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The Imaginary Puritan
The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics
Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor

1. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to

Medieval Women, by Caroline Walker Bynum
2. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at
the Turn of the Century, by Walter Benn Michaels
3. Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the
Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism, by David Lloyd
4. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in
Renaissance England, by Stephen Greenblatt
5. The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the
Writing of History, by François Hartog, translated by Janet Lloyd
6. Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents, by Leah S.
Marcus
7. The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan
Chivalry, by Richard C. McCoy
8. Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530, edited by
Lee Patterson
9. Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from
Wyatt to Shakespeare, by Jonathan Crewe
10. Rabelais's Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext, by Samuel Kinser
11. Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Homiman, and the Struggle for the Abbey
Theatre, by Adrian Frazier
12. Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain, by Alan Sinfield
13. Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and
the Dominant Culture, by Debora Kuller Shuger
14. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America,
by Gillian Brown
15. The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450-1700, by
David Harris Sacks
16. An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from "Utopia"
to "The Tempest," by Jeffrey Knapp
17. Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican-
American Social Poetics, by José E. Limón
18. The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical
Age, by Jacqueline Lichtenstein, translated by Emily McVarish
19. Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300-1600, by Randolph
Starn and Loren Partridge
20. Expositions: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century France,
by Philippe Hamon, translated by Katia Sainson-Frank and Lisa Maguire
21. The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of
Personal Life, by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse
22. Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics and the Poetics of
American Social Movements, by T. V. Reed
23. Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in
Thirteenth-Century France, by Gabrielle M. Spiegel
24. Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class
Family, by T. Walter Herbert
The Imaginary
Puritan
Literature, Intellectual Labor;
and the Origins of Personal Life

Nancy Armstrong
Leonard Tennenhouse

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley • Los Angeles • London
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 1992 by
The Regents of the University of California
First Paperback Printing 1994

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Armstrong, Nancy.
The imaginary puritan : literature, intellectual labor, and the
origins of personal life / Nancy Armstrong, Leonard Tennenhouse.
p. cm. - (The New historicism ; 21)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-520-08643-0
1. English literature—Early modern, 1500-1700—History and
criticism—Theory, etc. 2. English literature—18th c e n t u r y -
History and criticism—Theory, etc. 3. American literature-
History and criticism—Theory, etc. 4. Great Britain—Intellectual
life—17th century. 5. Literature and history—Great Britain.
6. Literature and history—United States. 7. United S t a t e s -
Intellectual life. 8. Imagination—History. 9. A u t h o r s h i p -
History. 10. Self in literature. I. Tennenhouse, Leonard, 1942-
II. Title. III. Series.
PR431.A76 1992
820.9'004—dc20 91-40263
CIP

Printed in the United States of America

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, .ANSI Z39.48-1984. ©
For Henry, George, and Rey
Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Imaginary Puritan 1

1. The Mind of Milton 27

2. The English Revolution 47
3. Family History 69
4. The Work of Literature 89
5. The Vanishing Intellectual 114
6. Signs of Personal Life 140
7. The Reproductive Hypothesis 160
8. Why Categories Thrive 196

Notes 217
Index 269
Acknowledgments

This project was supported by two grants from the Rockefeller Foun-
dation which allowed each of us to be part of the multiyear project on
narrative conducted at the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan Uni-
versity. Armstrong was a fellow at the center in 1987-88, and Tennen-
house in 1989-90. While a fellow at the Huntington Library in the winter
of 1987, Tennenhouse began the research on chapters 2 and 4. A section
of chapter 4 appeared as "Gender and the Work of Words," Cultural
Critique 13 (1989): 229-78, and a portion of chapter 7 as "The Interior
Difference: A Brief Genealogy of Dreams, 1650-1717," Eighteenth-Cen-
tury Studies 23 (1990): 458-78. For permission to reprint a revised version
of the first essay, we wish to thank the editor, Donna Przybylowicz. For
permission to reprint a version of the second, we thank the editors of
Eighteenth-Century Studies. Our special thanks go to Doris Kretschmer
and Tony Hicks for the care they took with the manuscript of this book.
The Imaginary Puritan could not have been conceptualized and writ-
ten without the enabling fantasy of the very kind of community it elab-
orates. The book exists for us as the instrument and record of a sequence
of scholarly exchanges that took place across the United States and in
Portugal over a three-year period. For this community, we are indebted
to the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University; to Richard
Vann and Richard Ohmann, respectively, who directed the Center while
we were fellows there; and to those members of the Wesleyan faculty
who provided the center of the Center. We thank you for creating a
milieu where ideas could be tried out, passed around, tinkered with, and

ix
X Acknowledgments

regarded with still more affection for the experience. During the alternate
school years, 1988-89 and 1990-91, we lived with the intellectual pres-
sure and generosity of a second community—again largely imagined be-
cause hardly the norm—as members of the Department of Comparative
Literature at the University of Minnesota. Our appreciation extends to
Susan McClary and to Paula Rabinowitz as well. Our summers were
spent in Solana Beach, where it was possible both to synthesize the pieces
of research and writing of the previous year as we walked along the beach
and to produce each of several drafts while looking out over the Pacific.
An early draft went out to yet another group of friends and colleagues
who were as generous with their time and criticism as the first. We cannot
imagine having proceeded further with the project without Joseph Witt-
reich's suggestions for chapter 1; the readings Paul Christianson, Richard
Vann, and Henry Abelove gave of chapter 2; Mark Poster's and Henry
Abelove's advice on the historians of the family, discussed in chapters 3
and 6; suggestions by Thomas Laqueur, John Frow, Michael Denning,
and Joan Scott for chapter 4; Richard Ohmann's insights concerning the
subject matter of chapter 5 as well as Bruce Robbins's response to an
early version of that chapter; Richard Vann's advice on research and
Felicity Nussbaum's comments on chapter 7; and the help of Carroll
Smith-Rosenberg, Doris Sommer, and Page duBois in conceptualizing
chapter 8. After these responses and suggestions found their way into
the manuscript, it went on the road. It grew both sharper and more
mellow as it encountered an unanticipated range of objections, questions,
and suggestions. Though we cannot possibly acknowledge these contri-
butions individually, we count on those who offered them to recognize
their handiwork in the finished product. We must thank Marjorie Garber
for providing a forum for an earlier version of chapter 4 at Harvard
University; John Carlos Rowe for devoting a seminar to our draft of
chapter 5 at the University of California Humanities Research Institute;
Irene and Boaventura Santos for organizing a challenging debate over
chapter 5 at the University of Coimbra; Kathleen Woodward for arranging
a very helpful discussion of chapter 7 at the Center for Twentieth-Century
Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Sharon Salinger for
making chapter 8 the focus of a Women's Studies colloquium at the
University of California-Riverside, sponsored by the University of Cali-
fornia Humanities Research Institute; and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and
Peter Stallybrass for organizing a seminar around this chapter at the
University of Pennsylvania.

Once all these exchanges had made their mark on the manuscript, it
Acknowledgments XI

had the good fortune to fall into the hands of several readers who were
as good-humored as they were honest, informed, shrewd, and practical.
For putting this kind of effort into our manuscript, we want to thank
George Mariscal, Josue Harrari, Homer Brown, J . Paul Hunter, and Mi-
chael Davidson. We owe a special debt to Stephen Greenblatt. With his
expert and unwavering support from beginning to end, we were able to
pursue our research and assemble our argument with a sense of intel-
lectual freedom that perhaps few scholars enjoy.
Another kind of gratitude is reserved for Henry Abelove, George
Mariscal, and Rey Chow, who were willing to entertain any idea—no
matter how pedestrian, how grandiose, how speculative, or how crudely
constructed—during the entire period it took to complete this book.
Where do the best ideas come from if not from such friends?
Introduction:
The Imaginary Puritan
In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically:
it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the
simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with
any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it orga-
nizes a world which is without contradictions because it is
without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evi-
dent, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean
something by themselves.
Roland Barthes, " M y t h T o d a y "

This is a book about the appearance of "the author" during the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and what happens to tradi-
tional historical narratives once one grants central importance to this
event. Indeed, for purposes of argument we have equated the appearance
of the author with nothing less than the onset of modernity itself. It
might be argued that there were writers before this moment—Ben Jonson
or Cervantes, perhaps—who imagined having much the same kind of
power as writers that modern readers now attribute to authors, but we
are not interested in arguing for the anomalous figure or the lone pro-
totype. By the appearance of "the author" we mean the emergence of
the group who first gave the term its modern meaning, the class of people
on whom writing conferred authority by placing them in a new and
distinctive relationship with themselves, with other people, and with a
world of objects.
We gladly concede that neither the subject matter nor the theoretical
issues this book addresses are all that new. Even the most conventional
histories of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England note the si-
multaneous lifting of censorship, the emergence of the popular press,
the growth of a mass readership, and the increasing importance of popular
media in determining the outcome of political conflict. Each of these

1
2 Introduction

events, furthermore, has been the focus of any number of specialized

studies. While such scholarship has proved invaluable to our project, it
is grounded on historiographical assumptions that critical theory chal-
lenged some time ago. With nearly flawless consistency, accounts of the
modern period assume that events occurring to, through, or within writ-
ing belong in a secondary or derivative relationship to economic, political,
and social history.1 To compose a history of such events, we therefore
turned away from the very materials that history most often uses to
explain the relationship between past and present-day Western culture.
We have focused instead on materials that usually testify to effects rather
than causes, and we have privileged what are generally thought to be
contingent rather than necessary relations among them. In granting such
phenomena a central role in our account of modernity, we have given
them causality, and thus, one might say, a kind of necessity. In doing so,
we will be questioning the basic categories of modern historiography.
We should perhaps begin to lay out our argument by saying that in
identifying the problem we have with traditional literary criticism and
British historiography, we found it advantageous to downplay the schism
that developed within poststructuralism more than two decades ago over
the question of history.2 In Of Grammatology, Derrida asks his readers
to relinquish the hierarchical relationship between speech and writing
that literate members of modern European cultures pretty much take
for granted. He invites them to invert the commonsense assumption that
writing necessarily presupposes speech, which in turn presupposes human
thought and feeling. This chain of assumptions makes truth depend on
tracing the printed word back to an origin within an individuated con-
sciousness—what is meant by an "author." Indeed, he argues, this com-
monsense epistemology perpetuates the belief that where there is writing
there must once have been someone thinking those thoughts and putting
them into words. Despite the rhetorical battle he waged with Derrida
almost thirty years ago, Foucault's work proceeds from this same prop-
osition.3 He questions only its universality. Derrida exposes the ahisto-
ricity of any history that anchors language to a world of referents outside
and prior to the act of inscription. Foucault uses another tactic. He turns
history against itself by historicizing the very classification system that
makes history possible, which includes the distinction between that
which originates outside the individual consciousness and that which
comes from within it, as well as the distinction between words and things.
He does this by giving the Derridean inversion a specific location in space
and time.
Introduction 3

At some time in the late seventeenth century, according to this delib-

erately strange retelling of the story, certain people in France, England,
Germany, and presumably elsewhere in western Europe undertook a proj-
ect whose enormity could be understood only in retrospect. For Foucault,
the thoroughgoing, irreversible effects of the venture rested not so much
on the classification system they managed to put in place as on a twofold
fact of its semiotic character: the tendency to individuate things and
people by assigning them a place and function, and the tendency to do
this first of all in writing. It was when a whole new group of people
began to write—and to write, we might add, for a wholly different purpose
than ever before—that the inversion which empowered writing must have
taken place. As words began to master things through various and subtle
procedures of classification, writing began to imply a source in individual
thought, and that source consequently became the means of mastering
both objects and other people. If Derrida calls attention to the ahisto-
ricity of traditional historiography, then Foucault historicizes the sym-
bolic behavior that simultaneously produces an origin for meaning out-
side and prior to language at the same time that it declares one can know
anything—a person, an idea, a disease—by determining where it came
from. He historicizes the moment when histories in this general sense
began to provide the explanatory logic of Western culture.
By writing his off-centered histories—of madness, of the reclassifica-
tion of nature, of the clinic, of sexuality, of the modern penitentiary—
Foucault argues that modern history has heretofore been turned back-
ward, so that it can specify where something that presently exists "came
from." That is to say, history by its very nature is a kind of just-so story
that gives the operative categories of industrial cultures a location well
in the past, thus allowing the present order of things to emerge as so
many facts of human nature. For Foucault, however, history also offers
the only way out of the dilemma posed by history. One must give up
the whole pretense of knowing the past (which only conceals the effects
of writing about it); one must show precisely when and how the most
basic categories of modern culture developed and how they related to
one another. Rather than explain how a particular sequence of humane
reforms transformed the scaffold into the modern penal institution, for
example, Discipline and Punish offers the reader a snarl of contingen-
cies—theories, procedures, architectural drawings—that worked together
to produce an entirely new understanding of crime. Foucault assembles
the remains of particular practices from various local sites to show how,
when viewed retrospectively, these practices attributed crime to asocial
4 Introduction

tendencies within the individual or, more precisely, to aspects of human

nature that had not been properly managed.
His account pursues the principle of overdetermination orchestrating
the development of an institutional culture with the production of people
who require its managerial procedures. In providing us with such an
account, his point is never to make one see the past as it really was. His
concern is wholly for the present. He submits to literary analysis precisely
those statements that seem literally true. Then, having turned fact into
metaphor, he can establish what kind of ideological work such metaphors
do. Foucault's histories no more presume to say what things, people,
words, thoughts, or feelings are now than they do to say what these
things used to be. He simply wants to demonstrate how they were written
into existence in one way rather than some other. The only true history
is the history of discourse, or how an entire field of symbolic practices
became meaningful in relation to specific kinds of writing that could be
called knowledge.
Foucault begins from the assumption that history actually authorizes
certain power relations in the here and now by giving them a source in
earlier periods of time. As it establishes narrative continuity between
modern phenomena and their earlier counterparts, history also establishes
an unbreachable distinction between the subject and object of writing.
To overturn history, one simply has to demonstrate that words come
chronologically as well as ontologically before the things they are pre-
sumed to represent and the differences that already exist among those
things. Those of us who are willing to entertain this possibility have had
little difficulty finding evidence to substantiate the inversion of traditional
historical priorities. 4 Such a claim can be made with unwavering confi-
dence, however, only until one tries to historicize the moment when
writing and writers changed places and words began to create a new
source for themselves in the kind of individual they named as their author.
At that point, one must address the question of who authored the author.
It is all well and good to argue, as poststructuralism has done, that
writing produces its author rather than the other way around. It is just
as important to understand that writing did not always imply such a
source. For only by dispelling the universality of "the author" can one
understand the significance of writing that called authors—countless va-
rieties of them—into being. But there is still a trade-off involved in de-
mystifying the author, as there is, no doubt, in any act of démystification.
The magic simply gets relocated, and theory tends to mystify writing
instead of authors. In Foucault's accounts of modernity, for example,
Introduction 5

