![]() Our first American novelist of substance, Charles Brockden Brown, was born of a Philadelphia Quaker family but his major novel Wieland, or The Transformation (1798) is suffused with the spirit of Puritan paranoia-”God is the object of my supreme passion,” Wieland declares. Is there nothing in the gothic imagination that can mean simply-”nothing”? Taylor’s subtle, intricately wrought metaphysical verse dwells upon God’s love and terror almost exclusively, and man’s insignificance in the face of God’s omnipotence: “my Will is your Design.” Taylor’s poetry suggests a man of uncommon gifts, intelligence and sensitivity trapped in a fanatic religion as in a straitjacket here is the gothic predilection for investing all things, even the most seemingly innocuous (weather, insects) with cosmological meaning. The great Puritan poet Edward Taylor was also a minister. The Spiritual Conflict, The Holy War, Day of Doom, Thirsty Sinner, Groans of the Damned, The Wonders of the Invisible World, Man Knows Not His Time, Repentant Sinners and Their Ministers, Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions-these might be the titles of lurid works of gothic fiction, not didactic sermons, prose pieces and poetry. It comes as no surprise, then, that the very titles of celebrated Puritan works of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries strike a chord of anxiety. The extreme gothic sensibility springs from such paradoxes: that the loving, paternal God and His son Jesus are nonetheless willful tyrants “good” is inextricably bound up with the capacity to punish one may wish to believe oneself free but in fact all human activities are determined, from the perspective of the deity, long before one’s birth. We never had a chance! those so excluded might cry out of the bowels of Hell. Consider, for instance, the curious Covenant of Grace, which taught that only those men and women upon whom God sheds His grace are saved, because this allows them to believe in Christ those excluded from God’s grace lack the power to believe in a Savior, thus are not only not saved, but damned. The New England Puritans were an intolerant people whose theology could not have failed to breed paranoia, if not madness, in the sensitive among them. Yet all were characterized by the intransigence of their faith their fierce sense of moral rectitude and self-righteousness. The most radical Puritans, “Separatists” and eventually “Pilgrims,” settled Plymouth, Massachusetts, in the 1620s others who followed, in subsequent years, were less zealous about defining themselves as “Separatists” (from the mother country England). It was the intention of those English Protestants known as Puritans to “purify” the Church of England by eradicating everything in the Church that seemed to have no biblical justification. And how powerful the temptation to project mankind’s divided self onto the very silence of Nature. ![]() When Nature is so vast, man’s need for control-for “settling” the wilderness-becomes obsessive. How uncanny, how mysterious, how unknowable and infinitely beyond their control must have seemed the vast wilderness of the New World, to the seventeenth-century Puritan settlers! The inscrutable silence of Nature the muteness that, not heralding God, must be a dominion of Satan’s the tragic ambiguity of human nature with its predilection for what Christians call “original sin,” inherited from our first parents, Adam and Eve. Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright. Originally Published in American Gothic Tales Smith Reviews Robert Frost Shakespeare Shirley Jackson short stories Sylvia Plath Tawana Brawley Ted Kennedy The Accursed The Brothers Karamazov them The Poisoned Kiss The Possessed Troilus and Cressida twitter Ulysses Where Are You Going Where Have You Been? Wuthering Heights young adult & children's Zombie Lawrence Dostoevsky drama Edgar Allan Poe Edward Kennedy Elaine Showalter Ellen Datlow Emily Brontë Emily Dickinson featured fiction film films France Gloria Vanderbilt gothic Greg Johnson grotesque Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque horror Interviews James Joyce Jane Eyre JonBenet Ramsey Joyce Carol Oates King Lear Literary Awards Lovely Dark Deep Marilyn Monroe Mary Jo Kopechne Memoir Michael Krasny Mike Tyson My Sister My Love Nonfiction novellas novels Ontario Review photography plays poetry Rape: A Love Story Raymond J. Tags Anthologies Antony and Cleopatra Arnold Friend A Widow's Story Bearing Witness Bellefleur Biography boxing Chappaquiddick Charles Dickens Charles Gross Charlotte Brontë D.H. ![]()
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