V-2nd, Chap 7

[alice wellintown]

We mentioned David S. Reynolds's _Beneath the American Renaissance:
The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville_ where
we find in the chapter, "Types of American Womanhood", a discussion of
the profound influence the "last puritan", as he is called, Jonathan
Edwards had on American thought and on its literature. Edwards's brand
of Calvinism (he had one foot in the Puritan world and one in the
Enligtenment world..not unlike Henry Adams who had one foot in the
20th century and one foot in the 19th leaning toward the 18th)
combines the Enlightenment cosmology that features a God who has not
simply turned His key in the Newtonian clock-work-universe and walked
away, but has deliberatley cut Himself off from Humanity. In His
terrifying inscrutability He still torments Man who is reduced to a
worthless wretch. The response to Edwards, in part, is the Angel, who
functions as Angels do in Roman Catholicism. This Angelic figure is
familiar to readers as Hester Prynn who is, of course, no mere Angel,
but the Virgin whose child is the Magical Pearl.
Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix forever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock




On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 8:43 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> page 167...
>
> Right there are the very words used by Calvinists, to describe the Protestant
> Ethics' belief system: Victoria Wren's
> "implicit acceptance of the four episodes as outward and visible signs of an
> inward and spiritual grace belonging to
> Victoria alone".....................
>
> Right before that we see a description of Roman Catholicism--"her private,
> outre' brand of Roman Catholicism merely
> condoned what the Church as a whole regarded as sin"--as the very Protestantism
> described above when the real
> tenets of Catholicism are violated with
> self-justification..............................
>
> TRP, Catholic-raised, surely EX- by now, makes sure the Protestant Ethic and the
> Spirit of Capitalism is what he
> is intending here................about Victoria Wren.....
>
>
>
>