Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination [1 ed.] 0268102171, 9780268102173

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Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

CATHOLICISM and AMERICAN BORDERS in the GOTHIC LITERARY IMAGINATION

Fa r r e l l O ’ G o r m a n

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu Copyright © 2017 by University of Notre Dame All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: O’Gorman, Farrell, author. Title: Catholicism and American borders in the Gothic literary imagination / Farrell O’Gorman. Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017024318 (print) | LCCN 2017036803 (ebook) ISBN 978-0-268-10219-7 (web pdf ) | ISBN 978-0-268-10220-3 (epub) | ISBN 9780268102173 (hardback) | ISBN 0268102171 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: American literature—History and criticism. | Religion and literature—United States—History. | Gothic revival (Literature)—United States—History . | Catholic Church—In literature. | Catholics in literature. | Nationalism and literature—United States—History. | American fiction—History and criticism. | Catholic fiction—History and criticism. | BISAC: RELIGION / Christianity / Literature & the Arts. | RELIGION / Christianity / Catholic. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Gothic & Romance. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Asian / General. Classification: LCC PS166.O46 (ebook) | LCC PS166.O46 C38 2017 (print) | DDC 813/.087290938282—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024318 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

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For Anna Clare and Jack Lucky to live in America Called to communion beyond it

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix 1

CHAPTER 1

Crèvecœur’s Mask of the Modern: Roman Ruins and America’s “New Man”

39

CHAPTER 2

Melville’s “Monkish Fables”: Catholic Bodies Haunting the New World

67

CHAPTER 3

Fear, Desire, and Communion in Chopin’s Old La Louisiane

97

CHAPTER 4

Waste Lands, Border Histories, Gothic Frontiers: Faulkner, McCarthy, Percy

141

CHAPTER 5

O’Connor’s “True Country”: Borders, Crossings, Pilgrims

183

Coda: Catholicism, American Borders, and the Gothic in Contemporary U.S. Fiction

225

Notes Bibliography Index

249 291 313

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book, which in part grew out of my earlier work on Catholicism and the literature of the American South, is rooted in foundations laid by my mentors as an undergraduate in the University of Notre Dame’s Program of Liberal Studies and as a graduate student in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My reading of American literature has natu­ rally deepened and expanded during the nearly two decades I have spent teaching, first at Wake Forest University, where I benefited especially from the support of Anne Boyle and the friendship of Alex Garganigo, Mad­ huparna Mitra, and Robert West. At Mississippi State University, Richard Patteson and Noel Polk—both since passed away—helped me to approach Herman Melville and William Faulkner with newfound insight, and Rich Raymond, Matt Little, Holly Johnson, Kelly Marsh, and Brad Vice all spurred me on in different ways. At the same time, scholars as far afield as Nicole Moulinoux and Charles Crow sparked my interest in the Gothic via international symposia in France and Mexico where I was privileged to encounter such accomplished critics as Maurice Lévy and Allan Lloyd Smith. Bruce Gentry provided an invaluable opportunity for me to crystal­ lize my initial thoughts on the American Gothic in relation to Catholicism when he generously invited me to lecture at a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Symposium on Flannery O’Connor in 2007. Dur­ ing these years, assorted members of the ­Cormac ­McCarthy S­ ociety also provided good company as I sought to think through ­McCarthy’s religious identity, a task ultimately aided by the work of Bryan Giemza in particular. My interests have always been interdisciplinary, and it was a historian—­ Jason Phillips—who kindly invited me to write an essay on southern bor­ ders and the literary imagination that would ultimately prove foundational to my framework for this study. Much of what I believe to be best and most ix

x Acknowledgments

distinctive about my book would simply not have been possible without the five years I spent in an interdisciplinary Catholic Studies department at DePaul University. I am greatly indebted to Karen Scott, Mike Budde, Peter Casarella, Emanuele Colombo, Sheryl Overmyer, and Bill Cava­ naugh; my understanding of Catholicism in relation to American borders and to modernity generally has been deeply informed by what I learned while working with them. In DePaul’s English Department, Paula Mc­ Quade and James Murphy were especially generous colleagues, facilitating and supporting my teaching of graduate courses on literature and religious identity. Dean Charles Suchar supported a research leave in fall 2011 that proved invaluable for my work on Kate Chopin and J. Hector St. John de Crève­cœur. Now, at Belmont Abbey College, I still benefit from an aca­ demic environment where real interdisciplinary conversations take place, and I owe thanks to the many faculty colleagues and students whose con­ tinual hard work and dedication help to keep me grounded. I also remain grateful to Abbot Placid Solari and the monks of Belmont Abbey for their hospitable support of the only Catholic college in the part of America that my family calls home, the college that helped to expand my own father’s horizons beyond the borders of the small-town South half a century ago. I owe thanks to all those who have responded to my work at meetings of the American Literature Association, the Conference on Christianity and Literature, and elsewhere. I want to express special gratitude to those who have invited me to present or publish portions of this project and who in many cases have been companions and fellow travelers, includ­ ing Mark Bosco, Bob Brinkmeyer, Patrick Connelly, Hank Edmondson, Christina Bieber Lake, Collin Messer, Doug Mitchell, Mike Murphy, Rich­ ard Russell, Susan Srigley, and Mary Ann Wilson. In some ways the chief respondents—­whether they know it or not—are and will remain the mem­ bers of my family, especially my wife Natasha and my children, to whom this book is dedicated. I was delighted to place this project with the University of Notre Dame Press and have benefited immensely from the professional assistance of Stephen Little, Rebecca DeBoer, Maria denBoer, Wendy McMillen, and Susan Berger in completing it. Finally, I should note that parts of this book were published previously in different form. Portions of the introduction and chapter 4 appeared in my essay “Rewriting American Borders” in

Acknowledgments xi

Story­telling, History, and the Postmodern South, edited by Jason Phillips (Louisiana State University Press, 2013). Other portions of chapter 4 origi­ nally appeared in my essays “Confessing the Horrors of Radical Individu­ alism in Lancelot” in A Political Companion to Walker Percy, edited by Peter Augustine Lawler and Brian A. Smith (University Press of Kentucky, 2013) and “Joyce and Contesting Priesthoods in Suttree and Blood Meridian,” in Cormac McCarthy Journal 4 (2005), for which copyright is held by the Pennsylvania State University Press. Much of the middle portion of chap­ ter 5 was published as “White, Black, and Brown: Reading O’Connor After Richard Rodriguez” in Flannery O’Connor Review 4 (2006). I am grateful to these journals and presses for their early support of my scholarship and for granting me permission to reprint it.

I N T RO D U C T I O N

Gothic fiction, the fiction of fear, has long been identified as paradoxically central to the literary tradition of the United States. Early exhortative texts such as the Declaration of Independence and Benjamin Franklin’s Auto­ biography clearly articulated an optimistic national narrative of rational, self-interested individuals escaping past tyranny to progress confidently to­ gether into an expansive future. By contrast, the Gothic fictions of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison have depicted nightmarish threats to national ideals, in­ herent flaws in those ideals and their implementation, or both—thereby radically challenging “America’s self-mythologization as a nation of hope and harmony.” Such is the critical consensus.1 What scholars have failed to recognize adequately is the recurrent role in such fiction of a Catholicism that consistently threatens to break down borders separating U.S. ­citizens— or some representative “American”—from the larger world beyond. This role has in part reflected enduring fears of the faith in Anglo-American cul­ ture. British Gothic fiction originated in the eighteenth century as what one scholar pointedly deemed Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition, responding directly to its audience’s pronounced anxieties regarding Ca­ tholicism.2 Such anxieties were in a sense imported to the United States— not only in the antebellum era, and not only in the nation’s literature. Up until at least the middle of the twentieth century, educated and uneducated citizens alike often openly deemed Catholicism a particularly insidious 1

2  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

threat to the United States and the radical new possibilities that it, uniquely, had made available to its citizens, if not to all humanity.3 Today, expressions of fear of an invasive and foreign Catholicism men­ acing a potentially utopian United States are at once less common and more complicated than in decades or centuries past. Yet they linger in ways that cut across the conventional political spectrum. One recent ex­ pression of such fear is particularly useful in understanding the extent to which it has shaped longstanding notions of national identity. Prominent political scientist Samuel Huntington, best known for The Clash of Civilizations, argued in his final book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity that the future success of the United States depends on preservation of the “Anglo-Protestant culture” established by the earliest settlers in Britain’s North American colonies. From New England south­ ward, these settlers—not Anglicans, predominantly, but instead dissenters of the sort Edmund Burke deemed the most Protestant of Protestants— carried with them distinctive “values.” Foremost among these was “indi­ vidualism,” closely tied to “the work ethic.”4 Huntington claims that with­ out this preexisting cultural foundation of values provided by dissenting Protestantism, Enlightenment “ideas” would never have yielded the great fruit that they eventually did in the United States—and that they failed to yield in regions of the Americas colonized by Catholics, for example, “Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.”5 Later generations of “immigrants,” qualita­ tively different from the original British “settlers” in Huntington’s schema, helped the nation to prosper only because they assimilated to its already established Anglo-Protestant culture. Huntington’s great fear is that recent patterns of immigration, coupled with an emphasis on multiculturalism in the U.S. education system, will end this pattern of assimilation forever. His primary concern is with massive immigration from historically Catholic Latin America, especially Mexico—which, he notes grimly, once owned a significant portion of current U.S. territory. Huntington’s position clearly depends on certain debatable premises regarding religion. It is not, however, based on any profession of ­Christian faith. Even as Huntington maintains that the Protestant Reformation was ultimately more foundational for the United States than was the Enlight­ enment, he never promotes any form of Christianity as an end in itself. Rather, he touts Anglo-Protestantism as the historically necessary means

Introduction 3

to and enduring basis for maintaining that which he sees as truly valu­ able: an “American Creed” that he describes, approvingly, as “Protestant­ ism without God”; and an “American civil religion” that he describes, again approvingly, as “Christianity without Christ.”6 The purpose of “Anglo-­ Protestantism” as defined by Huntington is ultimately to replace Moses with George Washington and Jesus Christ with Abraham Lincoln. This is a view that Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards would undoubtedly find problematic—as many of Huntington’s less theologi­ cally inclined contemporaries have, for a variety of reasons.7 Yet the ar­ gument is worth noting because it so bluntly exemplifies longstanding Anglo-American habits of seeing the Protestant Reformation and the En­ lightenment as essentially continuous with one another and, furthermore, of seeing “Anglo-­Protestantism” as properly culminating in a post-­Christian individualism that paradoxically serves as the common thread binding the nation together. In both views, U.S. identity is defined in opposition to a Catholic Christianity best kept beyond national borders. Huntington writes, by his own account, as both a “scholar” and a “pa­ triot.”8 His goal is to make a clear and persuasive argument regarding what he sees as necessary to maintain his own nation’s political and economic success. The enduring fiction writers to have come out of that nation are, by comparison, much more complex. The greatest of them are those at once most deeply rooted in and most profoundly critical of their culture. Such literary artists are ultimately attuned not to questions about national wellbeing but to larger questions about the nature of reality and hu­manity’s place in it—even as each understands and articulates those questions in relation to his or her own cultural tradition and historical moment. To some extent, writers ranging from Homer and Sophocles to Anton Che­ khov and Virginia Woolf can help readers to see beyond the limits of the simultaneously triumphalist and anxious narrative of U.S. civil religion proposed by Huntington. My concern here, however, is with canonical fiction writers of the United States who do so, writers who—though they should not be categorized as “merely” Gothic in any reductive or dismis­ sive sense—­participate in and ultimately revise a larger Anglo-American Gothic literary tradition in relation to Catholicism. The authors I con­ sider are J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, Herman Melville, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Cormac McCarthy,

4  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

and selected c­ ontemporary writers including Toni Morrison. Representing a variety of historical periods from the early republic up until the present day, these authors have distinct experiences of borders within and around their nation and hemisphere, itself an ever-emergent “America.” They also have distinct experiences of Catholicism and distinct ways of imagining the faith, often shaped at least in part within the Church itself. Their fic­ tions collectively demonstrate the complicated and profound role that Ca­ tholicism has played in Gothic narratives of U.S. identity. These are only indirectly narratives of the nation as such: they are most often narratives that feature some representative American, a willfully autonomous indi­ vidual who appears as synecdoche or achievement of the nation. As will become clear, the border that these authors are ultimately most interested in is the border between self and “other.” More precisely, they are interested in the border the individual intellect attempts to maintain be­ tween itself and a larger reality that it seeks isolation from or control over, a reality that includes but is not limited to other individuals. Crucially, each author considered here understands or intuits that border as defini­ tively bound up with U.S. identity, its enforcement essential to maintain­ ing the individualism that Huntington and others posit as foundational for the nation. While such individualism may in part be tied to the legacy of dissenting Protestantism, it is more profoundly a function of liberalism, that is, “the long tradition of political philosophy—stemming in part from the social contract theories of thinkers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—that places the autonomous individual at the center of social and political concern” and has been undeniably essential to the U.S. experi­ ment.9 Regardless of whether such commitment to the individual is viewed as “Protestant” or as “liberal,” it is the rigidity of the border perceived as necessary to maintain or achieve individual autonomy that is most at issue and most chillingly challenged, complicated, and undermined in the fic­ tion I consider here.10 That fiction’s rootedness in a particularly Anglo-­ American Gothic tradition is, as we shall see, immediately evident in that it is primarily concerned with threats to the autonomy of the individual of Anglo-Protestant provenance; its particular national character is clear in that it depicts such individuals as tending to believe—like each author’s presumed primary audience—that the United States is the one nation in which individuals can in fact achieve and maintain autonomy.

Introduction 5

Accordingly, American exceptionalism of a certain sort is a founda­ tional concern in these fictions.11 Their Gothic character is largely a func­ tion of the fear that the nation is not exceptional, that the nation and in­ dividuals within it are susceptible to older, foreign patterns of experience most intimately modeled by Catholicism. Hence, fears of Catholicism are often bound up with fears related to the breakdown of borders, fears of outwardly imposed violence, contagion, or corruption—a corruption both literal and figurative, both bodily and moral. Yet simultaneously, Catholi­ cism is here at times associated with a haunting desire within the individual to cross the borders of the self, with a troubling passion that, in the root sense of the word, necessarily involves suffering. Violence in these fictions generally occurs in conjunction with such fear or such desire. Violence, that is, occurs in attempts to assert the border both around the individual and around the space or nation in which he believes he might maintain his autonomy; or it occurs in conjunction with the breakdown of that border. Ultimately, each fiction considered here imagines some possible or realized crossing of borders in relation to Catholicism, whether that crossing is imagined as unwelcome or not—as invasion and violation or as com­ munion and fulfillment. While the latter is less common, it exists at least as possibility in the work of some of the more recent writers considered here. These writers most clearly demonstrate that the Gothic mode can co­ exist with or become a kind of religious writing, a possibility in fact in­ herent in a number of my readings here. My analysis contributes not only to discourse regarding Gothic fiction but also to a broader ongoing dialogue regarding religion, secularism, and American literature. It extends the work of Jenny Franchot and Susan M. Griffin, who have demonstrated the profound relationship between antiCatholicism and nineteenth-century U.S. literature, rightly reading antiCatholic rhetoric in this context “not merely as a means of attacking Rome, but as a flexible medium of cultural critique” often directed in part at con­ cerns within the nation itself.12 My work also complements that of Tracy Fessenden and Elizabeth Fenton, who have recently demonstrated how in U.S. culture up until at least 1900 liberalism is closely tied to a species of “secularism” that “often appears . . . not as the condition of being without religion but, rather, as the condition of being without Catholicism.”13 My study is unique, however, in its intensive and sustained focus on Gothic

6  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

fiction; in that it considers authors writing from the Revolutionary era up until the present day; and in that it focuses primarily—though not ­exclusively—on authors of Catholic background or conviction.14 These authors are variously attuned to the fact that their nation has been shaped by a recurrent narrative in which “Protestantism’s emancipation from Ca­ tholicism” is seen as providing “the blueprint” for “secu­larism’s emanci­ pation from ‘religion’ itself,” and in which a definitively post-­Protestant secularism has been subtly affirmed as essential to proper citizenship.15 Examining the work of these authors with consistent attention to bio­ graphical contexts and to recent scholarship on U.S. Catholic intellectual and social history, I deepen and complicate previous critical insights re­ garding Catholicism and U.S. literature prior to 1900 and, furthermore, establish a previously overlooked context for understanding twentieth-­ century and contemporary authors who depict, engage, or are directly shaped by Catholicism.16 Whereas earlier studies tend to emphasize Catholicism’s association with Europe in the U.S. literary imagination, mine—in its consistent con­ cern with borders—documents how that imagination often responds to a Catholicism associated with Latin America, the Caribbean, and Quebec. On a deeper level, it demonstrates how the U.S. Gothic tradition I trace here confirms and ultimately transforms the longstanding image in Anglo­ phone literature of Catholicism as at root “a religion without a country; indeed, a religion inimical to nationhood.” In the nineteenth century, Ca­ tholicism was generally viewed in both “England and America as foreign infiltration, as, variously, Irish, German, Italian, French influence”: because “Protestantism was understood as a defining aspect of ‘American’ and ‘Brit­ ish,’” Catholicism was seen as “doubly dangerous, implying as it did both the immigrant’s refusal to be converted from a prior nationality and mem­ bership in an anti-national organization.”17 Of the fiction writers consid­ ered here, one might expect that those who had no personal experience within the Catholic Church (Melville and Faulkner) would be most apt to deem it as presenting some “foreign” challenge to the United States. Yet this is not necessarily the case. All of these writers—whether insiders to the Church, outsiders to it, or sojourners near its doors—deploy images of a somewhat foreign Catholicism in narratives that ultimately challenge a competing faith.

