Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) January 2011 This Loquacious Soil: Language and Religious Experience in Early America Natalie Spar Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Recommended Citation Spar, Natalie, "This Loquacious Soil: Language and Religious Experience in Early America" (2011). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 330. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/330 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of English Dissertation Examination Committee: Sarah Rivett, Chair Daniel Bornstein Joseph Loewenstein, Co-chair Robert Milder Daniel Shea Wolfram Schmidgen THIS LOQUACIOUS SOIL: LANGUAGE AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE IN EARLY AMERICA by Natalie D. Spar A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2011 St. Louis, Missouri Copyright by Natalie D. Spar 2011 Acknowledgments If the Puritans were particularly loquacious, my own words of gratitude are especially insufficient. First, I would like to thank the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Washington University for the dissertation fellowship in 2010-11. In the Department of English office, Kathy Schneider always unhesitatingly delivered the support and genuine care that I needed more than she realized, and Dorothy Negri gave me enough light-hearted laughter to remind me not to take my dissertation too seriously. I am grateful to the members of my committee for their interest and support and to Dan Shea and Wolfram Schmidgen for their guidance and attentive reading of drafts. Joseph Loewenstein has been a source of inspiration ever since he told me, in a course now many years past, to embrace a bolder side of myself. Sarah Rivett‘s course on early American religion and the public sphere first interested me in the rich materials of the period, and her mentorship over the years has nurtured the academic, as well as the fanatic, in me. Washington University has also afforded me a reserve of kind and talented fellow-travelers. My work is better and my mind more inquisitive because of the dissertation workshop, in the English Department, and the Interdisciplinary Early Americanist Reading Group. Nick Miller, my accomplice in all things early-American, has been a great reader, conversationalist, and friend. This dissertation would be more chatter and less substance if it were not for his always enthusiastic feedback. Shining examples of academic care and inquisitiveness, Erik Strobl, with his generous commentary, and Erica Delsandro, with her always genial commiseration, make me proud to be a part of this profession. Courtney Weiss Smith and Katie Muth have been indispensible as readers, models of intellectual fervor, and dear friends. They truly listened when I chattered about my ideas over wine, on late-night balconies, and through literal deserts and mountains. If it were not for the countless walks through the park with Anna Teekell, I may not have finished this dissertation. Thank you. Those who cannot commiserate with the academic experience are perhaps due the deepest thanks. I owe my siblings, Nathan, Jennie, and Stephanie, an enormous debt of gratitude for the friendship and conversation that made me take my nose out of the books. And no one has reminded me that books contain experiences that real people live more than Scott. For your faith, patience, and gentle insistence that I never forget why I read in the first place, there are not words enough. Finally, I would never have given the Puritans much mind if my parents had not been the people they are. My mother, always the teacher, made me a true reader, and my father, a student of the Word, encouraged me to interrogate all words. This dissertation is dedicated to them. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Introduction 1 Notes 18 Chapter 1 Mediating Words: The Plain Style Sermon I. Occasional Reflections 21 II. A Study in Mediation: The Plain Style and its History 27 III. The Empiricism of Metaphors: The New England Sermonic Plain Style 40 Notes 63 Chapter 2 Monstrous Words: Anne Hutchinson, the Quakers, and Heretical Speech I. Miscarried Theologies 69 II. Speech without Miscarriage: Hutchinson‘s Prophetic Speech 73 III. To Speak New Things: Quaker Speech and Silence 90 Notes 108 Chapter 3 Metamorphizing Words: Native American Language and Translation I. Strange Speech 113 II. Breaking the Ice: John Eliot and Translation 118 III. A Box Full of Keys: Roger Williams‘s A Key into the Language of America 138 IV. Eliot and Williams in Context 153 Notes 155 Chapter 4 The Material Word: Jonathan Edwards and Language as an Image of the Divine I. Words, those Dreadful Enemies 162 II. Solid Shadows: Edwards‘s Philosophy of Language 165 III. Let the Judicious Reader Observe: Great Awakening Case Histories 