Finding is the First
Act (MBED 1043)
After the beaver population in New England had been decimated by human greed, when roads were cut through unopened countryside, the roadbuilders often crossed streams on abandoned beaver dams, instead of taking time to construct wooden bridges. When other beaver dams collapsed from neglect, they left in their wake many years’ accumulation of dead bark, leaves, twigs, and silt. Ponds they formed disappeared with the dams, leaving rich soil newly opened to the sun. These old pond bottoms, often many acres wide, provided fertile agricultural land. Here grass grew as high as a person’s shoulder. Without these natural meadows many settlements could not have been established as soon as they were.
Early narratives of conversion, and first captivity narratives in New England, are often narrated by women. A woman, afraid of not speaking well, tells her story to a man who writes it down. The participant reporters follow and fly out of Scripture and each other. All testimonies are bereft, brief, hungry, pious, authorized.
Shock of God’s voice speaking English.
Sound moves over the chaos of place in people. In this hungry world anyone may be eaten. What a nest and litter. A wolf lies coiled in the lamb.
Silence becomes a Self. Open your mouth.
In such silence women were talking. Undifferentiated powerlessness swallowed them. When did the break at this degree of distance happen?
Silence calls me himself. Open your mouth.
Whosoever. Not found written in the book of life.
During a later Age of Reason eighteenth-century Protestant gentlemen signed the Constitution in the city of Philadelphia. These first narratives from wide-open places re-place later genial totalities.
During the 1850s, when the Republic was breaking apart, newly exposed soil from the abandoned narratives was as rich and fresh as a natural meadow.
Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville are bridge builders. Their writing vaults the streams. They lead me in nomad spaces. They sieve cipherings, hesitations, watchings, survival of sound-meaning associations: the hound and cry, track and call. So much strangeness from God. What is saved to be said.
Once dams, narratives are bridges.
In 1850, when Melville wrote about American literary expression, he called the essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses” and chose a fragment from Hawthorne’s story of Puritan doubt.
“‘Faith!’ shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony ad desperation; and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying – ‘Faith! Faith!’ as if bewildered wretches were seeking her all through the wilderness” (PT 251).
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THOMAS SHEPARD
Object. But Christ is in heaven; how can I receive him and his love?
Ans. A mighty prince is absent from a traitor; he sends his herald with a letter of love, he gives it him to read; how can he receive the love of the prince when absent? Ans. He sees his love in his letter, he knows it came from him, and so at a distance closeth with him by this means; so here, he that was dead, but now is alive, writes, sends to thee; O, receive his love here in his word; this is receiving “him by faith” (W 2: 599–600).
In Europe, Protestant tradition since Luther had maintained that no one could fully express her sins. In New England, for some reason hard to determine, Protestant strictures were reversed. Bare promises were insufficient. Leaders and followers had to voice the essential mutability they suddenly faced. Now the minister’s scribal hand copied down an applicant for church membership’s narrative of mortification and illumination.
In The Puritan Conversion Narrative; The Beginnings of American Expression, Patricia Caldwell points out that during the 1630s, in the Bay Colony, a disclaimer about worthlessness and verbal inadequacy had to be followed by a verbal performance strong enough to convince the audience-congregation of the speaker’s sincerity.
New England’s first isolated and independent clerics must have wrestled with many conflicting impulses and influences. Rage against authority and rage for order, desire for union with the Father and the guilty knowledge they had abandoned their own mothers and fathers. In the 1630s a new society was being shaped or shaping itself. Oppositional wreckers and builders considered themselves divine instruments committed to the creation of a holy commonwealth. In 1636 the antinomian controversy erupted among this “Singular Prospect of Churches erected in an American Corner of the World, on purpose to express and pursue the Protestant Reformation” (MC 172).
The antinomian controversy circled around a woman, Anne Hutchinson, and what was seen to be “the Flewentess of her Tonge and her Willingness to open herselfe and to divulge her Opinions and to sowe her seed in us that are but highway side and Strayngers to her” (AC 353). Thomas Shepard made this accusation. Paradoxically, he was one of the few ministers who required women to recite their confessions of faith publicly, before the gathered congregation. Hugh Peter lectured Anne Hutchinson in court: “You have stept out of your place, you have rather bine a Husband than a Wife and a preacher than a Hearer; and a Magistrate than a Subject. And soe you have thought to carry all Thinges in Church and Commonwealth, as you would and have not bine humbled for this” (AC 382-83).
