bercovitch and miller anxiety of influence

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Anxieties of Influence: Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch Author(s): Arne Delfs Source: The New England Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Dec., 1997), pp. 601-615Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/366647Accessed: 15-06-2015 13:28 UTC

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Reconsiderations

ANXIETIES OF INFLUENCE: PERRY MILLER AND SACVAN BERCOVITCH

ARNE DELFS

N 1993, in his Rites of Assent, Sacvan Bercovitch suggested that classic American writers "were radical in a representative way that

reaffirmed the culture, rather than undermining it."' Bercovitch's consensus theory of classic American literature, although it partakes of the current revisionism in American Studies,2 is rooted in his early rhetorical analyses of Puritan writing. When Bercovitch first entered the field in the 1960s, American Puritan Studies was still largely domi- nated by Perry Miller's intellectual history of the "New England Mind."3 As a newcomer, Bercovitch published a number of essays that directly challenged Miller's authoritative work on Puritanism, and

I would like to thank Sacvan Bercovitch, Ursula Brumm, John Bumsted, Winfried Fluck, Philip Gura, Robin Hodess, David Hollinger, Heinz Ickstadt, Sieglinde Lemke, Leo Marx, and Michael McGiffert, who have read earlier versions of this essay. Re- search for this article was made possible by a fellowship in the graduate seminar "Democracy in the United States" at the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin.

'Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construc- tion of America (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 365.

2For New Americanist revisionism, see, e.g.: The American Renaissance Reconsid- ered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982-83, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Jane Tomp- kins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Russell Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature (New York: Methuen, 1986); Donald Pease, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writing in Cultural Context (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); The New American Studies-Essays from "Representations," ed. Philip Fisher (Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press, 1991).

3Perry Miller's most important publications include: The New England Mind-The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939); The New England Mind-From Colony to Province (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952); Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956); The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965).

601



602 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

they did so, as Philip Gura has commented, "with enough intellectual firepower to be taken seriously."4

The complex intellectual relationship between Miller and Berco- vitch has been the topic of numerous essays. Many have portrayed Bercovitch as an antagonist of Miller's or, worse, as a parricide. One such article is David Harlan's impassioned "A People Blinded from Birth: American History according to Sacvan Bercovitch." In this article, Harlan complains that "Bercovitch has come not to honor Miller but bury him; Bercovitch's interpretation of Puritanism is not an ex- tension of Miller's work, but its denial and negation." Harlan's polemic can be summarized in one of his overdrawn metaphors: Bercovitch's work, he declares, is "itself a lance hurled straight into the heart of Miller's corpus."5

It is misleading accounts like Harlan's that I hope to correct by viewing Bercovitch's treatment of Miller within the institutional context of American Puritan Studies in the 1960s. Read against the background of the growing criticisms of Miller, Bercovitch's typological critique reveals itself to be not one more attack on, but rather a so- phisticated defense of, Miller's coherent view of Puritanism. It was an attempt to counter the mounting criticism of social historians, the student protest movement, as well as Miller's own declining faith in his intellectual construct. That effort has extended to the present, as Bercovitch continues to reconstruct Miller's original concept of Puri- tanism in response to the growing fragmentation and politicization

4Philip Gura, "What Hath Bercovitch Wrought?" Reviews in American History 21 (1993): 562. For Bercovitch's early essays on Puritanism, see, esp., "New England Epic: Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana," English Literary History 33 (1966): 337-50; "Typology in Puritan New England: The Williams-Cotton Controversy Re- assessed," American Quarterly 19 (1967): 166-91; "The Historiography of Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence," Essex Institute Historical Collections 104 (1968): 138-61.

5David Harlan, "A People Blinded from Birth: American History according to Sac- van Bercovitch," Journal of American History 78 (December 1991): 952. For further critical assessments of the relationship between Bercovitch and Miller, see, e.g.: Fran- cis T. Butts, "The Myth of Perry Miller," American Historical Review 87 (1982): 665-94; Nina Baym, "Reviews: Puritan Origins and American Jeremiad," Nineteenth- Century Fiction 34 (1979): 348-52; Andrew Delbanco, "The Puritan Errand Re- viewed," Journal of American Studies 18 (1984): 343-60; Emory Elliott, "Sacvan Bercovitch and Puritan Studies," Studies in Puritan American Spirituality 3 (December 1992): 1-20; Philip Gura, "The Study of Colonial American Literature, 1966-1987: A Vade Mecum," William and Mary Quarterly 45 (1988): 305-41; James Hoopes, "Art as History: Perry Miller's New England Mind," American Quarterly 34 (1982): 3-25; Daniel Howe, "Descendants of Perry Miller," American Quarterly 34 (1982): 88-94. Ormond Seavey has tried to reassess these negative accounts of the Miller-Bercovitch debate in "Sacvan Bercovitch and Perry Miller: Parricide Regained," Studies in Puritan American Spirituality 3 (1992): 149-64.



