Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The allegorical structure of colonial desire
- 2 Fear and love: two versions of Protestant ambivalence
- 3 Forgoing the nation: the Irish problem
- 4 Preaching the nation: the sermon as promotion
- 5 Love and shame: Roger Williams and A Key into the Language of America
- 6 Fear and self-loathing: John Eliot's Indian Dialogues
- Coda
- Notes
- Index
6 - Fear and self-loathing: John Eliot's Indian Dialogues
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The allegorical structure of colonial desire
- 2 Fear and love: two versions of Protestant ambivalence
- 3 Forgoing the nation: the Irish problem
- 4 Preaching the nation: the sermon as promotion
- 5 Love and shame: Roger Williams and A Key into the Language of America
- 6 Fear and self-loathing: John Eliot's Indian Dialogues
- Coda
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Attempting to articulate the differences between John Eliot and Roger Williams, one scholar suggests that, “Eliot has correctly been described as the apostle to the Indians while Williams was rather the apostle among them.” He was of course acknowledging, on the one hand, Williams's refusal to participate personally in the work of proselytizing the Indians and, on the other, Eliot's lifelong commitment to such a project. On the face of it, Eliot's work as the so-called “Apostle to the Indians” would seem to lend itself easily to the discourses of Protestantism and nationalism that we have been examining in this study. Eliot's relationship, however, to the discourse of nation was, as we shall see, a complicated one. While he zealously solicited support from people who remained in England, he also had to confront the disappointing reality that his work among the Indians was less valued among his fellow colonists than it was in England.
Published in 1671 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Eliot's Indian Dialogues represents his attempt to transform his labor among the Indians into a commodity that would be valued, not simply in England, but in the colony as well. He therefore puts forth his missionary enterprise as the most reliable way for the colonists to embody the ideals of Protestantism and Englishness. Implicitly suggesting that the real future of English Protestant identity lay not in England but in the colonies, Eliot frames his dialogues as an allegory of the ongoing struggle for survival of English Protestantism.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Colonial Writing and the New World, 1583–1671Allegories of Desire, pp. 155 - 186Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999