Abstract:This essay argues that the 1623 starving time through which Pilgrims championed universal self-interest was a direct and anticipated consequence of their risky decision to build a palisade and a fort rather than plant corn. This historical insight, derived by comparing Edward Winslow's Good News from New England with William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, updates and advances literary historical assessments of the power of sympathy in a settler colonial context. First, it reveals how the figuratively boundary-blurring fellow feeling that was exemplarily required by New England settlers' social theory had its historical conditions of possibility in the prior construction and renewal of material boundaries—walls, forts, and fences. These boundaries affirmed difference both within and beyond the New England settlement, and they normalized the self-interest across which sympathy's transgressive power derives. Second, these readings demonstrate not only how fellow feeling was enabled by these material demarcations but also how expressions of sympathy, particularly through practices of mercy, violently intensified the social difference that these walls and fences represented. This violence was at once explicit—in the terror and torture enacted on indigenous people—and implicit—in the expectation that fellow settlers forgo their desires for justice in the name of an affectionate community. Finally, in reviewing fellow feeling's capacity to be used as a weapon, this article suggests how future scholarship in New England studies might participate more robustly in a critique of the settler colonial conditions that endure into the present.

中文翻译：

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“仁慈与极端”：新英格兰定居点的堡垒、栅栏和同胞情怀

摘要：本文认为，朝圣者在 1623 年的饥饿时期捍卫普遍的自我利益是他们冒险决定建造栅栏和堡垒而不是种植玉米的直接和预期结果。这种历史洞察力是通过将爱德华·温斯洛的《来自新英格兰的好消息》与威廉·布拉德福德的《普利茅斯种植园》进行比较而得出的，更新并推进了对殖民者殖民背景下同情力量的文学历史评估。首先，它揭示了新英格兰定居者社会理论所典型要求的比喻性边界模糊的同胞感觉如何在物质边界（墙壁、堡垒和围栏）的先前构建和更新中具有其可能性的历史条件。这些边界肯定了新英格兰定居点内外的差异，他们使同情的越界力量所产生的自身利益正常化。其次，这些解读不仅展示了这些物质界限如何促成了同胞感情，而且还展示了同情的表达，特别是通过怜悯的做法，如何猛烈地加剧了这些墙壁和围栏所代表的社会差异。这种暴力既是明确的——在对土著人民实施的恐怖和酷刑中——又是含蓄的——期望其他定居者以一个充满感情的社区的名义放弃他们对正义的渴望。最后，在回顾同胞感情被用作武器的能力时，本文提出了新英格兰研究的未来学术如何更强有力地参与对持续至今的定居者殖民条件的批判。