RECONSIDERATIONS 603

brought about by new critical trends. Paradoxically, Bercovitch has achieved his ends through what I will call, with reference to Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence, a "creative misreading" of Miller's discussion of Puritan typology.6

Bercovitch laid the foundation for his revisionist critique in his 1967 essay "Typology in Puritan New England: The Williams-Cotton Controversy Reassessed," which offered a reconsideration of Miller's interpretation of the debate between John Cotton (1584-1652), Boston's first minister, and the Puritan separatist Roger Williams (c. 1603-83). Perry Miller had argued that the debate between Williams and Cotton had derived from "an irreconcilable opposition between two methods of reading the Bible."'7 In Miller's portrayal, Cotton appeared as a typologist who assumed a direct historical link between Old Testament prophecies and historical events in the Puri- tan colony; Williams, in contrast, was portrayed as an allegorist who held to a spiritual interpretation of Scripture, which undermined Cot- ton's typological vision of New England. In the eyes of his orthodox contemporaries, Miller made clear,

Roger Williams was the arch-radical of the age or of any age, a demon of dis- cord and subversion .... Williams was hacking savagely at the root of every ecclesiastical organization through which Western civilization had striven to confine the anarchical impulses of humanity. If he was correct then all coherence was gone, not only theological but social. ... If he was correct, the colo- nization of New England was a gigantic and senseless blunder.

Miller emphasized that Williams's allegorical method continued to pose a potential threat to the dominant social order in contemporary American culture: "Few realize that [Williams] is today, if he be lis- tened to, as serious a threat to any sort of 'establishment' as he was visibly to that constructed by the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay."8

Bercovitch took issue with Miller's interpretation of the Cotton- Williams debate, claiming in "Typology in Puritan New England" that Miller's "analysis is patently wrong in several essentials." Bercovitch's main point of criticism was that Miller had overlooked the dominance

"Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

7Miller, "Essay in Interpretation," in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, vol. 7, ed. Perry Miller (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), p. 10.

"Miller, "Essay in Interpretation," pp. 6, 11.



604 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of typology in Puritan New England. In order to prove his point, Bercovitch cited a passage from Miller's 1953 book on Roger Williams:

Professor Miller's position rests on the premise that the early Puritans "eschewed" typology. He contends that Luther and Calvin "had been very explicit in their condemnation of the typological method" and that, accordingly, "Puri- tan divines [were] ... resolved to expunge [it] ... from Biblical exegesis.'9

At this stage, however, Bercovitch misquotes Miller, slightly but significantly. Miller had not argued that all Puritans had "eschewed" typology; rather, he had limited his statement to European Protestant reformers, as follows:

the great Protestant reformers had been very explicit in their condemnation of the typological method along with every other variant of the allegorical. ... The Reformers were the more resolved to expunge this method from Biblical exegesis because they were convinced that in the late Middle Ages (as we call them) the allegorical and typological interpretations had become a riot of irre- sponsible divinations.1'

Miller had understood the distinction between New England Puritans and European Reformers in their attitudes toward typology. Indeed, only two pages beyond the passage Bercovitch quotes, Miller had stated explicitly: Puritan theologians-especially those who came to New England-read about the covenant which God had established with Abraham, and so orga- nized their churches on a covenant among the saints which included their "seed." By this sort of reading, they produced a theology, an ecclesiastical program, and a social philosophy for New England. They did not entirely con- demn typology; the founders of New England recognized that it, if used with extreme caution, might have its uses."