writing ceases to operate as an effect of other causes, located mainly in

the church and the nobility, and becomes a cause in its own right. To
give writing this priority, he grants it the capacity to authorize itself, and
the will to do so, at some point in the late seventeenth or the eighteenth
century. Before relying on Foucault, then, one has to consider what is
gained—theoretically, historically, or otherwise—by deciding to place all
the emphasis where he did. To what advantage does one substitute "dis-
course" not only for "authors" but also for "money," "Parliament,"
nationalism, man's relentless will to dominate, his unquenchable thirst
for freedom, or any of the other causes traditionally thought to have
ushered in the modern age? If this attribution of causality produces only
another mystification, why undertake such a project at all?
We have fixed on writing because it is on this point that poststruc-
turalism inadvertently collaborates with traditional historiography in re-
fusing to grant writing much causality, if any at all. Poststructuralism
charges writing with the mysterious power to create what it presumes
to represent, while historiography unselfconsciously exploits that power
whenever it claims to be putting us in touch with things that no longer
exist and the people who used to know them. Some investigators use
the idea of textuality as a way of closing this gap between literature and
history. Let us think of history itself as a text composed of various bits
of cultural material, symbolic systems, and social practices, they say.
Indeed, they add, let us assume further that descriptions or theories of
that text add something to the object of analysis and can therefore trans-
form the very nature of its being. All well and good, we say—until one
finds that the old opposition between philosophical " t e x t " and historical
"narrative" has been put back in place.
To be historical, others insist, a text must have a narrative that connects
it to the larger narrative of history. Thus, for example, after demonstrating
the literary element in nineteenth-century historiography, Hayden White
connects the figurative behavior of specific historical texts to " d e e p "
narrative structures that are somehow universal to human cultures, and
yet historical in that they can enter into play in a specific field through
one of several protocols that fix the field to its moment in time. As he
says of "Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt among the his-
torians, and of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce among the philos-
ophers" of nineteenth-century history: "through the disclosure of the
linguistic ground on which a given idea of history was constituted, I have
attempted to establish the ineluctably poetic nature of the historical work
and to specify the prefigurative element in a historical account by which
6 Introduction

its theoretical concepts were tacitly sanctioned." 5 T h e influence of this

residual structuralism, or layered model of textual production, is still very
much with us and could indeed be said to linger in Fredric Jameson's
idea that the master narrative of a given age offers one way of getting at
the political unconscious of the people who actually lived during that
time. 6 If not human nature, then a peculiar residue of the folktale, and
thus a sense o f the archaic, clings to the concept o f narrative whenever
it provides a quasi-somatic bond between the text and the people.
But it is not only the humanistic side of the debate that recognizes
the power of narrative. Whereas White and Jameson identify it as a
"deep," or prewritten, dimension of collective human experience, Fou-
cault and Derrida assume that the story is all on the surface; narrative
is what produces the illusion of depth. For Foucault, narrative is more
specifically what creates a cause-and-effect relationship among people
and things that leaves words out of the picture. T h e superficial aspect
of human experience is really all there is, since it produces the language
of the nonself, the underclass, the non-Western, the otherwise gendered,
and thus the unconscious. This being the case, why can't one simply
look at narrative as a function of the surface? Because narrative form,
no matter how formal, tends to drag one back into the ahistorical quag-
mire of deep meaning. Thus to reject narrative is in a sense to acknowl-
edge its peculiar ability to locate meaning outside of words themselves.
Poststructuralism may have identified the problem, but it has not found
a way to resolve it. Even Foucault leaves the opposition between text
and narrative alone, and this makes him vulnerable on two counts. He
has committed what traditional humanism regards as "the sin" of post-
structuralism, that of having focused on the text rather than on the
experiences of real people. At the same time, poststructuralism suspects
Foucault of telling stories without explaining exactly why and how he
is doing so. His work somehow embodies both sides of the question of
history; it is at once too concerned with the text and not concerned
enough. But whether narrative constitutes an a priori and more material,
because collective, reality or whether it is a function of the text to create
the illusion that its words have come to life in a kind of motion picture,
the verdict for narrative is virtually the same. It is assigned to a realm
of sub- or pretextuality.
We want to question the distinction between text and narrative, if for
no other reason than that such an interrogation is long overdue. It is
probably true, as Geoff Bennington protests, that narrative ultimately
introduces an element of self-deception into critical discourse. " T h e
Introduction 7

claim to be able to discern the real continuities and thus to ground those
fantasies at least partially in 'truth' depends simply on the illusion of an
intelligentsia as subject of science to stand outside and above that reality
and those fantasies. This," he asserts, "is on its own terms not at all a
historical or historicising position" (25). But what if one were to consider
the narrative as purely a function of the surface? What if it were nothing
else but the traces of the labor that went into organizing various materials,
representations, representations of representations, into a reproducible
and consumable body of knowledge that could be converted into
speech—that could indeed produce a speech community? Then narrative
could not be distinguished from writing in a fully historicized material
sense. Narrative would have to be seen as the principle by which a modern
scientific culture "works." 7 If such a definition o f narrative bears a residue
of nineteenth-century idealism, this cannot be helped; that residue is part
of the history of the concept o f intellectual labor itself. But concealing
that labor has not at all curtailed its historical effects, as we will explain
in subsequent chapters. Its disappearing act only mystifies the way intel-
lectual labor works and the power it wields in modern cultures. Such
labor disappears into writing, which in turn melts either into things or
else into thin air, where it seems to refer to nothing at all. Indeed, if
history is the story that scientific cultures tell about themselves, then the
story apparently does its work by simultaneously empowering writing
and rendering it transparent. T h e story of intellectual labor consequently
remains to be told.
To privilege writing among the various changes that are said to have
inaugurated our age is therefore to question historiography at several
points at once: on the material terrain of social history, where labor and
money make things happen; on the epic battlefields of political history,
where armies and parliaments determine the course of the events; and
on the loftier plateaus of intellectual history, where one set of ruling
ideas inevitably gives way to another. We will argue that late-seventeenth-
century England saw certain changes in intellectual and artistic practice
that were both startling and profound. These changes simultaneously
called into being an author with a personal life and transformed irre-
versibly what writing was, because they changed forever what writing
did and could henceforth do. Writing could make demands in the name
of the author on behalf of others. Thus, one can imagine, it created a
sense among certain people that the so-called author—no longer to be
understood as the spokesperson of God, king, or some lesser p a t r o n -
exemplified the English people themselves.
8 Introduction

Each of Foucault's histories identifies a strategic location where dis-

course can be observed at work, producing the cultural ground in which
capital could take seed and flourish. He organizes these accounts by
overturning the two presuppositions common to virtually all other his-
tories of the modern period. He uses the strategies of history to show
that changes in ruling ideas preceded changes in economic production
and consumption. He also makes history argue that changes in the pro-
duction and consumption of "ruling ideas," the emergence of "dis-
course," a certain form of "literacy," and distribution of "power" or
"cultural capital" preceded the appearance of "the author," a vernacular
"literature," and a horizontal affiliation among those people whom eigh-
teenth-century scholarship considers part of a "readership."8 In this way,
Foucault demonstrates how words produced an object world precisely
when they presumed to do no more than accurately describe and classify
one. He also demonstrates that words produced a historically new form
of individual as they began to reveal that, for centuries presumably,
secrets had been repressed within each mind concerning the relationship
between that mind and the body in which it was enclosed; these were
the secrets of such an individual's desire. Two meanings of the word
"subject" can consequently be—and often have been—used to describe
the modern subject. He is, as Foucault explains, "subject to someone
else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a con-
science or self-knowledge."9 What Foucault does not explain is how the
two inversions are related: how did those people who possessed the new
"self-knowledge" acquire power over those who were simply subjects in
the first sense, and what does that have to do with the process by which
words gained ascendance over things? Both of these inversions are re-
quired to place rational man in a position of cultural authority. This
omission in Foucault's account—how it happened—is what our book
attempts to elaborate.
The phrase "Imaginary Puritan" refers to a logical, ontological, and
historical gap shared by historicisms old and new, as well as to the
theoretical and rhetorical sutures that insist one has received a whole
picture of the seventeenth century, despite the time shift form early
modern to modern that in fact severs one side of this cultural territory
from the other.10 To the gap and the continuity concealing it we have
assigned the name "puritan," because the word invokes the generic in-
tellectual ancestor that British and American scholars identify as the
source of the power that makes individuals into subjects and vice versa.
The puritan in question is "imaginary" because the term does not come
Introduction 9

from or refer to anybody in particular. As far as we know, it never did. 11

It came along and endowed an ensemble of cultural practices with a
purely discursive body that made them vividly—indeed, powerfully—
graspable as an originary moment, a moment that at once sowed the
seeds of the Enlightenment, motivated the rise of the new middle classes,
and enabled the onset of capitalism. Such an image does not arise from
events but gives them meaning, places them in relation to us, and, in a
word, makes them real. 12 Before laying out this argument in more detail,
however, it is only fair to explain the reasons why we have used Milton
to launch such an investigation.
When he described Milton as "the poet, the statesman, the philos-
opher, the glory of English literature, the champion and martyr of English
liberty" as well as the embodiment of "the noblest qualities of every
party," Lord Macaulay was not asserting an obvious truth; he was launch-
ing a spirited partisan defense. 13 Using the occasion of the publication
of Milton's recently discovered De Doctrina Christiana, Macaulay
turned Milton into a figure suitable for Whig celebration. While modern
historians have generally understood Macaulay's use of Milton as a re-
sponse to David Hume's equally partisan rendering of the seventeenth
century, literary critics have tended to see it as an answer to Samuel
Johnson's harshly critical "Life of Milton." In either case, with this
statement Macaulay joined an argument about Milton that had begun
decades before the publication of Hume's History of Great Britain and
Johnson's essay on the poet. 14 The argument continues to this day.
Successive generations of cultural historians and literary critics have
fought over Milton as over perhaps no other author, but they all tend
to invoke features of the poet's life and works as if his mind alone could
be said to contain the poles of modern humanism. Some, as Macaulay
said of Johnson and his kind, "contrive in the same breath to extol the
poems and to decry the poet"; others, T. S. Eliot prominent among them,
attack Milton for writing poetry that could not be read "without our
theological and political dispositions . . . making an unlawful entry." 15
The debate over which—politician or poet—defines the true Milton has
set the political inflexibility of the puritan moralist against the extraor-
dinary learning and artistic virtuosity of the Renaissance humanist. It has
also placed the regicidal pamphleteer in contention with the poet of
Christian forgiveness. More recently, Milton's celebration of the com-
mon man, long thought to express a boldly progressive political stance,
has come to be seen as evidence of a deep-seated conservatism on gender
issues because of its relative exclusion of women. 16 And thus the argu-
10 Introduction

ment proceeds as if Milton himself were capable of generating the dif-

ferences among intellectual positions so diverse as those of William
Blake, Samuel Johnson, Lord Macaulay, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Hill,
Harold Bloom, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. It is no doubt
because his "mind" seems capable of authorizing all these positions and
yet satisfying none that Milton continues to appear to each succeeding
generation as both extraordinarily capacious and significantly lacking—
for modern readers, the kind of mind that exemplifies human nature
itself. Regular unmaskings only perpetuate his status in this respect, and
he remains curiously unchanged through all the twists and turnings of
literary fashion, more so perhaps than any other author. Two centuries
of debate have made him into something on the order of what Roland
Barthes calls a mythology, namely, something "at the same time imper-
fectible and unquestionable." 17
These terms first call to mind, perhaps, the Milton of the high aesthetic
tradition to whom the late eighteenth century gave credit for anticipating
the epistemological questions that coalesced around the concept of the
sublime. 18 Since then, Milton has served as the model of the Anglo-
American poet; he defines the contours of the discipline of English lit-
erature and anchors the canon of English letters. Literary criticism cel-
ebrates him as both the great exemplar of Renaissance humanism and
its last true embodiment in English cultural history. In practically the
same breath, however, the critical tradition routinely declares Milton the
first modern poet. Alienated from the political world after the failure of
the English Revolution, he is said to have withdrawn into a world of
pure imagination. With nothing but the resources of his own milieu to
depend upon, he inaugurated a poetic tradition that rolls through the
Enlightenment to inform Romanticism on both sides of the Atlantic and
from there worms its way into the heart of high modernism. One con-
sequently finds him likened to William Blake, on the one hand, and to
Henry James and Wallace Stevens on the other. 19
It is no doubt because his career includes the period of the English
Revolution that Milton provides such a convenient bridge between Ren-
aissance humanism and the kind of humanism that came into fashion
with the Enlightenment in England. In sealing over what social and po-
litical historians regard as a definitive rupture, he also becomes the means
of drawing a natural line between the materials that can be called lit-
erature and those of history. Biographical accounts expand upon the
claim that he wrote prose on behalf of the revolutionary government at
the expense of his poetry and then returned to poetry only after he lost
Introduction 11