Peters, Cotton, Winthrop, Eliot, Wilson, Dudley, Shepard, and other men, had stepped out of their places when they left England. She was humbled by them for their Transgression. Anne Hutchinson was the community scapegoat. “The Mother Opinion of all the rest…. From the womb of this fruitful opinion, and from the countenance here by given to immediate and unwarranted revelations ’tis not easie to relate, how many monsters, worse than African, arose in the regions of America: But a synod assembled at Cambridge, whereof Mr. Shepard was no small part, most happily crushed them all” (M I: 386).
NOAH WEBSTER:
SCĀPÉ-GŌAT, n. [escape and goat] In the Jewish ritual, a goat which was brought to the door of the tabernacle, where the high priest laid his hands upon him, confessing the sins of the people, and putting them on the head of the goat; after which the goat was sent into the wilderness, bearing the iniquities of the people.” Lev. xvi. (WD 986)
Kenneth Burke says in A Grammar of Motives, “Dialectic of the Scapegoat”: “When the attacker chooses for himself the object of attack, it is usually his blood brother; the debunker is much closer to the debunked than others are. Ahab was pursued by the white whale he was pursuing” (GM 406-7).
René Girard says, in The Scapegoat, “What is a Myth?”: “Terrified as they [the persecutors] are by their own victim, they see themselves as completely passive, purely reactive, totally controlled by this scapegoat at the very moment when they rush to his attack. They think that all initiative comes from him. There is only room for a single cause in their field of vision, and its triumph is absolute, it absorbs all other causality: it is the scapegoat” (S 43).
I say that the Scapegoat Dialectic and mechanism is peculiarly open to violence if the attacker is male, his bloodbrother, female. Kenneth Burke and René Girard dissect grammars and mythologies in a realm of discourse structured, articulated, and repeated by men.
THOMAS SHEPARD: We are all in Adam, as a whole country in a parliament man; the whole country doth what he doth. And although we made no particular choice of Adam to stand for us, yet the Lord made it for us; who, being goodness itself, bears more good will to man than he can or could bear to himself; and being wisdom itself, made the wisest choice, and took the wisest course for the good of man. (W I:24)
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Key
AC The Antinomian Controversy: David Hall, ed.
GM A Grammar of Motives: Kenneth Burke.
M Magnalia Christi Americana: Cotton Mather.
MBED The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson: R. W. Franklin, ed.
MC Magnalia Christi Americana, Books I and 2: Kenneth B. Murdock, ed.
PT The Piazza Tales: Herman Melville; Hayford, MacDougall, and Tanselle, eds.
S The Scapegoat: Rene Girard.
W The Works of Thomas Shepard: John. A. Albro, ed.
WD An American Dictionary of the English Language: Noah Webster.
Selected Sources
Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. New York: George Braziller, 1955.
Caldwell, Patricia. The Puritan Conversion Narrative; The Beginnings of American Expression. Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Dickinson, Emily. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson. 2 vols. Edited by R. W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1981.
Girard, René. The Scapegoat. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
Hall, David D. The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A Documentary History. Edited by David D. Hall. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968.
Mather, Cotton. Magnalia Christi Americana: or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England. 2 vols. Hartford, Conn.: Silas Andrus & Son, 1855.
Melville, Herman. The Piazza Tales, and Other Prose Pieces. Edited by Harrison Hayford, Alman A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1987.
Shepard, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Shepard. 3 vols. Edited by John A. Albro. 1853. Reprint, New York: AMS, 1967.
Webster, Noah. An American Dictionary of the English Language. Revised and enlarged by Chauncey A. Goodrich. Springfield, Mass.: George and Charles Merriam, 1852.
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“Finding is the First / Act (MBED 1043)” is from “Incloser” in The Birth-mark, unsettling the wilderness in American literary history (Wesleyan University Press, 1993, pp.50-53) by Susan Howe