However justified the Puritans felt in colonizing the New World, little could prepare them for the rigors of Colonial life. Aside from the sheer amount of physical labor required to create settlements, aspiring colonists had to contend with starvation, death, disease, and frequent wars with American Indian tribes. Amid such a vulnerable existence, Puritan settlers gave structure to the wilderness around them through concepts of predestination and divine providence.
“That there is a God my reason would soon tell me by the wondrous works that I see, the vast frame of the heaven and the earth, the order of all things, night and day, summer and winter, spring and autumn, the daily providing for this great household upon the earth, the preserving and directing of all to its proper end.”
Anne Bradstreet was a Puritan author renowned for her poetry in both the colonies and England. In her writing, Bradstreet encapsulates the Puritanical desire to order an unstable world through God. Her poem, “Upon the Burning of Our House,” details her response to the complete destruction of her home by fire. As Bradstreet said….
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Chaotic, traumatic, or unexpected events, such as the burning of Bradstreet’s house, were explained as being part of God’s overarching plan, thus giving them meaning and purpose. As Bradstreet wrote, “Yea, so it was, and so’twas just” (Bradstreet, 15-16). Oftentimes, especially negative events, such as the death of a child or the spread of a disease, were described as God’s punishment to the unfaithful. In a letter left for her children, Bradstreet described her numerous childhood illnesses as “[representing] God’s effort to curb her vanity and humble her pride, sins that threatened her spiritual wellbeing” (Belasco, Johnson, pg. 169).
Even death, the greatest “unknown” all creatures must face, was made orderly though predestination; Puritans believed their fate in the afterlife – either to Heaven or Hell – was determined at the moment of birth. In this way, the numerous dangers and threats the Puritans faced in the wilderness of the New World were made manageable.
Although the Puritans’ rigid philosophy helped to contain their anxieties about the wilderness, it also generated potent moral anxieties. Individuals, like Bradstreet, were under near constant pressure to demonstrate their piety, morality, and faith as proof of their worthiness of Heaven. Yet, even with such an ordered ideology, the chaos of the wilderness continued to rage around them. A rift began to form between their linear view of the world their unpredictable reality as their fears and anxieties grew to the breaking point, causing a shift in their concept of the wilderness.