The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic (Cambridge Companions to Literature) by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Author:Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock [Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-11-30T05:00:00+00:00

Puritan Frontier Gothic

Two of the earliest American documents to use the structure and tropes of frontier Gothic, and uncannily parallel in their frontiers to Paradise, are Cotton Mather’s 1693 The Wonders of the Invisible World and Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 Sovereignty and Goodness of God. In his “record” of the Salem Witch Trials, “Mather famously figures the American wilderness as ‘devil’s territories’ … reinforcing the characterization of Native Americans as diabolic agents,” as does Rowlandson (Weinstock, “Monsters” 43). Like Morrison’s Convent women, the “others” of Wonders and Rowlandson’s narrative are tropologically blended with the wilderness itself, with its animals and misty outlines. Thus the “Divil,” when given a chance, unleashes his “Mastives of Hell” on the Puritans of Salem (Wonders 11). Rowlandson writes, “Oh the roaring, and singing and dancing, and yelling of those black creatures [Indians] in the night … made the place a lively resemblance of hell” (17). Mather’s Salem community has had “a Hedge about us,” but the disruptive and unholy can invite the devil in through a “Breach” (11). Beyond the “Hedge” is the frontier, “fill’d with vast Herds of Salvages” (12).

In “herds,” like mastiffs, these devil-“savages” are also animals; as Leslie Fiedler had it, at the frontier “unlikes turn into likes … things become their own opposites,” the danger being that Puritan may become Indian and/or animal (31). David Mogen explains: “To Puritan eyes Indian religion was clearly a form of witchcraft … which not only threatened invasion from without but which, more insidiously, sought allies within their own constantly threatened communities” (95). Indians/animals/witches blend together in the Puritan gothic imagination, fed by their typological historiography that envisioned a recurrence of events and people. New England Puritans were types of Christ, or Moses, or both as their “errand into the wilderness” reiterated both Moses’ and Christ’s wandering in the “desert.”1 Through this temporal layering, it follows that the Native Americans are a type of the devil, antagonists of Christ’s followers. Biblical history, then, predicted the seventeenth-century present, as this present reenacted and completed layered cycles of history. If the past can reappear at any time, then people can be, uncannily, more than one thing. Natives are devils; witches are “neighbors” and Satan’s helpers; both Natives and witches can also be animals, the lowest, least civilized form of life to appear in Puritan texts. Such metamorphoses gothicized the threat in and of the frontier, as the sheer shiftingness of character, setting, and plot makes for a “spectralization of setting, the derealization of plot, and the ambiguation of character” (Jarraway 92).

Rowlandson’s story is gendered differently from Mather’s. She casts herself at times as a gothic damsel in distress, a victim of the violence and unknowing of her captivity among the Wampanoag during King Philip’s/Metacomet’s war with the English over property. She sees herself typologically as Job, passively suffering by God’s direction at the hands of the devil’s followers. “Because of the literal-mindedness with which she embraces her theology, the journey into the wilderness is a gothic encounter with the other world” (Mogen 96).

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