Mission San Luis Rey de Francia...
What is it Saying? What is it Willing to Say?

The first place I went when I visited at the Mission was its cemetery. It is open, outside the thick adobe walls of the Mission "garrison" itself, and I thought it could offer perhaps the most honest and human--the most "unscripted"--story the Mission might tell. I entered the cemetery with no particular religious reverence, but I did walk its paths and across its cool green grass in the hope I would hear the low, muted, but constant murmuring common to almost every cemetery. After a bit--long enough for the two other living people there to leave--I knelt close to the ground near where the children are buried. I heard it; the murmuring was there, and it was everywhere, echoing faintly from gravestone to gravestone, and bouncing off the low, thin, and bleached-bone white adobe walls surrounding the cemetery.

 “¿Por qué somos tan pocos?" a scratchy old voice several yards away asked of no one in particular. "Una vez que fuéramos tan muchos y tan fuertes. iPor qué somos tan pocos... y tan débiles?"

Another dry old voice answered: "We are still many, but, alas it is true: we are no longer so strong. The Mission, she is no longer so strong. When we, some of the first to feel the dark in here, the first to lie down here, when we last saw her, she was big--muy grande, y también espléndido y magnífico--but even she fell down into the dirt, like us. She died of a broken heart, a stolen heart. Her heart was ripped from her by government robbers. And like the frail and bent vieja abuela, she fell to the ground, broken and alone, no longer needed."

I could understand what these voices--or were they just wind in leaves?--were saying. Except for this graveyard, the Mission had been built as a fortress, the church itself making up just one corner of the overall structure. Its original construction plan shows a building complex much bigger than the current Mission. Its grounds had a radius of as much as fifteen miles (an area potentially more than 700 square miles).

"Había muchos indios paganos a convertir," whispered another entombed, withered voice from beneath an old, cracked marble headstone.

Yes, I thought, there were many native Indians to be converted to Christianity. At least, that's what you believed. Did one of the shamans of the indigenous Indians--perhaps from one of the Pala clans?--suddenly have a vision and report to his people that they must convert to Christianity (specifically, Catholicism), a religion of which they were not even aware at the time? I don't think so. But you believed they must be converted. That is why you and a few others came to this valley with Father Antonio Peyri, of the Franciscan order, and built a mission. And that is why you convinced or coerced or otherwise caused the natives of the valley to help build the Mission for you, and to till the soil and grow crops for you, and to hunt and fish for you, and to tend your livestock. And in return, you converted them to Christianity. Maybe.

The Mission is certainly a monument to your success. There are only Spanish and Anglo names on the gravestones here in the cemetery. In the Mission itself, there is only Spanish architecture and accouterments, except for a few intricately woven baskets for which the "Luiseño" Indians are rightfully famous. The lavenderia one hundred yards to the south was the place--you proudly point out--where the Indians did your laundry for you. Was that part of the covenant? "Luiseño" is the name you gave them, carelessly lumping all the clans and tribes together. Was that part of the covenant also? I wonder. As I look around the graveyard, I can't help but think that neither was part of any "covenant." You just didn't know any better. As far as you knew, all Indians were the same, and they were all heathen and in need of conversion. Perhaps it is the quiet, or the long and low shafts of late afternoon light, or the lack of any wind, or that the only noise, the only "voices" I hear are yours coming up from the ground so faintly and so meekly now; perhaps it is all of these things that make me think you truly believed you were giving the Indians a "gift" when you tried to give them Christianity. And perhaps you were giving them a gift. Perhaps. But ‑ and I cannot help but think this ‑ it had to be a gift, or your Christian belief system would have been of no value to them... or to you. It had to be a "gift" worth giving to them, or it would have been worthless, even to you. Alas, now you know. Now you are no longer of this Earth. You know what is beyond, what happens, what is true. Was it truly a gift? Or was it a need--your need?  

How silent the graveyard has suddenly become. Cat got your tongues? Truth got them? I suppose I will never know. And you will never tell me, will you?

Silent, eh? Well, I really didn't think you would fall into that simple trap. But I had to try. I will go ask the Fathers entombed here, in the small friars' crypt built into the side of the church.

In an almost painfully small room built into the side of the church next to the cemetery, each of the Franciscans buried here lies in what looks for all the world like a file drawer with a hand-lettered front. Black lettering on white. Everything is painted white. Like a cloud, a Camelot, a dream sitting on the ground. Perhaps that's all it was, really: a dream...

Fathers, brothers: did you bring a gift?

From inside the file drawers comes a faint rustling, like the far away raking of brittle brown leaves.

"Por supuesto era un regalo. Why else would we bring it?" faintly crackled one frail Franciscan voice. "Why else endure the hardships of frontier Mission life, far from home, muy lejos de todos sabíamos y amamos. We did not come for riches, as you can see from the rooms inside. They are small and crude, and built only to sustain us," the voice rustled, perhaps a bit too plaintively.

"Estábamos solos. Alone, and far from everything... everything but the love of Christ, which was always with us, wherever we went. That love, that boundless love, is what we brought to the pagans. And we taught them agriculture and husbandry and iron-working skills. How could these not be gifts?" demanded the painful whisper of another voice.

But after the secularization in 1834, the Mission fell into ruin, in both idea and fact. Why did Christ not protect you and your beloved Mission from that?

