What Are We Doing Here?

by Marilynne Robinson

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  What is lost in the fact that our early history is distorted by suppressions and omissions? I was surprised by the importance of women in the literary culture of the Renaissance—specifically Calvinist women, who patronized and protected writers and who themselves wrote poetry and drama and made translations. Lucy Hutchinson, the wife of a regicide, wrote an epic based on Genesis and made the first complete translation into English of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things. Anne Vaughan Lok wrote the first sonnet cycle in English. Mary Sidney wrote tragedies as well as the greater part of the verse translation of Psalms begun by her brother, Philip. I have come across the names of many more than I have had time to look into. The rise of English as a literary language would have been an encouragement to women, who were not often educated in the use of Latin. In any case, this period was clearly a stimulus to literary expression as well as to theological and other learning in women.

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  When I write about the character and importance of Puritanism, it is not with the intention of suggesting that we could or should return to it. It was as much a long historical moment as it was a distinct tradition. Its struggles with orthodoxy, and the marked tendency of its own institutions to decry elements of orthodoxy, were a consequence of the fact that orthodoxy was inconsistent with its own tenets. It was meant to be reformed and continuously reforming. The hardest definitions it made of itself were an effect of its defenses against the pressures of an environment in which “nonconformity,” as it was called, was subject to exclusion from civic life. The acts of uniformity imposed by Elizabeth and others, which were meant to enforce by fines weekly attendance at an Anglican church, together with exclusion from university, public office, property ownership, and so on, were the kind of thing that harden the perimeters of any minority. These strategies of self-defense tend to become identifying features of the group, from the point of view of members as well as outsiders, no matter how arbitrary they are in their origins. Protestant men from certain regions of Europe, especially clergy, still wear beards beneath their chins because the soldiers who once harassed them wore mustaches. To doff their hats or not, to stand or kneel or not, were choices that were meaningful in highly particular settings, and signs of their participation in particular controversies. Once in America, without the context that made them meaningful, these customs began to seem anomalous over time, and provincial. In the early nineteenth century Harvard became Unitarian while Yale adhered to its ancestral Congregationalism. Amherst and Andover were founded to shore up the old religion, which changed under their influence in ways that would seem unexpected, given the assumptions we would be likely to bring to the idea of a restored Puritanism. These two schools, with Yale, became the front line of the abolitionist movement. They helped found and staff other new colleges in the disputed territories of the Midwest, which in turn became outposts of abolitionism. Higher education—liberal education—became a very important medium for the advancement of radical social reforms. The movement that scattered these colleges over the landscape, a very distinctive feature of American civilization, has had immeasurable consequences, including its contributions to the ultimate elimination of slavery.

  Since my interest here is in putting both American Puritanism and certain writers in context, I will consider for a moment the family of Emily Dickinson, citizens of Amherst. Dickinson’s grandfather was among those who felt passionately that the loss of Harvard to Unitarianism had to be compensated by the creation of a new school to train Congregational clergy. He poured so many of his resources into the project that he went bankrupt and had to go west to recoup his losses. Where did he go? To Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he seems to have looked after the school’s finances and invested in land. Lyman Beecher was the president of Lane, and Calvin Stowe taught there—the father and the husband, respectively, of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who lived in Cincinnati from the age of twenty-one to the age of thirty-five. Lane was at the time the largest Protestant seminary in the country, and the Beechers, and increasingly the students as well, were involved with abolition and the Underground Railroad. This provided the material for Stowe’s famous novel. Old Dickinson came home and the college was opened. Amherst provided a low-cost education to aspiring clergy and opened its classes to auditors as well—townspeople and younger students like Dickinson herself. Congregational clergy were trained in the liberal arts before they began their theological training, so Amherst was a rich resource for its community. Dickinson briefly attended nearby Mount Holyoke College, a school meant to provide a low-cost education to young women from the poor hill towns around Amherst. The school was founded on what was called the manual labor system. Everyone at the school, student or faculty, contributed work to the running of the school. The president, Mary Lyon, baked the bread. This system was characteristic of colleges founded by the antislavery movement, for example, Knox College and Oberlin. It was meant to keep higher education affordable, to erase social inequality, and to create a more “useful” educated class. It was directed against slavery in that it encouraged the individualism of self-sufficiency as opposed to the habits of exploitation of others associated with slavery and social inequality.