180 IV. Words Burning and Shining: Edwards‘s Sermons 193 Notes 204 Coda After Edwards: The Bodily Language of George Whitefield 211 Notes 219 Bibliography 221 iii If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent If the unheard, unspoken Word is unspoken, unheard; Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard, The Word without a word, the Word within The world and for the world; And the light shone in the darkness and Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled About the centre of the silent Word. -T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday iv Introduction This Loquacious Soil: Language and Religious Experience in Early America They one and all embarked for the wilderness of America, where they might enjoy, unmolested, the inestimable luxury of talking. No sooner did they land on this loquacious soil, than, as if they had caught the disease from the climate, they all lifted up their voices at once, and for the space of one whole year did keep up such a joyful clamour, that we are told they frightened every bird and beast out of the neighbourhood. -Washington Irving, The History of New York The first American colonists so demanded the luxury of talking, Irving imagined, that they crossed the ocean to find it: English religious dissenters desired freedom of conscience, which soon became liberty of speech because ―they possessed that ingenuous habit of mind which always thinks aloud, and is for ever galloping into other people‘s ears.‖1 I take seriously Irving‘s joke that America has its roots, at least in part, in the desire to talk. But, as he quips, this inclination to loquacity also implies ―the right of talking without ideas and without information,‖ which makes the tongue a weapon to tyrannize, silence, and indoctrinate the powerless or disagreeable members of society.2 The powerful tongue always stands on the brink of manipulation. In Irving‘s narrative, the English dissenters‘ talkative nature necessarily resulted in the clergy adopting ―the usual methods‖ of reclaiming the people‘s ears. Yet their ―invincible spirit of independence‖ could not be subdued, and they embarked for a soil that seemed more naturally suited to their loquacity.3 The colonial clergy were no less interested in reclaiming ears, and they felt there were many obstinate ears. Preacher Solomon Stoddard‘s (1643-1729) thunderous hell-fire sermons are one example echoing Irving‘s depiction of the American colonists as unbounded speakers. His sermons, 1 preached almost a century after the first loquacious colonists arrived, were explicitly aimed at recapturing ears, and through them, souls, with loud, uncontainable words. But like Irving‘s depiction of the tyrannous tongue, Stoddard‘s sermons always stood the risk of manipulating or drawing attention to their own loquacity rather than authentically transforming the soul. Stoddard, thus, poses the central problem of my dissertation: the text initiates but threatens the authenticity of religious experience. The sermon and the Bible were meant to give the hearer or reader access to God, but the text could easily manipulate or disrupt an immediate experience of the divine. The theologies of Stoddard, his grandson Jonathan Edwards, their Puritan predecessors, and the Puritan‘s heretical contemporaries were all defined by this tension between religious experience and the sermonic and biblical texts. Thus, Stoddard strove to make the sermon a genre of experiential transference; the sermon conveyed an experience of God, rather than an argument aimed at persuasion, but it also rhetorically structured the laity‘s religious experience. The hearer was meant to sense his or her experience as authentic and individual, despite the sermon‘s work of making all religious experiences fit within pre-defined boundaries of a universal spiritual truth. Stoddard‘s 1705 sermon, The Danger of Speedy Degeneracy, issues a warning we expect from hell-fire preaching: ―God will surely judge you, if you corrupt your selves.‖ In order to make his congregation realize the fear of this as yet abstract threat, Stoddard rhetorically personalizes God‘s judgment. He explains how God will judge the corrupt: you may never recover, the world will reproach you, and you will perish. Under this last head Stoddard reinforces his argument with repetition: ―multitudes of you will perish. 2 Multitudes when they dye will go to Hell; when Parents dye, and Husbands dye, and Wives dye, and Children dye, they will generally go to Hell; after all miseries here they will have Eternal misery […] and then the Children of the Kingdom are cast into outer darkness.‖4 Though Stoddard shifts from the second person to the third, he catalogues types that particularize the abstraction of God‘s judgment: God will judge parents, husbands, children.