Introduction 7

That faith, as defined by Patrick Deneen, is a “democratic faith” that is deeply characteristic of the United States. It is largely a “belief ” in human perfectibility, “in the possibility of mastery and dominion—whether of other humans, nature, or even ourselves,” and it is “closely aligned” to a dangerous “self-satisfaction.”18 Strikingly, it is indeed a “faith,” though not generally recognized as such: it “tends to reject tragedy” as well as “warn­ ings against hubris, invocations of human nature and human teleology, and reminders of inescapable human shortcomings.”19 Like Catholicism, this faith sees itself as potentially global and in the United States “too easily ­inclines to the illusion of national mission undertaken in the name of democratic universalism and crusading self-righteousness”—manifested, for example, in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s proclamation that “with America’s destiny lies the destiny of the world.”20 Paradoxically, democratic faith proves inimical to true democracy in the long run. It is therefore in need of “friendly critics,” preferably native ones. Committed Catholic authors such as Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy might seem most prone to narrate the shortcomings of such a faith because, as Deneen puts it, “strenu­ ous” Christian belief necessarily “forces a harrowing recognition of the vast chasm that exists between humanity’s self-flattering ambitions and God’s intentions.” In fact, all the Gothic fictions considered here—whether penned by professing Christians or not—present a harrowing challenge to democratic faith, to modernity’s “comforting belief ” in “human mastery, progress, and the possibility of overcoming alienation” via a liberalism that in fact abets it.21 As fictions, their challenge is in large part existential as opposed to broadly political or abstractly philosophical, manifesting a real concern with the predicament and ultimate fate of actual flesh-and-blood persons as opposed to nations or political systems. It is often precisely in such focus on concrete individual experience that these authors most pow­ erfully critique “borders” as conceived of within the United States in rela­ tion to Catholicism. Such is the broad foundation of my argument. Before elaborating further, I define the Gothic with particular focus on its relationship to borders and Catholicism. I do so first genealogically, demonstrating how early Gothic fictions present the rise of individualism and concordant de­ velopment of the modern nation-state as functions of Protestantism and secularism, imaginatively intertwined in opposition to Catholicism. This

8  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

­ ecessarily entails consideration of foundational Gothic fictions in Britain n as well as the United States. In considering them, I in many ways follow critics of the past two decades in reading the Gothic not primarily “as a discourse on and of the familial subject of psychoanalysis” but instead as “descriptive” of “the subject as articulated by the sociopolitical discourse of the nation.”22 Insofar as the fictions I consider are profoundly concerned with the border between self and other, however, familial relation and other “psychoanalytical” concerns do prove vital to my approach—though I ulti­ mately place those concerns in a broader philosophical and religious frame­ work. Elaborating this genealogy and framework enables me to return to, clarify, and further my thesis before providing an overview of individual chapters. I then conclude by suggesting the relevance of my argument to possible reconsiderations of the place of “the church” in American culture and, relatedly, to considerations of how a Catholicism that challenges bor­ ders might appear—and perhaps appeal—to imaginations in the United States and beyond in the twenty-first century.

CATHOLICISM AND ANGLO-AMERICAN GOTHIC FICTION: BRITISH ORIGINS, ATLANTIC CROSSINGS

Understanding the Gothic novel’s origins in eighteenth-century Britain is essential to understanding its formative relationship to Catholicism, related narrative complexity, and longstanding concern with borders—national and otherwise. Defined concisely, Gothic fiction is the fiction of horror and terror, marked by violence, the irrational, and supernatural or seemingly supernatural phenomena; it initially featured medieval settings such as the monastery or castle, and later the haunted mansion, house, family, or land­ scape. Despite this foundational relationship to the medieval (Catholic) past, many late twentieth-century scholars displayed a “de-historicising bias” in their analyses of the Gothic. Such scholars favored supposedly uni­ versal psychoanalytical readings or readings exclusively attentive to ques­ tions of race and gender, generally maintaining “an embarrassed silence upon the matter of early Gothic fiction’s anti-Catholicism.”23 This critical error often occurred even in analysis of the British Gothic, which quite clearly highlighted national anxieties regarding religion in seminal classics

Introduction 9

such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). These fictions, all written by Protestant authors living in an ascendant im­ perial Britain, were all set in a horrifically imagined and decadently irratio­ nal Catholic Mediterranean world. Such geographical configurations were transplanted into an American Hemisphere divided, roughly, between an Anglo-dominated North and a multiracial Latin South—a hemisphere given shape not only by conflicts between the colonial powers of England, Spain, and France, but also by what may understandably be deemed “the most enduring and formative ideological conflict of modern European his­ tory,” that between Catholicism and Protestantism.24 An initial understanding of this British literary tradition and its trans­ lation into Anglo-American form by two influential practitioners, Poe and Hawthorne, demonstrates just how profoundly assumptions regard­ ing Catholicism informed the literature of the antebellum United States. These foundational texts and authors also demonstrate that the Gothic, originating as it did in an age marked by a perceived crisis of authority, is frequently concerned with questions of historiography. Whereas many nineteenth-­century English-language novels—beginning perhaps with those of Jane Austen—tended toward mimetic realism and overt didacti­ cism, the Gothic’s often seemingly fantastical fictions embraced ambiguity and challenged predominant Anglo-American cultural assumptions: they rejected a narrative of history as inevitably progressive and often depicted the ultimate inability of the autonomous intellect to author an accurate history, or, more broadly, to read or write the truth. Contrary to the Ref­ ormation tenet of sola scriptura and the Enlightenment tenet of sola ratio alike, early Gothic fictions emphasized that the truth is more complicated than any single formulation of it read or written out in black and white by an earnest individual.25 The Castle of Otranto, universally acknowledged as the first Gothic novel in English, exemplifies these patterns and prefigures much later Anglo-­American Gothic fiction. The novel was written by the son of Sir Robert Walpole, the de facto first prime minister of Great Britain. A zeal­ ous Whig, Walpole was a member of that ascendant party that at mid-­ eighteenth century wished to erase even the memory of two centuries of religious strife that had ended a generation previous with the succession of

10  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

William and Mary. But the question remained: what in fact legitimated Britain’s increasingly parliamentary government, along with the accompa­ nying rise of the mercantile class and of capitalism generally? Walpole and his Whig colleagues attempted to ground their burgeoning rule—­including its entrenched anti-Catholic laws—in the myth of a piecemeal native ­con­stitution, sometimes deemed a “Saxon” or “Gothic” constitution, that reached back to the Magna Carta and was perceived as a “bulwark” of the democratic and therefore fundamentally “Protestant freedoms” that had finally prevailed for good in the Glorious Revolution.26 In The Castle of Otranto, however, Robert Walpole’s son Horace suggested that history was not necessarily such a neat narrative of inevitable moral progress—that it perhaps remained a crude power struggle marked as much by might as by right, and that present prosperity was inevitably built on past wrongs. Walpole’s novel about a powerful family’s hidden history “dwells ob­ sessively on illegitimacy and usurpation, on gaps and ruptures,” in that his­ tory. Hence The Castle of Otranto, though set in medieval Italy, can ulti­ mately be read as a critique of eighteenth-century Whig rule: while in public Horace Walpole upheld his father’s “political image,” in his fiction “he dons the garb of the family’s ancestral [Catholic] enemies and turns as­ sassin” by effectively calling all political authority into question. He does so in a complex manner. “It’s not just that [in the novel the ruling patri­ arch’s] attitude toward divorce unhappily recalls Henry VIII and the Ref­ ormation or that the plot concerns usurpation”; in fact, “the theme of ille­ gitimate possession pervades all aspects” of the novel, including the way the narrative not only turns on the discovery of a falsified will but also insis­ tently points to the likelihood of its own “textual fakery.”27 For Walpole initially published The Castle of Otranto under a pseudonym, masquerad­ ing as the translator of the work of a supposed Counter-Reformation Ital­ ian priest who is in turn presented as the likely forger of the primary nar­ rative, a tale set at the time of the Crusades. This priest’s tale is so offensive to the modern mind, the faux-translator warns his readers in a lengthy pref­ ace, that it was likely intended to confirm its original Italian readers in their Catholic superstitions: “[its] principal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of Christianity.”28 In its self-questioning framing device and in Walpole’s preface to the second edition, which forthrightly defends what one critic deems the text’s apparent “generic miscegenation,” this

Introduction 11

proto­typical Gothic fiction highlights those questions regarding the nature of authority—that is, textual authorship and interpretation as well as po­ litical legitimacy—that were so central to that most foundational of early modern events, the Reformation.29 This fact is highlighted again at the novel’s conclusion when the deposed patriarch and his wife, stripped of all worldly power, are effectively forced to “take on the habit of religion” and disappear into monastic communities adjoining their former realm.30 Read in historical context, then, the major question raised by The ­Castle of Otranto and its violent tale of usurpation becomes: what is the proper basis of ultimate authority? If not the Roman Catholic Church or the divine right of kings, can parliamentary representation be trusted to be much better—particularly when it seems to replace Christian tradition only with imperialistic nationalism, and when rule of the nation-state ap­ pears to be grounded only in the calculating wills of self-interested indi­ viduals (at this time, of propertied white males)? Walpole and other early Gothic authors see their “characters and readers as torn between the entic­ ing call of aristocratic wealth and sensuous Catholic splendor, beckoning back toward the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, on the one hand, and a desire to overthrow these past orders of authority in favor of a quasiequality associated with the rising middle-class ideology of the self as selfmade, on the other—but an ideology haunted by the Protestant bourgeois desire to attain the power of the older orders that the middle class wants to dethrone.”31 Diane Long Hoeveler foregrounds these concerns as she characterizes the early British Gothic, in the wake of Otranto, as seeking, in effect, to ex­ orcise the Christian past: The rise of an Enlightenment ideology made possible the growth of capitalism, nationalism, and secularization, all of which privileged in­ dividualism, the private over the public display of spirituality, and the reading of the word itself rather than its interpretation by a priest. But to transform a society in this way, to move it from an oral to a printbased culture, to uproot traditional ways of doing and living and being could not have been easy or painless. . . . The killing of Catholicism in England took more than two hundred years, and the gothic charts that murder in all its convoluted moves. Killing the king becomes in

12  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

the gothic the killing of a corrupt duke or monk, while the rationality so highly prized by Protestant individualism and Enlightenment ide­ ology moves to center stage, creating a new cultural ideal that chastised idolatry, superstition, hierarchy, and popery in all its forms. . . . The gothic [therefore] charts the death of the old world of Catholicism, communalism, feudalism, and the rise in its place of the Protestant subject, individual, modern, secular.32 By the late eighteenth century, an idealized version of this new and only nominally “Protestant” subject had become a veritable “object of w ­ orship”— the new “social and cultural divinity” in Britain. Though broadly represen­ tative of “the modern individual,” this subject or self was figured as “middle class, white,” and “male.”33 Such figuring was a function of the fact that in this milieu “women, people of color and the lower classes” were perceived as exemplifying a radically “embodied subjectivity” and therefore lacking full “agency”: “they were born to fulfill” specific “social roles,” as their bodies “determined who and what they could be and become.” Hence, they were seen as incapable of fully modern selfhood. Yet this figuring is not properly understood as only a function of racism and sexism. It was a function of “Enlightenment beliefs” that defined “the self as unitary, reasonable, and located somewhere above and beyond the body.” At the time middle-class white males seemed the “putative norm” for such “universal subjectivity” because they were the only individuals deemed capable of attaining such a desirable state.34 Such was the dominant Enlightenment construct that informed the nascent Gothic. Hoeveler rightly stresses, however, that it would be a mis­ take to deem the Gothic an “Enlightenment genre.” Multiple scholars have observed how Gothic fiction essentially plays on the fear that neat rational dichotomies—between mind and body, male and female, white and black, good and evil, living and dead, present and past—might some­ how break down. In the early Anglo-American Gothic, “Protestant”—or, better, “secular”—generally corresponds to the first and putatively positive of these opposed categories (mind, male, white, living, present), “Catholic” to the second and putatively negative ones (body, female, black, dead, past). But in this milieu Catholicism, like the Gothic itself, is also associ­ ated with the complete breakdown of such dichotomies, with a horrifying

Introduction 13

intermingling between seemingly opposed states of being, and, accord­ ingly, with ambiguity. This includes, as in Otranto, a narrative ambiguity that implicitly critiques the monolithic mythmaking on which national­ ism inevitably depends.35 Gothic complications of seemingly black-and-white narratives of na­ tional identity were particularly vexing in a modernity in which print cul­ ture itself was largely responsible for creating the newly “imagined com­ munities” that were nation-states. Daily newspapers and other periodicals had begun to connect otherwise disparate readers into a loose “spiritual fraternity” of citizens that in some respects served to replace a Church de­ clining in influence.36 Literate citizens increasingly understood themselves as “individuals who used their reason” to escape “the artificial worlds of the aristocratic and peasant classes” alike: for them, “reason was the attribute of individuals, while imagination was the attribute of groups,” groups per­ ceived as inherently restrictive.37 Bourgeois citizens of the newly imagined communities that were nation-states chose, paradoxically, to imagine that imagination and community alike were in large part things of the past— the essence of “chaotic tradition” from which they, as modern individuals, had escaped. From the perspective of the Anglo-Americans who would tri­ umphantly articulate U.S. identity, allegiance to such tradition seemed to have kept Latin Catholics and “Indians” alike from forming “real nations” in the Americas.38 As they saw it, true individuals and a true nation sprung into existence in the Americas only “when middle class Anglo-Americans in 1776 rejected the English king.” They did so via the Declaration of Inde­ pendence, a text intended to be utterly unambiguous and transparently accessible to the individual via naked reason—that same reason through which the individual could “achieve an artless and classless relationship with nature,” a nature that he ultimately came to see as granting him free­ dom to dominate it.39 Fiction itself depends, of course, less on reason than on imagination— and also on “groups” or tradition, on some degree of communion with predecessors. In the new nation that produced Thomas Jefferson’s emi­ nently rational Declaration, who would look to British literary tradition and imagine an American version of The Castle of Otranto? That tradition itself was one in flux. Before 1825, British Gothic novels sought the formal affect of “terror or horror” via conventions of character and plot, “scene

14  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

and atmosphere,” and “operatic use of language and dialogue” to such a degree that they can be seen as a consistent genre; soon, however, a wide variety of British novels and short stories would incorporate single aspects of the Gothic, or “some unpredictable combination” of them, without being immediately or reductively identifiable as Gothic texts themselves.40 Accordingly, Gothic fiction in the United States, typically dated as be­ ginning with Charles Brockden Brown, emerged less as a genre than as a ­flexible literary mode, “an innovative and experimental literature” of “daz­ zling originality and diversity.”41 Over time, “American writers increasingly came to strike the Gothic note in macabre detailing rather than by invok­ ing the [original] genre in toto.”42 They ultimately created a tradition of their own, so that writers such as Faulkner, McCarthy, and Morrison would be “keenly celebratory of their dark antecedents” in the nineteenth-century United States.43 Foremost among those antecedents was Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote the Gothic indelibly into the national canon. Poe’s own imaginative development depended on Atlantic crossings, both literal and figurative. He spent a crucial five years of his childhood in Britain and the rest in Virginia, where he attended Jefferson’s new uni­ versity and experienced a slaveholding society that—despite certain faux-­ feudal elements—was both definitively modern and definitively American. Poe’s mature work would draw on all aspects of his experience even as it often responded to his U.S. audience’s reservations regarding the E ­ uropean Catholic past in fairly obvious ways. If the Reformation, Enlightenment, and opening of the Western Hemisphere had offered enterprising Anglo-­ American individuals apparent liberation from the medieval past—room to breathe in, open space—then Poe was aware that Catholicism might seem to threaten to lock them back up: in castles and cathedrals, monas­teries and abbeys, dungeons and confessional booths, all figurative ­coffins. Poe suggested this most flagrantly and systematically in “The Pit and the Pen­ dulum,” a captivity narrative set during the Spanish Inquisition, and “The Masque of the Red Death,” a tale of decadent and diseased a­ ristocrats—­of both moral and bodily corruption—set in a “castellated abbey” in Europe. He deployed the same fears more sporadically in fictions such as “The Black Cat,” wherein the narrator kills his wife and walls up her corpse, he tells us, “much as the monks of the Middle Ages are recorded to have walled up their victims.”44 Yet Poe did not merely cater to the prejudices

Introduction 15

of his audience. “The Black Cat” and stories such as “William Wilson” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” finally offer less reason to fear medieval or Eu­ ropean authorities than the quintessentially modern and willfully autono­ mous ­individuals—democrats? Americans?—who serve as the criminal and significantly unreliable narrators of these tales, often inadvertently calling their own veracity into question. Via murder and other means, Poe’s mod­ ern individuals seek to deny and escape an embodiment that they perceive as limiting and associate not only with Catholicism but also with the femi­ nine. The hypersensitive intellectual Roderick Usher, who fears all sensual experience, is a prime exemplar as he buries his cataleptic twin sister alive in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Imaginatively yoking Catholicism with the world of matter—the world known by the body—and the feminine alike was not uncommon in Poe’s antebellum milieu.45 His contemporary Hawthorne linked female bodies to the faith explicitly in The Scarlet Letter as he introduced Hester Prynne clutching her illegitimate daughter atop a public scaffold: “Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman . . . with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity.”46 Prynne—whose scarlet “A” in part signifies Ambiguity—initially appears, then, as a dark Madonna. She is also oddly nun-like at points in the novel and is in effect held captive in New England, which in The Scarlet Letter is hardly characterized by the bright typological narrative the Puritan fathers wished to write for it. ­Hawthorne’s introduction to that novel, “The Custom-House,” explicitly highlights questions of historiography and authority, and his oeuvre em­ phasizes American settings more obviously than Poe’s. In Hawthorne’s work, it is typically not abbeys or castles but woods that appear as haunted—often by the ideas or acts of his own dissenting Protestant an­ cestors. Hawthorne wrote much more explicitly of Christianity than Poe did, creating a “doctrinally ambivalent” fiction that increasingly focused on Catholicism as U.S. Protestantism’s most intimate other.47 While he clearly saw the Catholic Church as flawed, he was primarily concerned with ex­ ploring flaws in his own Anglo-American culture, including its tendency to denigrate the Mother of God, whom he saw venerated during his travels in Europe. The many images of the “divine woman” in Hawthorne’s fiction in part represent a direct challenge to “the masculine symbol system” that

16  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

the author had “inherited from the theology of his Puritan-Unitarian fore­ bears.”48 He and Poe alike therefore demonstrated both continuities with and divergence from the British Gothic tradition, inheriting and trans­ forming that tradition just as their own literary legatees would do.

