Back to Essay MenuBack to Essay MenuShakespeare once wrote, "The whole world is a stage," and perhaps no society took that idea more literally than that of the Puritans. Drawing from the scripture stating that the Old Testament contained types and shadows of things to come, they believed that each "type" created in the Old Testament was represented in their society through different individuals, i.e. John Winthrop as their modern day equivalent of Nehemiah. In the beginning of their society, this viewpoint created a great deal of security for them in that they could simply look in the Bible and see the courses of action and outcomes necessary to fulfill that type and its destiny. To understand their belief in typology and its repercussions, it is useful to view their actions as similar to performance art. The Puritan typological philosophy in ideal and practice, the reasoning and steps in its evolution, and its presence in daily life can be illuminated by the ideas of an original work, performance, and audience as presented in Henry Sayre’s essay "Performance."
After many years of trials and tribulations under English rule and an unsuccessful move to Holland, the Puritan community moved to America, held together by their common Calvinist interpretation of the Bible, convinced that once all of the outside corruptions and influences had been eliminated, their community would be pure. This can be related to the early literary idea that the author’s intentions are "embodied in the work itself" (p92) and that the same, perfect outcome would present itself by simple adherence to the text. If the Bible is the original work, or masterwork, containing all types available to Puritan society, then many of the first conflicts within Puritan society, such as the Anne Hutchinson trial, can be seen as efforts to return to the text and in the process discover God’s true intentions behind that text. However, almost immediately the pure community that the Puritans had hoped for began to fracture into a myriad of interpretations, dissolving from a "covenant of faith" to a "covenant of works." Their purity of text theory could no longer account for, support or contain the interpretations spinning off from a single original text, signaling an obvious need for an evolution in their definition of a masterwork.
A more modern approach to defining a masterwork or original text states that "the work itself is not only distinct from its actual or possible realizations but in fact transcends them. That is, it anticipates, even authorizes, its many occurrences and somehow contains their variety" (p91); in this case, the Bible, in particular the Old Testament, can be seen as a collection of parts and scenes which then become the types of the Puritan community and are put into action in new situations. Each time a new person fills that type, the situation dictates a reinterpretation to fit the person and the time period. This happens because, like the Fountain sculpture, there is nothing inherent in the type—the meaning is in its use (p94). If in fact the Puritan community saw the Bible as a collection of structures to be applied to their lives, they, like the readers of Ursonate, may have felt that it was somehow inadequate as a text in that not all of them could apply it to their lives, only the chosen ones. By emptying the structures of content, they could make the narrative their own, part of themselves. In the idea of "readerly" and "writerly" texts, a readerly text creates a situation in which the reader is a passive receiver of the message of the text, while the writerly text makes the reader a "producer of the text" (p93); in the context of Puritan types, the "new" types became writerly texts, in which the person filling that type produces a new text, not the old, expected outcome which the original literal interpretation had hoped to produce. Thus, those who successfully internalized the new structures could fill types in the community according to the situation, becoming a sort of impromptu performer in a narrative sanctioned and expected by the community.
Perhaps the covenant of works was a natural internalization of those types in Puritan society, in which it was no longer enough to see the types at work in the text, but to see it in action within their own society, transforming that typology into a sort of performance art, depending on works, or the acting out, to sustain it. At this point, "The concept of the ‘original,’ the self-contained and transcendent masterwork, containing certain discernible intentions, has been undermined, and a plurality of possible performative gestures has supplanted it. As a result, performance art often seems to be extraliterary or even anitliterary in nature." (p94) Once Puritan typology reached a performance level, it defied literal, solid definition because it became contained beyond the text, in the Puritan communal psyche. In performance art, "the potentially disruptive forces of the ‘outside’ are encouraged to assert themselves" (p94), and in this case, it is the context that asserted itself, dictating what types would be needed to play out the situation and their relationship to each other.
What happened to the Puritans when this typology began to evolve beyond the text of the Bible? One can almost see the dilemma forming in the Puritan community in that when they believed that a pure interpretation of the text was possible, they had security in thinking that their footsteps were already ordered by God. Now, however, the structure of these types—who fit into the definition of the elect, of a leader, etc.—moved farther and farther away from the actual text of the Bible, and the mass interpretations needed a bigger space for containment. This situation relates to the evolution of writing and art, in which "walls, galleries, public spaces began to function as pages for a form of ‘writing’ that included not only the transcription of language but also the physical gestures of voice and body in space" (p94); the transformation went from the literal text to something much larger, something more internalized within the person filling the type. The authority of the text had been stripped from the types, the structure it had created, leaving a free-floating entity not even carried in the conscious mind. Sayre noted that, "Because performance is above all historical—that is, inevitably caught up in the social and political exigencies of the moment—the formal dimensions of an artist’s particular medium might even be said to impede the action of the performance" (p98). In other words, the internalization of those types did away with the formal structures of the original text, allowing the type to be used to its full potential of expression. No longer was Winthrop the only one who could fill the part of Nehemiah simply because he lead the Puritans over to America; now anyone filling that situation, no matter what the scale, could play the Nehemiah-type.
