SOURCE: MacLennan, George. “Bunyan and Trosse: The Pathology of Puritanism.” In Lucid Interval: Subjective Writing and Madness in History, pp. 55-77. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, MacLennan examines the use of the autobiography by Puritan writers, using Bunyan and George Trosse as examples, focusing on their of revealing Puritan spiritual beliefs and concerns as revealed through life's journey.]

I

The seventeenth century, the heyday of English Puritanism, saw a profusion of autobiographical writings of the ‘progress of the soul’ type. Puritan spiritual autobiographies were not only more numerous than Catholic and Anglican counterparts but were also characterised by a greater degree of inwardness: ‘spiritual experiences are no longer simple, objective events, but moments of intense emotional contact between God and the individual soul.’¹ The Protestant concerns of introspective self-scrutiny, the need to be spiritually reborn in God, and a requirement for ‘experimental Evidences of the work of grace,’² made the confessional autobiography an apt vehicle for Puritan writers.

The most famous work in this genre is Bunyan's Grace abounding to the chief of sinners (1666). Less well-known, but no less memorable, is The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse, written by the nonconformist minister of that name in 1692-3. Both of these works tell stories of reprobate youth, spiritual crisis and conversion. In each case the crisis turns on pathological disturbance. Bunyan suffers a prolonged testing of his ‘inner man’ through extremes of obsession and despair. Trosse's crisis is still more traumatic: he recounts three successive episodes of insanity which he suffered in his mid-twenties. The experiences reported by Bunyan and Trosse are extreme, but neither of their discourses are generically atypical.³ In comparing the two documents we see that Trosse's madness is different in degree but not in kind from the spiritual experiences of his Puritan contemporaries. Extreme as they are, the conversion experiences of both writers throw into relief significant elements of the psychological disposition of Lutheran and Calvinist Protestantism.

Puritan autobiography reproduces intensities of affective experience which result from the internalisation of conscience. For seventeenth-century Puritans, spiritual life—the inevitability of sin, the promise of salvation (predestined in the case of Calvinists), and an accompanying threat of damnation—became a matter of urgent concern as the self was required to monitor its own condition. Individuals became the keeper of their own consciences, rather than having them kept by the authority of the Catholic or Established churches. This explains the prominence in Puritan writings of the mysterious and unpardonable sin against against the Holy Ghost: ‘members of the laity were probably little concerned with it, until the Puritan emphasis upon Scripture made Bible-reading a common practice among ordinary people. Many thereafter were troubled by the references to the sin against the Holy Ghost, and some developed a conviction that they were guilty of this offence.’⁴ Bunyan and Trosse were haunted by this fear, as Cowper was to be in the 1760s.

Both Bunyan and Trosse survey the errors of their sinful past and the travails of spiritual awakening. Thus the ‘I’ of the autobiography distinguishes between the autobiographical narrator and a protagonist who struggles, through crisis, to become that narrator. The vantage point of a justified narrator implements narration as a discourse of identity. The identity in question, however, is a renewed one: it has been painfully regenerated out of the breakdown of a former self: intensity of regeneration is correlative to severity of breakdown.

The characteristic features of the inner drama of the Puritan conscience can be traced back to the figure of Luther himself. In Young Man Luther, Erik Erikson analysed the development of Luther's career in terms of identity crisis. Erikson takes into account a range of data in order to establish the historical scope of Luther's ‘process of identity,’ but doesn't specify how the psychology of identity formation is itself historically determined. When he suggests that Luther carried forward the ‘incomplete’ programme of the Renaissance ‘by applying some of the individualistic principles immanent in the Renaissance to the Church's still highly fortified home ground—the conscience of ordinary man,’⁵ he assumes that Luther's revolutionary position involves new inner and psychological co-ordinates of identity, but the implications of that assumption remain unexamined. Identity crisis may be, as Erikson suggests, a perennial factor in cultural history,⁶ but it acquires in Luther a fresh dynamism which has very considerable consequences in succeeding centuries—particularly, so the evidence suggests, in England.

Christopher Hill has complained that ‘Sociological and psychological historians have not got very far in explaining why there was so much despair in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, leading some to suicide, some to atheism, some to conversion.’⁷ Evidently not all of this can be laid at the door of Luther; however, as Erikson makes clear, his questioning of papal authority and his resumption of inner-directed, Augustinian theological concerns emerge as a force in European culture alongside other factors with which they significantly coincide, most notably Gutenberg's invention of printing. Subsequently, Elizabeth Eisenstein has argued that the emergence of a print culture is a necessary precondition of the Reformation,⁸ and Walter Ong has outlined the psychological scope of this development: ‘Even apart from the expressed doctrine of private interpretation [of the Scriptures], the printed text throws the individual back on himself, away from the group or tribe. Psychological structures supporting the corporate sense of the Christian are weakened (…) when private reading of the Bible is moved to the centre of Christian life.’⁹ Luther (initially at least) insisted that Christians should acquire the ability to read the Bible: literacy rates were higher in Protestant Northern Europe than Catholic Southern Europe in the seventeenth century, and penetrated further down the social hierarchy.¹⁰ It is the general availability of the Scriptures which guarantees a direct, inner relationship with God. Reading and writing are the prerequisites of the internalised conscience: to put it another way, the internalised conscience is accompanied by the interiorisation of script. Bunyan provides an extraordinary account of the drama of literacy in a humble man born in the wake of Luther. The only reason he finds to mention his first wife is that she brings two godly books with her as dowry; his reading of other printed matter, including Luther's pamphlet on the Galatians, are important events. His immersion in the text of the Scriptures is so all-consuming that Biblical phrases and expressions assume for him a tangible, heard reality.¹¹

Most of the cases of spiritual crisis that Christopher Hill lists in The world turned upside down occur among non-Anglicans,¹² and we know about many of them because of the collapse of censorship in 1641. Print, literacy, conscience and the break with absolutist political and ecclesiastical authority—these come together to form a potent constellation: ‘Innumerable zealots took to the streets and market-places (…). The more literate among them called on the printers to aid the dissemination of the spiritual experiences which had been granted them. A vast pamphlet literature thus came into existence between 1649 and 1660, most of it more or less directly personal in tone.¹³ Hill notes that ‘evidence [of personal crisis] increases as the revolutionary crisis deepened.’¹⁴ Erikson is surely correct to suggest that Luther's identity crisis relates to ‘the spiritual and political identity crisis of Northern Christendom in Luther's time.’¹⁵ We need only go a little further in suggesting that Luther patented a particular form of identity crisis appropriate to his epoch, namely the internalisation of conscience.

Bunyan depicts his struggle with despair through images of personal subsidence: ‘I now began to sink greatly in my soul’ (26); ‘I found myself as on a miry bog’ (27); ‘truly I did now feel myself to sink into a gulf’ (62).¹⁶ In the collapse of the old world where the recognised external authorities—Church, King, community—which have previously underpinned identity lose validity then the self must rediscover its own inner authority. But this is a process which is undertaken at great cost.¹⁷ The autobiographies of Bunyan and Trosse testify that the internalisation of conscience which Luther bequeathed to the ‘ordinary man’ of the Protestant West is born from inner crisis—and that Luther's bequest includes his own experiences of melancholy and despair.

