taking (New York: Macmillan, 1948)Google Scholar. For a survey of American culture regions, see Gastil, , Cultural Regions, pp. 137–288.Google Scholar

18. Thomas, G. E., “Puritans, Indians, and the Concept of Race,” New England Quarterly, 48 (1975), 3–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar, provides a short overview of this controverted subject. The strongest case on the Puritans' behalf is put by Vaughan, Alden, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620–1675 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965)Google Scholar; the anti-Puritan position is pressed most vigorously in Jennings, Francis, The Invasion of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975).Google Scholar

19. See, for instance, Solomon, Barbara Miller, Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. Adams, , “The New England Confederacy of 1643,” Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 3rd ser., 9 (1846), 219, 222.Google Scholar

21. Wendell, Barrett, A Literary History of America (New York: Scribner's, 1901), p. 462.Google Scholar

22. Hawthorne, , Our Old Home, edited by Charvat, William et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1970), p. 18.Google Scholar

23. Grosvenor, William M., The Puritan Remnant (New York: privately printed, 1911), pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

24. Ransom, , “Reconstructed but Unregenerate,” in Rubin, Louis D. Jr, ed., I'll Take My Stand (1930; rpt. New York: Harper, 1962), p. 25.Google Scholar

25. See, for instance, Hall, David D., “Understanding the Puritans,” in Bass, Herbert J., ed., The State of American History (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970), pp. 330–49.Google Scholar

26. Veysey, Laurence, “Myth and Reality in Approaching American Regionalism,” American Quarterly, 12 (1960), 31–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar, comments thoughtfully on the relative merits of empirical and myth-oriented approaches to the subject. Degler, Carl's Place Over Time: The Continuity of Southern Distinctiveness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977)Google Scholar impresses me as a model of tact with regard to its weighing of empirical and subjective evidence, as well as in its avoidance of the pitfalls of over- and understatement of regional distinctiveness. A pair of essays on New England culture that in their antagonism reinforce the point I am making are Pierson, George Wilson, “The Obstinate Concept of New England: A Study in Denudation,” New England Quarterly, 28 (1955), 3–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which argues that “New England is not so much a Region as an optical illusion” (p. 7)Google Scholar, and Boynton, Percy H., “The Novel of Puritan Decay from Mrs. Stowe to John Marquand,”Google Scholaribid., 13 (1940), 626–37, which sees change in but no end to storytelling about “New England puritanism's fall from high estate” (p. 637)Google Scholar. The logical inference seems to be that the strangeness of New England's obstinacy is itself partly an optical illusion resulting from having taken the power of imagination insufficiently into account.

27. Davenport, , The Myth of Southern History (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1970), p. 12 and passim.Google Scholar

28. Degler, , Place Over Time, p. 127Google Scholar; Bois, Du, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; rpt. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1961), p. 17.Google Scholar

29. The following discussions I have found particularly helpful here: Blyden Jackson's contribution to Jackson and Rubin, Louis D. Jr.'s Black Poetry in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Chapters 5–7 of Baker, Houston A. Jr., The Long Journey Back (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Rampersad, Arnold, “The Universal and the Particular in Afro-American Poetry,” College Language Association Journal, 25 (1981), 1–17Google Scholar; Bruck, Peter, “Protest, Universality, Blackness: Patterns of Argument in the Criticism of the Contemporary Afro-American Novel,” in Bruck, and Kaiser, Wolfgang, eds., The Afro-American Novel Since 1960 (Amsterdam: Gruner, 1982), pp. 1–28Google Scholar. Roughly speaking, Jackson takes a “universalist” position that Rampersad articulately opposes; Baker makes a strong case for the inevitability of conceiving Afro-American literary history in terms of a national vs. particular dialectic, while Bruck points out how easily that dialectic becomes reduced to formula by both contending parties.