愛国の響き――ティモシー・ドワイトの詩『グリーンフィールド・ヒル』(1794年)第四部「ピークォッド族の壊滅」を読む―一

抄録

The Pequot War broke out in 1637 and the Puritan’s Hartford Treaty (1638) deprived the Pequot of the very proper name of the tribe. According to Alden T. Vaughan, writers in eighteenth-century New England regarded the war as “a defensive maneuver,” but later such attitude gradually changed. Indeed, in L827 Catharine Maria Sedgwick narrated the conflict in Hope Leslie. In 1851, Herman Melville commented in Moby-Dick: “the Pequod . . . was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians.” Melville also gave to the symbolic whaler the name “Pequod.” Therefore, a rereading of Timothy Dwight’s “The Destruction of the Pequods,” published in 1794, will give us a clue for reconsidering early American literary history.

This paper investigates how Dwight depicts the war from three perspectives. First, it confirms that he tends to side with the Pequot like Sedgwick and Melville. Although historians in Connecticut considered the Pequot as their enemies in the Biblical sense, Dwight admonishes readers to “feel for Indian woes severe.”

Second, in order to think about this admonishment precisely, the history of the Puritan mission in New England is reconstructed. Hence, it is clarified that Dwight inherited his views from Puritan missionaries (particularly John Eliot, Thomas Mayhew Jr., and his own grandfather Jonathan Edwards). This inheritance is combined, for Dwight and without contradiction, with three basic goals of the Federal Indian policy during the Washington administration: that is, according to John Demos , “to turn Indians from hunters into settled agriculturalists; to draw them fully into the orbit of Christianity; and to attach them to the principle of private, 2S opposed to communal, ownership of property.”

Finally, “The Destruction of the Pequods” is re-interpreted with special emphasis on its poetic form, the Spenserian Stanza: a dual structure (i.e., two narrators with two viewpoints) of eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by one line in iambic hexameter with the rhyme scheme “ababbcbcc.” Using the dual structure (the L637 perspective of the Pequot War and the 1794 one), Dwight implies his indebtedness to Puritan sources for narrating the battle and his awareness that he cannot transcend the conquerors’ eyes. And, he em-ploys this rhyme scheme to show his respect for and humbleness before the great epic poets: Homer and Virgil (whom he mentions in the last stanza). With the form of Spenserian Stanza as a strategy for indicating a connection with the past and creating national poetry in eighteenth-century England, as David Fairer pointed out, Dwight’s style helped establish American epic after the Revolution. It is through the equivocal poetics that Timothy Dwight came to dedicate his epic to both the Puritan and the Pequot in the year of 1794.