Word: puritanic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...women's talk is descriptive--they explain their jobs, their families, and what they do all day. Only the prostitutes actually analyze their predicaments, but even their conclusions have, at times, an odd ring. One hooker traces society's intolerance of prostitution to the Bible. "It's the whole Puritan trip," she insists. "The Bible, which insists on chastity and monogamy, is for women the most oppressive book ever written." She smiles almost proudly then and says, "Hookers escape the double standard," adding simply, "and they get punished for it." The prostitutes sitting around the jailhouse coffee table know...
...general cultural approach to Puritan history, Bercovitch writes squarely in the tradition of Perry Miller, for whom "the mind of man is the basic factor in human history." Like Miller and his disciples, Bercovitch is concerned solely with Puritan intellectuals and their literary outpourings. But his originality resides in taking their approach one step further--by asserting the primacy of language over historical fact as the determinant of culture...
...attachment of the Miller-Heimert school to historical fact--as imaged in the writings of Puritan divines--has obliged it to account the Puritan errand at least a partial failure. For these historians, the corruption of the communal vision led inevitably to the separation of individual and communal salvation. Not so for Bercovitch. By shifting his emphasis from historical fact to the language itself, Bercovitch can support the continued coincidence of the two. In The Puritan Origins of the American Self, facts have ceased to matter at all--what counts instead is the distinctive Puritan rhetoric tying the redeemed individual...
...LITERARY KEY to late Puritan ideology, Bercovitch chooses not the jeremiads but Cotton Mather's epic work, the Magnalia Christi Americana--particularly his "Life of John Winthrop." In his "Life," Mather portrays Winthrop as a "Nehemius Americanus," a peculiarly American saviour whose life foreshadows the Second Coming. Mather's ambition, according to Bercovitch, is to be the Winthrop of his generation; writing during the decline of theocracy, Mather, he says, offered himself--in his capacity as a representative American type--as a link between the triumphal era of Winthrop and the millenial future, thus initiating a special mode of defining...
Miller and his successors modified earlier views of the Puritans as anti-egalitarian, hypocritical killjoys by examining more closely the role their religion played in their lives. Because he focuses on the language of that religion alone, Bercovitch can go even farther and assess the Puritan achievement in a frankly celebratory vein. "History betrayed them, we know," he writes. "That they persisted nonetheless requires us, I believe, to redefine their achievement in a positive way." In labeling Cotton Mather as the keeper of the American dream, Bercovitch writes that "he rescued the errand by appropriating it to himself." Although...