WRITING CATHOLICISM IN U.S. GOTHIC FICTION: “METAPHYSICAL RIDDLES” OF SELF AND OTHER

As the work of Poe and Hawthorne suggests, four factors distinguished early formulations of the Gothic in the United States from the British model: slavery, the frontier, the Puritan legacy, and the young nation’s sus­ ceptibility to utopian visions and accompanying dystopian fears. All of these factors contributed to a pronounced tendency toward “Manichean formulations of good and evil” in the emergent United States.49 Broadly speaking, “Manichean” belief signifies a simplistic moral dualism and as such neatly corresponds with the Enlightenment dichotomies outlined in Hoeveler’s work above. These are evident with regard to gender, for ex­ ample, in early U.S. Gothic fiction’s tendency to associate masculinity with virtuous self-control and to manifest an accompanying “fear of the femi­ nine” as inherently uncontrollable.50 “Manichean” habits of thought have also been identified as supporting rigid racial categorization in British American colonies that defined themselves in pronounced opposition to Spain, a Catholic nation popularly associated with moral corruption and miscegenation in Europe and the Americas alike.51 Early Anglo-American Protestants, that is, were prone to be broadly Manichean not only in that they defined themselves against evil Catholic Spaniards but also precisely in that they saw themselves (opposite the Spaniards) as maintaining a proper binary separation between the races, between good “white” and depraved “black” or otherwise nonwhite. This pattern, as we shall see, informs a number of Gothic fictions concerned with borders between races—as well as between Anglo-Protestant and Latin cultures in the United States and the Americas more broadly. What is finally at issue here, however, is not gender, race, or ethnic identity. These fictions do generally—though not always—figure the will­ fully autonomous individual as an Anglo-American male. One might argue

Introduction 17

that this is because “the very ‘social contract’ at the heart of liberal political theory both bears within it and produces structures of patriarchal power and white supremacy.”52 As I see it, however, the social contract at the heart of liberal political theory bears within it and produces desire for individual power and supremacy—insofar as such power and supremacy seem essen­ tial to achieving or maintaining individual autonomy. As noted above in a British context, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the ideal mod­ ern “subject” or self—the rational self not limited by embodiment, and therefore potentially autonomous—was indeed figured as white and male.53 For much of U.S. history only such individuals were deemed capable of autonomy; accordingly, the Gothic fictions considered here tend to depict Anglo-American males as most diligently seeking it and most susceptible to the illusion that they might attain it. What these fictions are ultimately concerned with, however, is the radical hope that the United States can en­ able the emergence of the autonomous individual per se, the individual who like the nation itself has righteously and triumphantly escaped past limitations, among which might conceivably be any particular racial, eth­ nic, or gender identity.54 Correspondingly, these fictions to varying degrees demonstrate a concern with Manichaeism proper, which is not merely a synonym for moralistic dualism. Manichaeism, rather, is a form of Gnosti­ cism, an ancient belief system that professes that the material world is evil—seemingly designed by some lesser god or demiurge—and that the individual must seek escape from that limiting world and access a higher one through acquisition of hidden knowledge possessed by an elect few. The most fundamental dualism in Manichaeism or in Gnosticism gener­ ally, then, is that between the world of matter (including the human body and all of nature) and the world of spirit or intellect. Gnosticism may seem an obscure religious perspective, one that obvi­ ously predates the United States.55 Nonetheless, it has been identified by a wide range of scholars as relevant to the nation. Deneen includes a “Gnos­ tic” tradition of “belief that humans can bring about their own salvation in some form” among several that provide the unacknowledged “theo­ logical underpinnings” of the democratic faith unconsciously held by many citizens of the United States.56 Harold Bloom has deemed a democratized Gnosticism the true “American religion” in a United States that is essen­ tially “post-Christian,” celebrating it as the creed of Ralph Waldo Emerson

18  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

and Walt Whitman even as he occasionally regrets its political effects (e.g., its intermittent manifestation in Manichean foreign policy that simplisti­ cally divides the world between American good and un-American evil).57 Bloom ties Gnosticism in the United States directly to the legacy of dis­ senting Protestantism; Presbyterian scholar Philip J. Lee does so as well, albeit not in celebratory fashion, in Against the Protestant Gnostics.58 Insofar as Calvinism stressed a radical division between divine grace and fallen na­ ture, to be sure, it has often been identified as fostering a perception of the body and the world known by the body as antagonistic to proper human desire—that is, the desire for individual salvation, conceived of as a purely spiritual freedom. In Manichaeism proper, the world known by the body is so antagonistic that it seems diabolically designed and governed. Whether via Puritan influence or otherwise, such a view helped to shape the early U.S. culture that produced “Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe,” who, “like all true Gothic writers, believed that evil was a real and active force in our lives” and whose characters confront a world that often seems combatively engaged in imprisoning the self and invites combat in return.59 Again, the fictions considered here are in one sense a function of hope—the radical hope that the United States can enable the emergence of the autonomous individual who like the nation itself has righteously and triumphantly escaped past limitations. Such a hope can itself be deemed Manichean insofar as it identifies the true self, that “divine spark” that in essence is the individual, as trapped in a world of matter and accompany­ ing social bonds from which it must separate itself to attain freedom—a freedom conceived as depending on both intellectual certainty and mastery over any opposing “other,” including individuals, peoples, and the natural world itself. The Gothic fictions considered here counter this radical hope that the individual might attain such freedom with the radical fear that he will not; at times, they also present some deeply troubling desire within the individual to embrace or merge with that from which he generally seeks to escape and bound himself. An invasive or otherwise alien Catholicism is vital to these narratives because it appears both as signifying some potential denial of individual freedom and as source of troubling, if not enslaving, desire. In turn, things identified with the denial of individual freedom or as sources of troubling desire—including the natural world and the human body itself—are here figured as explicitly Catholic or in language sugges­

Introduction 19

tive of Catholicism. To put it most simply: in these fictions a limitation and suffering (including passion) presumably foreign to the United States is associated with Catholicism, whether Catholicism is seen as inflicting such limitation and suffering or as simply embodying it. “Catholicism” might itself be deemed a broad term. Yet in this fic­ tion, written primarily for a U.S. audience conceived of as overwhelm­ ingly Protestant or post-Protestant, Catholicism appears in ways that are often fairly self-evident. It is represented most readily by reference to con­ secrated Catholic religious figures—monks, nuns, priests, the pope—or artifacts such as Church vestments or architecture. Relatedly, it is repre­ sented by “foreign” cultures or settings that have historically or otherwise been marked by conspicuous Catholic belief. These are most often Latin cultures or settings, whether in Europe or in the Americas, and they tend to appear as simultaneously medieval and multiracial. Catholicism also ­appears—sometimes more subtly—as worship or practice, often by way of reference to the sacraments, which necessarily involve the body. The sac­ rament of Eucharist above all appears as distinctively Catholic. Given its emphasis on sacramental life and on aesthetics alike, the faith also often appears here as seeming idolatry—a form of misleading artifice—and ac­ cordingly as manifesting a disturbingly pre-modern irrationality and su­ perstition that is rendered “pagan” as much as it is “medieval.” In its very complexity, its seeming multiplicity, Catholicism is associated with a trou­ bling ambiguity—a pattern in Anglophone literature that dates at least to Edmund Spenser’s post-Reformation epic The Faerie Queene, in which the darkly duplicitous “Catholic” Duessa vies against the simple truth repre­ sented by “Protestant” Una. (Indeed, Spenser’s overtly allegorical poem— which endorsed Queen Elizabeth’s emergent English nation in the name of Protestant Christianity—was much studied by Hawthorne and Melville and thereby indirectly helped to establish in U.S. Gothic fiction an asso­ ciation of Catholicism with “duplicitous” reading.)60 Catholicism’s role in relation to borders in these fictions is also help­ fully understood with reference to the long-dominant psychoanalytical ­perspective on the Gothic, that of Julia Kristeva. Her influential study ­Powers of Horror directly poses the pointed question: “How can I be with­ out ­border?” Kristeva posits that the individual psyche, in order to define itself, must erect borders—must “abject” (i.e., throw away, off, or under)

20  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

that within itself which “disturbs identity, system, order.” What most dis­ turbs the psyche and therefore must be rendered abject is that in its own ­experience—particularly bodily experience—which is perceived to be “inbetween,” “ambiguous,” or “composite.” Nonetheless, that which is ren­ dered abject constantly haunts the borders of the self, “is something re­ jected from which one does not part”: “Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.”61 Scholarship on Gothic literature generally holds that it manifests Kristevan abjection as protago­ nists attempt to cast off perceived “fundamental inconsistencies” that pre­ vent the psyche “from declaring a coherent and independent identity”— that is, from asserting an autonomous individuality. The “most primordial” such inconsistency, the most primordial experience of being “in-between,” is “the multiplicity we viscerally remember from the moment of birth, at which we were both inside and outside of the mother.” To the modern ­individual, this experience corresponds to being both “dead” and alive, re­ spectively: “Whatever threatens us with anything like this betwixt-and-­ between . . . is what we throw off or ‘abject’ into defamiliarized mani­ festations, which we henceforth fear and desire because they both threaten to reengulf us and promise to return us to our primal origins.” Gothic fic­ tion abounds with such “othered figures” that “reveal this deeply familiar foundation while ‘throwing it under’ the cover of . . . ghostly or monstrous counterparts.” Such figures often convey “overtones of the archaic and the alien in their grotesque mixture of elements viewed as incompatible” in the dominant culture.62 In a Western modernity that has a vexed relationship with the faith that helped bring it into being, the Church—traditionally figured as ­maternal—can be seen as the ultimate abject mother. Furthermore, the Eu­ charist that is essential to that Church can seem a “grotesque mixture” of spirit and flesh, a “monstrous” reminder of our own inevitable embodi­ ment in a cosmos in which even the Transcendent is bound to a suffering body. Kristeva’s own oeuvre indirectly suggests as much. Since Powers of Horror, she has written extensively and appreciatively regarding both the Eucharist and Catholic mystics such as St. Teresa of Avila; in 2011, she— an unbeliever—accepted an invitation by Benedict XVI to speak at Assisi regarding the need for a more profound and mutually respectful dialogue between Christianity and contemporary “humanism” in the West.63 From

Introduction 21

the beginning, Kristeva has presented her psychoanalytical approach as not unrelated to either religion or historical context: “Abjection accompa­ nies all religious structurings and reappears, to be worked out in a new guise, at the time of their collapse.”64 So it is that Gothic fiction—­emerging in conjunction with the rise of the nation-state and seeming collapse of ­Christendom—“reminds” its modern readers that despite the Enlighten­ ment they might not achieve individual autonomy, “that something like a return to the confusion and loss of identity in being half-inside and halfoutside the mother . . . may await us behind any old foundation, paternal or otherwise, on which we try, by breaking it up, to build a brave new world.”65 Hence in nineteenth-century Britain and the United States alike, “Protestantism’s Catholic past,” a cast-off mother of sorts, often “haunts the present” in Gothic narratives “as the uncanny, manifested in monsters both literal and metaphoric.”66 Citizens of the emergent United States, however, had more extravagant hopes than Britons for creating “a brave new world,” and therefore more extravagant fears. Building on Kristeva’s work and on D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, Eric Savoy outlines how such citi­ zens came into existence. Representative citizens such as Benjamin Frank­ lin, he argues, created a “national ideology” premised on a figurative border beyond which was cast a “strange and fugitive self ”—a self “repudiated by the enlightened and forward-looking American psyche.” This fugitive self is “radically excluded,” “banished, haunting the border of life”: it “has the lowly status of the ‘abject’” and is therefore forced to inhabit a “location for throwing off the psyche’s and a culture’s most basic drives, the ones most in need of repression.” This location is in every respect a border region, “a domain of impossibility and uninhabitability, associated with betwixt-­ and-between conditions where death keeps invading life, into which the normative American subject must cast the irrational, the desire unaccept­ able to consciousness,” locating “it ‘over there’ in some frightening incar­ nation of the always inaccessible Real.” This border, he argues, is essential to U.S. identity because “it is precisely this consignment or repudiation” of the fugitive self there “that enables the subject to emerge as a coherent na­ tional subject, a proper citizen of the republic, by contrast to that other.”67 Yet in early U.S. Gothic fiction, such proper citizens of the republic ultimately find their national identity unsustainable. Savoy rightly charac­ terizes that fiction as “essentially conservative,” raising “doubts about the

22  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

ability of individuals to govern themselves in a full-fledged democracy” in which they “have no authorities available to tell them what to do, what to believe, how to act.”68 They are doomed particularly in their willful blind­ ness to the inevitable impact of (communal) past on (individual) present— an impact often dramatized in familial relationships that serve as radical checks to notions of individual autonomy. Savoy explicates these relation­ ships primarily with reference to fathers and to Freud; Kristeva’s emphasis on the maternal, however, provides a better framework for understanding this pattern with regard to Catholicism. In the fictions I consider here, the “fugitive self ” in the borderlands of the United States approaches the Eu­ charist or some maternal figure who is associated with or suggestive of the Church—and who simultaneously, as mother, serves as unwelcome re­ minder of the willfully autonomous individual’s embodiment, of her place in the natural world. That world is generally portrayed in these fictions as haunted or hor­ rific, inherently bound up with suffering and limitation, and is marked as implicitly or explicitly “Catholic” precisely in this regard. Gothic repre­ sentations of the U.S. “wilderness” as “heathen” and “unredeemed” have long been identified as originating in colonial Puritan writings that largely depicted “the American forest” as “a realm of evil.”69 The Puritans also vigorously associated Catholicism with evil, of course, yet language that associated Catholicism with evil in the natural world endured in North American culture well beyond their day—sometimes in surprising ways. In the late nineteenth century, John Fiske, a Harvard-educated philosopher who helped to popularize Darwinism, could write: “Nature is full of cru­ elty and maladaptation. In every part of the animal world we find imple­ ments of torture surpassing in devilish ingenuity anything that was seen in the dungeons of the Inquisition.”70 To Fiske’s audience, “the Inquisition” was intrinsically linked to a barbaric Spanish Catholicism; startlingly, his remark suggests that nature’s cruelty is best understood by reference to such Catholic impositions on individual freedom and privacy. I will dem­ onstrate how such linkages between the natural world and a violence or suffering associated with Catholicism appear in the fictions of writers from Crèvecœur on, often strangely permeating the U.S. Gothic imagination even as it “warns us to fear the non-human, to dread the vengeance of ani­ mals and the environment.” Most powerfully of all, this fiction warns us

Introduction 23

“to dread the horrific fact that our bodies and minds are entwined with the land itself and will eventually decompose back into it.”71 The natural world itself resembles the Church as it becomes the abject mother—that most fundamental “other” from which the individual wishes to separate himself in order to assert autonomy, and which he must dominate in order to do so.72 This is ultimately futile, for the human body itself is part of the natural world. As René Descartes illustrated (and Americans are prone to mirror him in this regard, according to Alexis de Tocqueville), the mind can in­ deed affirm that it exists in isolation, independent and sufficient unto itself: cogito, ergo sum.73 The body, by contrast, is in constant and necessary com­ munion with a larger outside world: the world of air and water as well as other organic bodies, beginning with the maternal body—a world in which rigid boundaries of the sort formulated and favored by the analytical mind finally do not exist. Any religion that insistently implicates the body in its practice therefore tends to foster communion across abstractly conceived borders, including political borders, in a way that a private and interiorized religion of sola fide does not.74 Catholicism perhaps most fundamentally challenges borders, then, via its emphasis on the body—for example, on the body’s centrality in the reception of grace via the sacraments, on em­ bodied representations of the crucified Christ and the saints, and on its longstanding teachings regarding the roots of knowledge in sense experi­ ence and the spiritual efficacy of corporal works.75 This emphasis on the body is ultimately altogether consistent with the manner in which Catholic teaching challenges notions of permanent, impermeable borders between nations and racial or ethnic groups. It challenges those notions via essential doctrines regarding the sacramental unity of the universal Church as well as specific documents such as John Paul II’s Ecclesia in America, which de­ scribes the “mestiza face” of the Virgin of Guadalupe as rightfully belong­ ing to the Americas at large.76 Such a face was first recognized in part be­ cause sixteenth-century Spanish “neoscholastics” articulated an “organic conception of a divinely ordained society dedicated to the achievement of the common good” and thereby fostered American colonies that—however imperfect—were relatively “inclusive,” characterized by certain “compro­ mises” with indigenous peoples. By contrast, “exclusionary” and entrepre­ neurial English settlers kept strange bodies at a safe distance in their America.

