The One All-Black Town Worth the Pain: American Exceptionalism, Historical Narration, and the Critique of Nationhood in Toni Morrison's Paradise - African - Critical Essay

African American Review, Summer, 2001 by Katrine Dalsgard

Yet, while the Puritans' advance expectations of America as the Promised Land and the American people as God's chosen agents became central aspects of American exception-alist ideology, such millenarian expectations became intricately connected with a sense of failure as the colony developed. Around mid-century, as they began to encounter a series of serious worldly problems such as internal unrest, harvest failure, and trouble with both the British Crown and the Native American population, the discrepancy between their morally superior self-narrative and their actual cultural practices grew. This discrepancy culminated in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692-1693 as the Puritan theocracy imprisoned more than a hundred people and executed about nineteen, mostly women, on charges of witchcraft (Tindall 57-58). Imagining impending apocalypse, the Puritans interpreted such destabilizing of their millenarian process as a sign of God's punishment. Calling for a return to the original covenant, in sermon after sermon, th e theocracy began to condemn the community's younger members for having failed the responsibility placed upon them by the founding fathers. And this led to exceptionalism's being redefined in rhetorical terms in the form of the so-called jeremiad. As Ruland and Bradbury describe William Bradford's diary, Of Plimouth Plantation, which was completed in 1650 though not published until 1856, it "testifies repeatedly to the shortcomings of the sons when measured by the dreams of their fathers. As it sounds its call for a return to the primal vision and turns toward jeremiad, its lament for the gap between divine intentions and human fulfillment becomes a fresh assertion of divine selection" (13). Against this background, Ruland and Bradbury conclude that in "that recurrent conflict between the real and the ideal, the Utopian and the actual, the intentional and the accidental, the mythic and the diurnal, can be read... an essential legacy of the Puritan imagination to the American mind" (13-14).

Rather than speaking of "an essential legacy," which seems to imply that later exceptionalist texts were somewhat passively defined by the Puritan original in advance of their being written, I prefer Byers's suggestion concerning the active role of later American generations in the shaping of an exceptionalist literary tradition. According to Byers, a literary phenomenon becomes distinctive "only if its perceivers have an interest in distinguishing it as such." While exceptionalism may well have been generated by what Sacvan Bercovitch calls "the Puritan origins of the American self," it would hardly have attained its canonical status "if the tradition had not itself been constituted by men who saw themselves as heirs to the Puritans and other exceptionalists" (92-93). [2] One way or the other, however, neither Byers nor I disagree with Ruland and Bradbury's basic contention that the Puritans' exceptionalism, as I have described it above, developed into a central American literary tradition insofar as it was carried on in the work of such canonical writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Henry James, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.