his eyesight and retired from public life. In this way, the historical con-
tradictions contained within the body of writing that bears his signature
have broken apart along disciplinary lines (i.e., separating the politician
and the poet) and then bonded together to compose the self-conflict of
a single individual (i.e., the author). As a result, no one has found it
necessary to deal with the fact that what it meant to write poetry as well
as political prose changed drastically at least twice during Milton's
lifetime.
But Milton is equally important for our purposes because he has been
used in American high school and college literature courses to establish
the continuity between English and American culture. Often represented
as the quintessential puritan poet, he was the most widely read author
in eighteenth-century America. Accounts of American literature generally
mention his poetry as providing some of the soil in which an American
republic of letters could take root and flourish. If a home in the American
colonies possessed any books besides the Bible, they were likely to be
The Pilgrim's Progress and Paradise Lost. George Sensabaugh has de-
scribed Milton's stature in colonial America as so great that until the
early nineteenth century "his shadow eclipsed even Homer and Virgil." 20
In the nineteenth century he continued to be an important source for
an indigenous American imagination. And because such writers as Emer-
son, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville saw fit to acknowledge a debt
to Milton, F. O. Matthiessen identified him as a major force behind the
American Renaissance. For quite a long time, according to Matthiessen,
"Milton remained the archetype of the poet for New England." 21 For
American literary criticism, then, he provides the cultural conduit be-
tween English and American literature by providing an English prototype
for American poetry and fiction.
Serving in this capacity, Milton has almost single-handedly perpetuated
the twin beliefs that English literature is our national literature and that
Britishness is a distinctive feature of our national culture. 22 What else if
not such convictions can explain Margaret Fuller's pronouncement that
Milton was "more emphatically American than any author who has lived
in the United States?" 23 Like other nineteenth-century American writers,
Fuller appears to have been not only quite self-conscious about her
struggle to invent a literary past but also acutely aware of what was at
stake in that struggle. Yet our purpose is neither to argue for national
autonomy vis-à-vis literature nor to imply continuity in the discursive
fact of this bridge. We are ultimately interested in how each side of the
Atlantic depended on the other for its sense of national identity. The
12 Introduction

uses of English in North American culture have certainly changed over

time, and each generation that perpetuates this continuity does so for
its own political reasons. 2 4
These rather basic observations (convictions, really) prompted us to
address the following questions: What was it about Milton's mind and
world that enabled him to straddle the fault line between early modern
and modern culture? Why does his position in literary criticism set his
poetry in conflict with his politics? H o w did scholars and critics come
to defend certain features of this author at the expense of others? Why
perpetuate this conflict? What notion of human identity compels modern
readers to do so? What truth is produced by representing Milton as the
author of authors? H o w have we as modern intellectuals used Milton
to deny our position as American subjects of English literature?
To address these questions we have constructed something called "the
mind of Milton." If this phrase has a familiar ring to it, that is perhaps
because we have tried to think of Milton much as Barthes thought of
Einstein in " T h e Brain of Einstein," Garbo in " T h e Face of G a r b o , " or
humankind in " T h e Great Family of M a n . " That is to say, we have
assumed the object of our analysis to exist, in Barthes's words, as " a
kind of nebula, more or less hazy, of a certain knowledge. Its elements
are linked by associative relations; it is supported not by an extension
but by a depth" (122). The Milton that we are after is one that indeed
links a self-evident character with a cloud of associations whose principle
of coherence resists analysis. This construction has nothing transcen-
dental about it even though it always tries and usually manages to create
the impression of transcendence. In contrast with those who wish to
mystify art or any other aspect of a culture, Barthes pokes among the
images, objects, or signs of industrial cultures for the ones that display
the essential properties of the commodity fetish.
The nineteenth century was only half underway when Marx described
much the same kind of inversion as the one with which poststructuralism
has attempted to come to terms. H e foresaw a situation where men
would no longer determine what things they themselves produced and
consumed, and instead things would tell people what to desire in one
another as well as in the world of things. He described an object that
not only inverts what he presumes to be the natural relationship between
people and things; it simultaneously overturns the relationship between
signs and their users. The commodity fetish is an object that has acquired
the power to determine its own meaning and value. Barthes's "mythol-
ogies" behave in much the same way. They are complex images, objects,
Introduction 13

or signs that seem to exist free of any known form of human control
for the simple reason that they have been cut off from the history of
their production. Indeed, there can be no historical explanation for this
kind of object since it appears to be iconic by nature. It seems to contain
the source of its own meaning and value.
Though he was certainly not the only author to have acquired the
properties of such an object while England developed a national liter-
ature, we believe we are on safe ground in saying that no one else has
revealed quite so many flaws as Milton and still retained such unques-
tionable authority.25 There is something about his very name, as we have
tried to suggest, that makes him both impossible for literary scholars of
any subsequent period to ignore and extremely difficult for them to wrest
free of a particular historical moment and beatify. This unique position
in English cultural history obviously has something to do with Milton's
double foothold in the disciplines of literature and history. If the richness
of the poetry seems to call into question the politics of the puritan, then
his work in Cromwell's government somehow challenges the integrity of
the poet. And so any defense of Milton on one of these bases necessarily
renews the other, which produces new grounds for attack and in turn
calls forth another defense. A corrective reading of such a figure, as
Barthes explains, "will in no way increase its power or its ineffectiveness:
a myth is at the same time imperfectible and unquestionable; time or
knowledge will not make it better or worse" (130). It is, in a word, the
perpetual need for such a defense that matters in making mythologies.
Much like those congealed bits of information that operate as "my-
thologies" in the Barthean sense of the term, Milton incorporates some
of the important contradictions of our culture. These take the form of
a compensatory set of shortfalls and surpluses, invariably reproducing a
gap between the Milton historical scholars discover and the model author
whom literary critics try to make him measure up to.
After a decade and a half of critical demand for a new literary history,
it may well strike our readers as somewhat odd for us to pass by so much
of the work that goes by the name of new historicism, postmarxism, and
cultural studies in favor of the Barthes of the Mythologies. However, we
regard this way of defining our object of analysis as no more or less
peculiar than borrowing Foucault's argument with modern historiography
to define our historical method. We turned to both Barthes and Foucault
after extensive research on Milton and the period during which he wrote
had convinced us that academic discourse has yet to deal adequately with
the insights offered in that unassuming book on "mythologies" written
14 Introduction

more than three decades ago. Even as theory was rapidly imported during
the 1970s and certain critical practices acquired both prominence and
sophistication in the United States, the political justification for the theory
revolution and the motive for a new literary history—often called "de-
mystification"—were well on their way to being ignored or simply
forgotten.
Our examination of the scholarly constructions we call "the mind of
Milton," "the English Revolution," "family history," and "the work of
literature" led inevitably to the conclusion that no one can really distin-
guish the past from what subsequent critics and historians have made of
it. Our own work has therefore concentrated on the intellectual gap that
remains in these accounts of modernity, on the means of transformation
from one cultural frame of reference to the other, on the people re-
sponsible for this profound change, and on the political consequences
that ensued from their efforts. To explain this transformation, we have
gathered information from various historical accounts—of the English
Revolution, of the rise of the modern family, and of the emergence of
a vernacular literature, for example—where changes in the production,
dissemination, and political effects of information are thought to have
played a minor though instrumental role in bringing about the indus-
trialized world we presently inhabit. We have used Milton both to identify
the logical tautologies in traditional historical narratives and to propose
another narrative. But we have neither looked for the continuities be-
tween the two halves of his career nor taken the other way around the
problem and closed the chapter on the Caroline Milton only to open
another with his political writings or his great poetry written after the
Restoration. Our argument abruptly turns away from Milton's life and
work in order to focus on details related to the formation of what
Foucault calls "discourse," a field of symbolic practices that exist in
relation to writing. A standard of literacy that includes both reading and
writing inevitably dominates such a field.

Having provided some sense of our motive, method, and object of

analysis, let us provide a more detailed account of the steps in this ar-
gument and how our readers will encounter them on a chapter-by-chapter
basis.
To launch an investigation into the origins of modernity, in chap-
ter 1 we offer a brief discussion of the main trends in Milton scholarship.
This may seem all too conventional for a book that aims to overturn a
number of basic literary historical presuppositions. Nevertheless, it does
allow us to integrate a Barthean notion of the author as a mythology
Introduction 15

with a Foucaultian notion of the modern moment as an inversion

whereby words began to have their sources located in individual authors,
and their meanings in those authors' relations to things. Milton schol-
arship reproduces one half of this process whenever it uses Milton's
poetry to "discover" and then reproduce the kind of consciousness—
self-conflicted and enclosed—that Milton's poetry called into being. In
taking the mind of the author as its object of knowledge, criticism in-
advertently provides direct access into the other half of the process by
which "the mind" of the author became a mythology. By reading Milton
criticism for purposes of observing this process at work, we demonstrate,
further, why Milton is not just any old author but, in a very literal way,
the author of authors.
One of the themes resounding throughout this criticism, and a large
part of the reason Milton must be valued even where he is disliked, is
the self-reflexivity of his later poetry, especially Paradise Lost. For a wide
spectrum of readers, such self-reflexivity suggests that in a quite deliberate
way he defined himself as an author—an author who, these readers as-
sume, had to preexist that self-representation. In this way, the modern
critical tradition naturalizes the solitary individual whom the poem des-
ignates as its source. We consider Milton among the first and best ex-
amples of those who had reason to think of writing rather than their
relationship to God and king as the basis for their political identity. But
we do not agree with the mainstream of Milton scholarship and criticism
when it assumes that the individual so represented had to be there in
order to represent himself as the source of those words. Indeed, writing
takes on such power of self-definition only when it has inverted the
historical priorities of author and individuated text.
In chapter 2 we turn to British social history in an effort to discover
when writing eluded the control of a centralized monarchy and began
to name its source in independent-minded individuals. Such decentrali-
zation of writing is recorded as one of the more short-lived effects of
the English Revolution. Almost every historical narrative invites us to
think that the revolution in writing ended when censorship was reimposed
during the protectorate and that it did not pick up again until 1695,
when Parliament failed to renew the Licensing Act of 1662. In turning
to some of the best-known attempts to determine the revolutionary ef-
fects marking the onset of modernity, however, one finds no cause other
than discursive events and a "revolution" constituted after the fact in
writing. Thus, "the English Revolution" operates much as does an "au-
thor"—that is, as a magical first cause, or cause of all other causes—to
16 Introduction

fill the gaps that would otherwise appear in the accounts of the transition
from early modern to modern. In these accounts, the English Revolution
brings about a world based on productive labor, and therefore a whole
new notion of historical causality. Yet the Revolution itself is not iden-
tified with the rise of such labor; it is a prior cause. N o r does the Rev-
olution, as history describes it, fulfill any of the definitions of revolution
formulated in the centuries to follow, definitions that characteristically
use events during the 1640s in England as the very model of the changes
that brought modern Europe into being. We are interested in how the
mythology of an English Revolution—that is, an apocalyptic change and
cause of causes—has operated as a cause in its own right and why it
remains essential to the story that modern culture tells about itself. 26
The modern notion of the "author" did far more than locate the
source of writing inside the individual and so constitute the individual
as such. It also located history outside rather than inside both the author
and his writing. With a few notable exceptions, historians collaborate
with literary criticism to extend this purely modern relationship of text
to author back across the divide between early modern and modern
England, even while the same historians proclaim that violent disruptions
brought one epoch to an end and initiated another. During this period,
a majority of them insist, everything changed. In this way, we contend,
the mythology of the English Revolution takes up a relationship of mu-
tual dependency with the mythology of the author. Without the Revo-
lution there would be no way of explaining swift and radical changes in
the means of publication, the status of writing, the identity of those who
wrote, the kinds of feelings, thoughts, and speech they verbalized, and
the object relations they consequently designated as real. Without the
transcendental mind of an author, on the other hand, there would be
nowhere to look for a revolutionary cause except to the ways and means
of producing and disseminating information. And historians do look to
such a mind, and specifically to the speech community it began to rep-
resent during the mid-seventeenth century, whenever they want to iden-
tify a first cause for this inaugural event. The English Revolution fulfills
the logic of a mythology when it prevents historians from considering
the possibility of a revolution that took place in writing. By standing in
for the action, speech, thought, and feeling that historically preceded
the words through which these became a narrative, the term "English
Revolution" conceals the story of how writing first got out of hand
some three and a half centuries ago. It also conceals the story of how
Introduction 17

the English Revolution came to represent this event for a much later
readership.
Having thus defended itself against interrogation, however, history still
has a problem. The Revolution itself requires a cause. To fend off a series
of attempts at démystification, the Revolution has to be naturalized in a
way that makes modern history appear unintelligible without it. Ac-
cording to the logic that insists one knows what an event is by knowing
its origin, historians proceed to give the Revolution an origin, or prior
cause, outside of history per se. As we discuss in chapter 2, contending
schools within the discipline appear to be of one mind in locating that
source in the very kind of individual to whom such authors as Locke
and Defoe attributed typically English thoughts and speech. This indi-
vidual was the same man who occupied the world of private property
as it had been described in puritan autobiographies, books on domestic
economy, handbooks on marriage, and educational treatises, as well as
in a poem such as Paradise Lost. If historians find it reasonable to locate
a first cause for the Revolution in the desire for self-government, it is
because writing allows them to do so whenever it represents Englishmen
as those individuals who possess such a desire. Past and present authors
characteristically identify themselves as the source of representation in
a second sense as well.
In presuming to "speak" on behalf of the individual, they not only
locate the source of writing in themselves, they also imply that writing
came from a much larger speech community. In writing his or her "mind,"
in other words, the author always speaks on behalf of such a community.
He or she "represents" the members of that community and acquires
authority by his or her exemplary status in this respect as much as they
do. 27 Some common ground among individuals is therefore essential to
the complex ideological package we are elaborating, so essential in fact
that such ground has to exist logically prior to authors and revolutions,
as the natural milieu that could have given rise to both. Otherwise, literary
and social historians would be left with nothing more or less than an
ensemble of discursive effects to account for the foundational categories
of modern culture.
The family provides that milieu. In chapter 3, we show how it provides
a cultural space where culture and nature collaborate to produce indi-
viduals. For this is where everyone is born of a more or less caring mother
and understands himself or herself as occupying a more or less adequate
position determined by a father's status in the world outside the family.
18 Introduction

The family is the origin, in other words, of all the drives and impulses
the social world either gratifies, sublimates, controls, or thwarts to the
point where some kind of rebellion becomes necessary. That these sup-
posedly indisputable facts of biological birth supply modern scholarship
with the theoretical portals by which individuals enter history and change
the course of events is nowhere so apparent as in the work of the British
historians of the family, to whom other historians and literary critics
turn with increasing frequency when they want to account for the per-
sonal lives of men and women in earlier times. On the one hand, we
would insist, this will to historicize the family indicates a sincere attempt
at self-understanding on the part of modern scholars. The move into this
area of research implies that the family, long the sacred preserve of nature,
has a history too. But the recent expansion of history into new territories
is certainly not without its perils, as Derrida suggested almost two decades
ago; and the downside of historicism is especially evident in British his-
torical studies of the family. That so much of it has been written in
defense of Peter Laslett's The World We Have Lost, a work that embodies
all the themes of Paradise Lost, demonstrates that historians have never
questioned the compulsion to establish origins for the modern middle-
class individual in a timeless world of nature outside of history.
To be sure, British histories of the family do document certain changes
in the internal organization of the family—Laslett arguing that indus-
trialization tore asunder what nature had joined together at the dawn of
English culture, and Lawrence Stone contending, to the contrary, that
modern family feeling was stifled by the economic motivations and gen-
eral lack of privacy that can be inferred from the evidence that remains
regarding earlier sexual practices. But the Anglo-American tradition of
the history of the family has in the main proved to be self-contradictory.
The major historical accounts of British family life begin by assuming
that the family is that intimate feeling of kinship attributed to the family
in certain countries of western Europe during the nineteenth century.28
Working from this assumption, these accounts assume, further, that any
other kinship relations disrupt, stifle, or otherwise tamper with nature.
If one turns to the literature that came off the presses in the years fol-
lowing the interregnum, however, a rather different story emerges. In
chapter 4, which (along with chapters 5 and 6) provides the keystone of
our argument, we read a range of these materials in relation to Milton's
Paradise Lost, arguing that if the poem is both a product of its time and
representative of English literature, then literature must have played an
active role in modernizing English culture. 29
Introduction 19