24  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

Steadfastly refusing “to include Indians and Africans within the boundaries of their imagined communities” gave those English settlers “more freedom of manoeuvre to make reality conform to the constructs of their [indi­ vidual] imaginations”—that is, greater autonomy, enabled by separation between themselves and any constricting other.77 The fundamental role of the body in regard to such borders between self and other is to varying de­ grees known or intuited by the writers I have chosen here. Implicit in my argument is the premise that the Gothic, even while foregrounding ambiguity and avoiding overt didacticism, often has some moral function. Others have recognized that function, including scholars in recent decades who have plausibly read Gothic fictions in the United States as dwelling on ethically flawed formulations of race and gender. My own goal, however, is not to read the Gothic with an eye to replacing “race” and “gender” with “religion” as a sociopolitical category. To varying de­ grees, the authors I have chosen are aware of and respond to such categories but see their fictions as addressing questions that are more fundamentally existential and ontological—if not always theological—in nature. These authors operate much as Fyodor Dostoevsky did, utilizing “the thematic and scenic commonplaces” of the Gothic to pose profound “metaphysical riddles.” They take up what has sometimes been seen as a merely titillating mode of fiction and demonstrate how “the language of the Gothic novel and its themes,” when given a “strong moral cast,” can offer “a powerful rhetoric for describing modern man’s predicament.”78 Most consistently, the authors considered here depict representatively American individuals who exemplify or explore the limits of a modern Manichaeism. Their char­ acters are drawn to a view of reality that is not only radically dualistic in its approach to human identity and experience—a view that necessitates forming and maintaining rigid borders—but also posits an essential hos­ tility between the individual human spirit or intellect and the world of na­ ture. Whatever its source, this view is undeniably central to a proper un­ derstanding of the literature surveyed here. It emerges as a concern in the work of writers of Protestant background and of Catholic background or conviction alike: in Melville and Faulkner, in Crèvecœur and Chopin and McCarthy, in Percy and O’Connor. All depict the desire to draw a firm border between self and nature, as well as self and other generally, as fre­ quently and problematically characteristic of the United States.

Introduction 25

Each of the texts I consider in this study should be understood at least partly in light of the early Gothic patterns established in eighteenth-­ century Britain, and each plays a vital role in a developing U.S. Gothic tra­ dition. Borders between nations have one essential role in that tradition. In the project as a whole, however, I finally speak of borders in a broader sense, borders drawn by the Anglo-Protestant settlers who created their nation’s predominant cultural narrative: borders between their hemisphere and that of Europe, between their nation and other nations of the Ameri­ cas, between their minds and nature, including bodies they had mastered as well as bodies that were different—bodies potentially rebellious or threat­ ening even in their potential embrace. In the U.S. Gothic fictions under consideration here, Catholicism is imagined as breaking down such rigidly conceived borders. Those borders represent some recurrent will within the nation to dichotomize mind and body, individual and community, present and past, innocence and guilt, “masculine” self-reliance and “feminine” receptivity, white and black, Anglo-American “purity” and Latin “impu­ rity.” Some of the authors considered here display a more explicit con­ cern with historiography and national mythmaking, as in The Castle of Otranto, than others. But ultimately, collectively, all of these Gothic texts write the confrontation with Catholicism in such a way as to challenge a myth of Anglo-American exceptionalism that features the United States and its representative citizen, the self-reliant individual, as righteously and masterfully escaping the tainted past. That myth itself can be deemed po­ tentially more altruistic than Huntington’s narrative—that is, it can posit the United States not merely as superior but also as potential savior to the rest of the world—yet it inevitably mirrors his approbatory emphasis on the Reformation and Enlightenment roots of the United States. Indeed, the myth was solidified in the minds of a leading “generation of AngloProtestant men born about 1800 in the United States” who “shared the vi­ sion of the Prussian G.W.F. Hegel that only a particular nation could lead the exodus from a lower to a higher civilization,” that “such an exemplary nation would be Protestant,” and that “it was the Germanic peoples alone who had rejected the Catholic past and opted for the Protestant future.”79 All of the fictions considered here respond to this enduring myth of the Anglo-Protestant United States as an exemplary and salvific nation in re­ lation to a rightly abject Catholicism. Some deconstruct it only to present

26  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

a tragic counter-narrative of enduring doom and despair; a few suggest a comic corrective to it; many display a primary concern with the ultimate fate of individual human beings and the larger human family as distinct from the fate of the nation-state. In other words, some merely construct “anti-myths against the myth of American exceptionalism,” while others not only smash the false idol of the nation-state but also point in relation to Catholicism to some greater good that should be worshiped in its place.80 To be sure, Catholicism itself was experienced differently by each of these authors, and their degrees of engagement with the faith are by no means equivalent. Yet even those who left the Church or had no direct experience of it often sense in Catholicism, as Melville finally did, a call to “a communitarian ethic rather than an in­ dividualistic ethic” and the potential “to identify Christ with the oppressed in every culture, using a central element of Catholic spirituality, meditation on the sufferings of Jesus, to create a universal sense of solidarity with the suffering.”81 Each presents in relation to Catholicism some counterpoint to the figure of the triumphantly autonomous self: a hierarchical or relational reality in which the embodied individual is finally not master; an experi­ ence of being enmeshed in community and history, which inevitably en­ tails guilt and moral culpability; and a deep sense of incompleteness within the self, properly marked by a suffering passion not entirely unrelated to eros.

SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS

The vast majority of writers born before 1900 who have been enshrined in the U.S. literary canon sprang from an Anglo-Protestant background. My first chapter offers a reappraisal of one vital exception to that rule: J. Hec­ tor St. John de Crèvecœur, whose Letters from an American Farmer (1782) has rightly been identified as foundational to the U.S. Gothic tradition, but whose religious identity has been almost altogether ignored. The epis­ tolary narrator of Crèvecœur’s Letters, one “Farmer James,” is a provincial British colonist, nominal Protestant, and de facto Deist, long read as a simple mouthpiece for the author. Yet Crèvecœur himself was born into the French Catholic petty aristocracy, educated by Jesuits in Normandy,

Introduction 27

and spent his first years in North America in Quebec. While scholars have increasingly recognized and explored the narrative complexity of Letters from an American Farmer, they have failed to attend to its central concern with religious identity, instead focusing primarily on race as the axis on which the text turns from an early utopian vision of British America to a late dystopian one. I demonstrate how James’s account in Letter I of his neighboring Protestant minister—who spurs him to write all that ­follows— introduces the text’s fundamental concern with literacy, historiography, and unwelcomed ambiguity in relation to Catholicism. This framework proves crucial to understanding the connection of Christianity and Ameri­ can borders in James’s emergently Gothic vision in those portions of Letters that are most widely studied and anthologized. In Letter III James praises the “self-interest” and “religious indifference” of the “new man” developing in the pastoral middle colonies of British America, but simultaneously paints a horrific picture of a western frontier where un-churched and radi­ cally individualistic settlers seem little better than “carnivorous animals.” Direct references to transubstantiation subtly connect these dual aspects of Letter III, foreshadowing James’s otherwise incongruous use of Eucharistic imagery in describing the body of a tortured slave at the close of Letter IX. There James describes a South Carolina that initially seems a simulacrum of a quasi-feudal Peru but ultimately exemplifies the very same character­ istics that he earlier praised in the capitalist middle colonies. Examination of Crèvecœur’s unpublished writings on Spanish America supports this analysis and situates his work in a larger hemispheric context. So, too, does Crèvecœur’s negative view of an emergent American exceptionalism during the Revolution as suggested in both his closet drama Landscapes and his crucial role in opening the first Catholic church in New York City—a par­ ish that soon served Caribbean immigrants as well as the first Catholic saint born in British America, Elizabeth Ann Seton, whose father-in-law had initially encouraged Crèvecœur to publish Letters from an American Farmer. Chapter 2, “Melville’s ‘Monkish Fables,’” builds on established scholar­ ship demonstrating that Melville—like Poe and, to a degree, Hawthorne— wrote Gothic fictions that “consistently undermine the anti-Catholicism they invoke,” not only in order “to mock the nativist susceptibilities of the reading public but, in so doing, to question the very pretensions of narra­ tive.”82 Melville did so most obviously in his 1855 novella Benito Cereno,

28  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

rewriting Poe, Walpole, Lewis, and Radcliffe in a forthrightly Gothic nar­ rative set aboard a seemingly haunted Spanish slave ship off the coast of Latin America, a ship that strangely resembles a European monastery. This novella’s subversive exploration of a foreign Catholic landscape that appears disturbingly unreadable from the United States is, I contend, mirrored in other widely studied Melville texts of the 1850s.83 In those texts, Mel­ ville did more than any other major antebellum writer to transport and to translate British Gothic concerns with Catholicism into the Americas. In making this case I give ample consideration to biographical contexts that shaped Melville’s perceptions of Catholicism: his international travels, his family’s employment of female Irish Catholic domestic servants, and his political awareness regarding the legacy of the Mexican-American War and nativist anxieties in the face of massive waves of Catholic immigration in the 1840s and 1850s. I briefly examine his autobiographical novel Redburn before focusing on Gothic representations of Catholicism and American borders in three texts: Moby-Dick, with particular attention to the central chapter “The Town-Ho’s Story,” a figuratively miscegenated tale told in Lima, Peru; “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” which is simultaneously concerned with the legacy of the Knights Templar and nineteenth-century female Catholic immigrants to the United States; and “The Encantadas,” a bleak narrative of South America that culminates in the portrayal of a mestiza woman who seems a tragic figure of Marian devo­ tion, if not of Christ himself. Taken as a whole, these fictions demonstrate that Melville consistently imagined a Catholic “America” in Gothic terms even as they present a critical portrait of both American exceptionalism and the archetypal Anglo-American figure of the self-reliant f­rontiersman—a portrait later taken up by major writers of Gothic fiction in the twentieth century. Kate O’Flaherty Chopin was born in 1850 into a St. Louis that was itself a gateway to a newly expanded Anglo-American frontier. Her native city had previously been a central hub of France’s La Louisiane, the region that had nurtured her mother’s family and indirectly shaped her own imagi­nation well before she moved downriver to the state of Louisiana in the 1870s. Chapter 3, “Fear, Desire, and Communion in Chopin’s Old La Louisiane,” begins with consideration of “Désirée’s Baby,” a story widely read as an exemplary U.S. Gothic text. I demonstrate how this story and much of Chopin’s oeuvre reveal her deep ambivalence regarding the Car­

Introduction 29

tesian individualism identified by Alexis de Tocqueville as particularly characteristic of the United States—and, furthermore, that Chopin’s work cannot be read properly without due regard for her experience of FrancoAmerican Catholicism in the lower Mississippi River Valley and Caribbean Rim alike. In reading selections from Chopin’s intended late collection A Vocation and a Voice and novel The Awakening (1899) in relation to the Gothic, I stress Chopin’s education by and friendships with the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, giving particular attention to the legacy of the immigrant St. Rose Philippine Duchesne in Missouri. Chopin experienced and wrote into her fiction the radical divide between the hopes for a multiracial French Catholic civilization in North America embodied by Duchesne, on the one hand, and the view of a Louisiana properly subordinate to an Anglo-­Protestant United States as represented in the local color fiction of George Washington Cable, on the other. Chopin was, nonetheless, more directly concerned with the fates of individuals than the fates of nations. While The Awakening initially seems to proffer Romantic hopes for selffulfillment via the unfettered individual’s relation to nature, that novel and A Vocation and a Voice alike ultimately present darker views of nature, views in keeping with the Gothic mode at the post-Darwinian fin-de-­ siècle. These texts convey the self-defeating nature of radical individualism, whether Romantic or capitalist, in a manner essentially consistent with Catholic social teachings being newly articulated at the time. In fact, ­Chopin’s fictions of unspeakable desire—desire frustrated by the cruelty of Darwinian nature and human divisiveness alike—were most fundamen­ tally shaped by the embodied understanding of eros and agape communi­ cated to her by the sisters and mothers who first presented to her the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Chapter 4, “Waste Lands, Border Histories, Gothic Frontiers,” con­ siders a selection of representative twentieth-century novels set along the southern borders of the United States, with primary attention to William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Walker Percy’s Lancelot (1977), and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985). In the early twentieth century, understandings of Catholicism and American borders among U.S. writers evolved considerably, as reflected in the hunger for Christian tradition ex­ pressed by many modernist expatriates in Europe and in the radical reimag­ ining of Catholicism in the Americas accomplished by Willa Cather. Cath­ ­ irectly er’s dual identities as U.S. regionalist and as Francophile appealed d

30  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

to Faulkner, whose early fiction also responded to T. S. Eliot’s image of modernity as post-Christian waste land and to the Catholic-inflected mod­ ernism of James Joyce. Faulkner’s engagement with Catholicism, then, must be understood in relation to his contemporary literary milieu, but also to specific biographical contexts—including his travel in Europe, his more extensive time living in New Orleans, and his ongoing awareness of pronounced anxieties regarding immigration in his native South and throughout the larger United States in the 1920s. I briefly examine con­ cerns with Catholicism and American borders in Faulkner’s early fiction and Light in August before focusing on Absalom, Absalom! Long categorized in somewhat reductive regional terms as a “southern Gothic” novel, more recently admired for its radical interrogation of national borders in the Americas, Absalom, Absalom! is in fact properly understood only when its dual engagement with a definitively Catholic Caribbean world and with U.S. Gothic literary tradition is recognized. Faulkner’s narrative here insis­ tently juxtaposes a Latin Catholic New Orleans and Haiti with an Anglo-­ dominated Mississippi, Virginia, and New England. As it does so, it echoes texts by Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville and deconstructs a narrative of Anglo-American exceptionalism that features the larger United States as purifying or righteously escaping a tainted past. Like Benito Cereno and Melville’s other narratives of Latin America, Faulkner’s novel is explicitly concerned with historiography and demon­ strates the ultimate inability of the autonomous individual intellect— f­igured here as belonging to the putatively self-reliant Anglo-American frontiersman—to author an accurate history. Percy’s Lancelot and McCar­ thy’s Blood Meridian follow suit in this respect, in their engagement with Catholicism and in their geographical settings along the southern borders of the United States (south Louisiana and the U.S.-Mexico border, respec­ tively). Percy and McCarthy, however, have more explicit and insistent theological concerns than does Faulkner—the former as a convert to Ca­ tholicism, the latter as an apparently lapsed Catholic. Writing in a Cold War era shaped by increased apocalyptic anxieties, both employ Eliot’s ear­ lier waste land motif and share his fundamental concern with the viability of Christian faith in an era of destructive nationalism. Percy and McCarthy invoke U.S. Gothic tradition with a postmodern self-consciousness even as they, like Dostoevsky, finally utilize the Gothic mode as a means to raise

Introduction 31

profound moral and metaphysical questions. Lancelot explicitly references Poe and seems in some respects almost a parody of the Gothic, but is finally a confessional novel in the mold of Notes from Underground; Blood Meridian repeatedly alludes to Melville’s fiction and contains overtly supernatu­ ral elements, yet its satanic-cum-Nietzschean antagonist raises questions regarding the depths of human depravity worthy of The Brothers Kara­ mazov. Ultimately, the continued probing of American borders in these novels is complemented by the authors’ mutual concern with the problem of mind-body dualism, whether figured as Cartesian or as Manichean. That concern is also present in the work of Flannery O’Connor, widely recognized as the most distinctively Roman Catholic author in the U.S. canon. When O’Connor, a Georgia native, began publishing in the 1950s, the term “Gothic” was frequently used to describe contemporary authors from her region whose work featured apparently gratuitous violence, physical and psychological abnormalities, and sexual excess; accordingly, she resisted applications of the term to her own fiction. Yet O’Connor em­ braced Hawthorne wholeheartedly (and Poe halfheartedly) as literary ex­ emplar, and her work in many respects follows earlier U.S. Gothic patterns. It consistently depicts horrific characters who utilize violence in their at­ tempts to assert their own autonomy and enforce their own rigidly con­ ceived intellectual dichotomies—even as the world of matter, and the God whom O’Connor sees as active in that world, ultimately collapses those dichotomies along with the illusion of individual autonomy. O’Connor as­ sociates the flaws of her insistently self-reliant characters with modernity and a debased Anglo-Protestantism alike; she posits as their corrective a Catholicism that is at once “foreign” and associated with the natural world. She does so subtly in stories such as “The Artificial Nigger” and “Green­ leaf ” and more explicitly in “Parker’s Back” and “The Displaced Person,” the latter of which concerns Catholic immigration. These stories are illu­ minated in surprising ways by Richard Rodriguez’s and Octavio Paz’s essays regarding differences between Latin Catholic and Anglo-American habits of thought, suggesting how O’Connor’s fictions of the U.S. South can be read in a more broadly American setting. Her ultimate perspective on bor­ ders is best understood in relation to her understanding of the sacraments and of pilgrimage. Read alongside contemporary political theology that contrasts theories of globalization with a Christian catholicity that finds its

