Video Comprehension Questions
What is new about Penn’s “Letter to the Lenni Lenape”? How does he view Native Americans? How is his attitude toward Native Americans different from the Puritans’ attitudes toward them?
William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, envisioned a society in which American Indians and whites would live as “neighbors and friends.” This was an important part of what Penn called a “holy experiment.” In a letter to the Lenni Lenape tribe, Penn expressed his hopes for an honorable peace: “I desire to win and gain your love and friendship by a kind, just and peaceable life.” Looking to govern Native Americans who sought refuge in the colony, Penn formed a partnership. All Native American tribes had their own religions and spiritual beliefs long before Europeans arrived in North America. In his "Letter to the Lenni Lenape Indians," Penn explains his belief that the Indians and the Quakers (and indeed all people) share the same God and are ruled by the same moral laws: "This great God has written his law in our hearts, by which we are taught and commanded to love and help and do good to one another, and not to do harm and mischief one unto another." This statement helps elucidate the Quakers' commitment to pacifism and their theological doctrine of the "inner light," or the manifestation of divine love that dwells inside and thus unites all humans.
What did John Winthrop mean when he proclaimed that New England would be “as a City on a Hill”? What benefits and responsibilities would such status incur for a community?
The preeminence of a city built on a hilltop is interpreted as a kind of superiority, as though it were nation set above other nations, and even above the ordinary historical forces that beset other nations. A city on a hill thus becomes an apt symbol for a country which enjoys an indisputable superiority in wealth and military power, implying a sort of vaguely providential sanction upon that wealth and power. The reference to this image by conservatives almost always carries connotations of national self-congratulation, and almost always serves to enhance that most distinctively liberal attitude – complacency. But this is not at all what John Winthrop meant when he first applied that image to the Pilgrim settlers, in his famous sermon. What he wrote was as follows: “Consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and byword through the world.”
What are the characteristics of a jeremiad? How does Mary Rowlandson’s text function as a jeremiad?
A jeremiad is a long literary work, usually in prose, but sometimes in verse, in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society's imminent downfall. Generally, the term jeremiad is applied to moralistic texts that denounce a society for its wickedness, and prophesy its downfall. The jeremiad was a favorite literary device of the Puritans especially in sermons like "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by Jonathan Edwards. Characteristics of a Jeremiad are sorrow, complaining, mournfulness, and bitter lamentation. Mary Rowlandson's text functions as a jeremiad by quoting scripture from the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah. It also contains the characteristic I have mentioned before. Rowlandson laments over the sinfulness of her community, while quoting scripture to justify the punishments as from God Himself. Rowlandson tells her readers that she composed her narrative out of gratitude for her deliverance from captivity and in the hopes of conveying the spiritual meaning of her experience to other members of the Puritan community. In many ways, her narrative conforms to the conventions of the jeremiad, a form usually associated with second-generation Puritan sermons but also relevant to many other kinds of Puritan writing. But in spite of its standardized jeremidic rhetoric, Rowlandson's narrative is also marked by contradictions and tensions that sometimes seem to subvert accepted Puritan ideals.
Context Questions
What is typology? What events and institutions did the Puritans choose to understand typologically? How did typology help them make sense of the world and their position within it?
Typology - the belief that God's intentions are present in human action and in natural phenomenon. Failure to understand these intentions are human limitations. Puritans believed in cyclical or repetitive history; they use "types" - Moses prefigures Jesus, Jonah's patience is reflected in Jesus' ordeal on the cross, and Moses' journey out of Egypt is played out in the Pilgrims' crossing of the Atlantic. God's wrath and reward are also present in natural phenomena like flooding, bountiful harvest, the invasion of locusts, and the lightening striking a home. The Puritans may not have been the only group of people to see God’s hand in everything, but they certainly were good at giving God credit. Bad things could be interpreted as more than just punishment, the Puritans thought that bad events could also be like corrections from God. Whether or not the Puritans thought that God was blessing them, correcting them, or punishing their enemies, they knew that their God was looking out for them and loved them dearly.
How did internal doubts and external enemies problematize and challenge the Puritans’ conception of their “sacred errand”? How did Native Americans and “witches” fit into the Puritans’ sense of their mission?
Internal doubt caused problems for the Puritan's as well as external enemies. They, however, believed these problems were here because of their own interpretations of Scripture from the Bible. These problems put Puritans against each other, struggling to perform their sacred errand. The Native American's and witches, enemies of the Puritan's, were considered to be those who would oppress the Puritans who believed religiously that they were in the right. In the Puritan imaginary, the individual captive in their suffering comes to represent the perilous existence of the whole community, an individual who stands in for a society in torment ‘betwixt God and the Devil’, on the cusp of civilization and barbarity. The Indian captivity narrative is located in historical contexts of conquest and colonization. So far as the English Puritans are concerned, this is primarily undertaken to fulfill a mission of Sacred Errand. The earliest examples of which dramatise the traumatic experience of Puritan relocation and subsequent struggles to settle the New World: ‘early New England was a site of spiritual warfare for colonists who cast American Indians and witches as their demonic adversaries.’ Sacred Errand as construed in the Puritan’s reading of sacred history involves flight from the corrupted Old World Egypt (England) to the New Israel (New England) through the design of, and by the grace and guidance of God.
