Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

I chose to study the Harlem Renaissance because all the books and poetry and art I have seen and read that have come out of the Harlem Renaissance have been some of the most influential, true, and beautiful pieces of art and literature I have been exposed to. Somehow, after being repressed for such a time in their history, and maybe because of that, when the Blacks of America stood up, stretched, smiled and let their voices be heard, there were angels dancing on their tongues and doves flew from their fingertips. Or, that's how I saw it at least. It was beautiful. Authors like James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes emerged and shared themselves. They saw a beauty in the human condition and human relations that is rarely equaled. There is some process that occurs when a people go through something collectively, as a people, and come out from it still singing, thriving, and moving as men. That is what I admire about these artists, and it is that thriving element in their work, be it sad, be it happy, be it urban or rural, be it violent or be it romantic -- the feeling that permeates their voices draws me to them.

Zora Neale Hurston's story "Sweat" empowers the black woman, like usual. the skinny, shy woman rises up to her potential and shows us how strong she is. "Delia's habitual meekness seemed to slip from her shoulders like a blown scarf." Her abusive husband is a good-for- nothing, worst-sort-on-earth type who sleeps around and scares poor delia with snakes. He gets what was coming to him anyway, the result of his own prank: a rattlesnake bite and death. "She never moved, he called, the sun kept rising."
Early on in the story, Delia is shown as a hard-working, submissive woman, eager to make her comfortable home even more comfortable by working hard and sweating hard -- doing whatever needed to be done for life to be worth living. But that husband made her shoulders low:"Delia never looked up from her work, and her thin, stooped shoulders sagged further." Everyone loved her from afar, she was a beautiful woman beaten down by a man over fifteen years, but still strove for everything. A happy woman sings and so she sang after she declared: "Ah hates you tuh de same degree dat Ah useter love yuh." and had that man leave her house.
This woman rid herself of her man just like the Black people rid their backs of whites, in a way, in Harlem, in their own cultures, in their writing and in their singing, before they had true freedom (by law).
I love in Hurston's novels, her rural settings, her slow towns and southern heat that virtually pours out of her writing like I can feel in on the street. The people are care free, the men are lazy as Rip Van Winkle ("The village men on Joe Clark's porch even chewed cane listlessly.") and stars twinkle in everyone's eyes.
Her words are inspirational, and moving. They move the part of you that grew up a long time ago, the part of your parents that did that too. She touches the freedom that everyone wants to feel all the time and touches the spot in me that wants to break free every second of my life.
This is a true Rebirth.


The poets all hold a simplicity in their poetry that moves me with its beauty like a sunset, or a full moon -- so simple yet so powerful.
Countee Cullen could display his bitterness in 12 short lines, 3 short verses, but it makes me sigh when he closes with "That's all I remember." How fleeting and frustrating!
Langston Hughes softens me with his personal touches. He holds the world and makes it his. "My soul runs deep like the rivers." His budding curiosity, his love for the land, the histories of his life and his country. Everything is so obvious with him, he could (and did) touch a whole population with his verse.
Edwin Arlington Robinson in Richard Corey displays a very subtle knife about a beautiful man, patient but boring people, the man's evidential suicide.

"He was always human when he talked

But still he fluttered pulses when he said

'Good-morning,' and he glittered when he walked"

Sad, sad, sad is when a man can inspire but he can't move others to action. I am not sure, this is what our poet wanted to express but he expressed that to me, and he expressed how much people can misunderstand. I wonder if they misunderstood him too...
Frost brought poetry to daily life. He wrote of his frustrations like they were works of art, his convictions like philosophical maxims (maybe he thought they were that good) and he gave a little cuteness to his rhyme, a little familiarity to his verse. He was a poet for the working man, for the man of reason and he reasoned in Mending Wall:
"There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard."
yet he keeps a magical edge to fight and wend his way through his words.

REALism

The story of the woman, by Katie Chopin, tells of the time when she becomes free. First, from others. Then, by death. "she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature." Chopin exposes a scene of domestic uncertainty and possibly grief, but which turns into a scene of personal liberation. In the late 1800s, women were attached to men. They could not really have independent lives if/when they were young. Chopin was giving a general situation. She was showing us a known-to-be delicate woman. She was showing us worried friends and a death announcement of a husband. But this woman, "whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength," had more in her than was thought. With the death of her husband she could become a human, a woman. "She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life." It was her springtime then. " The delicious breath of rain was in the air." She felt grief, but rose above in her liberated mind.

