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Puritan

Entertainment / Literature / Puritan: Most familiar to modern Americans as the religious denomination of the Mayflower colonists, the Puritans were a Protestant sect particularly active during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a positive sense, Americans associate Puritanism with the struggle for religious freedom since the Puritans colonized America to escape religious persecution, however, the idea is something of a misconception since the Puritans' hope was to create an all-encompassing Puritan culture in the new colony, not to create a cosmopolitan, tolerant society open to other branches of Protestant Christianity, much less Catholicism, Judaism, or other religions. (That sort of religious tolerance comes about in American culture largely as a result of the Deism fashionable among intellectuals in the eighteenth century during the writing of the Constitution.) In its negative sense, the word Puritan often evokes the idea of dour, grim, religious conformity, since Puritans stereotypically wore only black and white, they frowned upon drinking, dancing, and displays of sexuality, burned aging misfits as witches, censored literature, and closed Shakespeare's playhouses in England because of acting's 'immorality.' These tendencies have led to H. L. Mencken's jest defining Puritanism as 'the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.' Puritanism forms the backdrop of The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible in American literature. Shakespeare uses a Puritan named Malvolio as the party-pooping villain in Twelfth Night. See also Roundhead and Puritan Interregnum.
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