Duration and Depravity: Religious and Secular Temporality in Puritanism and the American Gothic
Abstract
Duration and Depravity identifies a temporality of “sinful feeling” operating in the archive of Puritan writings of personal piety, such as diaries, autobiographies, conversion narratives, and sermons, and persisting into early American gothic literature. This temporality of sinful feeling is an attempt to discipline the self through temporal projection oriented towards the theological fact and religiously experienced feeling of sinfulness. Duration and Depravity engages with the proliferation of postsecular criticism in American literature studies generally, and Puritan studies more specifically. Postsecular criticism in literary studies is a style of historicism that reconsiders its primary archive’s position in newly complicated narratives of secularization provided by such thinkers as Talal Asad and Charles Taylor. This project’s identification of a temporality of sinful feeling in the Puritan archive and in the early American gothic both builds on and complicates Charles Taylor’s proposition that secular modernity is defined by the assumption of Walter Benjamin’s “homogenous, empty time” as the primary source of modern disciplinary culture. Charles Taylor believes that Puritanism is paradoxically responsible for producing this modern secular phenomenological condition. In contrast, I argue that, while the Puritans did indeed assume time as a homogenous empty medium and “precious resource, not to be wasted” in the quest for personal self-discipline and religious industry, they also defined themselves according to a temporality of sacramentalism, repetition, and queerness that resisted this homogenous disciplinary time and oriented itself around recurrent experiences of personal depravity—or sinful feeling. This temporality of sinful feeling persists in the early American gothic not as something which the “secular” novel form critiques, but which it proposes as a morally desirable component of citizenship in the early American republic.
Among other theoretical approaches, Duration and Depravity engages the Puritan archive with postsecular theory (Talal Asad, Charles Taylor), queer temporality theory (Elizabeth Freeman, Lee Edelman), phenomenology of time and affect (Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Charles Altieri), and pain studies (Elaine Scarry). The first seven chapters examine the formation of a New England Puritan tradition of a temporality of sinful feeling in Puritan authors (Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, Michael Wigglesworth, and Jonathan Edwards). Through a reading of Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 gothic novel Wieland, chapter eight contends that the gothic tragedy of the novel transmits a Puritan lesson about the need for responsible American citizens to embrace rather than repudiate a temporality of sinful feeling as a method of judgement and self-discipline. Duration and Depravity concludes by suggesting that the early American gothic style portrays a depraved temporality which it inherits from Puritanism and transmits in “secular-religious” form as an important source of responsible republican selfhood. The early American gothic is not so much a secular critique of Puritan origins as it is a carrying forward of Puritanism as itself a necessary form of self-critique and democratic citizenship.