America's Gothic Fiction

America’s Gothic Fiction America’s Gothic Fiction The Legacy of Magnalia Christi Americana Dorothy Z. Baker The Ohio State University Press Columbus Copyright © 2007 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Baker, Dorothy Zayatz. America’s gothic fiction : the legacy of Magnalia Christi Americana / Dorothy Z. Baker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–8142–1060–4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978–0–8142–9144–3 (cd-rom) 1. American fiction—History and criticism. 2. Religion and literature. 3. Mather, Cotton, 1663–1728. Magnalia Christi Americana. 4. Mather, Cotton, 1663–1728— Influence. 5. Puritan movements in literature. 6. Horror tales, American—History and criticism. 7. Gothic revival (Literature)—United States. 8. Religion and literature—United States—History. 9. National characteristics, American, in literature. I. Title. PS166.B35 2007 813.’0872—dc22 2007012212 Cover design by Fulcrum Design Corps, LLC Text design and typesetting by Juliet Williams Type set in Minion Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents w Acknowledgments vii Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 “We have seen Strange things to Day”: The History and Artistry of Cotton Mather’s Remarkables 14 Chapter 3 “A Wilderness of Error”: Edgar Allan Poe’s Revision of Providential Tropes 37 Chapter 4 Cotton Mather as the “old New England grandmother”: Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Female Historian 65 Chapter 5 Nathaniel Hawthorne and the “Singular Mind” of Cotton Mather 87 Chapter 6 “The story was in the gaps”: Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Edith Wharton 119 Works Cited 145 Index 157 Acknowledgments w My work on the legacy of Cotton Mather owes an immense debt to many scholars whose studies on American historical narrative and American historical fiction provided the foundation for this book. In addition, I could not possibly list the countless colleagues whose ready ears, bibliographic leads, and astute observations sustained and enriched my work. I would especially like to thank Jane Donahue Eberwein, Wyman H. Herendeen, John Lienhard, Steven Mintz, Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Roberta F. Weldon, and Lois Parkinson Zamora for their innumerable kindnesses. This book would have been impossible without their good counsel and the example of their scholarly practice. I first outlined the argument for this book in a conversation with the late W. Milne Holton and was encouraged by his keen interest in the project. Dr. Holton was an exacting and generous men- tor. Would that I could thank him for his unfailing support. Studies in American Fiction has kindly given me permission to reprint in chapter four a revision of my essay that appeared in the journal in 1994. I would like to thank the Interlibrary Loan Department at the M. D. Anderson Library of the University of Houston for its remarkable efficien- cy in meeting my every request. The University of Houston supported my research with a Faculty Development Leave, which was critical in helping me to initiate this study. I am very grateful to Sandy Crooms of The Ohio State University Press for her enthusiasm for this project. The anonymous readers at The Ohio State University Press contributed greatly to this book, and they have my sincere thanks. My personal debts are too numerous to list. May it suffice to say that I live more ably and fully because of the goodwill and generosity of many vii viii Acknowledgments wonderful people who daily show me the splendor and joy of this world. Foremost among them is Lawrence Baker. I would also like to acknowl- edge my daughter, Elizabeth Eve Baker, and my son, Daniel Abraham Baker, who are both magnalia Dei in my life. Finally, this book is dedicated to the memory of Abraham Harris Baker, my husband’s much-loved father, my children’s wise and wonderful grand- father, and my great friend. Dorothy Z. Baker Houston, Texas 2007 Chapter 1 w Introduction Providentialism was not born in Puritan America, but when seventeenth- century New England professed its belief in God’s agency in the great and small, public and private events of their lives, this profession of faith took on uniquely American coloring. Moreover, it became a deep-seated and dominant notion in American culture. Belief in divine providence expressed itself in the national historical and aesthetic literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Well into the nineteenth century, historians and literary authors continued to draw on the tropes of God’s providential designs for his people. The language of this profound religious tenet also found its way into many of the nation’s major political manifes- tos, such as those surrounding the Revolutionary War, Manifest Destiny, and the Abolition movement, and has continued in twentieth-century discourse concerning issues as diverse as John Kennedy’s pronouncements on the U.S. government’s involvement in foreign affairs and the religious right’s claims regarding the AIDS epidemic. Religious imagery, scriptural allusion, and even religious doctrinal assertion form powerful components of American political and historical writing, the philosophical underpin- ning of which is a belief in divine providence. More specifically, national political and historical documents regularly suggest God’s hand in the lives of individual Americans and the policies and practices of the nation. Belief in divine providence is the basis of a narrative form that is the staple of Puritan letters. The providence tale in early America is a formu- laic narrative that testifies to the omniscience and omnipotence of God, and especially to the belief that God exhibits these qualities in his active presence in the daily lives of his people in New England.1 That the power 1. My understanding of providentialism in Calvinist New England is based largely on the work of the following critics. David D. Hall offers a thorough and insightful history of the 1 Chapter 1 and will of God is exhibited in this world was a commonplace for colonial Puritans. The order and beauty of nature itself bespoke God’s majesty. The Puritans also understood that unpredictable displays of nature and exceptional occurrences in the life of men and women were also signs of divine providence and represented God’s special message to his people. Moreover, they sought to explicate and understand God’s voice in the exceptional and remarkable events they saw around them, and they did so through the providence tale. Each providence tale recounts an extraordinary occurrence, such as an eerie, prophetic dream, a remarkable religious conversion, a dramatic gal- lows confession, a miraculous deliverance from shipwreck, the exposé of sinful wrongdoing, or a deathwatch vision. Despite its brevity, the tale offers a measure of character development and dialogue, most frequently ejacula- tory prayers. The plot of the providence tale relies on great suspense—what will become of the sailors lost at sea, will the young wife survive Indian captivity, will the bereaved parents recover from the death of their baby? Finally, within the author’s narrative construction, the dénouement of the tale clearly illustrates not only the divine hand in the lives of his people, but divine judgment—God sends a bird to feed the one virtuous sailor aboard the shipwrecked vessel, punishes the blasphemer with the inability to speak, and causes the murder victim to cry out from the grave to reveal the name of his killer. Closure inevitably sets the anecdote within the framework of Puritan theology, and thereby articulates its significance and ensures its importance. The message is unchanging—God maintains an active presence in the world and in the lives of his people. He blesses and European origins of the providence tale as well as the New English expression of providence in colonial wonderbooks in Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), and Michael P. Winship’s Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) offers a detailed discussion of the theological support for providentialism as well as an excellent treatment of the cultural and religious forces that altered belief in divine providence in seventeenth-century New England. For a sketch of the varied approaches to providential historiography in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England, see Bernd Engler and Oliver Scheiding, “Re-Visioning the Past: The Historical Imagination in American Historiography and Short Fiction,” in Re-Visioning the Past: Historical Self-Reflexivity in American Short Fiction (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1998), 1–27. Stephen Carl Arch’s excellent treatment of providence tales as historical narrative in early New England is found in Authorizing the Past: The Rhetoric of History in Seventeenth-Century New England (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994). See especially 56–87, 124–28. See also James D. Hartman, Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 1–14 and Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1939), 228–31, 360. Introduction preserves his elect while he brings public, definitive, and symbolic punish- ment to those who sin. The providence tale is now recognized as an early expression of the short story and a fiction form that fascinated readers well into the nineteenth century.2 Such tales are regularly found as embedded narratives in Puritan sermons. They are also found in collected form, most notably in Increase Mather’s Illustrious Providences (1684), and then in book six of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702).

Load more