We Wear the Mask

 F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote "there are no second acts in American lives."  There are multiple ways of interpreting that statement, and one way is to see it as a statement on the impermanence of American identity.  That is, we constantly shift and re-invent who we are.  Somehow that ability came to be built into our national character as something we cultivate and cherish.  This is amply demonstrated by the endless supply of celebrities and politicians who screw up, publicly apologize and swear they've changed--and we endlessly believe them.  To not believe them would be to not believe the American possibilities for re-invention and personal redemption.  (One of the best literary examples of identify re-invention in an American setting is Fitzgerald's own novel, The Great Gatsby.)

So what does any of this have to do with Phillis Wheatley's poem "On Being Brought from Africa to America"?  Few groups in our history have had to endure re-invention--both forced and self-willed--as African-Americans.  Slavery, for example, involved more than economic oppression and forced labor; it also involved attempting to force a slave identity upon the slaves (as Douglass pointed out in his narrative).  But as is often the case, slaves, as a culturally marginalized and so culturally powerless group, frequently developed a subversive identity:  a surface image to present to those in power, that would hide what was going on beneath the image.  The black philosopher and sociologist W.E.B. Dubois called it "double consciousness": the need for African-Americans to be simultaneously aware of their own identities and how white culture looked at them, and thus be ready to shift identities depending upon the context.  As the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar put it, "we wear the mask that grins and lies."

At first reading Wheatley's poem can seem more than a little problematic, at least for contemporary readers who presume to be enlightened.  Her identification of Africa as a pagan land (and consequently carrying with it all the pejoratives that come with the word "pagan" to Christian readers), her simile comparing Negros to the blackness of Cain (thus effectively associating both Blacks and the word "black" with sin and outcast), and her use of the word "mercy" to describe being taken from Africa to America have all been reasons for readers to dismiss or ignore Wheatley.  And no doubt these perceptions helped make her something of a poetry superstar in her own time, able to rub elbows with the elite of American culture (including people like Jefferson, Franklin and George Washington).  Her fame had little to do with appreciation for her aesthetic talents; it had more to do with her role as a poster child for the rightness of the philosophies of the Age of Reason.  That this ex-slave could write poetry bore witness to the fundamental possibilities for all humans to succeed, if circumstances allowed it.  But likely few if any white readers (and that's who her readers were going to be) thought her revolutionary in her ideas--and that was just fine.

But I don't think Wheatley is that simple, or should be so easily dismissed.  First, I think we need to recognize that her point in writing the poem is not to praise her christianization, but to chastise those who would call themselves Christian but behave otherwise.  In that way she is in line with John Winthrop, in that she is reminding her readers (again, the majority would be white Christians) how Christians are supposed to behave--not what to believe, but how to behave, how to act on those beliefs.  In essence she is calling them to task for politicizing their faith--that is, using their faith to engage in an act of political power.  This perhaps reveals a profound level of irony in the poem.  As Wheatley says, Negros are perceived as black as Cain; the associations between blackness and sin are embedded in the word "black" itself.  Yet it is the Black woman who needs to remind the white Christians just who they are supposed to be. 

We might, then, see this poem as a kind of mask.  The opening lines are perhaps the mask that grins, the mask that makes the viewer/reader comfortable, the mask that enables her to bring the reader into the poem, where she can then smack them with their own hypocrisy.

One of the more intriguing aspects of "Rip Van Winkle" is that among all of the literature we produced during what was arguably one of the greatest periods of literary production in America--the era of Romanticism--one of the very few characters that has emerged and endured as a pop culture icon has been Rip Van Winkle.  (Interestingly enough, another of Irving's creations, Ichabod Crane, has also done pretty well on the pop culture circuit).  I find this significant because something becomes iconic in pop culture when it speaks to something we value, something we want, something we want to be.  Keep in mind that Rip Van Winkle hasn't been a shooting star, lasting briefly then flaming out.  It's been almost 200 years since the story was published, and we still know the name and basic story of Rip Van Winkle, even if we've never actually read the story.  But what really makes this interesting is that the character of Rip would seem to stand against everything we presume to be central to American character.  All you need to do is think for a moment how the Puritans would have regarded a person such as Rip.



The story does have a significance beyond that of the character of Rip, and it's revealed in the opening of the story: the foregrounding of the American landscape in Irving's description and use of the Catskill Mountains.  In an earlier post I mentioned that one way American writers answered the call for an idiosyncratic American literature was to celebrate our landscape, which was perceived as meaningfully different (in look and value) from the Old World landscape.  In this story before Irving ever calls our attention to the main characters, he sets the reader into an identifiably American landscape, and a landscape that would serve both as setting and metaphor.

But no doubt, this story is about Rip.  In many ways Rip can elicit similar polar reactions as those elicited by Bartleby.  On the one hand Rip seems to be little more than a lump, and quite happy to be that.  He violates virtually everything our Puritan heritage has taught us about a work ethic and the moral value of work.  Before we at least partially excuse him for having to endure a shrewish wife, I think we have to consider that she has a point in her complaints.  After all, he seems willing to help others outside of the family, but would rather go on a 20 year bender than actually do something for his own house and family.  One thing to recognize in this story is that we see things as Rip sees them, not as his wife sees them.  And it doesn't take an intimate knowledge of Puritan values to imagine how they would react to a man who willfully leaves his family to indulge in drunken excess.

But that being said, things still are not that simple.  There's the nagging fact I mentioned before--for someone who seems so anti-American in character, he sure has enjoyed longstanding popularity.  And before you say that the popularity is because we can look at him and feel good about ourselves because we're not like him, there's that other even more nagging fact: Rip comes back from his bender, and becomes ... famous and respected.  Let me emphasize this--he has done nothing, he has accomplished nothing, and he becomes famous and respected.  Somehow he has managed to re-invent himself, which is indeed an American characteristic, but has re-invented himself by basically sleeping one off.

So this leads to a question similar to that which we asked of Bartleby.  Is Rip an example of individualism taken to an heroic degree?  He does, after all, seem to have the characteristics common to other rugged individualists in our culture and literature.  First, he has the ability to move at will.  Second, he refuses to behave according to social convention, and so perhaps presents a threat to society and social order.  Third, he defines his worth no according to how others outside of him perceive him, but according to his own internal values.

While many of the settlers who first came to this land came to explore new commercial possibilities, the Puritans came here to re-invent their world.  The new world that would become America offered more than an escape from oppression; it also offered the promise of a new start, with which they could leave behind their troubled past and begin again the process of redemption.  It was no accident that for many Puritans the new world was a second Garden of Eden (metaphorically speaking), a place where they could correct past mistakes of the original fall from grace.  The notion of re-defining and re-building the self, then, is embedded in our cultural origins.

