Karen has said that she'd like to start writing a short series on literature that she can't recommend, by which I think she means literature that she has learned from or enjoyed, but that she knows that many of her followers might not appreciate. Well, here I go briefly.
I really enjoyed poet Kaveh Akbar's 2024 debut novel Martyr, and I mention it here because I kept being reminding of Baldwin, whose second novel, Giovanni's Room, I had recently read. (There's a theme here). Akbar is an American citizen with Iranian and Islamic heritage, and I think he ponders his relationship to Islam (riffing on what being a martyr would mean) in much the same way as I think Baldwin does with Christianity. His stand-in character (these novels seem always to be autobiographical) is also on a pilgrimage of sorts (though with no allusions to Bunyan's work). Why can't I recommend it? Well, I can, but a reader will find some crude references to sex and crude language, enough that would offend readers who would likely be more okay with Baldwin.
In this article, I have focused on the two texts that I think have the most use of Pilgrim's Progress. However, references and allusions to Pilgrim's Progress or Bunyan appear elsewhere in African and African American literature.
One is in James Gronniosaw's slave narrative which has one of those long 18th Century titles I never get right. He writes about learning to read and encountering Bunyan's The Holy War. There is some scholarly inquiry on whether it was really The Holy War or Grace Abounding that Gronniosaw was reading because he rejects Bunyan as being as wicked as he is and therefore not worth reading, and the research I read suggests the response is more appropriate to Grace Abounding.
Pilgrim's Progress gets one mention in James Weldon Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Novel, but it is a significant mention. The narrator notes that he has a library, that Pilgrim's Progress is in it, and that he has therefore successfully (ironies are intended) passed for white. There's a lot more that could be discussed about Johnson himself, his changing politics from relatively conservative to more independent and activist, his point of view about the value and shortcomings of respectability, and his literary taste.
I have not read this yet, but the recently-deceased Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o wrote a memoir about his education with the title of In the House of the Interpreter. From my reading about this memoir, I know that he refers directly to Bunyan and Pilgrim's Progress several times. On my tbr list.
I would welcome notices of other references and allusions to Bunyan and Pilgrim's Progress as you find them within African American, colonial, and post-colonial literature. I'll bet it's somewhere in the literature of India or other countries of South Asia.
Many of us as readers have the unfortunate habit of putting our reading in boxes that isolate one book from another. Interesting to note that Jack Heller discovered the relationship between Bunyan Baldwin because he read their two books in a short time period. I am an advocate of reading and then mulling over a book before writing a review of the book that forces my rethinking and gives me a source to come back to for refreshing my memory. That very act of writing a review often brings to mind other books that have a relationship to the one I read. I don’t think this is mere coincidence. I think this is the way God designed our minds to work. As our culture moves away from literary to more oral expression, it is more difficult to keep ideas in mind and make important relationships.
Baldwin does not call attention to his use of Pilgrim's Progress; in fact, I suspect that he suppresses attention to it. Pilgrim's Progress is in Go Tell on the Mountain more than I have developed here, but in nothing that I ever seen published has Baldwin ever mentioned Bunyan and Pilgrim's Progress. To my knowledge, there are only two academic sources connecting the two authors, Breen, whom I have cited, and a 1981 article by a Rolf Lunden, from whom I depart in my reading. (I had thought there was a third article, but I have been unable to find it again.)
I think Baldwin's allusions to Bunyan are missed because, if I may generalize broadly, I doubt there's much overlap between Bunyan readers and Baldwin readers. But that Baldwin himself would have been a Bunyan reader might follow from several facts: 1) Baldwin was raised in the church and had been a preacher. 2) One of his teachers was the Black poet Countee Cullen, who was very much into re-envisioning religious texts from a Black perspective. (See, again, Claude Atcho's chapter on Jesus and Countee Cullen.)
I'll mention two other Bunyanesqe features from Go Tell It on the Mountain: 1) If a person reads Baldwin, notice how John Grimes thinks of "Broad is the way that leads to destruction" when he is in Broadway. 2) The Sisters Price and McCandless are almost caricatures of church matrons, and think about what those names mean.
Thank you for this comment, Jack. I was also struck by Heller’s reading of the two books in a short time span on two different occasions.
I saw the Tempest performed by the Boulder Shakespeare theater last evening and I am reading the Count of Monte Cristo at the same time. I’m discovering connections between the two and thinking about Joseph in Genesis as well.
