Of Pastors and Petticoats: Humor and Authority in Puritan New England

shaun horton

And here we think it very strange & ridiculous, to see Satyrists play the Divine, and deny that it falls under the Cognaizance of our MINISTERS. —Cotton Mather, A Vindication of the Ministers of Boston, 1722

N 1722, Solomon Stoddard (1643–1729), pastor at North- I ampton, Massachusetts, issued An Answer to Some Cases of Conscience Respecting the Country, a sixteen-page pamphlet that decisively addressed a series of issues challenging the integrity and continuity of Puritan New England. Once a tiny frontier town, Northampton had mushroomed from two dozen families to over two hundred and was now a promi- nent community. Sabbath observance had become lax, mer- chants routinely cheated their clientele, and civil lawsuits were 1 legion. “Hooped petticoats”—undergarments and skirts that had been stiffened and expanded with whale bone or with in- 2 tersewn wooden hoops —were, notwithstanding their affront to the natural function of clothing, all the rage among young women. Along with mixed dancing and private drinking par- ties, hoop petticoats were, Stoddard insisted, “Practices that are plainly Contrary to the Light of Nature.” Despite their pretense of adequately covering women’s bodies, in fact “HOOPED

1 Solomon Stoddard, An Answer to Some Cases of Conscience Respecting the Coun- try (Boston: B. Green, 1722), pp. 1, 7–10, 14. 2 See Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “hoop-petticoat.”

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 OF PASTORS AND PETTICOATS 609 petticoats have something of Nakedness” in their design, he 3 concluded. Stoddard’s brief but striking commentary on ladies’ undergarments abruptly closed an otherwise grave and methodi- cal discussion. Some of his readers may have laughed at this brusque shift, an inadvertent juxtaposition of serious contemporary problems with innocuous underskirts. Hoop-Petticoats Arraigned and Condemned by the Light of Nature and Law of God (1722), a parody of Stoddard’s sermons in general and his pamphlet in particular, quickly followed on its heels, suggest- ing that at least one eighteenth-century reader thought this was 4 funny. The episode, minor as it was, contributed to an emerg- ing trend in popular entertainment. Not only were citizens engaging in activities that fit poorly with church leaders’ moral vision, but they were also openly defying religion’s prescriptive social mores.´ New England Calvinists’ struggle to maintain influence throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been extensively discussed, but the social function of humor in the contestation of authority has received little treatment. During the eighteenth century, the function of humor in New England slid from an affirmation of the Puritan community’s solidarity into an increasing willingness to mock the spokesper- sons for social order. Through multivalent social symbols like the hoop petticoat, critics used humor to address perceptions of gender roles, national identity, and sexual norms and to subvert and symbolically reverse the balance of social power. Humor’s Engagement with Authority Two of humor’s primary theoreticians are Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud. For Bergson, who presents the human mind as

3 Stoddard, Cases of Conscience, p. 15. The material quoted above encompasses the entirety of the pamphlet’s comments on hoop petticoats. 4 The authorship of Hoop-Petticoats Arraigned and Condemned by the Light of Na- ture and Law of God (Boston: James Franklin, 1722) has been attributed to its printer. Franklin also produced The New-England Courant (1721–26), a satirical newspaper that lampooned well-known clergymen and social elites, especially Cotton Mather. See Bruce C. Daniels, Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New En- gland (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 42–43, and Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 334–42.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 610 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY essentially spontaneous and autonomous (as opposed to mechanistic or automatic), laughter is a response to “automatism in contrast with free activity.” Individuals become comical when their rigid, mechanical, or stereotypical actions betray their lack of self-control or originality. Bergson sees humor as a social cor- rective to insincerity, arrogance, absent-mindedness, and other shortcomings that lead human beings to act like automatons. Laughter chastises automatism by reasserting the superiority of human spontaneity over mechanistic habits and rituals. Freud, who also connects humor to spontaneity, attributes the pleasure derived from jokes to the momentary freeing of the subconscious in response to disruptive stimuli or ideas. Because the psyche is constantly engaged in monitoring the subconscious, an incident amusing enough to brieﬂy confound it relieves some of the stress involved in the psychic expenditure, thereby re- leasing a temporary burst of enjoyment and freedom. In both theoreticians’ views, the joke thus functions to challenge accepted patterns and to subvert a dominant structure of ideas. For Freud, a man slipping on a banana peel is funny because his sudden, unexpected, frenetic motion reveals some hidden aspect of his person. For Bergson, the episode is funny because with his sudden, unexpected loss of control, the man has been instantaneously reduced to an automaton. At the psychoanalytic level, the power of the joke is its ability to destabilize systems 5 of control. Mary Douglas extrapolates this aspect of humor beyond the realm of the psychoanalytic to posit an essential “joke-pattern” that operates at the social level. By juxtaposing “a control against that which is controlled, this juxtaposition being such that the latter triumphs,” jokes undermine systems of com- 6 munal regulation. Because jokes are deeply embedded in the

5 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan Company, 1914), p. 130; Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1960), pp. 42–44. 6 Mary Douglas, “Jokes,” in Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, ed. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 296. The essay, which occupies pp. 293–300, is reprinted

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 OF PASTORS AND PETTICOATS 611 social context in which they are delivered, the analyst must understand that social context if he or she is to appreciate the joke’s significance. For Freud, wit itself involves an econ- omy of articulated ideas. A well-crafted joke, which employs puns, double entendre, and allusions to shared (but unspoken) knowledge, carries its punch connotatively far more than literally. Douglas argues that a joke must also posit a social structure congruent with the audience’s own experience, which does not necessarily conform to the prescriptions of recognized authorities. “A joke confronts one accepted pattern with another” and thus provokes a creative reinterpretation of social relationships. As long as it occurs within the boundaries of particular conventions that distinguish jokes from other modes of communica- tion, the disruption does not threaten the basic integrity of the social system and so is distinct from “obscenity” or abomina- tion, which intrudes one set of meanings onto another without relying on accepted social conventions. Whereas the joke rep- resents only a “temporary suspension of the social structure”— a momentary “disturbance in which the particular structure of society becomes less relevant than another”—obscene or abom- inable episodes disrupt not only the social order and social convention but also the rational categories of perception that make 7 sense of order and convention. Jokes attenuate confrontation by operating within customary parameters that affirm the tran- sience of the subversion and, ultimately, the cohesion of the group. As such, jokes are not permanently intimidating, but they do offer an occasion for looking at the social order from a different perspective and, in some cases, of evaluating it. How- ever, those evaluations will gain acceptance only among those who are not offended or threatened by them. And so we return to Douglas’s hypothesis that the significance of a joke is contingent on its social context—and, by extension, on its historical context as well.