"Es verdad. The Mission, and we Franciscans with her, fell from favor here, fell from the favor of the new and revolutionary government in Mexico," another, thinner voice sighed, as only the dead can sigh. "We were abandoned, and we had to abandon the Mission. But we never fell from God's favor. We are here, are we not? And is not the Mission restored to her former glory? Could that be anything but the favor of God shone upon us and the Mission?" The question seemed strangely hollow. Perhaps it was only the echo of the crypt.

Yes, I said, those things you say are true, more or less. But what of the Indians? You Franciscans had a religion and a home to return to, no matter how difficult that may have been for you to do. Did you leave them a religion to return to, a former home to find sanctuary in? The secularization was meant to replace one colonial system--religious missions--with another: secular pueblos. But the Mission lands were never given back to the Indians. They simply passed into the hands of a different, secularized upper class. The best the Indians could hope for was to get work on the pueblo lands, which had been their lands-- Indian lands--before you and before the pueblos.

iToda la gloria est6 al Dios!" rasped and raked another Franciscan friar from his own file. "Our plan worked, did it not? The pagans were converted to the One True Religion, and trained in our ways. In this way, they could get jobs in the pueblos. Praise God!"  

But most of them were not hired. Most were killed, I think, so none would claim their own lands back from the new Mexican government. Was this in your plan? Is this the way of God?  

There was no sound in the friars' crypt now save the far away raking of leaves. Dead, dry leaves. I had to look elsewhere, for the friars had turned their gaze--their tentative gaze?--away from me and toward Heaven. They would not answer. As so many before me had, I sought solace, and perhaps answers, in the church itself.

It was large, cool, and, for the most part, muted by darkness. But the altar was luminescent. It glowed in white and gold and radiant, celestial blue. Walking from the back of the church to the altar was a journey out of darkness into the light. And into the glory: the paintings of Christ and the Virgin of Guadalupe, among others, were larger than life and painted high enough on the wall behind the altar that they seemed to float above those who would stand at their feet, looking up at them, no doubt in both amazement and awe.

This was not the casual work of frontier missionaries. It was intricately calculated to inspire--and to awe, perhaps even into belief. The church was calibrated to convert, designed to pull nonbelievers delicately out of the "dark" of paganism and into the "light" of Christianity. Unlike the fortress of which this beautiful church is a part, the church itself is not of such a scale that it tries to force faith. Rather, it was designed to coerce and convince.

The rest of the Mission, taken from the outside, is a huge and mighty fortress, designed to awe those outside and protect those inside. In its bold, stark whiteness it still makes a clear, unmistakable statement. It says: I am Spain; I am the Catholic Church; I am strong, solid, substantial, and I am here to stay. If you wish to enter, knock on the huge, thick wooden doors, the fortress doors. Then, and only then, I will decide if you may enter.

As I walked away from the Mission, I realized there was much it did not say, and I realized that what was not said was just as important as what was.  

Except for a small display of the intricate basket-weaving art of the local Indians, there was no discernable acknowledgment of them ever having existed. Had they been assimilated, willingly or not? Or had they been eliminated? Had their religious beliefs and ways of life been recognized as valid and important? Or had those, too, been voided?

I looked back over my shoulder. When I saw once more the imposing fortress, almost painfully white in the afternoon sun against a deepening blue sky, I knew I would get no answer. And I remembered that no one in the graveyard or the friars' crypt had wanted to discuss it. And that there were no Indian names in either place.

Sadly, there were no "heathen" Indian burial grounds nearby where I might query. Why was that, I wondered? Looking once more at the Mission/fortress, I knew,

I left with only one side of the story. It was the side of the story the Mission offered me. But that did hint strongly about the other side. 

Appendix

Photos taken by the author.  We were unable to import the pictures as well as we would have liked.  The five photographs that follow are of these sites at the mission:

The Church

In the Graveyard

                                                        

Religion in Early Amenican Literature (1600-1855)  
          A Steady March from "Absolutely" to "Maybe"

That religion played a major role in the development of what loosely may be described as American literature (this paper will look almost in the whole at "United States literature") is a statement which would be little contested. In fact, the first stirrings of what more easily could have the label of "literature" attached to it than be called simply "prose" was written, in the main, to proselytize, preach, praise, teach, or demonstrate religion. Religion was central to nearly all the writings of the early European colonizers in the New World. As time went on, colonies took hold and began to do better than just barely survive and a distinct American culture developed.

The literary works of the colonists and, later, the citizens of a new country--the United States of America--also matured and took on their own particularly "American" characteristics, setting themselves apart from the European continent from whence their germinal phase came. Even though this new literature grew steadily in both scope of subject matter and artistic sophistication, it never lost its close ties with religion. In fact, it began to speak more and more eloquently in the language of the peculiarly American Puritanical idiom.

That idiom is made manifest in one particular and powerful way: unlike the general Catholic value structure, which is built upon faith, the Puritan and Pilgrim value structures were (and are) based upon morals. The Calvinist legacy in the United States was, then, one less a construct of salvation through faith than of a personal and community moral construct--it was more a code of ethics than a doctrine of redemption.