Few writers in our history have better spoken to that ability to build a new self than Ben Franklin (though ironically enough, Franklin was about as far away from living the puritanical life as a person could be).  Franklin's autobiography (one of the best-selling books in our literary history) really is not so much about presenting an historically accurate portrayal of Franklin's life as it is about presenting a model for an American type.  Franklin's autobiography was published not long after our successful revolution, when we had basically cut the umbilical cord that tied us to the old world.  This, in combination with the new ideas abounding from the Age of Reason, helped shape a world that was both exhilarating and terrifying in its newness.  That the recommendations he was making about how to shape one's character had little bearing on the way he himself behaved was, frankly, irrelevant.  (Franklin was quite the hedonist.)  What was relevant was that Franklin was providing a scientific, programmed method for achieving character best-suited for this brave new world of post-revolutionary America.  The Puritans may have provided a scheme for proper character in the 17th century, but Franklin was providing his readers a way to redefine themselves and American character for the Age of Reason.

We conveniently like to think that autobiographies are self-histories, presumably objective retellings of the events of one's life.  In fact, autobiographies are notoriously selective, and in Franklin's time the purpose of an autobiography was not to offer verisimilitude, but to function as an exemplum--an example of how to live one's life.  Originally, an exemplum offered the path to live a life proximate to the life of Christ, but Franklin had little interest in matters of faith and religion.  His notion of exemplum had more to do with creating a model for secular success in a newly-minted America.  Franklin was not pulling his concepts of success out of thin air, but gauging them according to the needs of this new country.  So one thing to think about is how his design for proper character would fill what was needed in post-Revolutionary America. 

 Two of the Heirs to Franklin's Values for Self-Creation

I would also emphasize the significance of the charts Franklin creates.  They don't just simply make things easy to follow; they create a programmed, scientific, empirical method for achieving personal success.  In other words, Franklin rejects the notion of innate depravity and predestination dear to the Puritans in favor of the possibility that one could build a new self, and build one systematically.  If any of you are familiar with the plethora of self-help books that have come out in the last couple of decades or so--things like Five Minutes to.... or One Hundred Habits of Successful ..., etc. etc., you're not seeing anything new; Franklin was playing that shell game 200 years ago.

Crazy Lady

You may be familiar with the slogan "Question Authority," which has appeared on numerous buttons, posters, t-shirts, etc., over the years.  Among American poets of the nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson stands as a poster child for that slogan.  From the oddball content and structure of her poems (what's up with all those dashes?) to her disinterest in publication to her choices for how she lived her life, Dickinson represents a truly idiosyncratic American poet, matched only by Whitman in creating poetry that emerged from the mass of numbing sameness produced by most American poets.  Ironically, her singularity did not come from heeding Whitman's call for a unique American voice, but from the simple choice to live her life as she wished.

A common perception of Dickinson is that she was a somewhat loony woman living the life of an "old maid" because of some sort of psychological or emotional disorder.  It says a great deal about our culture that we would struggle with the notion that she would choose to live the life she lived.  Cultural authority at that time generally dictated two "acceptable" roles for single women of Dickinson's social standing: either marriage and motherhood, or a life devoted to charitable works (as a sort of secular nun).  Dickinson  was interested in neither one of these options.  (A little bit later in the semester we'll see just how insidious the concepts of marriage and motherhood would become with regards to defining the worth of women.)

But nothing defines her individuality more than her poetry, which looks and sounds like nothing else written during that time.  Again, we can tend to misread that and assume that the privacy of her life left her unexposed and unfamiliar to prevailing poetic trends.  She was, in fact, quite well read and aware of what was happening in the world around her.  While she was none too keen on the function of organized religions (something she had in common with Melville)--because they acted as intermediaries between the individual and God, they diminished the personal relationship with God--she wrote much poetry that was deeply spiritual and demonstrated her awareness of religious texts.  Her poetry owes a great deal to biblical verse, particularly the psalms.  Her poems about nature and God indicate that she had more than a passing familiarity with Transcendentalism, a spiritual philosophy primarily from pre-Civil War America that held, among some of its major tenets, that "pieces of God" are in all of us, and we are all part of God (which meant humans are intrinsically divine, not sinful; take that, Calvinists!) and that Nature was a far better expression of God than all the sermons in the world.  In her poem "Some keep the Sabbath going to Church," note, for example, both her disdain for the limitations of organized religion (which diminishes the personal relationship with God) and the sanctification of Nature--two key elements to transcendentalist thinking.  You can even see something else that we often don't associate with Dickinson--a wry sense of humor.  The line "And the sermon is never long" is a not-so-subtle dig at the tendency some preachers at the time had to see themselves as religious rock gods who enjoyed being the center of attention.  (A theme Hawthorne would also explore, in his short story "The Minister's Black Veil.") Given the existence of televangelists and Prosperity Gospel advocates in our own time, things don't seem to have changed much since Dickinson's time.

Nevertheless, there is no denying the uniqueness of her poetry in her time.  Among American poets, she was the yin to Whitman's yang--Whitman wrote hugely expansive, muscular, naked-to-the-world poems, while Dickinson wrote intensely personal, contemplative (which helps account for the dashes, which can signal, among other things, the hesitation and carefulness of the poem's narrator, sort of like the verbal pauses we take when we're trying to compose our thoughts while we think), minimalist poems.  American poetry would not see poetry like this again until the modernist movement of the early 20th century and the compressed poetry of people like William Carlos Williams and E.E.Cummings.  

The privacy and intense personal nature of her poetry are what provide the interesting characteristics to her spiritual and religious poetry.  She has no interest in proselytizing, indulging in public displays of praise, or spreading any sort of word.  God may be a deity, but she treats him like a companion--and even as a lover, as in her poem titled "God is a distant--stately Lover--."  We see something similar in the poem "Because I could not stop for Death," which instead of treating Death like the Grim Reaper with a scythe, treats him as a courtly lover: patient, courteous--but also cold and relentless.  The third stanza, where she points out that they passed a school, grain fields and a setting sun, isn't so much a travelogue or reminiscence as a reminder that everything dies, and that no one--even a child--is exempt. 

"I heard a Fly buzz" is another example of Dickinson approaching the subject of Death in an unconventional, and even whimsical way (and not just because of the fact that this poem and "Because I could not stop for Death" are narrated by someone who's already dead, though that certainly helps).  Here we have this crucial moment, the moment when our narrator is about to pass from this life into the unknown.  She is in a room full of weeping people, praying for the dying narrator ("And Breaths were gathering firm/For that last Onset - when the King [God/Christ]/Be witnessed..."), waiting for this most dramatic moment, terrifying and exhilarating--and along comes a stupid fly.  What a great reminder of  just how full of ourselves we are.  While we weep and moan and pray and mythologize Death, a filthy housefly (a creature that vomits and poops frequently, by the way) comes along, completely indifferent to our grandiosity and self-importance.  In a sense, Dickinson is easing into Realism by creating a context that deflates our perceived significance in the grand scheme of things.