In Paradise Lost, one household disintegrates and another must be

formulated in its place. As we all know, the modern family depends upon
the labor of a man and woman rather than the bounty of some patron.
This is, according to the angel Michael in Books XI and XII, the reason
why history begins. History, as he explains it, is what broke up the
materials of an older theocentric patronage culture—much as Freud's
notion of "dreamwork" does—so that these materials might be used to
make a new world, a world at once anthropocentric and logocentric. In
certain respects, however, the world that emerges in the poem is not all
that heretical. For one thing, it is only the domestic world that changes—
and, at that, a domestic world that only strives to reproduce the aris-
tocratic culture it is in fact displacing. Indeed, Paradise Lost rather ex-
plicitly articulates the wish to return to an original state of plenitude
from which the author and those he addresses have been forever de-
tached. As the poem also illustrates, however, humanity moves farther
away from this state of effortless luxury the more it tries to get back.
The quest for origins—of self, nation, family, and language—displaces
that past with an arduous set of textualizing practices that authorize a
new class of authors and readers.
There is another paradox in this, which we examine in chapter 5.
Paradise Lost demonstrates that the activity called intellectual labor rep-
resents itself as secondary and derivative—dependent on the world to
which it refers—just when it acquires the power to revise the very nature
of things. To produce a history of the mythologies that still organize
much of everyday experience, intellectual production, and political policy,
binding these various domains together despite their contradictions into
a single culture, we have to foreground the very cultural activity that
receded by its own devices into the background. We have to explain how
the labor of representation disappeared into its product, the represen-
tation of labor. To this end, we try to isolate those places in critical
theory where intellectual labor becomes the object of analysis. If theory
characteristically mobilizes the distinctive tropes of modern culture, all
of which make language point to something outside, prior to, and more
real than itself, then this is especially true of theory that deals with
cultural production and reception. As if responding to an invisible im-
perative of writing itself, both Marx and Gramsci represent intellectual
labor as something outside of their critical analysis, something that refers
in turn to something outside itself.
As we have already suggested, Foucault's model of "discourse" pro-
vides an important exception in this respect to the mainstream of social
20 Introduction

history and theory. He argues that the rise of "writing" cannot be dis-
tinguished from the rise of a class of people whose purpose in life was
to reform both themselves and other people in compliance with abstract
norms of humanity that were, by definition, impossible to meet. Inform-
ing the formation of institutional cultures is the logic of the same wish
to return to origins that receives perhaps its most complete and explicit
articulation in Paradise Lost. Even in his later work, Foucault seems to
see the institutions most characteristic of modern culture as developing
according to a will of their own, one that transcends individuals, the
spaces they inhabit, and the textualizing procedures that fixed them there.
Foucault makes intellectual labor into an object of knowledge—indeed,
something one must know if one is to know anything at all, because it
produces both subjects and objects. But he also removes intellectual
labor from history—in much the same way that his predecessors removed
the individual mind, nation, and family—by allowing that labor to provide
its own cause. He deliberately avoids the question of why, or by what
other cause, writing began to operate in an entirely new way and to
constitute a form of power in its own right.
In an effort to avoid reproducing the tautology whereby authors appear
to author themselves, in chapter 6 we turn to Benedict Anderson's ac-
count of what he calls "print capitalism." As writing extended across the
ocean and formed a kind of umbilical cord that connected the monarch's
agents in the New World back to the European metropolis, something
apparently happened to the relationship between writing and speech. At
first, one might imagine, only writing, and then writing that made it into
print and was distributed on a mass basis, began to take on a life in the
New World apart from the European metropolis, apart from speech, and
in contradistinction to the European speech community—or so Anderson
tells the story. In his account, the extension of writing to the New World
gave words new importance as the means of cementing the Old World
to the New. As print vernaculars acquired such importance, they em-
powered those people who controlled the means of producing infor-
mation. This change in what writing did changed what writing was.
Simply by indicating that people of a particular cultural and linguistic
competency belonged to its readership, as Anderson claims, writing may
well have provided the basis for a whole new class and nation.
One might regard his account of the extension of European languages
to the colonies as the most literal unfolding of a fable in which intel-
lectual labor brings a new world into being, a world that appears to be
based solely on labor, were it not for the fact that Anderson neglects to
Introduction 21

complete the historical process encapsulated in Paradise Lost. He does

not stress the fact that what was being written in Spanish, Portuguese,
French, Dutch, and English was written so as to reproduce the very
European cultures from which the emissaries to the New World had been
exiled. Nor does he say what happened to the print-based bureaucracies
that served the centralized monarchies back in Europe. As these bu-
reaucracies were extended to include other worlds, information from
those worlds began to circulate along with that from their own, and to
become part of European culture. If Paradise Lost went virtually every-
where that English-speaking people did, then captivity narratives poured
back just as consistently into Europe along with news from the colonies.
Early modern colonialism was, in other words, far less one-sided than
Anderson's narrative suggests; simply in terms of the information which
people consume on a day-to-day basis, it changed western European
culture profoundly. (At least, that is how it looks from a North American
perspective.) The very attempt to maintain the "original" English might
have destroyed the aristocratic monopoly on information back in Europe
just as it displaced that language in the New World with a modern print
vernacular.
But if Foucault's historical model requires Anderson's transnational
narrative to carry it from one historical moment to another, then An-
derson requires Foucault for a yet more basic reason. Anderson explains
how print got out of hand and acquired priority over speech at the very
moment when print appeared to detach itself from what had been the
international language of power and to adhere instead to speech in the
form of vernacular English. His model assumes that speech comes from
individuals, and that they as authors produced the new language of power
even though they as readers consequently understood themselves in re-
lation to that language. Such a model can explain why but not how the
new print vernacular that seemed to imitate speech also changed thought
and feeling, specifically the people's sense of themselves as private in-
dividuals who never had to intermarry or even to meet in order to feel
they belonged to the same community.
In the first six chapters of this book we work through the tautology
of representation characterizing modern culture and propose a way out
of the problem by taking that tautology as our object of analysis. The
last two chapters demonstrate what a history of the inversion of speech
and writing might look like. We began with the premise that the writing
appearing during the late seventeenth century produced what is now
called an "author" as the model of an educated English person. Accom-
22 Introduction

panying the appearance of the "author" were any number of assurances

that he sought to reproduce the values of a fallen aristocracy in writing
alone, and only on a personal scale. In chapter 7 we read such canonical
texts as Locke's Second Treatise of Government and Essay Concerning
Human Understanding and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as attempts to
articulate the logic of Paradise Lost for the purpose of showing how
the educated individual might reproduce those values for himself. In each
case, what begins as a question of how to legitimize the sovereign rights
of individual man through his labor ends up by legitimating the sovereign
rights of those who can perform a certain form of intellectual labor
associated with "rationality" in the case of the Lockean individual, and
with an intricate protoinstitutional form of prevarication that might be
called "fiction," in the case of Defoe's. For all their differences, all such
arguments begin with the question of how best to reproduce an original
England. But they invariably answer the question by transferring that
hierarchical order onto a purely interior plane, by implication producing
a nation of self-governed individuals.
Foucault requires one to think of the writing that established a basis
for individual rights across western Europe in terms of the discursive
technologies that produced that individual in the first place; we try to
stress the reproductive dimension of his productive hypothesis. We use
Locke and Defoe to shift attention away from what history has tradi-
tionally taken for events and onto the plane of discourse. There we use
these authors to argue that the very writing we identify with the advent
of modernity aimed at reforming monarchy rather than at producing
something new and hostile to the status quo. Unless it attends to the
nostalgia that infuses Paradise Lost and lends it moral force, no theory
can account for the success of those works which—like Milton's later
poetry—open out onto the modern age. Despite obvious differences in
the authors' social positions and in their genres and intended readers,
the works in question speak with a single voice and express the longing
to return to a speech community that was supposed to exist prior to the
reign of writing.
Our last chapter considers how such an inherently conservative fantasy
might have eliminated the possibility of returning to a culture of powerful
landowners simply by reproducing that fantasy in writing. In the process,
we surmise, writing itself began to operate according to what has been
called the principle of supplementarity; it added something that required
a thoroughgoing internal reorganization of the culture. To make this
move, we have borrowed Anderson's strategy of turning time into space.
Introduction 23

We have shifted attention to North America in order to explain what

happened in Europe during the historical gap we are investigating. We
have regarded Mary Rowlandson's account of her captivity as the best
demonstration of how supplementation works simultaneously to transfer
the power of monarchy onto the written word, to substitute literacy for
both labor and birth in determining individuals' identity, and thus to
reconstitute the nation as a readership.
Although gender has not entered into our argument up to this point,
we are nevertheless acutely aware of what is usually meant by gender; it
is essential to our story. Our title suggests a relationship between the
origins of personal life and the onset of modernity that would be im-
possible to imagine without a historical understanding of gender. In her
now famous critique of Gareth Stedman Jones's Languages of Class,
Joan Scott demonstrates that any model of the languages of class remains
incomplete if it fails to account for the relationships such languages
establish between the categories of class and gender.30 To make her point,
she turns to the collapse of Chartism in 1848, the cataclysmic event in
English working-class history that Stedman Jones sought to explain by
looking to "language." Scott shows how even that most language-sen-
sitive social historian fails to understand this turning point in modern
history because he fails to perceive gender as a linguistic instrument of
class rather than a fact of nature. Acceding to the same notion of gender
as their opponents, the workers did not see that in order for them to
cut a deal with the factory owners, both sides had to agree to a notion
of individual rights based on the gendered division of labor—a notion
that, in Scott's analysis, goes back to the beginnings of Enlightenment
thought as formulated in Locke's Second Treatise of Government. Ac-
cordingly, workers and owners agreed that only those men who possessed
their own labor were men, and that only men should be enfranchised.
Those who existed in a feminine relationship of dependency to such men
were not so entitled. By accepting this gendered definition of rights, the
working class clinched the deal and lost the struggle for some of their
kind to own their labor. Other workers would identify their interests as
the interests of the very class whose powers they were contesting.
Many modern historians reproduce the mistake of the Chartist ne-
gotiators when they accept the idea that the emergent middle class was
made up of modern men. This one supposition makes it unlikely that
those historians will see how such turning points in modern history
accompanied sweeping changes in distinctions based on gender and the
uses to which those distinctions were put. How, after all, can anyone be
24 Introduction

expected to tell where "gender" intersects with the histories of "class"

and "writing" when none of the major accounts of the modern period
bothers to isolate the revolutionary move that placed private life, personal
emotions, family relations, domestic affairs, and the writing that deals
with such things, outside of history and in the domain of women? To
create a narrative explaining how writing might have gained ascendancy
over authors, families, and nations and begun rewriting them, we have
tried to make this move explicit. We have connected gender to the fate
of writing.
It is what might be called feminine writing that declares itself by nature
detached from politics and history so that it might change the status,
behavior, and political objectives of writing. Scott's insights prompt us
to add what we regard as a necessary step to any account of the rise of
writing. She suggests that it is not enough to show, as Foucault does,
how writing turns the tables on both authors and the things they are
supposed to represent. Nor can one really solve the problem, as Anderson
contends, by showing how print vernaculars became the basis of the
New World nation, not if these moves neglect the formation of the
modern woman-centered family. For it is out of such a matrix that im-
portant men emerge and carry on their business, just as it is o f such
households and the emotional glue that binds them that the new nation-
state is made at once cohesive and coherent.
Because she is only a woman, Mary Rowlandson can do all this while
seeking to return to the community from which she was forcibly removed.
Unlike her fictional counterparts who were made, not born, men of
property, the abducted woman can return and assume her rightful place
within that community. In this respect, Rowlandson offers a solution
that neither Locke nor Defoe could very well imagine. Once rescued
from his island, Crusoe cannot find an appropriate place within English
society for his self-forged identity. N o r can Locke imagine how the form
of self-government that individuals might achieve within the sanctuary
of the home would modify the political status quo. Only in America,
where territory had not already been politically inscribed—a place, in
other words, without a history—could private property provide the basis
for an individuated kingdom where each individual reigned supreme.
Locke limits his concept of self-government in England to the home and
immediate family, where it in turn limits the absolutist definition of
monarchy favored by the Stuart kings. In Rowlandson's account, however,
the new individual can nest within the old society and never disturb its
political order because she nests within a purely domestic space rather
Introduction 25

than camping on someone else's property. At the same time, she "adds
on" a space that had never existed before.
By showing how closely Richardson's Pamela observes the same pat-
tern of exile and return as Rowlandson's persona, we propose that the
insertion of such private domestic spaces within an earlier landowning
culture could just as well have transformed Europe too. The abduction
and the return of these women perform a transformation that could not
be accomplished in overtly political terms. They begin as wordless objects
in an exchange among men, but both evolve into bodiless subjects of
writing. In doing so, they distinguish an earlier, apparently more primitive
aristocratic culture from one in which every literate individual matters.
The community to which they belong changes accordingly, from one
governed by a monopoly on violence to one in which mastery is exercised
strictly through words. In returning to their mother cultures, then, they
quietly and almost imperceptibly change those cultures forever. A speech
community gives way to one for which writing not only establishes the
model but also poses as speech, thought, or human nature itself.
In using American literature to write modern British history, we do
not presume to be discovering the origins of that or any other culture.
Convinced that a compulsion to determine where something comes from
naturalizes what is most ideological about modern culture, we try to
show how any narrative that fulfills the fantasy of Paradise Lost will
transform the place to which that narrative longs to return. We would
like to think that our own endeavor to discover the origins of modern
culture offers something of an exception to the rule, because we have
used Paradise Lost and other writing of the period to suggest how and
why knowledge might have come to be equated with the search for
origins. As Milton's attempt to reproduce a culture from which he had
been irrevocably separated, the poem offers a paradigm for the operations
of a peculiarly European brand of nostalgia. Separation from an originary
speech community compels translation of English culture into the writing
that subsequently became the basis for the existence of that culture. In
looking forward to the new world that was supposed to emerge with
the coming of Christ, the author has his eyes cast only backward. The
"forward" movement of the narrative must be understood as an attempt
to "return." The desire on the part of North American English men and
women to return to an originary speech community required reproduc-
tion at once of that community and of the lack that cannot be filled by
written words. Under these conditions, language loses its innocence—its
Adamic character—and begins to behave as signs, writing, or the sup-
26 Introduction