But there was a fundamental change from the earlier literature: as it developed, American literature became less absolute and more ambiguous in its religious underpinnings. It still reflected the Calvinist morality upon which United States culture was--and still is--based, but it moved further away from absolute answers and more toward a "here is the story; you figure it out" ambiguity. The literature still delivered a moral, but more and more, it was left to the reader to supply his or her own moral from the material the author offered. In about one-hundred years, the literature grew from the didactic and, in a personal-choice sense, impersonal moral certainty of Bradford and Rowlandson to the contemplative and much more personal-responsibility moral paradoxes of Hawthorne and Melville.

Was this a simple, unselfconscious evolution in literary style, or was it a maturing and strengthening of the literature and its writers which allowed--and perhaps demanded--that the previous and then current religious ideology and the moral id&s fixes of society needed to be questioned instead of being accepted out of hand?  

As the authors of the mid-nineteenth century might have said, "Hmm... That's a very good question."  

In The Beginning  
"The Old English Puritan was such an one, that honored God above all, and under God gave every one his due. His first care was to serve God, and therein he did not what was good in his own, but in God's sight, making the word of God the rule of his worship," (Geree, 3). Although the break with Catholicism in 1535 in England had moved some way toward the Puritan belief in an idea of religious authority grounded solely in Scripture, by substituting king for pope as the head of the church, England hadn't done all that much to set straight what was seen by Puritans and other separatists as an unnecessary, corrupt, and even idolatrous religious order (Gill, 1.9-21).  

To the Protestant colonizers of the area now known as New England--Puritan and Pilgrim alike--the fundamental daily dictum was the word of God. They had all come from England with the "great hope, for the propagating and advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world," (Wheelwright, 7,8). After having a bit of a navigational error place the Mayflower and William Bradford's Pilgrims ashore in the cold climes and dense, dark forests of Massachusetts, which would have been so far "in the back of beyond" that it must have made East Anglia look cosmopolitan and overcrowded to them, Bradford exhorted that they buck up and create a legacy that their children would look back on proudly. He adapted Deuteronomy 26:5, 7 to the situation, saying that he wanted their children to be able to say, "Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness; but they cried unto the Lord, and he heard their voice and looked upon their adversity," (Bradford, 250). His intention was to keep order and purpose among his people that they might survive. One could certainly argue that it worked, for the colony did survive.  

Was, though, Bradford saying, "Have faith and ye shall be saved?" This author thinks not. What Bradford did in choosing the particular words he did was set forth not a call to faith, but a moral challenge. He went on to say (nearly in the same breath), "Let them therefore praise the Lord, because He is good: and His mercies endure forever," (250). In other words, take what God has given us, be morally strong, and we shall be rewarded. From the beginning of Protestant settlement, the difference between a system of faith and a system of morality can be seen. Faith was not enough; success required moral rectitude. One must always keep in mind that the Congregational Pilgrim beliefs--Bradford's beliefs--were firmly rooted in Calvinistic predestination. Therefore there was no particular need to swear one's faith in God, rather to carry out God's preordained plan faithfully. The Plymouth Colony was in that plan. Bradford made sure of it: In these hard and difficult beginnings they found some discontents and murmurings arise amongst some, and mutinous speeches and carriages in other; but they were soon quelled and overcome by the wisdom, patience, and just and equal carriage of things, by the Governor and better part, which clave faithfully together in the main (2 5 1). "Wisdom, patience, just carriage?" The Pilgrims did not set about to individually seek and show faith. They held themselves and the others to the moral code of behavior.  

From Chapter XIX of Of Plymouth Plantation we learn the story of Thomas Morton of Merrymount, who was trading with the Indians and "...was so high as he scorned all advice," (257). Morton was stepping outside the boundaries of good communal moral conduct. Captain Standish and some others were dispatched to bring Morton into line, but Morton had barricaded himself in his dwelling with some of his friends. But Morton and his men were both too haughty and too drunk to protect themselves and thus were taken captive. Morton was shipped back to England (2 5 7). The lessons of the literature are clear: 1) Morton was an immoral man (haughty, individualistic, drunk), 2) the colony did their best to correct him, but 3) it was to no avail so he was separated from the colony. The story of Morton was not a story of faith, but of morality. 

A Woman Makes a Little Change  
Anne Bradstreet (1612?1672) arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in Boston, ten years after the founding of the Plymouth Colony just to the south. There she and her husband settled in with other Puritans, but soon left for Newtown (Cambridge), Ipswitch, and finally North Andover (Lauter, 289). Ms. Bradstreet's additions to the slowly growing canon of "American Literature" were in the Meditative Poem genre (Curry, 2/22/99). This structured form sets up a difficult situation; requires that the writer asks God for the grace necessary to understand, to find the rational in the irrational situation; attempts to understand from a point of despair; demonstrates affection for God rekindling as reason returns; and demonstrates the return of love--for God, for others, for circumstance.  

Bradstreet also wrote, as part of her poem, "A Dialogue Between Old England and New":
        These are the days the church's foes to crush, 
        To root out popeling's head, tail, branch, and rush. 
        Let's bring Baal's vestments forth to make a fire,
        Their mitres, surplices, and all their attire, 
        Copes, rochets, croziers, and such empty trash,
        And let their names consume, but let the flash 
        Light Christendom, and all the world to see
        We hate Rome's whore, with all her trumpery. (Bradstreet, 175)  

While maintaining her adroit poetic style, Bradstreet becomes somewhat strident in her condemnation of the "popeling" things which still "afflict" Europe. Given the corpus of her meditative and contemplative work, this is a quite striking bit of verse for Bradstreet.  