  Mount Holyoke was one of a number of colleges or seminaries established in New England during this period. Women’s higher education was part of a movement toward gender equality associated more broadly with antislavery. We tend to think of these female seminaries as sequestering, perhaps, but they in fact provided young women with a privilege unique in the world at the time, a rigorous education comparable to the education enjoyed by young men, and on terms that were intended to make them accessible, to remove financial barriers. All these schools have evolved into institutions of a very different kind, with a very different impact on society, and the genius of their early years and first intentions is by now a lost memory. They are worth considering not only because they help to interpret the vast development of the educational culture so characteristic of this country but also, for my purposes, because they are the self-interpretation of the last population who identified, without irony or affectation, as Puritan. They were the most radical social reformers this country has ever seen, in part because they had an extraordinary opportunity to put the impress of their values on a civilization very much in a formative stage, in part because they felt, and they were right to feel, that the civilization was tending away from them. The Unitarianism of Harvard was seen even then as more sophisticated, if not more learned, than the old religion. I will observe, in earnest hopes of being corrected, that Harvard figures very little in this epic tale. I know of no college founded from Harvard in this period. Troops of young Yale Divinity School graduates went out into the wilderness to spread enlightenment in a true sense of the word among these new towns and populations. They left a heritage that, if it were known, might even give goodness a good name. The whole movement had a kind of heroic generosity in its design and intention that is rare in history, and it persisted through decades, planting colleges throughout the Midwest, and in Colorado, California, and Hawaii. Josiah Lovejoy, a famous antislavery martyr in Illinois, was a Princeton man. I await information that will correct me—it appears from my reading that sophisticated Harvard did not exactly throw itself into this great work.

  So Emily Dickinson, in going to Mount Holyoke, was stepping into the stream of a reformist movement. We all know that she soon stepped out of it again. Why she chose to go home to her family we will never know. There is a tendency to present her as captive to a rigid society, but the female seminary actually offered intellectual liberation not available to women in any other society of the period. Whatever her reasons she did well, giving the world a body of work it would be much poorer without. In going home, it must be noted, she did not seclude herself from the distinctive radicalism of her time and community. She could hardly have done so, because the Dickinsons were very much involved in it, at least by association. Her brother, Austin, was a close friend of
Frederick Law Olmsted, the great landscape designer and abolitionist. They wandered around the local woods together finding native vegetation suitable for planting on the Amherst green and the campus of the agricultural school that would become the University of Massachusetts. And Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson asking for his response to her poetry. Higginson, I hasten to note, was a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. He was not only a great abolitionist, the commander of a black regiment in the Civil War, a friend and supporter of John Brown, but also a strong proponent of women’s rights and workers’ rights before and after the war. Clearly she knew to whom she was writing. Higginson is himself a wonderful essayist, both brilliant and ingratiating. He traveled to Amherst to meet the poet who had written to him, and then wrote a singularly fine evocation of her. After Dickinson’s death her sister brought the trove of her poetry to him, and he edited and published it. This story is very often told in a way that makes a villain of Higginson. He is supposed to have made the wounding assessment of her work that discouraged her from publishing more than a scant few poems. Clearly, however, Higginson was a gifted man, strongly predisposed to reading a woman poet with great interest and respect. His report of his encounter with her certainly reflects this. If he tried to nudge her toward slight changes that would make her strange and difficult poetry a little more accessible to the general reader, this is surely a forgivable error in an editor responding to the work of someone so complex and elusive.

