Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture

by Robert Blair St. George

The people of colonial New England lived in a densely metaphoric landscape--a world where familiars invaded bodies without warning, witches passed with ease through locked doors, and houses blew down in gusts of angry, providential wind. Meaning, Robert St. George argues, was layered, often indirect, and inextricably intertwined with memory, apprehension, and imagination. By exploring the linkages between such cultural expressions as seventeenth-century farmsteads, witchcraft narratives, eighteenth-century crowd violence, and popular portraits of New England Federalists, St. George demonstrates that in early New England, things mattered as much as words in the shaping of metaphor. These forms of cultural representation--architecture and gravestones, metaphysical poetry and sermons, popular religion and labor politics--are connected through what St. George calls a 'poetics of implication.' Words, objects, and actions, referentially interdependent, demonstrate the continued resilience and power of seventeenth-century popular culture throughout the eighteenth century. Illuminating their interconnectedness, St. George calls into question the actual impact of the so-called Enlightenment, suggesting just how long a shadow the colonial climate of fear and inner instability cast over the warm glow of the early national period.

Genres: History

480 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1998

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Robert St. George's illustrative book delineating his "poetics of implication" is both lavish and interesting. His chapters are at times tediously long and some of his connections are too thin, but it is nevertheless a worthwhile read for anyone interested in early American culture.

[K.L. Brogdon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an utterly satisfying interpretation of the meaning of colonial architecture, fashion, and other symbols. It made me more aware of cultural clues when I study historical data. This book will definitely sharpen your critical thinking skills.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Robert Blair St. George's Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication was academically dense but full of well-researched and theorized and very thought-provoking ideas about the mental world of Colonial Americans. One of the hardest things to understand about the past is the ways in which the world of symbols and associations resonated with people; rarely are these things commented on directly, so knowing the 'mind' of the past by their documentary history and material culture alone will always be incomplete. St. George tries to fill in some of that incompleteness by uncovering resonances between the idea of social order and its metaphors in human bodies and house architecture, and ideas about mortality and time in the marketplace and trade. Connecting everything from witchcraft and monstrosities to gravestones, front doors and center halls, trade unionism and family portraits, he convincingly re-creates some of the patterns Colonial people perceived in their world - many of which continued (and continue?) to underlie popular conceptions of society and the universe well past the Enlightenment.

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Attacking Houses"

On August 14, 1764, Andrew Oliver, the resident Stamp Master, was hung in effigy and his house was dismantled by an angry mob. Robert Blair St. George charts the reasons for why these symbolic acts took place and what they mean(t). By destroying the house, the mob was able to send a clear message that they disapproved of the occupant's actions without actually hurting him (in fact he was warned before the violence occurred so that he would vacate the premises). Overall, the symbolic performance was an outpouring of dissatisfaction with gross social inequalities exacerbated by the Boston fire a few years earlier in which artisans were disproportionally denied restitutions. Instead the upper class used it as an opportunity to make the crooked ways straight and re-mastermind the city plan's layout. St. George argues that this political and social metaphor also had religious undertones; millennialism suggested that all spiritual things were working towards a literal, physical restitution of justice.

pp. 206-295