Coming of age in the age of the American revolution

摘要

Americans understood the Revolution by means of a developmental metaphor: the thirteen rebellious colonies were like children outgrowing their dependence on their parents and asserting their own autonomy. On this analogy, their Declaration of Independence was a natural unfolding of “things in the womb of time.” But the bitterness and bite of this developmental view of the Revolution went beyond a bland assertion of biological maturity. In the American apprehension of the matter, British parents mistreated their colonial offspring and provoked their wish to be free. The familial relationship was a dysfunctional one. And such an outlook made sense to Americans because their familial experience conditioned their familial imagery. In early America, colonists routinely left home at an early age, some because their parents sent them away, others because they chose to go. Patterns of precocious autonomy were widespread, impelled not only by withering mortality but also by an array of intergenerational animosities. Such strained, unloving ties between parents and children persisted long beyond 1776. Indeed, they set the terms of the American developmental ideal to this day, in ways which rupture the relation between generations and leave the American future both open and empty.