Schaefer American Lit I Fall 2005
Midterm Exam—due in class Wednesday, October 25
Choose two of the questions below and write a well-considered and well-supported response of roughly 750 words to each one.
1. Compare the attitudes toward divine forces, nature, and community expressed in the Native American myths we’ve studied with those expressed in the narratives of John Smith and William Bradford. Do you discern similarities as well as differences?
2. Discuss both the specific strengths and weaknesses, as you see them, of the theocratic form of government that William Bradford and his fellow-settlers establish in the Plymouth colony, based on their understanding of God’s covenant with the Israelites. Is this a form to which America should return, in your view, as is frequently advocated?
3. As we noted in discussing her narrative, Mary Rowlandson’s version of her experiences in King Phillip’s War is filtered through the Puritan doctrine of affliction, and two extreme responses to her approach are to see her as a victim of post-traumatic-stress syndrome who should be excused for not interpreting her experience in a more objective way, or else as a self-centered racist whose twisting of Christianity encouraged genocide. Do you take one of these positions or one somewhere more in the middle? Articulate and defend your view, being as specific as possible.
4. As we discussed in class, Anne Bradstreet’s struggles regarding her acceptance of God’s will are certainly of historical interest, shedding light on the way an intelligent seventeenth-century Puritan’s mind worked, but various aspects of those struggles transcend issues of strictly Puritan theology and attain more universal relevance. Discuss several elements of Bradstreet’s work that seem to you most illustrative of her Puritan ideology and several that you find applicable to a person of any religion who’s faced with a divergence between his or her own will and that of the deity. (Feel free to consider any of her work in our anthology, not just those poems we discussed in class.)
5. If there's a particular subject related to the reading we’ve done thus far that you're interested in but that isn’t covered by the above questions (perhaps something that’s emerged in class discussion or your writing in your journal), then you may formulate your own question and write an answer to it. Be sure to write the question out along with your answer so I'll know what you're aiming at in that answer.