Below you'll find one of my favorite and most intriguing Dickinson poems: "I know that he exists."  As is the case in many of her poems, "I know that he exists" is about her personal relationship with God.  The first line, in fact, can be quite comforting for many readers, because the narrator asserts ("know," not "think" or "believe") the existence of a Supreme Being (something that many American Realists would be loathe to do).  However, as is also often the case with Dickinson, she frames that relationship as a friend or even a kind of drinking buddy; she certainly is not awestruck, and fear and trembling aren't even part of the conversation.

In this particular poem what's intriguing is the analogy she uses to ponder that nature of her relationship with God: a game of hide and seek.  What I'd like your thoughts on is why do you think she would use that analogy to describe her relationship with God, and what do you make of the third and fourth stanzas, where the poem seems to take a dark turn, and something seems to happen that makes the game less ... fun. For now I'll just say that in her poetry Dickinson is not shy sometimes about chiding God.

I KNOW that he exists
Somewhere, in silence.
He has hid his rare life
From our gross eyes.
’T is an instant’s play,	5
’T is a fond ambush,
Just to make bliss
Earn her own surprise!
But should the play
Prove piercing earnest,	10
Should the glee glaze
In death’s stiff stare,
Would not the fun
Look too expensive?
Would not the jest	15
Have crawled too far?

The Unshorn Fields ... for Which the Speech of England Has No Name

William Cullen Bryant was the answer to a lot of prayers that had been said in America since the 18th century by those desperately seeking an authentic American voice of American poetry.  A question for many American readers and critics had been whether an artist could find in America a subject matter that would put American literature on par with its European counterparts.  Bryant, at least initially, provided the answer to that question, and he would have to do as a genuinely American poet until Walt Whitman came along and let fly with his barbaric yawp.

Bryant was not necessarily a brilliant poet, and certainly not an original one, but that perhaps is what actually made him appealing to so many readers.  (We need to keep in mind that in the nineteenth century people actually read poetry for pleasure and entertainment.  In a survey done before 1840, the American public identified their two favorite writers as Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant.)  If one's frame of reference for great poetry was the verse produced by someone else--in this case, classical and English poets--then you measure greatness by how close it comes to that frame of reference.  True originality can cause problems (as Whitman would find out), because we can't measure it against what we know and with which we are familiar.

So what then made Bryant an American poet?  To a large degree because he drew his inspiration from what many in the 18th and 19th century considered to be one of America's most distinct characteristics: its landscape.  Certainly in England you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a nature poet.  But America's nature was different--it was big and dangerous and wild and still populated with wild people.  Bryant infuses his poetry with a transcendentalist sensibility, and uses near-biblical cadences in his verse, resulting in poetry that raised the American landscape (and consequently America itself) to a profound level.

Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains - Albert Bierstadt

"Thanatopsis" is considered by many to be what's been called a "proto-Transcendentalist" poem; that is, it's one of the earliest literary expressions of a transcendentalist world-view.  The poem is fundamentally a meditation on death--not exactly new material for poetry.  Since we're still working out the principles of transcendentalism, we won't approach this poem through the filter of transcendentalism; rather, let's try to understand Bryant's perceptions of death as something that can also help lead us to an understanding of transcendentalism.

The first thing to think about is the nature of God in this poem.  Second, notice that while Bryant certainly seems to think that Death is not the end, he also never describes or talks about an after life--at least not the conventional after life.  What is the after life for Bryant?  Here the key section of the poem is the third stanza (beginning with line 31).  Finally, Bryant's point is not to obsess about death; as he tells his reader's in the last stanza "So live...," because death should not be feared.  But note that he says nothing in the last stanza about finding comfort in God--God is not mentioned at all.  So where does the comfort come from?

Just Like a Wheel Inside a Wheel

William Cullen Bryant's poem "Thanatopsis" brings us to one of the most idiosyncratic spiritual philosophies in American culture: transcendentalism.  It's difficult to account for the long-standing notoriety of this philosophy (to call it a religion would be inaccurate), considering that relatively few advocated it.  (Perhaps, to some degree, because it is a bear to understand.)  Typically we associate it with the writers of American romanticism, specifically people like Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Thoreau and perhaps the most celebrated of them all, Walt Whitman.  Hawthorne dabbled in it, but mostly found it mildly amusing, and Melville, ever the contrarian, thought transcendentalists were basically nuts. 

So why did it become so well known?  Part of the reason, I think, is that it is in many ways classically American--pretty much every part of the philosophy was borrowed from somewhere else, and we cobbled the pieces together into something wholly new.  (It's pretty much a given that in most circumstances in our history, we did not invent new cultural forms--we borrowed and adapted.)  So transcendentalism is a mix of Plato, Hinduism, Confucianism, German Existentialism, Kierkegaardian philosophy, assorted form of Eastern mysticism, and good old-fashioned Christianity.

Another reason for its enduring fame is that it came along at a time--first half of the 19th century--when our writers and artists were desperately trying to separate themselves from the Old World--particularly England--and establish their own cultural identity.  They were trying to figure out what exactly is American literature.  Transcendentalism at its best tries to accommodate two particularly significant aspects of American cultural identity: individualism and democracy. 

So what is it?  Well, the first step, before we turn our attention to Bryant, is to tease out its groundwork values, and to do that I'm going to ask you to deconstruct an image.  Below I've placed an image that metaphorically captures the essential values of transcendentalism.  Your task is to look at the image and figure out its implications.  If this image represents the essence of transcendentalism (and it does), what do you think this tells us about the nature of human relationships, the nature of human relationships to the universe, the nature of relationships of all living things, the nature of God.

The Wonders of the Visible World

If Cotton Mather profoundly believes in a vibrant interconnectedness between the supernatural world and this world, Thomas Paine casts a skeptical eye on that proposition, and --appropriate to one of the major philosophical forces of the Age of Reason--use logic and reason to deconstruct it. 

Even more so than his other Deist contemporaries, such as Jefferson, Paine sought to illuminate the fundamental flaws of reason that lay behind religion .  Since Paine was not particularly good (or even particularly interested) in approaching this issue with some diplomacy, you can probably guess that he was one of the more controversial writers of his era.  Nevertheless, his application of reason to issues of faith illustrates well the rationalist view that would displace puritanical world views and galvanize what was and probably always will be the contentious relationship between the sacred and the secular in this culture. 