Everything in this story is told with a delicate perfection. Each word simple but very representational of the emotions going on. Chopin describes the scene, "the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair," she describes the things going on in the woman's head, the look of her eyes, the rise and fall of her breathing bosom. What could draw one in more? We see natural life, (in the end) natural disappointment, natural grief and natural worry; emotions that we all experience and that we can all relate to. The Realists saw this ability to relate of their readers and decided that this was the way to go. I personally don't know. Although realism is described as being the most realistic, the most life-like, way to write, the writing doesn't even have to describe a scene to be realistic. It has to capture and copy the thoughts, the inner workings, the machines beneath the sidewalk of everyone's mind and relate them to paper. The writer must write in a way that says, "Paper, this is man -- just believe me." And that, is the most realistic realism of all. I think Katie Chopin has this.


Fredrick Douglass and his tale of amazing strife to become a man again and it being almost as good as being free: Douglass was upset about the degradation of the man as a slave, one of the worst things that can happen to men, and he wants to make people see what its like, feel how he felt, understand plantation life like he lived plantation life. "I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died." Douglass had a strong intellectual mind but with the hard work he could no longer think. He barely had time to sleep, nonetheless dream. "Work, work, work was scarcely more the order of the day than of the night." He was a man turned into "a brute".
It seems like heresy against humanity for men to be treated like this. By another man, by a system of life, by machines -- man can do so much better. People reading his words might have been able to understand what this oppression was when they had never experienced it before. The time he spent, the life he didn't have a chance to lead. "I spent this [Sunday] in a sort of beast- like stupor, between sleep and wake, under some large tree." Fredrick Douglass had a high hope for humanity; he had great respect for all people and though he felt weak, he could with an elevated sense of self become free inside, if not on the outside. "He only can understand the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who had himself repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery. I felt as I never felt before. It was a glorious resurrection from the tomb of slavery to the heaven of freedom."
Douglass presents every detail for the reader. His words are straightly set and direct. They are simple enough for any reader, and they are empowering enough, too, for the weary-eyed stranger. He tries to make everything real. Nothing is romantic in his story. He walks his seven miles and is tired at the end of it. He works his 14 hours and his is done when they are done. He sits in stupor beneath the tree like any man would, even now, even today. This is an example of a presentation of events, a plotted (though true) story, that serves as a persuasive piece of writing because of its moral. Which is how most realist writings are; they have their moral that is ingrained into the story as they are naturally ingrained in life that makes the writing seem even more realistic, because it presents one of life's secrets to us, when we've only ever heard it in our minds.


The movie Requiem for a Dream displays a certain profound realism while maintaining a beautiful filming technique, and its impressive. Requiem for a Dream has the same realist style that was above talked about; the life represented is real, but the minds represented ring true as well. It was one of the most desturbing movies I have ever seen but yet it has this truth in it that makes it enticing, alluring, and yet frightening. Movies like this present pieces of life, like the realists of a century ago, that we haven't experienced, or dreamed about living. They are like foreign lands brought much closer, because they include elements of our own lives and attach a different face.

Dark Romanticism

Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe all went through pretty rough childhoods with sketchy backgrounds. None of them were raised happily, half were orphans, and there was death and poverty and shame deeply ingrained in their brains. Their eyes were stuck in the mud but they all attained a pretty magnificent level of beauty, truth and mastery of language in their writing.

I am but a naive Transcendentalist. I believe in the good around me, I believe life is everything, can be everything, will be everything, has been everything if one lets it. I can see the good all over this world, and in love, and I believe that saying evil exists is creating evil itself. This id not to deny the greatness of the Dark Romantics, because I am a big fan of Herman Melville. All three of these writers had beautiful senses of reason and a down to earth style and humour that makes their work quite timeless.

