American identity at a crossroads : Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World

Abstract

Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World (1692) has traditionally been dismissed as a failed missive attempting to defend the controversial Salem Witch Trials. What is missing from this characterization is an analysis of the degree to which the text, written at a moment of crisis in Puritan culture, actually looks forward to the emergence of a democratic polity. By tracing the topical disarray and the instability of audience that Wonders presents, the beginnings of this shift--which culminate in the American Revolution eighty years later--becomes apparent. Wonders demonstrates the quiet emerging of a distinct American mindset amidst social and political upheaval in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Although Cotton Mather's book did fail to unite his community in 1692, the flexible metaphors he borrowed, shaped, and refined in Wonders helped to define the nation of America.