Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
then follows that the nature of an infant at birth, assumed to have had no sensory
experiences until that moment, must be like a tabula rasa or blank slate, untainted
by original sin. While the Puritans believed that humanity is born bad, Locke
asserted that humanity was born blank. The sensory experiences that followed and
the inferences drawn from them as a result of a good or faulty education would
dictate the kind of person one would become.
Though Empiricism held that human nature could be swayed either way, this
period was nothing if not optimistic. Some Enlightenment and Federal era thinkers
emphasized the goal of human perfectibility. Despite the concept’s name, they
did not actually think humans could become perfect; however, they did believe
that individuals and humanity in total could continually improve, if reason was
applied to determine the best ways to be and the best ways to learn those ways.
This period ushered in the establishment of many a library, athenaeum, and study
group like Franklin’s Junto Club—all institutions available to the person wishing
for self-improvement because people now believed that it was possible to become
better through one’s own eorts. For these reasons, American literature of the
eighteenth century is frequently intended to instruct, whether it be Benjamin
Franklin’s “bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection” or the
frequent cautions about the dangers of vanity and frivolity for women in Hannah
Webster Foster’s The Coquette.
Though reason had a new place of prominence in the eighteenth century, its
inadequacies were also explored. Franklin lays out an eminently rational system of
inculcating virtue, then goes on to admit that he never could learn some of those
virtuous qualities. In an echo of his younger self rationalizing the break with his
vegetarian principles when the smell of cooked sh becomes too tempting, Franklin
slyly acknowledges that, sometimes, a “speckled” or only partially virtuous self
is best. Foster too creates a tension between the textbook virtuous women who
advise her heroine to abandon her irtatious ways and settle for the life of a dutiful
minister’s wife and that same heroine’s clear and persuasive understanding that
this proposed life would be both unsuitable for her personality and deadly boring.
This new respect for human ability and potentiality lead the period to reimagine
the relationship between the individual and the community. For Puritans,
individualism was the cause of much evil, and so in John Robinson’s letter read to
William Bradford’s group when they embarked for the New World, each traveler
is instructed to “repress in himself and the whole body in each person, as so many
rebels against the common good, all private respects of men’s selves, not sorting
with the general conveniency.” For writers of the Enlightenment, the individual
and the community were not antagonists but collaborators nding a balance that
benetted both. Remarking on individual freedom, Locke in his Second Treatise
on Civil Government (1689) asserts
But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of license . . .The state
of nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason,
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