Mechal Sobel. Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era. Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000. 368 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-04949-6.
Reviewed by Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe (Pittsburgh Theological Seminary )
Published on H-SHEAR (September, 2001)
Mechal Sobel, who teaches history and directs the
Graduate Program in American Studies at the University
of Haifa, Israel, has written a remarkable and highly original book. Through close study of more than two hundred autobiographical narratives by ordinary men and
women, both black and white, she uncovers the struggle
to achieve and define selfhood in what she calls America’s “greater Revolutionary period.” Thirty-two illustrations interspersed through the text put faces on some
of the book’s subjects and enable us to visualize more
clearly some of their dreams. This book links the psychological and spiritual work of individual self-fashioning
with the emergence of the Republic in strikingly fresh
ways, including detailed analysis of recorded dreams and
how those dreams changed social behavior and sometimes influenced political action. Astonishingly, more
than half the autobiographies report such dreams and visions; it was a culture that reverenced dreams and sought
their meanings.
complex inter-racial experience of Americans during Sobel’s period (and into the twentieth century), Ann Taves’s
Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1999). Taves’s study of extraordinary spiritual experiences, and how they were understood between the polarities of “enthusiasm” and “formalism,” has to do with overt religious practices, however, while the dreams which are of interest to Sobel
were experienced by her subjects while sleeping. These
remembered dreams were often filled with religious imagery and were interpreted as having life-changing spiritual importance. They were understood, therefore, as
pivotal breakthroughs rather than as part of a person’s
ongoing practice. The two books complement one another in many ways, perhaps most notably in their treatment of African American influences on white experience (and vice versa) in Methodist and Baptist religious
circles. Both effectively tie the colonial period with the
nineteenth century in a coherent interpretive narrative.
Focusing on the century from 1740 to 1840, from the
Great Awakening through the Revolutionary War itself
to the rise of sectionalism at the beginning of the antebellum period, enables Sobel to show how the Revolution
was both the result of already-achieved shifts in American self-understanding and the seed-bed of previously
unimagined changes. “The Revolution, in part the work
of people who had a new self-view, hurried changes already begun and was in turn a catalyst for new change
in self.” It was a century during which “attitudes toward many core values changed significantly” in regard
to such key factors as gender and race, divine and human
causality, and freedom and authority (p. 220).
Sobel’s thesis that the possibility of self-fashioning
only emerged in the greater Revolutionary period is
based on the notion that previously “most people seemed
to regard themselves as having porous boundaries and as
part of a wider or ’we-self’ ” similar to traditional societies like Japan or India (p. 3, p. 243 n. 2). While historians have long pointed to the Great Awakening as a causal
phenomenon in the rise of American individualism, it
seems to me that the roots of this sense of an ”inner self“
which might be altered, redirected, or refashioned should
still be traced to the Puritan movement out of which
the revivals of the mid-eighteenth century emerged. A
closer comparison of Puritan diaries and spiritual autoTeach Me Dreams may profitably be read alongside
biographies with the published narratives studied in this
another recent book that explores the inner lives and
book would clarify the extent to which the Revolution1
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ary generations were indebted to their grandparents and
great-grandparents in such matters as dream interpretation, individual regeneration, self-definition over against
an ”alien other“ through membership in a community of
shared belief, and vocation.
the more fluid possibilities opened up by the Revolution
for blacks and women. Sects that had encouraged female leadership became more churchly with male hierarchies. Racially integrated religious groups divided along
lines of color, with whites distancing themselves from
“primitive” behaviors they had once enthusiastically embraced and African Americans separating to form their
own churches.
For example, Sobel refers to the “new church authority” which enabled Susanna Anthony, Sarah Osborn, and
Samuel Hopkins to define themselves as a “sect,” as if
it were an upstart religious movement, while it was the
traditionally evangelical and long-established Congregational Church to which they belonged (pp. 29-30). Similarly, she mistakenly identifies Samuel Davies as a “Baptist preacher” (p. 108), which would more naturally explain his special concern for African Americans. Davies,
of course, was a Presbyterian missionary pastor who
eventually became president of the College of New Jersey
(Princeton). An unfortunate omission in the book is the
important black Congregational pastor Lemuel Haynes,
a New Divinity Hopkinsian who served white churches
in northern New England. As the first African American
ordained in a white church, and one who wrote against
slavery and embodied the inner and outer conflicts dealt
with here, his case study would have deepened Sobel’s
exploration of those who belonged to the older colonial
churches. The evangelicalism exemplified by the Baptists
and Methodists was shared widely during this period and
exhibited more continuity with the older Puritanism than
is recognized here. Nevertheless, as Sobel demonstrates,
by the 1740s a new world was in process of being born.