Why do you think Louise Erdrich chose to reimagine Mary Rowlandson’s experience in her poem “Captivity”? How does Erdrich’s poem both draw from and challenge Rowlandson’s narrative?
American myths and stereotypes about Indians within the Indian captivity genre by providing a rare Native American response to two highly popular captivity narratives: Mary White Rowlandson‘s, A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mary White Rowlandson. Erdrich‘s brief but significant critical and poetic reply to the texts provides us with a record of her discursive encounter with colonial American literature in which the captivity-reader and –writer (that Erdrich becomes when she rewrites Rowlandson in her poem) explicitly identifies with the Indian captors instead of the white captives. Erdrich‘s written responses reveal an understanding of and an appreciation for the dynamic historical practice of Indian captivity that was motivated by complex economical and social factors. Her reactions, however, are also not without contempt for the genre itself and its historical reduction to what she calls ―those cautionary and often inflammatory tales of abduction and redemption.
Exploratory Questions
Can you think of later, post- Puritan examples of jeremiads? Where can you see the influence of the jeremiad form in contemporary literature, culture, and politics? Why has the jeremiad remained a central component of the rhetoric of American public life?
The jeremiad is part of a longstanding American rhetorical tradition, one that understands the nation as existing in a special, covenanted relationship with God, with special purposes to accomplish in the world. Although the jeremiad did not originate in America, and is not unique to the American experience— other peoples, in many different times and places, have proven all too eager to claim sacred status for their own communities—it has played a key role in Americans’ self- understandings since the early days of colonization. Many Americans, from the earliest days of colonial settlement down to the twenty- first century, have understood their nation as chosen to carry out God’s purposes in human history. Some example of post-Puritan Jeremiads are Sacvan Berovitch and David Howard-Pitney. The Jeremiad form can be found in contemporary literature, culture, and politics, especially after a tragedy. The Jeremiad form is most useful then to help explain these tragic occurrences to people. The Jeremiad has remained a central component of rhetoric of the American public life because it helps explain the unexplainable. It accomplishes this by using the power of God to do so.
How have Quaker beliefs and convictions influenced the development of American values?
The Society of Friends has been influential in the history of the world. The state of Pennsylvania, in the United States, was founded by William Penn, as a safe place for Quakers to live and practice their faith. Quakers have been a significant part of the movements to abolish slavery, promote equal rights for women, and end warfare. They have also promoted education and the humane treatment of prisoners and the mentally ill, through the founding or reforming of various institutions. Quakers actively promoted equal rights. At first Quakers were barred by law and their own convictions from being involved in the arena of law and politics. As time went on, a few Quakers in England and the United States did enter that arena. During the 19th century Friends in the United States suffered a number of separations. These separations have resulted in the formation of different branches of the Society of Friends. Despite the separations, Friends remain united in their commitment to discover truth and promote it. During the 19th Century, Friends continued to have an impact on the world around them. Many of the industrial concerns started by Friends in the previous century continued, with new ones beginning. Friends also continued and increased their work in the areas of social justice and equality. They made other contributions as well in the fields of science, literature, art, law and politics.
Why do you think the Puritans, more than any other early immigrant group, have historically been considered the starting point for the United States’s national culture? Why did leaders such as John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan choose to invoke John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” image in their late-twentieth-century speeches?
The ideas put forth by the Puritans are not simply an important starting point for American culture because they were the first in the country, but because they offered ways of thinking that are still ingrained in our culture today. Although many of the thoughts of Puritans have gradually dissipated or become less meaningful over time, it is important to note that Puritan writers such as John Winthrop offered ideas that were new at the time that stayed with the American consciousness—culturally, socially, and politically. Notions of freedom, liberty, and the role of religion within the state have long since been at the forefront of national debates. When the Puritans considered such ideas, their thoughts and writings on the matter were never quite forgotten, only shifted and modified to suit the taste of contemporary concerns. John Winthrop says that “This liberty is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority; it is of the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.” In other words, Winthrop views the liberty of the Puritans as something that is loving, but also something that has the potential to be abused. Winthrop was quite ahead of his time in many aspects, especially in terms of how he thought critically about the meaning of liberty and the individual’s right to act according to moral principles. These ideas were a crucial starting point for American culture because they set forth the questions about the personal sense of free will and liberty; both in terms of the state and the self.