Crisis is almost a sine qua non of a self reborn in God: the soul becomes a battlefield of conflicting impulses, torn between the forces of the Devil and the force of God: ‘The main point to be made here is Luther's new emphasis on man in inner conflict and his salvation through introspective perfection.’¹⁸ In propounding a divorce between faith and works, Luther pronounced a break between the inner and outer man,¹⁹ leaving the Christian conscience with the full burden of responsibility for its sinful nature, which faith alone could redeem. Guilt was a necessary product of this doctrine, and despair was a frequent byproduct. The inner pressures induced by notions of individual responsibility and a personal salvation guaranteed by faith alone could—and did—raise psychical tensions to breaking point. Religious melancholy was a widely recognised symptom in seventeenth-century England: Bunyan was merely one of many who read with terror A relation of the fearful estate of Francis Spira, Nathaniel Bacon's account of an Italian cleric who, in the climate of the Counter-Reformation, had recanted his Protestantism and died in despair of salvation (‘The reading of Spira's case causeth or increaseth melancholy for many,’ the Puritan divine Richard Baxter commented.²⁰) Those who, like Bunyan and Trosse, had tempered themselves spiritually in the forge of religious crisis acquired considerable moral authority: ‘emphasis falls on regeneration, on the regathering and strengthening of spiritual integrity, while never letting go the knowledge of guilt and terror once felt (…). Thus, far from being despised or even pitied, the melancholics who successfully regather themselves may join the race of saints, as many believed Trosse had done.’²¹

As Christopher Hill remarks, the intensity of this drama was heightened by the context of the events of mid-century: ‘In the widespread despair and atheism of the late 1640s and early 1650s we can sense the impact of the revolutionary crisis on the certainties of traditional Calvinism.’²² The personal crises of Bunyan and Trosse both coincided with the turmoil of the ‘Puritan Revolution’ of 1640-60.

Stephen Greenblatt has contrasted the Puritan ‘representation of inwardness’ with a ‘presentation of inwardness’ found in sixteenth-century writings: ‘In seventeenth century spiritual autobiography, the inner life is represented in outward discourse; that is, the reader encounters the record of events that have already transpired (…). In the early sixteenth century there is not yet so clearly a fluid, continuous inner voice.’²³ This assessment of Puritan writing is somewhat misleading. Puritan self-representation is not merely ‘the record of events that have already transpired.’ The ‘justified’ viewpoint asserts a spiritual victory which is never secure because always threatened by the felt reality of ungodly forces. In the ‘Conclusion’ of Grace abounding, Bunyan itemises ‘abominations’ which ‘I continuallie see and feel, and am afflicted and oppressed with.’ Yet they serve a good purpose—‘they show me the need I have to watch and be sober’ (103). The Puritan conscience is required to subject itself to a process of continual self-monitoring, so Puritan autobiography reenacts the inner discourse of a subject whose self-examination is an ongoing concern: in this way it reproduces an immediate inner self-reflexivity.

What Greenblatt calls ‘outward discourse’ is closely linked to the inward reality which it relates. Bunyan draws attention to the functional style that his serious matter demands:

I could also have stepped into a stile much higher than this in which I have here discoursed, and could have adorned all things more than here I have seemed to do: but I dare not: God did not play in convincing of me (…); neither did I play when I sunk as into a bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell caught hold upon me: wherefore I may not play in my relating of them, but be plain and simple.

(3)

Joan Webber has related the Anglican high style and the Puritan plain style to the respective versions of selfhood which they represent. The ‘I’ of the Anglican writer ‘is obscure, ambiguous, many-sided because that is how he looks to himself, both in his use of such metaphysical figures as optical illusion, paradox, and word-play, and in stylistic shifts from one point to another in his prose. He is aware that “he” need not even be the same person from moment to moment.’ The Puritan writer, by contrast, ‘is active, timebound, as simple and visible as possible, desirous of being taken literally and seriously.’²⁴

Bunyan's language of self-awareness, unlike that of Donne, does not derive from Renaissance humanism. He rejects humanistic rhetoric on religious grounds, but the rejection comes all the more easily inasmuch as ‘I never went to school to Aristotle or Plato.’²⁵ The anti-rhetorical realism of Grace abounding is consistent with Bunyan's education and his unprivileged social position generally.²⁶ His moral pilgrimage begins with his first marriage: ‘though we came together as poor as poor might be, (not having so much houshold-stuff as a Dish or Spoon betwixt us both), yet this she had for her part, The plain mans path-way to heaven’ (8). Just as Bunyan the writer disdains the showy ornaments and decorations of the Anglican high style, so the young Bunyan, awakening to conscience in circumstances of relative scarcity, cannot afford the luxury of rhetorical self-projection. His circumstances at the time of his marriage mean that the spiritual value of The plain mans path-way cannot be dissociated from the material values of property.²⁷ Donne and other humanist writers come into possession of a privileged rhetoric of self-presentation: under these conditions, a perceived mutability of the self may be of concern to a ‘melancholic’ observer such as Montaigne (‘Myself now and myself a while ago are indeed two’),²⁸ but is not experienced as a crisis of self-value. Bunyan, for his part, experiences God's Word as a material support for the self—‘this sentence stood like a Mill-post at my back’ (60). The substantial Word, however, doesn't guarantee self-possession: on the contrary, ‘all these fears of mine did arise from a stedfast belief that I had of the stability of the holy Word of God’ (57). Bunyan's ‘inner man’ belongs to God, not to himself, and where his thoughts or behaviour leave salvation in doubt, then his inner reality, granted only under divine licence, begins to crumble: ‘I had cut myself off by my transgressions, and left myself neither foot-hold, nor hand-hold amongst all the stayes and props in the precious word of Life. And truly I did now feel myself to sink into a gulf, as an house whose foundation is destroyed’ (62).

Victor Sage, discussing the forms of Puritan psychology, draws our attention to a passage from Grace abounding in which Bunyan likens two opposed thoughts in his mind to a pair of oscillating scales—‘sometimes one end would be uppermost, and sometimes again the other’ (65). Bunyan's narrational metaphor of balance controls the images of inner imbalance which it conveys: ‘The power of this kind of metaphor,’ Sage comments, ‘prevents the language from shading over into psychopathology.’²⁹ Bunyan's art ‘is not to let the “I” appear at all unstable,’ while narrating the instability which the same ‘I’ has passed through. The metaphor of the scales derives from an inner economy of self-accounting: Sage quotes Calvin on ‘the anxiety which fills the breasts of believers, who sincerely examine themselves. Every mind, therefore, would first begin to hesitate and at length to despair, while each determined for itself with how a great a load of debt it was still oppressed (…).’³⁰ Sage comments, ‘The language of finance (…) in which the sincere deal with themselves supplies the most objective-seeming metaphor of all for mental-process: the account book. (…) The idea of debit and credit is somehow more “real”: the “weight of debt” seems literally to drag the mind down.’³¹ There is, then, nothing at all reassuring about this most objective of metaphors. Bunyan's image of the scales, in allying a metaphorical economy of the inner self with the subtext of real economic concerns, underscores the felt reality of the protagonist's tormenting fear that, like Esau, he has sold his birthright.³² The economic metaphor may guarantee the stability of the narrational ‘I’, but it maintains, nevertheless, an underlying affinity with the real instability it so effectively expresses.