32  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

center in the Eucharist, her fictions are rightly apprehended not as celebra­ tions of violence littered with ironic religious imagery but as narratives of lost seekers called to cross borders—including national borders—by a God whose presence in the world is made known most fully in the Church. Even as her fictions often overtly echo the fears of Catholicism that have characterized the Anglo-American Gothic, they finally overturn them com­ pletely, and she is better understood both as a Catholic artist and as a post1945 U.S. fiction writer when her radical transformation of Gothic tradi­ tion is recognized. The patterns outlined in this study continue to shape the imagina­ tions of writers in the United States today, as I detail in a coda examin­ ing how contemporary authors whose imaginations have been profoundly shaped by Catholicism continue to extend U.S. Gothic tradition in fic­ tions that complicate borders in North America. These include Louise Erdrich, whose novels of Catholicism and Ojibwa life are set on reserva­ tions near the Canadian border in the upper Midwest; Ron Hansen, whose Mariette in Ecstasy is set in a largely Francophone convent near New York’s border with Quebec; and, again, Cormac McCarthy, whose The Road fea­ tures both a post-apocalyptic landscape in which nation-states no longer exist and an insistent religious language that emphasizes the permeability of the border between the world of the living and that of the dead. Toni Morrison, who has intermittently identified as Catholic, has written of Catholicism in relation to U.S. Gothic tradition in Paradise and, most re­ cently, A Mercy. The latter echoes Benito Cereno and Absalom, Absalom! alike in its depiction of an insistently Protestant Anglo-Dutch trader from colonial New York who seems to lose his innocence in traveling to Catholic Maryland, where he meets a depraved Portuguese plantation owner who prompts him to invest in Caribbean slavery. This protagonist builds a great manor house only to die there, his formerly powerful body fallen prey to disease. The novel ends on a pronounced Gothic note as it is written in the words of one of his slaves—a girl who has been mistaken for the ghost of the Protestant trader, a girl whose words of longing to her lost Lusophone African mother are written on the walls of the manor house. The alphabet she uses has been taught to her, illegally, by a Catholic priest, in part sug­ gesting Morrison’s own adolescent interest in a Catholic Church that she found attractive in part because of its emphasis on Latin as a “unifying and universal language.”84

Introduction 33

A Mercy, then, depicts a Catholicism that initially appears as horrific and corrupting but is finally bound up with a potentially saving communal literacy, a literacy that spans national borders even as it highlights the radical artificiality and contingency of such borders in the colonial Ameri­ cas. In doing so Morrison’s novel continues the Gothic tradition that I at­ tempt to trace here. That tradition ultimately demonstrates the complexity of discourse regarding Christianity not only in U.S. literary history but also in the Americas more broadly. Furthermore, it demonstrates the power of fiction both to incorporate and to contribute to different modes of ­imagination—including the historical, the political, and the theological— as the authors considered here all share a commitment to truth-telling via fiction and respond to a Catholicism that they depict as insistently calling for profound communion across borders.

CONCLUSION: IMAGINING “CHURCH” IN AMERICA

The broadest implications of this study can be illuminated by considera­ tion of one final question: how has “church,” defined as the body of believ­ ers called to be the Body of Christ, been imagined in America? I want to draw on both theological and literary sources in briefly considering this question, beginning with one novel that directly answers it and simultane­ ously provides a bright parallel to the darkness of the Gothic—a kind of inverted mirror that can help us to better see the tradition I have outlined here. That novel is Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. Like her predecessors and contemporaries from Hawthorne to Faulkner, Cather here eschewed mainstream literary realism, as this novel “seems more like a saint’s life or a series of scenes from a stained-glass window than a fullfledged, mimetic narrative.”85 Unlike the Gothic writers, however, Cather clearly stressed the fruitful presence of the Catholic Church in America rather than its threatening or haunting border status—as certain other nov­ elists have done at various points in U.S. history.86 Cather did so as a Prot­ estant, the preeminent example in American literature of such an author expressing some forthright hunger for communion across borders in rela­ tion to Catholicism. Her fictional re-creation of the life of the first Catholic archbishop of Santa Fe opens in Rome, features two priests from France, and deals with U.S. territory recently taken from Mexico. Cather’s Catholic

34  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

Church is in every way a Church at the border, a Church that is in but fi­ nally not of the United States, and will receive more extensive attention in chapter 4. What is most significant here is that Death Comes for the Archbishop has proven important to two prominent Protestant theologians considering the complicated relationship between U.S. identity and Christian identity. Stanley Hauerwas and Ralph Wood praise Cather’s successful depiction in this novel of “a faithful community” wherein grace is “socially embodied and ethically sustained”—one that finds value in the cultural traditions of many peoples and that opposes the modern West’s “Cartesian urge” to “subdue nature for human use.”87 Using the term “church” as implicitly ecumenical, they identify Death Comes for the Archbishop as no less than the “one authentic portrayal of the church in American literature” (and deem it “exceedingly ironic” that this portrayal “is located not in the center but, at least from the complacent perspective of Europe and New England, on the negligible periphery of the Continent, and not in the Protestant but in the Catholic community”).88 Hauerwas and Wood are interested less in the border status of Cather’s authentic church than in its uniqueness—or, to put it differently, in the scarcity of depictions of “church” in U.S. litera­ ture at large. That scarcity, as they see it, reflects the fact that individual churches in the United States have failed to properly imagine, embody, and enact what it means to be “church.” Put simply, “our major writers have little substantive regard for Christianity because our churches have made it impossible for them to do so”: individual churches have “made the gospel of Jesus Christ seem all too much like the gospel of the United States,” and “the church” universal has therefore by and large failed to make its “unique and distinctively Christian witness” in this, “the one nation founded al­ most entirely on an Enlightenment basis.”89 Hauerwas and Wood, in other words, decry exactly what Huntington values in Who Are We?: the general collapse of Christian tradition into a broad “American Creed” that unites the nation. Christianity in the United States, these two theologians regret, has by and large become radically acculturated to “a triumphant individualism centered upon a new definition of freedom” that enshrines “the autono­ mous self ” and fosters two “mirror evils”: on the one hand, a “moralistic liberalism” that involves spreading a gospel of blindly self-referential “op­ timism about human nature and destiny”; and, on the other, a necessarily

Introduction 35

isolating “individualistic pietism.”90 These are exacerbated by a widespread privatization of religion that in effect renders any Christian church un­ viable as a potential rival or alternative to the state. One cause of such privatization is that the United States—unlike all other North Atlantic ­nations—has no tradition of an established church (and it is indeed diffi­ cult to contend that the hundreds of scattered denominations in the nation comprise one “church” in any meaningful sense of the word: Huntington is altogether right about the legacy of dissenting Protestantism in some re­ gards).91 Furthermore, insofar as the church proclaims itself to be a body that transcends national boundaries, the state—in order to become a co­ hesive and undivided body itself—has had a vested interest in encouraging individuals to redefine “religion as a purely internal matter.” This neces­ sarily means denying the relevance of religion to the bodies of individual human beings, rendering it “an affair of the soul” alone, “not the body.”92 Such emphasis on the soul, on interiority, makes religion irrelevant both to political concerns (by making religion merely local to the indi­ vidual) and to material concerns more generally (by making religion merely a function of individual subjectivity). It negates any sense that the sacra­ ment of baptism in which all Christian bodies participate marks their real “ecclesial solidarity” as joint “members” of the Body of Christ, “of a com­ munity broader than the largest nation-state . . . and more capable of ex­ emplifying the notion ‘E Pluribus Unum’ than any empire, past, present, or future.”93 The interiorization of religion also renders ineffectual any church’s critique of an “ethical individualism unwilling to recognize any authority beyond the self.” While undermining of authority might seem to run counter to the interests of the state, it can in fact serve any state that is committed to a capitalist economy and sees itself as threatened by alle­ giances and ties beyond the nation. Ethical individualism is inevitably complicit with both “an economic individualism pliant before the market­ place” and a “romantic view of individual autonomy, often commingled in the United States with anti-Catholicism,” that lessens any sense of re­ sponsibility for or “solidarity with” others—especially with the “most vul­ nerable” and abject “members” of the social body, those who might appear as “strangers in our midst.”94 Hauerwas and Wood suggest that the general failure of churches in the United States to imagine and be “church,” the Body of Christ, is one reason that most eminent U.S. writers—from Ralph Waldo Emerson and

36  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

Henry David Thoreau to Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain—have proven to be, “at best,” “heterodox” Christians.95 This failure may also help to ac­ count for the fact that the U.S. fictions considered in this study are gen­ erally not “Christ-centered” but instead “Christ-haunted.”96 With this in mind, I want to close by considering a contemporary writer who—though he would likely not quarrel with being identified as heterodox himself—­ consistently expresses his own desire to belong to “church.” Richard Rod­ riguez is a Mexican American essayist and journalist from Cather’s beloved West who would agree with much in the critique of U.S. Christianity presented by Hauerwas and Wood. As a portion of chapter 5 here sug­ gests, he is also a kind of creative border theorist, one who has broadly influenced my thinking about borders in the Americas. His Days of Ob­ rgument with My Mexican Father openly regrets the exces­ ligation: An A sive individualism and spiritual poverty of his contemporary United States and expresses a corresponding hunger for communion with his parents’ historically Catholic Latin America. As Rodriguez imagines it, that other “America” is less obsessed with racial borders than the United States and— like the immigrant Irish nuns who taught him in California—knows that the “story of man was the story of sin, which could not be overcome by any such thing as a Declaration of Independence.”97 He is distinct from many other U.S. writers both in his insistent profession of faith and in his forth­ right assertion that his dual identities as a Christian, on the one hand, and as a creature of the United States, on the other, are often in conflict with one another—“are not equal partners.” He experiences these two identities as “adversaries in many ways”: they place him “always at odds” with him­ self on issues ranging from immigration and military actions to abortion and homosexuality. Yet Rodriguez feels that “the Christian church” in the United States has unfortunately “forgotten” the inevitability of such con­ flict, as the most vocal U.S. Christians too often assert that their religious identity and their national identity are properly one and the same.98 In ex­ plicitly stressing both the vitality and the propriety of this ongoing ten­ sion between U.S. identity and Christian identity, the imaginative essayist ­Rodriguez radically differs from the self-professed “patriot” Huntington, as he made clear in an appalled review of Who Are We? 99 Rodriguez is also perhaps something of an anomaly in the nation’s literary tradition. Nonetheless, the writers I consider in this study would

Introduction 37

all join him in recognizing the power of an image that has captured wide attention in our age of supposed globalization, an image that will neces­ sarily endure: the first pontiff from the Americas—himself a child of im­ migrants to Argentina—visiting an island in the Mediterranean to pray for and alongside immigrants from Africa. Francis did so at the start of Ramadan, “saluting the beginning of the Muslim season of fasting. And there he stood,” this native of the Americas, “shaking the hands of Muslim migrants, welcoming them to Europe!” So writes Rodriguez, who stresses that the pope’s actions at Lampedusa furthered the 1952 teaching of Pius XII that migration is a human right: “No American president at that time or since has ever uttered such a thought.”100 Francis has in fact power­ fully accentuated older Catholic teachings in this and other regards. In his ­actions—washing the feet of criminals, embracing bodies disfigured by ­disease—and in his words alike, this American pope has emphasized Christ’s command to the Church to cross borders, “to come out of her­ self and to go to the peripheries, not only geographically, but also the ex­ istential peripheries: the mystery of sin, of pain, of injustice, of ignorance and indifference to religion, of intellectual currents, and of all misery.” He has preached that the Church must make manifest “the maternal womb of mercy” in “a world of ‘wounded’ persons,” traveling toward such ab­ ject human beings even if in the process the Church’s “shoes get soiled by the mud of the streets.”101 Finally, he has emphasized that the entire globe is home to one “human family” that shares “a common destiny.”102 The Catholic Church understands itself in part as a sacrament—both a sign and an instrument—of that family’s unity. To be sure, not all of the writers considered here are as hopeful regarding the destiny of the human family as the Church proclaims itself to be. All, however, contribute to an ongoing literary tradition in which Catholicism is figured as representative of that destiny, a destiny that originated and will necessarily culminate well be­ yond the borders of any nation-state.

C H A P T E R

1

CRÈVECŒUR’S MASK OF THE MODERN Roman Ruins and America’s “New Man”

The most canonical of colonial Anglo-American texts is William Bradford’s history Of Plymouth Plantation, written in the mid-seventeenth century. Together with other New England Calvinists, Bradford—the first gover­ nor of the Plymouth colony—inaugurated a new Anglophone literary tra­ dition marked by pronounced fears of old Catholic Europe and anxieties regarding the American landscape alike. Of Plymouth Plantation opens with his Pilgrims fleeing an England in which the mission of the Reforma­ tion had not been fully accomplished, as the established Anglican Church still obscured the “light of the Gospel” under the lingering shadow of Ca­ tholicism, “the gross darkness of popery.” Bradford and his fellows hoped to build in America a pure Christian community that would necessarily have sharply delineated borders: Puritan Massachusetts ultimately excluded other dissenting Protestants along with the “savage barbarians” who inhab­ ited the “hideous and desolate wilderness” surrounding it.1 The nearest Roman Catholics also dwelled in that wilderness—to the north in sparsely settled Quebec, more proximately among native tribes converted by French Jesuit missionaries. To colonial New Englanders, then, Catholicism itself was at once unimaginably beyond the pale and hauntingly close at hand, a 39

40  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

threatening presence that they saw as incorporating pagan idolatry and all the more sinister because nominally within the borders of Christendom.2 Their fears of a Europe dominated by Catholicism, of an inherently “sav­ age” American landscape, and of an active Satan bent on undermining their potential Puritan utopia would long resonate in the Gothic literary imagination. At the same time, their sense of their community as chosen to rise above the common flaws of humanity—most memorably articulated in John Winthrop’s vision of his Massachusetts Bay community forming an exceptional “city on a hill”—has continued to resonate for centuries in a United States that the Puritans could never have anticipated. For good or ill, these seventeenth-century New Englanders in many ways set the stage for all the authors who followed them in the U.S. Gothic tradition. Yet the Puritans themselves were not writers of fiction. Their nar­ ratives accordingly lack the complexity of the eighteenth-century text with which I begin: J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer. Written in the same decade as the Declaration of Independence, Crèvecœur’s multilayered book was long misunderstood as simply reflect­ ing the nation’s Enlightenment roots, or perhaps the beginnings of an opti­ mistic American Romanticism. Early interpreters did insightfully recognize its articulation of perhaps the “earliest and most influential” example of a “new American character” as it describes settlers who, like Benjamin Frank­ lin, often perform a successful “masquerade” that exemplifies their capacity for “metamorphosis, adaptability, and indomitable self-mastery,” for canny transformation from rags to riches in the British America that was becom­ ing the United States.3 For much of its history, then, Letters was read neither as Gothic, nor as fiction, nor as particularly concerned with Christianity. Yet scholars have come to recognize the complexity if not outright decep­ tiveness of the text in part by attending to the fact that Crèvecœur was not a native of British America, let alone of the United States; he was a French petty aristocrat who came to North America in the 1750s via Quebec and whose sympathies during the American Revolution were with the Loyal­ ists. Writing Letters in the persona of a simple Anglo-American farmer, the Jesuit-­educated author—who in fact maintained a complicated but gener­ ­ imself.4 ally unremarked relationship to Catholicism—­wore a mask h The first readers of Letters from an American Farmer were entirely un­ aware of such complexity. Written in the 1770s and first published in Lon­

Crèvecœur’s Mask of the Modern 41

don in 1782, Letters was among the earliest books to represent the fledgling United States to the larger world. Crèvecœur’s text took the form of a series of letters from a putatively representative Anglo-American colonist, one “Farmer James,” to a worldly correspondent in England. Soon translated into Dutch, German, and French, Letters was read and admired by audi­ ences on both sides of the North Atlantic. George Washington deemed the book “founded on fact”—if “rather too flattering” to be entirely true.5 Washington’s reaction was typical in its apparent focus on the book’s early sections, particularly Letter III, which claimed that “the most perfect so­ ciety now existing in the world” was to be found in British North America.6 The “American” coming into being there was presented as “a new man”—a “mixture” of the various peoples of northern Europe—and uniquely able to form “new ideas” because his milieu was at once closer to nature and more thoroughly modern than was Europe. Here humanity could escape the mistakes of the past and live the ideal being articulated simultaneously in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. For in British America as nowhere else, James asserts, the “rewards” of each man’s “industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement?” (70). In such passages Crèvecœur offers a fundamentally positive image of Anglo-American culture akin to that crafted by many of his Revolutionary-­ era contemporaries. In form and content alike, however, his text is finally more complicated than Franklin’s Autobiography or Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. For Farmer James is a fictional character. Accordingly, Letters from an American Farmer, though originally published as the “genuine pro­ duction” of the simple farmer whose name the text bore—one J. Hector St. John—ultimately demonstrates that Crèvecœur was “an embryonic novelist” (35).7 His epistolary narrator James undergoes a kind of develop­ ment that becomes most evident in the final letter, in which he is deeply disturbed by the beginnings of the Revolutionary War. Here the Revolu­ tion seems not the rational act outlined by Jefferson in the Declaration— an act proceeding with the cool inevitability of a syllogism—but instead an inexplicable eruption of violence threatening to displace James and his family. Even before this moment, however, James describes aspects of the thirteen colonies that call his initially exuberant optimism about British America into question. Most clearly in his horrific description of southern