In any event, it is quite evident from her poem, "Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10thi, 1666," (Lauter, 313), that she is deeply imbued with the Puritanical beliefs of predestination (if the house burned, it was because an all-knowing, omnipotent God wanted it to burn), and that any such disaster is but another lesson for her to learn more about the behavior God wants of her. As defined above, that behavior is not ranting and raving, or disobedient questioning of God's good grace; it is a return to rationality. No matter what may beset her, as a Puritan it is her place to behave morally and rationally as determined by the strict Puritanical code. There is no room for excess, for individual interest, and especially for asking, "Why?" That question is always answered before it is even formed: because God had deemed it meet and right from the beginning.  

In only a few short years, though, things had changed just a bit. "Even as Puritanism mandated self-subordination to God, Anne Bradstreet invested herself in numerous roles, among them not only dutiful daughter and Puritan, but also devoted wife, mother, grandmother, poet, admirer of nature, and advocate of women's worth," (Blackstock, 39). Thus does the woman credited by most as the first published American woman poet move American literature a tiny bit away from Puritanical absolutism toward thought-provoking ambiguity.

Another Woman, Another Slight Shift
Another woman who contributed toward that end, perhaps without even being consciously aware of it, was Mary White Rowlandson [Talcott] (1637?- 1711). Rowlandson wrote one of the first "best-sellers" in American literature when she chronicled her abduction by and captivity among the Algonquin Indians in 1676 (Lauter, 340), in the process placing the Captivity Narrative genre in the growing canon of American literature. The Soveraignty and Goodness of GOD, Together With the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, along with the distinction of having one of the longest titles of any literary work, also had one of the longest runs of popularity, remaining successful into the nineteenth century (340). The Narrative was written in retrospect (it was published in 1682) and by request to serve a didactic role (Curry, 2/24/99). It was meant to demonstrate initiation into being a good Christian by surviving captivity by the Indians in all their heathen depravity, and as an initiation into being a good American by surviving the wilderness in all its vast and wild aloneness. It also served as a metaphor for facing the wilderness of Godlessness and finding salvation through God's providence. It was, coincidentally, the first in­depth narrative about the Indians, and it was a foreshadowing of the Gothic Tale genre, with the wilderness serving as the dark, hulking castle (Curry, 2/24/99). With all this, it was also the first woman's narrative, "a paripatetic record which, like the course of her journey, crosses and double-crosses the straight path of the story of her salvation, demonstrating that the contradictory trope of the woman traveler may express that which is suppressed in the dominant culture," (Wesley, 42).  

There is yet another interesting aspect to the Narrative: the fourth in Rowlandson's list of it remarkable passages of providence, which I took special notice of in my afflicted time," (Rowlandson, 360). Rowlandson noted of the Indians that even when their corn was cut down (destroyed), or if they were driven from where their food caches were, even in the middle of winter, ti yet how to admiration did the Lord preserve them for his holy ends, and destruction of many amongst the English! strangely did the Lord provide for them," (3 6 1). Rowlandson accounted for this by saying, "God strengthened them to be a scourge to his People," (361). Perhaps she was correct, but the account does leave a "perhaps." Perhaps God wasn't looking out just for "His chosen people," the whites, the Christians. That one "perhaps" leaves a bit of room for the reader to wonder, to consider an alternative. That one small "perhaps" leaves open the slightest room for ambiguity where none had been allowed before. If so, this becomes a turning point in American literature's movement from "absolutely" to "maybe." 

The Age of Enlightenment
Perhaps no movement would move religion in American literature from "absolutely" to "maybe" more than the Age of Enlightenment during the eighteenth century, and perhaps no person of letters in America so embodied and personified the Enlightenment than Benjamin Franklin. By his death in 1790, Franklin was ranked as a philosophe, and the equal of Voltaire and Rousseau (Lauter 717). Franklin did indeed belong to the Age of Reason (the Enlightenment), for he was an "infinitely reasonable" man. He was also the consummate Renaissance Man, as evidenced by his stove, sewers, street lighting, postal system, his bifocals, diplomacy, kite flying, and his new form of hospital in Philadelphia (Burke, 195, 278). This is only fitting, for the Enlightenment was a child of the Renaissance and the humanism and rationalism that had fueled it.  

The Enlightenment went through its adolescence between 1680 and 1720. By that time most of the major advances and alterations in science, philosophy, and economics had come into fruition. The Enlightenment was characterized by an optimistic faith in the ability of man to develop progressively by using reason. By coming to know both himself and the natural world better he was able to develop morally and materially, increasingly dominating both his own animal instincts and the natural world that formed his environment ("Philosophical anthropology," Encyclopedia Britannica Online). The Enlightenment was the time when man came to think of himself as being "infinitely reasonable," and that thought alone put man on a collision course with God, the heretofore sole proprietor of the infinite. In seventeenth-century American literature, God was downstage center, the commanding presence on the stage of everyone's lives. The Enlightenment pushed God more upstage--out of the way, providing room for mankind to take the van in thought and reason (Curry, 3/8/99).  

