MDDM related: Early American Sex (book review)
Doug Millison
pynchonoid at yahoo.com
Thu Sep 12 00:33:09 CDT 2002
Sexual Revolution in Early America
by Richard Godbeer (Gender Relations in the American
Experience), 414 pp, $34.95, ISBN 0-8018-6800-9,
Baltimore, Md, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
reviewed by
Robert A. Nye, PhD
Oregon State University
Corvallis
"Godbeer is at pains to counter the literary portrait
of Puritan sexuality offered up by Nathaniel
Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter of a dour, punitive,
and joyless citizenry for whom sexual coupling was
inherently shameful and rigorously connubial. He cites
the impassioned prayers of Puritan divines begging
sensuous union with a beauteous Christ, their
celebration of marriage as a sacramental and human
bond between life mates, and the emphasis they placed
on redemption from sexual sin over hellfire and
damnation. Part of this positive valuation of the joys
of the marriage covenant was strategic, a means of
lessening the appeal of informal unions that were
still recognized by much of the populace as equivalent
to the sacramental variety. But there is also no
doubting the desire of Puritan elites to confine
sensuality to marriage as a mode of social discipline
in a new and uncertain world. To achieve this end,
both the law and the enormous shaming power of church
communities were brought to bear on identifying,
punishing, and, in all but the most recalcitrant
cases, redeeming sexually errant citizens. If they did
not first run afoul of a watchful magistracy,
neighbors or relations were virtually adjured to act
as their brothers' keepers and report sexual
irregularities to church authorities. It was often
preferable to undergo the humiliation of a public
shaming within church walls for fornication or
adultery than run the gauntlet of the courts where the
punishments might entail whipping, mutilation, or
death.
Godly though their enterprise might be, the early
colonists had little doubt about the tenuousness of
civilization in the new world; the weather was fierce,
the Indians were hostile, and there was little time
for education or the cultural refinements of Europe.
The overriding fear was of a kind of degeneration in
which brute nature would progressively animalize those
Americans who did not obey the laws of God and man or
who yielded to their lowest impulses. On the sparsely
settled frontier, in the seaports and big towns, and
in the more loosely administered Southern colonies,
premarital cohabitation, prostitution, interracial
unions, incest, and even polygamy flourished. It is
not surprising, therefore, that elites regarded
bestiality and sodomy with particular horror and
believed interracial marriage to be a step toward
perdition and, more palpably, barbarism. Such behavior
threatened the whole of colonial society; it was
merely the end point of a slippery slope that might
begin with the solitary vice of masturbation but would
surely worsen and spread contagiously. The relative
transparence of sexual behavior seemed to many a small
price to pay to avoid such a fate."
review continues at
http://jama.ama-assn.org/issues/v288n10/ffull/jbk0911-3.html
=====
<http://www.dougday.blogspot.com/>
<http://www.online-journalist.com/index.html>
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