In Poe's Hop-Frog, one can easily see Poe's distaste for much of society's men. His story tells the tale of a boisterous king and his councilors who under the revenge of their jester, die a smoky charred death 30 feet up in the air and captured in a chandelier. The King had dishonored a woman, laughed at everyone else's oddities and not cared a whim, thus this, for Hop-Frog the jester was enough reason to die. And it sure did prove a point I suppose. Poe can see these aspects of man as common place and the under-dog seems always to be driven to madness in Poe's stories.
In the king's presence the jester "placed the goblet nervously on the table, and looked round upon the company with a half -- insane stare. They all seemed highly amused at the success of the king's 'joke.'" Poe's character is constantly jovial and laughs at everything, but the king does not think about anything, especially not the feelings of his victims. "Whether people grow fat by joking, or whether there is something in fat itself which predisposes to a joke," Poe is not a fat man at all, and he does not pretend to joke.
You can see the evil in all of the characters in this story as plain as daylight, and though Poe starts will his wit and lyric all enticing, he lacks the courage to go forward long with a good attitude. In all of Poe's stories there is always the point of no return in which the character is marked bad for ever on.
In the Raven, Poe reaches that point at the second to last verse after the Raven has repeated once more "nevermore" to Poe's question on the woman Lenore's presence in heaven:
"Be that our sign of parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting--
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul has spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!
The poet is frustrated by the bird's resolve, and he is struck to madness and desperation in faint hopes that this mythic bird is there to answer all he needs. He finds this to be untrue, and for life, therefore, to be dull and useless. Which could have likely been how Poe felt himself when his wife was dying. That there was no going forward. This idea is dramatic and dark, something typical of the Dark Romantic era, but ever more so to Edgar Allan Poe himself who is the era's best literary example of that.
Poe's life was tumultuous and stormy intermittent with: serious bouts of drinking that once got him fired from a publishing house; He married his cousin when she was 13 years old but she fained to be 21; He was found delirious and in a stranger's clothes on the streets of Baltimore before he died. He was an interesting man, and this unique but genuine mind made him a literary sensation and a household name in the 1840s, despite his erratic behavior. It was his mind that made him unique, not any movement, and though he became quite famous, I doubt he ever thought of himself as in a movement of writers. He was dark, and he was romantic, but he wouldn't have been nice on the street, or even in his own living room. It doesn't seem to me that his life had anything to do with his stories. He wrote this shocking macabre in a often playful manner, but his writing seems merely to show his great intellect and imagination. The subject matter, indeed, does include subjects that could only come from his deep emotions, but that could not rationally be explained.

Transcendentalism....

I am a very transcendental thinker. I believe, like Emerson and Thoreau, in the goodness of man, in the strength of the individual, and in the grace of God present in the good acts of men.

The Transcendentalists of the mid-1800s were new minds in their day. The idea to go back to nature, to return to who we truly are, was almost unheard of in the early days of America. Our new nation was about progress and invention; it was not about humans, it was about humanity. The Puritans who came before the Independence believed only in following like sheep under the rule of God, working to survive, but really living seemed like either nonsense, heresy, or dreams. The Transcendentalists believed that dreams come true.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in Nature : "The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible." With this statement one can see that Emerson knew something that many were ignoring. In the 1840s Polk was taming the West under a reasoning called Manifest Destiny that gave men a god-given right to take all the land they could. Men worked and traded, bought and sold for profit, for goods, for industry, for everything that they could ever hold in their hands. Emerson understood the value of things of a higher scale: the beauty of the unattainable, the value of the untouched, the wisdom of the wilderness. (If Emerson was ever the president of the United States, we'd have a much wilder and wiser country.) He continues, in Nature, "few adult persons can see nature...at least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child." I find him most wise in "the lover of nature," and thus a truly alive man, "is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other." There is nothing more true. Emerson believes in the goodness of man, the grace that shines through; he simply understands that men are losing this in their interactions with other men. There is something that needs to be changed, the misunderstood by society are the only truly great men and women, but he provides no options for salvation. Whereas the Puritans said we need salvation for being born as demon-ish men, the Transcendentalists said that we need salvation from being the foolish men we are trained into being; "The voices we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter the world." (from Self-Reliance). Why, oh why is this so?! What goes wrong when a group of good individuals get together? How is it that they can make bad decisions, forget the virtue of helping others, forget the needs that every man needs?