As Donald Fleming has perceptively observed, "Perry Miller was fascinated by the history of typology."'12 As early as 1948, Miller had commented that "in the literature of New England ... a resurgence of typology can be traced, as it can in the literature of all Protestant com- munities." And in the accompanying footnote, he had added: "A study of the revival of typology in Protestant countries during the seventeenth century would . .. make a substantial contribution to an un-

9Bercovitch, "Typology," pp. 167-68. 'oPerry Miller, Roger Williams--His Contribution to the American Tradition (Indi-

anapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), pp. 34-35. "Miller, Roger Williams, p. 37, emphasis added. '2Donald Fleming, "Perry Miller and Esoteric History," Harvard Review 2 (1964): 28.




derstanding of modem literature."'3 Ironically, Bercovitch fulfilled Miller's prediction almost twenty years later by turning Miller's discussion of Puritan typology against himself.

In one of his first articles, "New England Epic," Bercovitch had openly admitted his indebtedness to Miller's "pioneering work on typology in colonial America."'14 In "Typology in Puritan New En- gland," however, Bercovitch created the impression that Miller had ignored the subject. Why, we may ask, did Bercovitch, who was other- wise such a perceptive reader of Miller, misread his predecessor's discussion of Puritan typology at this decisive point?

In characterizing the Cotton-Williams debate as a conflict between allegory and typology, Miller had, according to philological conven- tion, defined typology as "a special subdivision of the allegorical method."'5 Bercovitch, in contrast, considered the debate "an opposition between two different typological approaches," a "conflict ... between two views of typology" which "took place within a culture thor- oughly familiar with typology."'6 By inverting the two rhetorical terms, Bercovitch presented typology, rather than allegory, as the dominant mode of expression in Puritan New England, which contained within itself the subversive elements of Williams's allegory." Consequently, the conflict between Cotton and Williams literally dis- appeared. Williams's allegorical protest, in Bercovitch's reading, reaffirmed Cotton's typological vision of New England, rather than undermining it. In Bercovitch's words:

This harmony between historical and allegorical typology brings out the fur- thest implications of John Cotton's answer to Roger Williams. It enlists the heretic's exegetical method as support for the theocracy and binds all aspects

3Perry Miller, Images or Shadows of Divine Things by Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), pp. 24, 141 n. 30.

14Bercovitch, "New England Epic," p. 337 n. 2. 15Miller, Roger Williams, p. 34. In his book on Jonathan Edwards, Miller had warned

that allegory and typology "must never, under pain of damnation, be confused" (Images or Shadows, p. 32).

'6Bercovitch, "Typology," pp. 167, 175, 171, emphasis added. '7Bercovitch's hegemonic concept of typology contradicts conventional philological

terminology. Erich Auerbach, for example, to whom Bercovitch repeatedly refers in his article, makes clear: "Since in figural interpretation one thing stands for another, since one thing represents and signifies the other, figural interpretation is 'allegorical' in the widest sense" ("Figura," Scenes from the Drama of European Literature [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984], p. 54, emphasis mine). Friedrich Ohly has criti- cized the confusion between typology and other forms of allegory in American Studies in his "Typologie als Denkform der Geschichtsbetrachtung," in Typologie, ed. Volker Bohn (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), p. 41.



606 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of the New England venture-physical and theological, individual and com- munal-into a comprehensive vision. Its distinctive blending of the notions of representative men and a "chosen" country, whereby one signifies (or should signify) the other, may be seen as an essential part of the Puritan legacy to American literature. ... Cotton's use of typology, as it conforms to, suggests and perhaps influenced that of his contemporaries and successors, attests to an imaginative force in American Puritan writing which has too often gone unrecognized.s8

Paradoxically, Bercovitch's typological argument both undermines and reaffirms Miller's consensus history of Puritanism. For Miller, New England writing had offered an imaginary alternative to the dominant liberal ideology in American culture.'9 For Bercovitch, however, Puritan typology was precisely an early expression of the liberal consensus, which was able to co-opt all other competing ideologies. With a definition of consensus so comprehensive, Bercovitch was later able to absorb subsequent expressions of literary dissent in American Studies and culture. As David Harlan has accurately noted, this semi- nal essay "foreshadowed the directions [Bercovitch's] later work would take."20 Ultimately, however, Bercovitch's typological critique has not displaced Miller's allegorical approach to Puritanism; rather, Bercovitch has completely internalized Miller's image of Puritanism and redirected its energies. By emphasizing the culturally affirmative dimensions of Puritan allegory, Bercovitch has merely stripped it of its subversive significance.