The purpose of the writings of the philosophes such as Voltaire and Rousseau was didactic: to spread the knowledge and sense of optimism which Enlightenment brought, and the message that Enlightenment brought knowledge and progress. The problem, then, was to understand what is meant by "optimism." Some philosophes believed in philosophical optimism, which could be roughly summarized as the assertion that the world which exists is the best of all possible worlds. This was a very powerful message, a very human message, and one that pushed aside much of the need for the absolute moral rule of religion, ("The Enlightenment." The Open University).

The major effect of the Enlightenment on American literature was to move it out of the pulpit and onto the streets of the cities and towns and into the homes of everyday people. What the Enlightenment brought to literature in America‑especially in Franklin's writings--was, for the most part, two--fold.  

First, it foreshadowed what inevitably would come by defining the "'perfect" American. "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do," wrote Franklin (Franklin, 783). Second, he then put pen to paper and wrote out his thirteen Virtues with their precepts (813). This "infinitely reasonable" list gave all who cared to read and heed it a blueprint for a virtuous life and made it possible for anyone to emulate Franklin. Franklin's texts, then, were meant to enlighten people and, thereby, better the community (Curry, 3/8/99).  

Another Enlightenment paradigm which edged people away from religious absolutism was the deist movement. In general, deism refers to what can be called natural religion, the acceptance of a certain body of religious knowledge that is inborn in every person or that can be acquired by the use of reason, as opposed to knowledge acquired through either "revelation" or the teaching of any church ("Deism." Encyclopedia Britannica Online). The reason why deism, like humanism, rationalism, and all such parts of the Age of Enlightenment of which Franklin was both so enamored and a part, could be problematic to the concept of the absolute truth of Protestantism, the eighteenth‑century progeny of Puritanism, is manifest. It is also manifest why American literature as expressed by "infinitely reasonable" writers such as Franklin was nudged even further away from "absolutely"--even though the absolutism of religion was still influential--toward "maybe." After all, one of Franklin's motifs was this: God is reasonable (Curry, 3/8/99).

From the Unnatural Light of the Enlightenment to the Natural Shadows of Transcendentalism--from "Absolutely" to "Maybe"
Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville--these were at the core of the
Transcendentalism and they were the authors of yet another paradigm shift in American literature. They did not consider themselves theologians who wrote, nor did they consider themselves "infinitely reasonable" teachers. They considered themselves literary people (Curry, 4/5/99). They did not rely on divine guidance or absolute science. They relied on their own intuition and consciousness--their emotions and imaginations. They emerged from the American Renaissance of Romanticism with the belief that a dignified human being is one who is able to transcend his or her humanness to reach a higher level of understanding and communication (Curry, 4/5/99).

The transcendentalists felt it was extremely important to live spiritually. But they found their spirituality in nature, and bent every effort to connect to it. Much like the deists, they felt one could connect with God for oneself, perhaps more important, they went further and believed there was no need for organized religion. They believed the person one should trust the most was oneself; they were the beginning of individualism (Curry, 4/5/99).  

The only real problem with their idyllic beliefs was just that: they were idyllic. They were just not practical or, in the end, practicable. But that didn't stop them from trying. That is why Emerson wrote "The Poet." In it he wrote: 

        But the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double
        meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or much more manifold
        meaning of every sensuous fact... And this hidden truth, that the fountains
        whence all this river of Time, and its creatures, floweth, are intrinsically ideal
        and beautiful, draws us to the consideration of the nature and the functions of
        the Poet, or the man of Beauty, to the means and materials he uses, and to the
        general aspect of the art in the present time (Emerson, 1647).  

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essentially, Emerson, seeing the need and not feeling capable himself, was putting out into the land a "want ad" for The Great American Poet, the person who would once and for all elevate American literature to at least the equal of English literature, if not greater. He felt certain such a person existed, or would soon. In short order, someone answered the ad.

Leaves of Grass was Walt Whitman's answer to Emerson's essay (Curry, 4/5/99). He was gay, and he was not a transcendentalist himself, but what did these matter, as long as his work met the criteria Emerson had set forth in "The Poet"? He was new, an American, and a visionary. The world, felt Emerson, was a poem waiting to be captured by The Poet, and Whitman did. The work of The Poet had to transcend the ugliness of the world and those who dwelt upon it; Whitman's did. And The Poet had to be America's greatest thinker, fully capable of working in metaphors and maintaining mystery in his or her work. Leaves of Grass was the proof. The Poet had to be able to absolve "us" of our sins, to spearhead what the transcendentalists were opting for, which was a new, secular religion. Well, one can't have everything (Curry, 4/5/99).

Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) took the power of the individual to new heights, while exploring the darker side of the "Transcendental Premise," that is that there is injustice and that one must stand against the injustice, no matter the cost (Lauter, 2090). He took the motto, "That government is best which governs least" and turned it into "That government is best which governs not at all," and placed responsibility for an individual and his actions squarely on the shoulders of the individual (Thoreau, 2093). In his vehement objections to the Mexican­American War of 1846-48, Thoreau said,  
        (When) a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army,
        and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to    
        rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact, that
        the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army (2095). Thoreau notes that the government is likely to "hire one to scourge it" of sin, and thus setting itself in the position of supposedly doing something about its own sins (injustices), feel free to continue sinning. Then, sounding much like Shakespeare's Macbeth, he sighs, "After the first blush of sin, comes its indifference," (2097). It was Macbeth who abhorred the idea of killing his king, but who, after a few more killings, found killing to be quite easy to do. Evil unchecked begets more evil more and more easily. This, Thoreau thought, was the condition of the government of the United States, (2097).  

