Introduction: The puritan origins of American Sex

In Cotton Mather's early diary, and in Edgar Allan Poe's tale 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar', the 'shadowy' presence of Jewishness reembodies itself. More specifically, a particularly troublesome bodily particular, the circumcised Jewish penis, reasserts and rearticulates itself as a highly animated tongue, issuing hyperactive outbursts. Mather, in a manner echoing what Daniel Boyarin has shown in early Christian negotiations of Jewish scripture and circumcision, refused to embrace a bodily practice of marking the penis. In other words, within Mather's emergent notion of American Puritanism, circumcision was to be available for figural purposes, as a word but not as a corporeal practice. Edgar Allan Poe found much of this noxious. A conglomeration of aesthetic, biographical, and temperamental differences made Poe a self-willed alien to New England literary culture. The sense of Valdemar's shifty nationality is fortified by the allusions to his command of multiple national languages.