In the life narratives of the period “individuals began to
see themselves as dramatic actors, and some went further
and came to see themselves as self-creators” (p. 4).
It was often the images imprinted in dreams that empowered individuals to actualize these new possibilities
and identifications. Building on scholarship on the significance of dreams in the fields of psychology and anthropology, Sobel has “taken the narrators at their word”
(p. 12) and accepted the autobiographies (though not
uncritically) as reliable reports of authentic human experience and self-understanding. The picture that takes
shape, of American selves formed in the context of binary
systems of race and gender (and not class, as in Europe),
is one that has endured long after the close of the period
of this study. Indeed, we are still haunted by the images
that filled the dreams of these men and women.
The book consists of five chapters and a concluding
“coda.” The first chapter, “ ‘Teach Me Dreams’: Learning
to Use Dreams to Refashion the Self,“ traces the shift from
porous/collective self to individuated self with particular
attention to the way African and European dream traditions influenced both black and white Americans. The
title of the book and chapter is from an Osage prayer
and Sobel shows how ”the signifying universe of early
European settlers was enriched by the dream interpretations of Africans and Native Americans“ (p. 41). But the
black-white relationship was the formative context for
the creation of both white and African American identity. Inter-racial Baptist and Methodist revival meetings
provided the setting for figures such as Freeborn Garrettson to create his new self, a Methodist opposed to the
war and to slavery, in opposition to ”the very self that
was being appropriated by other southern white males“
(p. 31). African dream imagery was Christianized and
white converts to the new Christian sects found their experience transformed by the presence of African Americans. Subsequent chapters, two on race and two on gender, explore ”Whites’ Black Alien Other,“ ”Blacks’ White
Enemy Other,“ ”Making Men What They Should Be,“ and
”Women Seeking What They Would Be.“
The process by which many ordinary Americans
shifted from “a permeable or collective sense of self to
a far more individual and interior one” (p. 18) involved
two key elements: creation of alien or enemy others (the
“not-me” against which individuals defined themselves)
and commitment to an external authority which validated the new self (often one of the new religious groups
that flourished during this period). Relationships with
the enemy other were complex, involving both hatred
and love, a process of attack and borrowing (“extractive
introjection”). Those who just possessed an alien other,
without membership in a group that served as an external authority, were usually frustrated in their quest for
selfhood. But, ironically, while commitment to an auSobel portrays Revolutionary-era America as a culthority validated the new sense of self, it also over time
ture
created by constant black-white interaction. She
solidified the more negative relationship to the other and
traces
the variety of responses among whites to this soended up shutting down the borrowing process. By the
cial
reality
where “almost all had intimate long-term exend of the period, therefore, a reaction set in against
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periences with African Americans” (p. 56). The autobiographical narratives make it clear that “many whites
both desired to emulate and at the same time were terrified of African Americans,” leading Southern men in
particular to use “black women to establish their power
over black men as well as over white women” (pp. 6061). Some whites like John Woolman and Sarah Hamilton responded to dreams that pointed toward fashioning
new selves with blacks as “an (almost) equal other.” Others appropriated black culture but felt compelled to “restrengthen hierarchies and ’keep blacks in their place.’ ”
Still others created an identity by ”actively demeaning
blacks to achieve a sense of unity and superiority“ while
unconscious of their utter dependence on them (pp. 6162).
an outlet during the war through the ideal of the male
as soldier and by actual military experience. Sexual behavior changed radically during the war, with brothels
proliferating, and male “sexual aggressiveness increased
in the two decades after the Revolution, especially toward women in public” (p. 139). Behaviors that had
been not only acceptable but exemplary among men before, such as crying and showing sympathy, were now
seen as feminine. Evangelical groups that began by “radically increasing the status and power of women” now
“shifted direction and reconstructed patriarchal power”
(p. 144). Still, the Methodist itineracy provided a setting for preachers like Asbury and Garretson to “embrace
the ’womanish part’ ” of devotion to Christ (p. 147) and
feminine aspects of Masonic ritual suggest ”men’s hidden desire to be more like women, to reaffirm aspects
African Americans, for their part, “used their white of themselves they had denied“ (p. 163). As white men
alien other to renew a quasi-African communal self,” increasingly saw sexuality as dangerous and ”feared the
most often in “African Christian institutions of their
sexuality of white women, and all blacks“ (p. 155), and
own” (pp. 108-109). The black experience in America was
”black men often regarded white women as their central
largely expressed in Sojourner Truth’s assertion, “When enemies“ (p. 158) it became harder to ”be a man.“
I was a slave I hated the white people.” The most significant “method used by enslaved Africans to develop and
In the Revolutionary era, while “more women openly
protect themselves was to consolidate an image of the came to recognize their rage at the other sex as the enwhite enemy other.” This image of “the white as a liar emy” and others reacted against “the traditional woman,”
and a cheat” became for blacks “that which they would it was “only those who accepted an authority that dinot be, a fierce white enemy that was hated and was to be rected their anger and approved and assisted their own
attacked whenever possible and whose characteristics, if development in opposition to their alien other” who were
found in the black self, were to be destroyed” (p. 110).