Most contemporary Americanists have, nevertheless, subscribed to Bercovitch's misleading account of Miller's discussion of Puritan typology.21 Andrew Delbanco is one of the few who notes that Ber-

'8Bercovitch, "Typology," p. 189, emphasis mine. '9See Godfrey Hodgson, "The Ideology of the Liberal Consensus," in America in

Our Time (New York: Doubleday, 1976), pp. 67-98. For a.New Americanist critique of the liberal consensus, see Donald Pease, "New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon," in The New Historicism Reader, ed. Aram Vesser (New York: Rout- ledge, 1994), pp. 141-60.

20Harlan, "Blinded from Birth," p. 955.

21Philip Gura, for example, has claimed: "Miller simply underestimated and thus vir- tually neglected [the significance of Puritan typology] (except in his study of Roger Williams, whose thought he simply misconstrued)" ("A Vade Mecum," p. 310). Everett Emerson has complained about "Miller's ignorance of typology" ("Perry Miller and the Puritans," History Teacher 14 [1981]: 463-65). John Crowell has argued, "According to Perry Miller, typology was not practiced by the New England Puritans" ("Perry Miller and Typology," Andover Newton Quarterly 17 [1977]: 227). Even David Harlan, other- wise Miller's most impassioned defender, knows no better than simply to repeat Bercovitch's misleading criticism: "Perry Miller thought the Puritans had condemned typology" ("Blinded from Birth," p. 954).




covitch's revisionist essay "significantly amplifies Miller's somewhat muted discussion of typology in Puritan thought."22 In another place, Delbanco has explicitly questioned Bercovitch's typological reading of Puritanism: "Our recent vision of the Puritan founders as hungry for the millennium and convinced that their journey was typed out in scripture needs to be revised."23

Thomas Roche, however, has accused both Miller and Bercovitch of defining typology too broadly, at the cost of allegory: "the Mr. Bad- man in this history [of the decline of allegory] is Perry Miller, who is the only begetter of typology's satanic hold on allegory's jugular, and his prophet is Sacvan Bercovitch."24 In his brilliant essay "Israel Redi- vivus: The Eschatological Limits of Puritan Typology in New En- gland," Reiner Smolinski has similarly questioned the dominance of the typological tradition in American Puritan Studies. Smolinski notes that Americanists "have long been fascinated by Puritan typology and its myth-making power as it conferred divine approval on the Puri- tans' Errand into the Wilderness."25 In this manner, Americanists from Perry Miller to Sacvan Bercovitch have perpetuated the idea of Puritan New England as the site of a "New Jerusalem."26 After criti- cally reevaluating the original Puritan texts, Smolinski reaches a striking conclusion:

22Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 283 n. 31.

"Andrew Delbanco, "The Puritan Errand Re-viewed," Journal of American Studies 18 (1984): 351.

24Thomas Roche, "Typology, Allegory, and Protestant Poetics," George Herbert Journal 13 (1989/90): 2, 7.

'5Reiner Smolinski, "Israel Redivivus: The Eschatological Limits of Puritan Typol- ogy in New England," New England Quarterly 63 (1990): 357.

26For typological studies, see, e.g.: Ursula Brumm, Die Religiose Typologie im Amerikanischen Denken-Ihre Bedeutungfiir die Amerikanische Literatur--und Geis- tesgeschichte (Leiden: Brill, 1963), trans. American Thought and Religious Typology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970); Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966); Jesper Rosenmeier, The Image of Christ: The /ypology ofjohn Cotton (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1966). For a collection of important essays, see Typology and Early American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972). For more recent examples, see: Emory Elliott, Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Mason Lowance, The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); Cecilia Tichi, New World, New Earth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Philip Gura, A Glimpse of Sion's Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620-1660 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1984).




My reexamination of the typological and figural evidence suggests that in di- vorcing language from doctrine, critics ironically arrive at conclusions diamet- rically opposed to Puritan eschatological and typological positions on these is- sues.... critics impose preconceived notions on Puritan typology to certify their own theories and, in the process, they divorce language from doctrine and thus allegorize and metaphorize the literal intent of those typological pas- sages they extract for evidence.27

