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Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority 1750-1800

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This book contributes in a very important way to substantiating thus refining the transatlantic connection around the American Revolution. It does so by describing what I want to call the "epistemic" presence of Lockean thoughts on education throughout the process. Fliegelman's rehabilitative investigation impinges on discontinuities as much as on continuities between the Old World and the New World. As what buttresses the whole Enlightenment, the continued strain is Locke's sensationalist epistemology that encourages moral and political independence, but it transforms while differentiating across the Atlantic and through the period of the Revolution. Still, the entire antipatriarchal movement is, as Fliegelman traces it, an interaction between and combination of various factors among which literary texts are conspicuous and active players. Therefore, as the author makes it clear, "Much emphasis is placed on relating eighteenth-century literary history to social, theological, and political events in America."(5)

What unfolds through the interconnection is a movement toward maturity in all its forms. As the title implies, there is a progress signaled by iconographic conversion from prodigals to pilgrims and transition from childhood to adulthood. And the positive side of this development will culminate in the growing advocacy of geopolitical self-reliance during the Revolution. Fliegelman's strength seems to be proved by the felicity of connections he makes among seemingly discrete facts in addition to the extensiveness of his investigation. This alignment is achieved diachronically as well as synchronically so that a progressive pattern takes shape. Overall, it is fleshing out the primordial framework of a nation. "The rising glory of America had proven to be the fortune long promised and now provided the earliest European prodigals, the first fallen. America was the Canaan to which God's providence had led. It was a macrocosm of the rehabilitated nuclear family, that original ideal of the antipatriarchal revolution, that great compensation for the fall from universal sociability."(267)

As Fliegelman understands it, Lockean pedagogy which was essentially "rational and sensationalistic...morphological...stoical...tolerant and utilitarian...moral...."(14) These are the characters treated by Chesterfield, Gregory, Fénelon, Marmontel, Richardson, Sterne, and others. It is interesting to see how the American reception of these writers shows the way Locke's ideas were assimilated into revolutionary America. "Taken together they articulate an ideology and paradigm that by 1776 had become, in effect, a new cultural orthodoxy, one that provided the terms in which men and women thought about political, moral, and social issues."(66) _Robinson Crusoe_ and _Clarissa_ are two outstanding examples. The former is significant in offering an acceptable model for the American reading public. "By literalizing Calvinist or Puritan doctrine, Defoe has both wittingly and unwittingly succeeded in turning what began as a story of a prodigal into a radical fable of the fortunate fall. The circle of the prodigal's return has snapped; it has become again the straight line of the pilgrim's progress."(72)

And the American edition of _Clarissa_ was redacted in such a way that it showed "the rejection of a too narrowly consanguineous understanding of family."(88) Added to the two major English novels that were understood as not only describing but also prescribing the spirit of the age, Franklin's _Autobiography_ (Part I) represents "the literary Americanization of the themes and structures of the sentimental and Puritan picaresque traditions."(107) And these are just some examples of numerous literary expressions of one and the same ideal. "Those prodigal pilgrims fleeing parental tyranny, popery, and the extorted debt of nature turned to their hearts for guidance and sought the promise of a new kind of relationship. Filial freedom was but the prelude to the dream of great voluntaristic union and the reordering of society it suggested when writ large."(122)

While these texts reveal the promising and adventurous careers projected by the bright side, Sterne's writing contains "the dark implications"(15) of Locke's epistemology. Skepticism is another palpable presence throughout the formative period of American mind. And Fliegelman finds one more strong expression of such uncertainty and disillusion with Brown. "_Wieland_ is, in effect, the dark flip side of Franklin's _Autobiography_."(240) Brown's novel is "a terrifying post-French Revolutionary account of the fallibility of the human mind and, by extension, of democracy itself."(239) And it is one of those fearful moments of a greater transformation under way. It is interesting that skeptical fictionalization by Sterne and Brown adds much to the entire picture of the age as it reflects the ambivalence inherent in the making of a new framework. One crucial icon of American Revolution is George Washington. Fliegelman believes that "the glorification of Washington was intimately related to the glorification of the new parenthood."(199) He was also "made representative of the spirit of the Lockean age."(222) While having to go through the political vicissitudes, American public could rely on him as its pivotal point. He is described as a national hero who provided a critical ballast to the newly-born nation. After all, "his idealization as the nation's father served to complete the transformation of the antipatriarchal ideology into a national dogma."(225) But he is also portrayed as a subtle personality who was consciously carrying out an insightful appraisal of the pros and cons of the political and moral project. At certain moments, Fliegelman seems to depend so much on the role Washington played in the national commitment to the grand reconfiguring work that I wonder what America should have done without this fatherly character.

If Washington is still representative of the harmonious and auspicious convergence of all the novel but risky visions, it's also true that there were other comparable personages like Paine who as a trailblazer cut some tricky Gordian knots with some aggressiveness and audacity. Fliegelman's real merit would be such an impartial coverage he gives of the widest possible expanse of history. He keeps inserting highly relevant facts and events to reinforce the significance of the texts he surveys. As he makes it clear, "this work is fundamentally a study in intellectual and cultural history."(6) One of its goals is apparently to widen the scope with the aid of "interdisciplinary" approach. From the beginning, Fliegelman wants to address this issue. "Our received notions as to who were the most important transmitters of Enlightenment ideas central to the American Revolution are in need of revising as much as our understanding of what constitutes a "political" text is in need of broadening."(4-5)

From the lionizing of Washington up to the promulgation of Monroe doctrine, there is an intermediate stage of triumphant "neutrality" which "proved self-destructive."(257) For this awkward policy of isolation, Fliegelman has his diagnosis: 'Adolescence and America, those kindred eighteenth-century "inventions," had perhaps in some fundamental manner become overidentified with each another."(258) He thinks that Washington had his cure for this ignorance of "a world where trade agreements necessitated political agreements."(256)

Also involved in the political process were the clergy who responded in their own terms to what they felt was urgent. It was "a revolutionary reconsideration of the basic elements of Protestant orthodoxy."(154) The theological self-reflection finally reached a wholly different Christian belief that was widely received in America. "Central to the Unitarian purpose is to prove that the source of love and the source of authority could be one; indeed, that true authority was conferred by the power to love."(193)

I see more interesting points in this book, interesting because they give me a sense of a dynamic holism that the Lockean "episteme" holds together. But there are too many of them even to mention briefly. Nevertheless, particularly revealing are his arguments on Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, Brown. I don't mean they alone are good. But the author's exertion to illuminate the relevance of these writers and their fiction to revolutionary America accounts for more than just a part of what he aims to achieve: "to clarify the crucial thematic connections between key historical events and the important literary, pedagogical, theological, and political texts of the period under consideration."(6) Perhaps, his rediscovery of the historical significance of those literary works is another accurate portrayal of reality.