Review: The American Jeremiad.; The Puritan Origins of the American Self.

SACVAN BERCOVITCH, The American Jeremiad. Madison and London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. Pp. xvi + 239. $15.00. ?10.50. SACVAN BERCOVITCH, The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975. Pp. x + 250. $15.00. In 1970, Sacvan Bercovitch published a long monograph entitled "Horologicals to Chronometricals: The Rhetoric of the Jeremiad" in Literary Monographs, III. (The "jeremiad" is a type of New England sermon, a lamentation over backsliding, which Perry Miller explored as evidence of distress over loss of religious fervor among second- and third-generation Puritan colonists.) Bercovitch's book of 1979, The American Jeremiad, draws freely on the earlier monograph and the argument is substantially the same. Those familiar with Melville's Pierre can infer the argument from the monograph title: the rhetoric of the jeremiad permitted a transference of focus over time from the ideal spiritual life (horological, absolute time) to a real secular one (chronometrical, relative time). Through this transference, Puritan ideology insofar as it was implicit in its tropes and figures persisted as a controlling influence on American culture. The purpose of the ar- gument is to compel us to recognize the relevance of the Puritans in a culture from which their values would seem to have disappeared. In the interim between publication and republication of his argu-Reviews 349 ment about the jeremiad, Bercovitch published The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975), a book which makes a similar case for a different Puritan literary mode: biography (within which he subsumes autobiography also). Both of his books follow the same format. They begin with an investigation of the chosen literary mode as practiced by three generations of seventeenth-century Puritans, follow the mode through crisis periods during the Great Awakening and the Revolu- tion, and conclude with its triumphant enthronement in the national consciousness around the middle of the nineteenth century. Since the nineteenth century thus becomes the goal and end of Bercovitch's pro- cessual narrative, his ideas of that century are basic to his work. They are quite familiar ideas: a nineteenth century dedicated to progress,. patriotism, manifest destiny, and the imperial self. The word "familiar" is central, for historical approaches to the Puri- tans alternate between two poles: the Puritans were like us, they were unlike us. The great work of Perry Miller, in whose shadow Bercovitch perforce operates, sprang significantly from the wish to demonstrate the strangeness of the Puritans, their unlikeness to the bourgeois figures of popular Thanksgiving iconography. Miller believed that the English Restoration and the American Revolution, each in different ways, had shunted the Puritan enterprise to the side of American his- tory. The Restoration destroyed the position of the Massachusetts Colony as an advance guard for Christ's kingdom on earth, while the Revolution permanently secularized the course of events in America. Miller's painstaking analysis of textual detail in Puritan writing was. controlled, significantly, by a heroic myth in which the Puritans had struggled for goals they did not achieve and disappeared from the land like Titans or Druids. The smaller creatures who inherited their in- stitutions celebrated them without understanding them, by making them over into jolly burghers. Miller's own mission was to estrange the Puritans again, to make them back into what they really were. The great omission in Miller's splendid work was to have accepted the Puritans' written texts for the whole. Because of this he presented them as people who lived through words and almost entirely in the arena of doctrinal debate. This gap in his conception left much for students of Puritan life and literature to explore, and significant dis- coveries about Puritan family life, landholding practices, social struc, ture, art and architecture, and the like continue to enlarge our view of their world and to correct the relentlessly intellectualized image that Miller presented. Bercovitch, however, refers to none of this newer material. He returns to the same documents that Miller used and, at- tempting to counter Miller's estrangement, produces precisely that reading of the Puritans against which Miller argues, turning them into the comfort-loving capitalists of the first Thanksgiving. It is only be- cause Miller's view has so dominated academic scholarship (in popular history, Squanto and the turkey have never been dethroned) that Ber-350 Nineteenth-Century Fiction covitch can present his interpretation as a new approach to the Puri- tans. What he has really done is assimilate the sophisticated textual explorations of Perry Miller to the old, consensus view of the Puritans as the recognizable Founding Fathers of the free enterprise nation in which we now pretend that we live. I would say that this reading comes at a bad time, except for the fact that Bercovitch has enjoyed great success. He is clearly the leading can- didate to succeed Perry Miller as authority on the Puritans. So impor- tant and solid a historian as Edmund S. Morgan has praised The Amer- ican Jeremiad (in the New York Review) as "intellectual history [writ- ten] at the highest level." But the success may be partly due to the fact that historians of Puritanism like to hear about the importance of their subject. Literary scholars and historians who focus on the nineteenth century, however, are increasingly uncomfortable and dissatisfied with the consensus approach which may well be indispensable to Berco- vitch's work. More and more, we recognize that consensus American history is not so much a description as a program, an assertion not of what has been happening but of what ought to be happening. Consensus history pre- sents an idealized nation, wherein one people move forward with a confidence imparted to them by democracy and upward mobility. It ignores the elitism and generally medieval cast of mind of the Puritan settlers. It overlooks American Indians, Spanish-Americans, French- Americans, immigrants from Germany, Scandinavia, Ireland, Italy, or Eastern Europe (except as an occasional "success story": i.e., amalga- mation might indicate the all-embracing opportunity of American ideals). Black Americans and women are nowhere to be found in the consensus, which goes so far as to leave out even white, male New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians, and