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2 results

  • Chapter 4 - Rereading Puritan Masculinity through Trans Theory

  • from Part I - Intimacies
  • Edited by Jean M. Lutes, Villanova University, Pennsylvania, Jennifer Travis, St John's University, New York
  • Book:
    Gender in American Literature and Culture
    Published online:
    01 April 2021
    Print publication:
    15 April 2021, pp 66-81

  • Summary

    In 1991, I argued that, “The Puritan patrimony has exacted a heavy toll on men, a fact borne out by our present ‘crisis in masculinity,’” which second wave feminists identified as the existence of “a rape culture” in the United States. A contributing factor was the narrative of religious conversion innovated by early New England Puritanism, which required believers to become spiritual “brides of Christ” in order to be saved. This devotional rhetoric not only colored Puritan poetry but indicated deeply held attitudes about spirituality, embodied gender, and social power, which shaped subsequent US poetry. In this chapter, I revisit and update these claims in the light of trans theory, reread poetry on spiritual gender by Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, early New England’s two major poets; and conclude with a discussion of Emily Dickinson, who was raised in a Puritan culture but makes irreverent, even subversive, use of this legacy.

  • Chapter 7 - Asserting a National Voice

  • from Part II - A New Nation: Poetry from 1800 to 1900
  • Edited by Alfred Bendixen, Princeton University, New Jersey, Stephen Burt, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of American Poetry
    Published online:
    05 December 2014
    Print publication:
    27 October 2014, pp 155-176

  • Summary

    More than two hundred American Puritans wrote poetry that is still extant. In their worldview, the physical world was itself a book written by God to connect this world with the next, to link the lowly creatures with their creator, because that, which may be known of God, is manifest in them. Standardized prayer was criticized as a papist and Anglican ritual, because any good minister could and should pray in the spirit. The practice of meditation, of making abstract doctrine real and true to human experience through an intense focus, was itself a poetics, away of channeling thought and feeling in language. Anne Bradstreet, Roger Williams, Michael Wigglesworth, Edward Taylor and Jane Colman Turell, wrote poetry, as a part of their religion, an unending struggle to connect transient life and lasting truth, to work out the meanings of life, to connect the natural and supernatural orders.