The typological exclusion which held the children of Israel out of the walls of the city in Jeremiah, and which rejected Anne Hutchinson for her ideas, can be used as an example to further define "performance" in the instance of the witch trials and the Crucible. Sayre defines performance as "an activity which generates transformations, as the reintegration of art with what is ‘outside’ it, an ‘opening up’ of the ‘field’" (p103). As the Puritans began to play those parts, or types, they began to see their relation to others in the narrative as a whole, what was outside of the narrative, and what actions generated an acceptable outcome in the community dynamics. This reintegration with the outside is an obvious source of violence in that the acceptance of the Other is generally explosive, much like matter and anti-matter or racial integration. So, when the Other, in this case witchcraft (whatever form it was in, if at all), came into contact with the community, the situation called for exclusionary types to enter the play. Because types in the society that mete out punishment and judge were generally men, and because the situation called for a quick deflection of that normal exclusionary mechanism, Abigail Williams acted against the structure of her society, creating a sort of anti-type for herself through hysteria. This creation of a new type is allowed because in performance, the "performers maintain their own identities" (p96). She is still herself, only she is fulfilling a necessary role of accuser, whatever her interpretation of that may be. Depending on one’s view of the situation, she can be seen as either a protecting judge, like Samson, a lamenting prophet, like Jeremiah, or even the "accuser of the brethren," Satan himself.
If one wishes to understand what truly happened or the motivation behind the trials, it is crucial to pin down which type Abigail fills and which types the others fill, because once the types are discovered, one can draw parallels to the original text and search for the situation that once called for those types to come into play. This is why the witch trials lent themselves to reinterpretation in the 50s for Arthur Miller’s work The Crucible—he only had to recreate the types necessary for exclusion and accusation, and the motivations for which a similar situation, i.e. the Red Scare, was based upon presented themselves easily. The masterwork, once stripped of its authorship, becomes a "vehicle for investigating the lives of its performers" (p97), and in this case, the types and situations revealed motivations of greed, lust, and paranoia.
Necessary in the dynamics of this typology and its performance is the audience, in that opening up a dialogue, or a "community of discourse between artist and audience" (p100), folds the reactions of the audience into the performance itself, changing the outcome according to the reactions. Laurie Anderson, in her work United States, Part 1-4, treats performances like "field situations," which "ties the audience into the problematics of the event itself" (p99). In this case, the audience is able to see itself and its reactions in her work, therefore turning the spotlight around towards itself; by treating performance as a field situation, one can begin to see that daily life, especially that of an American, is a performance. This is most eloquently shown in the movie of The Cruicible in which the audience to the trials, or the Salem residents, had to learn not to take their day-to-day actions for granted, such as waving to a neighbor, because the entire city was invested in the trial and could turn on them for any aberration. At the point which the audience becomes involved in the performance, a community is formed, much like as related in the tuning story about the memorial service song: everyone has shared something, and is activated as a part of the drama (p102). Included in the new community is the performer, like Anderson, who begins to speak with us instead of for us; the performers, acting in their types, speak with the community because the community mind-set as a whole sanctions their actions and expects them—the entire narrative is internal within everyone in that community and is a part of them all.
In fact this dialogue between the performer and audience not only creates a community but forms the backbone of it, through the creation of a "common dilemma" (p101). This is why these dilemmas are so necessary, pervasive, and deadly in the Puritan community: Conflicts not only threaten their beliefs, but their existence as a community, in that the failure to respond in kind, in the accepted and typed way, would mean the end for them. Much like Antin’s talks, these performances in types "help us to define both ourselves and our roles in the community proper…. This sort of performance is an integral part of…the daily lives of the performer and the audience…roughly equivalent to ritual" (p101). In other words, the community’s participation in the dialogue serves as a sounding board to show them their part in the community, and therefore, define their identities. This dialogue creates what Sayre calls "the event of the text" (p103), in this case the actual performance in daily life of Puritan structures and types. The community, though, also determines the acceptability of the types being played out, in that part of its function is to determine a "work’s relative worth" (p100). An example of this can also be seen in The Crucible movie, in which, in the beginning of the trials, the citizens bless Abigail as she goes on her way and she continues her crusade with vigilance; however, soon the community turns on her and say, "God forgive you, Abigail Williams," and the trials near to an end. The performer of a type cannot simply act contrary to the community and situation upon a whim; they must in principle play out their role or be replaced.
Thus, the various aspects of performance art allow us to look at the reasons behind the use and evolution of Puritan typology, as well as its function in society as a whole. It is said that "literature creates a reality of its own" (p97), and in this case, the fiction that the Puritans wrote with their beliefs created the American self. Their types and actions are so deeply ingrained within all Americans that we play them out day by day, unconsciously, superconsciously. After all, each time a play is performed, a new entity is created, unlike anything ever seen, but with echoes of the past. We rise to each occasion, playing out the prescribed types that could lay dormant in us forever without a whimper. But with one spark, we are Puritans again, dancing the same old dances to new songs, reciting the same old lines to a new tempo and with a new voice. The study of types, and the discovery of that spark that puts them into action again, has the potential to unlock the illogic that rules the American psyche, and the motivation behind every move we make. But until then, we will dance, and we will sing, and we will all play our parts on the world’s stage, unknowingly complicit in the actions of our fellow performers. This is the longest running play in history.
Sayre, Henry. "Performance." Critical Terms for Literary Study (1995): 91-104.