America's Gothic Fiction

169 Pages·2007·0.82 MB·English

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 litera-
ture—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 his-
torical 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 excep-
tional 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.