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School of Foreign Languages, Hebei University of Science and Technology1 Introduction（标题, 居中，不加点，加黑，三号，Times New Roman，下空一行小4号。以后所有章节各级标题都同此。但是，不可用“一、”等汉书形式）（所有段落开头都空四个字母。正文1.5倍行距，小4号字，Times New Roman，各段之间不空行，各章之间空一行）Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the Protestant Church, who came into existence in the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I. The first settlers who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them Puritans. They came to America out of various reasons, but it should be remembered that they were a group of serious, religious people, advocating highly religious and moral principles. As the word itself hints, Puritans wanted to purify their religious beliefs and practices. They felt that the Church of England was too close to the Church of Rome in doctrine, form of worship, and organization of authority. The American Puritans, like their brothers in England, were idealists, believing that the Church should be restored to the “purity” of the first-century Church as established by Jesus Christ Himself. To them, religion was a matter of primary importance. They made it their chief business to see that man lived and thought and acted in a way that tended to the glory of God. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God, all that John Calvin the great French theologian who lived in Geneva, had preached. There they meant to prove that they were Gods chosen people enjoying His blessing on this earth as in heaven.As a culture heritage, Puritanism, on the one hand, did have a profound influence on the early American mind, on the other hand, it also had a enduring influence on American literature. It had become, to some extent, so much a state of mind, so much a part of the national cultural atmosphere rather than a set of tenets.With the immigration and settlement of early Puritans in North America, Puritanism has permeated widely in the American culture. It was the dominant element of early American culture and literature; furthermore, Puritanism established a solid foundation for the vigorous development of early American ethnic literature. For the early American literature, no matter in the religious fanaticism in the initial stage of colonial literature, or in the statement of the original sin in Romantic literature, or in the stress on harmony between human and nature and in the emphasis on the pure moral in Transcendentalism, we all can see the widespread influence of Puritanism. Another important contribution of Puritanism on early American literature is that it provided a permanent literary source The Bible, the greatest treasure for all Puritans.Therefore, it is safe to say that only have a comprehensive and systematic knowledge of Puritanism; people can truly understand the American culture and literature.（下空一行）2 Social Causes for the Prosperity of Puritanismin Early American Literature2.1 The Immigrants Religious Belief （小四号，加黑，左对齐）The first permanent English settlement in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. Among the members of the small band of Jamestown settlers was Captain John Smith, an English soldier of fortune. His reports of exploration, published in the early 1600s. His descriptions of America were filled with themes, myths, images, scenes, characters, and events that were a foundation for the nations literature. He portrayed English North America as a land of endless bounty. His vision helped lure the Pilgrims and the Puritans who saw themselves as new saints with a spiritual mission to flee the Old World and create a New Israel, a New Promised land, in the America that John Smith had described. Then quite a few of Puritans became the founding fathers of the American nation. Naturally, the religious belief that Puritans advocated became the most popular one during that period of time.2.2 Historical ReasonIf the time, especially the religion which control peoples mind does not have any important change, peoples thought will alter little. Therefore, Puritans were firmly entrenched in Puritanism all the way. Puritans consistently believed that the God is the Creator and the ruler of the whole world and they looked upon themselves as a chosen people, and it followed logically that anyone who challenged their way of life was opposing Gods will and was not to be accepted.Over the years the Puritans built a way of life that was in harmony with their somber religion, one that stressed hard work, thrift, piety, and sobriety. These were the Puritan values that dominated much of the earliest American writing, including the sermons, books, and letters of Puritan clergymen（Annette，2000：112）.2.3 The Early American Literature FormThe first writings that we call American were the narratives and journals of the Puritans settlements. These Puritan writers wrote about their voyage to the new land, about adapting themselves to unfamiliar climates and crops, about dealing with Indians. They wrote in diaries and in journals. They wrote letters and contracts and government charters and religious and political statements. They wrote about the land that stretched before them-unimaginable and immense, with rich dense forests and deep-blue lakes and rich soil. It stirred the imagination to great heights. All seemed possible through hard work and faith as Puritanism advocated.All the early writing forms such as sermons, journals, historical, biographical and other narrative works, and poetry became the most powerful vehicle to advertise the beliefs of Puritanism.3 The Specific Influence of Puritanismon Early American LiteratureSince the first group of pilgrims landed on American soil, they brought not only religion but also literature. The pilgrims who are