Book Review
Larsa Ramsini
The Wordy Shipmates
67 Ramsini
Anne Hutchinson is “the Puritan Oprah—a leader, a guru, a star” (208). This is one of the many comparisons comedian Sarah Vowell makes in her book The Wordy Shipmates between the seventeenth century Puritans and our modern United States. Despite the many points of humor found throughout the work, most of her exploration of the life of the Nonseparatist Puritans who arrived in New England on the Arbella with Reverend John Winthrop in 1630, ten years after the Separatists Puritans arrived on the Mayflower, is used as a critique against our country’s present arrogance and self-adoration, or what Vowell refers to as “American exceptionalism” (6). The title of the work refers to the complete obsession with reading and writing that the Puritans possessed. Vowell explains that “their single-minded obsession with one book, the Bible, made words the center of their lives—not land, not money, not power, not fun” (13). As an example of their devotion to literary study, she explains their founding of Harvard in response to an embarrassing loss of wits due to a theological disagreement between Anne Hutchinson and the representatives of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (225-6). Throughout the book,Vowell defends her interest in this particular group of Puritans, as most Americans would probably hesitate to read an entire book on what has come to be known as such a boring group of people. She does succeed, however, in making them resonate with the values we hold today. In one especially moving part, as Vowell describes Winthrop’s goal of creating a unified community working together towards a common goal, she writes, “despite their unruly theology, their sometimes hair-trigger hate, the fact that the image of being members of the same body was so agreed upon to the point of cliché, makes them worth getting to know” (53). The most effective way Vowell helps the modern reader to connect with the Arbella Puritans is in drawing connections between the two seemingly divergent cultures. She describes Winthrop as “Peter Seeger, gathering a generation around the campfire to sing their shared folk songs,” and Roger Williams, the independent thinker adhering to the separation of church and state, as “Bob Dylan plugging in at Newport, making his own noise” (128-9). In explaining the Pequot War between the English and the Pequot Indian tribe, she claims that “severed body parts” are the “seventeenth-century equivalent of a gift basket of minimuffins” (186-7). And returning to her theme of past and present American exceptionalism, she compares the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s seal of a Native American saying “Come Over and Help Us” to Dick Cheney remarking on Meet the Press in 2003, “My belief is that we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators” (26).
aegis 2009
Vowell, Sarah. New York: Penguin Group, 2008. 272 pp.