Readers often confound Paine's assault on religion and religious structures with an assault on faith itself, though a careful reading of Paine reveals that he clearly distinguishes between the two.  And that generally is true of other rationalists and Deists--they commonly accepted the existence of God; they had trouble accepting that God needed spokespeople to do His business, or even that God had any interest in us whatsoever.  You have to remember that much of the impetus that lay behind the development of the dominant philosophies of the Age of Reason, especially in Europe, was the persistent institutional oppression by churches and the spiritual leaders of formal religions.  Those of a revolutionary mindset recognized that a major reason church leaders often claimed a special intermediary relationship with God was so that they could maintain their positions of cultural and political power. 

Thomas Paine

Paine's target isn't God; it's those who presume to speak for God.  (And remember, logically it makes no sense that God would need anyone to speak for Him. )  Paine was well aware of the bloody history of things done in the name of God--he's not that far removed historically from the Salem Witch Trials.  If you parse Paine's argument, it's really not that complicated:

1. We pin our faith on what other human beings tell us about God (e.g., The Bible).  There may have once been a person to whom God communicated directly, but as Paine says, "it is a revelation to that person only."  Everything beyond that is filtered.  It's akin to the party game in which person A whispers a phrase to person B, and by the time we get to person Z the original message has likely been lost.
2. Since the original message--and Paine does not necessarily believe there was one, but being the good rationalist that he was, he was willing to entertain that for the sake of argument--inevitably gets filtered by human beings, who are flawed, it's unreasonable to expect that the original message from God is intact.
3. So why in the world then do we unquestioningly believe what these intermediaries tell us?  For Paine the core problem isn't that we believe; it's that we unquestioningly believe.

For Paine, Mather's ideology would be the poster child for his argument.  Mather's problem (at least as Paine would see it) is that he pins his argument upon the unquestioned belief that the supernatural commingles with the natural world, a belief handed to him by his forebears, who had that belief handed to them by their forebears, and so on and so forth.  This leads to a fundamental logical flaw in Mather's argument--the evidence does not empirically proved the presence of Satan; rather, Mather presupposes the presence of Satan and makes the evidence fit his beliefs.  The result?  Much human suffering.

In both Mather and Paine you are seeing a snapshot of the antagonistic relationship between the sacred and secular that has been a  part of our culture since we first landed on these shores.

A Dreadful Knot of Witches

The Salem Witchcraft Trials, of which Cotton Mather writes in his Wonders of the Invisible World, were something of a tipping point in American culture.  While it would be naive to suggest that these trials ended the impact of Puritans upon American culture (and as I've said a number of times, their influence still persists in 2009), the trials certainly diminished them--and to a degree those directly involved with the trials knew it.  This was an event that took on a life of its own and moved beyond the control of those supposedly in control.  What began seemingly as a childish prank exploded into a kind of civil war in the town of Salem. 

Part of the tragedy of the Salem Witch Trials was that the disputes among the citizens of Salem had more to do with landgrabbing, personal conflicts, and problems with those who behaved outside of the norm than with genuine belief that Satan chose Salem as his personal playground.  However much those involved tried to cloak their actions in moral righteousness, the fact was that what happened stemmed from everyday human greed and pettiness.  Note, for example, in Mather's description of Martha Carrier's trial, how often he remarks upon Carrier's abrasive personality and the "differences" the witnesses commonly have with her--including Abbot's dispute involving land.  So how did things get so out of control?  The Puritan world view, in which God and the supernatural directly insert themselves into our world, and in which God had made the Puritans His chosen people, created a context within which claims of witchcraft had to be taken seriously--not to do so would essentially invalidate a fundamental precept of Puritanism--and acted upon.  Witnesses who claimed witchcraft would know exactly what the potential consequences of that claim would be. 

Martha Carrier's Headstone

The trials ultimately made the Puritans look old, tired, irrelevant and mean-spirited.  By 1692 science had made a significant impact upon the world-view of humans, and events that had once seemed mysterious or supernatural now had rational, quantifiable explanations.  In such a world Puritanical claims of New England being the "devil's territories," as Mather puts it, seemquaint and harmless--until those presumptions about the world lead to the executions of dozens of people at the hands of judges who themselves did not necessarily believe witchcraft had anything to do with what was going on.

Cotton Mather

When reading Mather, it's important to try to tease out the assumptions about the world that allow him make the assertions that he makes.  It's tempting to dismiss Mather as a loon for believing what he believes, but his view is consistent with Puritan beliefs.  It would also be a serious mistake to dismiss Mather as ignorant.  The fact was that Mather was a voracious reader, including scientific texts (remember that the Puritans placed a great deal of value in literacy and knowledge), and was one of the most formidable thinkers in our history.  His text on Wonders of the Invisible World is not the ramblings of some crank wearing an aluminum hat.  It's an exercise of powerful logic--of reason--that's operating within a particular spiritual and philosophical world view.  We can miss the logic because we would likely dismiss the underpinning world view. 

Beyond the Custom of Her Sex

In many ways, simply having Anne Bradstreet's poetry available to us is an accomplishment.  Writing as she did in the 17th century, Bradstreet worked within a cultural environment that did little to encourage women to write, and at worst actively discouraged writing.  Typically in this period women did not have access to formal education.  Furthermore, printing, publishing and distributing a book was a relatively expensive proposition, and given that financial independence or self-sufficiency for women was unlikely, publishing a book meant depending upon the beneficence of others.  The rigid domestic roles of women further mitigated against an independent writing career.  The notion that a woman could or should define herself beyond her place within the household violated cherished cultural norms.  Anything that might distract from the roles of wife and mother would have been regarded with more than a little bit of scorn.  As an example, a minister commenting upon the efforts of a woman he knew (not Bradstreet) attempting to publish a book wrote "your printing of a book, beyond the custom of your sex, doth rankly smell."

Anne Bradstreet

So how was Bradstreet able to emerge from this state of things?  It would be nice and inspirational to say that she did so by virtue of her strength of will and determination--but that would be naive.  No doubt, she had will and determination--but she also had the good fortune to be born into comfortable economic and social circumstances.  In short, she was born into a class for whom the "luxury" of education and writing was readily available.   She had the advantage of having private tutors, as well as the support (including financial) of her family.  Nevertheless, Bradstreet's accomplishment as a published poet was no mean feat.