It is fun to find links where you don’t expect them. In the case of PP, I’m amazed at the far reaching influence of this book on so many readers and writers. I’m looking forward to finding more connections — especially by writers of other cultures as Heller notes.
I am rather sure I've read research on Shakespeare's allusions to the Joseph narrative in The Tempest. It's been a while since I've read that play, but I remember seeing the allusions too, probably involving Prospero and Antonio.
I would like to ask Bunyan scholars if they think his Giant Despair owes something to Book One of The Faerie Queene.
I recently read the abridged edition of William Still's 'The Underground Railroad' (abridged because it is an enormous record) which notes the Crafts' escape among so many others. What struck me was the deep Christian conviction of Still and those whose escapes he records that they were resisting evil by escaping. I grew up with apparently Christian homeschooling curriculum, published in the U.S., that consistently muddied the moral waters around slavery in the U.S. and never mentioned the existence of all these firsthand escape accounts.
On Bunyan's negative portrayal of dark skin, what was the cultural shift between Shakespeare's Othello and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress? Race-based slavery hadn't been established in the American colonies by Bunyan's day. Or are the differences in the portrayal of Othello and that of the Flatterer due to the difference in perception between a cosmopolitan middle class Londoner versus a rural working class Englishman?
I have just a few minutes before I go to work, so I will reply only to a part of this and return later. Race-based slavery was in fact 50+ years in existence as Bunyan wrote Pilgrim's Progress. The first ship of African enslaved people arrived in Virginia in 1619; I think the date for Pilgrim's Progress is 1676. And the racism would precede slavery; one person would not enslave another person without already being prejudiced against that person. I can comment more on Othello and the Flatterer later. Thanks for asking.
Thanks for answering. I should clarify that I meant that the laws constructed to keep those of African descent in perpetual slavery, as opposed to indentured servitude, hadn't yet been established - but I see, upon checking, that those laws started be established by the 1660s. I was also thinking of the early formative influences on Bunyan's viewpoint, that his portrayal in 1675 was the result of views established much earlier.
Several court cases in Virginia in the 17th century helped to establish the status of enslaved Africans in America, but I would suggest that practices preceded the law. Up until the Amistad case, once Africans had been brought to the New World, their enslavement was assumed to be perpetual, even if the passage of laws and the decisions of courts came later (though not much later). There were no ships returning Africans to their homelands.
I'm a little reluctant to affirm class-based explanations for the perceived differences of various people's prejudices. Are you familiar with Nathaniel Bacon's rebellion in the 17th Century? It united poor whites, indentured servants, and enslaved Africans against the colonial government, during the same years Bunyan was writing Pilgrim's Progress.
As for Othello v. Flatterer, Othello is a complicated case. I have seen arguments that the play is racist based upon the claims and assumptions of Iago. With Shakespeare, I would resist affirming the opinions of the villains as stating certain truths about the world. On the other hand, I think an argument can be supported that Othello (the play) affirms some stereotypes because the character is so easily duped. In the last act, Emilia says a number of racist things, and one may read the play as affirming those racist things by how Othello acts. I am a fan of the play Othello, but it has some problems, though not necessarily every problem attributed to it.
However, in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, the villain Aaron is black and evil. Pretty much no nuance. Alas. I wouldn't say that Bunyan was familiar with Titus Andronicus, but the Flatterer is not very different from Aaron (maybe different from Othello).
Iago is such a villain that anything that comes out of his mouth is twisted. When I read his words they remind me so strongly of a bitter and foul minded person I know, that it seems like Shakespeare was giving a study in how a depraved mind deliberately twists everything that passes through it. Whatever Othello's portrayed weakness, it is Iago the Venetian who is cast as villain in the play.
That English opinion of Africans was often based more on rumour than reality in the era is evident from Othello being called a Moor, when he is clearly intended to look like someone from sub-Saharan Africa. When I lived in West Africa, I frequently encountered Mauritanians from North Africa, who are the real Moors, hence their country's name. They look exactly like southern Europeans from Spain or France or Italy. In fact, according to West African historians, the West African Wolof term used for white people, tubaab, was historically first used for Mauritanians. Now the word tubaab is exclusively applied to those of European descent, and I was told by those fluent in the language that local mothers would tell their children to be good or the tubaab would stick them with a needle. Which explained why, even though the rural area I was in was within an hour's drive of a tourist destination, small children of the village still burst into tears at the sight of my skin colour.
When I taught Othello in the university, I had a short history presentation on costuming his character through the centuries. For a while, it was popular to costume Othello as if he were Turkish or Arab. The justification was his Aleppo line.
