2 - The Dream of a Christian Utopia

Summary

In fascinating ways, the literature of the New England Puritans reveals – and at times conceals – the remarkable number of contradictions in their religious, social, and political ideas, and it demonstrates how they managed to balance opposing aspirations and ideals to sustain a society that was from the start fragmenting from internal conflicts. Despite their tenacious struggles to achieve clarity in their expressions of purpose and design, the Puritans were frequently ambiguous and paradoxical. This chapter attempts to account for the compulsions, dissensions, and convergences within their culture and to demonstrate the intellectual complexity of their thought and writing. Language and literary forms both generated and formulated narrative expressions of the experiences of individuals and their communities as the generations journeyed from the bleak landing at Cape Cod to the flourishing of the New England Federation in 1642 to the tragic events at Salem in 1692.

Over the past forty years, scholarship on the American Puritans has been so rich and various that there is hardly a statement one can make about the Puritans today without arousing controversy. Scholars in every area of the humanities and social sciences have employed new theories and methodologies in their studies of Puritan New England. Because many see the Puritans as having established certain ideas and structures that are fundamental to later American society – although even this point is much debated–scholars are attracted to the study of seventeenth-century New England, and interpretations of that culture frequently have larger political and ideological implications for the United States as a whole.