from Douglas, Implicit Meanings (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 90–114. 7 Douglas, “Jokes,” pp. 304–6.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 612 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Why Petticoats? As difficult as humor may be to detect and to understand across cultural and historical divides, available evidence suggests that hoop petticoats were silly. The London papers had ridiculed the English hoop petticoat from its emergence in 1709. At the time, it was referred to as a new fashion, although skirts with hoops had gone in and out of vogue (and occasionally been banned) throughout Western Europe since the fourteenth century. Popular accounts (satirical and otherwise) attributed the invention of the hoop skirt to various noblewomen intent on hiding embarrassing pregnancies. The garment’s precursors, the French and Spanish farthingales, became popular in their respective countries during the sixteenth century. The Spanish farthingale made its way into British wardrobes when Mary Tudor adopted it as her customary court dress, a style that Queen Elizabeth maintained throughout her reign. Dilated skirts fell out of favor after Charles I and Queen Henrietta assumed the throne, and women’s clothing became increasingly conservative and simplified under the Puritan Commonwealth of England. When the monarchy was reestablished and Charles II assumed the throne, the fabrics and fashion trends of France, one of the mainland countries to which he had exiled himself, were carried to England as well. The hoop petticoat of the eighteenth century emerged from these French contributions, particularly the bustle (a frame- work under the back of a dress intended to support its fullness and the drapery of its fabric). One element in a progression of liberalizing styles characterized by, in addition, lower necklines, shorter skirts, and more revealing sleeves, the hoop petticoat grew more voluminous, provocative, popular, and ostentatious 8 throughout the first half of the eighteenth century. Juxtaposing nakedness with pomp, awkwardness with el- egance, and vulgarity with refinement, the ubiquitous and

8 Kimberly Chrisman, “Unhoop the Fair Sex: The Campaign against the Hoop Petti- coat in Eighteenth-Century England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 30 (Autumn 1996): 5–8; The Origin of the Whale Bone-Petticoat: A Satyr: Boston, August 2d. 1714 (Boston, 1714), p. 8. See also Alice Morse Earle, Customs and Fashions in Old New England (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1893), pp. 318–23.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 OF PASTORS AND PETTICOATS 613 conspicuous hoop petticoat upset customary constructions of 9 class, gender, nationality, and respectability. Although hoop petticoats signiﬁed wealth and sophistication, their ungainli- ness undermined the grace and poise of well-mannered social elites. Women found the petticoats to be more comfortable, better ventilated, and less constricting than the heavy skirts of earlier styles, but the hoops distorted the shape of the female body and created clumsy movements as women struggled to pass through doorways, enter carriages, and dance. Hoop petticoats also embodied a mixed message about sexual accessibil- ity. The woman’s lower body was completely hidden under the garment’s bell-shaped expanse, but she was scantily clad under- neath it. Solely the province of men, drawers were considered inappropriate apparel for English women until the early nine- teenth century. Because the skirts were easily tipped by sudden winds or careless movements, they carried with them the ever- present threat of exposing nakedness, a titillating aspect of their design that, critics carped, made them well suited for coquettes and strumpets. The possibility of being so labeled did little to dampen women’s enthusiasm for the style, however, and man- ufacturers obliged by increasing their stocks, so much so that the middle and even the lower classes gained access to the European fashion. Although other European trends were also assaulting New England, as the most visible and risque´ among them, the hoop petticoat became a vehicle for commenting on sexual morality, female liberality, the anglicization of colonial society, and the eccentric (perhaps even absurd) aspects of 10 incessant social change. On the other hand, they were only dresses. The hoop petticoat’s ironies and paradoxes were hidden, as contingent on

9 Chrisman, “Unhoop the Fair Sex,” pp. 10–17;Earle,Customs and Fashions in Old New England, pp. 317–22, 325–26. Though Chrisman discusses the reactions of English male satirists to the hoop petticoats of the eighteenth century, she does not interpret their ambiguity; rather, she argues that their uniformity of shape, along with their expansion of the “female dominated social and personal space,” provided a kind of sexual liberation, which British writers attacked unsuccessfully with satire. 10 Chrisman, “Unhoop the Fair Sex,” pp. 18–22.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 614 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY perception as they were on the social situation. To be sure, women did not wear hoop petticoats to provoke laughter. In- deed, the garment’s underlying propriety was as important as its occasional tumbles into impropriety for the purposes of humor. Unless an object was both familiar and accepted, unless it occupied a meaningful place in the social order, it had no capacity to generate irony or paradox. The revelatory potential of jokes lay in their applicability to essentially any social phenomenon whose ordinary role was taken for granted. Thus humor’s capacity to prompt a “rediscovery of the familiar” gen- erated alternate interpretations not only of the given social situation but also of other mundane phenomena shared within 11 the Puritan community.

Humor and the Community In New England’s early decades, popular humorous works typically afﬁrmed Puritan identity rather than subverting it. “New England’s Annoyances,” a ballad of sixteen dual-couplet stanzas that may have emerged as early as the 1640s, lampooned the hardships that the Puritans endured in their newly adopted 12 land. The opening lines introduce the song’s subject matter, and the next identiﬁes the speaker as a New Englander among his fellows.

11 See Freud, Jokes and the Unconscious, pp. 120–23. Freud contends that the cognitive event of recognizing through memory is a source of pleasure. “Rediscovery of the familiar” refers to a technique of requiring the listener to recall factual knowledge in order to complete the joke. 12 Joseph Lemay, ed., New England’s Annoyances: America’s First Folk Song (Cran- bury, N.J.: Associated University Press, 1985), pp. 19–35. Lemay argues that “New England’s Annoyances” was an attempt to undercut the “anti-Puritan” satires of the New World during the period from the 1640stothe1660s. Although the earliest print version of “New England’s Annoyances” is dated 1758 (ostensibly recorded from the recitation of a ninety-two-year-old woman), Lemay presents highly suggestive (though inconclusive) evidence in favor of its origins among the ﬁrst generation of Puritans in Massachusetts Bay. The version I examine here is Lemay’s reconstruction of the song from later print sources. Arguing that Edward Johnson (1599–1672) was most likely the author of the original piece, Lemay cites similarities with Johnson’s other writings on New England in terms of style, motif, and subject matter. Unfortunately, the possibility that the original song was composed at a later time is not considered in depth.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 OF PASTORS AND PETTICOATS 615 New England’s annoyances you that would know them Pray ponder these verses which briefly doth show them 13 The place where we live is a wilderness wood. The twelve stanzas that follow are littered with references— references that may have been obscure to the uninitiated— betraying a first-hand knowledge of seventeenth-century North America. The stanzas evoke the Puritans’ experience of bitter winters, frozen ground, ruined crops, patched clothing, and pumpkin diets (“We have pumpkin at morning and pumpkin at 14 noon / If it was not for pumpkins we should be undone”). Environmental annoyances are accompanied by religious ones, including the covenant of grace, the social implications of which produce friction between Puritans and non-Puritans as well as within Puritan communities themselves. And we have a Cov’nant one with another, Which makes a division ’twixt brother and brother, For some are rejected and others made Saints, 15 Of those that are equal in virtue and wants. Although the stanza alludes to a fundamental tension in Calvin- ist doctrine between the solidarity of the community and the apparent arbitrariness of sainthood, it hardly amounts to an at- tack on the Puritan errand as a whole; in fact, within the context of the song, the lines actually mount a defense. The divisions consequent from the covenant of grace are here equated with the nuisances of bland food, cold winters, and raccoons raiding the vegetables. In other words, exaggeration renders the rela- tive merit or severity of each particular “annoyance” impossible to discern: all are equally absurd. Couched firmly within the conventions of a safe and satisfying satire, “New England’s An- noyances” is a benign Puritan self-caricature that makes light of the community’s struggles in an intimate tone that inspires 16 commiseration and solidarity.

