Allegory in Colonial New England

Abstract

The claim of an Anglo-American cultural tradition to primacy in the New World was made at the earliest opportunity and in the harshest of terms. Among the most ubiquitous, if not the most violent, of these claims is the enduring assumption of importance regarding the founding fathers of the Massachusetts Bay colony and the characteristic style of their rhetoric. I want to explore in this chapter the ways in which the typological rhetoric of the orthodox New England clergy was used for hegemonic purposes in order to claim, if not to preserve, a share of political power in the evolving colonial government. The ideological dimensions of colonial allegory become apparent when the rhetoric of American exceptionalism is contrasted with a style of allegorical discourse that was used to deny the existence of a pattern of significant providential correspondences which define the New World as a redeemer nation. The conflict between John Cotton and Roger Williams which took place in the 1630s and concerned the coercive behaviour of the Massachusetts Bay theocracy, as regards the related issues of ‘state worship’ and freedom of conscience, illustrates the cultural purposes served by the typological allegories constructed by the earliest settlers.