The continuing fascination with Puritan typology, and especially Sacvan Bercovitch's application of it, can be fully understood only with reference to the larger political and institutional context of American Studies and culture in the 1960s. Philip Gleason has shown that American Studies first gained real prestige in a climate of nation- alism and patriotism fostered during World War II and its immediate aftermath.28 The founding fathers of American Studies were attracted to Puritan typology because it conveniently supported U.S. claims for exceptionalism. Perry Miller was one of the main proponents of this persistent belief in the exceptional Puritan origins of American culture. Famously, Miller's Puritan errand into the wilderness was in- spired by the "realization of the uniqueness of the American experience."29 However, in the years following Miller's untimely death in 1963, social historians and student protesters began to attack his concept of a definable New England Mind. In view of increasing ethnic and political conflicts, his belief in a unified national character appeared hopelessly outdated. Retrospectively, Steven Watts has described this paradigm change in American Studies as follows:

Somehow notions of "the pastoral ideal" and "the New England mind" and "the American Adam," the stock-in-trade of traditional Americanist scholarship, seemed irrelevant and perhaps even fraudulent in a society wracked by deep social and cultural confrontations. Students of social history pushed to the fore as the study of ideas became retrograde, elitist, even reactionary in this political climate.-4

27Smolinski, "Israel Redivivus," pp. 359, 369.

"Philip Gleason, "World War II and the Development of American Studies," Ameri- can Quarterly 36 (1984): 343-58.

29Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, p. ix. 30Steven Watts, "The Idiocy of American Studies: Poststructuralism, Language, and

Politics in the Age of Self-Fulfillment," American Quarterly 43 (December 1991): 626.




Bercovitch's typological critique of Miller must be understood against the background of this growing dissent in American Studies and culture. Bercovitch seemed to participate in the radical attack on Miller's New England Mind. His typological criticism was perceived by many as an attempt to "deconstruct" the coherent structure of Miller's work. As Andrew Delbanco has recently argued, Bercovitch's work

was a deconstruction of what appeared to the mind of the 1960s to be a perni- cious and fearfully compelling national myth. It disclosed in the colonial imagination a preposterous symbolism that contained the seed not only of Manifest Destiny but of Doctor Strangelove as well. "The Puritans," Berco- vitch wrote in a sentence at least as angry as Miller's on our foolish choice of friends, "used the Biblical myth of exodus and conquest to justify imperialism before the fact." The unspoken question behind this statement was the press- ing question of its day: "Why are we in Vietnam?"31

Cecilia Tichi has similarly interpreted Bercovitch's typological argument as a typical expression of the revolutionary Zeitgeist of the 1960s:

just as the idea of the Puritan mind should find favor in a particular postwar climate, so should the millennialist arguments be enabled by the cultural moment of the 1960s (roughly 1965-75), the Vietnam war era, in which many in literary studies perceived the United States not as a global democratic bene- factor but as a militaristic empire.32

To a certain degree, both Delbanco and Tichi are correct. Berco- vitch identified imperialist desires within the founding texts of Puritan New England. In contrast to Miller, who had viewed Puritan writing as a possible means of subverting American liberal ideology, Berco- vitch recognized in the very same Puritan texts certain rhetorical strategies which served to affirm this ideology.

However, "Typology in Puritan New England" also implied a subtle critique of the radical Zeitgeist of the 1960s. The years 1966 and 1967 were marked by race riots in Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit as well as by the first, large-scale anti-Vietnam War marches in Washington, New York, and San Francisco. All that "intellectual turmoil, the Civil Rights Movement, and the anti-war protests influenced American Studies," as Allen Davis has argued.33 No doubt, Bercovitch also had the dissenters of his own day in mind when he demonstrated how

3'Delbanco, Puritan Ordeal, p. 217. 31Cecilia Tichi, "American Literary Studies to the Civil War," in Redrawing the

Boundaries, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: Modern Language As- sociation), pp. 212-13.

3AllUen Davis, "The Politics of American Studies," American Quarterly 42 (1990): 359.



610 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Williams's allegorical protest had reaffirmed Cotton's typological vision. Like Williams once had, it was implied, radical Americanists reaffirmed the Puritan myth of America, in the very moment they voiced their protest against it.

Influenced by the French Annales school, social historians attacked Miller's intellectual history of the New England Mind on the ground that he had been "so swayed by the Puritans' rhetoric that he lost track of New England's realities."34 In his survey study, "American Pu- ritan Studies in the 1960s," Michael McGiffert commented on the state of the field:

[Perry Miller] found great diversity within the Puritan coherence. His more outspoken critics, for their part, deny the coherence itself-and their declara- tions of extreme pluralism bespeak the dishevelled state of Puritan studies in the post-Miller period. "Dissensus" becomes the rule, among both scholars and Puritans.