13 Lemay, New England’s Annoyances, p. 17. 14 Lemay, New England’s Annoyances, pp. 18–19. 15 Lemay, New England’s Annoyances, p. 19. 16 Lemay, New England’s Annoyances, p. 15.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 616 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY The intimation of solidarity is reinforced in the song’s con- clusion, when it abandons hyperbole to endorse the Puritan errand. Shifting the audience’s attention from New Englanders to their onlookers, the ballad’s last three stanzas dismiss the “many mad fellows” who, after brief forays into the wilderness, had returned to England and issued peremptory judgments about a society still coming to fruition. And they are for England, they will not stay here But meet with a lion in shunning a bear.

Now while some are going, let others be coming, For while liquor is boiling it must have a scumming; But we will not blame them, for birds of a feather, By seeking their fellows are ﬂocking together.

For you who the Lord intends hither to bring, Forsake not the honey for fear of the sting; But bring both a quiet and contented mind, 17 And all needful blessings you surely shall find. In turning its attention from New Englanders to their onlookers, “New England’s Annoyances” responds to British satires, current in the 1640stothe1660s, that mocked England’s sepa- ratists for having exiled themselves to a faraway land where they fashioned their own crude versions of the Christian Church. By shifting the burden of inferiority from New England’s inhabi- tants to their English detractors, the ballad diffuses arguments against New World settlement. Among the experiences emi- grants share in the hostile wilderness, the final and most sig- nificant is the gathering of like-minded people guided by the will of God, who thereby rewards them for the hardships they endure. In thus appending a moral to its preceding jests, “New England’s Annoyances” ensures that its lampoon of Puritan life will remain securely bound within its explicitly pro-Puritan rhetoric. The political message that Nathaniel Ward (1578–1652) sought to convey in The Simple Cobler of Aggawam (1647)was

17 Lemay, New England’s Annoyances, p. 19.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 OF PASTORS AND PETTICOATS 617 more pointed and contentious than that embodied in “New England’s Annoyances.” Through the humble persona of a dili- gent cobbler, Ward champions the “New English” as bastions of moral order against England’s political, social, and ecclesial corruption. Sexuality is caught up in the polemic not only when the cobbler digresses into the topic of women’s fashions but also insofar as the narrative employs marriage as a core allegor- ical theme. The cobbler, a “solitary widower of almost twelve years,” intends to “step over to my Native Country [England] for a yoke-fellow [wife].” In preparation for his journey, he practices defending the ideals of the Puritan colonists by mus- tering metaphors of craftsmanship and marriage. His primary concern is England’s policy of religious toleration, which fos- ters a pluralistic society and “adulterate[s] Truth” by mingling it with the heresies of “Opinionists.” He likens the proliferation of liberal ideas among men with the equally disturbing proliferation of liberal fashions among women. By borrowing “a little of their loose-tongued liberty” to “misspend a word or two upon their long-wasted, but short-skirted patience,” the cobbler renders sexualized women’s fashion emblematic of England’s 18 infidelity to religious truth and national identity. Given their association with liberality and foreign influence, hoop skirts offered Ward a ready symbol for the visible corruption of English character. For his simple cobbler, English women’s enslavement to continental fashion reveals the extent to which England has been distorted by pluralistic “Opinionism.” Hooped dresses warp the feminine figure, making proper English women look silly, shallow, and foreign.

It is beyond the ken of my understanding to conceive, how those women should have any true grace, or valuable virtue, that have so little wit, as to disﬁgure themselves with such exotic garbs, as not only

18 Nathaniel Ward, The Simple Cobler of Agawam in America: Willing to Help Mend His Native Country, Lamentably Tattered, both in the Upper-Leather and Sole, with all the Honest Stitches He can Take, and as Willing Never to be Paid for His Work (London: John Dever & Robert Ibbitson, 1647), pp. 14, 6, 11. See also Daniels, Puritans at Play, pp. 36–38, and William Scheick, “The Widower Narrator in Nathaniel Ward’s The Simple Cobler of Agawam in America,” New England Quarterly 47 (March 1974): 87–96.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 618 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY dismantles their native lovely luster, but transclouts them into giant bar geese, ill-shapen shotten shell-ﬁsh, Egyptian hieroglyphicks, or at best into French ﬂurts of the pastery.

Such distortions of bodily shape and of cultural identity not only rob women of their natural beauty but corrupt society by drawing attention to the sexuality of the women who don the despised clothing. “We have about five or six of [such women] in our Colony,” complains the cobbler. “If I see any of them accidentally, I cannot cleanse my phansie of them for a moneth after.” This candid admission juxtaposes probity and desire. The normative purpose of fashion, in his Puritan world view, is to convey women’s elevated social status and to enhance their feminine beauty, not to showcase their sexual allure. And so, the cobbler deplores “goodly English-women imprisoned in French Cages” and “honour[s] the woman that can honour herself with her attire.” “A good Text,” he comments, “alwayes 19 deserves a fair Margent.” Humor allowed the anonymous author of “New England’s Annoyances” and Ward’s fictional cobbler to debunk carica- tures of Puritan identity by exposing the absurdities and moral confusion still plaguing England, and in doing so their texts fortified the image of an organically unified New World religious community. The popularity of such entertaining rep- resentations of early American Puritanism persisted into the eighteenth century, even though conceptions of colonial identity had altered substantially by the turn of the century. Mas- sachusetts, now led by a crown-appointed governor, was subject to British laws enforcing religious toleration. Increased trade with the motherland and other foreign territories had given rise to a wealthy merchant class. Independent printers and booksellers had multiplied along with secular entertainment venues like taverns and dancing schools. The writings of Isaac Newton, John Locke, and other Enlightenment philosophers engendered an enthusiasm for natural philosophy and the sciences among Puritan ministers even as they wrestled with how

19 Ward, The Simple Cobler of Agawam, p. 14.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 OF PASTORS AND PETTICOATS 619 to reconcile such liberalizing humanistic concepts with the conviction of human depravity that was central to New England Calvinism. A distinct youth culture began to emerge during the early 1700s, accompanied by a greater emphasis on gender dif- ferences and romantic interaction. As the colonies “anglicized,” the social authority of Puritan ministers became yet another target for the era’s satirists. Throughout the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century, the acceptable parameters of good taste in printed humor broadened as steadily as the circumference of 20 ladies’ petticoats.

