The Americans: The Colonial Period - The Quakers

Early in The Americans: The Colonial Experience, Daniel J. Boorstin looks at four groups of colonists to America. He focuses on the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, the Quakers of Pennsylvania, the settlers of Georgia, and the Virginians. We tend to look back through the haze of history more with a goal of telling ourselves an inspirational creation story rather than understanding the complexities and variations in the group of colonists who braved the Atlantic passage for a new life in the New World, and we often view the colonists as a homogenous group of people, but Boorstin’s approach reflects the complex motivations that drew people to the New World, and the ways those motivations influenced and shaped the different colonies. By understanding the goals of the colonists, we can understand not just what drove them to the Western Hemisphere, but why they met with success or failure.

I found the unit discussing the Quakers especially challenging. So much of the Quaker approach is appealing. The ideals they espoused resonate nicely with the outlook of a modern day liberal: belief in equality, informality, and toleration. However, it is Boorstin’s contention that their attitudes toward these ideals made the Quakers ill equipped for governing. It’s the familiar argument of a pragmatist; idealists are naïve and unrealistic. While the Quakers possessed great personal bravery, and were willing to sacrifice their own lives for a cause they championed, their unwillingness to accommodate the political realities of the day caused others to suffer as well.

The chapters dealing with the Quakers caused me to view them with a combination of admiration and frustration. I found their ideals admirable, and their insistence on following those ideals long past the point of futility to be frustrating. In the end, one of the most admirable things they did was to recognize their own unsuitability to govern, and to voluntarily give up their political power.

Wuthering Heights

The realization that it has been almost exactly twenty years since I first read Wuthering Heights was a cruel one. I am now old enough to simply forget if an event took place ten or twenty years ago. Perhaps that’s why I find myself compelled to journal or blog about the books that speak to me. I can revisit my notes to refresh my ailing memory, without needing to resort to pulling entire college reading lists off my bookshelves.

I originally read Wuthering Heights without being required by a college professor or high school teacher, which is regrettable. While the narrative isn’t difficult to follow, it is difficult to know how to respond to the main characters, Heathcliff and Catherine. The connection shared by Heathcliff and Catherine often causes Wuthering Heights to be described as one of the most romantic English novels, but this book is not your mother’s romance novel.

In fact, the dark tone set by the novel, in which all of nature seems to echo the tumultuous relationship of the main characters, has proven a real attraction to Japanese readers, who flock to the moors of England in large enough numbers to require some remote road signs to be printed in English and Japanese.

My reaction to Heathcliff was apparently more ambivalent than that of his Japanese fans. Heathcliff’s passion for Catherine seems to require an active hatred for the rest of mankind. His only pleasure seems to be in planning the torment of those around him, and I find myself too easily echoing the sentiments of the less imaginative characters in their condemnation of Catherine and Heathcliff’s actions.

Still, Bronte has created two unforgettable characters in Cathy and Heathcliff, and her affection for them is contagious. You won’t forget them, but you may forget precisely how long it has been since you first encountered them.