Himself a historian, McGiffert feared that literary scholars, given their "particularist instinct ... and the biographic press toward indi- vidualization of experience and character," would further fractionate Puritan Studies.35 McGiffert's pessimistic outlook was shared by many others, including David Hall, who articulated his concerns in a 1970 essay entitled "Understanding the Puritans."36

In a subsequent essay published in 1987, however, Hall indicated that his pessimistic prediction had been premature. In "On Common Ground: The Coherence of American Puritan Studies," he observed:

New energies poured into Puritan studies in the 1970s from a direction that McGiffert or I did not adequately forecast. I refer to a renaissance of literary

34Robert G. Pope, "New England versus the New England Mind," Journal of Social History 3 (1969): 69. See, also, Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop's Boston: Portrait of a Pu- ritan Town, 1630-1649 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965); Robert Pope, The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Prince- ton: Princeton University Press, 1969); John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Kenneth A. Lock- ridge, A New England Town, the First Hundred Years: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636-1736 (New York: Norton, 1970); Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Knopf, 1970).

35In 1968, McGiffert had sent questionnaires to nearly 80 Puritan scholars, 46 of whom replied, among them Bercovitch. The third of the four questions read: "Please indicate the relation, if any, of your investigations and conclusions to those of the late Perry Miller." McGiffert published the results of his study in William and Mary Quar- terly 27 (1970): 36-67; quotations pp. 41-42.

36David Hall, "Understanding the Puritans," in The State of American History, ed. Herbert J. Bass (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), pp. 330-49.




history that may be dated from the founding of Early American Literature in 1966. Initially appearing in a modest format, EAL has become one of the most important of the journals that promote American Puritan studies. The strength of EAL is in part the consequence of a literary history that adopts a generous definition of literature. At the very moment that intellectual history fell into disrepute and social history turned its back on sermons, literary historians were expanding their domain to encompass every possible text. By de- fault, they also took on the task of providing synthesis. Few others had the daring to present Puritan New England as a whole or to propose that the development of ideas paralleled the development of society."3

Bercovitch played a crucial role in this literary reconstruction of American Puritan Studies. His typological revision of Miller's "great synthetic work" served to defend its coherent structure against social historians' particularizations and, even, against Miller's own latter-day despair.

Miller's intellectual history had contained within it the seeds of its own deconstruction. "The more one studies the history of Puritan New England," Miller had conceded, "the more astonished he becomes at the amount of reeling and staggering there was in it." At the beginning of his career, Miller had idealized the "New England Mind" as "the most coherent and most powerful single factor in the early history of America." But in his preface to Errand into the Wilderness, Miller admitted a fundamental failure:

I suppose the saddest comment I can make upon the whole enterprise is that, after three decades of endeavor, though we have shaken a few complacencies, we have not arrived at the comprehensive understanding we presumptuously proposed."I

As Gene Wise has poignantly remarked, Miller "saw culture as conflict." His work showed "how enormous the gap is between the world pictured by the official Puritan mind and the world of existence out- side that mind."39 Due to this growing discrepancy between vision and reality, American history struck Miller as "a list of miserable and re-

37David Hall, "On Common Ground: The Coherence of American Puritan Studies," William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 196. Similarly, McGiffert has recently admitted that "fears in 1970 about the disintegration of Puritan Studies proved groundless, although the new coherence has proved significantly different from Miller's top-heavy construct" (personal communication with author, 22 February 1996).

38Miller, Errand, p. 190; Seventeenth Century, p. viii; and Errand, pp. viii-ix.

39Gene Wise, Historical Explanations--A Strategy for Grounded Inquiry, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), pp. 93, 322.