Governing Mirth Noting the potential dangers of humor’s expanding license early in his career, Benjamin Colman (1673–1747) published the only comprehensive exegetical work dedicated to prescrib- ing a model of “mirth” for the Puritan laity. The Government and Improvement of Mirth According to the Laws of Chris- tianity (1707) consisted of three sermons, one for each kind of mirth, which Colman delivered in 1704. “Civil” mirth was well regulated, natural, healthy, and productive. “Vicious” mirth was disruptive, unhealthy, socially inappropriate, and detrimen- tal to the individual as well as the community. Mirth of the spiritual sort (which Colman called “Holy Joy”) enhanced the profound happiness of those believers who enjoyed assurances of grace. Steeped in English commitments to physico-theology, the sciences, and a religious view of the world as fundamen- tally ordered, rational, and predictable, Colman argued that “government and improvement” were achieved when humans, through their faculty of reason, asserted control over the in- stincts they shared with other creatures of the natural world. He emphasized the natural and spiritual aspects of cheerful- ness and good humor, premising them on his conviction that

20 See Harry Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 117–19; David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 53–61; Daniels, Puritans at Play, pp. 11–13; Chrisman, “Unhoop the Fair Sex,” pp. 5–6.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 620 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY their merit (for good or ill) was largely a function of the particular social context within which they were exercised. Though mirth’s essential workings were tied inextricably to the body as well as the mind, Colman understood them primarily in social and communal terms. He recognized the capacity of jokes to suspend social patterns and to reconﬁgure relationships among cultural symbols in such a way as to reveal hidden meanings. In the terms Douglas has advanced, The Government and Im- provement of Mirth was an explicit attempt to deploy religious authority to subdue the subversive elements of New England humor. In essence, Colman sought to protect the church from humor’s potential dangers by articulating a moral order intrinsic 21 to humor’s very mechanism. Colman’s stated purpose was “to show the decency and obligation of natural and civil mirth, and then the foul abuses of it to vice and carnality; and ﬁnally . . . the pleasures that are proper to Religion.” As it grew in population and prosperity, Boston, where Colman preached, had become a pleasant and cheerful town. Indeed, he worried, it was in danger of be- coming too pleasant. “It may be there never was more Mirth,” wrote Colman, “nor under less Regulation, than in this Age, and among too many in this Place.” Young people were especially prone to “Levity and Laughter.” Given their immaturity, they could become disorderly and were constantly in need of correction from their elders. Still, their propensity for mirth was essentially and ultimately good.

I am far from inveighing against sober mirth. On the contrary, I justiﬁe, applaud & recommend it; Only let your conversation be as becometh the Gospel and let it be pure and grave and serious and devout . . . and yet free and cheerful; there’s no necessity of being 22 Immodest or Profane, Idle and Impertinent, in order to be Merry.

21 Benjamin Colman, The Government and Improvement of Mirth According to the Laws of Christianity, in Three Sermons (Boston: B. Green, 1707). See also John Corrigan, “Catholick Congregational Clergy and Public Piety,” Church History 60 (June 1991): 211–15. 22 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, A3–A4; all emphases are the author’s.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 OF PASTORS AND PETTICOATS 621 Colman’s paradoxical expression “sober mirth” recurred fre- quently in various forms, including “moderate Mirth” and “cheerful, yet grave.” Bruce Daniels suggests that the phrase encapsulates Puritanism’s general ambivalence toward recreation and entertainment. Although early-seventeenth-century ministers affirmed the virtues of many pleasures, they also in- veighed against their indulgence. Alcohol, conjugal love, and sport, while inherently worthy, were all harmful in excess. “In its overall thrust, Colman’s work rehashed what must have been a familiar message to New Englanders: Have fun, but not too 23 much.” For Colman, however, governing mirth was not just a matter of measuring out one’s pleasures. Cheer, a gift from God, had a purpose beyond its pure expression; good humor had a part to play in furthering God’s work in the world. And therefore, Colman asserted, not only the quantity of mirth but its quality should be monitored. Mirth unregulated, in both 24 degree and kind, was dangerous. Colman subsumed mirth under a dichotomy of feeling (or “State” of mind) that set natural, lawful, and religious states against worldly, sensual, and irreligious ones. His proof text for all three sermons was the Epistle of James, chapter 5, verse 3: “Is any among you afflicted? Let him pray. Is any merry? Let him sing psalms.” The act of serving God, Colman claimed, favored no one state of mind over the other; rather, God had provided “a Law how to behave our selves in either Case,” that is, in sorrow or in gladness. Whether an individual was merry or afflicted, effective regulation entailed a state of mind fitting to the situation and correctly expressed. Mirth was “design’d by nature to chear and revive us thro’ all the toils and troubles of life.” It promoted good spirits and bodily health. It also strengthened the love and friendship fostered by social gatherings. Good cheer was conducive to happy occasions like weddings, thanksgivings, the birth of a child, or the satisfac- tion of a good day’s work. Whereas sin, grief, and penitence were necessary precursors for salvation, the reformed Christian

23 Daniels, Puritans at Play, pp. 17–18. 24 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, pp. 7–12.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 622 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY worshiped God at church and at home by being joyful for the Lord’s blessings and cheerful in the execution of his or her 25 duties. Colman stressed that the devout were under an obligation to demonstrate the superiority of the Christian life for the ben- eﬁt of those who did not share in it. “[L]et ’em see that you enjoy more pleasure in Serving God, than they can in serving divers lusts and pleasures.” The “joyous Life of eminently good men,” Colman was convinced, was compelling enough to con- vert sinners, whereas an overabundance of sorrow was likewise a powerful deterrent.

The sad hearted Christian seems to be without hope in the World, and so his Religion without Motive or Allurement in it, which were an Effectual Care that it should make no Converts. Let me only ask the pensive drooping Christian, Is your Master hard, your work unreasonable? . . . Don’t force People to pity you and to say, What a Poor Slave goes there! What a Miserable Look has he! What a load of Grief hangs on his Brow! What a dead Eye and Heart has he! Pray, what Tyrant does he serve? & whats the Drudgery he is put to? O 26 Christian, let ’em see that there is such a thing as your Masters Joy.