plement. It displaces speech and relocates the preindustrial speech com-

munity still farther in the past with each successful written replication
of the originary speech community. The logic that brings us from revo-
lutionary England to prerevolutionary America to modern England is one
that preserves the traces of intellectual labor from Paradise Lost into
captivity narratives, then into fiction, and from there into what nine-
teenth-century intellectuals called history.
In going back to the origin of the myth of origins, we hope to provide
some insight into the means of that myth's production. We hope to show
that modern humanism began in writing and continues both to empower
and to conceal the power of intellectuals. We hope to show, further,
that through the humanities our culture not only reproduces the reigning
concepts of self, family, and nation but also conceals the history of their
production, allowing these same concepts to constitute and classify re-
sources and to disperse those resources to individuals, long after the
historical purpose and social efficacy of "self," "family," and "nation"
have disappeared. If the work of feminism and cultural studies is going
to dislodge what now exist as purely discursive entities, it cannot, we
would argue, simply posit some new fantasy—even a fantasy of multiple
origins—in place of the so-called Western tradition. If our study has
anything to contribute to modern scholarship and critical theory, there
is no question what we would like that contribution to be. We would
like to make it just a little easier for others to abandon the whole concept
of origins as the basis of identity politics and to study, in its place, the
discursive practices by which we are made and remade into selves, fam-
ilies, and nations.
CHAPTER ONE

The Mind of Milton

Milton did not belong strictly to any of the classes which
we have described. H e was not a Puritan. H e was not a free-
thinker. H e was not a Royalist. In his character the noblest
qualities of every party were combined in harmonious union.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, " M i l t o n "

It has been said that nothing breathes new life into a dead poet so fast
as an attempted assassination. If the historical figure in question should
survive the attack, he or she is likely to come back to life, warts and all,
in a culturally more durable form. This is certainly what happened when
T. S. Eliot attacked Milton for setting up a model of English poetry that
stifled the poetic creativity of successive generations. But attacks on this
particular figure have effects far removed both from the object of the
attack and from the intentions of those who have exposed his feet of
clay. His very flaws give Milton a vitality in our time that he probably
lacked in his own. They become facts of his nature—a reality in their
own right, as well as the framework in which his work is subsequently
read. This being the case, the question arises: In defending Milton against
Eliot's charge, does one come closer to representing the true Milton or
does one reproduce the same mythology that Eliot was himself perpet-
uating? "Myth," Barthes reminds us, "can always, as a last resort, signify
the resistance which is brought to bear against it." 1 Any claim that the
object in question is really less exalted than was formerly thought, further
establishes the reality of that object outside and independent of its
representation.
Douglas Bush's magisterial account perhaps best describes the Milton
who comes down to us as the embodiment of the major English currents
of Renaissance humanism. The following passage illustrates how such
portrayals of the author of Paradise Lost reconcile certain features of
early modern culture with those characterizing the Enlightenment:

27
28 The Imaginary Puritan

Our present view of Milton is not unanimous or final but, with a better
understanding of his background, roots, and evolution, we have perhaps struck
a juster balance between the Renaissance humanist and the Puritan. Milton
may be called the last great exponent of Christian humanism in its historical
continuity, the tradition of classical reason and culture fused with Christian
faith which had been the main line of European development. His Christian
humanism, intensified and somewhat altered by the conditions of his age and
country and by his own temperament, becomes as he grows old a noble
anachronism in an increasingly modern and mundane world. 2

By anthropological and historical standards, Bush's description of the

maturing Milton is rather muddled. Within the bounds of the author's
personal history, the conflict between humanism and puritanism that tore
apart Caroline culture, and indeed—it might be argued—led to the exe-
cution of the king, somehow turns into a conflict between what Bush
identifies as "Christian humanism" and what he simply claims was "an
increasingly modern and mundane world." Bush translates both the po-
litical conflicts that organized Milton's world and the cultural conflicts
that consequently organized his work, into a story about the author's
mind. By the end of the passage quoted above, the intense political
conflict between an aristocratic tradition of letters and an emergent cul-
ture that was aggressively secular has dissolved into the psychology of
internal conflict.
Milton provides the means of producing a continuity, precisely where
historians locate a decisive political rupture within English culture. Just
as the violent conflict between the values of humanism and of puritanism
modulates into a conflict between one epoch and another in Bush's
account, so too the clash between old and new fades into the melancholy
of a mind that had outlived its age to become nothing more than a
"noble anachronism." However radically the world in which Milton
wrote may have changed, the mind that did the writing remained essen-
tially the same. 3 By insisting on the constancy of the author's identity,
Bush conceals the gap between a culture that warred almost continuously
over what ought to be the proper relationship between G o d and the
monarch and a new culture that sought to differentiate the individual's
rights from those of both God and king. Thus Bush contains within
Milton's mind the conflicts shaping early seventeenth-century English
letters and sets that mind against the modern conditions (godlessness and
anarchy) for writing. This use of Milton to incorporate the past within
the present is hardly peculiar to Bush. We contend that it is a good part
of his business, as a literary historian, to suppress any changes in human
consciousness that might have occurred within Milton's career. 4 Main-
The Mind of Milton 29

taining the continuity of this author's mind is essential for an unbroken

tradition of letters across the cultural fault line that divides seventeenth-
century England.
Balachandra Rajan's Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth Century
Reader affords a slightly different angle on the political operations of the
paradox that puts literature outside of political and social history. True
to his title, Rajan establishes a relationship between the kind of knowl-
edge that became obsolete with the onset of modern culture and the
fascination Milton holds for modern readers. According to Rajan, Par-
adise Lost was written before English culture rendered poetry a less than
reliable source of knowledge about the world: "There is hardly a question
which the seventeenth century could ask which it [Paradise Lost] does
not directly or indirectly answer. So," Rajan concludes, "if we must think
of Milton in connection with his poetry, it is perhaps best to think of
him thus, within the impersonal requirements of his office, and as possibly
the last person in history to hold all human knowledge for his province."5
Even more baldly than Bush, then, Rajan explains why literary scholars
tend to focus on Milton. For Rajan, as for many Miltonists, this poet
allows them to define "the poet" as someone who personifies "all human
knowledge." They can then abstract Renaissance literature from political
history and confine it to a domain both personal and aesthetic. Once
enclosed in the consciousness of an author, the history of the language
bearing Milton's signature is submerged in the fate of his body, and its
meaning becomes thoroughly personalized. Furthermore, once con-
sciousness is assumed to be the source of literary language and a work
of literature can be read as the very embodiment of an individual's con-
sciousness, the text and the author can explain each other without ref-
erence to the historical conditions for their coexistence.
In what continues to be a very influential reading of Milton, Joseph
Summers embraces what may at first appear to be a contrary position.
Although he reads the poem as the embodiment of Renaissance hu-
manism, he regards Milton as a man ahead of his time—a modern author.
Thus, Summers suggests, the poem does incorporate the historical gulf
between early modern and modern culture that we are trying to identify.
But instead of placing its author in a world where he lacks a suitable
readership, Paradise Lost

demands of its readers, now and in the seventeenth century, qualities of at-
tention and discrimination similar in some respects to those which many
readers have only lately learned to bring to certain modern works of fiction:
we must recognize and respond to the carefully delineated contexts and qual-
30 The Imaginary Puritan

ifications; we must read this work and not confuse it with others. We must
recognize the natures of the speakers, the points of view behind the speeches,
and we must not confuse the dramatic participants with the voice of the
author.6

Unique in anticipating modernism, Milton made certain that readers

would distinguish his voice from those of other authors and from the
speech of characters within his poem; his voice is consequently every-
where and nowhere. Resembling no one so much as Henry James in this
respect, Milton makes visible the operations of his own highly indivi-
duated consciousness. 7 For Summers, the telling difference between an
ordinary consciousness and one like Milton's has nothing to do with the
gulf between the Renaissance and "an increasingly modern and mundane
world," as Bush suggested. That readers admire Milton and still find him
meaningful today, testifies, in Summers's account, both to the transcen-
dence of great minds and to the fact that Milton had one. Thus history
drops out of the equation as contemporary readers reenact Milton's
relationship to the audience for whom he wrote whenever they recognize
the superiority of his authorial consciousness to their own. What Bush
and Rajan identified as a gulf between the kind of knowledge required
by Renaissance poetry and that possessed by modern readers, Summers
regards as the measure of poetic genius, a quality of individual con-
sciousness that transcends an individual's moment in time.
Acknowledging his debt to Summers, Stanley Fish avoids the whole
problem of authorial intention. He does not see any point in trying to
figure out what the poem really meant in its time, not if Milton's poetry
educates readers today much as it originally did—indeed much as the
angel Michael instructs Adam in the last two books of Paradise Lost.
"I believe Milton's intention to differ little from that of so many de-
votional writers," claims Fish: " 'to discover to us our miserable and
wretched estate through corruption of nature' and to 'shew how a man
may come to a holy reformation and happily recover himself.' " 8 Fish
couples his claim for Milton's immortality as a poet with an assertion
of the reader's relative inferiority, when he describes the poem itself as
"Milton's programme of reader harassment" (4). The claim of immor-
tality identifies the poet with a rhetorical component of the poem that
survives into the present day; the assertion of "reader harassment" defines
the poem as a set of activities that take place entirely in the mind of the
reader. Together, these moves make history vanish, along with the whole
problem of how Milton's poem might have changed over the centuries. 9
For, as Fish explains, "if we transfer the emphasis from Milton's interests
The Mind of Milton 31

and intentions which are available to us only from a distance, to our

responses which are available directly, the disparity between intention
and execution becomes a disparity between reader expectation and read-
ing experience; and the resulting "pressures" can be seen as part of an
intelligible pattern" (3). True, one can attribute the difficulty experienced
in reading Paradise Lost to one's own (human) deficiency, and one can
say something about what the poem was doing to seventeenth-century
readers of devotional poetry. But, having done so, has the literary critic
really eliminated the problem of history, or merely sidestepped it? Fish's
proposition can be reversed.
It can also be true that in experiencing the difficulty of reading Paradise
Lost, the modern reader experiences a conflict between the culture that
dominated England centuries ago and the one that dominates the United
States today. Students bring to their classroom encounters with Milton
(and where else but in the classroom do most such encounters take place
nowadays?) a knowledge of both poetry and human nature garnered from
home, from peer groups, and from other classrooms. Reading Milton
forces them, as it has forced most of us at one time or another, to
recognize the limits of such homely knowledge. But few of us are ever
encouraged to read the gap between high and low culture as a gap be-
tween two cultures, or even between two moments in a single culture.
According to Fish's uniquely frank model of reading, the gap is and has
always been one that distinguishes elite from popular culture. Milton
authorizes specialized methods of interpretation designed to make his
readers feel the inadequacy of the interpretive equipment they bring to
the poem. But this inadequacy can hardly be the same for members of
a theocentric culture as it is for present-day American students enrolled
in an English literature course, nor are the relationships to authority the
same, nor the consequences that ensue from success or failure at reading.
The historical approach of Bush and Rajan suppresses the historical dif-
ferences between the culture summed up in Paradise Lost and the milieu
in which they themselves read that poem; but these very differences sneak
back into the cultural picture as a qualitative difference between high
and low. By placing the mind of Milton within a single framework along-
side the modern reader, Fish makes the inherent conflict between author
and reader impossible to ignore. His method is, in this sense, ultimately
more historical than more traditional biographical criticism.
That the two critical methods—emphasizing textual production and
reception, respectively—are ultimately compatible, however, becomes ap-
parent once we turn to Louis Martz. If the Renaissance Milton of Bush
32 The Imaginary Puritan

and Rajan contained more learning than any later poet could, then the
modern Milton described by Summers and Fish transcends his readers
because his is a literary mind. The Renaissance Milton's body of knowl-
edge is larger than that of his readers because it encompasses the coherent
body of theology, politics, and science made available through humanist
training; and the modern Milton's is superior insofar as it has been trans-
formed into poetry capable of transcending history. Logically, these two
bases for authorial power should contradict each other the moment we
attach the name of Milton to both of them. Martz, like Bush, understands
Milton as the consummate personification of high cultural knowledge
and the author of "the last great poem of the European Renaissance, a
poem that combines the cool objectivity of Homer, the sensitivity of
Virgil, and the strong personal presence of Ovid and the Renaissance
poets. Standing as it does on the very latest verge of the Renaissance—
indeed beyond that verge—the poem," in Martz's view, "looks backward
toward the traditional examples of epic narrative." 10 To become the poet
whom Bush calls a "noble anachronism," Martz's Milton undergoes the
very form of alienation that made possible the modernism of James,
Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Joyce, and Yeats; he is a "poet of exile." His
poetry consequently supplies the vital link that connects ancient to mod-
ern literature in an unbroken tradition. According to Martz, Paradise
Lost "looks backward towards the traditional examples of epic" and, at
the same time, makes "a motion forward to the time when the figure of
the poet, representing the individual consciousness of man, will become
the only organizing center for the long poem, as in Wordsworth's Prelude,
Whitman's Song of Myself, or Pound's Cantos" (79).

