I, Roger Williams

If I wanted to be dry about it, I could say that Mary Lee Settle's I, Roger Williams was about the separation of church and state. That doesn't sound like a subject likely to fire the imagination, but so it does here. More exactly, this is a novel about the dream of the separation between church and state, as opposed to the oppressive realities of seventeenth-century England and America: those who fight for freedom of conscience, like Williams' beloved hero, Sir Edward Coke, find themselves trampled by power or, as in the case of Oliver Cromwell, seduced by it. Not surprisingly, Williams' narrative emphasizes both the powers and dangers of language; characters must speak indirectly or only to themselves, struggle to free themselves from the trammels of rhetorical convention, and sometimes choose between truth and death. Settle's Williams lives passionately through words, whether through books, speech or letters. In this imaginary autobiography, however, the consolations of language always lead to the sad awareness of loss--the loss of friends, of the London of his youth (vanished in the Great Fire), of his books.

In this novel, loss tends to be violent. One of the triggers for Williams' narrative comes from his anguished guilt over his part in the destruction of the Narragansett--whom he had earlier befriended--during King Philip's War. Perhaps significantly, Williams' reminiscences never quite make it back to that event; instead, he dwells on those things lost to metaphorical or literal fires, like the fire that takes his teacher Bartholomew Legate or the fire that eventually (and symbolically) destroys all that he brought from England:

So much forgotten, my book gone up in flames that gave me leave to join all of those singled out by the fire for their beliefs, political fires, religious fires, I have at last seen them both as fires of language. We killed in a religious language but we killed politically. The same, whatever the cause, that blood of fury rising and overflowing into war one with another, one country with another, one tribe with another, the cause only the flint that lights the bonfire. Why is that killing fire called bon? Good? (302)

At times, it seems as though for Williams history is fire, an ongoing process of destruction, purification and renewal. What burns in the fire returns, Phoenix-like, in the minds and actions of others. The power of the word burns brighter in history once it has been put to the literal torch, reappearing in "other voices, the ember long forgotten" (302). In that sense, Williams remains optimistic about freedom emerging from the ashes of repression, even though he stands witness to a history in which authority fights liberty of conscience by burning both books and bodies.

Settle also makes much of Williams' status as a "seeker" for religious truth; his attempts to keep himself in a state of permanent questioning (or, as he puts it, "questing") sometimes make him sound as though he's a theistic John Stuart Mill. As Williams acknowledges, he is a late convert to seeking, and for him hindsight is often bittersweet: too often, his younger self presumes that he knows when, in fact, he is too young or too uninformed or simply too thick-skulled to even begin knowing. The elderly Williams cannot help but mourn how his Anglo-American friends imprison their minds with idols, whether "God Money," "God Politics," "God Entertainment," or--most dangerously--"God Land." Such idols deform language in general and the language of religion in particular, because they provide "worshippers" with the opportunity to clothe naked opportunism in the garb of spirituality. Moreover, such false gods cloak and protect the self against the threat of self-dissolution implied by seeking. Williams' own conversion experience is, as he himself acknowledges, a "dark night of the soul," in which he must first lose and then reconstruct himself from what is left of his "broken and tattered" past (216). Like the fires of history, conversion destroys and then restores the self in a different form, but in this novel only a rare few are brave enough to lose themselves in either history or God.