A key step in reading and discussing her poems lies in reading them in the order in which the children die.  Clearly in reading these poems (and others), Bradstreet suffered a good deal of loss, though that did not necessarily make her terribly distinct in her time.  What's interesting, though, is to gage the change in tone as she moves from one poem to the next and continues to struggle with the mounting losses.  What I would like you to do is focus especially on the poems "In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet" and "On My Dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet," a poem describing the death of a child some 4 years after the first.  Does her attitude about death and God change, even if slightly, from one poem to the next?  Pay close attention to the language she uses to describe death in the first poem, and compare that to the language she uses in the second.

The Cat Doth Play, Then After Slay

Even if this class represents your first extensive exposure to American literature, you should have no trouble by now noticing that issues of faith and religion are central to the development of American literature.  Much of that centrality comes from the persistent antagonism in our culture between values rooted in faith and religion and values rooted in secularity.  If we've been paying any attention to this country over the last couple of decades or so, those two different sets of values have been butting heads constantly.  This is not a new thing, however.  Let's not forget that while we tend to focus our attention on the Puritans when speaking of the early settlement of this country, we also need to keep in mind that the Puritans came over with more secular-minded merchants, professionals and soldiers.  Much as today, those two groups did not get along very well--hence the Mayflower Compact.  (A little aside here--a myth about the Puritans is that they sought to create a theocracy, a government based on religion and run by religious figures.  In fact, the Puritans understood a rudimentary concept of separation of church and state.  While ministers wielded a great deal of cultural power, ministers were typically not involved in government.  That would begin to change around the time of the Second Great Awakening, a post for another time.)

So one could reasonably say, I think, that with matters of religion and secularity, this country was born in contentiousness, and we haven't looked back since.  We've seen the contentiousness in Melville, who basically mistrusted anything that smacked of religion.  Thomas Morton openly mocked the Puritans.  John Winthrop reminded his listeners in no uncertain terms that if they're going to claim to be Christian, they better behave like it.  Hawthorne in typical fashion is more circumspect about all this, but many of his stories, including those we've read, are driven by the clash of the sacred and the secular.

In a previous post I had explained a bit about the religious philosophy that informed the Puritans.  In preparation for reading and discussing the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, I'd like us to start thinking about how Puritans perceived children, specifically the religious education of children and the fundamental lessons about the world which the Puritans wished to impart to their children.  I had mentioned in an earlier post that literacy was extremely important to the Puritans, and a major reason for that was so the children could read the Bible.  (Though also remember that the Puritans generally were well read, and did not shy away from reading secular texts.)
What you'll find below are a few illustrations taken from one of the major sources of education for Puritan children: The New England Primer.  What I'd like you to do is take a look at the illustrations, and talk about what seem to be the ways in which the Puritans perceived children and their roles in a universe governed firmly by the hand of God.

 

What I Am About

For most mainstream white Americans in the first half of the 19th century (as well as other times in our history), the notion of personal autonomy has been more of a question of degree.  That is, how much control does one have over one's own life, rather than does one have control over one's own life.  The answer to that question often hinged on money--more money, more freedom to do what you please.  We may value autonomy and individualism as abstract moral concepts, but to a degree--perhaps even a great degree--they are also economic concepts. 

For Frederick Douglass, however, personal autonomy was more straightforward.  As a slave, he had none, at least none that was recognized socially, politically or culturally.  His autobiography, then, functions differently than most autobiographies generated in American literature at this time.  A typical American autobiography presented the writer as an exemplum, an example of how a life should be lived in order to achieve moral and social standing.  Probably one of the best, and most popular examples of this would be Ben Franklin's autobiography.  But Franklin's readers had fundamental ways with which to identify with Franklin--they shared a culture and the values intrinsic to that culture.  Douglass had no such advantage.  For one thing, most of Douglass's readers were white, and lived in the North--there was no possible way these readers could empathize with Douglass or even begin to understand the circumstances of his life. 

This writer-reader problem is further exacerbated by the fact that for many white Americans, race and slavery were separate issues.  In our time we would struggle with this notion, but at the time Douglass wrote his Narrative one could be vehemently opposed to slavery, yet believe that Blacks were fundamentally inferior to whites.  (Though there were whites who both opposed slavery and disdained the concept of racial inferiority.)  Slavery was a human rights issue; racial hierarchies were a social issue rooted in biology.  The more contemporary idea that race itself is culturally constructed was an idea not available to Americans in the early 19th century.  (Though Melville comes close to articulating that idea in his novella, Benito Cereno.)

Common Illustration in Abolitionist Texts

Douglass also had to contend with readers doubting the authenticity of his text.  Douglass's narrative is one of hundreds of slave narratives written from about 1830 - 1865.  Slave narratives typically detailed the experiences of that author in slavery.  Their primary purpose was not literary; their primary purpose was political: to bring about the end of slavery.  Since most of the slaves who published their stories had little or no formal education (and often could not simply read or write), they needed what were called amanuenses--educated whites, typically abolitionists, who would edit or ghost-write the story.  As you can probably figure out, slavery apologists would point to this relationship as reason to doubt the credibility of the slave's story.  How does one know that the abolitionist didn't simply write the whole thing and slap a slave's name onto the text?  That's why you'll commonly see attached to the slave narratives documents certifying the authenticity of the text.  If you look at the beginning of Douglass's narrative, you'll see a letter from Wendell Phillips and a preface by William Lloyd Garrison--two culturally powerful whites.  The purpose of these documents is to let readers know that they can trust the information Douglass presents.  The hard truth is that without these documents, many readers would have seen Douglass's work as a work of fiction.

It also didn't help Douglass that he was a superbly skilled writer.  While most narrators simply related facts, Douglass uses stylistic embellishment, metaphor and symbolism, imagery, literary references--stuff that white readers would not have thought Black writers were capable of using.  As long as Black writers restricted themselves to facts, they would be fine, but the racial perceptions of the time suggested that Blacks were incapable of higher acts of imagination.  Douglass's skill, then, also brought the authenticity of the text into question, since readers could not fathom a relatively uneducated Black man being this skilled with language.

Frederick Douglass

And yet ... this was an extremely popular book, one of the best sellers of its day.  (As a whole, the slave narratives were popular.)  So in spite of all the obstacles, Douglass managed to establish a connection to his readers.  The parts of the narrative I asked you to read hopefully show you how extraordinary this was.  The first part, what I'll call Douglass's Creation Story, immediately announces to the reader why and how he is different.  Douglass begins by separating himself from his readers, not by making a connection to them.  The second part deals with a particularly touchy issue at this time--slave violence.  Little terrified whites, both South and North, more than the possibility of a slave uprising.  That's why Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion reverberated through the nation, and why Thoreau's defense of John Brown is noteworthy. 

So my question is simply how do you think he is able to do this?  Or to ask the question in a more complex way, how is Douglass able to exploit revolutionary concepts of individualism, autonomy and natural rights to establish common ground with his readers?