  My point is that everywhere Dickinson looked there was radicalism of some kind, reform of some kind. Her reactions to it all, so far as I can tell, are undiscoverable. Clearly, however, the cliché of her being an intellectual captive in a frozen world is simply wrong. Perhaps her brother’s long and open affair with Mabel Loomis Todd and the stoicism with which it seems to have been accepted is another light on the radicalism of the time and place. The ideal of Puritan reform was not essentially nostalgic but was instead primitivist. It reexamined the most fundamental institutions, including social hierarchy—including, emphatically, marriage. It gave no presumptive positive significance to the fact that social relations of any kind were long-standing or seemingly universal, and this included gender relations. This is true at the same time that marriage as covenant was, according to Calvin, the bond most favored by God. This vision of it is an aspect of the rejection by him and other Reformers of priestly celibacy and of celibacy in general as a more sacred condition than marriage. The idealization of marriage changed the understanding of it in ways that might not have been foreseen. The first modern divorce was granted in Calvin’s Geneva.

  In any case, I have omitted one great factor in all this, which is the Second Great Awakening. A few preachers, Charles Grandison Finney notable among them, set off a lengthy and, again, radical religious revival that swept the Northeast, especially upstate New York, the motherland of American religions. Finney was a lawyer and church musician who underwent a profound religious experience, trained as a minister, and became a revivalist, which at that time was a highly respectable calling, aspired to by learned men, a credential that qualified one for a college presidency, for example. The conversion experiences that drove this awakening and their consequences are best described by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience. He was writing after the heat of the moment had passed, more or less, but describing to his Scottish audience the demonstrable, transformative effects of these highly individual raptures that Americans were inclined to pass through. The conversion, as in Finney’s case, was not a change of religious belief but an intensification of it. This was hoped for and encouraged as a sign of one’s acceptance by God. It was the experience of all but two of the students at Mount Holyoke while Dickinson was there, one of the two being, of course, Dickinson. It is all rather hard to imagine now. But James’s point, and a thing well worth noting, is that these most intense excitements, passing through whole populations, had consequences that were overwhelmingly benign. These excitements were too much for some to endure—hospitals in affected regions were prepared to treat what they called “religious hysteria.” But there was no ramping up of old hostilities, no one was burned or hanged. Certain offshoots were trivial or absurd, of course. But a great part of these energies went into antislavery activity. Finney himself became a professor, then the president of the new Oberlin College, accepting the appointment on the condition that all races and both genders would be admitted on equal terms. The philanthropist behind the creation of Oberlin was no other than Lewis Tappan. He created it as a place where abolitionist students, expelled from Lane Theological Seminary for their radicalism, could complete their education and express their radicalism without inhibition, which they did.

  So when these self-professed Puritans, who had effectively lost any place in England and knew they were losing ground in America, set out to renew their tradition, the effort was marked by intense piety, the founding of many schools intended to promote reform, and utopianism striking enough to earn a mention in Engels’s essay on the viability of Communist societies for both Brook Farm and Florence, Massachusetts. There is a tendency among historians to treat the efflorescence of Puritanism as a departure from it, or a rejection of it, a pure consequence of the polemically negative characterization of Puritanism. In fact all those schools, the reforms in the status of women, the conscious inculcation of a work ethic as a rejection of the association of status with leisure based on exploitation were not changes that made us more like the rest of the world. In fact, they made us more like ourselves, and our better selves. All this brought on the Civil War. It could hardly do otherwise. Of course it would be truer to say that slavery itself brought on the Civil War.

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  Again, I am aware of exploring lost history. I mentioned how aware I am that I bear the stigma of living in Iowa and of teaching in a public university. This country grossly impoverishes itself with this condescending or contemptuous dismissal of vast reaches of its terrain and the multitudes who live and die there. I have been asked a hundred times why I teach at Iowa, by people sophisticated enough to know that in my field anywhere else on earth would be a step down. So perhaps I teach at a public school in the Midwest because I am an elitist. I have my own reasons for being glad that Iowa is in Iowa. I would never myself have discovered the region or its history, which is an epochal part of our national history and which settled into my literary imagination as satisfyingly as the prairie instructed me in a new aesthetics.