For Colman, according to the normative rules of behavior that God had designed for humanity, civil mirth required that individuals exercise their self-awareness and discipline to be cheerful or sorrowful as circumstances warranted. Colman’s concept of humor, with its emphasis on regulation, bears a striking resemblance to Mary Douglas’s. As Douglas points out, regulation is an essential component of jokes insofar as they are governed by rhetorical conventions that deﬁne them as such. The conventionalized joke-form, which ﬂeetingly suspends normative social patterns and offers a brief respite from social control, allows subversive ideas to be expressed, but only with the crucial caveat that they are frivolous and should not be taken seriously. This momentary release gives license for multivalent cultural symbols to realign, thus exposing

25 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, pp. 1, 7, 29–30. 26 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, pp. 38–40.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 OF PASTORS AND PETTICOATS 623 unspoken elements of the absurd in the joke’s originating social situation. For Douglas, the joke does not bring the absurd into existence; it only heightens the salience of absurdities already present. In addition to their shared interest in regulation, Colman’s distinction between civil mirth and vicious mirth is directly analogous to Douglas’s distinction between humor and the obscene. By policing the boundaries between humor and obscenity, Colman hoped to prevent the subversion of religious ideals. His dichotomy of feeling, which pairs joy with mirth and sadness with prayer, demonstrates his desire that humor be rational and conducive to social harmony, a desire not necessarily at odds with the joke’s power to create a brief moment of release from social control, a concept that Douglas borrows from 27 Freud. Indeed, Colman’s evocation of the “pensive drooping Christian” is arguably a didactic joke that exempliﬁes civil mirth. Having asserted the need for Christians to be joyful in their service to God, Colman goes on to adopt the perspective of an uninformed outsider. For a moment, God’s sovereignty becomes tyranny, his people oppressed slaves, and their diligence drudgery. If this is a joke, it is of the safest possible variety. Colman primes his audience with the rhetorical question, “Is your Master hard, your work unreasonable?” Of course not! the believer will necessarily reply. Thus does Colman employ a clever rhetorical strategy, an argument ad ridiculum: he suspends his own prescriptions in order to expose the absurdity of not conforming to them. And in so doing, he draws upon the audience’s shared knowledge of God’s benevolence to afﬁrm their communal solidarity and to instruct them on its preserva- tion. In essence, Colman’s civil mirth did not admit absurdity within the church’s inviolable tenets but it did allow for the mi- nor absurdities of day-to-day life. A clean and clever witticism 28 was funny. Hoop petticoats on a windy day were not.

27 Freud, Jokes, pp. 117–27. Freud distinguishes “innocent” jokes from “tendentious” jokes, the former of which entail no judgment against any person or group (pp. 90–94). Douglas’s socially oriented model leaves little or no room for such jokes, but Colman apparently did. 28 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, pp. 44–48.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 624 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY While civil mirth was demonstrably good by virtue of the benefits it conferred, “vicious mirth” accomplished nothing and was therefore irrational. “There is a Laughter, of which the Wise Man cou’d not but say—It is Madness, Transporting the Mind beyond the bounds of Sobriety & Reason. . . . What does it? It does no Imaginable good, but much hurt.” Colman could describe such a phenomenon only in terms of its deviation 29 from civil mirth. People who laughed too loud, for too long, or too often were wasting their time “in Madness and Riot,” 30 tiring rather than rejuvenating themselves. Ill-mannered mirth, which included men’s contemptible carousing in taverns, betrayed a lack of self-discipline. Licentious, fleshly, or frivolous jokes were “flat and tasteless to a chaste and healthful 31 soul,” and nothing was “so Nauseous as a Merry Drunkard.” Especially disturbing were occasions when people laughed for no discernible reason. Being a rational creature, a human being had to know the “sufficient cause for all his actions; know why he laughs, and why he weeps, and not [frisk about] like a Horse that has no understanding.” Inexplicable laughter was a “symptom of a sickly Soul, which every amusement and 32 fancy commands and tosses about at pleasure.” A product of divine design, the body was a logically ordered object, governed by a rational mind and endowed with agency. A merry drunkard, or a body in the throes of uncontrolled laughter, presented a visceral perversion of the natural order, a distortion analogous to an epileptic fit and so complete as to undermine the individual’s humanity. Humor in and of itself, Colman insisted, was “without sense and meaning, without 33 design, and void of Harmony.” Irrational mirth’s power to distort the perception of an individual extended to the social situation as well. Mirth during times of sorrow or humiliation was sinful because it destabilized

29 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, p. 44. 30 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, p. 45. 31 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, p. 48 32 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, pp. 55–56. 33 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, p. 55; see also Douglas, “Jokes,” pp. 293–300.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 OF PASTORS AND PETTICOATS 625 the occasion’s meaning. Laughing at a funeral, for example, not only offended fellow mourners, but it violated the sanctity of the ritual. Colman warned his congregation, “The House of Mourning is no place to be Merry at. Christianity requires us 34 to weep with those that weep.” Also distressing were the idle, silly distractions that disrupted the Sabbath, even “in the very Exercises of Worship; which is to affront the Great God to his very Face.” To treat the Sabbath as a “Play-day” rather than a day of rest, Colman asserted, was worse than treating it as a 35 work day. According to Colman, vicious mirth is socially disruptive because it perverts attitudes toward the sacred. “Profane mirth” referred to any joy that was derived from occasions of sin (one’s own or those of another) or that took “Religion or Goodness” as its object. Sin was an occasion for sorrow, the necessary response for any individual hoping to draw near to God. To glorify one’s own sins was to court damnation rather than salvation, but far more destructive was encouraging the sinful behavior of others, “which is the guilt of wicked Friends and Companions.” Mocking others for their sins debased the ideals of Christian charity, and mocking religion itself was the most despicable profanity of all. “It is dangerous to have one light tho’t of God, or of his Word,” Colman warned. “Such mad fools play with the Thunder, and clap hands at their Imaginary Judge, as if he were but a Name. . . . They do daily what the barbarous Jews 36 did once to him on the Cross.” Society had reached a level of unprecedented blasphemy, Colman cautioned, and all church members were stigmatized by the indiscretions of a few. “Modern Deists” openly ridiculed the doctrine of revealed religion. Puritan ministers were 37 treated “with all the rude pleasures of a Bear-baiting.” Such a wanton abuse of mirth even extended to using the Bible as a source for vulgar jokes.

34 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, p. 52. 35 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, p. 51. 36 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, pp. 66, 69–70. 37 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, p. 73.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 626 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY To promote Mirth some are often making Allusions unto Texts and Phrases of Sacred Scripture. As if there could be no ﬁnished piece of Farce except the Bible be hal’d in and burlesqu’d! this passes for the Quintessence of Wit with some, and it is easily to be observ’d of them, that let another talk with ten times the Finess and Quickness without such Allusions, and he may pass for a sensible man it may be; but let a rude Dunce blunder out a scurrilous Pun in Scripture-language, and they burst out and clap hands.