Bad Girl, Bad Girl, What You Gonna Do?

In a couple of ways Foster's novel The Coquette (of which you have an excerpt) falls into some fairly common literary traditions.  First, the novel takes an epistolary form--the narrative is told through a series of letters--which is a novel form that goes back to the 17th century and the works of a writer named Aphra Behn.  The epistolary form was popular during much of the 18th century, though beginning to fade by the time of The Coquette.  (Typical American writer--late to the party.)

Second, and more interesting given the themes of The Coquette, is the novel's association with the "seduced and abandoned" story line, a story line common to sentimental romance novels.  The seduced-and-abandoned story is fairly simple: a young woman is seduced by an unscrupulous man (sometimes older, usually wealthy or at least having some social status); she believes his promises of love and marriage, gets pregnant, is cast aside (the abandoned part) and lives out the rest of her life in moral ruin.  If she's lucky, she dies, though death in these novels functions as a moral judgment.  The purpose of these novels, as you can probably guess, was cautionary, specifically to warn young women to keep their skirts on (literally and figuratively) until they could make a proper, moral marriage.  Yes, I know--why are the women getting stuck with these expectations?  Why isn't anyone telling the men to keep it in their pants?  The simple answer is that culturally (including American culture) women had long been regarded as the moral and spiritual centers of the family and of society.  A ruined woman threatened the stability of the family, and consequently, threatened the stability of the society in which she lived.  Often a religious justification would be offered for this--if Eve had just been a carnivore, none of this would have happened.  The subtext of all this, of course, is that the ones best served by these perceptions were men.  It would be ridiculous to assume that men consciously conspired to invent this notion--as with most cultural values, this evolved over time.  Nevertheless, the seduced-and-abandoned model, to get all Marxist on you, was a cultural production that served to secure power with the dominant members of a culture.

The Coquette - James Wells Champney

However, I don't think it's quite so easy to say that Foster fits comfortably into this design, and that perhaps is what makes her novel worth considering.  What strikes me about this novel is not so much that Eliza is "irresponsible" in the conventional ways that we understand that term, but that she lives within a society that has no means to accommodate someone like her.  She lives in a society that defines relationships in rational terms; note how Mr. Boyer, who just oozes excitement, speaks about how he will pursue his courtship of Eliza: "I am in no danger, however, of becoming an enthusiastic devotee [of Eliza].  No, I mean to act upon just and rational principles."  Fair enough--but Eliza's society deems him the appropriate choice, despite that fact that he bears little in common with Eliza, who, as the man who will seduce and ruin her writes, is "apparently thoughtless of every thing but present enjoyment."

Illustration from The Art of Home-Making, by Margaret E. Sangster

To ask the question to get the discussion started, is whether this novel is a critique of rationality.  We've talked in other places about the significance of the concepts of reason and rationality in the development of individualism, but have not talked about potential dangers that lie in a culture devoted to reason.  I also wonder whether this novel is less a critique of the moral character of Eliza Wharton, and more a critique of a culture that can find no place for someone like her.

Just Plain Nuts

While American writers have created characters that have become iconic in the mainstream (e.g., Rip Van Winkle, who we'll see later), very few writers themselves have become cultural icons, at least enduring icons.  The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, for example, was the romanticist equivalent of a rock god when he wrote.  The house in which he lived was frequently besieged by an endless stream of visitors trying to catch a glimpse of or even meet him.  However, that fame was relatively short-lived.  The only writer, at least in the time frame that we're considering, who has had enduring popular cache is Edgar Allan Poe.  Many of his stories and even poems have been turned into movies--most of them pretty cheesy--and "The Raven" has made it to the gold standard of popular culture, The Simpsons.  His life itself has been the stuff of legends (and movies and tv shows), particularly the final few days of his life when he went on a business trip to Philadelphia and was found, 4 days later, wandering the streets of Baltimore, delirious and wearing clothes that were not his own.  As far as I can tell, to this day no one knows where he had disappeared to or how he came to be in the condition in which he was found.  (Poe died before he was lucid enough to explain; theories range from psychotic break to alien abduction.)  As a final testimony to Poe's grip on our cultural psyche, for over 50 years now someone--no one knows who--has left roses and cognac on Poe's grave on Poe's birthday.

"The Raven" on The Simpsons

Poe has also elicited extremes in the reactions to his literature.  Some consider him little more than a nineteenth century version of Stephen King--overblown, overpraised, excessive to the point of being a self-parody.  Others, like the French, consider him one of the greatest American writers we've produced (though they also think Jerry Lewis is a comic genius.  Go figure.) Poe would heartily concur with the French since, as he liked to point out to any poor soul who would listen, he indeed was the greatest.  (Poe was not above trashing other of his contemporaries, such as Hawthorne, in an effort to bulk up his own reputation.)  Such extreme reactions are quite appropriate given the extremeness of his literature.  He is the X-Games equivalent of American Literature.  He is much in line with what was being done by other romanticist writers in his focus on the inner life and heightened sensations and feelings.  But Poe takes that romanticist predilection to a degree that no other American writer does. Rather than simply write about the heightened sense of his characters, he takes his characters to a liminal, uncertain world between sanity and madness.  That's where Poe's juice comes from--that twilight place betwixt and between where one is not really sure what's real and what's not.  Poe's stories, then, tend to be disorienting to readers, particularly when he narrates from the first person point of view, as is the case with "The Tell-Tale Heart."  Combine these elements with Poe's fondness for a supernatural context (though note he does not write ghost stories), and he is able to create a truly idiosyncratic American literature.

"The Tell-Tale Heart" is nothing short of brilliant.  It represents Poe at his best, to a large degree because although excess and obsession are still integral to the story, here he shows a restraint and control that he rarely ever has.  This is also brilliant because it is perhaps his most unsettling story.  Throughout the story there are elements of it that are elusive.  Who is the old man?  What is the relationship between the two?  Is the narrator insane?  After all, he claims not to be.  But if he is, then why do we believe anything he tells us?  There are answers we should have but don't, reasons we should know but don't.  Consequently as readers we may feel a vague, persistent unease as we move through the narrative.  Although we conveniently sometimes refer to Poe as a horror writer, he in fact is a terror writer.  The difference?  Horror is about revulsion after the fact; terror is about dread before the fact.

Let's start with two questions, though they may actually be two sides of the same question.  First, Poe commonly tells his stories from a first-person point of view.  He likes to drop his readers into the minds of his protagonists.  What effect or impact does the first-person narration have upon this particular story?  Second, the writer insists he is not mad.  Your thoughts on that?  There are interesting ramifications to the story depending upon how you answer this question.