  And I take comfort in the fact that the state has no death penalty, that there are earnest and ambitious efforts to educate people in prison. I am pleased that Iowa has one of the highest literacy rates in the country and the fourth-lowest rate per capita of gun ownership. If I were to use that profile to choose a better state to live in, I would be hard-pressed to find one. I am pleased that marriage equality was recognized early in Iowa, and that, since it was a territory, Iowa has had no laws forbidding interracial marriage and no laws permitting segregation in schools. If I were to add these to the profile, my choices would be narrower still, probably approaching zero. Every four years the national media come to Iowa to photograph cows. Since I am a connoisseur of forgotten places, I have a house in upstate New York. I could demonstrate for the press the existence of many cows, just a cab ride and a train ride from Trump Tower. Speaking of which, or of whom, I don’t appreciate being blamed by The New York Times for that phenomenon, that most New York phenomenon, a sort of political Paris Hilton, famous for being famous by virtue of their own fascinated attention. There’s no point mentioning that Donald Trump didn’t win Iowa, since Ted Cruz did.

  In any case, rumors persist that Cleveland has an orchestra and also a clinic. Chicago has some interesting architecture and a few decent universities. There’s a museum in Kansas City whose Ancient Near Eastern collection is more or less inexhaustible, if you like that sort of thing. There are those for whom Ann Arbor is a synonym for paradise. I joke, of course. A region of sixty million people of every po
ssible ethnicity, thickly strewn with colleges and universities and with a long history of relative wealth, is no simple “heartland,” no backwater or cultural desert. If population density is productive of desirable traits, it has its great conurbations. I will mention, however, that Iowa City is larger than Periclean Athens.

  I am weary of omissions, of failures to acknowledge. People can be convinced that they live in a small country, for all purposes, where there are few options, and markers of success or failure that will be recognized anywhere. My reformers had a glorious sense of space and freedom, very deeply impressed by obligation. They made it, by human and historical standards, a great theater of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still. At this time the country needs to regain equilibrium and direction. It needs to recover the memory of the best it has done, and then try to do it all better.

  Mind, Conscience, Soul

  Plenary Address at the Religious Affections in Colonial North America Conference, Huntington Library, San Marino, California: January 27, 2017

  I am deeply indebted to Jonathan Edwards. Reading him in college—assigned portions of The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended—made me aware of a much more plausible ontology than anything compatible with the ugly determinisms on offer then and now in courses on philosophy and psychology. I could put a name to my discontents because I had an older brother who shared them. But I got past them finally one particular afternoon, reading from a nineteenth-century edition of Edwards’s Works. Everything about this assignment suggested drudgery. But that hour felt like an awakening, so to speak, as if a great burden had been lifted from my soul. I recognize the irony of my having been rescued by precisely this text. In it Edwards describes Being as emergent and the continuities we depend on not as intrinsic but as wholly sustained by God. So reality is indeterminate within a very broad and arbitrary frame of probabilities and possibilities, until it happens. In other words, Edwards dismisses the narrow causal channel of conventional deterministic thinking, which is also essential to Freudianism, Skinnerism, Marxism, or neo-Darwinism. His purpose is to defend the traditional doctrine that implicates all generations in the sin of Adam, without reference to individual transgression. He asserts another, higher-order determinism, which is the freedom of God, constrained only by his own nature. Very characteristic of recent theories about humankind is the assumption that we are the creatures of our race or genes or the traumas we have suffered or the shape of our brains. These theories have been put aside one after another as they are found to be based in errors of fact that yield errors of reasoning, or vice versa. Edwards taught me how to understand that something much richer and stranger is going on than any of these schemes can begin to suggest. I realize I am involving myself in complicated thoughts about a treatise that is not my subject. My purpose is simply to say that I have long seen Edwards very differently than as the black-clad cleric with spiders on his mind. His conception of Being as emergent opened Emerson, Dickinson, Melville, and Whitman to me, and William James as well. He helped me wonder constructively about what Puritanism actually was. He certainly made me wonder what I was looking at when I read his work and theirs.