Dormant talismans: Reconceiving America's spiritual and occult notions of identity (Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Studies of early American religion and culture traditionally identify Puritanism as a comprehensive theological and cultural framework by which subsequent cultural developments may be interpreted. Recent studies by Jon Butler, John Brooke, and David Hall suggest that occultism challenges this Puritan-centered view of America's intellectual and cultural origins by examining how it influenced American literature and culture. These studies, however, do not examine the means by which occult lore and practice in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American literature affects the narrative means of representing the formation of personal identity.; In seventeenth and eighteenth century America, occultism existed not only as a tension within orthodox religious practices but also as a tension within one's understanding of the self. Though writers such as Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards attempt to divide Puritanism from occultism, these efforts fail when they realize that the two must exist alongside each other in an ongoing tension making the difference between saving grace and damnation difficult to determine. By the nineteenth century, occultism no longer appears as a threatening alternative to Puritan spirituality. Authors such as Lydia Maria Child and Nathaniel Hawthorne draw therefore upon occult forms and idioms to explore how they modify traditional notions of an American identity rooted in New England Puritanism. Child, for example, locates her argument concerning the relationship of Native Americans to the American identity within a divinatory spell, while Hawthorne draws on belief in ghosts and spirits to challenge traditional American modes of representing the past.; The circulation of occult lore and practice in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American literature affects narrative representation of religious faith and the formation of personal identity. The literary use of the occult in this period modifies the way evidence for faith becomes available and how it is received and circulated culturally. For representations of occult lore and practice to circulate through literary texts, then, is to find opportunity not only to question the means of narrating religious faith, evidence, and experience, but also to inquire how they reflect larger the narrative patterns used to describe the nature of culture.