The Puritan Legacy: What Later Writers Inherit

The idea

Puritan New England produced a body of writing that almost nobody meant as literature, and the exam asks about it anyway, because the assumptions inside it run through American writing for two centuries afterward. The doctrine came first: a sovereign God, a naturally depraved humanity, an election nobody earns. From that came typology, the habit of reading one's own life as a repetition of scripture, and from typology came the characteristic Puritan move of turning a concrete domestic fact into a doctrinal claim in the space of two sentences. Winthrop sets the pattern in the sermon delivered on or near the Arbella, telling the colonists they will be a city upon a hill with the eyes of all people upon them, which is a promise and a threat in one image and makes the colony answerable for being watched. Bradford writes the settlement's history with providence as its organizing principle, so that weather and mortality become God's dealings with a chosen people. Rowlandson divides a forced march into numbered removes so that captivity can be read as trial. Sewall keeps a diary that records a judge's public recantation beside his domestic life, and Mather defends the court that Sewall came to regret. Edwards, a century on, holds a congregation over a fire with a spider and then spends a career arguing, out of Locke, that grace is something felt. Against all of them stands Bradstreet, whose poems perform the same doctrinal correction and let a reader hear the cost, calling the burnt house dust after listing every piece of furniture in it. What later American writing takes from this period is not the theology but its instruments: the self-examining first person, the conviction that private experience carries public meaning, the errand that makes a nation answerable, and the plain style. Hawthorne and Emerson both argue with these people, and the exam expects a reader to know which inheritance each is arguing about.