Mortal Combat with the Forces of Evil and Sin on the Campus: Functions of Puritan Intertext in Francine Prose's Blue Angel

Abstract

In her novel Blue Angel (2000) set in a small New England college Francine Prose involves her readers in the ingenious postmodern play with preceding cultural texts, including Puritan intertext central for the novel’s cluster of meanings. Arguably, it unfolds primarily along the following trajectories: socio-political Idle code of political correctness/witch-hunt), cultural/psychological (the code of [unsatisfied] desire), and literary/epistemological (the code “fiction-reality”). Based on the ideas expressed by Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Catherine Belsey, SacTan Bercovitch and others, the paper seeks to explore the implications of Puritan “text” in Prose’s university novel. It is argued that ‘Puritanism’ operates there as a metaphor for certain features in American intellectual and moral life of the past decades that the writer views as utterly negative, due to their perilous impact on the educational environment.