It seems to me that Bunyan's discourse is intrinsically related to the crisis it represents. Metaphors, by virtue of their very operative seriousness, can acquire a disturbingly hallucinatory potential in that cast of mind which seeks to validate images in terms of reality. When Freud suggests that the schizophrenic takes words for things,³³ his notion applies with particular force to the Puritan self. If madness comes frighteningly close to Bunyan it is because his perception and representation of reality are so utterly serious. Donne can afford to be referentially and metaphorically playful without summoning the threat of madness precisely because he is unconcerned with the perception or representation in language of a material experience of spiritual reality.

We may refer here to Roman Jakobson's celebrated distinction between ‘metaphoric’ and ‘metonymic’ aspects of language. Jakobson proposed that lyric poetry is metaphorical inasmuch as it embodies a paradigmatic axis of substitution, whereas realist prose is metonymic, primarily embodying a syntagmatic axis of combination.³⁴ Jakobson formulated this thesis in a paper on aphasic disturbance, and it was his analysis of the two general types of aphasia which gave rise to his classificatory categories. In extending these to literary genres, he avoided any implication of pathological disorder—with, however, one intriguing exception. On the side of metonymy he referred to a Russian realist writer, Gleb Uspenskij, who, according to Jakobson, suffered a mental disorder which affected his prose style, resulting in an ‘abnormal’ overload of metonymic detail.³⁵ Thus, in the case of referential realism, and only in this case, Jakobson allowed an implicit criterion distinguishing normal from abnormal or pathological referentiality. Realism, unlike figurative or lyric writing, incorporates evidential norms, enabling judgmental perspectives of norm and deviation which may operate from within the text as well as from without. Where realism is above all a psychological imperative, as it is in Bunyan and Trosse, then it implicates deviation as a psychological—which is to say psychopathological—tendency. As a result Trosse directly recognises his deviant perception as madness, constituting that madness as a pathological fact. In comparison, the Anglican poet Christopher Smart's subjective, lyrical and prophetic asylum poem Jubilate agno has no truck with realistic representation or evidential norms. Correspondingly it includes no recognition or acknowledgement of madness. Smart's celebratory mode of subjectivity is undespairing and free from the pathological torments of Bunyan, Trosse and Cowper: ‘For the sin against the HOLY GHOST is INGRATITUDE.’³⁶

Bunyan's ‘house whose foundation is destroyed,’ liable to collapse at any moment, is the narrator's figure for a self in need of reconstruction, but it is more than that. The metaphor is prominently positioned in the Conclusion of Grace abounding, where it reveals its scriptural origin:

Of all the Temptations that I ever met with in my life, to question the being of God, and the truth of his Gospel, is the worst, and worst to be borne; when this temptation comes, it takes my girdle away from me, and removeth the foundation from under me: O I have often thought of that Word, Have your loyns girt about with truth; and of that, When the foundations are destroyed what can the righteous do?

(102)

Given its source, this is no mere rhetorical figure. The protagonist has experienced it as a literal force acting on his experience of reality. In the well-known bell-ringing episode, the young Bunyan, his conscience freshly awakened, feels compelled to abandon his guilty enjoyment of bell-ringing for fear that the church bell and church steeple will come tumbling down to crush him. The figurative instability of a Church without ‘true’ foundations acquires here the dimensions of pathological instability:

Now you must know, that before that I had taken much delight in ringing, but my Conscience beginning to be tender, I thought that such a practice was but vain, and therefore forced my self to leave it, yet my mind hanckered, wherefore I should go to the Steeple house, and look on: though I durst not ring. But I thought this did not become Religion neither, yet I forced my self and would look on still; but quickly after, I began to think, How, if one of the Bells should fall: then I chose to stand under a main Beam that lay over thwart the Steeple from side to side, thinking there I might stand sure: But then I should think again, Should the Bell fall with a swing, it might first hit the Wall, and then rebounding upon me, might kill me for all this Beam; this made me stand in the Steeple door, and now, thought I, I am safe enough, for if a Bell should then fall, I can slip out behind these thick Walls, and so be preserved notwithstanding.

So after this, I would yet go to see them ring, but would not go further than the Steeple door, but then it came into my head, how if the Steeple it self should fall, and this thought, (it may fall for ought I know) would when I stood and looked on, continually so shake my mind. that I durst not stand at the Steeple door any longer, but was forced to fly, for fear it should fall on my head.

(13-14)

The psychological realism of this account should not blind us to its allegorical potential: added to the third edition of 1672, it arguably exemplifies the scriptural citation in the (already written) Conclusion, ‘When the foundations are destroyed …’. The protagonist must exit from an unsound Church and its communal-festival activities, which threaten spiritual collapse and destruction: he must do so in order to undertake a putting-in-order of his own house. However, Bunyan does not open out this underlying allegorical implication: indeed he gives no indication of being aware of it. Allegory can only emerge outside the temporal narrative, as a token of promised redemption. To impose it at this point would be to abolish the immediate urgency of the historical narrative as it conveys the protagonist's crisis-experience. Nevertheless the implication insists as a problem of meaning. As the threat of collapse takes possession of the protagonist's mind, his guilt and fear seize on a given particular—the bell, which might fall—but are unable to contain it in this detail, and leap uncontrollably from bell to entire steeple in a concatenating sequence. This can be traced back to Calvin's analysis of the ramifying obsessions of the fearful conscience: ‘When a man begins to doubt whether it is lawful for him to use linen for sheets, shirts, napkins, and handkerchiefs, he will long be secure as to hemp, and will at last have doubts as to tow.’³⁷ The uneasy or guilty conscience falls victim to its own over-literalistic perception of the meanings of reality. To use Jakobson's terms of reference, a metaphorical meaning is pathologically grasped in terms of a sequence of metonymic details: these progressively contaminate each other as a perceived instability of reality itself. The newly awakened conscience recognises that the edifice—the very structure of meaning—which it had previously inhabited is unsound and lacks foundation or support: a new meaning must be discovered, without which the unsupported self will collapse: ‘but now a Word, a Word to lean a weary Soul upon, that I might not sink for ever! 'twas that I hunted for’ (78). This acquires potentially hallucinatory dimensions when projected by the guilty conscience as a literal perception of reality.

