Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- Introduction: provincialism and the frontier
- 1 “But enmity this amity did break”
- 2 Brother Jonathan
- 3 “A musy in the thicket”
- 4 Geoffrey Crayon and the gigantic race
- 5 Hawthorne's provincial imagination
- 6 Working in Eden
- 7 Life as art in America
- 8 Reading God directly: the morbidity of culture
- Postscript: tradition and circumstance
- Notes
- Index
2 - Brother Jonathan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- Introduction: provincialism and the frontier
- 1 “But enmity this amity did break”
- 2 Brother Jonathan
- 3 “A musy in the thicket”
- 4 Geoffrey Crayon and the gigantic race
- 5 Hawthorne's provincial imagination
- 6 Working in Eden
- 7 Life as art in America
- 8 Reading God directly: the morbidity of culture
- Postscript: tradition and circumstance
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Yet I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed: how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me?
– Jeremiah 2:21Adam. And so, Mr. Jonathen, you say that your country is better than ours.
Jonathen. Aye, that it is, I swear for it – much finer, more abundant, larger and more like a world than yours – and what's better, the people ayn't half so wicked, or given to Belzebub, as you are.
–Joseph AtkinsonThe first New England settlers genuinely feared that in their unaccustomed surroundings they would begin to degenerate, to lose not only their sense of mission but their culture in general. John Cotton addressed the departing Winthrop fleet in a sermon urging them to “have a care that you look well to the plants that spring from you, that is, your children, that they do not degenerate.” Citing his text from Jeremiah 2:21, he continued: “Your ancestors were of a noble divine spirit, but if [you] suffer [your] children to degenerate, to take loose courses, then God will surely pluck you up.”
The same fear pervades William Bradford's history Of Plymouth Plantation, in which the novelty of the environment is seen mainly in its capacity to generate crime and wealth, Cotton's “loose courses,” and Winthrop's “great things for ourselves.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Sacred GameProvincialism and Frontier Consciousness in American Literature, 1630–1860, pp. 27 - 41Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1985