Taking Hell Seriously.

This essay critically engages with the New Puritan Studies movement in early American literary scholarship by reexamining the concept of hell, a central yet often overlooked element in the worldview of seventeenth-century English settlers in Algonquian territory. It argues that the settlers' experiences of original sin and the fear of hell shaped their social behaviors and notions of sympathy, but also produced profound alienation and suffering, exemplified by the life of Ann Needham Hett, who internalized these doctrines to tragic effect. The essay critiques existing scholarship, particularly Abram Van Engen's work on Puritan sympathy, for overlooking the limits of settlers' self-understanding and the failures of sympathy to fully grasp others' interior experiences. It proposes that incorporating psychoanalytic and other theoretical approaches could deepen historical understanding by acknowledging the gap between settlers' ideals and their lived realities, thus offering a more nuanced and reparative account of early American history and its enduring legacies.