However, literal meaning, felt negatively by the protagonist when it acts on his perception of reality, is redeemed when converted into the higher meaning of allegory.³⁸ In Grace abounding, explicit allegory is restricted to a premonitory dream-vision of salvation: Bunyan sees the elect of Bedford ‘as if they were set on the sunny side of some high Mountain.’ He is separated from them by a wall encircling the mountain, keeping him out in a wintry cold. He goes round and round the wall, finding at length a ‘narrow gap’ through which he succeeds in passing only with the greatest difficulty. The meaning of the vision is then spelled out:

the Mountain signified the Church of the living God; the Sun that shone thereon, the comfortable shining of his mercifull face on them that were therein: the wall I thought was the Word that did make separation between the Christians and the world: and the gap which was in this wall, I thought was Jesus Christ, who is the way to God the Father.

(18)

Bunyan deploys here a full complement of conditionals (‘methinks,’ ‘as it were’) which indicate the non-reality of the vision. The literal exit from the church steeple is compensated by a nonliteral but prophetic entry into the true Church—via a ‘Word’ founded in a concrete but non-literal image. The anticipated triumph of the narrative of self-regeneration is celebrated through the allegorisation of meaning, with Pilgrim's progress (1678) already in view. In Pilgrim's progress, meaning itself is regenerated and redeemed. Promising salvation, the positive meaning of allegory redresses the negative one of a pathological literality which threatens damnation. Both terms tend towards a visualisation and ‘reification’ of figural or symbolic modes of meaning, but if allegory is a positive instrument used by Bunyan the writer in ordering meaning, then pathological literality is negatively instrumental and acts on Bunyan as a passive, helpless protagonist.³⁹

In the eighteenth century, Christopher Smart, for all that he acknowledges his situation and location, never considers the possibility of an aberrant madness. Because his transcendental Anglican God does not judge him, Smart does not judge himself. Bunyan's God is not a transcendental force: his operations are as real as they are mysterious. In relation to him, Bunyan may be either really saved or really damned: it is not a matter which lies within his choosing. Throughout his crisis, there is no active determination of meaning on his part: meaning must be solicited, awaited and received. So sustained and intense is Bunyan's concentration on Scripture that it acquires an autonomous reality: he is continually assailed by scriptural texts which bolt into his mind or sound in his ear. In this way meaning acquires the tangible dimension of reality while losing none of its spiritual efficacy. Whether it takes the form of diabolical literality or of godly allegory, this substantialisation of meaning relates to an historically specific self, projected through the formal realism of the autobiographical narrative. The psychology embodied in the autobiography is inseparable from the commitment which autobiographical discourse makes to realism as a mode of representation: autobiography, as history of an inner self, necessarily involves an acknowledgement of the given conditions wherein the self discovers and confirms its authenticity. Even in his allegorical dream-vision Bunyan must struggle with the unyielding materiality of a wall. By contrast, material obstacles provide no hindrance to Bunyan's contemporary, James Carkesse (‘Fetters they were but Straw…’).

Carkesse's ‘witty’ self-representation is playful where Bunyan's is not. The crises of Bunyan and Trosse remove them from Carkesse's non-psychological realm of play, spectacle and public exteriority. Bunyan receives his ominous call to grace ‘in the midst of a game of Cat.’ As we shall see, Trosse too is abruptly removed from a life of idle conviviality.

II

In The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse, the Puritan internalisation of conscience coincides with an interiorised experience of madness. The collapse of self-identity in madness which threatens Bunyan in Grace abounding overtakes his contemporary, George Trosse.

The first twenty pages of Trosse's Life relate his early life—his education, his decision to become a merchant, and his sojourns in France and Portugal. At about the age of twenty he returns to his native Exeter where he remains for the next five years—a period of inaction passed over briefly in the narrative. Trosse suspends his narrative at this point to provide a fifteen-page summary of the various ways in which he has broken the Commandments. Only then does he resume his story: in this way he sums up and judges a closed chapter.

Before his crisis, Trosse seems to exist solely in terms of a limited area of surface consciousness: he depicts himself in the first phase of his life as lacking in any sense of inner or spiritual awareness. His youth unfolds against a backdrop of historical crisis—the Civil War, the execution of Charles I, and the Protectorate, but these events scarcely seem to affect him. He was, by his own account, anti-Parliamentarian before his madness, but not actively so: Cavalier attitudes were congenial to his youthful lack of seriousness. Otherwise it's difficult to assess the significance of national events to his state of mind. Yet the single, seemingly innocuous occurrence which precipitates his breakdown involves the religious and political tensions of the day. Trosse stands surety for a former major in the King's army, held on this account to be a ‘suspected Person,’ and thus required by the Sheriff ‘to give Security in a Bond, of some Hundreds of Pounds, not to leave the city’ (84).⁴⁰ This is an act of impulsive political enthusiasm: ‘I was a vain rash Young-Fellow, thoroughly devoted to the Interest of the Cavaliers, and extreamly fond of that Party’ (85). He then gets roaring drunk and goes home to sleep it off. Only on awakening to find himself beset by hallucinations and delusions does he become aware of the consequences for himself should the major default—but otherwise there is no obvious relationship between the given events and the descent into madness: this is abrupt, inexplicable and unmotivated. Just as Gregor Samsa awakens to find himself transformed into a beetle, so Trosse awakens to find himself mad.

As a flagrant non sequitur the episode underlines the arbitrary quality of the autobiographical narrative up to this point. The young Trosse's choice of career is motivated by selfish and opportunistic concerns: ‘having a Roving Fancy, a Desire to get Riches, and to live luxuriously in the World, I was bent upon Merchandize and Travelling into Foreign Parts. But then in this I had no other Motive, but the Satisfying the Great Lords and Commanders of the unregenerate World, the lusts of the Eyes, and the Pride of Life’ (48-9). On a day-to-day basis, this existence is largely contingent, and Trosse depicts his pre-crisis self as a thoughtless and conscienceless creature. Reverend Trosse reproaches his youthful self for neglecting private prayer: unconcerned with the obligation of private self-scrutiny, the young Trosse lacks moral awareness. He doesn't experience himself subjectively and so doesn't experience public events as factors of consequence in his own existence:

As to the Protector, as Oliver was called, I hated and revil'd him, and wish'd his Ruine and Destruction, (not out of any Conscience towards God, because he had so horribly sinn'd against the Fifth Command, by putting the King to Death; and usurping Authority, but) meerly from a proud Fancy, and because he seem'd to favour those who were religious and pious.

(79)

Trosse's madness, far from being the result of some psychological trauma, instigates psychological self-awareness. Whereas Reverend Trosse routinely condemns and rejects his pre-crisis self, his discourse acquires an urgency of involvement in narrating his madness.