Forget that Milton was English and steeped in an aristocratic tradition

of letters. Martz understands the contradiction between the consummate
humanist and the modern genius as a conflict between the tradition in
which Milton was trained and the one in which he was, as Eliot laments,
largely received and lionized. In this, Martz agrees with Bush. At the
same time, Martz seems to concede Summers's point that men who
produce great literary works are more alike in their superiority to readers
than different because they write at different moments of time. From the
assumption that Homeric verse had its source in a similarly alienated
individual, Martz infers that disillusionment with the English Revolution
gave Milton the detachment required to write a poem of epic proportions;
this detachment is what he shares with Wordsworth, Whitman, and
Pound as well as with the Greek and Roman poets.
Another tradition of criticism challenges the idea of the poet as a self-
The Mind of Milton 33

contained mind. " N o poet compares to Milton in his intensity of self-

consciousness," contends Harold Bloom. This intense awareness of self
as poet or poet as self—both assumptions seem to be at work in Bloom's
description—"necessarily involved Milton in direct competition with Ho-
mer, Lucretius, Ovid, Dante, and Tasso, among other precursors." 1 1 His
competition extended ultimately to God, whose word Milton reproduced
as poetry; and this boundless desire to surpass all his "fathers" led Milton
to place his own words instead of theirs at the origins of Western culture.
"Precisely here," in the enormity of his oedipal crisis, according to
Bloom, "is the center of Milton's own influence upon the Romantics,
and here also is why he surpassed them in greatness, since what he (was
able to do?) for himself was the cause of them becoming unable to do
the same for themselves" (127). In this theoretical restatement of Eliot's
complaint, Bloom clearly intends us to see the poet as a text rather than
the other way around. Yet that text, as he describes it, still contains all
of English culture, past and present. And, like more traditional scholars
and critics, Bloom personifies the differences among historical epochs
and translates those differences into a psychodrama that relocates the
creative process within each author's mind. 12
The last fifteen to twenty years have seen a feminist critique of this
grandiose Milton produced by literary criticism take root and flourish.13
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar adapted Bloom's contention that Milton
was "the great Inhibitor, the Sphinx who strangles even strong imagi-
nations in their cradle" to formulate one of the most influential feminist
representations of English literature in general and of Milton in partic-
ular. 14 Whereas Bloom's Milton embodied the various sources of au-
thority at the heart of Western culture, Gilbert and Gubar reject the idea
that the gap between author and readers is a function of either the
superiority of his mind or the cultural distance created by his historical
remove. Instead, they use Bloom's competitive model to argue against
what was then the reigning literary tradition, in whose oedipal dynamic
only male authors could acquire the status of genius.
If the capacities of Milton's mind oppressed his male successors, Gil-
bert and Gubar speculate, then imagine what it must have done to would-
be women authors to think of themselves as excluded from the com-
petition because of their gender. On the one hand, Gilbert and Gubar
say, Milton conceptualized women "as at best a serviceable second" to
men (214). At the same time, however, he represented the poetic imag-
ination—"insofar as it [that imagination] was a demonic world"—as more
often identified "with Eve, Satan, and femaleness than with any of the
34 The Imaginary Puritan

'good' characters [of Paradise Lost] except the epic speaker himself"
(203). Thus Gilbert and Gubar argue that men could participate in a
tradition transmitted through the mind of Milton in a way that women
could not: "As a figure of the true artist, God's emissary and defender
on earth, Milton himself, as he appears in Paradise Lost, might well have
seemed to female readers to be as much akin to God as they themselves
were to Satan, Eve, or Sin" (210). For Gilbert and Gubar, the author's
maleness represents both the limitations and the exalted status of the
knowledge he embodies.
This move to identify the psycho-sexual limitations of the mind of
Milton inaugurated an important feminist critique of the literary tradi-
tion. Rather than equating the possession of classical learning with a
qualitatively superior form of consciousness, Gilbert and Gubar made
many readers aware that such learning was actually limited to men by
virtue of a circular process that identified it with masculinity. This critique,
launched against so central a figure, was quite compatible with others
that soon followed in identifying the class and ethnic biases of the English
literary canon: it was made not by authors but by white Europeans, and
beginning with the English Renaissance, by white Anglo-Saxon men.
However, in exposing the limitations of the literary tradition and of
Bloom's model as well, Gilbert and Gubar accepted Bloom's most fun-
damental assumption about literary production. They conceded that lit-
erature was produced by a struggle within and among individual minds.
They did not examine the cultural processes that allowed Milton to
transmit ancient knowledge and transform that knowledge into the kind
of poetry that would make sense to the readership of a much later age.
Instead they drained the historical character of Milton's writing of all
materiality, choosing instead to emphasize the biological fact that Milton
was a man. Despite its boldness of purpose, Gilbert and Gubar's position
came under attack on the grounds that it was exclusionary in its own
way. That is to say, feminism itself identified the assumption that people
are either men or women and always have been as the belief system of
an elite and timebound minority. 15
More recent feminisms deem it highly unlikely that even in modern
cultures can writing take the form or exercise the authority it does simply
because of an author's sex. Though on quite different grounds, post-
structuralism and the new historicism have also taken issue with the
tradition of reading that represents the author as an embodied con-
sciousness, grandiose and unified, and so produces a continuous tradition
of high culture from antiquity to the present day. Prompted by these
T h e Mind o f Milton 35

developments in critical theory, another generation of Miltonists has

reacted against traditional methods of textual interpretation and his-
toricism.
The critical procedures associated with deconstruction aim at reducing
the kind of transparency that encourages readers to assume that writing
comes from an individual who preexists the text and continues to give
it meaning and coherence. It is with a strong sense of self-irony, then,
that Herman Rapaport takes sides with T. S. Eliot in order to produce
a deliberately anachronistic Milton, one whose seventeenth-century po-
etry is allied with the project o f twentieth-century poststructuralism:
"Milton's transgression of what Eliot calls 'actual speech' by the 'auditory
imagination' corrupted by book learning in general and rhetoric in par-
ticular, is very reminiscent of the kind of transgression that French post-
structuralists address in terms of a writing that usurps or supplements
voice." 1 6 If Milton's words do not strike us as so freighted with thought,
feeling, or truth as Eliot wants them to be, it is, according to Rapaport,
because Milton does not harbor the essentialist ambitions o f Eliot. He
is not trying to represent what is outside o f language; he is an iconoclast
who "incorporates important resistances within his texts to prevent the
word from acceding to an idolatrous notion of the Word" (15). Rather
than simulate either the word of God or the voice o f a Romantic poet,
Milton's poetry asks us to observe its rhetoric at work. In calling attention
to the rhetorical surface of the text, Rapaport may seem to echo Summers
and Fish. However, according to the logic of poststructuralism, the sur-
face of the text does not give one access either to Milton's mind or to
the minds of his readers, but only to the operations of the text itself—
the procedures by which it distinguishes itself from language that comes
from a source other than the author, and the measures it takes to make
an "internal" world appear coherent. By forcing us to see the rhetorical
operations that allow Milton's poetry to exist, poststructuralism detaches
the text from the man, and the method should do away with the construct
of "the author."

Despite his theoretical antagonism to traditional humanism, however,

Rapaport assumes that Milton's poetry preserves intact the intricate game
plan of a master mind. For Rapaport regards the rhetorical strategies of
that poetry—no matter how belated, iconoclastic, stifling, or enabling—
as deliberate moves in the great game of high culture where genius locks
horns with others of its kind at the expense—but ultimately for the
edification—of the reader. Capable of embracing contradictions, the po-
etry so described tends to resemble the mind that performs extraordinary
36 The Imaginary Puritan

feats of rhetoric and so, Fish claims, browbeats each and every reader.
Indeed it might be said that in eluding history Rapaport's Milton becomes
historical, much as Fish's Milton did. For neither critic is this author
dead—as Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida have proclaimed he should be.
At the same time, neither Fish nor Rapaport identifies Milton as the
seventeenth-century Milton who was once adored by readers on both
sides of the Atlantic—readers, we might add, who had no special literary
education. If anything, Rapaport's Milton is more aloof than Fish's Mil-
ton; he is the very model of poetic consciousness and the forbear of a
critical tradition connecting him to Rousseau and Derrida rather than to
Blake and James.
The editors of the collection Re-Membering Milton are similarly con-
scious of their relationship to a tradition of reading that reproduces the
powerful and unified consciousness we call "the author" by alternately
idolizing and castigating Milton. In contrast with Rapaport, however,
they embrace historicism as the means of demystifying authorial presence.
The introduction begins by declaring "that the figure of Milton the author
is itself the product of a certain self-construction; and that signs of
motivated self-constitution can be seen even more clearly in the various
critical and cultural traditions in which Milton enjoys an afterlife." 17 The
editors promise that their collection will elaborate the relationship among
the many different constructions that cling to Milton's name. It will
accomplish this by looking at various self-constructions, determining the
various contexts that gave rise to them, and specifying some of the in-
terrelations between Milton's self-presentations and "the numerous rep-
resentations of him to be found throughout the last three centuries"
(xiii). To explain the historicist assumptions that inform the collection
as a whole, they turn to Foucault's well-known essay, "What Is an Au-
thor?" They contend that "Foucault's comments suggest the possibility
of locating the emergence of the author Milton in an historically specific
conjunction of socio-economic and discursive practices, even though the
exact character of that conjunction continues to be fiercely debated
among historians of the Civil War period" (xiii). No matter how one
feels about Milton, it is important to acknowledge that his state of mind
was the product of an age different from ours. As the editors explain,
"Milton's self-authorship both participates in his political and religious
radicalism and reveals features of an emerging bourgeois class-conscious-
ness in ways that have yet to be fully explored" (xiii).
That "the figure of Milton is itself the product of a certain self-
construction" they make very clear. This figure is in fact a composite of
The Mind of Milton 37

constructions, all of which came into being in "an historically specific

conjunction of socio-economic and discursive practices" (xii-xiii). Some
of these constructions are Milton's own doing and can be labeled "self-
construction," "self-constitution," "self-authorship," or "self-presenta-
tion." Such representations of the author are distinctive. They differ from
"the numerous representations of him to be found throughout the last
three centuries" (xiii). Much like older historicisms, then, the new his-
toricism supposes that there was an authentic Milton whose construction,
constitution, authorship, and presentation differ in some essential way
from what people subsequently wrote about him. The editors of Re-
Metnbering Milton regard "the author" as purely a cultural construct;
but to locate Milton within the historical context where he became an
author, curiously enough, they posit an originary Milton w h o was already
there to author the author. That this one move reintroduces all the
problems of the old historicisms should become clear once we reconsider
the editors' statement of their thesis: "Milton's self-authorship both par-
ticipates in his political and religious radicalism and reveals features of
an emerging bourgeois class-consciousness in ways that have yet to be
fully explored" (xiii). The statement implies that (1) a single consciousness
is capable of giving rise to another, ideologically conflicting one, and (2)
texts originate in "selves" rather than the other way around. Thus, while
they acknowledge that all they have to go by is representation, the editors
nevertheless promise readers a historicism capable of arriving at a human
reality beyond representation.
There is an obvious reason for the durability of the literary object we
have called "the mind of Milton." As we have already explained, the
supposition that literary language originates in a solitary and unified con-
sciousness has allowed literary scholars to elide what social historians
regard as a deep and irreversible break between early modern England
and the modern nation-state. Few Milton scholars would dispute that a
new humanism, which would prove ideologically and philosophically at
odds with the preceding tradition of letters, began to emerge around
1660, seven years before the publication of Paradise Lost. Even so, as
we have tried to suggest, they persistently produce a modern authorial
consciousness from the cultural material that bears Milton's name and
identifies his position in history. We take issue with the critical procedures
described above in order to challenge the assumption that Milton did
in fact traverse the gap between Renaissance humanism and bourgeois
humanism as a consciousness single and entire. H e offers a particularly
convenient focus for identifying the transformation of the one culture
38 The Imaginary Puritan

into the other. Because he lived and wrote through the period that saw
the end of one epoch and the beginning of another, most scholars have
settled on Milton as the means of extending backward in time a purely
modern definition of the author even as they acknowledge the political
turbulence that he experienced.
By no stretch of the imagination can Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jame-
son be called Miltonists. They regard Paradise Lost, much as we do, as
the product of a moment of profound historical transformation, and thus
a document capable of explaining the advent of modern culture. To read
the poem, both locate their object of analysis on a semiotic terrain that
is neither individuated—in the sense that what bears the name of an
author originates in the author's mind—nor lacking agency, in the sense
that the text in question belongs to a rarefied domain of high cultural
performances. They see the poem as part of a larger cultural process that
broke down an older aristocratic culture into the categories we are calling
"mind," "family," and "nation." So placed, it can be read as the record
and instrument of change. Jameson and Eagleton distinguish the culture
that produced Paradise Lost from the individualistic culture to which
that poem gave shape and meaning. In this way, they invite us to question
the prevailing critical assumption that it took a modern author to produce
a modern author, while history provided the backdrop.
Eagleton accepts the traditional view that Milton was so positioned
socially as to identify with the bourgeoisie and so placed within an aris-
tocratic tradition of learning "as to revise, reject, assimilate, and appro-
priate its contents in the cause of his own people." 18 As we have seen,
most literary criticism asks us to imagine Milton within an aesthetic
tradition that authorized the very forms of power against which he turned
his pen as Cromwell's Latin secretary. Eagleton goes along with tradition
this far. But he diverges sharply from the critical consensus when he
contends that Milton did not stop being political when he wrote his
great poems. Eagleton holds to a view that the writing of Milton the
poet, like that of Milton the politician, brought about change in its own
right rather than simply reflecting changes that took place elsewhere in
the culture. He identifies Milton as "the organic intellectual of the English
Revolution" without translating that identity into the familiar codes of
a modem industrialized culture (346). Eagleton subjects the genres used
by the youthful Milton to a minimum of the psychologizing that might
apply to the poetry written in a later period, when Milton's rhetorical
mastery testified to the breadth of his knowledge and imagination rather
than to his relationship with the church and the nobility. 19 Eagleton is
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Metipom's
hostage
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and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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Title: Metipom's hostage

Being a Narrative of certain surprising adventures befalling
one David Lindall in the first year of King Philip's War

Author: Ralph Henry Barbour

Illustrator: Remington Schuyler

Release date: July 28, 2024 [eBook #74148]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921

Credits: Produced by Donald Cummings and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK METIPOM'S

HOSTAGE ***
METIPOM’S HOSTAGE
KING PHILIP
 METIPOM’S HOSTAGE
BEING A NARRATIVE OF CERTAIN SURPRISING
ADVENTURES BEFALLING ONE DAVID LINDALL
IN THE FIRST YEAR OF KING PHILIP’S WAR