42  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

slavery, more subtly elsewhere, James’s America is gradually revealed to be a place that has not altogether avoided evils of the sort he initially wishes to associate with Europe. Instead, it nightmarishly mirrors certain of those evils—and threatens to breed others all its own. Hence Letters has gradually come to be identified as a foundational text in the U.S. Gothic literary tra­ dition, a text that initially stresses the emerging nation’s superiority but by its conclusion becomes in many respects a horror novel.8 Questions of religious identity in Letters from an American Farmer, however, have received little sustained attention.9 I will demonstrate how the early portions of the text establish anxieties regarding an essentially for­ eign Catholicism—yet also, and more profoundly, regarding a modern “re­ ligious indifference”—as central to Crèvecœur’s ultimately Gothic repre­ sentation of the border between self and other, the border erected in British America by the willfully autonomous individual. Such borders are estab­ lished with an initial confidence in Letter I, where James’s identity as nar­ rator is established in direct relation to a Protestant minister whose own voice is best understood as akin to other prominent voices in his Revolu­ tionary milieu—particularly those of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. In the much-anthologized Letter III, James’s voice begins by mimicking this minister as he narrates an essentially Anglo-Protestant “American” identity. By the end of the letter, however, James has begun to shift from celebrating the autonomous individual, the natural world, and the interi­ orization of religious faith to articulating latent anxieties regarding all of these. As James’s voice becomes more complicated at this point, I will pause in my reading of Letters to elaborate on Crèvecœur’s own identity and pro­ clivity for Gothic narrative—stressing his French Catholic upbringing, his necessarily cosmopolitan perspective on “America,” his distant engagement with the European Enlightenment, and his ultimate capacity to see Ca­ tholicism as compatible with if not necessarily essential to a kind of trans­ national humanism. Such biographical contexts will prove vital in returning to the text of Letters, specifically the well-known Letter IX on slavery, which is pro­ foundly concerned with not only racial and regional borders but also indi­ vidual, hemispheric, and religious borders in the Americas. This letter fea­ tures subtle reflection on the fading authority of Christian churches in the British colonies and turns on a strikingly violent Eucharistic image that

Crèvecœur’s Mask of the Modern 43

sparks incipiently Manichean meditations on the part of James. Read prop­ erly, these reveal a critique of Enlightenment notions of disembodied uni­ versal subjectivity—of a rational self willfully detached from any other—at the heart of Letters from an American Farmer. That critique is best under­ stood in relation to Crèvecœur’s broader oeuvre and identity during and immediately following the American Revolution. Of particular importance in this regard are his closet drama Landscapes, which satirizes an emergent American exceptionalism that is directly tied to dissenting Protestantism among Patriots during the Revolution; his role and legacy in helping to es­ tablish New York City’s first Catholic church in 1785; and his fateful rela­ tionship with the family of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton.

MEETING THE AMERICAN FARMER: CRÈVECŒUR’S NARRATOR AND HIS MILIEU

Crèvecœur’s persona James begins Letters from an American Farmer by as­ sociating his own budding literacy with his Protestant identity—though, as we shall see, this identity is finally better understood in relation to Frank­ lin and Paine than to John Calvin or Jonathan Edwards. A Pennsylvania-­ born farmer, James is self-professedly unsophisticated, having inherited from his father only a few “miscellaneous” books of Elizabethan history and “Scotch divinity” (40). The text’s premise is that a highly educated English­ man has written him to request that they begin an extended correspon­ dence about America. James reports in his very first letter that he is hesitant to do so until he receives encouragement from his local minister, who is both a neighbor and a farmer himself. The minister professes a general trust in the ability of the common man to work competently with texts—a trust founded on assumptions that here clearly owe as much to John Locke as to Martin Luther. Writing is not necessarily complex, the minister main­ tains: a letter is “only conversation put down in black and white” (44). He fully believes that James is capable of a good plain style and even has cer­ tain advantages in this regard: your “mind,” he tells James, “is what we called at Yale college a tabula rasa, where spontaneous and strong impres­ sions are delineated with facility” (46). Furthermore, James has particularly worthwhile information to com­ municate to his English correspondent, who—the minister imagines—has

44  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

probably already wasted too much time studying Europe in general and one country in particular: Italy. In a lengthy monologue, dutifully reported by James, the minister places pagan-cum-Catholic Rome at the center of the tragedy that human history has been up until the eighteenth century. America, he believes, is more worthy of study precisely because it has been exempt from that history. Anything viewed in Rome “must have a reference to ancient generations” and is “clouded with the mist of ages”: Here, on the contrary, everything is modern, peaceful, and benign. Here we have had no war to desolate our fields; our religion does not oppress the cultivators; we are strangers to those feudal institutions which have enslaved so many. Here Nature opens her broad lap to re­ ceive the perpetual accession of newcomers and to supply them with food. I am sure I cannot be called a partial American when I say, that the spectacle afforded by these pleasing scenes must be more entertain­ ing, and more philosophical than that which arises from beholding the musty ruins of Rome. Here everything would inspire the reflecting traveller with the most philanthropic ideas; his imagination, instead of submitting to the painful and useless retrospect of revolutions, deso­ lations, and plagues, would, on the contrary, wisely spring forward to the anticipated fields of future cultivation and improvement, to the future extent of those generations which are to replenish and embellish this boundless continent. There the half-ruined amphitheatres, and the putrid fevers of the Campania, must fill the mind with the most melancholy reflections, whilst he is seeking for the origin, and the in­ tention of those structures with which he is surrounded, and for the cause of so great a decay. Here he might contemplate the very begin­ nings and out-lines of human society, which can be traced nowhere now but in this part of the world. . . . For my part I had rather admire the ample barn of one of our opulent farmers, who himself felled the first tree in his plantation, and was the first founder of his settlement, than study the dimensions of the temple of Ceres. I had rather record the progressive steps of this industrious farmer, throughout all the stages of his labours and other operations, than examine how modern Italian convents can be supported without doing anything but singing and praying. (42–43)

Crèvecœur’s Mask of the Modern 45

The minister in fact believes “misguided religion, tyranny, and absurd laws, everywhere depress and afflict mankind,” but he chooses Italy as the worst possible example—even as he asserts that in his own newly settled land “we have in some measure regained the ancient dignity of our species.” He draws a clear border between a Mediterranean Europe that is ancient, Catholic, and corrupt and an America that is at once modern and nearly Edenic. While his negative view of Rome resembles that of earlier Puritans in certain broad respects, it is not grounded in any Protestant theology: the minister critiques Italian convents not because they are unbiblical but be­ cause they are not economically self-reliant. Despite living in the modern era, the convent’s religious cling to a medieval rule, their minds presumably cluttered with dogma altogether foreign to James’s exemplary Lockean psy­ che. Devoting their lives only to “singing and praying,” they seem decadent aesthetes and otherworldly ascetics all at once. Surely, the minister believes, the world has more to learn from an industrious American man—he is a farmer himself six days of the week—than from any Roman convent. In common English usage of the day, a “convent” might be the home of either male or female religious, so the minister’s views regarding gen­ der are not entirely clear. Nonetheless, he inhabits a Revolutionary mi­ lieu in which “submissiveness to royal authority and commitment to the larger community were coming to be seen as feminine, while rugged in­ dividualism was increasingly becoming the model for American mascu­ linity.”10 Such individualism was in many respects at the heart of Frank­ lin’s Auto­biography, wherein the authority in question is ultimately not the Crown but the church—and Christian tradition generally. Franklin re­ sembles the minister of Letters in that he views historical Protestantism not as a means of purifying Christianity but rather as a stage on the way and a means to becoming more fully modern, which is to say self-­sufficient. In his Auto­biography, he initially professes pride in the fact that he is de­ scended from dissenting English Protestants who, at risk of punishment by Anglican authorities, secretly endeavored to read the Bible on their own.11 Yet this is only by way of introducing his own deliberate departure from any Christian communion as he ultimately seeks to develop a prac­ tical, do-it-­yourself morality that yields quite tangible rewards, like those gained by the in­dustrious and therefore “opulent” American farmer in the minister’s ­account.

46  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

In certain respects, James’s minister is even more closely akin to Revo­ lutionary Patriot Thomas Paine. Paine ultimately confessed in The Age of Reason that he subscribed to the tenets of no church other than the church of his “own mind,” yet nonetheless highlighted the faith of Rome as the epitome of the irrational religious traditionalism that he hoped humanity would soon outgrow.12 Much as James’s minister implicitly links the para­ sitic Catholic convent with the uselessly decorative temple of the goddess Ceres, Paine deplores the legacy of a Mediterranean world where “the statue of Mary succeeded the statue of Diana in Ephesus. The deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints. The Mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian Mythologists had saints for everything. The church became as crowded with one, as the pantheon had been with the other; and Rome was the place of both.” So far, Luther or Calvin might have said the same. But Paine immediately goes further in denouncing all Christian churches as practicing “little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue.”13 As with James’s minister, Paine’s overriding concern is with politics and eco­ nomics, not theology—or at least not with theology as it has traditionally been understood. Paine maintains that “the true theology” is that discipline “which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of sci­ ence, of which astronomy occupies the chief place”: this is the true “study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works.”14 Paine’s belief in this regard is essential to yet another crucial point on which he bears a subtle resemblance to James’s minister—this time as bud­ ding American Patriot. In Common Sense, Paine argues: Even the distance at which the Almighty hath placed England and America is a strong and natural proof that the authority of the one over the other, was never the design of Heaven. The time likewise at which the Continent was discovered, adds weight to the argument, and the manner in which it was peopled, increases the force of it. The Refor­ mation was preceded by the discovery of America: As if the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years, when home should afford neither friendship nor safety.15 Paine is a Deist, not an atheist, and speaking here to a colonial American audience that he knows to be overwhelmingly Protestant, his rhetoric de­

Crèvecœur’s Mask of the Modern 47

pends on reference to one God. But that God is in fact the God of nature. Paine argues not from biblical revelation but from empirical observation that the God who designed nature clearly placed America at a safe remove from Europe to ensure its independence. This same God designed history so that an ostensibly unpeopled America would be discovered by Europe­ ans precisely when many of them most needed to flee rising political and religious tyranny—a tyranny newly manifested in 1776 by a British Crown that is strikingly characterized as both “jesuitical” and “papistical.”16 James’s minister does not speak to these issues as directly, but he like Paine sees nature and the historical “design of Heaven” as demarcating the border between America and Europe (as represented by Catholic Italy). The two continents appear in his previously cited monologue as prelap­ sarian and postlapsarian, respectively. In placid America, “Nature opens her broad lap” to welcome and feed oppressed strangers, and the land­ scape itself inspires humans with “the most philanthropic ideas.” Italy, by contrast, is not only devastated by injustices and violence attributable to human moral agency but also characterized by “plagues” and “putrid ­fevers” that cannot even be observed without causing “melancholy.” While James’s minister is nominally Protestant, then, in his remarks he favors a manly self-reliant Deism of the sort exemplified by Franklin and Paine and held to be uniquely available in America—that land chosen not by the God of Israel as revealed in Scripture but by the “design of Heaven” as revealed in nature. The minister appears only in the first of James’s twelve letters, yet he remains a crucial reference point throughout Letters from an American Farmer because James himself initially adheres to the minister’s “model of America’s difference” from Europe.17 James, as we shall see, also attempts to follow the minister—and mirrors Franklin and Paine—in a nascent U.S. habit of seeing “Protestantism’s emancipation from Catholicism” as provid­ ing the “blueprint” for “secularism’s emancipation from ‘religion’ itself.”18 He does so in an initially approbatory account of the privatization of reli­ gion by way of interiorization, which is to say the disembodiment of Chris­ tian practice. James articulates a pattern of settler “assimilation” to British America in the context of apparent religious “pluralism” via “a redefinition of religious life that derived from the Enlightenment and, before that, from the Protestant Reformation. The redefinition began with the Protestant claim to locate religion in the consciousness and the conscience of the

48  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

i­ndividual” and “would result in a considerable narrowing of the realm of religion in public life.”19 James’s most extensive general statements regarding religion come in Letter III. Here he posits that religious differences among American colo­ nists are both widespread and so rapidly interiorized that they quickly and properly fade into religious indifference. James makes this case by pro­ ceeding through a litany of different types of Christian farmers. He begins with a Catholic, despite the fact that there are so very few of them in the British colonies. Implicitly, he does so because this Christian’s faith is most dependent on externals, on a visible Church and its sacraments: “as he has been taught,” the Catholic settler “believes in transubstantiation” and ac­ cordingly in the centrality of the Eucharist to Christian life (74). But in James’s America, such seemingly radical belief makes no external difference in the believer’s life. Belief remains so completely internalized here that the Catholic is finally no different from his neighbor, “a good, honest, plod­ ding Lutheran, who addresses himself to the same God, the God of all, agreeably to the modes he has been educated in, and believes in consub­ stantiation; by so doing, he scandalizes nobody; he also works in his fields, embellishes the earth, clears swamps, etc. What has the world to do with his Lutheran principles?” (74). Such laudable separation of faith from “the world” is also happily characteristic of a “seceder, the most enthusiastic of all sectaries.” What matters in America is simply that this man, like the first two, is “a good farmer, a sober, peaceable, good citizen”: “how does it con­ cern the welfare of the country, or the provinces at large, what this man’s religious sentiments are, or really whether he has any at all?” Completing a gradual reversal of his initial emphasis on private belief, James ends this catalogue by straightforwardly asserting that this last farmer’s industrious good citizenship admirably marks his external and “visible character; the invisible one is only guessed at, and is nobody’s business” (74–75). Be­ cause all Americans tend to share this habit of assessment, James says, they demonstrate a growing tendency toward “imperfect” religious education of the young. This is why “religious indifference” has emerged as “one of the strongest characteristics of the Americans,” a people whose real devo­ tion is to industry (and whose gradual abandonment of Christianity may soon create a “vacuum fit to receive other systems” of religious belief ). Such indifference is in fact a positive good because “what the [European]

Crèvecœur’s Mask of the Modern 49

world commonly calls religion” feeds on “persecution, religious pride, and the love of contradiction,” all of which are in fact disruptive to healthy ­societies  (76). James’s approving account of the “religious indifference” of Americans here is consistent with the general optimism of Letter III. Crucially, how­ ever, this account is placed between two meditative descriptions of the western frontier—descriptions that clearly call into question the value of religious indifference. The first comes immediately after James, having ended the unqualified paean to Britain’s American colonies that opens the letter, suddenly strikes a more complicated note: he lists the defining “char­ acteristics” of Americans as “industry, good living, selfishness, litigiousness, country politics, the pride of freemen, religious indifference” (72). He elaborates on the more obviously negative of these terms as he for the first time considers the frontier, home to the most “modern” (i.e., recent) set­ tlements, where “religion seems to have still less influence” than elsewhere: When discord, want of unity and friendship, when either drunkenness or idleness prevail in such remote districts, contention, inactivity, and wretchedness must ensue. There are not the same remedies to these evils as in a long established community. The few magistrates they have are in general little better than the rest; they are often in a perfect state of war; that of man against man, sometimes decided by blows, sometimes by means of the law; that of man against every wild inhabi­ tant of these venerable woods, of which they are come to dispossess them. There men appear to be no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank, living on the flesh of wild animals when they can catch them, and when they are not able, they subsist on grain. He who would wish to see America in its proper light, and have a true idea of its feeble beginnings and barbarous rudiments must visit our extended line of frontiers, where the last settlers dwell and where he may see the first labours of settlement, the mode of clearing the earth, in all their different appearances, where men are wholly left dependent on their native tempers, and on the spur of uncertain industry, which often fails when not sanctified by the efficacy of a few moral rules. There, remote from the power of example and check of shame, many families exhibit the most hideous parts of our society. (72)

