Puritans Hatred In The Puritans

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The Puritans developed an arduous amount of hatred towards the secular and different for an incredibly extensive time period. One of these long-lasting opponents of the Puritans hatred was the natural world around them, or as they often named it, the wilderness. Even from accounts on the Mayflower voyage, the Puritan people have always had an indignation towards the natural environment, as if it was out to destroy them. A very notable example comes from a Puritan work from a man named William Bradford, called Plymouth Plantation, which describes the voyage and early days of the Puritan settlement and how the settlers resented Nature. He writes of the ocean as being malevolent and vast, and almost as if the ocean was out to destroy the Puritans as it was very tumultuous and destructive on their voyage to America. He even gives the same negative outlook …show more content…
Before the Puritan settlement, the word “wilderness” was an official word that was often used, but not really to an existential amount. However, after the settlement and influences of the Puritan settlers, the word began to flourish and become a more common term of vocabulary, even though the meaning was meant to be negative. The word became more of a natural term to describe the eminent presence of danger and fear around the Puritans. The Puritans often coined the phrase “howling wilderness” in their literature and works to describe the negativity towards Nature, that Puritan literature became easily distinguishable among other works with the identification of this phrase. In fact, the word “nature” appears over four hundred times in Puritan literature, and with each usage there was usually an association with a sense of damnation. The word was often implied to describe certain things or people who had not reached salvation or redemption, and so they were not able to “come out of the wilderness” (White and
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