Muslims, Colman claimed, revered their “Alcoran” more than most Christians their Bible. Because “Scripture is so very pure; therefore the rooted corruption in Mankind lusts so mortally against it, while it bears with the Alcoran because of the Mix- tures of Filthiness in it.” Burlesquing the Bible may have amused some Bostonians, but for Colman the act trivialized 38 both scripture and sin. In his sermon on vicious mirth, Colman attempted to recast subversive humor as subversive obscenity. Having established a normative role for civil mirth in the regulation of social harmony, he proceeded systematically to categorize various forms of disruptive humor in terms of the harm they inﬂicted. In mat- ters of religious import, his model of mirth allowed no room whatsoever for even a momentary suspension of social control. Mirth, in Colman’s world view, possessed a moral value that was contingent on its object, its social context, its delivery, and its bodily effect. Certain objects, he insisted, must be exempt from ridicule. Mirth out of place was as disruptive for Colman as matter out of place is for Douglas—perhaps more so insofar 39 as it refused to take its transgressions seriously. In a thanksgiving sermon in 1704, Colman expounded the virtues of “spiritual and holy” mirth, which could inspire the community toward an appreciation of God’s saving grace. “There is a Spiritual & Religious Joy, proper to a Saint; his rich Priviledge, and his Duty to Aspire after. A Joy which the Carnal heart knows nothing of, which the World can’t give,

38 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, pp. 71–72. 39 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, pp. 75–79, 94–98.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 OF PASTORS AND PETTICOATS 627 40 nor can it take away.” Among the chosen, this joy promoted love of the Sabbath, the sanctuary, and the sermon. Although the unconverted might perform Christian duties as the saints did, they derived pleasure from worldly things alone. “Divine Pleasure” or “Holy Joy” arose from the “Devout Apprehen- sion of God’s Governing PROVIDENCE, and a religious Truth therein,” in other words, from a perception of the invisible 41 aspects of creation available only through grace. Holy joy, Colman emphasized, could be keenly felt during worship, especially when singing psalms. Song, he claimed, acted “strongly on Sense & Imagination, and by them has the more forcible Access to our Affections. Our Spirits being Imbodyed are naturally come at by Impressions on our Senses.” Music imbued the lyrical message with a unique and powerful force, arousing different passions depending on the composition (“whether it be Grave or Loose”). Sonnets, which were “loose,” could de- prave men by appealing to their sensuality, thus serving Satan’s ends. As Satan used sonnets, the Holy Spirit “uses Holy Psalms as naturally tending to leave impressions of what is Holy and Good upon us.” Offering praise through the psalms, when done properly, could stimulate the physical senses and thus facilitate the soul’s apprehension of God’s grace among those who as- 42 piredtoit. Colman had distinct ideas about worship and how psalms ﬁt into it. Vital to the communal (and private) performance of praise was the sincerity of the joy expressed. Singing poorly or disrespectfully was an affront to the ordinances as grievous as praying poorly or disrespectfully. Sung words, like spoken words, had to express the worshiper’s true feelings. “Therefore our present WORSHIP must be from the HEART, from an Engaged Spirit, & raised affections,” he wrote. “A Joyful Noise alone is not Praise.” In order for piety to remain central in Puritans’ daily lives, they must enjoy worship, and so they must experience the Word as something more engaging than any

40 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, pp. 99–100. 41 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, p. 115. 42 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, pp. 149–50.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 628 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY play, poem, or sport. For pious Christians, religion must be the 43 supreme entertainment, as God designed it to be. Benjamin Colman was aware that Boston’s Congregational churches were competing with local taverns, dance halls, sports, secular literature (including plays), and other diversions for the attention of young laypeople. His detailed treatment of vicious mirth suggests that New Englanders were indeed finding pleasure in numerous subversive venues, as reflected in their un- fortunate behaviors. They told bawdy jokes, laughed in church, invented unflattering nicknames for their ministers, and made 44 fun of the handicapped. Such mirth unregulated was highly dangerous, in no small part because, in order for ministers to assert political, as well as spiritual, power, the laity had to take them seriously.

Pastors and Petticoats Arraigned With An Answer to Some Cases of Conscience Respecting the Country, Solomon Stoddard committed a rhetorical blunder that not only diminished the seriousness with which his words would be received but that rendered him a target of ridicule. The ensuing parody, Hoop-Petticoats Arraigned and Condemned by the Light of Nature and Law of God, juxtaposed the gravitas of the Puritan jeremiad with the levity of dilated underskirts. Probably written by its publisher James Franklin, it was not the ﬁrst pamphlet printed in Massachusetts to be 45 dedicated to the silliness of hoop petticoats, but it may have been the ﬁrst to mock both the pastorate and the petticoat in equal measure. Embellishing on Stoddard’s succinct opinion about hoop petticoats, the work, which assumed the guise of a sermon, enu- merated with ludicrous precision how the fashion contradicted

43 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, pp. 153, 168–69. 44 Colman, Government and Improvement of Mirth, pp. 46–48, 51, 74, 57–58. 45 This honor appears to belong to the 1714 Origin of the Whale-Bone Petticoat, an anonymous satirical poem alleging that the garment had been designed speciﬁcally to conceal the pregnancy of a French maid named Belinda.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 OF PASTORS AND PETTICOATS 629 the natural “Ends of Apparel.” The ﬁrst of these ends was to veil nakedness.

Now, that Hoops in petticoats don’t answer this End, but rather contradict it, is evident, in that instead of covering our Nakedness they expose...thosePartsthatAdam and Eve seem’d to take especial care to cover, in the Aprons they provided . . . yea, uncomely Parts which therefore have the more need of comely Covering. See 1 Cor, 12: 23, 24....They make bare the Leg, and uncover the Thigh, so that 46 their Nakedness is uncovered, yea, their shame is seen. The allusions to exposure were revisited in the second end of apparel, which hoop petticoats also assailed: to protect the body from injury. Hoop petticoats offered insufﬁcient protec- tion from the cold and were obviously “troublesome and uneasy to the Body.” “Hoop Gallants” had to contort and twist their bodies to walk, especially through narrow passages and doorways,

so that there seems a Necessity either of making our Doors bigger, or their Hoops less. Methinks they would do well to consider, that strait is the gate, & narrow the way that leads to Life; and whether their extensive Hoops may not be some hinderance unto them in walking 47 in this narrow way. The ﬁnal end of apparel, the adornment of one’s person, called for a close reading of Isaiah 3:16:“...the Daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth Necks, and with wonton Eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their Feet.” “Feet” in this passage, Franklin’s mock sermon explained, was an English derivation of a word that also meant “fetter,” so that “a tinkling of the feet” meant “going as if they were fetter’d,” which described with prophetic accuracy how New England’s young daughters of Zion moved as they attempted to avoid tripping over their petticoats. The piece ended with the admonition from Isaiah 32 to “Tremble ye Women that are at Ease, be troubled ye careless ones; strip

