Puritanism and the 19th Century American Novels

The Puritans were the dissidents from the Anglican Church. The Anglican Church had become corrupt and a need to establish purity was felt by many of its devout members; hence The Puritans. The Puritans were the vanguard of the Republican revolution of the 1640s which was directed at the monarch of England. However, the restoration of monarchy in the middle of the 17th century brought disillusionment with the state of England and the diehard Puritans set sail from Old England to the virgin land of America to establish their New England. This exodus brought Puritanism to America.

American writers of the nineteenth century like Hawthorne and Melville look at the ‘new’ culture of America and examine the legacy of Puritanism with skepticism and interrogation because by their time the problems and gaps of the Puritan dream were recognizable. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, when looked at from within the world in which it is located i.e. of early Puritan immigrants to America, seems a story about sin and punishment. But Hawthorne is rather writing about Puritanism from a critical vantage point. Because he is not writing from the Puritan point of view, quite significantly his protagonist Hester Prynne, who had come as a part of the early Puritan community which included only the most ardent Puritans who could face the hazardous journey, later “cast away the fragments of a broken chain” and pronounces that “the world’s law was no law for her mind.” Similarly Melville’s character in Moby Dick, Ishmael, who begins with an intolerant Puritan mindset, shuns away the manacles of narrow-minded Puritan subjectivity after coming into close proximity with Queequegg, a savage.

Hawthorne, in trying to understand his own situation in ...

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... definitely moves out of the Puritan world. Melville on the other hand shows Ishmael as better suited to survive than Ahab. Ishmael’s survival is a testimony of the affirmation of his appreciation of the multitudinous of the world and acceptance of the ‘other’ as against Ahab’s blindness to colour and diversity.

Puritanism is, thus, an American heritage; but there is an ambivalent negotiation on the part of authors like Hawthorne and Melville in whose texts we see part acceptance and part questioning of that cultural heritage. For this negotiation, while for Hawthorne it is the experience of marginalization and being set aprt (and not of adultery, sin and punishment) which is crucial and that the fall is possibility for the fallen, for Melville it takes the form of accommodation of the other.

Works Cited

Hawthorne’s – The Scarlet Letter

Melville’s – Moby Dick