Thoreau did more than write and talk about how one should face injustice. He did something about it. In late July of 1846, a little more than one year into Thoreau's stay at Walden Pond, he needed to get his shoe repaired, and walked into Concord to have the repair made. But as he was leaving the cobbler's store, Sam Staples, the town constable, asked Thoreau to pay his poll tax. Thoreau was intentionally several years behind in paying his tax. When asked to pay up, he refused. He objected to the use by the government of the revenues of the tax­helping to finance the United States' war with Mexico and supporting the enforcement of slavery laws. Thoreau refused to pay his taxes, and Staples was required to take Thoreau to jail, ("Thoreau, Henry David." University System of Maryland) . It was while in jail at Concord that he wrote his essay, "Resistance to Civil Government," in which he argued that the individual could exercise power over a national government through simple non-compliance. In the essay he wrote: 
         Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we
         endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or
         shall we transgress them at once? ... I say, break the law. Let your life
        be a counter friction to stop the (governmental) machine. At is enough
        if (abolitionists) have God on their side, without waiting for that other
        one (to constitute a voting majority). Moreover, any man more right
        than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one already (Thoreau
        2098-99).
Finally, Thoreau argued for a moral order transcending the Constitution of the United States, and that it was every man's duty to thus strive for the moral high ground: "There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly," (2107).  

Thoreau represents a significant paradigm shift away from the early Congregational Pilgrim and Puritan belief system. He is an architect of the power of the individual to make the world a better place on his own, and on his own terms. But even though he decidedly shies away from any dependence on divine intervention, and Providential plan at play, he still recognized that God is a significant force, and that God can increase any number to a majority (see above). The two key points to recognize here are that 1) God oversees things, but does not run them, and 2) that God does not represent a system or faith so much as a moral code, and that the moral code is absolute withing the individual, not the collective. With Thoreau, "absolute" recedes further, while "maybe" continues to near.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) is recognized as one of America's most important writers, both as a romantic who investigated man's deeper, inner mysteries, and as a realist who assayed that which made up the American character and experience (Lauter, 2190). Hawthorne was a shrewd and intellectual writer who considered at great length the American identity as it had progresses from Puritan times to his present (2193). Because of his belief in the impossibility of earthly perfection of man, his fiction was constructed in such a way that he required his readers to be active participants in the interpretations of his works. It was precisely because he had his readers bring their own experiences to his pages so as to render judgement that he brought American literature ever so much closer to "maybe," and so much farther away from it absolutely," (2193).  

This is apparent in such works as "The Birth‑mark." Though scattering hints and clues around like leaves on a forest floor, Hawthorne asks--demands--that his reader come to his or her own conclusion concerning Aylmer's motives and Georgiana's desires. So much like the Puritans, Aylmer wants to rid Georgiana of her birthmark, " the visible mark of earthly imperfection, " (Hawthorne, 2225). The birthmark or Georgiana's cheek Hawthorn describes as "the fatal flaw of humanity, which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary or finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain," (2226).  

The Puritans would have seem the birthmark as, perhaps, an outward manifestation of Georgiana's state of sin, and as a providential work of God, there to stay and be seen by all as a didactic device. They would never have presumed to attempt to remove it, for it was placed there by God's divine hand. It would have been, to the Puritans, an absolute.

The modern mind of Aylmer, though, sees the birthmark as a challenge to his scientific abilities, his reasoned knowledge, and he sets about to rid her of what, in just a short time­though only in the eye of the beholder--has become a hideous blemish on an otherwise perfect cheek. Hawthorne did not see the birthmark as a teaching or punitive object set in place by God, but as a part of the all-encompassing nature of which all humans were a part. To him, the birthmark was as natural as a rose or a stone, neither good nor bad--it was simply there. Its negative value was a construct of Aylmer (mankind) which Georgiana (also mankind) accepted as being hideous after being told so by Aylmer. It is not insignificant that Aminadab, the Caliban of "The Birth-mark" --that is to say, the manifestation and personification of nature in its much purer form--says to himself, "If she were my wife, I'd never part with that birth-mark," (2229). His mutterings foreshadowed the outcome of this unfortunate attempt to co-opt nature. Lamentably, the removal of the birthmark meant the removal of that which made Georgiana human, and, perforce, she died as the result of Aylmer's scientific success in ridding her of the birthmark. The story does not end without a moral:
        Yet, had Aylmer reached a profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung
        away the happiness... The momentary circumstance was to strong for him; he
        failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of Time, and living once for all in
        Eternity, to find the perfect Future in the present, (2236).
The "infinitely reasonable" Aylmer believed he could, through his absolute knowledge of 4( science," combine the elements of humanity perfectly and create a perfect human being. He did not recognize the folly of trying to control that which was natural in people (in his case, Georgiana's birthmark) and was thus unable to transcend the imperfection and be able to abide the birthmark as a way of having so otherwise perfect a wife as Georgiana (Curry, 4/19/99).  