46 Franklin, Hoop-Petticoats Arraigned, pp. 1, 3. 47 Franklin, Hoop-Petticoats Arraigned, p. 3.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 630 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY 48 ye and make ye bare, and gird sackcloth on your Loins.” Franklin’s choice of biblical passages was not inadvertent; ministers, including Stoddard, had employed those passages from Isaiah to inveigh against the pride and haughtiness of fash- 49 ion. By appropriating sermonic rhetorical tropes—including a minister’s routine references to his biblical and intellectual expertise, etymology, and natural reason—scripture and exege- sis became, in the parodist’s art, vehicles for bawdy puns and satirical barbs. The contrast to Nathaniel Ward’s Simple Cobler is signif- icant. With his humble narrator and appeals to plain sense, Ward defended a political position and affirmed the valid- ity of the Congregational churches in New England. Ward attacked hoop petticoats to reveal their intrinsic absurdity; Franklin attacked hoop petticoats to challenge the authority of the ministry. Ward’s invective against hoop petticoats was funny because those who wore them did not realize how silly they looked; Franklin’s was funny because everyone knew how silly hoop petticoats were but Stoddard had chosen to bela- bor the point anyway. Hoop-Petticoats Arraigned presented no explicit political agenda. In adopting the persona of a particular real-life individual (Stoddard, or any other minister with a comparable style or set of convictions), the pamphlet refused to affirm anything save the farcical image of a minister scruti- nizing the underskirts of his constituency with the same erudi- tion he applied to his study of scripture. The cobbler admitted that the fashion acted on his “phancie.” Franklin’s minister is too proud to make such an admission, but he dwells on the titillating specifics of the garment nonetheless. And whereas the cobbler resorts to metaphor when he describes the visual effects of hoop petticoats—“ill-shapen, shotten shell-fish” and

48 Franklin, Hoop-Petticoats Arraigned, pp. 5–8. 49 See, e.g., Stoddard (1675), quoted in Earle, Customs and Fashions in Old New England, p. 318, and Nathanael Morrill, The Lord’s Voice in the Earthquake, Crieth to Careless & Secure Sinners. : Shewed in a Sermon Preach’d in the Parish of Rye, in New-Castle, in New-Hampshire, in New-England, Novemb. 16. 1727. being a Day of Publick Fasting Thro’Out the Province, Occasioned by the Late Awful and Terrible Earthquake. : Now Publish’d at the Earnest Request & Desire of Many in the Audience (Boston: Printed for Richard Jenness and Joseph Lock, 1728).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 OF PASTORS AND PETTICOATS 631 50 “out-landish caskes” —Franklin’s minister writes explicitly of legs, thighs, nakedness, awkward body movements, and exposure to cold. His almost lewd attention to detail thwarts his chaste intentions and invests his sermon with a comical sense of futility. Franklin’s minister remains, however, totally unaware of the effect of his words, and he proceeds to admonish his congregation. “Since this [wearing hoop petticoats] is so great an Evil, we ought, as to avoid it ourselves, so to do all we can to suppress it in others.” Parents and husbands were to exert their “Au- thority” to prevent their women from wearing the garments (a tactic that had clearly failed to date). Ministers were to continue preaching against the petticoats so that “they may be able to say with Job, chap. 13.V.34. Did I fear a great Multitude? or did 51 the Contempt of Familys terrify me, that I kept silence? &c.” Herein lay the social inversion. Just as hoop wearers would not be deterred from their fashion preferences, so ministers would not be deterred from issuing their moral pronouncements, no matter how ineffectual. The Hoop Gallants, silly as they were, were not as silly as the ministers—nor such juicy targets. Af- ter all, fashion was fashion; moral authority was something else altogether. The timing of the publication may have heightened the im- pact of its indictment of ministers. During the smallpox epi- demic of 1721–22, James Franklin and Cotton Mather had taken opposite sides in the inoculation controversy. Six promi- nent ministers, including the Mathers and Benjamin Colman, had, contrary to popular opinion and the advice of local physi- cians, supported inoculation. The debate quickly devolved into a contest over who had the authority to make moral and medical claims. Mather’s opponents charged him with exceeding the limits of his professional expertise. Franklin, who had standing in neither the medical nor moral arenas, used his satirical gift to lambaste the ministers’ position and credibility, especially

50 Ward, The Simple Cobler of Agawam, pp. 14, 15. 51 Franklin, Hoop-Petticoats Arraigned, pp. 7–8. The quoted verse is actually found at Job 31:34.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 632 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Mather’s. Mather denounced the resistance to the ministry as “a shocking Blasphemy,” a denunciation that did little to ad- vance his cause. Jokes at the clergy’s expense, including Hoop- Petticoats Arraigned, countered their authority as scholars and guardians of morality with suggestions of their pettiness, sopho- 52 moric reasoning, and utter impotence. As petticoats grew more common among women of various ages (especially in Boston), they gradually came to represent New England femininity rather than foreign distortions of it. During a fast sermon in New Castle, New Hampshire, follow- ing the earthquake of 1727, somber women in hoop petticoats listened to Nathanael Morrill rail against the haughtiness of fashionable dress. Morrill did not think hoop petticoats proper attire at church meetings. The women knew as much, and wore them anyway. And I look upon it to be very unseemly and unbecoming, for Persons to dress themselves up in their forlorn Hoop’d-Coats, to appear before God in his House: and that which I cannot think is right in the sight of God. Nay, I believe it is a very great Sin, and that which is highly provoking in God’s sight. I believe it therefore I speak: And I would counsel & advise all Persons that have in times past delighted themselves in their Hoop’d-Coats, to leave them off, and never wear them more. Yea, I charge you to do it, you that are under my Watch and Care, and now publickly [warn] you, to turn from these Vanities. I have told some of you in private, but you have refused to follow my Council; and I think it is my Duty to tell you of it again. . . . And now it may be, some are almost ready to be offended with me, and 53 to complain of what I say.

Morrill’s defensive tone undercut the force of his message. In the face of open deﬁance, he resorted to the self-conscious language of a speaker whose opinion was of no account. The offending hoop-gallants, rather than “trembling under the Word”—as Colman thought pious congregations must do— elected to differ from Morrill’s point of view, persist in refusing

52 John Blake, “The Inoculation Controversy in Boston: 1721–1722,” New England Quarterly 25 (1952): 502. 53 Morrill, The Lord’s Voice in the Earthquake, pp. 27–28.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 OF PASTORS AND PETTICOATS 633 his counsel, and suffer him his duty to repeat it. His anticipation of offense suggests that Morrill’s congregation did not ﬁnd the situation humorous—at least not while the sermon was being delivered. Instead, they may have found their pastor’s public admonishment every bit as transgressive as he found their choice of attire.

