Imaginary Friends: Representing Quakers in American Culture, 1650–1950. By James Emmett Ryan. Studies in American Thought and Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. xii+285 pp. $26.95 paper; $19.95 e-book.

摘要

Quakers are many things in the history of the American imagination. For the firstrnhalf-century andmore of their American career, Quakers were odd andmenacing,rnor so the Puritan dominant culture of New England considered them. Sufferingrndeath, exile, corporal punishment, imprisonment, public humiliation, andrnsuspicion, Quakers were an iconically victimized outsider in Puritan America.rnTheir countercultural speech, clothing, manner, and refusal to observe socialrnhierarchies, not to mention taking oaths or taking up arms, made them an objectrnof orthodox scorn. And their religious commitments were regarded asrnantinomian and therefore a direct threat to the public wellbeing. As symbols inrnthe public mind, Quakers were an early instance of the visibility of religiousrnand cultural nonconformity. Indeed, as James Emmett Ryan shows, the Quakerrnbody was a preeminent focus from early colonial America to twentieth-centuryrnAmerican film. One might say that Quakers helped visualize American culture,rnlending difference an especially corporeal and ocular register by virtue of theirrndistinctive appearance—both by their own choice and by the engines of culturalrnrepresentation, which Ryan very nicely surveys over the course of three centuries.