The attraction travelling had held for Trosse contrasts with his reluctance, when mad, to move at all. Disrupting his superficial way of life, madness plunges him into the dimension of depths: ‘I was resolv'd not to move out of my Bed; for I was perswaded that if I remov'd out of it, I should fall into Hell, and be plung'd into the Depths of Misery’ (92). Spatial movement no longer occurs in terms of a horizontal surface but opens up vertically. His removal to Glastonbury and the private madhouse is experienced as a descent into hell: ‘I was now perswaded that I was no longer upon Earth, but in the Regions of Hell. When we came to the Town, I thought I was in the midst of Hell’ (93). This threatening descent plumbs the depths of a negative self: ‘If I went out of my Chamber, every Place, Person and Object afforded Matter of Terror and Confusion; for I carry'd, as it were, my Hell within me, and therefore could see nothing without that was pleasing to me’ (98).

Trosse's descensus Averno is no less psychological for occurring in terms of Christian eschatology. The Puritan self does not determine its own meanings, but incorporates those which the Bible and Providence make available.⁴¹ Accordingly, alienated or negative forms of conscience are understood as manifestations of the Devil. As the Devil becomes a psychological reality, he loses his old magical attributes. If God is a positive measure of inner reality then the Devil is the agent of unreality or loss of reality, and Trosse credits him as the author of his delusions and hallucinations: ‘I was dispos'd to believe every Falsehood that the Father of Lies might impose on me’ (88).

Nevertheless madness is instrumental in revealing to Trosse the superficiality and unreliability of the world of appearances in which he has hitherto moved: only when insane is he exposed to the content of his experience and confronted with the need to interpret it: ‘Walking up and down in the Room, in a miserable distracted, despairing Condition, I had a Suggestion and Temptation to curse God and die. Whatever was the Meaning of those Words in the Mouth of Job's Wife, I am sure, I then apprehended them to be Literally meant’ (89). His interpretation is bad because, clinging to a shallow literalism, he fails to penetrate to an authentic depth of understanding. Even in the catastrophic breakdown of everyday reality, he remains subject to delusory surfaces and appearances, enabling the Devil to dupe him. Trosse must, eventually, confront the hallucinatory depths of the Bottomless Pit before learning that, for him, stability is founded in a moral relationship with the world. In Camus's L'Etranger, Meursault's relationship with his environment empties out the kind of moral relationship between character and milieu which obtains in Balzac or Dickens. But, in the seventeenth century, it is just this emptiness that Trosse must fill with meaning, otherwise the factitious world of surfaces he has inhabited up to now will fall to pieces. The course of his madness, which takes him down into the bowels of Glastonbury madhouse, is a process of death and rebirth through which he progresses towards a morally authenticated reality. From being a place of hallucinatory damnation, Glastonbury will become a scene of real recovery and enduring conversion.

When Trosse awakens to madness, the hallucinatory voice addresses to him the question ‘Who art thou?’ Self-knowledge and identity are at issue here. Trosse, hallucinated, misrecognises his spiritual adversary because he does not know himself. Towards the end of his account he is able to answer this question: ‘I am what I was not.’ Trosse's discourse of identity, in replying to the hallucinatory question of identity, reveals the hell of his madness as the crucible in which an inadequate self is transmuted: ‘I perceiv'd a Voice, (I heard it plainly) saying unto me, Who art thou? Which, knowing it could be the Voice of no Mortal, I concluded it was the Voice of God, and with Tears, as I remember, reply'd, I am a very great Sinner, Lord!’ (86). The narrator retrospectively views this as a satanic ploy: ‘Thus, pretending the Worship of God, I fell, in effect, to the Worshipping of the Devil.’ However, Trosse's God and his Devil are doubles, and the moral force of the question of identity persists.

The ambivalent status of the voice—God or Devil?—corresponds to an implied duality of inner and outer: it is the ‘good’ voice of the internalised conscience, hitherto dormant, which returns, sounded externally as an aural hallucination. As the narrative continues, the voice, a grotesque parody of the self-punishing voice of awakened conscience, prompts Trosse to humiliate and abase himself. The passage, which climaxes with Trosse's realisation that the voice is bent on driving him to self-destruction, is worth quoting at length:

while I was praying on my Knees, I heard a Voice, as I fancy'd, saying, as it were just behind me, Yet more humble, Yet more humble; with some Continuance. And not knowing the Meaning of the Voice, but undoubtedly concluding it came from God, I endeavour'd to comply with it. Considering that I kneel'd upon something, I remov'd it; and then I had some kind of Intimation given me, that that was what was requir'd. Thus I kneel'd upon the Ground: But the Voice still continu'd, Yet more humble; Yet more humble. In Compliance with it I proceeded to pluck down my Stockings, and to kneel upon my bare Knees: But the same awful Voice still sounding in my Ear, I proceeded to pull off my Stockings, and then my Hose, and my Doublet; and as I was thus uncloathing my self, I had a strong internal Impression, that all was well done, and a full Compliance with the Design of the Voice. In Answer likewise to this Call, I would bow my Body as low as possibly I could, with a great deal of Pain, & this I often repeated: But all I could do was not low enough, nor humble enough. At last, observing that there was an Hole in the Planking of the Room, I lay my self down flat upon the Ground, and thrust in my Head there as far as I could; but because I could not fully do it, I put my Hand into the Hole, and took out Earth and Dust, and sprinkled it on my Head; some Scripture Expressions at that Time offering themselves to my Mind, I thought this was the Lying down in Dust and Ashes thereby prescrib'd. At length, standing up before the Window, I either heard a Voice, which bid me, or had a strong Impulse, which excited me, to Cut off my Hair; to which I reply'd, I have no Scissars. It was then hinted, that a Knife would do it; but I answer'd, I have none. Had I one I verily believe, this Voice would have gone from my Hair to my Throat, and commanded me to cut it: For I have all reason to conclude, that the Voice was the Voice of Satan, and that his Design was to humble me as low as Hell.

(86-7)

The ramifying process of Trosse's self-abasement resembles a passage in Calvin's Institutes which we have already noted. Calvin cautions against overscrupulosity of conscience in regard to external observance: ‘When a man begins to doubt whether it is lawful for him to use linen for sheets, shirts, napkins, and handkerchiefs, he will not long be secure as to hemp, and will at last have doubts as to tow (…). Here some must be by despair hurried into an abyss.’⁴² Calvin confirms the rhetorical pattern of the above passage. The abyss towards which Trosse's self-chastising conscience is hurried acquires an hallucinatory literality as the voice prompts him to cut his hair. The direction of the admonition, which has just taken him down to the floor, makes all too credible the projection of a descending knife path from the cutting of hair to the cutting of the throat. But it is the degree of control whereby the narrator's voice retrospectively trumps the literal force of the hallucinatory voice which impresses in this passage. Rhetorical control at the formal level is inversely proportional to hallucinatory control at the level of content: ‘his Design was to humble me as low as Hell.’ In deciphering the underlying design, Reverend Trosse's discourse reasserts mastery: the demonic parody of the good voice of conscience, entrapping the self in a concatenation of guilt, is vanquished by the stable voice of the writer himself, retrospectively elucidating the true meaning of his earlier experiences. Madness both inverts and perverts meaning: ‘applying my self to read in a Book I had taken up, I saw, as I apprehended, horrid Blasphemies in it’ (100). But, through the writing of the Life, Reverend Trosse is able to recapitulate these negative meanings in a spiritually significant testament.

