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Andrew Delbanco, ed., Writing New England: An Anthology from the Puritans to the Present. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001 xxix + 463 pp.
Reviewed by Anne G. Myles Published 27.06.2003 Expressing a faith in American regional identity in the twenty-first century is, as Andrew Delbanco reflects upon near the opening of his introduction to Writing New England, a proposition that inevitably raises certain questions: "in today's McWorld," he asks, is there a basis for believing there is still something distinctive about an area as thoroughly centralized and assimilated as part of the United States east coast (xiii)? Needless to say, this volume answers "yes": New England retains unique and important features, and its present is, through many permutations, grounded in its origins and historical development. Such anxiety about the potential evanescence of regional identity is, of course, nothing new. A volume such as this can be seen as having antecedents in the American literary regionalism of the late nineteenth century, in which writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Elizabeth Wilkins Freeman began writing stories expressive of New England's regional identity precisely because the traditional elements of this identity seemed to be under threat from the forces of modernization and industrialization. To write this region now, by contrast, is not so much to elegize something passing away as to stake a claim for what, despite all changes, still endures. Another factor underlying the rise of nineteenth-century regionalist writing, however, was that this writing sold in the literary marketplace of the time. And such economic motives do not lie far from the surface in the publication of an anthology of this kind, which Delbanco, an Americanist scholar who has moved into the territory of the public intellectual, was invited by Harvard University Press to edit for the general reader. Whatever it achieves as something to be read, the real purpose for this book is to inspire people to plunk down a nice hardcover price that will, presumably, help subsidize Harvard's publication of more specialized scholarly works. Since I, as a scholar of seventeenth-century New England texts, am not quite the person for whom this anthology was assembled, I find myself recurrently imagining the ideal intended reader (I have settled on a cultured tourist, stopping in the bookstore for a "meaningful" souvenir to take home from her/his trip to view the fall foliage and other local color) and thinking about how that reader shapes the contents of this collection. Beyond the general issues shaping such a regionalist anthology, the final consideration-I seem unable to extricate myself from a host of framing considerations in encountering this book-is the unique position of New England within the American literary and cultural heritage. While, on one hand, New England is, as a regional entity, defined in opposition to a homogenized mainstream, on the other, most people would grant that it has played a special, even central role in the creation of American identity and in the genesis of the American literary tradition. It is at once at the margin and the center. Americans cannot consider New England without celebrating and/or interrogating their deepest values, without grappling with the key metaphors that structure their sense of national identity in a global context. Those seventeenth-century Puritans, however remote and incomprehensible they may seem, are still us. It is an ambiguous, insistently bifurcated legacy - marked by idealism and intolerance, integrity and repression - that American writers have been grappling with as far back as the New England historical romances of the 1820s, and continue to confront to this day. Delbanco has deep roots as a Puritan scholar (his first book was the insightful historical interpretation The Puritan Ordeal [1989]), and his introduction grounds Writing New England in an informed but accessible overview of the region's Puritan origins and the emotional, economic, and religious landscape that took shape in the early decades. He quotes Henry Adams's comment that "resistance to something was the law of New England nature" (xiv), and sums up provocatively, "To use a phrase that, in the 1960s, served as the shorthand term for all sorts of malcontents, the founders of New England were drop-outs - with all the indignation, idealism, and wounded righteousness that the term implies" (xxii). Delbanco posits that the region's continuities lie in what, following Henry James, he calls "the New England conscience" - a certain searching, idealistic, disputatious, and self-critical quality of mind. If the Americans have inherited the Puritans' problematic faith in America as the New Israel with a special mission in the world, they have also drawn from this conscience a tradition of dialectical self-questioning and moral scrupulosity and, he ultimately moves to assert, a standpoint for resisting "the seemingly ineluctable triumph of marketplace values" (xxix). Delbanco's faith that the country's New England roots offer us a genuinely usable past links the project of this anthology to his immediately preceding publication, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (2000), a book drawn from his 1998 William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Civilization at Harvard and devoted to reflecting for a