I don't know. And neither really did Henry David Thoreau. He just laughed at it, and turned his back. He did not turn his back intellectually -- his mind was on the bettering of our society all his life, but his actions denied that any problems existed. This is so possible still! An individual life can live true and free despite a government or a society, denying them, perfecting them on a small inaudible level. Thoreau knew this very well: "There will never be a really free and enlightened state, until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power." Though Thoreau still believed in a government (it seems he did not ever fathom life with one) he knew that the individual had all the power inside himself and the government would never cease to be oppressive till this power was seen. Thoreau gave good advice, treated himself as an equal with every other man and thought that if other men just sat down to envision and question want they wanted (especially in terms of a kind of government) then we would have want we wanted, "that [would] be one step toward obtaining it."

What I really like about these men is that they are brutally honest and overwhelmingly hopeful. There was never an end, there were never battles lost, they lived until they died and they made the most out of what they could during their lifetimes. These Transcendental ideas were new and truly American ideas. No one else had every expressed them so eloquently before. The Transcendentalists really gave hope to the American man, and still do.

Considering your second scenario, if I were Chris, Chris would change his career, give up a money making career and go to teacher's school. "Imitation is suicide" and "he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion" says Emerson, and so he must. Chris will never truly succeed in Law if he goes into law school knowing he doesn't really want to be there; that is fact (though unproven [sometimes the heart knows more in the end than the mind]). And if his wife is unhappy with him for not choosing the wealthier career plan, then maybe he shouldn't have married her.

Romanticism in America

Rip Van Winkle is a charming story by Washington Irving that tells a fabulous tale and swears its true. It takes place before and after the Revolutionary War in a lazy town about a lazy man. Idle, not lazy. Though his wife scolds him for his idle behavior, I don't see anything wrong with it. He is very happy with his friends who just sit around and read and talk and watch the sun move across the sky. I especially liked the comment on how the townspeople could know the time of day by looking at the placement of one old man on the porch of the town inn: "he took his seat from morning till night just moving sufficiently to avoid the sun and keep in the shade of a large tree; so that the neighbors could tell the hour by his movements as accurately as by a sun-dial." But his idle behavior, his lackadaisical moods, and his friendly demeanor take him into the myths of the Catskill mountains and through time in one night. That dreaded flagon!
The story is very romantic, in the way that 'romantic' means 'like a novel'; the story is well plotted, the characters nicely developed. Everything ends happily, no one is severely in the dumps with the effects, and the causes weren't serious anyway. No one would ever react to anything that way now. (I only wish they did). The lazy town, the present that doesn't worry about the future, or mingle with the past (excepting the ghosts) -- these aspects of life are so absent in today's world. Perhaps they were only fiction in Winkle's day too and Irving was the Hollywood man to get people's hearts dreaming. I wish Hollywood got my spirits up and my mind amused in the same way now that Irving did in his words. He had a sense of humour, a lack of seriousness about his work, his writing, and his life yet these senses made his stories all the more interesting, and all the more truthful.


Thanatopis is about a commune with nature, in life and in death. We read here of nature's good tidings, its comforting arms, its gentle loving embrace when we walk through its pastures, but also as we lie down for ever in our graves. Somewhat of a consolation for death -- do not dread dying, he says, for everyone will die with you, someday.

In the Ropewalk, the poet is trying to convey the perfumy air of his time period with the ongoing, amazingly long room where rope is wound. The images of the circus tightrope walker, the woman fetching water from a well, the ship's anchor being dropped -- all of these uses for the rope! Though it be a monotonously dreary job, the poet daydream's about his product's future. A thing that we barely notice but who's presence is everywhere, in everything we do; pointed out to us -- quite a beautiful thing. I also see a sense of the rope worker, at work, thinking of all these scenes as the future of his products and thus making them worth making.