Puritans established schools and encouraged education, which contributed to the development of literature.3.1 Significant influence from The Great BibleIt is a critical commonplace now that American literature is based on a myth, that is, the Biblical myth of the Garden of Eden. This literature is in great measure a literary expression of the pious idealism of the American Puritan bequest. The Puritans dreamed of living under a perfect order and worked with indomitable courage and confident hope toward building a new Garden of Eden in America, where man could at long last live the way he should. Fired with such a sense of mission, the Puritans looked even the worst of life in the face with a tremendous amount of optimism. All this went, in due time, into the making of American literature (Liu, 1999).This is made clearer and more eloquent in John Winthrops A Model of Christian Charity. The first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony states in this speech of his that there was the cause between God and his people who entered into a covenant with God for this work of building a new Garden of Eden in the new world:“The Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of his wisdom, power, goodness, and truth than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemiesfor we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us ”(1630: 56).During the colonial period, some Puritan poets also appeared on the literary stage. Among them, Edward Taylor is the most accomplished poetic craftsman. His works such as Metrical History of Christianity, Gods Determination, Preparatory Meditation all reflect his great devotion to God. And Taylors poems are considered as The Great Bible in poetry. As a Puritan poet, he always concerned about how his images speak for God. A good example is his poem, “Huswifery” , which indicates that he saw religious significance in a simple daily incident like a housewife spinning: Huswifery Make me, O Lord, thy spinning wheel complete. The holy word my distaff make for me. Make mine affections thy swift flyers neat, And make my soul thy holy spool to be. My conversation make to be thy reel, And reel the yarn thereon spun of thy wheel.The spinning wheel, the distaff, the flyers, the spool, the reel and the yarn have all acquired a metaphysical significance in the symbolic, Puritan eyes of Edward Taylor.3.2 Puritan Beliefs InfluenceIn the eighteenth century, Puritanism has been planted deeply in American minds. Therefore, it is naturally for the early American writers took Puritan beliefs as the theme of their works. Furthermore, during that period of time, Puritanism has become the common character or feature of the whole America. In the famous, Americas Coming of Age (1915), Van Wyck Brooks attempted a general survey of eighteenth-century America and the American character:“For three generations the prevailing American character was compact in one type, the man of action who was also the man of God. Not until the eighteenth century did the rift appearIt appeared in the two philosophers, Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, who share the eighteenth century between them. In their amazing purity of type and in the apparent incompatibility of their aims they determined the American character as a racial fact, and after them the Revolution became inevitableStrange that at the very outset two men should have arisen to aptly side by side and fixed the poles of our national life! For no one has ever more fully and typically than Jonathan Edwards displayed the infinite inflexibility of the upper levels of the American mind, nor any one more typically than Franklin the infinite flexibility of its lower levels ”(1915: 63).This is a penetrating analysis, exhaustive in many ways, of American Puritanism as a cultural heritage as well. The American Puritanism is a two-faceted tradition of religious idealism and levelheaded common sense. Jonathan Edwards represents the former aspect, and Franklin the latter.Edwards strongly believed Gods overwhelming presence in nature and in the soul. In real life, he liked to walk in the woods, to be solitary, far from all mankind, so as to sweetly converse with Christ, to be wrapped and swallowed up in God. Once, going out into the woods in 1737 and walking for divine contemplation and prayer, Edwards had a view which he called “extraordinary”, a view of the glory of the Son of God in his wonderful, great, full, pure, and sweet grace and love, and meek and gentle condescension. He cried with joy and recorded the experience of ecstasy in his Personal Narrative, a spiritual autobiography, in this way:“I felt an ardency of soul to beemptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone; to love him with a holy and pure love; to trust in him; to live upon him; to serve and follow him; and to be perfectly sanctified and made pure, with a divine and heavenly purity” (1962: 69).Edwards held that God who is Himself the source of all being, the substance of all life, created the world out of Himself by diffusing Himself into time and space. He made the world by an extension of Himself, by taking upon Himself the forms of stones and trees and men. To Edwards the beauty of the skies, trees, fields, and flowers is a manifestation of spiritual excellence. Everything is an image or shadow of the divine. The clean blue sky denotes for him the glory of the departed saints. The growth of grass and other vegetables dependent on the rain and the heat of the sun represent for him the dependence of our spiritual welfare on Gods gracious influences and the effusions of His Holy Spirit. The extreme fierceness and extraordinary power of lighting is an intimation of the exceeding power and terribleness of the wrath of