50  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

James here for the first time begins to darken the bright picture of America initially painted by his minister. Up until now, both had implicitly pre­ sented the cultivated farmlands of Pennsylvania and the middle colonies generally as synecdoche for all America. But as he considers the frontier for the first time, James posits that nature in America can wear a countenance even grimmer than that which the minister presented it as wearing in disease-­ridden Europe. Here, the natural world implicitly involves a “state of war” between “carnivorous animals.” More horrifically, the settlers who live in these most “modern” settlements along the frontier, stripped of all ties to tradition, begin to mirror such animals as they make war against each other. Simultaneously, in “dispossessing” animals of the woods, such humans also make war against nature itself. Paradoxically, this warfare against nature—this radical transformation of the frontier that is at the heart of the westward expansion of British America—occurs in pursuit of the very same self-interest that James had earlier praised as “the basis of nature.” Such self-interest now suddenly ap­ pears not as the proper basis for industry but as a selfishness that fosters ­violence, a selfishness fostered by “unlimited freedom.” This last is made clear in James’s second meditation on the frontier. Having turned away from the region once to approve, in the passages considered earlier, the steady growth of “religious indifference” among the more settled Christian farmers, James rapidly and inexplicably turns his attention to the frontier a second time. He poses himself the question: what sort of people inhabit it? His answer: Europeans who have not that sufficient share of knowledge they ought to have, in order to prosper; people who have suddenly passed from oppression, dread of government, and fear of laws, into the unlimited freedom of the woods. . . . Eating of wild meat, what ever you may think, tends to alter their temper, though all the proof I can adduce is that I have seen it, and having no place of worship to resort to, what little society this might afford is denied them. The Sunday meetings, exclusive of religious benefits, were the only social bonds that might have inspired them with some degree of emulation in neatness. . . . The Moravians and the Quakers are the only instances in exception to what I have advanced. The first never settle singly; it is a colony of the society which emigrates; they carry with them their forms, worship, rules, and decency. (77)

Crèvecœur’s Mask of the Modern 51

James here directly highlights the negative effects of “religious indifference” and stresses that Christianity is valuable—not because it is true, but be­ cause it is useful. It predisposes its practitioners to form social bonds and develop virtues such as “neatness” that seem to yield greater prosperity for the entire community. More surprising, perhaps, is James’s suggestion that specific practices—“forms, worship, rules”—may be essential to even this aspect of Christianity, as in the case of the Moravians. His admiration of the Quakers, as we shall see, is more complicated. So too is his obsession with diet and the act of eating itself. That obsession is partly explicable as a function of James’s budding naturalism, his tendency to view humans merely as organisms that respond to their environments. But this explana­ tion is finally insufficient to account for the whole of the text here. The eating of “wild meat” and corresponding degeneration of human “temper” is connected grammatically to the absence of a proper “place of worship” that would afford a basis for “society”—a place, perhaps, to eat together and thereby become part of a common body. In Christian tradition, cer­ tainly in Catholic tradition, the food that unites many believers into one body would be the body of Christ, the Eucharist. This possibility would likely not occur to James. It would, however, to his creator. Understanding Crèvecœur himself is necessary to better under­ stand the Gothic aspects of Letters from an American Farmer, incipiently developed in James’s horrific images of the frontier, in relation to Catholi­ cism. Though Crèvecœur spent nearly a decade living as an American farmer himself, he finally could not be more different from James. The dis­ junction between their identities is at the root of the crisis of authority— that hallmark of the early Gothic—that first surfaces in James’s third letter as he unwittingly begins to question the simplistically positive model of British America favored by his minister.

BEHIND CRÈVECŒUR’S MASK: JESUITS, BORDER CROSSINGS, AND “GOTHIC PARCHMENTS”

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur was born Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crève­cœur in Caen, Normandy, in 1735.20 Scion of a Catholic family in the local petty nobility, he was a boarding student at the Jesuit Collège Royal de Bourbon (later the Collège du Mont). The curriculum heavily emphasized language and literature—grammar, rhetoric, poetry, oratory,

52  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

Latin, and possibly English—as well as mathematics and certain applied sciences. Given tendencies in Jesuit thought at the time, it is possible that the faculty were “receptive to new developments” in the sciences and “op­ timistic about the moral progress of human history”—though in France this was countered by a “pro-Augustinian, often pro-Jansenist Catholic En­ lightenment” that was more “pessimistic about the depravity of human ­nature and reason.”21 Crèvecœur later wrote that he hated the severity of the school and the dreariness of its boarding conditions, but he excelled in the classroom. At around age twenty, apparently unhappy with his father, he left home to live with distant relatives in England. Within a few years he traveled to Quebec, where some of his former Jesuit masters had served, and joined the French Colonial Army. He fought against the British in the Seven Years’ War until professional disgrace, budding “anglophilia,” or some combination of the two apparently caused him to resign his commis­ sion and cross the border into New York in 1759.22 He spent much of the following decade traveling in the British colonies as a surveyor, trapper, and trader, finally transforming himself into a naturalized New York citizen with a new name, “J. Hector St. John.” Settling down to farm in Orange County—proudly named for King William, whose Glorious Revolution had ensured that England was free from Catholicism for good—he soon married a local Anglo-Protestant woman and fathered three children. He may have owned a few slaves and doubtless had African servants: a water­ color he painted of his own Plantation of Pine-Hill is centered on a black man bending over a plow as Crèvecœur and his wife look on from beneath a shade tree.23 Though he presumably enjoyed his newly settled agrarian life, he was not averse to traveling the short distance to New York City for more cosmopolitan company. He read the French philosophes and began to pen literary sketches of America. His decision to publish these owed much to the encouragement of his close friend William Seton, an English-­ born Episcopalian merchant—whose future daughter-in-law Elizabeth would become the first U.S.-born Roman Catholic saint.24 The outbreak of the Revolutionary War caused Crèvecœur consider­ able personal anxiety. He sought to journey to France to reestablish his pat­ rimony, taking his eldest son and the recently completed manuscript of Letters from an American Farmer with him. En route he was imprisoned by the British as a possible rebel spy—though his actual sympathies were

Crèvecœur’s Mask of the Modern 53

­ oyalist—until Seton arranged his release. Crèvecœur stopped in London L and there secured a publisher for Letters in 1781 before arriving in France later the same year. He stayed until the American Revolution was over. Then, making the most of his father’s connections, he befriended Benja­ min Franklin in Paris and secured a position as French consul to the newly independent states of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. In this ca­ pacity Crèvecœur returned to America in 1783 only to find that his wife had been killed by Native Americans allied with the British. Reuniting with his children, he spent most of the following seven years as consul in the United States before returning to France in 1790. On the outbreak of the French Revolution, he chose to live in obscurity in Normandy for most of the following decade.25 He never returned to America and died outside Paris in 1813. No undisputed biography of Crèvecœur yet exists; he remains to some extent a mysterious figure. But the commonly recognized facts above firmly support the conclusion that he “was too much of a divided man ever to be­ come a complete American.”26 His life, unlike that of James, was one spent constantly crossing borders. But what was his religious identity, and what role did it play in prefiguring or establishing a Gothic literary tradition in the United States? An account of his youth in Normandy that he wrote late in life helps to answer both questions. Crèvecœur was reared on his father’s ancient family estate and as a boy attended an eleventh-century Roman­ esque church on a neighboring hilltop; Caen itself featured a massive Bene­ dictine abbey that served as the burial site of William the Conqueror, whose tomb had been defaced by Calvinist iconoclasts in the sixteenth cen­ tury.27 None of this history was lost on the young Crèvecœur: From my earliest youth I had a passion for pondering every trace of antiquity which I came across—worm-eaten furniture, tapestries, old family portraits, and the Gothic parchments of the fifteenth and six­ teenth centuries that I tried to decipher held an indefinable charm for me. When I was older, I loved to stroll in the solitude of graveyards, to examine the tombstones, and to make out the moss-grown epi­ taphs. . . . I knew most of the churches in our district, the time of their foundation, the most interesting things they contained by way of paintings or sculptures.28

54  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

This passage clearly distinguishes the author Crèvecœur from Farmer James (and James’s minister). While he seems indeed to have wished at cer­ tain points in his life to transform himself into a new man in America, Crève­cœur—fascinated by “antiquity” and deeply engaged from youth with the history of his native Europe—could never become a tabula rasa. Furthermore, his habitual attention to aesthetic detail and professed fond­ ness for the “charm” of potentially undecipherable ancient documents ­uncannily support the characterization of him as “embryonic” Gothic nov­ elist. Critics long failed to recognize that Crèvecœur’s use of James as his own doppelganger in Letters is in many ways as outrageous as Horace Wal­ pole’s outright hoax in The Castle of Otranto. It seems less so only because Crève­cœur actually lived out the fiction of being someone other than ­himself—of being J. Hector St. John of Orange County, New York. That Crèvecœur had a proclivity for encrypting authority as marked as Wal­pole’s was perhaps even more clearly reflected in his second book about America, published in France in 1801 as Voyage dans la haute Pensylvanie et dans New York, which wildly purported to be a translation of a damaged English manuscript found in a shipwreck off Copenhagen.29 Crèvecœur’s family history and education were inescapably intertwined with Catholicism. But what were his own mature religious beliefs? Critics and biographers have devoted little attention to this question, casually la­ beling him a “Deist à la Rousseau, if not à la Voltaire,” who simply outgrew the faith of his parents and Jesuit teachers in keeping with the spirit of his age. There is no evidence that he was a regular Catholic communicant after he left Quebec. His 1769 marriage and the eventual baptism of his chil­ dren were conducted by a Huguenot minister he had befriended in New York.30 Even if Crèvecœur had desired the Catholic sacraments, however, they would have been hard to come by in New York: prior to the Revo­ lution, the Catholic Church was rigorously restricted there, even more so than in most British colonies.31 Significantly, Crèvecœur would play a vital role in remedying this in 1785 as he became one of four founding “trustees of the Catholic Church in the City of New York.” He helped to set in mo­ tion the building of the city’s very first Catholic church, St. Peter’s, where his daughter would be married in 1790 with William Seton and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson in a­ ttendance.32

Crèvecœur’s Mask of the Modern 55

After his permanent return to France, Crèvecœur’s known relationship to the Catholic Church is perhaps most tellingly marked by his relation­ ship with the Abbé Grégoire, a controversial juror bishop who simultane­ ously supported the French Revolution and proclaimed himself a faithful Catholic. The two men shared an interest in the abolition of slavery. Crève­ cœur’s abolitionist tendencies dated at least from his reading of a very dif­ ferent “abbé,” Guillaume Thomas François Raynal, an openly apostate priest whose writings on the Americas served as a partial model for Letters. Grégoire was in some ways as much a child of the Enlightenment as Ray­ nal, with the essential difference that he ultimately asserted—however problematically—that the Catholic Church was essential to the achieve­ ment of a proper human “universalism.”33 His essentially antiracist beliefs drove him to become “perhaps the most important leader of the nascent abolition movement in France in the 1790s” and to send “a copy of one of his attacks on slavery” to U.S. bishop John Carroll.34 Crèvecœur met Gré­ goire on several occasions after 1790 and wrote fondly of the priest’s warmth and kindness toward him.35 Beyond this, there is little on record regarding Crèvecœur’s engage­ ment with Catholicism in the final two decades of his life. As I will clarify in my conclusion, his drama Landscapes—written during the Revolution— reveals his mounting sense of the dangers of a U.S. nationalism bound to dissenting Protestantism, and the early years of the Catholic parish he helped to found in New York City provide a vital window onto the rela­ tionship of Catholicism, the Americas, and U.S. borders. But the mature interest in abolition that he shared with Abbé Grégoire provides a key to returning to Letters from an American Farmer itself, specifically to that por­ tion of the text most commonly identified as Gothic.

CHRISTIANITY, SLAVERY, AND THE AMERICAS IN LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN FARMER

Aside from Letter III, the most frequently discussed and anthologized por­ tion of the text by far is Letter IX, on slavery. The intervening letters focus primarily not on British America at large but on the Quakers of Nan­ tucket Island in particular. In this regard Crèvecœur participated in a larger

56  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

­ attern as he depicted James’s hopes for America: “In crucial ways for Euro­ p pean thinkers, and especially for French artists, intellectuals, and politicians of the late eighteenth-century Revolutionary period, Quakers had emerged as representations of a uniquely attractive blend of piety and communitar­ ianism.”36 James’s brief comment in Letter III alone makes clear that this is exactly how he views the Quakers: when the habitual American “religious indifference” that he wishes to see as generally advantageous fosters a dan­ gerously radical self-interest on the frontier, pious Quaker communities are somehow able to resist it. In this section James first articulates an appreci­ ation of the interconnection of religious devotion and ­community—and a sense of how both might be endangered in America. Praxis-oriented man that he is, he also expresses his specific admiration of Quaker resistance to slavery at several points in Letters. As we shall see in turning to James’s depiction of the plantation South, he ultimately connects slavery to self-­ interest of the same sort displayed by most frontier settlers. James’s hopes for the Quakers as representing the best communitarian aspects of Christianity in America have considerably diminished if not col­ lapsed by the end of Letter VIII, however, as the Friends have failed to pro­ duce an island utopia on Nantucket.37 The letter that immediately follows is not only utterly dystopian but also marks the most significant geo­ graphical shift in the entire text: James’s scope, heretofore limited to the mid-­Atlantic colonies and Nantucket, suddenly broadens to include not only the southern British colonies but also the Americas at large. His open­ ing sentence in Letter IX describes South Carolina’s port city of Charleston as, in North America, “what Lima is in the South; both are capitals of the richest provinces of their respective hemispheres” (166). A general com­ parison of South Carolina to Spanish America and the Caribbean contin­ ues throughout the first part of the letter, implicitly placing South Carolina in a negative light even before slavery is mentioned. Crèvecœur was well attuned to the Black Legend, a longstanding European narrative that pos­ ited particular depravity in Spain’s colonization of the Americas partly as a means of making other colonial powers seem justified by comparison.38 The Black Legend had some currency in France but was most pronounced in England—where supporters of Oliver Cromwell, for example, justified seizing Jamaica from Spain in 1655 by drawing on translations of Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas’s scathing indictment of his own countrymen

Crèvecœur’s Mask of the Modern 57

for their mistreatment of natives in the Americas more than a century ear­ lier.39 Aspects of the Black Legend clearly informed Crèvecœur’s unpub­ lished essay “Sketch of a Contrast Between the Spanish and the English Colonies,” which he wrote in the 1770s and perhaps considered including in Letters. This sketch compares settlers of England’s simple, industrious, freedom-­loving “Protestant Colonies” with priest-ridden South American Catholics—who waste a good deal of time praying to saints and confessing sins but nonetheless remain slaves to sloth and to vice generally. In many respects this sketch simply “paraded a cluster of stereotypes, with religion given pride of place,” as it presented “a banal encapsulation of the preju­ dices and assumptions of eighteenth-century Europe.”40 Given the complexity of Crèvecœur’s published work, there can be little doubt that this sketch was intentionally written in the voice of a naïve character such as James is initially.41 Furthermore, the neat dichotomy that it proposes completely collapses when read alongside Letters from an Ameri­ can Farmer, where South Carolina gradually comes to appear less as simu­ lacrum of Spanish America than as representative of all the worst aspects of the “Protestant Colonies.” Here, James views as horrific almost every­ thing that he initially lauded about British America: self-­interest, religious indifference, and even proximity to nature. But he starts with ­lawyers. Comparing the wide disparity between rich and poor in Charleston with that which he believes to be typical in Spanish America, James opines that the proximate causes of that disparity are quite different. In British America, it is not Catholic clergy but lawyers who are to blame: “In an­ other century, the law will possess [in the British colonies] what the church now possesses in Peru and Mexico” (168). In Carolina even the richest planters and merchants seem merely “tributary” to lawyers, who “far above priests and bishops, disdain to be satisfied with the poor Mosaical portion of the tenth” (167). The power of lawyers will necessarily continue to in­ crease not only in this colony but throughout all British America, James observes, as “the nature of our laws and the spirit of freedom, which often tends to make us litigious, must necessarily throw the greatest part of the property of the colonies” into their hands. Here, then, planters are subordinate to lawyers; but “the church” is subordinate to both—insofar as it exists at all. James reports an account of a Carolina minister who attempts to warn planters that it is their Christian

58  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

duty not to abuse slaves: “‘Sir,’ said one of his hearers, ‘we pay you a gen­ teel salary to read to us the prayers of the liturgy and to explain to us such parts of the Gospel as the rule of the church directs, but we do not want you to teach us what to do with our blacks.’ The clergyman found it pru­ dent to withhold any further admonition” (172–73). This passage recalls a comment from Letter III, where James describes a Pennsylvania Dutch Calvinist who ultimately “conceives no other idea of a clergyman than that of an hired man: if he does his work well, he will pay him the stipulated sum; if not, he will dismiss him, and do without his sermons, and let his church be shut up for years” (75). Though initially approved as part of James’s account of the growth of “religious indifference” in British America, the same practice appears in a quite different light in relation to slavery. Churches here can in effect have or teach no “rule” that runs counter to the self-interest of whatever individuals happen to employ any given minister; to do so would break the contract between them. As on the frontier, then, radical “religious indifference” in the planta­ tion South extends such self-interest well beyond any ostensibly limited economic sphere: human beings at their very core seem merely to be ad­ vanced “carnivorous animals” who prey on one another’s flesh. This is clear at the very end of Letter IX, which features a graphic scene in which a slave who allegedly killed an overseer is tortured to death both by his human owner and—in a sense—by nature. James unexpectedly encounters the slave while walking on a wooded plantation outside Charleston. The man has been suspended in a cage on a tree, intentionally left bleeding and ex­ posed in a place where birds and insects, having already pecked out his eyes, now “eat his flesh and drink his blood” (178). This scene, the most unforgettably horrific in the book, has been vital to the gradual identifica­ tion of Letters as a Gothic text and to the characterization of Crèvecœur as “embryonic novelist”: his literary skill is readily apparent as in “the midst of a realistic description,” he introduces “a Christian eucharistic idiom” in order “to heighten the horror” of the scene.42 “Half-dead and half-alive, a rotting corpse and a Christ figure, the caged slave embodies the abject,” to be sure—with a peculiar Catholic resonance in this region of British America that has initially been associated with Peru.43 In fact, the scene’s complexities can be fully understood only with reference to Letter III. On the one hand, this encounter in the woods must be connected to James’s

