though the consciences of such men are awakened

Today I finished reading The Pilgrim’s Progress. I’ve taken steps in the past few years to suspend all judgment on Evangelical materials because of the fear that my cynicism will usher in a forgetfulness for the details important for eventually forming my biases. On the back of the book, in bold, it reads: “A book that has crossed the barriers of time, race and culture…” - how unimaginative is that? Now, I applaud John Bunyan for sticking out 12 years of jail for preaching in an unauthorized zone, but I was really hoping for something more stinging. As a Catholic, especially, I wanted a bigger slap in the face than two evil men named Pope and Pagan. For the Puritans, most literate community in the Western world, the allegory was so simplistic that the message wasn’t even painful, as most Evangelical messages tend to be. And maybe it isn’t laborious, because…it is still so relevant. It still has such a currency in our modern world, our contemporary literature. And I am utterly aghast. I say we living in the same world. How much has changed since the days when John Bunyan was imprisoned and Anne Hutchinson excommunicated? Not much. Especially now where the relations movement exercising sanctity is stronger than ever, The Pilgrim’s Progress seems as contemporary a text as Left Behind, and about as hard an allegory to understand.

A brief history. Antinomian Crisis is a controversy rooted in the 4th century with Augustine and the Donotists. The latter advocated the separation of the pure members from the impure members of the church. Augustine draws from this the notion of two churches, the Invisible and the Visible. The first is known only to God; the second is the local congregation, which could not be pure because it is full of hypocrites and "misguided ones." The distinction is maintained by Calvin centuries later as the basis of congregationalism. Calvin argues that the Visible Church could contain the mostly pure but that hypocrites will always be hidden among the Saints. In England, the Calvinist lead is followed, but the intensity of the NE experiment causes the use of the public relation to be quite different from the English use. The public relation becomes a public examination introduced in order to produce purity via "rational charity"--but the theory is bound to fail because of the practice of the relation: women are not required to appear; persons with a long history of "apparent grace" were exempted; others were exempted due to extreme sickness; and finally, the relation becomes a device by which the community can maintain social conformity.

After the Antinomian crisis, the NE position on conversion is altered somewhat, so that the soul is not passive but has certain "obligations" in sanctification. The social functionality of the confession process and eventual acceptance into a church provide a means of social mobility within the class structure of Puritan community. Therefore, confession was not only the means of expression of spirituality and a declaration of faith, but also a binding and controlling mechanism in Puritan society for mitigating acceptable behavior among citizens. Membership to the church was denied to those that not only failed to express humility towards God and project a constant awareness of sin, but also to those whose social or political convictions did not conform to the established dogma. The highly disciplined and organized citizenry which resulted from this practice, may have been of great value in establishing survivable communities as early settlements in the New World, where there was no available infrastructure and agricultural arrangements that had been successfully established in European countries. On the other hand, given the expected level of acquiescence and subordination to the church authorities, individual liberties could have been suppressed and class divisions may have been exacerbated.

Why, oh why, do I write all of these things? I write them in part as a reflection on this terribly informative but enjoyable class, perhaps the last in America to teach the puritan canon as representative of early “American” literature. But I also write this as a reminder of the potent relevancy of history. Not literature, nor politics, not church and state rhetoric, nor eager protests. The end-times are ever-present: One person with one idea, one community in exodus from “The City of Destruction” hoping to form the perfect society.

a thing with feathers

I’ve decided to make these posts a little bit less melodramatic. If not for an attempt to cure my own sense of continued melancholy. I just read a 20 page journal article that argued for the destruction of the American Literature canon. It was 20 pages of absolute pretentious crap that essentially said “American literary scholarship depends upon, and reproduces, the oppressive nationalistic ideology which is the nightmare side of the ‘American dream’, and that our goal should be rather to construct a multicultural and dialogical paradigm for the study of writing in the United States.” Naturally, I agree whole- heartedly with this argument, however it was so unnecessary to write about it for 20 pages. But in my reading it occurred to me how much I fear taking a class from someone that is fundamentally unaware of this thesis. And secondly, how much anxiety I have for the one day that my own child is in school studying his little fiction or poetry reader interpreted by his teacher (someone from my generation no doubt) that has been drowned and resurrected by this neo-conservative cesspool of idiots bent on destroying everything interesting about literary theory.

“Susie, will you indeed come home next Saturday, and be my own again, and kiss me as you used to?” I was doing a little research on Emily Dickinson’s letters to Higginson but came across this little jewel instead, which of course, I find much more interesting. This is what I like to think will be included in the shiny new multicultural literacy canon. At least I still have my hope. Thank you Pandora.

they kept you awake

I’ve been reading about wetnurses. The Amah. During the glory days of the Roman Empire, the soldiers (legions) came back with women who were nursing. They would measure their breast milk and the women that had the most were sold for a higher price. It’s all a very sad story. One of the journals of obstetrics that I read pointed out the qualities that were desirable: “She must have a good character, modest, chaste and clean.” Wetnurses commonly held a second job as a prostitute. In the 18th century, France passed a law that women had to prove that their own child was 9 months old before they were allowed to become wetnurses because abandoned and smothered children because such a problem. Again, the more that you could produce, the better you were paid. So women were always trying for ways to increase the supply. One 17th century account in Germany recommends covering yours breasts with ashes of burnt owls and eating powdered earthworms.

But the real reason for my investigation is to try to understand the women who were said to go “mad” while they were wetnursing. Most of these women lived on the street, were constantly starving, and often had to give up or more likely kill their own children so that they could produce enough milk to get one of the only jobs available to them at the time. This was even more the case in America, especially in the deep south, with slaves. In that case, when a white woman from the “social” class needed some spare time a nursing slave would be located, and her baby would be killed our sold so that she could become a wetnurse. In Europe, some of these women would put opium on their nipples so that the children would sleep. Some children died.

I wonder what they dreamed about, these women. What they did when a child that was not theirs was sleeping on their chest, their small weight pushing against their bones. I wonder if they thought of their own children, dead or starving somewhere else? I wonder if they even dreamed at all. I would imagine you would be beyond dreams then, beyond sleep. And would it even matter if you knew you were alive, or giving life to another?

I have to write a poem paralleling one of Lee Peterson’s. Her book Rooms and Fields is a lovely set of dramatic monologues from the war in Bosnia. Well, lovely isn’t the right word, but really haunting and disarming. I’m going to write about the wetnurse. The Amah. What happens when she gets away from herself. What she thinks about when she dreams.