ABSTRACT
Puritan missionary John Eliot moved to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and soon learned the Algonquin dialect of the Native American he met there, and he eventually translated the Bible into their native language. His brief text, The Christian Commonwealth, outlines a model for a utopia governed by strict adherence to Puritan interpretation of the Bible, which relies heavily on the Calvinist self-regulation that was an integral part of the purifying aspect of Puritan theology and English endeavors to convert the Native Americans to Christianity. This chapter argues that Eliot’s text posits a Puritan panopticon and demonstrates how Lacan’s Symbolic Name-of-the-Father reflects biblical patriarchy in addition to resembling Foucault’s biopolitical, panoptic model.
