Through a Glass Darkly: Colonial American Assimilation and the Suicide of a Dutch Notary
The book title Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America calls forward the apostle Paul’s 1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV): “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” Corinthians 13:12 was a popular verse during the Renaissance and on into the seventeenth century as my research on Amelia Lanyer has shown. The full context of this verse is that it precedes the effect of “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but. the greatest of these is charity” (13:13); previous to looking through the glass, aka a mirror–darkly–the writer “spake,” “understood,” and “thought” as a child until he “became a man” and “put away childish things” (13:11). The writer from 11 to 12 moves from the “I” who spake/understood/thought to the “we” who “sees” (present tense) and “knows” and “shall know” (future tense) “even as also I am known.” To this end, the book’s title, when reflected onto “The Suicide of a Notary,” evokes the experience of this notary from moving from the “I” of his Dutch upbringing into the “we” that sees “through a glass, darkly” to “know even as also I am known.” The power of individuation as immersed into the collective community–the newly colonized Dutch New York’s assimilation into the English community, even as the Dutch had forced the indigenous communities to assimilate to their culture, way of life and language–contributed to the suicide or as the article invokes in the first sentence, “self-murder” of the notary whose livelihood was dependent upon his Dutch language and who was isolated from his family and culture. When merging into the Anglo-American melting pot, this self’s nutrients were cooked out.
Work Cited
Merwick, Donna. “The Suicide of a Notary: Language, Personal Identity, and Conquest in Colonial New York,” Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, 1997, pp. 122-153