In therapeutically redoubling the negative voice of the alienated conscience, Trosse's discourse compensates for the psychopathological doubling of God and Devil. This doubling is a projection of the tensions that derive from Lutheran and Calvinistic theology. The Puritan internalisation of conscience, with its presumption of guilt and its simultaneous assumption of salvation, induces a psychical splitting which manifests itself in symptoms of doubling and of voices:

I (seemingly) heard a Voice, saying with Great Anger, Thou Wretch! Thou hast committed the Sin against the Holy Ghost. This Breath I then believed to have been the Holy Ghost (…). And believing that I had been inspir'd and taught by Him in all these ridiculous Acts of Humiliation, (I am sure they were so as done by me.) I presently concluded, that I really had been guilty of the Sin against the Holy Ghost, and so could not possibly be pardon'd.

(88)

As this passage proceeds, the narrator reasons energetically with the protagonist's madness:

Thus by my careless and prophane Reading and Hearing of the Word of God, and not endeavouring to understand the Meaning of it, I gave the Great Deceiver an Advantage to make me believe, that the Word, perverted and understood in a wrong Sence was the Word of God: For, not Receiving the Truth in the Notion, much less in the Love of it, I was dispos'd to believe every Falsehood that the Father of Lies might impose upon me. But I am well assur'd that this was not the Sin against the Holy Ghost.

(88)

The rationality of this discourse is impressive, but, in retrospectively reordering his previous disorder, Trosse discloses the underlying epistemological problem which characterises the ‘dissenting, Protestant model of the mind.’⁴³ As the writer argues with himself, the urgency of the debate reproduces conflict at the very moment it denotes resolution.

In Puritanism there is no escape from the divided self. Self-division will usually take the form of an interiorisation of a repressive morality, with a consequent need for self-scrutiny. In Trosse this psychological pattern reveals its affinity with the experience of madness. His narrative does not merely report his madness, it actively seeks to reorder its deliriously misguided moral thrust. The hallucinatory voice which assails the protagonist is compensated by the retrospective voice of the narration: this reproduces the way in which a pathological split is therapeutically restored to balance. But the fact remains that the split voice of madness and the balanced, self-monitoring voice of sanity are, both, doubled voices. Just as an hallucinatory Devil mimics a morally rational God, so pathological self-division is, in Trosse, a bad form of rational self-scrutiny.

In a state of continuing delirium in the madhouse, Trosse sees a doppelgänger figure in a vision. This episode strikingly reveals how ambivalent the phenomenon of doubling is in the text:

there was One who had liv'd a very wicked and lewd Life, & was born in the same City and Street where I was, who also had been in France, and learn'd the Language with me in the same House; and afterwards when I return'd from Portugal, He liv'd in this City; we were Associates in Vice and Vanity. This person I imagin'd to have been in Chains, wrestling and striving to get himself free; by which he underwent a great deal of exquisite Pain, and told me, That He had gone thro' a great many Pains already, and was resolv'd to wade thro' this, and all others before him; that so at length he might be perfectly and everlastingly free from all Miseries.

(99)

The very narrative moment is ambivalent here. The vision seems too good to be true, and Trosse may be rigging his account in the interest of allegory. But whether the vision is invented or actual, the portrayal of extremes of suffering and salvation through the figure of the double is significant. If Trosse's experience is intrinsically ambivalent then the vision of the doppelgänger shows a practical awareness of that ambivalence. His narration of madness clearly involves a project of meaning, so that the delirious phenomena possess a paradoxical coherence. The insistently downwards movement of his self-abasement (‘Yet more humble’) is characteristic of a thematic pattern, and the episode of self-abasement, situated at the onset of the protagonist's madness, already anticipates the larger narrative outcome, wherein the downward path of despair terminates not in destruction and damnation but in eventual salvation.

Trosse's individualism and psychological realism more usually play down allegorical or emblematic tendencies. He possesses a practical insight into the kinship between the psychological forms of unreason and reason, and is able to turn this to a genuinely therapeutic end. In the eighteenth century William Cowper's Evangelical autobiography will celebrate a ‘miraculous’ rebirth to sanity, whereas Trosse presents a gruelling and prolonged re-education of the self. Like Bunyan, he condemns Quakerism, but, writing in the early 1690s, he demonstrates, as Bunyan does not, the accommodation English Protestantism reached with rationalist scepticism at the end of the seventeenth century: ‘I am perswaded, that many of the Quakers formerly were deluded by such Voices and Impulses from the Impure Spirit, which they mistook for the Holy Spirit of God’ (87). According to Trosse, enthusiastic Quakerism and ‘Visions and Voices among the Papists’ all derive from ‘the same Author, or Cause, viz. A crack'd Brain, impos'd upon by a deceitful and lying Devil’ (87). His own careful discriminations, coming in the previous paragraph, are eminently psychological in spirit: ‘I either heard a Voice, which bid me, or had a strong Impulse, which excited me.’ Christian truth requires a vigilant exercise of reason: it is not given but must be worked for.

In Trosse's prose a virtuous labour of reason seeks to penetrate beyond the deceit of surface appearances and arrive at an underlying truth: ‘I was (…) haunted (…) with a great many terrifying and disquieting Visions and Voices; which tho’ (I believe) they had no Reality in themselves, yet they seem'd to be such to me, and had the same Effect upon me, as if they had been really what they appear'd to be’ (89). Reason involves hard work: the painstaking differentiations of this sentence define sanity in terms of the Puritan work-ethic. Inasmuch as effort is an index of moral value, Trosse's recovery is literally hard-won.

This becomes evident in his study of foreign languages. He possesses an initial facility: ‘All my younger Years were spent at the Grammar-School, to learn the Latine Tongue. I had a quick Apprehension’ (47). Following the interruption of his studies, his first trip abroad is undertaken with the aim of learning French: ‘Within a Year, I arriv'd at a considerable Knowledge of that Tongue (…). And this was all the Good I got in France’ (51). When, following his final recovery, he goes up to Oxford he sets himself to studying the ancient languages—not only Latin and Greek, but also Hebrew, in order to read the Bible in the original. In this way he seeks to remedy the deviation which took him from the virtues of Latin and grammar school to the vices of France and French (by inference, an ungodly language). His progress from the study of Latin to Greek and then Hebrew suggests a concern to arrive at a language of ultimate patriarchal authority. If French has been the language which Trosse learned with the least effort, Hebrew, at the opposite pole, is the one which costs him most pains. But the effort expended is proportionate to the virtue gained inasmuch as this is the original language of the Scriptures,

which tho' I found very difficult and tedious, very jejune and sapless, (… now to beat my Brains about Words and Terminations, was for some time grievous to me.) yet apprehending it very useful for the attaining that End for which I design'd all my other Studies, which was the knowledge of Divinity, I waded thro' that Difficulty and got some considerable Insight into it; insomuch that now I have read the Hebrew Bible several Times thro'.

