John Winthrop's 'Modell of Christian Charitie' and configurations of the Puritan American covenant (Thomas Paine, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison)

John Winthrop's sermon, "Modell of Christian Charite" (1630) is a primary source of the iconic American home. Specifically, cultural and religious elements crucial to the development of the American home, including the importance of living in covenant with others, the elevation of the community over the needs of the individual, and the belief that the individual can be "saved" or redeemed by participation in a covenant, reside in this sermon. This dissertation argues that the covenant is a major cultural artifact of Puritan America and reconsiders three select works as attempts at reconciliation with the covenant ideals authorized by Winthrop in his sermon. Participation in the covenant is alternatively figured as that between God and believers, fathers and sons, and the colonies and England; with each successive formulation, the covenant is reconfigured along new lines. As American literature and culture evolve, Winthrop's model of home becomes explicitly realized in Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776), a work which justifies Independence in covenantal language. Paine depicts the king as a bad father who has broken covenant with the colonists and calls for the formulation of a new covenant, and perhaps foreshadows a fracture of the national covenant. Under a deceitful patriarch, as exemplified in the character of Ahab, the covenant is stressed to its limits in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), a work which represents nineteenth-century American literature's most distressing expression of the Puritan covenant. Ahab epitomizes the dark New England Puritan father who subverts the logic of election for his own end. In Paradise (1998), Toni Morrison historicizes the experience of African-Americans as a broken national covenant, marked by the trauma of slavery. Like Ahab, the Paradise fathers subvert the covenant by deceiving their community, using religion to further consolidate their oil empire. Morrison's novel interrogates the founder's promises of democracy, even as it reaffirms the importance of living in covenant with God and community. Paradise implies the potential resolution to the dilemma of maintaining a covenanted community in America.