In their belief in the perfection of God's providence, the Puritans believed in the absolute and immutable cause-and-effect nature of life. Hawthorne, one-hundred years later, was clearly saying that not everything was absolute, and that man had the opportunity--in fact, the responsibility--to create their own outcomes, hopefully for the better. Hawthorne's literature was still another‑and substantial‑step from "absolutely" to "maybe." 

Herman Melville
In "Moby-Dick," Herman Melville (1819-1891) created a monumental work of American literature that was rife with intratextual and intertextual Biblical references and religious meaning. It's very beginning, "Call me Ishmael," is a Biblical reference (Melville, 12). To the knowledgeable reader this immediately telegraphs that the narrator of this book is an exiled prophet with an unwanted message, (Curry, 4/21/99). Moby-Dick is much more than intertextual references to Bible stories, though: 
        The novel is, among other things, a sublime effort to plumb the tragic
        implications of man's relationship to nature. It dramatizes with extraordinary
        power a humanist vision transcending racial differences and national
        boundaries. And it widens into the most provocative study of man's
        relationship to God ever written by an American novelist (Tuttleton, 290).  
The Pequod is a universe unto itself, and as such it has a god, as Ahab declares: "There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod," (Melville, 394). Ahab is the absolute ruler aboard the Pequod, and that poses a particular problem for the crew, for their Captain, their god, is a monomaniac with one goal in mind: it is not to fill the ship's holds with whale oil, but to hunt down and kill Moby-Dick, the white whale and, for Ahab, the embodiment of pure evil.  

But was the whale pure evil? Was it not in fact not pure evil but pure nature? Moby-Dick is what is. This story was based in large part on Owen Chase's account of his ship, the Essex, being rammed and thus sunk by a large sperm whale (Chase, 590). While such a occurrence is rare, the simple fact of Chase's account showed that it was part of the natural world.  

If there is pure evil in Moby-Dick, this author finds it in Ahab, for it is Ahab's self-serving, unrelenting, unrepentant, and monomaniacal desire to kill the white whale--the whale that has taken off Ahab's leg, true, but only a whale, nonetheless--that finally drags the Pequod and all hands (save one: Ishmael) to death. Moby-Dick is not unlike Hawthorne's birthmark. It is a natural occurrence, and as such expunging it from the world is the unnatural act. Ahab, from the beginning (the "loomings") to the end is a man driven by his own belief in his ability to defy nature and rearrange the universe to suit his purpose--revenge.  

The Epilogue is subtitled with a Bible passage: "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee, (Melville, 470). Ishmael goes on to say that the Rachel, sailing back and forth looking for the son of the captain lost to the white whale, came across him as he lay on the "lifeboat" which had been Queequeg's coffin, and pulled him from the sea, "...that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan," (470). 

Is the reader to feel cheated that Moby-Dick was not punished, or reassured that those who become demagogues are dethroned? The answer in Moby-Dick is ambiguous. It is: maybe.

Conclusion
In a fervent desire to create order from chaos, and to protect themselves from the senselessness of the chaos of the wilderness that surrounded them, the Puritans put their faith in an absolute but external truth structure. There was no room for consideration, no allowance for ambiguity. The truth was the truth and it was manifest in God's providence.

One-hundred years later, that had changed. In American literature, authors were much more comfortable in passing by the first and most convenient answer, in investigating the possibilities, in challenging absolute authority, and in allowing for the inescapable vicissitudes of human nature.  

By the mid-nineteenth century, man was much more comfortable with asking "why" instead of "how." And readers and writers alike were much more comfortable with the ambiguity of the answers. Religion still played a powerful role in American literature by the mid-1800s, but the face of that religion had changed. Instead of having a look of stern absolutism, it now had the temperate face of inquiry. Was this because the previous and then current religious ideology and the moral idées fixes of society needed to be questioned instead of being accepted out of hand? Or was it because they could be questioned as they never could be before? Was it both? In the end, did it matter, as long as it happened, which, of course, it did?

As the authors of the mid-nineteenth century might have said, "Hmm... That's a very good question."  

Epilogue
Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the loss of faith in ourselves ...  

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race, or his holy cause. 

A generation that wearies of technology is bound to turn to magic. Those who refuse to use machines that move mountains will pray for a faith that moves mountains.  

                                        --Eric Hoffer     

Works Cited

Blackstock, Carrie Galloway. "Anne Bradstreet and Performativity: Self-cultivation, Self- deployment." Early American Literature. 3 1:1 (Jan. 3, 1997).

Bradford, William. "Of Plymouth Plantation." in The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1. 3" ed. Paul Lauter, Gen. ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin (1998).

Bradstreet, Anne. "A Dialogue Between Old England and New." Old South Leaflets, vol. 7. Boston: Directors of the Old South Work.

Burke, James. The Day the Universe Changed. 1985. London: Little, Brown & Co. (1995).

Chase, Owen. "The Essex Wrecked by a Whale." in Moby-Dick. Eds. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. The Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton & Co. (1967).

Curry, Ren6e, Ph.D. "Anne Bradstreet and the Meditative Poem'." Lecture. CSU, San Marcos. (Feb. 22, 1999).

---.  "Herman Melville and 'Moby-Dick'." Lecture. CSU San Marcos. (Apr. 21, 1999). 

---. "Mary Rowlandson and the 'Captivity Narrative'." Lecture. CSU San Marcos. (Feb. 24, 1999).  