able to move toward “creating a more individuated self”
(p. 166). Sobel portrays several options that emerge from
Establishing their African American selves through women’s narratives. Some Quaker women “eliminated
the means of becoming Christian, blacks experienced their womanish parts” (p. 167) by adopting male bibliconflict between this inner rage and the virtues of forcal role models and spoke with authority to men. Some
giveness and love, having to “absorb an inner contradiclike Congregationalist Sarah Osborn, Methodist Fanny
tion of enormous proportions” (p. 114). When the Revo- Newell, Baptist Salome Lincoln, and African Methodist
lutionary ideal that “all men are created equal” embedded Episcopal preacher Jarena Lee “took on the mantle of
itself in black consciousness, the marriage of evangeli- Christ” (p. 176) in response to God’s call despite their
cal zeal and the promise of liberty unleashed the series male dominated churches. Some, “attacking men and
of slave revolts that struck terror throughout the white
damaging themselves,” failed to establish secure identiSouth. While most blacks left Judgment Day to God, they
ties for lack of “communal or institutional support” (pp.
widely believed that few if any whites would be found 185-186). And a remarkable few who explored new idenin heaven. Narratives such as that of William J. Ander- tities by transvesting, passing for men in the army or at
son, Moses Grandy, Harriet Tubman, and Rebecca Cox sea, demonstrated by their cross-dressing the extent to
Jackson reveal the varied, complex, creative ways blacks which in the Revolutionary period “all these categories
fashioned new theological- and self-understanding in the
were being shaken up” (p. 191).
1820s and 1830s.
The concluding “Coda: ’In Dreams Begins ResponDuring the greater Revolutionary period gender roles
sibility’ ” points to a great irony of the Revolutionary
were also in flux, with women asserting themselves in period: While dreams ”had played a crucial although
the religious realm and in “choosing their own husbands largely hidden role in bringing men and women into the
and evaluating them, often publicly” (p. 143). “White and modern world,“ the ”modern“ rational understanding exblack male insecurity and desire for strength” was given emplified by Franklin, Jefferson, and the cultural lead3
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ers of the next generation viewed reliance on dreams
and visions as the relics of an ”old-fashioned and irrational as well as feminine and lower-class worldview“
(p. 240-241). As the dreams of Benjamin Banneker, the
African American farmer, mathematician, clock-maker,
astronomer and almanac writer, and surveyor of the District of Columbia, reveal, however, the insights and directions gained from such ”irrational“ experiences involved
highly complex race and gender ”boundary renegotiations“ and ”a spiritual journey“ of ”self-development“ (p.
209) beyond anything envisioned by white male elites.
”Both the dream reports and the life narratives provide
very strong evidence that the significant relationships
that a great many white people had with African Americans led to a change in themselves; nevertheless, this was
most often an ’unthought known’–a change in thinking
and in ways of behaving that whites were not conscious
of.“
“slipped past his conscious censorship” and “that of many
others in power and has served as a catalyst for change
in the world from that time on” (p. 226). Dreams of
flying birds and Jacob’s ladders, rooted in Africa and
the Bible, enabled the likes of Sojourner Truth, Harriet
Tubman, Elizabeth ’Maumbet’ Freeman, Catherine Livingston [Garrettson], John Woolman, and many others
to redirect their lives according to a new sense of self.
“Dreams…helped many to further reframe reality, to reclaim parts of their rejected selves, and thus to behave
as fuller selves, whites taking from blacks, and men from
women, as well as the reverse” (p. 241). Sobel ends with
the provocative thought that since “binary systems of
white/black and male/female” marked by inferiority and
alienation continue to characterize our lives, then “perhaps the way lies through a new appreciation of individual dreams and collective myths” (p. 242). This book
so persuasively opens up fresh understandings of American selfhood and society–of realities that are persistent
The greatest example of such an “unthought known”
and deeply-rooted–that this challenge should not go unwas Jefferson’s “All men are created equal,” which heeded.
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Citation: Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe. Review of Sobel, Mechal, Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era. H-SHEAR, H-Net Reviews. September, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5479
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