Dissenting Bodies: Corporealities in Early New England.
Fuller, Robert C.
Dissenting Bodies: Corporealities in Early New England. By Martha
L. Finch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. xiv + 274 pp.
$45.00 cloth.
John Demos, Edmund Morgan, David Hall, Anne Lombard, and Richard
Gildrie are among those who have examined the religious underpinnings of
everyday life in colonial New England. We can now add Martha Finch to
this list of scholars bringing fresh perspectives to otherwise familiar
themes in our nation's history. Focusing specifically on the
Plymouth Colony, Finch explores both how Puritan theology shaped
understandings of bodily existence and how bodies physically endured the
stark realities of seventeenth-century life.
Finch's narrative begins with the moralistic exhortations of
John Robinson, pastor of the English Separatist congregation preparing
to journey across the Atlantic where they hoped to establish a community
predicated on conformity to God's divine will. Robinson's
highly ascetic, Calvinist view of the world put a premium on
constraining prideful hearts. He envisioned a very particular kind of
sociocultural environment capable of eradicating selfish tendencies. It
was clear to Robinson that outer appearances mirror the inner self.
Because the body was the external measure of inner virtue, it required
specific kinds of discipline. For this reason Robinson and others
generated an explicit set of rules for monitoring outer comportment A
person's dress, manners, diet, sexuality, and outward piety all
indicated the degree of commitment to a hierarchically stratified
society and were therefore principal arenas for the contestation of
cultural power. Those who settled in the Plymouth Colony thus brought
with them a "theology of the body" that alerted them to
correspondences between bodily comportment and saintly piety.
Colonists' bodies--how they were disciplined, how they were
clothed, how they gestured during religious rituals, how Indians and
English viewed one another's behaviors or expressions--are
themselves texts that explain both the ideals and realities of Plymouth
religious and social life. Finch draws upon a variety of sources such as
letters, diaries, court records, travel narratives, and early histories
to examine the success with which theological systems succeeded or
failed in patterning colonial life. She provides vivid descriptions of
how colonists' bodies endured brutal physical experiences as
starvation, illness, or corporeal punishment even as they came together
to sing, pray, preach, and be baptized. The body, both as material agent
and metaphorical symbol, provides a rich perspective on how successfully
the colonists were able to subjugate individuality for the purpose of
erecting a godly society. The historical record is complex and
Finch's interpretations are judicious and nuanced.
Finch's narrative is at its best when she strays from the
somewhat warn constructivist argument that religious beliefs shape our
views of the body and instead hints that the reverse can also be the
case. Finch implicitly recognizes that our bodies are often the source
of our religious beliefs. Our adaptive capacities originate, after all,
not in cultural rhetoric but rather in the body itself. Humans apprehend
their immediate surroundings through the physical senses and orient
themselves through basic body postures: up and down, front and back,
approaching or avoiding. Unfortunately, Finch never pursues these
observations nor incorporates relevant insights from the natural
sciences. Yet her study invites innovative hypotheses concerning the
bodily origins of social and religious changes. She notes, for example,
that those who most contributed to bodily survival (for example, Thomas
Morton or Myles Standish) were often those whose physical vigor was more
outwardly visible than their inner piety. And, too, she emphasizes that
the wilderness environment was far less fraught with demonic peril than
the pious initially feared. The colonists' bodies evidenced more
physical health, grew taller, and lived longer than they had in Europe.
Bodily vigor and personal initiative proved more adaptive over time than
moral restraint and enforced conformity. Human bodies adjust their
valuations of experience to maximize adaptive fitness. There is thus
evidence to suggest that the body and its adaptive modalities eventually
exerted corresponding changes in both social and theological polity.
Dissenting Bodies is a thoughtful look at the sights, smells,
sounds, movements, and physical habitat that together filled the lives
of the English Separatists who settled in New England. It also reminds
us of the persisting tendency of humans to liken the social body to the
physical body and to seek control over the former by disciplining the
latter. A fine contribution to a corporeal history of American religion.
doi: 10.1017/S0009640710000843
Robert C. Fuller
Bradley University