God. When Edwards saw the sun rise out of darkness and from under the earth, raising the whole world with it, raising mankind out of their beds and brightening up everything, he thought of Jesus Christ from His grave and from a state of death and bringing happiness, life and light to the world of man. His Images or Shadows of Divine Things contains a great many instances of this kind that were part of the Puritan typological tradition.Reflecting the other aspect of Puritanism is Benjamin Franklin, who represents the whole of the colonial mind of America with Edwards. As Perry Miller observes, both came from the same parent stock, the Puritanism of New England, and each may be said to have realized a potentiality that was inherent in the original creed: they represent the paradox of Puritan materialism and immateriality.Franklins masterpiece The Autobiography is, first of all, a Puritan document. It is Puritan because it is a record of self-examination and self-improvement. The Puritans, as a type, were very much given to self-analysis. Because they believed in predestination, the Puritans and Calvinists constantly examined their conscience to ascertain for themselves how much more they should do to ensure salvation. The meticulous chart of thirteen virtues he set for himself to cultivate to combat the tempting vices, the stupendous effort he made to improve his own person, the belief that God helps those who helps themselves and that every calling is a service to God-all these indicate Franklin was intensely Puritan. Then, the book is also a convincing illustration of the Puritan ethic that, in order to get on in the world, one has to be industrious, frugal, and prudent.Another important aspect that should not be ignored is the optimism of Puritans. The wilderness filled the Puritans with the hope of restoring the Garden of Eden, and looked like the “Promised land” with which God rewarded His chosen people. Thus for a long time the hope kept floating before the people, keeping them happy and optimistic about the future. We also can see this kind of optimism in Franklins The Autobiography:“And now I speak of thanking God, I desire with all humility to acknowledge that I owe the mentioned happiness of my past life to his kind providence, which led me to the means I used and gave them success. My belief of this induces me to hope, though I must not presume, that the same goodness will still be exercised toward me, in continuing that happiness, or enabling me to bear a fatal reverse, which I may experience as others have done, the complexion of my future fortune being known to Him only in whose power it is to bless to us even our afflictions” (1909: 156).3.2.1 Puritan Beliefs Influence （三级标题，小4号，加黑，左对齐） XXX XXX XXXxxxx3.3 Formulating the Writing Skill of SymbolismThe American Puritans metaphorical mode of perception was chiefly instrumental in calling into being a literary symbolism which is distinctly American. Puritan doctrine and literary practice contributed to no small extent to the development of an indigenous symbolism.To the pious Puritan the physical, phenomenal world was nothing but a symbol of God. God has the overwhelming presence in nature and in the soul. And the stones, trees, skies, fields, and flowers all become the manifestations of the divine. For Puritans, the world was, in the words of Charles Feidelson the critic, “instinct with meaning by reason of Gods concurrence and susceptible of interpretation by reason of Gods salient acts” (1953: 86). Physical life was simultaneously spiritual; every passage of life, enmeshed in the vast context of Gods plan, possessed a delegated meaning. The world was, in a word, one of multiple significances.Originating from the earliest Edwards symbolism, Transcendentalism developed and appeared on the literary stage. Van Wyck Brooks once said: “the current of Transcendentalism, originating in the piety of the Puritans, becoming a philosophy in Jonathan Edwards, passing through Emerson, therefinement and aloofness of the chief American writers”(1956: 9).The one who was responsible for bringing Transcendentalism to New England is Ralph Waldo Emerson. He believed above all in individualism, independence of mind, and self-reliance that are main characteristics of Puritanism:“There is a time in every mans education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portionTrust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string” (1923: 79).For the writing skill of symbolism, we cannot lose sight of two giants, one is Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the other is Herman Melville.Hawthornes unique gift was for the creation of strongly symbolic stories that touch the deepest roots of mans moral nature. The finest example is the recreation of Puritan Boston, The Scarlet Letter. In this novel each word, image, and event works toward a single effect. The names of its characters, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, are symbolic, too, as are the flower at the prison door, little Pearl, the wilderness on the verge of which stands the Puritan community, and so forth. The House of the Seven Gables abounds in symbols of various kinds, the house and the rise and fall of its fortunes, the chickens and their dwindling in size, the love between the two young people, etc. Hawthornes short stories are mostly symbolic. Take his famous Young Goodman Brown for an illustration. The young man leaving his wife despite he repeated earnest pleadings not to go off into the night can be seen in one sense as emblematic of the inner urge of the young to grow up and get initiated into the adult world. He must go; it is decided by his human nature: it is a phase to go through. He must lose his innocence to discover abou