BY

RALPH HENRY BARBOUR

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY THE BOY SCOUTS OF AMERICA
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY RALPH HENRY BARBOUR

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

 CONTENTS
I. The Red Omen 1
II. The Meeting in the Woods 14
III. Down the Winding River 27
IV. The Spotted Arrow 41
V. David visits the Praying Village 53
VI. What happened at the Pool 69
VII. Captured 82
VIII. Metipom questions 93
IX. The Village of the Wachoosetts 105
X. Sequanawah pledges Friendship 122
XI. The Cave in the Forest 135
XII. David faces Death 147
XIII. A Friend in Strange Guise 159
XIV. Emissaries from King Philip 172
XV. The Sachem decides 180
XVI. Monapikot’s Message 193
XVII. Metipom takes the War-Path 204
XVIII. In King Philip’s Power 219
XIX. The Island in the Swamp 234
XX. David bears a Message 249
 XXI. To the Rescue 260
XXII. The Attack on the Garrison 272
XXIII. Straight Arrow returns 281
 ILLUSTRATIONS
King Philip Frontispiece
In that instant David knew, and his heart leaped into his
throat 80
There was a swift whiz-zt beside him and an arrow
embedded itself in a sapling 224
Then David was half pushing, half carrying Monapikot
through the doorway 282
METIPOM’S HOSTAGE
∙ ∙
∙
 CHAPTER I
THE RED OMEN
David Lindall stirred uneasily in his sleep, sighed, muttered, and
presently became partly awake. Thereupon he was conscious that all
was not as it had been when slumber had overtaken him, for,
beyond his closed lids, the attic, which should have been as dark at
this hour as the inside of any pocket, was illuminated. He opened his
eyes. The rafters a few feet above his head were visible in a strange
radiance. He raised himself on an elbow, blinking and curious. The
light did not come from the room below, nor was it the yellow glow
of a pine-knot. No sound came to him save the loud breathing of his
father and Obid, the servant, the former near at hand, the latter at
the other end of the attic: no sound, that is, save the soft sighing of
the night breeze in the pines and hemlocks at the eastern edge of
the clearing. That was ever-present and so accustomed that David
had to listen hard to hear it. But this strange red glow was new and
disturbing, and now, wide awake, the boy sought the explanation of
it and found it once his gaze had moved to the north window.
Above the tops of the distant trees beyond the plantation, the sky
was like the mouth of a furnace, and against the unearthly glow the
topmost branches of the taller trees stood sharply, like forms cut
from black paper.
“Father!” called the boy.
Nathan Lindall was awake on the instant.
“You called, David?” he asked.
“Yes, father. The forest is afire!”
“Nay, ’tis not the forest,” answered Nathan Lindall when he had
looked from the window. “The woods are too damp at this season,
and I have never heard of the Indians firing them save in the fall.
’Tis some one’s house, lad, and I fear—” He did not finish, but
turned instead to Obid Dawkin who had joined them. “What say you,
Obid?” he questioned.
“I say as you, master,” replied Obid in his thin, rusty voice. “And
’tis the work of the heathens, I doubt not. But whose house it may
be I do not know, for it seems too much east to be any in Sudbury,
and—”
“And how far, think you?”
“Maybe four miles, sir, or maybe but two. ’Tis hard to say.”
“Three, then, Obid: and that brings us to Master William
Vernham’s, for none other lies in that direction and so near. Whether
it be set afire by the Indians we shall know in time. But don your
clothing, for there may be work for us, although I misdoubt that we
arrive in time.”
“And may I go with you, father?” asked David eagerly.
“Nay, lad, for we must travel fast and ’twill be hard going. Do you
bolt well the door when we are gone and then go back to bed. ’Tis
nigh on three already and ’twill soon be dawn. Art ready, Obid?”
“Nay, for Sathan has hidden my breeches, Master Lindall,”
grumbled the man, “and without breeches I will not venture forth.”
“Do you find them quickly or a clout upon your thick skull may aid
you,” responded Nathan Lindall grimly.
“I have them, master,” piped Obid hurriedly.
“Look, sir, the fire is dying out,” said David. “The sky is far less
red, I think.”
“Maybe ’tis but a wild-goose chase we go on,” replied his father,
“and yet ’tis best to go. David, do you slip down and set out the
muskets and see that there be ammunition to hand. Doubtless in
time this jabbering knave will be clothed.”
“I be ready now, master! And as for jabbering—”
 “Cease, cease, and get you down!”
A minute or two later David watched their forms melt into the
darkness beyond the barn. Then, closing the door, he shot home the
heavy iron bolt and dropped the stout oak bar as well. In the wide
chimney-place a few live embers glowed amidst the gray ashes and
he coaxed them to life with the bellows and dropped splinters of
resinous pine upon them until a cheery fire was crackling there.
Then, rubbing out the lighted knot against the stones of the hearth,
he drew a bench to the blaze and warmed himself, for the night,
although May was a week old, was chill.
The room, which took up the whole lower floor of the house, was
nearly square, perhaps six paces one way by seven the other. The
ceiling was low, so low that Nathan Lindall’s head but scantily
escaped the rough-hewn beams. The furnishings would to-day be
rude and scanty, but in the year 1675 they were considered proper
and sufficient. In fact Nathan Lindall’s dwelling was rather better
furnished than most of its kind. The table and the two benches
flanking it had been fashioned in Boston by the best cabinet-maker
in the Colony. The four chairs were comfortable and sightly, the
chest of drawers was finely carved and had come over from
England, and the few articles that were of home manufacture were
well and strongly made. Six windows, guarded by heavy shutters,
gave light to the room, and one end was almost entirely taken up by
the wide chimney-place. At the other end a steep flight of steps led
to the room above, no more than an attic under the high sloping
roof.
David had lived in the house seven years, and he was now
sixteen, a tall, well-made boy with pleasing countenance and ways
which, for having dwelt so long on the edge of the wilderness, were
older than his age warranted. His father had taken up his grant of
one hundred acres in 1668, removing from the Plymouth Colony
after the death of his wife. David’s recollection of his mother was
undimmed in spite of the more than eight years that had passed,
but, as he had been but a small lad at the time of her death, his
memory of her, unlike his father’s, held little pain. The grant, part
woodland and part meadow, lay sixteen miles from Boston and north
of Natick. It was a pleasant tract, with much fine timber and a
stream which, rising in a spring-fed pond not far from the house,
meandered southward and ultimately entered the Charles River. The
river lay a long mile to the east and was the highway on which they
traveled, whether to Boston or Dedham.
Nathan Lindall had brought some forty acres of his land under
cultivation, and for the wheat, corn, and potatoes that he raised
found a ready market in Boston.
The household consisted of Nathan Lindall, David, and Obid
Dawkin. Obid had come to the Colony many years before as a “bond
servant,” had served his term and then hired to Master Lindall. In
England he had been a school-teacher, although of small
attainments, and now to his duties of helping till and sow and
harvest was added that of instructing David. Considering the lack of
books, he had done none so badly, and David possessed more of an
education than was common in those days for a boy of his position.
It may be said of Obid that he was a better farmer than teacher and
a better cook than either!
It was a lonely life that David led, although he was never
lonesome. There was work and study always, and play at times. His
play was hunting and fishing and fashioning things with the few rude
tools at hand. Of hunting there was plenty, for at that time and for
many years later eastern Massachusetts abounded in animals and
birds valuable for food as well as many others sought for pelt or
plumage. Red deer were plentiful, and beyond the Sudbury Marshes
only the winter before some of the Natick Indians had slain a moose
of gigantic size. Wolves caused much trouble to those who kept
cattle or sheep, and in Dedham a bounty of ten shillings had lately
been offered for such as were killed within the town. Foxes, both red
and gray, raccoons, porcupines, woodchucks, and rabbits were
numerous, while the ponds and streams supplied beavers, muskrats,
and otters. Bears there were, as well, and sometimes panthers; and
many lynxes and martens. Turkeys, grouse, and pigeons were
common, the latter flying in flocks of many hundreds. Geese, swans,
ducks, and cranes and many smaller birds frequented streams and
marshes, and there were trout in the brooks and bass, pickerel, and
perch in the ponds. At certain seasons the alewives ascended the
streams in thousands and were literally scooped from the water to
be used as fertilizer.
There was, therefore, no dearth of flesh for food nor skins for
clothing so long as one could shoot a gun, set a trap, or drop a
hook. Of traps David had many, and the south end of the house was
never without several skins in process of curing. Larger game had
fallen to his prowess, for he had twice shot a bear and once a
panther: the skins of these lay on the floor in evidence. He was a
good shot, but there was scant virtue in that at a time when the use
of the musket, both for hunting and for defense against the Indians,
was universal amongst the settlers. Rather, he prided himself on his
skill in the making of traps and snowshoes and such things as were
needed about the house. He had clever hands for such work. He
could draw, too, not very skillfully, but so well that Obid could
distinguish at the first glance which was the pig and which the ox!
And at such times his teacher would grumblingly regret that his
talent did not run more to the art of writing. But, since Obid’s own
signature looked more like a rat’s nest than an autograph, the
complaint came none too well.
Sitting before the fire to-night, David followed in thought the
journey of his father and Obid and wished himself with them.
Nathan Lindall had spoken truly when he had predicted hard going,
for the ice, which still lay in the swamps because of an unseasonable
spell of frost the week gone, was too thin to bear one and the trail
to Master Vernham’s must keep to the high ground and the longer
distance. The three miles, David reflected, would become four ere
the men reached their destination, and in the darkness the ill-
defined trail through the woods would be hard to follow. It was far
easier to sit here at home, toasting his knees, but no boy of sixteen
will choose ease before adventure, and the possibility of the fire
having been set by the Indians suggested real adventure.
A year and more ago such a possibility would have been little
considered, for the tribes had been long at peace with the colonists,
but to-day matters were changed. It had been suspected for some
time that Pometacom, or King Philip, as he was called, sachem of
the Wampanoags, was secretly unfriendly toward the English.
Indeed, nearly four years since he had been summoned to Taunton
and persuaded to sign articles of submission, which he did with
apparent good grace, but with secret dissatisfaction. Real uneasiness
on the part of the English was not bred, however, until the year
before our story. Then Sassamon, a Massachusett Indian who had
become a convert of John Eliot’s at the village of Praying Indians at
Natick, brought word to Plymouth of intended treachery by Philip.
Sassamon had been with Philip at Mount Hope acting as his
interpreter. Philip had learned of Sassamon’s treachery and had
caused his death. Three Indians suspected of killing Sassamon were
apprehended, tried, convicted, and, in June of the following year,
executed. Of the three one was a counselor of Philip’s, and the latter,
although avoiding any acts of hostility pending the court’s decision,
was bitterly resentful and began to prepare for war. During the
winter various annoyances had been visited upon the settlers by
roaming Indians. In some cases the savages were known to be
Wampanoags; in other cases the friendly Indians of the villages and
settlements were suspected, perhaps often unjustly. Even John
Eliot’s disciples at Natick did not escape suspicion. Rumors of
threatening signs were everywhere heard. Exaggerated stories of
Indian depredations traveled about the sparsely settled districts.
From the south came the tale of disaffection amongst the
Narragansetts, and from the north like rumors regarding the
Abenakis. There was a feeling of alarm everywhere amongst the
English, and even in Boston there were timorous souls who feared
an attack on that town. As yet, however, nothing untoward had
occurred in the Massachusetts-Bay Colony, and the only Indians that
David knew were harmless and frequently rather sorry-looking
specimens who led a precarious existence by trading furs with the
English or who dwelt in the village at Natick. Most of them were
Nipmucks, although other neighboring tribes were represented as
well. Save that they not infrequently stole from his traps—sometimes
taking trap as well as catch—David knew nothing to the discredit of
the Indians. Often they came to the house, more often he ran across
them on the river or in the forest. Always they were friendly. One or
two he counted as friends; Monapikot, a Pegan youth of near his
own age who dwelt at Natick, and Mattatanopet, or Joe Tanopet as
he was known, who came and went as it pleased him, bartering
skins for food and tobacco, and who claimed to be the son of a
Wamesit chief; a claim very generally discredited. It is not to be
wondered at, therefore, that David added a good seasoning of salt
to the tales of Indian unfriendliness, nor that to-night he was little
inclined to lay the burning of William Vernham’s house at the door of
the savages.
And yet, since where there is much smoke there must be some
fire, he realized that Obid’s surmise might hold more than prejudice.
Obid was firmly of the belief that the Indian was little if any better
than the beast of the forest and had no sympathy with the Reverend
John Eliot’s earnest endeavors to convert them to Christianity,
arguing that an Indian had no soul and that none, not even John
Eliot, could save what didn’t exist! Nathan Lindall held opposite
views both of the Indian and of John Eliot’s efforts, and many a long
and warm argument took place about the fire of a winter evening,
while David, longing to champion his father’s contentions,
maintained the silence becoming one of his years.
The fire dwindled and David presently became aware of the chill,
and, yawning, climbed the stair and sought his bed with many
shivers at the touch of the cold clothing. A fox barked in the
distance, but save for that all was silent. Northward the red glow
had faded from the sky and the blacker darkness that precedes the
first sign of dawn wrapped the world.
 CHAPTER II
THE MEETING IN THE WOODS