The Painting (on Siegmund's blog) represents the beauty of nature, and it sort of overcomes the viewer. Though perhaps enlightenment does not spring from viewing the painting itself, the realization of what it would be like to actually see that scene, is staggering. the Romantics thought that this natural beauty was a goodness unlike any other and very powerful by itself.
There are many such paintings by Romantic painters from all over the western world. Most all of them focus on a surreal event or scene that tries to tear from our hearts a sort of longing, magic, beauty that will make us too see truth.
I thought likely of this here painting by Vibert.
There is some element in it that really emanates a sense of wonder and beauty. A goodness that has left the religious man in death and hearkened the body of an angel over a desolate world.

My Rationalism

The Puritans were noted to have been people of acceptance. Their rules and styles were formed not by them but by some "divine" force, above them, or at least out of their lives. The Puritans feared God, they thought he was above us as an angry father, a creator, but also a destroyer, a master with a whip. The Rationalists knew things were different. They knew because they made their rules. They knew because they had proved it by using their minds. For the Rationalists, who also were devout, God was their creator that made the particles form into human beings. Man was smart enough to use himself and be all that he could be, to learn all that was in the world, to understand God’s reason for making us. Jonathan Edwards would have been horrified at men’s insolence, but these Rationalists thought that their way was the way to progress, and they were right.

Ben Franklin was one of the most famous Rationalist thinkers. In his Autobiography he proves his belief system with his mere train of thought; he provides all his actions with legitimate reasons. In leaving his hometown of Boston, "it was likely I might if I stay soon bring myself to scrapes…my indiscreet reputation….make me pointed at…as an infidel or atheist……..in three days found myself in New York." He is a quick reasoner, and he makes what needs to be done, done very quickly once he comes to his conclusions. He also shows that he believes in his own might: "I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into," even enough so to make a step-by-step guide for making himself into a morally perfect individual. If God made the body, he could make the Man. In his 13 rules, he tries to make already existing rules better, looser or tighter, stricter or less bound, enough so that he makes the best list he can procure for his maximal benefice.

My own 13 propositions for virtue:
Sincerity - because with honesty is truth and with sincerity is beauty
Industriousness - for what one wants often requires work and no work is too much for what one really wants
Frugality - because living cheap means truly living, no waste required
Humility - no man is better than I, and I am no better than any man
Dedication - everything worth doing, worth thinking, worth loving, is really worth it, and there is no need to not be seriously into it
Love - acceptance is true love
Tranquility - I need my peace of mind to be able to do all these things
Curiosity - Life should never get boring
Consideration - we live with other beings that are beings like ourselves
Wonderment - we should know that there are no limits to what there is
Silence - speak only what needs to be said, and that no one else will say
Inventiveness - newness is beautiful too
Simplicity - needs are accepted, wants are not necessary
This list of 13 virtues is how I already strive to live. To do them all requires only patience with oneself, with others, and dedication to one's principles -- the first thing to master. We cannot get bored with ourselves or our surroundings or we will fall into a depression that will make true virtue, irretrievable.

The American Declaration of Independence also holds a great deal of Rationalist thought in it. (After all, Ben Franklin was very influential on our young nation.) Firstly, in the Preamble, God is mentioned as a creator, but not necessarily a ruler. In fact he endows us with some "inalienable rights." There is also a great respect and pride for mankind and his opinions. The United States would not be a nation governed by anyone, only looked over by a God – but ruled by all men. There is also the great factor of Proof that comes as all the errors of King George upon the colonies. "Let the facts be submitted to the candid world."
There are many documents of the early United States that share rationalist thought because this thought process was a new and highly improved way of thought that seemed much more efficient, and more intelligent, than the deaf thoughts under so many blind rulings that had prospered in the past.

The Puritans: beliefs and texts

The Puritan vein of Christianity erupted out of the strict Episcopalian Church of England, established under King Henry VIII that was based more upon the hypocrisy of England’s king than it was upon any religious scruples. The Puritans believed that due to Original Sin – when Eve stole the apple from the Tree of Knowledge and thus got herself and Adam banished from the Garden of Eden – human kind was destined to live at the mercy of God’s wrath for ever after. This meant that men had to live life at the bare minimum, not allowing themselves to be coerced into merriment, fun, or love; life was but a mere appeal to God not to send them to Hell until their lives were over and they had begotten more forgivers into this world. Yes, this implied that even living as good citizens of God’s cruel world, we could still not go to Heaven, because our ancestors had committed too evil a crime to ever be acquitted -- although there did exist some who held a divine and inexplicable right to be in god’s favor, and were therefore appointed as priests and ministers to interpret God’s messages.