Who Was That Masked Man?

In one basic pattern, Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil" revisits familiar territory for the author.  As is the case in a number of his stories, including "Young Goodman Brown," "The Birth-Mark" and The Scarlet Letter, "The Minister's Black Veil" features a relatively young man who holds himself to what most would regard as impossibly high standards, leading to the destruction or devastation of his relationships, including romantic relationships.  Here the Reverend Hooper alienates his neighbors, his congregation and his fiancee Elizabeth out of some sense of moral duty (though in classic Hawthornian fashion, it's never really clear why he does what he does). 

No wonder, then, that readers can commonly struggle with Hawthorne's protagonists, because the reality is that for the most part we are a lot closer to the characteristics of the masses against which his heroes stand, than we are to the hero himself.  As we have seen in other stories of Hawthorne, the confrontation between the needs of the community and the needs of the self drive the narrative.  While as a culture we may wax poetic over the value of the individual, Hawthorne seems to be pondering how much of that is lip service.  In characters like Hooper, Hawthorne creates what we might call the Individualist Extreme, one who places greater weight on a personal code than on the codes that govern a society.  We tend to admire this--abstractly.  But Hooper not only defies social codes, he illuminates their hypocrisy.

As I've indicated in other places, though, Hawthorne is never that easy.  Sure, we can admire Hooper for having a moral code and sticking to it unswervingly, but whether he likes it or not, his individual actions reverberate into the community and affect others, most especially Elizabeth.  To put it another way, his need to punish himself leads to causing pain to others, even if it's unintentional.  Furthermore, for a man who wants to be secretive about what he's done, he sure is good at calling attention to himself.  If the point was to assuage himself of his own guilt (for whatever), how in the world does wearing a veil keep his act of penance private?  And since he won't tell anybody what he's done, how do we know that he's not being over-dramatic just to call attention to himself?  So where exactly is the line between individualism and narcissism, and does Hooper cross that line? 

Still, his comment to Elizabeth, that if she really loved him his veil would make no difference, is ... reasonable.  And if the congregation genuinely appreciated him his veil would make no difference, is also ... reasonable.  As I said, nothing is easy with Hawthorne.

Learning to Speak in a Rude Tongue

If the Age of Reason provided fertile ground for the growth of the concept of the individual, the Age of Romanticism--a period of American literature that includes our next several, and spans roughly from the late 18th century to the beginning of the Civil War--harvested that concept .

Romanticist writers represent what we can call our first truly American writers.  Previous to Romanticism, American literature was typically anything but.  For the most part our writers simply imitated traditional British literature.  the poet Walt Whitman would be so frustrated by the complacency and unoriginality of American literature that in a letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson he would confront America, asking 

America, grandest of lands in the theory of its politics, in popular reading, in hospitality, breadth, animal beauty, cities, ships, machines, money, credit, collapses quick as lightning at the repeated, admonishing, stern words, Where are any mental expressions from you, beyond what you have copied or stolen? Where the born throngs of poets, literats, orators, you promised? Will you but tag after other nations?...  Strangle the singers who will not sing you loud and strong. Open the doors of The West. Call for new great masters to comprehend new arts, new perfections, new wants. Submit to the most robust bard till he remedy your barrenness. Then you will not need to adopt the heirs of others; you will have true heirs, begotten of yourself, blooded with your own blood.  (To read the entire letter, click here.)

The growth of the concept of the individual would first of all encourage the particular idiosyncrasy of American writers.  More importantly, though, it would encourage writers to examine the internal lives of their characters (a hallmark of romanticist literature) within an American context.  Romanticist writers developed a more intense sense of the individual.  Feelings and intuitions, the shadows of who we were at our darkest and most private moments, became the stuff of literature.  The individual becomes its own frame of reference for what was right and wrong, an idea that leads to some of the most intense conflicts in Romanticist literature.  Mostly, though, our war of independence not only separated us politically from England, but also separated us ideologically.  Hard on the heels of political independence came the questions about what made us (America) distinct, what made us not-England, what was our particular identity?  (And of course, the notion of identity owes much to the Age of Reason.) 

These questions also arose out of the extraordinary changes occurring in our national landscape.  By the middle of the 19th century, for example, transportation had improved significantly enough that we not only began to become a more mobile nation, but new lands were opening up for the taking.  We had also seen a significant increase in immigrants who were in the process of transforming this nation from a cozy "private club" into a sprawling, complex nation (which Whitman would laud).  Moreover, we were becoming a more industrialized nation, which would help transform our identity from an agrarian nation that celebrated self-sufficiency.  The question, then of who we were carried no easy answer with it, because we were so much.  The changes wrought by the Revolution were good and necessary--but they carried a price too.

To open some discussion about these changes and about the values dear to Romanticist, I've included two paintings below, both from the Romanticist period.  The first is a painting called The Oxbow by Thomas Cole, painted in 1836.  The second is called Kindred Spirits, by Asher Durand, painted in 1849.  Both paintings represent a number of different, and even conflicting values, that were in the air during the early to mid-19th century.  So what seem to be the values that emerge from each of these paintings?

The Oxbow - Thomas Cole (1836)

Kindred Spirits - Asher Durand (1849)

 

Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap - George Caleb Bingham (1850 - 51)

A Man Who Chose Not to Live in Quiet Desperation

Few writers have had as profound an impact on American culture as Henry David Thoreau, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that he has had a profound impact on the world.  Not too shabby for a goofy heir to a pencil-making fortune.  His signature work, Walden, has been a bible for those who love nature and scorn the assorted destructions of progress, industry and civilization.  A simple two word sentence from Walden--"Simplify, simplify"--has become iconic.  The work I've asked you to read, "On Civil Resistance," helped to change the world.  While Thoreau did not invent the concept, he articulated the process of civil disobedience and consequently created what stands as one of the greatest political manifestos ever written.  Mohandas Gandhi cited Thoreau as an influence in the civil resistance movement that ultimately freed India from British rule.  Closer to home, Martin Luther King, Jr. explicitly cited Thoreau as an inspiration in the development of the Civil Rights Movement in America.

Thoreau's refusal to accept a role as a cog in the machinery of government and society has helped define him as the ultimate individualist.  It didn't hurt his reputation either that he was socially awkward and introverted, and often perceived by his neighbors as one who was, at best, within hailing distance of normal.  HIs efforts at finding even a romantic companion were thwarted not only by his personality, but by his looks.  By the standards of the day he was regarded as physically unattractive.  A story about him--perhaps apocryphal--is that he once wanted to court a woman he was fond of, only to have her tell him that she would rather hold hands with a twig.  (On the other hand, his friends, such as Hawthorne and Emerson, found him sweet, a brilliant and spiritual man.  Thoreau frequently played with Hawthorne's children, who apparently were quite fond of him.)