Fun fact: Ulysses S Grant once performed Desdemona.
Clothing in West Africa has Arabic elements, particularly among certain tribes. The Fula, who were herders, wore long shirts - the longer the hem, the more venerable the wearer - that look similar to Middle Eastern robes. Trade has flowed from West Africa to North Africa and the Middle East and vice versa for millennia.
Holly - it wasn’t until the 1960s that history teachers began to get a better handle on southern history and slavery. The “Lost Cause” version of history created a false idea of the slave system and white complicity in its cruelty. The research coming out in the 60s, 70s, and 80s augmented by writers like Baldwin was resisted for some time by homeschools in the North and denied by southern schools resisting racial integration. When we look at the basis for associating black skin color with inferiority, we need to go back to the initial colonizing efforts in Africa well before America was founded. That whole enterprise was based on the belief that people in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere were inferior and “needed” white European guidance to properly evolve. Meanwhile there were profits to be made exploiting those people and the natural resources of their countries. In reading an account of the reasons for Japanese entry into World War II one author I read said that Japan was trying to save Asia from European exploitation by building an Empire of Asians for the Asians. Americans were despised as colonizers because when we drove Spain out of the Philippines, America became the new colonial owner. America even fought a war against the Filipinos under Aguinaldo. From the Asia perspective, we were colonizers. Since most of the people in these colonized areas were people of color, it was a natural conclusion that people of color were inferior to whites and the darker the color the more inferior they were. This was true even among Christian missionaries that came in along with the European armies. Assumptions were made about how uncivilized or “savage” these people were. From the Japanese perspective Americans were the savages!
I've always regarded the 'inferior' justification as invented so that Europeans felt less guilty about the exploitation they either intended or had already embarked upon. The debate in 16th century Spain over whether native Americans had souls happened after the first colonies were already - I've read Bartolomeo de las Casas' contemporary account of the earliest Spanish colonies in the Carribean, and it is clear he thinks his ideological opponents are just making excuses for their evil actions.
Karen has said that she'd like to start writing a short series on literature that she can't recommend, by which I think she means literature that she has learned from or enjoyed, but that she knows that many of her followers might not appreciate. Well, here I go briefly.
I really enjoyed poet Kaveh Akbar's 2024 debut novel Martyr, and I mention it here because I kept being reminding of Baldwin, whose second novel, Giovanni's Room, I had recently read. (There's a theme here). Akbar is an American citizen with Iranian and Islamic heritage, and I think he ponders his relationship to Islam (riffing on what being a martyr would mean) in much the same way as I think Baldwin does with Christianity. His stand-in character (these novels seem always to be autobiographical) is also on a pilgrimage of sorts (though with no allusions to Bunyan's work). Why can't I recommend it? Well, I can, but a reader will find some crude references to sex and crude language, enough that would offend readers who would likely be more okay with Baldwin.
In this article, I have focused on the two texts that I think have the most use of Pilgrim's Progress. However, references and allusions to Pilgrim's Progress or Bunyan appear elsewhere in African and African American literature.
One is in James Gronniosaw's slave narrative which has one of those long 18th Century titles I never get right. He writes about learning to read and encountering Bunyan's The Holy War. There is some scholarly inquiry on whether it was really The Holy War or Grace Abounding that Gronniosaw was reading because he rejects Bunyan as being as wicked as he is and therefore not worth reading, and the research I read suggests the response is more appropriate to Grace Abounding.
Pilgrim's Progress gets one mention in James Weldon Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Novel, but it is a significant mention. The narrator notes that he has a library, that Pilgrim's Progress is in it, and that he has therefore successfully (ironies are intended) passed for white. There's a lot more that could be discussed about Johnson himself, his changing politics from relatively conservative to more independent and activist, his point of view about the value and shortcomings of respectability, and his literary taste.
I have not read this yet, but the recently-deceased Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o wrote a memoir about his education with the title of In the House of the Interpreter. From my reading about this memoir, I know that he refers directly to Bunyan and Pilgrim's Progress several times. On my tbr list.
I would welcome notices of other references and allusions to Bunyan and Pilgrim's Progress as you find them within African American, colonial, and post-colonial literature. I'll bet it's somewhere in the literature of India or other countries of South Asia.
Seems like there is a lot of good work here to be done, Jack!
I'm not sure I am ready for another research project, but if anyone sees this and wants to run with it, it's okay with me.