(115)

God's ‘original’ language requires mastery of the technical difficulties of meaning, an involvement with grammar and rules of syntax which is at the opposite pole from the Devil's spurious orality and hallucinatory conflations of signifier and signified. True meaning can only be established as a result of a learning of rules.

III

As Trosse recovers his faculties in the madhouse he correspondingly acquires a sense of Christian responsibility, but the improvement remains superficial: ‘I now began now to favour somewhat the Matters of Religion, and pray'd with the Gentlewoman [Mrs Gollop] in her Family, and constantly attended Publick Worship (…). Time after this, as to all external Actions, I liv'd very commendably: But, in the mean Time, there was but little of Heart-work’ (101). Out of Glastonbury, Trosse falls back into his bad old habits (‘I return'd to that Vomit’), then relapses into torments of guilt and is returned to the madhouse in a state of frenzy. Once more his recovery coincides with a renunciation of licentiousness and a turn to Christian observance. But he has not yet truly opened his heart to God: ‘[I] contented my self with some external Reformation, and a Pharisaical Religion’ (110). Again he relapses, and, for the third time, returns to Glastonbury. Yet again he recovers, but this time he at last commits himself decisively to God: there is no further question of moral or mental relapse. Assuming a new responsibility for his existence, he re-educates himself in the fullest sense by going up to Pembroke College to pursue a degree in Divinity (this is left incomplete owing to the circumstances of the Restoration). The interiorisation of the Puritan ethic of self-discipline is complete.

In a revealing phrase, Trosse states that he has (by God's grace) been ‘brought out of a State of Nature into a State of Adoption (. …) that my strong and powerful Lusts might be subdu'd and renounc'd’ (112). Stability has been attained at the cost of implementing the characteristically Puritan split between instinct and conscience. This split can be restated in Freudian terms, as the antithesis of id and ego/superego. This in turn suggests a psychoanalytical reading of Trosse's situation. His relapses constitute a regression to an infantile state, while the process of recovery involves a repetitious reworking of the conflicts of infancy and childhood: he can only break out of the cycle and achieve real growth by interiorising the father as superego, at which point the destructive bad father (Devil) is replaced by a benevolent good father (God), in whose name Trosse will henceforth act.

Such an interpretation encounters an obstacle in Trosse's uninformative narration of his actual childhood circumstances. It is entirely possible to speculate that his insanity derives from unresolved childhood traumas: indeed surviving extracts from another autobiographical manuscript written by Trosse indicate a deep and continuing resentment against his parents for having farmed him out as an infant to an uncaring nurse who almost starved him to death. The potential psychoanalytic significance of this detail has been explored by A. W. Brink. Following the precepts of the British school of object analysis, Brink hypothesises that

Trosse's behaviour disorder, which led him to punish the adult world so severely, would answer to a fundamental failure of personal relationships in infancy. Lacking a good outcome of infantile dependence, subsequent moral independence did not develop normally. The wayward course Trosse entered ended only with Mrs. Gollop's ministrations in the madhouse at Glastonbury; his melancholy lifted after the regrowing of his personality with the help of a surrogate mother.⁴⁴

This is a persuasive reading, one which offers an entirely convincing account of the crucial role of Mrs Gollop, the wife of the madhouse keeper. But Brink concludes that in the absence of available evidence (particularly of contemporary evidence which would lend weight to theories of childhood trauma), the psychoanalytic case remains unproven. This is all the more true of my speculative Freudian reading. However, even if we accept that hypothetical reconstructions of specific infantile and childhood trauma are disallowed, psychoanalytic interpretation remains potentially useful in relation to the broader socio-historical context.

In The history of manners, an examination of changes in social manners between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, Norbert Elias proposed that as succeeding social formations imposed increasingly formalised standards and codes of social behaviour on the educated classes, the expression of instinctual drives and impulses were correspondingly repressed. With the advance of an urban, bourgeois, society, instinctual tendencies came to be viewed as ‘infantile’ residues: ‘Much of what we call “morality” or “moral” reasons has the same function as “hygiene” or “hygienic” reasons: to condition children to a certain social standard. Molding by such means aims at making socially desirable behavior automatic, a matter of self-control, causing it to appear in the consciousness of the individual as the result of his own free-will, and in the interests of his own health or human dignity.’⁴⁵ This thesis offers a plausible account of Trosse's process of recovery. Madness reduces Trosse to a state of infantile helplessness, and in this condition he submits himself to Mrs Gollop, who, as Brink suggests, becomes a surrogate mother: ‘She had great Compassion upon me; would many times sit and discourse with me (…): if any one was more eminently Instrumental in my Conversion than another, She was the Person’ (96). Trosse's tutelage under Mrs Gollop initiates a process of re-education in the ways of faith, behaviour and reason, bringing him to God: ‘at length (…) I began to be somewhat quiet and compos'd in my Spirits; to be orderly and civil in my Carriage and Converse, and gradually to regain the Use of my Reason and to be a fit Companion for my Fellow Creatures (…) and hereupon I kept my self very sober and commendable in my outward Demeanour’ (100). As Trosse himself goes on to acknowledge, this acquisition of outward restraint is not sufficient to effect an inner change: ‘there was but little of Heartwork.’ In other words, Trosse must interiorise his learning of socialisation. Elias would interpret this as the socially determined formation of a superego: in overcoming a madness which reduces him to infantilism, Trosse necessarily initiates a process of repression: ‘The pronounced division in the “ego” or consciousness characteristic of man in our phase of civilisation, which finds expression in such terms as “superego” and “unconscious,” corresponds to the specific split in the behavior which civilized society demands of its members. It matches the degree of regulation and restraint imposed on the expression of drives and impulses.’⁴⁶

Elias focused on the civilised standards imposed by the court society of the absolutist monarchy as the key transitional stage between medieval and bourgeois standards. This is a greatly oversimplified schema: Roger Chartrier, in reviewing Elias's thesis, has noted the need to take into account other large-scale developments, notably the emergence of the ‘public sphere,’ also the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation:⁴⁷ Elizabeth Eisenstein would, no doubt, want to add the emergence of a print culture.⁴⁸ These are factors which complicate but do not contradict the fundamental proposition that social and ideological developments affect the psychical life of individuals. In the English context, Lawrence Stone argues that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, ‘a new interest in children, coupled with the Calvinist premise of Original Sin, gave fathers an added incentive to ensure the internalised submissiveness of children.’⁴⁹ Christopher Hill argues that ‘despite the defeat of religious Puritanism in 1660, and the isolation of nonconformity even after 1689, nevertheless much of the social content of Puritan doctrine was ultimately accepted outside the ranks of nonconformity.⁵⁰ This involved a tendency among the middle ranks of society to adopt the ethics of work, discipline and rationality which Trosse came so hard by in recovering from his crises.

