Word: puritanize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...prize victim of this plague of sophistication is Farmer Herkimer ("Heck") Brown, Ma's son-in-law, who has taken up with a fast crowd in Middle City. Heck now wears E.E. Cummings T shirts, affects an "inner-city laugh" and argues that both monogamy and the Puritan work ethic are strictly for the crows. When Wife Hattie asks him to dust the crops, Heck quips, "Oh, the maid will dust them...
...return for these wordly advantages, the Puritan ethic dictates the covenant's quid: a sense of mission, "presumably divinely inspired," engendered in each Winthrop as expiation or compensation for his headstart in life. That mission takes many forms. To Governor John Winthrop (1630), the mission entails hounding a religious non-conformist out of the young Massachusetts Bay Colony, in the interest, he believes, of public welfare. To Adam (1902), it means maintaining the standards of Society and the elitism of the Patroon Club by throwing a judicious blackball. Later, John (1967) serves as an advocate for the status quo, hawkishly...
Unfortunately, the author's deep involvement with his novel transforms his work from a historical chronicle of a distinguished New England family to a pointed deposition--sketched on yellow legal paper--on the Puritan ethic. Through all his talk of covenants, missions and Puritan ideals runs an annoying smugness. Novelists John Marquand and John O'Hara also assayed the WASP upper crust in their writings, but rarely presumed to give their characters a moral or aesthetic superiority over the Great Unwashed. Auchincloss, on the other hand, hints that his Winthrops are not only different from you and me, they...
...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...
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...