40Miller, Colony to Province, p. 14.




grettable failures."" Nonetheless, he expressed his hope that a new generation of scholars might fulfill the "gigantic labor" of providing a coherent history of American Puritanism.41

Sacvan Bercovitch responded to that challenge. Miller's "framework ... invited revaluation," he decided. In an accompanying footnote, he elaborated: "The invitation to revaluation was augmented by Miller's polemic style and by the sense of cultural tensions that pervades his work." Miller had recognized the imaginative power of the Puritan vision, Bercovitch admitted, "but from a hostile or alien point of view."42

"To speak as enlightened historians of the 'Puritan myth' is one thing," Bercovitch declared in his revisionist essay collection, Ameri- can Puritan Imagination; "to enter symbiotically into its modes of expression is something quite different." "In following the development ... of the metaphors of garden and exodus, of errand and trial (on sea, in the settlements, in the heart)," he continued, "we come to feel the visionary force that sustained the venture."43 As Mason Lowance has observed: "It is perhaps Bercovitch's almost complete absorption of [Puritan typology] that energizes [his] writing and drives his scholarship. . . . the energy of prophecy and fulfillment may be found on every page of Bercovitch's writing.""44

In Rites of Assent, Bercovitch attributes his peculiar fascination with Puritan rhetoric to the "Romantic-Marxist utopianism" of his Jewish-Canadian parents: "The analogies to the rhetoric of my own past seem so striking it still surprises me that they did not occur to me at once, and stop me in my tracks."45 Bercovitch's background may also help explain why his approach to Puritan typology differed so dra- matically from Miller's. Miller portrayed himself as an "academic lone wolf" for whom "nonconformity" was an "act of intellectual cour- age." 4As Ormond Seavey has noted, "Miller turned to Puritanism out of a spirit of intellectual nostalgia for a more tough-minded descrip- tion of the world than his liberal contemporaries provided.""47 Recog- nizing in Puritanism an ideological alternative, Miller emphasized the allegorical, potentially subversive, dimension of Puritan writing.

41Miller, Errand, p. ix. 42Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Puritan Imagination-Essays in Revaluation

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 2, 213 n. 1, 6. 43Bercovitch, American Puritan Imagination, pp. 6-7, emphasis added. 44Mason I. Lowance, "Sacvan Bercovitch and Jonathan Edwards," Studies in Puritan

American Spirituality 3 (1992): 55, 66. 4Bercovitch, Rites of Assent, p. 2, 6n. 46Quoted by Donald Weber, in "Review of Perry Miller's Responsibility of Mind in a

Civilization of Machines," New England Quarterly (1980): 255. 47Seavey, "Bercovitch and Miller: Parricide Regained," p. 158.




Bercovitch, in contrast, already approached American culture out of a certain creative alienation. For this cultural outsider, Puritanism presented a possibility for entering American culture rather than dis- tancing himself from it. Indeed, having initiated his search solo, Bercovitch discovered community in Puritan Studies. He has ex- plained that process, retrospectively, in The American Puritan Imagi- nation, as follows:

I recall the excitement of pursuing typology through seventeenth-century Massachusetts-and my ambivalent feelings, several months later, at learning that Ursula Brumm had already published on the subject. Still later I learned of no less than five dissertations on early New England typology, all of them written at more or less the same time as mine, and all under more or less the same illusion of originality. No doubt a good many other colonialists had simi- lar experiences, as they pursued their different paths through the literature. No doubt, too, they found ample compensation, as I did, in their sense of community. The shock of recognizing a Zeitgeist in one's thesis led to the re- assurance of shared enthusiasms, the personal and professional pleasures of a common effort.48

Recognizing that he had discovered Puritan typology only under the "illusion of originality," Bercovitch offered a creative misreading of Miller's prior discussion of Puritan typology which allowed him to challenge Miller without really undermining his coherent view of Pu- ritanism. In effect, Bercovitch's typological critique served to fulfill Miller's Puritan vision.

"Bercovitch joined in the literary scholars' project which sought to displace Miller," Ormond Seavey has declared, but ultimately Berco- vitch's achievement "is parasitic to Miller's ... in the way that valuable criticism always aims to subsist with important preceding criticism." Seavey concludes:

One important difference between Bercovitch and Perry Miller is that Miller, though himself a non-believer in religion, made himself into a sort of fellow traveler with the founders of neo-orthodoxy. . . . Bercovitch by contrast has moved steadily away from positions that accommodate with any intellectual establishment in this country. It is thus striking that the intellectual establishment has been willing to listen to him so long.49

48Bercovitch, American Puritan Imagination, pp. 1-2. 49Seavey, "Parricide Regained," p. 158. Seavey reconsiders the complicated relation-

ship between Sacvan Bercovitch and Perry Miller with reference to Hillis Miller's discussion of "parasitic" criticism. See "The Critic as Host," in Deconstruction and Criti- cism, ed. Harold Bloom et al. (New York: Continuum, 1979), pp. 217-53.




