Study Guide Household
Table of Contents
Overview
Home Divine
Many of the accounts related in Indian Converts take place in Wampanoag homes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For missionaries like John Eliot, the transformation of Algonquian households into Puritan style homes not only symbolized but also enhanced the spiritual conversions of American Indians. Ordered homes reflected ordered souls. The nature of that order was not arbitrary: for Puritans, houses were a reflection Christ’s divine body. Much of Indian Converts is spent convincing us that the domestic arrangements on the Island reflect that divine image. Mayhew is more willing to admit that many of his contemporaries, however, that Wampanoag household habits are not antithetical to spiritual progress. On the Island, both white and Wampanoag housing styles influenced each other during this era.
Privatization of Space
One of the changes that missionaries sought to impress upon converts was the need for private space. Puritans understood ownership in very personal terms, while much of Wampanoag lands were held by a community or by a sachem on behalf of a community. The sharing of goods, such as at feasts, was an important way that Wampanoags cemented relationships both between people and with the spiritual realm (Bragdon 1996: 220). Mayhew notes that conversion sometimes was accompanied by an undesirable change in patterns of food-exchange and hospitality (96).Possessions
Household possessions like furniture, silverware, bedding, and food also went transformations from the late seventeenth to eighteenth centuries. Possessions are crucial both for the way the display the status and ethos (moral character) of the owner. In the seventeenth century,Puritans valued simple, unadorned items and scorned ornamentation as a Popish heresy. Material possessions reflect spiritual as much as earthly wealth. Yet as the merchant class arose in the eighteenth century, tastes changed and colonists were more likely to display their material wealth in a more openly ostentatious manner. Mayhew counteracts this trend with his emphasis on the spiritual value of charity and caring for the poor. White trade good played an increasingly important role in Wampanoag society: although Wampanoags had long been self-sustaining, in the eighteenth-century Wampanoags on the island increasingly incurred debt in order to buy white goods such as food and clothing.
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