general audience on the problem of the nation's declension into a limited focus on self and the need to find the true fulfillment of our collective desires in spiritual values. It is this agenda combined (ironically enough) with the market role of the book that shapes its structure and content. The broad principle of his anthology, then, is to trace the "themes and preoccupations" (xxviii) of the New England tradition across time and into the words and experiences of wide-ranging and increasingly multicultural writers in whom he sees it perpetuated. The text is structured thematically rather than chronologically; following the Introduction and a timeline, it is comprised of eight sections: first two Puritan extracts representing "The Founding Idea," followed by longer central sections on nature and the divine; on "The Examined Self"; on portraits of the New England character; on education; on "Dissident Dreamers," what might loosely be called the reformist imagination; and on "Strangers in the Promised Land," selections by or about ethnic or cultural outsiders; the book concludes with a shorter final section reinscribing the traditional regionalist spirit, "The Abiding Sense of Place." Each section contains an array of briefly introduced selections from both well-known and lesser-known writers, moving from earlier periods to the twentieth century. In his Preface, Delbanco discusses his principles of selection from the overwhelming riches of available material: he has generally avoided the most familiar classic texts, choosing rather to emphasize less well-known extracts from major authors and juxtapose them with less familiar voices. "But all are here," he asserts, "because of the bracing freshness with which the describe places, people, ideas, and events, to which . . . we are reawakened by their words" (x). Certainly, there are many pieces here I knew and was pleased to encounter, and many pleasurable discoveries-to name only two, an extract from the Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West's The Richer, The Poorer (1995), about the African-American summer community on Martha's Vineyard, and by one of the most youngest writers included, a selection from Timothy Lewontin's Parson's Mill (1989), about his initiation into traditional labor and the society of men. The other stimulating feature of such an anthology is the chance to see works freshly as one sees them "New Englandly," to adopt a phrase from Emily Dickinson, and in fresh combinations. In this vein I was especially interested by the "Strangers" section, which provides the chance to think about the connections and continuities between voices such as those of the eighteenth-century Native American preacher William Apess and the turn of the century Jewish immigrant Mary Antin, between the perspective offered by Felix Frankfurter writing on the Sacco and Vanzetti case and by Shirley Jackson's famous story "The Lottery." Yet for all that is included and despite the obvious impossibility of including everything, I have questions about the anthology's omissions, because I can so readily see the shape of them. Delbanco's evident desire to recuperate the Puritan spirit causes him to go light indeed on the uglier incidents of early New England history: the Salem witchcraft trials are represented only by a brief extract emphasizing fidelity to conscience in one of the accused; other incidents such as the near-genocidal war on the Pequot Indians and the persecution of the Quakers (both of which, it is worthwhile to note, figured significantly for nineteenth-century writers trying to come to terms with the divided New England legacy) are absent altogether. Even the extremely important figure of the "Antinomian" dissident Anne Hutchinson, with her lasting effect on America's thinking about spirit, tolerance, and powerful women, is never mentioned. Moving to the nineteenth century, I also noticed that Delbanco's emphasis on New England as a site of resistance to capitalist values causes him to elide the region's central place in the Industrial Revolution: where, for example, is any extract acknowledging the experience of workers in the famous mills of Lowell, Massachusetts and elsewhere? A great deal was written about this, and it struck me what an evocative selection Herman Melville's "The Tartarus of Maids" (1855) would have been to include. Along with the truly admirable tradition of the New England conscience, there is a parallel tradition of what we might call the New England gothic that acknowledges the region's legacies of violence, privation, and painful repression and is, if not wholly invisible, not given coherent articulation in this book. Clearly, this dimension does not fit the cultural message Delbanco hopes to transmit with this anthology, nor does it, I'm afraid, fit the not-too-severely-troubled reading experience he and/or Harvard wants to offer their intended readers, as they pick up this volume from the night table of their quaint bed-and-breakfast or their bedroom back home. While this omission does not distract from the pleasures, virtues, and insights contained in the selections that have been included, it renders the anthology as a whole less than balanced in its view of its subject, and less honest in its confrontation with the past than works by some earlier New England writers have been.
KEYWORDS: New England tradition, regionalist writing, literary anthology
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