Many of us as readers have the unfortunate habit of putting our reading in boxes that isolate one book from another. Interesting to note that Jack Heller discovered the relationship between Bunyan Baldwin because he read their two books in a short time period. I am an advocate of reading and then mulling over a book before writing a review of the book that forces my rethinking and gives me a source to come back to for refreshing my memory. That very act of writing a review often brings to mind other books that have a relationship to the one I read. I don’t think this is mere coincidence. I think this is the way God designed our minds to work. As our culture moves away from literary to more oral expression, it is more difficult to keep ideas in mind and make important relationships.
Bring back mulling!
Baldwin does not call attention to his use of Pilgrim's Progress; in fact, I suspect that he suppresses attention to it. Pilgrim's Progress is in Go Tell on the Mountain more than I have developed here, but in nothing that I ever seen published has Baldwin ever mentioned Bunyan and Pilgrim's Progress. To my knowledge, there are only two academic sources connecting the two authors, Breen, whom I have cited, and a 1981 article by a Rolf Lunden, from whom I depart in my reading. (I had thought there was a third article, but I have been unable to find it again.)
I think Baldwin's allusions to Bunyan are missed because, if I may generalize broadly, I doubt there's much overlap between Bunyan readers and Baldwin readers. But that Baldwin himself would have been a Bunyan reader might follow from several facts: 1) Baldwin was raised in the church and had been a preacher. 2) One of his teachers was the Black poet Countee Cullen, who was very much into re-envisioning religious texts from a Black perspective. (See, again, Claude Atcho's chapter on Jesus and Countee Cullen.)
I'll mention two other Bunyanesqe features from Go Tell It on the Mountain: 1) If a person reads Baldwin, notice how John Grimes thinks of "Broad is the way that leads to destruction" when he is in Broadway. 2) The Sisters Price and McCandless are almost caricatures of church matrons, and think about what those names mean.
Thank you for this comment, Jack. I was also struck by Heller’s reading of the two books in a short time span on two different occasions.
I saw the Tempest performed by the Boulder Shakespeare theater last evening and I am reading the Count of Monte Cristo at the same time. I’m discovering connections between the two and thinking about Joseph in Genesis as well.
It is fun to find links where you don’t expect them. In the case of PP, I’m amazed at the far reaching influence of this book on so many readers and writers. I’m looking forward to finding more connections — especially by writers of other cultures as Heller notes.
I am rather sure I've read research on Shakespeare's allusions to the Joseph narrative in The Tempest. It's been a while since I've read that play, but I remember seeing the allusions too, probably involving Prospero and Antonio.
I would like to ask Bunyan scholars if they think his Giant Despair owes something to Book One of The Faerie Queene.
What a fun reading convergence, Nancy!
I recently read the abridged edition of William Still's 'The Underground Railroad' (abridged because it is an enormous record) which notes the Crafts' escape among so many others. What struck me was the deep Christian conviction of Still and those whose escapes he records that they were resisting evil by escaping. I grew up with apparently Christian homeschooling curriculum, published in the U.S., that consistently muddied the moral waters around slavery in the U.S. and never mentioned the existence of all these firsthand escape accounts.
On Bunyan's negative portrayal of dark skin, what was the cultural shift between Shakespeare's Othello and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress? Race-based slavery hadn't been established in the American colonies by Bunyan's day. Or are the differences in the portrayal of Othello and that of the Flatterer due to the difference in perception between a cosmopolitan middle class Londoner versus a rural working class Englishman?
Amazing how much water gets muddied around so many things….
I have just a few minutes before I go to work, so I will reply only to a part of this and return later. Race-based slavery was in fact 50+ years in existence as Bunyan wrote Pilgrim's Progress. The first ship of African enslaved people arrived in Virginia in 1619; I think the date for Pilgrim's Progress is 1676. And the racism would precede slavery; one person would not enslave another person without already being prejudiced against that person. I can comment more on Othello and the Flatterer later. Thanks for asking.
Thanks for answering. I should clarify that I meant that the laws constructed to keep those of African descent in perpetual slavery, as opposed to indentured servitude, hadn't yet been established - but I see, upon checking, that those laws started be established by the 1660s. I was also thinking of the early formative influences on Bunyan's viewpoint, that his portrayal in 1675 was the result of views established much earlier.
Several court cases in Virginia in the 17th century helped to establish the status of enslaved Africans in America, but I would suggest that practices preceded the law. Up until the Amistad case, once Africans had been brought to the New World, their enslavement was assumed to be perpetual, even if the passage of laws and the decisions of courts came later (though not much later). There were no ships returning Africans to their homelands.