Repression of instinctuality is already evident in Trosse's experience of madness, which involves obsessional guilt and self-punishment. This is consistent with Elias's broader proposal that Western European civilisation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries inaugurates a psychical divorce between ‘adult’ self-regulation and a ‘childish’ irresponsibility which will eventually be labelled ‘infantile.’ Trosse's recovery arguably permits a glimpse of the birth pangs of a socially determined superego, renouncing the pleasure-principle and paying its dues in full to the reality-principle.

Trosse's Life assumes that not only is there a period which precedes madness but also a period which succeeds it: this is confirmed by our knowledge that he led a virtuous and upright life from his eventual recovery in 1667 until his death in 1713. His autobiographical account of his converted life in the Life is brief and rational. If we compare Nerval's Aurélia in the nineteenth century, we find that it too asserts a therapeutic imperative, but, as is the case with many of the literary autobiographies of madness which followed in its wake in the twentieth century, the critical perspective implemented by the narrative voice is compromised by a reluctance to deny the ‘truth’ of the writer's experience. We are not surprised to learn that in Nerval's case the biographical record does not confirm the autobiographical claim to recovery: Trosse is the last of the writers discussed in this study to make a fully effective recovery from his experience of madness.

Notes

1. Delany, 1969, p. 56.

2. John Rogers, cited in Watkins, 1972, p. 20.

3. On the ‘typicality’ of Grace abounding, see Tindall, 1934, p. 22ff.

4. Quinlan, 1953, pp. 34-5.

5. Erikson, 1959, p. 12.

6. Ibid., p. 188. Cf. p. 189: ‘Luther accepted for his life work the unconquered frontier of tragic conscience (…) “Conscience is that inner ground where we and God have to learn to live with each other as man and wife.”’

7. Hill, 1989, p. 68.

8. Eisenstein, 1979, pp. 374-5.

9. Ong, 1967, pp. 283-4.

10. See Chartrier, 1989, p. 118. On the Protestant concern with reaching the common man through the printed word, see Eisenstein, 1979, p. 361ff.

11. Cf. Ong, 1967, p. 282:

    ‘The typographically conditioned Protestant assertion of the power of the word reinforces oral-aural attitudes in the Bible. It also alters them by insisting much more explicitly on the power of the word than does the early Church. This was the Protestant way of coping with the tendency of print, subconsciously sensed, to weaken the feeling that words themselves possess power.’

12. Hill, 1975, pp. 171-2.

13. Delany, 1969, p. 82.

14. Hill, 1975, p. 171.

15. Erikson, 1959, p. 13.

16. Bracketed page references are to Bunyan, 1962.

17. Cf. Carlton:

    ‘Those who broke with the “legalistic” faith of Rome or the Church of England felt that they had obtained a truly spiritual religion, but they paid a heavy price for their freedom: the loss of objective religious authority’

    (1984, p. 20).

18. Erikson, 1959, p. 13.

19. Cf. Marcuse, 1972, pp. 56-78.

20. Bunyan, 1962, p. 146, note 163. For an account of Bacon's Fearful estate and its impact on seventeenth-century English Puritans, see A. W. Brink, Introduction to Trosse, 1974, pp. 17-19.

21. Brink in Trosse, 1974, p. 28.

22. Hill, 1975, p. 182. Cf. Sawday, 1990.

23. Greenblatt, 1980.

24. Webber, 1968, p. 8.

25. Cited in Bunyan, 1962, p. xii.

26. ‘Bunyan's social position was paradoxical and unstable. He was an outcast from the world in some ways, but in other ways had a real “property” and interest in it. He was a despised itinerant manual worker, excluded from land-ownership, exposed to the rigours of the open road as he travelled and the violence of property-owners if he deviated; yet he was also a householder and artisan, descended from yeomen and small traders. His status was higher than that of the common labourer and (…) he dissociated himself indignantly from the homeless poor’ (Turner, 1980, p. 97).

27. Cf. Turner:

    ‘he conceived the World in political and economic terms, as a hostile hierarchy of wealth and power founded on place—social position and landed estates. He saw place as property.’

    (Ibid.).

28. Montaigne, 1958, p. 736. On Montaigne's melancholy, see Screech, 1983.

29. Sage, 1988, p. 76.

30. Cited in ibid.

31. Ibid., pp. 76-7.

32. ‘Jack Lindsay suggested that Bunyan's obsession relates to his family's sales of land in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, their birthright whose loss had necessitated the wandering life of tinkers’ (Hill, 1988, p. 69).

33. ‘If we ask ourselves what it is that gives the character of strangeness to the substitutive formation and the symptom in schizophrenia, we eventually come to realize that it is the predominance of what has to do with words over what has to do with things’ (Freud, 1957, p. 200).

34. Ferdinand de Saussure's formal analysis of the signifying processes of language proposed two interacting categories: a vertical or paradigmatic axis of selection and substitution and a horizontal or syntagmatic axis of combination. Jakobson proposed that these classificatory axes function as magnetic poles: actual verbal utterances tend to gravitate to one or the other. Both axes necessarily function in all utterances, but one may be dominant, the other subordinate. He analysed these two poles in terms of metaphor and metonym (metaphor embodies substitution, metonym combination), and went on to suggest that these contrasting modes provided formal descriptions of various genres—as for example lyric poetry and realist prose.

35. See Jakobson, 1963, pp. 64-5.

36. Jubilate agno, fragment B2, “For”, line 306.

37. Cited in Sage, 1988, pp. 240-1, note 11.

38. On the link between Bunyan's ‘concrete’ terms and metaphors on the one hand, and allegory on the other, see Sharrock, 1948, pp. 109-10.

39. For relevant discussions of passivity of voice and position in Bunyan, see Webber, 1968, pp. 28, 47ff.; Carlton, 1984, pp. 18-19.

40. Parenthetical page references are to Trosse, 1974.

41. Carlton draws attention to the characteristic use of ‘disclaiming locutions’ in Puritan spiritual writing—‘the act of narratively implying that one is not the agent of one's own actions.’ He continues,

    ‘How did the Puritans persuade themselves that some of their own thoughts were not their own but were divinely willed events? By using disclaiming locutions’

    (1984, pp. 19, 21).

42. Sage, 1988, pp. 240-1, note 11.

43. Ibid., p. 88.

44. Brink, in Trosse, 1974, p. 139.

45. Elias, 1978, p. 150.

46. Ibid., pp. 190-1.

47. Chartrier, 1989, pp. 16-19.

48. Cf. Eisenstein, 1979, pp. 430-2.

49. Stone, 1982, p. 109.

50. Hill, 1986, p. 490.

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