But don't be misled by this picture of a loner individualist.  Indeed, Thoreau was very much the individualist.  But his goal was not to lay out a plan for how to isolate oneself from one's society, but instead to figure out how an individual can engage in meaningful social action and change.  Even in Walden, Thoreau never advocates retreat as a permanent response to society.  Thoreau believed that one did have power as an individual, but because, as he writes, "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," it was difficult to wake up to one's own power and affect change.  Perhaps more importantly, Thoreau was attempting to provide a means of power to the disenfranchised.  If you are not a significant member of society, where do you get power?  His night in jail attempts to answer that question: your power comes from your refusal to do something.  (Sound familiar?)  (By the way, Thoreau ended up spending only one night in jail because his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson bailed him out.)

                                                               Reconstruction of Thoreau's Cabin at Walden Pond

One question to think about with Thoreau has to do with his advocating that one refuse to vote.  That would seem to counter everything we believe as a culture about the significance of voting.  How can Thoreau lay claim to having any kind of say in the direction of this country if he's refusing to participate in a fundamental aspect of the democratic process?

A second question centers around his rather blunt--and even disrespectful--comments about the government.  We know he advocates resistance.  Is he advocating the destruction of governement?  Is it possible to have a society full of Thoreaus and still have a functioning society?

For those interested, as I mention in my comment, here is a link to Throeau's speech, "A Plea for Captain John Brown."

Life, Liberty and What?

In our culture, there is no document more central to our reverence for the individual than the Declaration of Independence.  The crucial line, "We hold these truths to be self-evident," is in itself a manifesto for how humans were perceived in the Age of Reason:  truth was available to every individual, and not the privilege of a special few.  "Self-evident" simply means that one did not need an authority figure--say, clergy or government--to dole out the truth to the ignorant.  By virtue of being a sentient human being, an individual had the capacity to learn the truth for himself or herself.

This was Natural Law, as opposed to the laws made by institutions.  Now Thomas Jefferson (the primary author of the document) was not suggesting that man-made laws were irrelevant; rather, he was asserting that Natural Law trumped human law.  Human law did matter--but only when it illuminated and complemented Natural Law.  If human law contradicted Natural Law, well, then you have reason for--revolution.

     Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson, however, was hardly working in a vacuum when he composed this document.  In fact, the Declaration of Independence articulates fundamental principles that were abounding during the Age of Reason.  The notion that all men were created equal was not new to Jefferson or the Declaration.  The concept that a government can only work through the consent of the governed, and when the governed did not give their consent, they had the right and duty to rebel, basically restates John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689).  In fact, much of the Declaration--including some of Jefferson's phrasings--borrow substantially from Locke's writings about government and society in the 17th century.

However, there is a significant change that Jefferson makes in the Declaration that sets that document apart, and depending upon one's point of view, has brought much delight or much dismay to the American experiment.  One of Locke's more famous quote forms the basis for one of the most famous quotes from the Declaration; as Locke wrote, “Man... hath by nature a power.... to preserve his property - that is, his life, liberty, and estate [my emphasis] - against the injuries and attempts of other men.”  Unless we've been living in a closet, if we're American we should recognize two of the three elements of that trilogy.  And again notice that like Jefferson, Locke asserts that our power comes "by nature," not by human law.  So Jefferson clearly knows his Locke (no surprise, considering he was one of the smartest and most well-read people in our entire history).  But Jefferson also diverts from Locke in one meaningful way--he substitutes "pursuit of happiness" for "estate."


So there are two questions I'd like you to think about regarding the Declaration of Independence.  First, what do you think is the significance of adding a phrase about the pursuit of happiness to our revolutionary document?  The issue was not so much what Jefferson thought of property (he was for it), but that somehow he (and the others who signed the document) believed there was something important about codifying the right to pursue happiness.

                                                                            Rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence                                                                                           

Second, we all are familiar with the phrase "all men are created equal," and as I've said, that's not a concept original to Jefferson.  We also know that these words exist in a document written while institutionalized slavery was quite prevalent in this country.  (We may or may not know that Jefferson had originally included language outlawing slavery, but removed it in order to get the pro-slavery signers to sign.  Even without their signatures, Jefferson still would have had a majority, but he believed the Declaration would be effective only if he had unanimity.)  The knee-jerk response is that Jefferson was simply a hypocrite.  But can you think of ways in which the existence of slavery could be justified (or perhaps the better term is rationalized) in a nation which declares in writing that all men are created equal?

Clockmaker, Clockmaker, Make Me a Clock

As you can probably gather from the previous post on the Age of Reason, religion took a hit during this period--at least formal, institutional, dogmatic and authoritarian religion.  Those who advocated for the philosophical revolution of the Age of Reason paved the way for what would become one of Karl Marx's most famous declarations in the 19th century, religion is the opiate of the people.  Rationalists commonly saw religion as an institution that used mystery to control the congregation, thus assuring that clergy (who presumably had the ear of God, the source of these mysteries) maintained power--psychological, spiritual, political and economic.  By stripping away the mysteries of how things happened, science was able to put autonomous control back in the hands of the common folk, thus freeing them from the shackles of such institutions as churches.

However, don't conflate the spurning of religion with the spurning of faith.  The Age of Reason did not lead to a rejection of God, but its focus on the individual and autonomy helped shape a different relationship with a divine being that would become particularly important in the shaping of this nation.  To explain this, I'm going to use a metaphor common to the Age of Reason: the clock.

It should not surprise anyone that given the significance of science to rationalists, they saw the universe itself as an orderly, coherent system that humans could understand through reason.  While the Puritans had the Howling Wilderness, the rationalists had Natural Law, and all the implications that follow the word Law.  Where there is Law, there is Order, and where there is Order, there exists the possibility that we can understand how things work, including the universe itself.  To express that notion, rationalists frequently compared the universe to a clock or watch. 

Here's where you come in, to try to tease out the implications of that metaphor.  Think about and respond to the following questions:

1. If the universe is a clock, who is the clockmaker?
2. How does a clock work?  Try to think about this by thinking of old-style clocks, ones that you had to get working by means other than plugging it in or putting in a battery.
3. Once the clockmaker (whoever that is) starts the clock, does the clockmaker have to do anything to keep the clock running?
4. Ultimately, of course, the clockmaker sells or gives the clock to someone else.  So imagine a clockmaker has given you a clock.  Whose responsibility is it to make sure the clock functions properly?  And if it doesn't function properly, whose fault is that?
5. So what does any of this have to do with individualism, autonomy and the changing relationship between humans and their divine being?