Although I largely agree with Seavey's general reassessment of the Miller-Bercovitch debate, I do not agree with his conclusion. Berco- vitch has not moved away from any established intellectual position in the United States. Rather, I contend, he has used Puritan typology, boldly and imaginatively, as a means of inscribing his own marginal self, quite literally, into the institutional context of American Studies. As Rael Meyerowitz has recently suggested, Bercovitch's critical work on Puritanism has served as the very vehicle "of his own, gradual American acculturation."50

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom has argued that literary history is a constant struggle for originality and superiority, a "[b]attle between strong equals, father and son as mighty opposites," which leads to "the absolute absorption of the precursor." Under the anxiety of influence, poets and critics constantly misread one another, "so as to clear imaginative space for themselves." As a result, "most so-called 'accurate' interpretations . .. are only more or less creative or interest- ing mis-readings."5'51

Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence also applies to the complicated relationship between Bercovitch and Miller. To paraphrase Bloom: like Oedipus, Bercovitch has transformed his blindness to- wards his powerful precursor into the revisionary insights of his own critical work."52 Bercovitch's revisionist concept of Puritan typology is marked by that same dialectic of blindness and insight: Bercovitch has misread Miller's discussion of Puritan typology--only to offer an even more "original" reading of Puritan rhetoric--one more inclusive and reaffirming. For, as Bloom has pointed out: "poetic influence need not make poets less original; as often it makes them more original, though not therefore necessarily better."53

By denying the subversive elements of Puritan allegory in favor of his all-inclusive concept of typology, Bercovitch all but eliminates mo- ments of ironic tension, physical loss, and spiritual decline from Miller's work. In effect, he inverts Miller's tragic vision of American history by adopting a secularized version of Puritan typology as a hermeneutic method and mode of expression in his own critical writing. By virtue of the logic of his typological argument, Bercovitch has

5?Rael Meyerowitz, Transferring to America: Jewish Interpretations of American Dreams (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 237.

51Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, pp. 11, 5, 43. 52Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, p. 10.

5Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, p. 7.




been able to adapt to the rapidly changing political and institutional conditions in American Studies and to incorporate new ideas from deconstruction, ideologic criticism, and New Historicism into his consensus model of American culture.

In American Jeremiad, Bercovitch has accordingly described his relationship to Miller as follows:

I muted my dissent because I was unwilling to join in the patricidal totem feast following Miller's death, when a swarm of social and literary historians rushed to pick apart the corpus of his work. It seems clear by now that the corpus remains pretty much intact, and that it will remain a towering achievement of the American mind. It is with a deep sense of gratitude for his achievement that I have tried to clarify my differences with Miller.54

The "corpus" of Miller's work has indeed remained intact-in large measure thanks to Bercovitch's typological "attack" upon it. Bercov- itch's "creative misreading" of Miller's previous discussion of Puritan typology has not deconstructed or undermined his coherent image of the New England Mind, as recent critics have argued. Rather, Bercovitch's revisionist critique has served to reconstruct and defend Miller's Puritan work against the growing dissensus in American Stud- ies and culture. Bercovitch has not come to "bury" Miller, as Harlan claims. Rather, he has come to resurrect the Puritan body of Miller's work within the institutional context of contemporary American Stud- ies.55 And within this context, Bercovitch's revisionist insight into the consensus function of Puritan typology will continue to provide a powerful critique of the current cult of dissensus in American Studies.

54Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), p. xv.

55Accordingly, Bercovitch has replied to Harlan's "misguided jeremiad," as follows: "For the record, I have always considered and written about Perry Miller as America's greatest intellectual historian and I have always tried to convey in my teaching and writing the extraordinary richness, depth, and complexity of the New England Puritan imagination, as well as its intellectual power and radically affirmative spirit" ("Investiga- tions of an Americanist," Journal of American History 78 [1991]: 972).

Ame Delfs has studied American and German literature at the uni- versities of Heidelberg and Frankfurt. In 1993-94, he was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University. Since then, he has been a fellow in the graduate program "Democracy in the United States" at the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin, where he is currently finishing his Ph.D. dissertation, "Reconstructing American Studies: The Critical Work of Sacvan Bercovitch."



bercovitch and miller anxiety of influence

Documents

new england quarterly

new england mind

american studies

america new york

sacvan bercovitch authors

new americanist revisionism

classic american writers

american renaissance