---.  "Nathaniel Hawthorne and 'The Birth‑mark'." Lecture. CSU San Marcos. (Apr. 19, 1999)

---.  "The Enlightenment and Benjamin Franklin." Lecture. CSU San Marcos. (Mar. 8, 1999).  

---."Transcendentalism in American Literature." Lecture. CSU San Marcos. (Apr. 5, 1999).

"Deism." Encyclopedia Britannica Online. <http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?eu= I 17392&sctn= I > [Accessed May 23, 1999

Emerson, Ralph Waldo.  "The Poet." in The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1. 3 d ed. Paul Lauter, Gen. ed.  New York: Houghton MIfflin (1998).

"Enlightenment, The." The Open University <http://www3.open.ac.uk/courses/cftamedes/A206.htm  [Accessed May 21, 1999]

Franklin, Benjamin. "The Autobiography, Parts One and Two." in The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1. 3 d ed. Paul Lauter, Gen. ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin (1998).

Geree, John.  The Character of an Old English Puritan, or Non-Conformist.  1646.  Spokane: Grace Chapel (1995).

Gill, Crispin. Mayflower Remembered: A History of the Plymouth Pilg‑rims. New York: Taplinger Publishing (1970).

Hawthorn, Nathaniel. "The Birth‑mark." in The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1.3" ed. Paul Lauter, Gen. ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin (1998). 

Hoffer, Eric. in The Best of Humanism. ed. Roger E. Greeley. Buffalo: Prometheus Books (1988) 160.

Lauter, Paul, Gen. ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1. 3 d ed. New York:Houghton Mifflin (1998).  

Melville, Herman. Moby‑Dick. Eds. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. The Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton & Co. (1967).

"Philosophical anthropology." Encyclopwdia Britannica Online <http://members.eb.com/bol/topic?eu= 115088&sctn= 13 > [Accessed May 23, 1999].

Rowlandson, Mary White. "A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. MaryRolandson...." in The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1. 3rd  ed. Paul Lauter, Gen. ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin (1998).

Thoreau, Henry David. "Resistance to Civil Government." in The Heath Anthology of AmericanLiterature. Vol. 1.3rd ed. Paul Lauter, Gen. ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin (1998).  

"Thoreau, Henry David." University System of Maryland. InforM Service." <http://usmhl2.usmd.edu/thoreau/>  [Accessed May 22, 19991.

Tuttleton, James W. "The Character of Captain Ahab in Melville's Moby-Dick." The World & 1 13:2 (1998): 290‑298.  

Wesley, Marilyn C., "Moving targets: the travel text in'A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson'." Essays in Literature. 23 (Mar. 22, 1996): 42 (16). 

Wheelwright, John T., comp. The Mayflower Pilgrims: Being a Condensation in the Original Wording and Spelling of the Story written by Gov(1930). Bradford. Boston: McGrath,Sherrill Press

What Fun!  
As I reflect on what I have learned--and what I have learned about learning--in this class, and then upon the materials enclosed in this portfolio, I must admit I am pleasantly surprised by what I discover.

I entered the course as an avid reader, but I did not learn until I had progressed through the course some that though I had been reading so avidly for so many years, I had not been reading at all the levels available to me. As a result of this course, I now feel much more confident in my ability to choose at what depth into a text I shall read. Many texts offer so much more than is first seen, and I look forward to going back and rereading some works from my "long ago" in search of their deeper meanings.  

The trip to the San Luis Rey Mission was fascinating. I don't believe I have ever approached such a place as a "text" and spent time "reading" it, although I have to say that I have been many places and seen many things around the world, most of which have had an effect on me similar to what can be found in my San Luis Ray Mission paper. The difference is that those previous experiences were unconscious readings of the various forms of texts, of literature. I cannot say I got any less from them for it being an unconscious process, but I do feel that I "connected" better with the Mission because of the simple fact that I went there consciously set on "reading" it. Once again, I have discovered another conscious level at which to appreciate the bits and pieces of time and space that come my way.

An important thing this portfolio reveals is evident by its absence. Time and care were taken to awaken students to the ambiguities concerning what constitutes "United States Literature" and its umbrella genus, "American Literature." Though the class (and therefore 1, for I was in the class) was pressed hard on coming to terms with the difficulties of determining--or even just agreeing--on where the distinctions are between a cultural canon and a geopolitical canon, I had no difficulty with the concept. That is why there is no mention of this in the portfolio pieces. "United States" is as much a forced distinction as is "American" and "Western." Even where two cultures exist side‑by‑side, there is no distinct line between them. That is why, when I lived at the southern tip of the politically peninsular area of southwestern Switzerland, I had to know not only French but at least a smattering of Italian and German. Also, it would have been difficult for me, if I drove east into France, to stop and say: "This is where Swiss,French (as an idiomatic language) ends and French begins. Except for the extremely parochially-minded, cultures and their literary canons will always intermix to some extent. Borders are nothing more than lines people draw to suit their current purposes. They serve no function except to allow one or more people to say: "This is mine and not yours."  

I prefer to live in a world (which is small and confined in and of itself) where we all want to read literature, not use it to compete.   

With that sermon now over, I will say that this portfolio reveals I can read and critically analyze literature, putting each piece in its place while, at the same time, finding the connective thread that runs through it all.  

What fun!