It was broad daylight when David awoke, rudely summoned from

slumber by the loud tattoo on the door below. He tumbled sleepily
down the stair and admitted his father and Obid, their boots wet
with the dew that hung sparkling in the pale sunlight from every
spray of sedge and blade of grass. While Obid, setting aside his
musket, began the preparation of breakfast, David questioned his
father.
“By God’s favor ’twas not the house, David, but the barn and a
goodly store of hay that was burned. Fortunately these were far
enough away so that the flames but scorched the house. Master
Vernham and the servants drew water from the well and so kept the
roof wet. The worst of it was over ere we arrived. Some folks from
the settlement at Sudbury came also: John Longstaff and a Master
Warren, of Salem, who is on a visit there, and two Indians.”
“How did the fire catch, sir?” asked David.
“’Twas set,” replied Nathan Lindall grimly. “Indians were seen
skulking about the woods late in the afternoon, and ’tis thought they
were some that have set up their wigwams above the Beaver Pond
since autumn.”
“But why, sir?”
“I know not, save that Master Vernham tells me that of late they
have shown much insolence and have frequently come to his house
begging for food and cloth. At first he gave, but soon their
importunity wearied him and he refused. They are, he says, a
povern and worthless lot; renegade Mohegans he thinks. But dress
yourself, lad, and be about your duties.”
 Shortly after the midday meal, Nathan Lindall and Obid again set
forth, this time taking the Sudbury path, and David, left to his own
devices, finished the ploughing of the south field which was later to
be sown to corn, and then, unyoking the oxen and returning them to
the barn, he took his gun and made his way along the little brook
toward the swamp woods. The afternoon, half gone, was warm and
still, and a bluish haze lay over the distant hills to the southeast. A
rabbit sprang up from almost beneath his feet as he entered the
white birch and alder thicket, but he forbore to shoot, since its flesh
was not esteemed as food and the pelt was too soft for use at that
season of the year. For that matter, there was little game worth the
taking in May, and David had brought his gun with him more from
force of habit than aught else. It was enough to be abroad on such a
day, for the spring was waking the world and it seemed that he
could almost see the tender young leaves of the white birches
unfold. Birds chattered and sang as he skirted the marsh and
approached the deeper forest beyond. A chestnut stump had been
clawed but recently by a bear in search of the fat white worms that
dwelt in the decaying wood, and David found the prints of the
beast’s paws and followed them until they became lost in the
swamp. Turning back, his ears detected the rustling of feet on the
dead leaves a few rods distant, and he paused and peered through
the greening forest. After a moment an Indian came into view, a
rather thick-set, middle-aged savage with a round countenance. He
wore the English clothes save that his feet were fitted to moccasins
instead of shoes and had no doublet above a frayed and stained
waistcoat that had once been bright green. Nor did he wear any hat,
but, instead, three blue feathers woven into his hair. He carried a
bow and arrows and a hunting-knife hung at his girdle. A string of
wampum encircled his neck. That he had seen David as soon as
David had seen him was evident, for his hand was already raised in
greeting.
“’Tis you, Tanopet,” called David. “For the moment I took you for
the bear that has been dining at yonder stump.”
 “Aye,” grunted the Indian, approaching. “Greeting, brother. Where
see bear?”
David explained, Joe Tanopet listening gravely the while. Then,
“No good,” he said. “No catch um in swamp. What shoot, David?” He
pointed to the boy’s musket.
“Nothing, Joe. I brought gun along for friend to talk to. Where you
been so long? You haven’t been here since winter.”
Tanopet’s gaze wandered and he waved a hand vaguely. “Me go
my people,” he answered. “All very glad see me. Make feast, make
dance, make good time.”
“Is your father Big Chief still living, Joe?”
“Aye, but um very old. Soon um die. Then Joe be chief. How your
father, David?”
“Well, I thank you; and so is Obid.”
Joe Tanopet scowled and spat.
“Um little man talk foolish, no good. You see fire last night?”
“Aye. Father and Obid Dawkin went to give aid, but the flames
were out when they reached Master Vernham’s. They say that the
fire was set, Joe.”
“Aye.”
“They suspect some Indians who have been living near the Beaver
Pond,” continued David questioningly.
Joe Tanopet shook his head. “Not Beaver Pond people.”
“Who then, Joe?”
“Maybe Manitou make fire,” replied the Indian evasively.
“Man or two, rather,” laughed David. “Anyhow, father and Obid
have gone to Sudbury where they are to confer with others, and I
fear it may go hard with the Beaver Pond Indians. How do you know
that they did not set the fire, Joe?”
 “Me know. You tell father me say.”
“Aye, but with no more proof than that I fear ’twill make little
difference,” answered the boy dubiously. “Joe, they say that there
are many strange Indians in the forest this spring; that Mohegans
have been seen as far north as Meadfield. Is it true?”
“Me no see um Mohegans. Me see um Wampanoags. Me see um
Niantiks. Much trouble soon. Maybe when leaves on trees.”
“Trouble? You mean King Philip?”
“Aye. Him bite um nails long time. Him want um fight. Him great
sachem. Him got many friends. Much trouble in summer.” Tanopet
gazed past David as though seeing a vision in the shadowed forest
beyond. “Big war soon, but no good. English win. Philip listen bad
counsel. Um squaw Wootonekanuske tell um fight. Um Peebe tell um
fight. All um powwows tell um make war. Tell um drive English into
sea, no come back here. All um lands belong Indians once more.
Philip um think so too. No good. Wampanoags big fools. Me know.”
“I hope you are mistaken, Joe, for such a war would be very
foolish and very wrong. That Philip has cause for complaint against
the Plymouth Colony I do not doubt, but it is true, too, my father
says, that he has failed to abide by the promises he made. As for
driving the English out of the country, that is indeed an idle dream,
for now that the Colonies are leagued together their strength of
arms is too great. Not all the Indian Nations combined could bring
that about. Philip should take warning of what happened to the
Pequots forty years ago.”
“Um big war,” grunted Tanopet. “Many Indians die. Joe um little
boy, but um see. Indians um fight arrow and spear, but now um
fight guns. English much kind to Indian. Um sell um gun, um sell um
bullet, um sell um powder.” Tanopet’s wrinkled face was slyly ironical.
“Philip got plenty guns, plenty bullet.”
“But how can that be, Joe? ’Tis but four years gone that his guns
were taken from him.”
 “Um catch more maybe. Maybe um not give up all guns. Good-
bye.”
Tanopet made a sign of farewell, turned and strode lightly away
into the darkening forest, and David, his gun across his shoulder,
sought his home, his thoughts busy with what the Indian had said.
Joe Tanopet was held trustworthy by the colonists thereabouts, and,
since he was forever on the move and having discourse with Indians
of many tribes, it might well be that his words were worthy of
consideration. For the first time David found reason to fear that the
dismal prophecies of Obid Dawkin might come true. He determined
to tell his father of Tanopet’s talk when he returned.
But when David reached the house, he found only Obid there,
preparing supper.
“Master Lindall will not be back until the morrow,” explained Obid.
“He and Master Vernham have gone to Boston with four Indians that
we made prisoners of, and who, I pray, will be hung to the gallows-
tree.”
“Prisoners!” exclaimed David. “Mean you that there has been
fighting, then?”
“Fighting? Nay, the infidels had no stomach for fighting. They
surrendered themselves readily enough, I promise, when they saw in
what force we had come. But some had already gone away,
doubtless having warning of our intention, and only a handful were
there when we reached their village. Squaws and children mostly,
they were, and there was great howling and dismay when we
burned the wigwams.”
“But is it known, Obid, that it was indeed they who did the
mischief to Master Vernham’s place?”
“Well enough, Master David. They made denial, but so they would
in any case, and always do. One brave who appeared to be their
leader—his name is Noosawah, an I have it right—told a wild tale of
strange Indians from the north and how they had been seen near
the High Hill two days since, and proclaimed his innocence most
loudly.”
“And might he not have been telling the truth?”
“’Tis thought not, Master David. At least, it was deemed best to
disperse them, for they were but a Gypsy-sort and would not say
plainly from whence they came.”
“It sounds not just,” protested David. “Indeed, Obid, ’tis such acts
that put us English in the wrong and give grounds for complaint to
the savages. And now, when, by all accounts, there is ill-feeling
enough, I say that it was badly done.”
Obid snorted indignantly. “Would you put your judgment against
that of your father and Master Vernham and such men of wisdom as
John Grafton, of Sudbury, and Richard Wight, Master David?”
“I know not,” answered David troubledly. “And yet it seems to me
that a gentler policy were better. It may be that we shall need all the
friends we can secure before many months, Obid.”
“Aye, but trustworthy friends, not these Sons of Sathan who offer
peace with one hand and hide a knife in t’other! An I were this
Governor Leverett I would not wait, I promise you, for the savages
to strike the first blow, but would fall upon them with all the strength
of the united Colonies and drive the ungodly creatures from the face
of the earth.”
“Then it pleases me well that you are not he,” laughed David as he
sat himself to the table. “But tell me, Obid, what of the Indians that
father and Master Vernham are taking to Boston? Surely they will
not execute them on such poor evidence!”
“Nay,” grumbled Obid, “they will doubtless be sold into the West
Indies.”
“Sold as slaves? A hard sentence, methinks. And the women and
children, what of them? You say the village was burned?”
 “Aye, to the ground; and a seemly work, too. The squaws and the
children and a few young men made off as fast as they might. I
doubt they will be seen hereabouts again,” he concluded grimly. “For
my part, I hold that Master Lindall and the rest were far too lenient,
since they took but four prisoners, they being the older men, and let
all others go free. I thought to see Master Vernham use better
wisdom, but ’tis well known that he has much respect for Preacher
Eliot, and doubtless hearkened to his intercessions. If this Eliot
chooses to waste his time teaching the gospel to the savages, ’tis his
own affair, perchance, but ’twould be well for him to refrain from
interfering with affairs outside his villages. Mark my words, Master
David: if trouble comes with Philip’s Indians these wastrel hypocrites
of Eliot’s will be murdering us in our beds so soon as they get the
word.”
“That I do not believe,” answered David stoutly.
“An your scalp dangles some day from the belt of one of these
same Praying Indians you will believe,” replied Obid dryly.
Nathan Lindall returned in the afternoon from Boston and heard
David’s account of his talk with Joe Tanopet in silence. Nathan
Lindall was a large man, well over six feet in height and broad of
shoulder, and David promised to equal him for size ere he stopped
his growth. A quiet man he was, with calm brown eyes deeply set
and a grave countenance, who could be stern when occasion
warranted, but who was at heart, as David well knew, kind and even
tender. He wore his hair shorter than was then the prevailing
fashion, and his beard longer. His father, for whom David was
named, had come to the Plymouth Colony from Lincolnshire,
England, in 1625, by profession a ship’s-carpenter, and had married
a woman of well-to-do family in the Colony, thereafter setting up in
business there. Both he and his wife were now dead, and of their
children, a son and daughter, only David’s father remained. The
daughter had married William Elkins, of Boston, and there had been
one child, Raph, who still lived with his father near the King’s Head
Tavern. When David had ended his recital, his father shook his head
as one in doubt.
“You did well to tell me, David,” he said. “It may be that Tanopet
speaks the truth and that we are indeed destined to suffer strife with
the Indians, though I pray not. In Boston I heard much talk of it,
and there are many there who fear for their safety. I would that I
had myself spoken with Tanopet. Whither did he go?”
“I do not know, father. Should I meet him again I will bid him see
you.”
“Do so, for I doubt not he could tell much were he minded to, and
whether Philip means well or ill we shall be the better for knowing.
So certain are some of the settlers to the south that war is brewing,
according to your Uncle William—with whom I spent the night in
Boston—that they even hesitate to plant their fields this spring.
Much foolish and ungodly talk there is of strange portents, too, with
which I have no patience. Well, we shall see what we shall see, my
son, and meanwhile there is work to be done. Did you finish the
south field?”
“Yes, father. The soil is yet too wet for good ploughing save on the
higher places. What of the Indians you took to Boston, sir? Obid
prays that they be hung, but I do not, since it seems to me that
none has proven their guilt.”
“They will be justly tried, David. If deemed guilty they will
doubtless be sold for slaves. A harsher punishment would be fitter, I
think, for this is no time to quibble. Stern measures alone have
weight with the Indians, so long as Justice dictates them. Now be off
to your duties ere it be too dark.”
 CHAPTER III
DOWN THE WINDING RIVER

A fortnight later David set out early one morning for Boston to
make purchases. Warm and dry weather had made fit the soil for
ploughing and tilling, and Nathan Lindall and Obid were up to their
necks in work, and of the household David could best be spared. He
was to lodge overnight with his Uncle William Elkins and return on
the morrow. The sun was just showing above the trees to the
eastward when he left the house and made his way along the path
that led to the river. He wore his best doublet, as was befitting the
occasion, but for the rest had clothed himself for the journey rather
than for the visit in the town. His musket lay in the hollow of his arm
and a leather bag slung about his shoulder held both ammunition
and food.
His spirits were high as he left the clearing behind and entered the
winding path through the forest of pines and hemlocks, maples and
beeches. The sunlight filtered through the upper branches and laid a
pattern of pale gold on the needle-carpeted ground. Birds sang
about him, and presently a covey of partridges whirred into air
beyond a beech thicket. It was good to be alive on such a morning,
and better still to be adventuring, and David’s heart sang as he
strode blithely along. The voyage down the river would be pleasant,
the town held much to excite interest, and the visit to his uncle and
cousin would be delightful. He only wished that his stay in the town
was to be longer, for he and Raph, who was two years his elder,
were firm friends, and the infrequent occasions spent with his cousin
were always the most enjoyable of his life. This morning he refused
to think of the trip back when, with a laden canoe, he would have to
toil hard against the current. The immediate future was enough.
Midges were abroad and attacked him bloodthirstily, but he plucked
a hemlock spray and fought them off until, presently, the path ended
at the bank of the river, here narrow and swift and to-day swollen
with the spring freshets. Concealed under the trees near by lay a
bark canoe and a pair of paddles, and David soon had the craft
afloat and, his gun and bag at his feet, was guiding it down the
stream.
The sun was well up by the time he had passed the first turns and
entered the lake above Nonantum which was well over a half-mile in
width, although it seemed less because of a large island that lay
near its lower end. There were several deserted wigwams built of
poles and bark on the shores of the island, left by Indians who a few
years before had dwelt there to fish. David used his paddle now, for
the current was lost when the river widened, and, keeping close to
the nearer shore, glided from sunlight to shadow, humming a tune
as he went. Once he surprised a young deer drinking where a
meadow stretched down to the river, and was within a few rods of
him before he took alarm and went bounding into a coppice. Again
the river narrowed and he laid the paddle over the side as a rudder.
A clearing running well back from the stream showed a dwelling of
logs, and a yellow-and-white dog barked at him from beside the
doorway. Then the tall trees closed in again and the swift water was
shadowed and looked black beneath the banks.
At noon, then well below the settlement at Watertown, David
turned toward the shore and ran the bow of the canoe up on a little
pebbly beach and ate the provender he had brought. It was but
bread and meat, but hunger was an excellent sauce for it, and with
draughts of water scooped from the river in his hand it was soon
finished. Then, because there was no haste needed and because the
sunshine was warm and pleasant, he leaned back and dreamily
watched the white clouds float overhead, borne on a gentle
southwesterly breeze. Behind him the narrow beach ended at a bank
whereon alders and willows and low trees made a thin hedge that
partly screened the wide expanse of fresh green meadow that here
followed the river for more than five miles. Through it meandered
little brooks between muddy banks, and here and there a rounded