I'm a little reluctant to affirm class-based explanations for the perceived differences of various people's prejudices. Are you familiar with Nathaniel Bacon's rebellion in the 17th Century? It united poor whites, indentured servants, and enslaved Africans against the colonial government, during the same years Bunyan was writing Pilgrim's Progress.
As for Othello v. Flatterer, Othello is a complicated case. I have seen arguments that the play is racist based upon the claims and assumptions of Iago. With Shakespeare, I would resist affirming the opinions of the villains as stating certain truths about the world. On the other hand, I think an argument can be supported that Othello (the play) affirms some stereotypes because the character is so easily duped. In the last act, Emilia says a number of racist things, and one may read the play as affirming those racist things by how Othello acts. I am a fan of the play Othello, but it has some problems, though not necessarily every problem attributed to it.
However, in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, the villain Aaron is black and evil. Pretty much no nuance. Alas. I wouldn't say that Bunyan was familiar with Titus Andronicus, but the Flatterer is not very different from Aaron (maybe different from Othello).
Merchant of Venice is equally complicated on the question of Jewishness.
Iago is such a villain that anything that comes out of his mouth is twisted. When I read his words they remind me so strongly of a bitter and foul minded person I know, that it seems like Shakespeare was giving a study in how a depraved mind deliberately twists everything that passes through it. Whatever Othello's portrayed weakness, it is Iago the Venetian who is cast as villain in the play.
That English opinion of Africans was often based more on rumour than reality in the era is evident from Othello being called a Moor, when he is clearly intended to look like someone from sub-Saharan Africa. When I lived in West Africa, I frequently encountered Mauritanians from North Africa, who are the real Moors, hence their country's name. They look exactly like southern Europeans from Spain or France or Italy. In fact, according to West African historians, the West African Wolof term used for white people, tubaab, was historically first used for Mauritanians. Now the word tubaab is exclusively applied to those of European descent, and I was told by those fluent in the language that local mothers would tell their children to be good or the tubaab would stick them with a needle. Which explained why, even though the rural area I was in was within an hour's drive of a tourist destination, small children of the village still burst into tears at the sight of my skin colour.
When I taught Othello in the university, I had a short history presentation on costuming his character through the centuries. For a while, it was popular to costume Othello as if he were Turkish or Arab. The justification was his Aleppo line.
Fun fact: Ulysses S Grant once performed Desdemona.
Clothing in West Africa has Arabic elements, particularly among certain tribes. The Fula, who were herders, wore long shirts - the longer the hem, the more venerable the wearer - that look similar to Middle Eastern robes. Trade has flowed from West Africa to North Africa and the Middle East and vice versa for millennia.
Super fun fact!
Holly - it wasn’t until the 1960s that history teachers began to get a better handle on southern history and slavery. The “Lost Cause” version of history created a false idea of the slave system and white complicity in its cruelty. The research coming out in the 60s, 70s, and 80s augmented by writers like Baldwin was resisted for some time by homeschools in the North and denied by southern schools resisting racial integration. When we look at the basis for associating black skin color with inferiority, we need to go back to the initial colonizing efforts in Africa well before America was founded. That whole enterprise was based on the belief that people in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere were inferior and “needed” white European guidance to properly evolve. Meanwhile there were profits to be made exploiting those people and the natural resources of their countries. In reading an account of the reasons for Japanese entry into World War II one author I read said that Japan was trying to save Asia from European exploitation by building an Empire of Asians for the Asians. Americans were despised as colonizers because when we drove Spain out of the Philippines, America became the new colonial owner. America even fought a war against the Filipinos under Aguinaldo. From the Asia perspective, we were colonizers. Since most of the people in these colonized areas were people of color, it was a natural conclusion that people of color were inferior to whites and the darker the color the more inferior they were. This was true even among Christian missionaries that came in along with the European armies. Assumptions were made about how uncivilized or “savage” these people were. From the Japanese perspective Americans were the savages!
I've always regarded the 'inferior' justification as invented so that Europeans felt less guilty about the exploitation they either intended or had already embarked upon. The debate in 16th century Spain over whether native Americans had souls happened after the first colonies were already - I've read Bartolomeo de las Casas' contemporary account of the earliest Spanish colonies in the Carribean, and it is clear he thinks his ideological opponents are just making excuses for their evil actions.