Often times, looking back on the past of Christianity, we see that those that appointed themselves at the top of a religious hierarchy, were not necessarily the most honest or pious people. We see, many times over, the Pope setting rules for Christians that had no roots in the scriptures, ministers seeking glory from poor and illiterate but god-revering peasants, whole sects of a religion forming on one man’s illusionary idea, and a whole population following it as the truth. Many Puritans got their ideas of purity from the Swiss reverend John Calvin (famous for Calvinism, one of the earliest forms of Protestantism) who started the idea of predestination, which said that people were selected to heaven by birth, not by behavior, and that only a certain elite could ever dream of seeing the gates of heaven. Though the Puritans leaders had these ideas, it was more over the determination and durability of the Puritan settlers in Massachusetts that allowed them to live for many winters, alone and self-sufficient, yet still hopeful for a bountiful society, that makes them so important in our American history.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, a sermon delivered by the Massachusetts minister Jonathan Edwards, is a prominent example of the belief system that was drilled into the Puritan population of early America. The whole sermon is an explanation of how awful humans are, how ugly they are in god’s eyes, how god is merely “holding us over a fiery pit with two fingers.” The real Christianity comes in with the fact that we are supposed to have an undying love for this God, because he does not drop us into the screaming pit of hell that we really deserve (due to the famous Original Sin). The idea of this sermon was to make people see themselves through God’s eyes, which, says Edwards, is like looking at the grossest monsters and beasts that we can imagine; the sermon was to try to make the people understand our true natures; but moreover, to scare a generation of people into not really living.

Why did a religion that so explicitly tells us to hate ourselves, that explains to us that we are natural failures no matter what we do, and that sorrow and pain are the only feelings we are worth feeling, appeal to such a group of people? How did this idea come about? Though the Puritans were taught so much of this self-denial, they still had children, which means they obviously couldn’t have followed the rules as strictly as they would have if they thought a living hell equaled the truth. But why is it that whole groups of people can just be led around through life by others?

There must have been some merits to their system though, because they did live pretty able lives after they had sailed to America. In William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, his account of the lives of the newly settled pilgrims, the settlers are a dedicated community: friendly with the natives, willing to learn from others to fix their erred ways, and communal in life. After all, their community started with small hundred or so persons and lost about half of those in the first winter, so they must have been a tightly knit group.

Bradford’s account is another good example of Puritan literature, because, starting the minute the group arrived on land, his words are filled with blessing, thanking and marveling the power and grace of God: “they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the fast and furious ocean.” Everything that happens to them, like their treaty with the natives, is gift from God, and everything they do is for the Advancement of the Christian Faith (though this is normal for a religious spokesman) yet also the community also has a great faith in each other. It is interesting to see such a strong community, and we wonder whether this strength would have been the same in a community that didn’t have a religious concordance...

Its interesting to see how easily the English found the natives of this land, even thought of it as a blessing that they had met native’s who spoke English even, and yet the settlers still had no qualms towards taking over the entire land as if it were a vast, empty wasteland. The English are our ancestors, they are whom we study in our textbooks, and yet American natives populated so much of America that the settlers could run into them blindly. How is it possible that our cultures can so proud that we can’t even notice another culture that doesn’t have our same skin color as being a culture? The Puritan communities knew that their neighbors were not stupid; the natives impressed them (“...Indian came boldly amongst them and spoke to them in broken English, which they could well understand but marveled at...”) and yet they could trample them down to near extinction, as if they were ghosts. No wonder William Bradford recognized “this is men's corruption.... seeing all men have this corruption in them,” (and the Puritan in him continues) “God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them.”

It is obvious in both the studied texts the Total Depravity aspect of Puritan life made surviving quite difficult for those first settlers in America, yet it was also this dedication, in their simple lives that kept them alive (for if they had not busied themselves on work, who knows if we would be here today...). They also received harrowing teachings about their own innate evil by the “saints” and “chosen ones” of God, their religious interpreters, who could only make their sad situation worse.