Humor, Profanity, and Control Benjamin Colman’s references to profane mirth in 1704 arguably anticipated the “bad book” incident that forty years later in Northampton challenged the pastoral authority of Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), grandson of Solomon Stoddard. In the wake of the outpourings of grace among Northampton’s youth in the years between 1736 and 1742, many of the town’s young men had begun secretly reading and sharing “midwife’s books,” sexually explicit textbooks on reproduction, anatomy, and medical health. The books were not intended to be humorous or pornographic (although the illustrated one sold far more 54 copies), but they were used for those purposes in ways that parodied the common practice of social reading. In 1734,Ed- wards had suggested that young people “spend the evenings after lectures in social religion,” and he attributed the revivals’ 55 success in part to the popularity of those meetings. Ten years later, he learned that boys were gathering to read (and laugh about) books they called “the young folks’ bible” and “Aris- totle.” Ava Chamberlain has argued that these code-names, along with the appropriation of social practices surrounding the laity’s use of the Bible, “simultaneously afﬁrmed and undermined the authority of the text on which Puritan New En- gland was founded.” The young men involved in this subversive

54 This was Aristotle’s Masterpiece (London, 1684), which was the most popular book of its kind in eighteenth-century England and North America. See Ava Chamberlain, “Bad Books and Bad Boys: The Transformation of Gender in Eighteenth-Century Northampton, Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly 75 (2002): 188–89. 55 Jonathan Edwards, “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God,” in A Jonathan Edwards Reader, ed. John Smith, Harry Stout, and Kenneth Minkema (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 61.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 634 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY enterprise, a parodic community that rivaled orthodox reading groups, gleefully participated in an elaborate running joke on 56 the sanctity of textual revelation. The young men’s behavior transgressed the boundary between humor and obscenity when adolescent girls complained that the males were using the books to harass and tease them. Though Edwards had the church brethren’s support when he proposed that the matter be examined, popular opinion turned against him before the investigative committee con- vened. Though many of these “boys” were now in their twen- 57 ties, they lived in a “state of protracted adolescence.” The scarcity of available land had prevented them from acquiring property, moving out of their parents’ homes, and starting families of their own. By the 1740s, sexual liberality and courtship had become common themes in popular poems, jokes, and bal- lads that played on fantasies of masculine aggression, feminine receptivity, and the obliteration of social barriers to romantic liaison. Most Northampton adults had come to expect adolescent boys to be impressionable, insolent toward authorities, sexually brazen, and preoccupied with idle amusements. The youths’ conformity to these expectations attenuated the severity of their actions in the eyes of most church leaders and led them to conclude that, since the indiscretions had been committed in private, they should be dealt with privately by the offenders’ parents (some of whom were committee members themselves) 58 rather than in the public forum of the church. But Edwards was insistent, and the investigative committee did meet. Several of the accused failed to appear, however, and the town’s general opposition to the proceedings may have convinced others that they had no need to abandon their jocular behavior. While waiting for their turn to testify, some of the boys expressed their boredom by playing leapfrog, “whispering and

56 Chamberlain, “Bad Books and Bad Boys,” p. 190. 57 Chamberlain, “Bad Books and Bad Boys,” p. 183. 58 Patricia J. Tracy, Jonathan Edwards, Pastor: Religion and Society in Eighteenth- Century Northampton (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), pp. 162–63; Chamberlain, “Bad Books and Bad Boys,” p. 193.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 OF PASTORS AND PETTICOATS 635 laughing together,” and running off to the tavern to drink flip. Timothy Root, the group’s apparent ringleader, defended his preference for flip over obedience with a simple joke: “if they have any business with me, they may come to me; I ben’t 59 obliged to wait any longer on their arses, as I have done.” Root confronted the dominant perception that the investigation into his moral transgression had placed limits on his freedom with his own perception that the committee was inconvenienc- ing him with their trivial “business.” His suggestion that the committee members come to him was a thinly veiled declara- tion that they were no better than he. Root’s recourse to crude invectives reflected a discrepancy in status that left him little power to defend himself. “They are nothing but men molded up of a little dirt. I don’t care a turd, or I don’t care a fart, for any of them,” he declared. The reference to “their arses,” and Root’s proclaimed refusal to “worship a wig,” emphasized the committee members’ bodily physicality, of which no degree of 60 social respectability could divest them. Along with the conno- tation of idolatry implicit in the phrase “worship a wig,” Root’s comments had the effect of casting the entire investigation into a farcical light. In its false presumption of moral superiority, the committee displaced Root as moral transgressor. Root took refuge in his status as a private citizen with personal autonomy, but when the committee confronted him over his “wig” remark, he denied “any disdain or contempt” toward any member of the committee. Rather, he had only been afraid that the other witnesses would be “terrified with the fine clothes of some of the committee” and would “not exercise themselves agreeable to themselves” while giving their testimony. In an attempt to gain some measure of control in a hostile setting, Root had confronted one social view—an eminent committee inter- rogating witnesses—with another—bodies sitting on arses and wearing wigs. When the committee pushed back, however, he

59 “Papers Concerning Young Men’s Reading Midwives’ Books, Their Contempt of the Church, Etc.,” in A Jonathan Edwards Reader, p. 178. Daniels identiﬁes “ﬂip” as a mixture of beer, sugar, molasses, dried pumpkin, and a “measure of rum” (Puritans at Play, pp. 154–55). 60 “Young Men’s Reading Midwives’ Books,” pp. 177–78.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2009.82.4.608 by guest on 30 September 2021 636 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY realigned himself with the normative social order, expressed his sincere deference to authority, and repented all of his alleged 61 indiscretions. The inversion of social relationships implied in his initial defiance had been both temporary and unreal. Had his mirth been permissible within the social context, Root might have claimed that he had only been joking. Deference to authority was a crucial issue in the “bad book” incident, just as it was for Benjamin Colman’s Government and Improvement of Mirth, Cotton Mather’s verbal sparring with James Franklin during the smallpox controversy, and Nathanael Morrill’s admonition against petticoats in 1727. At stake in each case was the degree and scope of ministerial authority. Since the 1640s, fundamental conceptions of New England’s social reality had changed, including gender norms, community identity, the minister’s place in society, and the capacity of humor to undermine the authority of one’s own church leaders. The proliferation of petticoats among New Englanders provided a tangible and malleable symbol for these changing trends and cultural influences that alternately alarmed or excited Puritan observers. Hooped petticoats provided freedom not only to walk about unencumbered by clingy underskirts but to play with the normative perception of the social order within the ever expanding sets of conventions that defined the joke in Pu- ritan New England. Pastors who took them seriously did so at their peril.

61 “Young Men’s Reading Midwives’ Books,” p. 177.

Shaun Horton is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Reli- gion at Florida State University. His research focuses on the convergence of religion and entertainment in North American history.

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