American Voices: Literary Foundations

Before the novel, before the newspaper, before the republic itself, there was the sermon. The earliest Americans who left written records did so because they believed their words mattered to God — and to posterity. They wrote as witnesses to a divine experiment, convinced that the New World was not merely a place but a providential errand: a mission assigned by God, recorded for history, accountable to both.

The Puritan Vision

The men and women who settled New England in the 1620s and 1630s brought with them a theology of intense self-scrutiny. Puritanism demanded that believers examine their inner lives constantly, searching for signs of grace or sin. This habit of examination produced a literature of remarkable interiority — diaries, spiritual autobiographies, and meditative poems that turned everyday events into evidence of God's larger purpose.

William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony, kept a journal he called Of Plymouth Plantation. His prose is spare and plain, deliberately stripped of ornament, because Puritans distrusted decoration. Yet within that plainness is tremendous drama: storms, starvation, political negotiation, death, and what Bradford interpreted as God's mercy threading through all of it.

Notice Bradford's rhetorical move: he poses a question and supplies the only acceptable answer. The form itself enacts Puritan logic. Providence is not argued — it is demonstrated through the shape of events.

Anne Bradstreet and the Female Voice

Anne Bradstreet was the first published poet in colonial America, and her work complicates the image of a monolithic Puritan culture. Bradstreet wrote within Puritan constraints — she accepted the theology, the social order, the expectation that women's voices would be subordinate — but she also pushed against those constraints with remarkable wit and precision.

Her poem "The Author to Her Book" uses the extended metaphor of a poorly dressed child to describe her own published verse, sent into the world without her consent. Her poem "To My Dear and Loving Husband" transforms marriage into an almost mystical union. In both cases, Bradstreet claims emotional authority even while nominally submitting to social and theological hierarchy. This tension — between constraint and expression, between duty and desire — becomes a recurring thread in American women's writing for the next three centuries.

Captivity Narratives and the Construction of Identity

In 1682, Mary Rowlandson published an account of her capture by Wampanoag warriors during King Philip's War. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God became one of the colonial era's bestselling texts. On the surface, it is a survival story. Beneath that surface, it is a sophisticated piece of theological and political argument.

Rowlandson's captivity narrative established a genre with a durable structure: capture, ordeal, redemption. The narrative arc mirrors the Puritan spiritual autobiography — sin, suffering, grace. The captivity narrative genre would endure well into the nineteenth century, shaping popular ideas about race, danger, wilderness, and the boundaries of civilized identity.

What makes Rowlandson's account particularly complex is the ambivalence that occasionally breaks through her theological framework. She notices, despite herself, the humanity of her captors. She records moments of unexpected kindness. These moments of cognitive dissonance — what the text is trying not to say — are often the most revealing passages for a careful reader.

The "City on a Hill" and the American Myth

John Winthrop's 1630 sermon A Model of Christian Charity, delivered aboard the Arbella before his fleet landed in Massachusetts, contains a phrase that has echoed through American political rhetoric for nearly four centuries: "We shall be as a city upon a hill." Winthrop's sermon is a covenant — a collective promise made before God, binding the community to mutual obligation and moral accountability. If they failed, Winthrop warned, they would be "a story and a by-word through the world."

The phrase was revived by John F. Kennedy in 1961 and by Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1989, each time stripped of Winthrop's warnings and his communal obligations, repackaged as national self-congratulation. Reading Winthrop's original against its twentieth-century appropriations is a study in how source texts acquire new meanings as they pass through historical contexts.

Winthrop's full argument is thoroughly communal: individual success and failure are bound together. The failure of any member of the community reflects on the whole. This notion of collective moral accountability stands in striking tension with the later American cult of self-reliance — and tracking that tension from Winthrop forward is one of the organizing questions of this course.

The Spiritual Autobiography as Form

Alongside journals and sermons, Puritans developed the spiritual autobiography — a sustained narrative of one's inner religious experience, tracing the movement from sin through crisis to saving grace. This form had enormous literary descendants. The confession, the memoir, the conversion narrative — all derive structural DNA from the Puritan practice of narrating one's relationship with God.

Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth-century revivalist minister, represents the form at its most theatrically intense. His 1741 sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" deploys sensory imagery not to comfort but to terrify — the sinner hangs over the pit of hell as a spider held by a thread over fire. Edwards understood that theology moved people not through abstract argument but through vivid, physical imagination. His sermon is as much an exercise in controlled emotional manipulation as it is a theological statement, and it rewards reading as rhetoric as much as doctrine.

Close Reading Practice

When approaching any text from this period, bring these questions:

• Who is the intended audience, and how does the writer address them?
• What theological or political assumptions does the text take for granted?
• Where does the text's stated purpose conflict with what it actually reveals?
• What voices or perspectives are absent from this account, and why?

Colonial literature rewards suspicious reading. These texts were not written to be neutral. They were written to persuade, to record a particular version of events, to construct identity — and understanding that agenda is essential to reading them well.

The question of whose identity gets constructed — and whose is erased — runs beneath every text in this unit. Bradford's journal says nothing from the Wampanoag perspective. Rowlandson's captivity narrative, even when it notices its captors' humanity, cannot fully grant them it. Reading these silences alongside the texts themselves is part of the work of literary history.