Southerners (an early footnote in The American Jeremiad dismisses the Southern experience as "un-Amer- ican" [p. xiii]). Increasingly, it seems necessary that we enlarge our ac- count of American history to include all these groups which have been left out. Simply, consensus history has studied only one group of Amer- icans, a group whose characteristics fit (or are believed to fit) a pre- existing, normative definition of what an "American" is. Literally, it has been a history of a chosen people: chosen by the historian. In literature, the Puritan strain has been identified by consensus critics (for criticism of American literature is also dominated by a con- sensus ideology) as running counter to official American optimism. The Jacksonian idea of progress-perfectibility has seemed inadequate underpinning for a literature with moral depth, so critics have either had to denigrate American literary achievement or discover vestiges of such Puritan ideas as original sin and predestination in the writings of major American authors. Bercovitch turns this argument around just as he turns Miller around, claiming that optimism, progress, and all those presumably Jacksonian ideals derive rather from the PuritanReviews 351 sense of mission and the certainty that God had singled out the Puri- tans and their nation for the main role in an apocalyptic drama. Again, however, the argument comes at a time when consensus literary theory, though still extremely powerful, is less and less the source of important scholarship and criticism. Following F. 0. Matthi- essen, whose "American Renaissance" consisted of five authors, studies of American literature have largely consisted of assertions grounded in the close reading of no more than a dozen texts, written by no more than a half-dozen authors. Most literature written in America is un- read even by professional scholars, and as a profession we grow daily more ignorant. To make matters worse, we do not read our dozen texts as New Critics do for verbal structures and ironies; we read them to find out about "America." Far from questioning this state of affairs, Bercovitch's-work depends on it. Yet I think-I hope-that the current of the profession is moving in a different direction. Bercovitch's treatment of the nineteenth century is the same in both books. He devotes the final chapter of each to a survey of the persis- tence of his chosen mode in works of a small number of significant authors-in essence, Matthiessen's five: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, and Hawthorne. Although he is interested in rhetoric, or more specifically in figures, he offers no rhetorical analysis of nine- teenth-century works, taking for granted that the nineteenth century has been fully, and finally, analyzed: "The epilogue . . . treats the in- fluence of the jeremiad upon certain of our classic nineteenth-century writers, and particularly the use of America as symbol by the major figures of the American Renaissance. My purpose in that chapter is not to offer a new literary reading of familiar texts but to indicate, by way of conclusion, the pervasive impact upon our culture of the Amer- ican jeremiad" (American Jeremiad, p. xv). His statements about nineteenth-century literature tend to be cur- sory and general: "Whether or not ... The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance are versions of the national myth, the novels clearly center on the meanings of American progress" (Amer- ican Jeremiad, pp. 205-6). The scholarship is curiously off-the-cuff; in the relevant chapter in The American Jeremiad, for example, we find citations of Emerson as quoted by Daniel Aaron and by John Gerber (in a 1949 essay); Melville as quoted by Daniel Aaron; Henry Adams as quoted by Martha Banta; Whitman as quoted by Edwin Fussell and by John Cawelti; Hawthorne as quoted by Roy Harvey Pearce and by Arnold Rampersad (in a book about Melville). If such casualness has an excuse, it can only be that Bercovitch is content to accept the critics in lieu of the authors because he is absolutely satisfied with the critics' readings. The nineteenth century is a closed book. Something needs finally to be observed about Bercovitch's treatment of fiction, or of genre more generally. His argument, as he openly al- lows, fits Melville and Hawthorne far less neatly than it does Thoreau,352 Nineteenth-Century Fiction Whitman, and above all, Emerson, who seems a made-to-order author for the thesis. (This is hardly surprising, since Emerson was enveloped in the remnants of the Puritan tradition-white, Anglo-Saxon, New England, ministerial male that he was.) Part of the lack of fit may well be due to the fact that Melville and IHawthorne did not write in sim- ple, discursive prose forms. Bercovitch's focus on rhetoric, in practice narrowed to figuration, does not take into account the generic context of any of the works he cites. The jeremiad and the biography are gener- ically defined by their uses of specific tropes and figures. But tropes and figures are employed in all genres, and this may be precisely why it is so easy for Bercovitch to equate sermons, novels, and newspaper edi- torials. An argument for the persistence of a genre because of common tropes does not really hold up. To define a work like Walden as an example of Puritan biography,. or Pierre as a version of jeremniad, solely on the basis of common figures. is to make an unallowable leap. In fact, such a leap omits the unique defining characteristics of the given literary works. In essence, Berco- vitch's approach ignores generic differences and treats all literature as simple discourse. It is not insignificant that the "jeremiad" itself was not a recognized Puritan genre; Perry Miller invented it; and the type of biography or autobiography studied in The Puritan Origins of the American Self was invented by the American myth critics working in the mode of Virgin Land and The American Adam. Thus, Bercovitch does not consider the manner in which ideas of genre may have en- tered into the creation of a text or a group of texts-whether a sermon, novel, editorial, poem, journal, travelogue-even though genre is the ostensible subject of his investigation. Finally, then, Bercovitch's in- terest is neither in concrete examples of literary wholes nor even in generalized literary forms. He is concerned after all with "ideas," ab- stracted from their literary context but embodied in literary figures Thus he is writing an ahistorical form of literary history. NINA BAYM University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign