110 American Literature
Albeit one that lost more and more of its distinctiveness as the eighteenth century progressed. Not Cotton Mather’s “Life of Winthrop” but the True Travels of Captain John Smith, Robert Beverley’s History and Present State of Virginia, and John Lawson’s New Voyage to Carolina became the archetypal formulations of American selfhood, for “in this emerging secular and commercial culture,” Greene writes, “the central orientation of people in the littoral became the achievement of personal independence” (p. 195).
To read Greene, then, is to encounter an American whose colonists did not rationalize their behavior through the subtleties and contradictions of Puritan rhetoric but openly stated why they were in this new land. “Important though it has sometimes been,” Greene writes, the concept of “national election seems never to have been so pervasively and persistently influential in shaping American culture as the notion of America as a place peculiarly favorable for the quest of the good life, defined as the pursuit of individual happiness and material achievement” (p. 205). That, Greene claims, is at the heart of America, whether or not we like it.
And even if we do not like it, we must acknowledge that at some visceral as well as intellectual level it is what we always have known about America, have been shown most memorably, for example, by D. H. Lawrence in his Studies in Classic American Literature and William Carlos Williams in his Studies in Classic American Literature and William Carlos William in his In the American Grain, but also by Bancroft in his grand history and Parrington in his Main Currents in American Thought. Of course it is Crevecoeur’s New York and Franklin’s Philadelphia, too; but to say such things need not because we are now enough critically self-conscious to treat these and other formulations of American ideology as complex and problematic developments rather than as sacrosanct pieties. To assume Greene’s argument, in other words, is not to study a redeemer nation but a group of colonies on the cusp of modernization, grappling with the contradictions of emergent capitalism and the individualism on which it was based. And as we attempt to expand the canon, it allows us to teach, for example, the Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs (1798),
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