Crèvecœur’s Mask of the Modern 59

account of the frontier there, of human degeneration into violence in the wild freedom of America. On the other, the scene’s allusion to Christ’s cru­ cifixion in conjunction with a “eucharistic idiom” recalls the earlier discus­ sion of transubstantiation—a topic of little inherent significance to the nominally Protestant James, but necessarily more freighted to the Jesuit-­ educated Crèvecœur. James is unable to satisfactorily respond to his experience of the wounded body before him. He briefly and sentimentally sympathizes with the slave, wishing that he had a musket with which he could simply eutha­ nize the man. Then he all too quickly reverts to his role as self-satisfied Anglo-American farmer. James walks away from any nascent sense of com­ munion with the suffering slave to share a meal instead with the plantation owner—who, playing the role of scientist and lawyer alike, tells James that punishments of the sort he has just witnessed are mandated by “the laws of self-preservation,” laws dictated by nature itself (179). Juxtaposed with Letter III’s vision of humans as carnivores, Letter IX’s initial linkage of planter luxury and slave suffering, and the immediately preceding descrip­ tion of the slave being consumed alive, James’s meal with this planter be­ comes a figuratively cannibalistic Eucharist.44 It is wrenched from any tra­ ditional Christian theological context, however, as the planter who presides over it articulates a proto-Darwinian view of existence as violent competi­ tion among individuals and races—a view that mandates borders within as well as around his America and that is, furthermore, consistent with James’s own initial emphasis on self-interest. This vision of the state of nature as a state of war is one that James— who quietly owns several slaves himself—has in fact begun to articulate himself in the second half of Letter IX, albeit sadly.45 Completely departing from his minister’s initial near-Edenic image of America, James approaches the broader conclusion that British America is in no respect exempt from the wretched “history of the earth!”—and, furthermore, that nature itself is to blame, for “man, an animal of prey, seems to have rapine and the love of bloodshed implanted in his heart” (173–74). Such reflection leads James for the first time to straightforwardly theological questions. Having previ­ ously assumed the existence of a distant designing God who is essentially good, he now asks whether there must not be some crucial distinction ­between that God and a lower, malevolent nature.46 Left to his own devices,

60  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

then, James—our tabula rasa—begins postulating something quite like the doctrine of the ancient Manicheans, of whom he would know little. Crèvecœur, by contrast, gave them intermittent consideration, musing in a separate sketch entitled “The American Belisarius” that those who lose faith in eternal rewards and punishments might necessarily “turn Mani­ chean” and “worship the Daemon of the Times”—that is, worship the merely material or worldly, and thereby turn violent. A narrator of another piece by Crèvecœur, “The Frontier Woman,” suggests as much: “Methinks no fitter Period could be chosen to propagate the doctrine of the Mani­ cheans than that of civil war,” for “it is then that human Nature appears as if wholly left to the Guidance of some Powerful evil Genius.”47 The “civil war” under consideration is the American Revolution. It is with the outbreak of that Revolution that Letters ends, on a note of radical confusion and uncertainty, as a fearful James contemplates flee­ ing with his family into the wilderness. Here the collapse of the narrator’s initial naïveté is complete. James began his letters by placidly recording his minister’s confident assertion that war was not a concern in America as it had been in the Old World (an assertion that Crèvecœur, who had fought battles on North American soil as a French soldier, knew to be patently un­ true). In the end, the narrator comes to experience at home war and other horrors that he would rather wall off in Rome, horrors that foster a final existential crisis that he—fittingly—must ponder all on his own.

ENLIGHTENMENT, REVOLUTION, AND CHURCH IN AMERICA: CRÈVECŒUR’S COMPLEX LEGACY

Recognizing the gap between Crèvecœur and his creature James is essential to understanding Letters from an American Farmer as a Gothic fiction that challenges notions of borders in the Americas in relation to Catholicism. The author was a Jesuit-educated Frenchman and an inveterate traveler across the breadth of the North Atlantic; his character, a self-educated Anglo-American, a nominal Protestant, and a provincial whose Europe could only be imaginary. That narrator’s experience of crossing internal borders—along the frontier and in a plantation South that he wishes to conflate with Latin America—proves deeply unsettling. Critics have in­

Crèvecœur’s Mask of the Modern 61

creasingly recognized the gap between author and character, and Crève­ cœur’s ultimately critical stance toward British America and liberalism, without recognizing the vital role that religious identity plays in it.48 Some have rightly recognized that the text not only reveals James’s isolated naïveté but also provides a means of critiquing certain Enlightenment presupposi­ tions. In the character of James, Crèvecœur offers “a clear diagram of the scientific standpoint increasingly adopted for the articulation of white manhood” in the eighteenth century. Specifically, James’s conclusion at the end of Letter IX that “it is the very cruelty of Nature that creates slavery” is in fact “enabled” by the “scientific perspective” that he—along with his planter host—claims to have achieved. James’s accompanying failure to do any more than briefly sympathize with the particular slave body he encoun­ ters here is, like his moments of condescending affection for his wife, a function of the “disembodied, objective, and universalized standpoint of­ fered by Enlightenment science” and put into practice in his milieu by white males who figure themselves as autonomous agents.49 The ultimate failure of human community here is in fact a function of the desire for in­ dividual autonomy, itself associated with achievement of the detached “sci­ entific” Enlightenment standpoint that—in the social arrangements of the day—was most readily accessible to and encouraged in white males. How might Catholicism have encouraged Crèvecœur not only to resist idolizing individual autonomy but also to consider and admire forms of identity other than those favored by the Enlightenment and his contem­ porary Anglo-American culture alike? A partial answer to this broad ques­ tion can be found by considering a more specific one: why did Crèvecœur, on returning to New York as French consul after the American Revolution, play an active role in establishing the very first Catholic church in the new nation’s most populous city? To be precise, Crèvecœur served as a “lay trustee” who played the lead role in securing the property on which to build St. Peter’s Catholic Church in New York City in 1785.50 A history of Catholicism in the city notes that the “zeal” he displayed in doing so “on his part is surprising, because ac­ cording to reliable information he was by no means a fervent Catholic.”51 His motives for helping the Church are debatable. Crèvecœur perhaps be­ lieved “that the reassertion of his Catholicism might help him gain recog­ nition in France of the legitimacy of his children,” whose legal status there was indeterminate at the time.52 It is also possible that he saw fostering the

62  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

Catholic Church in the United States as a duty of his consular office— though his “earnest” appeals to Louis XVI to fund St. Peter’s failed.53 What is certain is that Crèvecœur’s efforts earned the appreciation of the promi­ nent Catholic laymen who worked in concert with him to found St. Peter’s. These included diplomats from Spain and Portugal who soon secured do­ nations from benefactors located in Cuba and Mexico, as well as their Ibe­ rian homelands, in support of the new church.54 Some of these co-founders joined Crèvecœur at St. Peter’s in 1790 as his daughter was married there by an Irish priest shortly before the family returned to France for good.55 Among the guests in attendance at the wedding were William Seton and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who signed the legal certificate of mar­ riage himself.56 Crèvecœur’s experience of St. Peter’s—a church that was foreign to the new republic in many regards yet also newly capable of engaging promi­ nent Anglo-Americans—reflects how he had likely come to view his an­ cestral faith as surprisingly beneficial to the United States. Given the in­ tense history of anti-Catholicism in colonial New York, his promotion of Catholicism there was in effect a promotion of radical new possibilities for the religious freedom that many had come to hope would be a distinctive hallmark of the new nation. Furthermore, to promote Catholicism was to promote a religious vision and experience that definitively transcended the borders of the new United States. By the late 1770s, Crèvecœur had come to believe that Protestantism—certainly dissenting Protestantism—was less likely to do so; that it could foster the deplorable radical individualism that he saw as animating many “patriots” in the Revolutionary War; and that it could be as inimical to religious freedom as Catholicism had ever been. These three points are made clear in Crèvecœur’s little-known closet drama Landscapes, written in approximately 1777. Here Crèvecœur speaks to his audience more directly than he does in Letters, and in a voice quite different from that of James. The play as a whole clearly presents “a bit­ ter, deeply ironic denunciation” not only of the Revolution but also of a “whiggish egalitarianism” that seeks to destroy all “conventional markers of identity.”57 The author’s Loyalist sympathies—and perhaps a Catholic ­sensibility—are evident as Landscapes implies that “only distant and estab­ lished authority, not local and upstart power, can ensure the tran­quility necessary for families to live in peace.” The “villains” of the play are earnest

Crèvecœur’s Mask of the Modern 63

Presbyterians with Ulster roots who run a “patriot committee of safety” in a rural district somewhere in the middle colonies. The play as a whole “voices the fear, grounded in a generic distrust of New Light enthusiasm, that an ideologically rigid Calvinism will be imposed as a state doctrine” in any new American republic. Here the casual “religious toleration” pre­ viously practiced in the middle colonies seems a “victim of war” as “the American Calvinist rhetoric of the chosen people” becomes “a source of Revolutionary violence,” justifying “acts against helpless and innocent ci­ vilians” who resist the call to Revolution as providential.58 Letters—particularly Letter III—has often been misread as one of the earliest articulations of a triumphant American exceptionalism; Landscapes directly mounts one of the earliest critiques of such exceptionalism. Crève­ cœur openly “scorns the notion that Americans are an elect, or more pre­ cisely, that Calvinist Americans are such.” Intriguingly, his critique is at once consistent with certain tenets of the European Enlightenment, affir­ mative of the traditional family, and—arguably—affirmative of sound re­ ligious education. In Landscapes, Crèvecœur argues not against religion itself but instead “against any religion dominating American life to the point where others are directly harmed by it.” In doing so he employs “a form, the drama, that promises a nonsectarian affirmation of traditional moral values,” including affirmation of self-restraint on behalf of a greater corporate good. The revolutionaries identified in the play itself as “pre­ tended saints, veteran Puritans,” in fact seem incapable of such restraint; they twist Scripture to advance their own self-interest and seem to have little theology aside from the doctrine of their own chosen-ness. They are “in fact inadequate interpreters of truth. Acting from passions, and not from reason,” the “ill-educated religious fanatics” in Landscapes “force a narrow Calvinism upon society, destroying, in the name of God’s mercy, the sustaining doctrine of family life—common mercy.”59 Crèvecœur knew that an admirable human mercy could well be found outside the borders of British North America and was not incompatible with traditional understandings of God’s mercy. One of the most straight­ forwardly positive depictions of Catholicism in his writings makes this clear. His unpublished sketch “Hospitals” features a narrator who lavishly praises women in Catholic religious orders because the care they provide to the sick and wounded “is far superior to any I Know of in civil society.”

64  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

Roman Catholicism as described here is “remarkable” for “that singular charity which is displayed in those Hospitals which are attended by Nuns,” as these women are spurred by Christian “Zeal” to “devote themselves to the Relief of the sick equally Intent on the recovery of their bodys as well as the preservation of their souls.” Writing from somewhere in British America, this sketch’s narrator notes of Catholic hospitals that “this is the country where I shou’d think those Institutions are wanted, tho’ unfortu­ nately ’tis incompatible with the spirit of Modern Protestantism.”60 To what extent does this narrator speak for Crèvecœur? Though the author indeed wore a somewhat bewildering number of “masks” in his life and in his writing, the scholar who first stressed this very point argued that he did write sans mask at times—and was entirely favorable in his depic­ tion of French Catholic Canada when he did so.61 Not many in British America were so favorable in 1774, when Parliament’s Quebec Act was viewed as “Intolerable” precisely because it seemed too accommodating to Catholics in the previously French territory.62 American Patriots at the time saw the act as demonstrating a disturbing new laxness toward Catholicism on the part of Britain, and advocated revolution in part by arguing that the empire might allow the faith to spread south into the thirteen colonies. The perceived foreignness of Catholicism in the new United States, then, could hardly have been overlooked by Crèvecœur. And given all that has been established regarding his life and his writing, it is easy to imagine that he would have been pleased when St. Peter’s of New York became a parish that included immigrants of a sort his fictional Farmer James had never imagined—including two currently being considered for canonization. Among its first parishioners was Pierre Toussaint, a Francophone Haitian of African descent who helped to found Catholic charities in New York; and Felix Varela, a Cuban-born priest and abolitionist who served at St. Peter’s decades later, founding the first Spanish-language newspaper in the United States and welcoming immigrants from Ireland at the time of the Great Famine.63 The church’s best-known communicant, however, was the widowed daughter-in-law of William Seton, the very man who had initially encour­ aged Crèvecœur to publish Letters from an American Farmer. Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton’s 1805 conversion to Catholicism was fostered in part by her regular prayer before a gift to St. Peter’s in 1789 from the archbishop of Mexico City, a painting of the crucifixion by Mexican artist Jose Vallejo.64

Crèvecœur’s Mask of the Modern 65

One can only imagine what Jefferson and other Anglo-American guests in attendance at Crèvecœur’s daughter’s wedding made of the painting. The strangeness of its presence in the early United States is made clear by a com­ ment of Elizabeth Seton’s sister: appalled to learn that the newly widowed Elizabeth was interested in attending St. Peter’s, she attempted to deter her by whispering, “They say, my sister, there is a great picture of Our Savior ALL NAKED--!”65 The future saint herself wrote that this apparently scan­ dalous image of Christ’s body, which hung directly above the Eucharistic tabernacle, was in fact crucial to her conversion. As she prayed before it she begged “our Lord to wrap my heart deep in that opened side so well de­ scribed in the beautiful crucifixion, or lock it up in his little tabernacle where I shall now rest forever.”66 Such “rest” was for Seton more active than contemplative. A mother of five who had already performed extensive charity work as an Episcopalian, on taking the habit of a nun she devoted her life to Catholic education in the United States. The order she founded, the Sisters of Charity, ultimately opened multiple hospitals like those Crève­­­cœur’s essay had praised in Quebec—including the first hospital west of the Mississippi, in what was then the U.S. frontier. Seton’s model for her order, the Daughters of Charity, was French; her conversion had been prepared for during an extended visit to Italy; and its final spur came via a work of Catholic art from Mexico. This first U.S.born Catholic saint was called to join a Church that spanned both Atlantic and American borders to incorporate her, as it did Pierre Toussaint and Felix Varela. She created an order of women dedicated to tending to minds, bodies, and souls alike even as she witnessed the beginnings of a United States that would ultimately be far more diverse than the mix of northern Europeans that Farmer James spoke of in Letter III. Was Seton’s labor “founded on the basis of nature, self-interest,” as was the labor of the set­ tlers described by James? Were she and the image of the wounded Christ that inspired her proper sources of fear? It is impossible to imagine that Crèvecœur would have answered “yes” to either of these questions. Yet he knew that many citizens in the new United States feared the “foreign” Church that both nurtured Seton and emphasized Christ’s Passion. In Letters from an American Farmer, James and his minister alike indi­ rectly reflect such fear as they initially seek to place suffering in old Catholic Italy, well outside the borders of British America. Yet James’s text ends by incorporating images of such suffering within those borders, and depicting

66  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

the evil erection of rigid racial borders within the nascent United States— despite his desire to restrict horror to the periphery of the new nation (the western frontier) or to that portion of it that he initially compares to Latin America (the plantation South). Crèvecœur’s own Gothic imagination de­ veloped elliptically in relation both to his own complicated experience of Catholicism and to Anglo-American anxieties regarding the faith. Those anxieties would not abate in the long half-century following the American Revolution, decades in which popular Gothic fictions such as those of ­Rebecca Reed and Maria Monk responded to and stoked a virulent anti-­ Catholicism that led to the burning of an Ursuline convent in Massachu­ setts in 1834.67 The judge who oversaw the subsequent trial, Lemuel Shaw, eventually became father-in-law to a writer of considerably greater merit than Reed or Monk, a literary giant whose work would mark the culmina­ tion of an era that has been deemed the American Renaissance. That writer was Herman Melville.

C H A P T E R

2

M E LV I L L E ’ S “ M O N K I S H FA B L E S ” Catholic Bodies Haunting the New World

How could men of liberal sense, ripe scholarship in the world, and capacious philosophical and convivial understandings—how could they suffer themselves to be imposed upon by such monk­ ish fables? Pain! Trouble! As well talk of Catholic miracles. No such thing. —Melville, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” Hunilla was partly prostrate upon the grave; her dark head bowed, and lost in her long, loosened Indian hair; her hands extended to the cross-foot, with a little brass crucifix clasped between; a cru­ cifix worn featureless, like an ancient graven knocker long plied in vain. —Melville, “The Encantadas”

The young Herman Melville in certain respects resembled J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur less than he did Farmer James. It is difficult to imag­ ine an individual heritage more representative of early U.S. identity—­ particularly when that identity is conceived of as Protestant—than his. 67

68  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

Melville was the son of a Unitarian father and a Calvinist mother with roots in colonial New England and New York; both of his grandfathers had fought as Patriots in the Revolution, one in the Boston Tea Party. Yet Melville himself was born in 1819 and came of age more than half a century after Letters from an American Farmer was written. Insofar as his personal identity was enmeshed with that of the new nation, it was so pre­ cisely at a moment when that nation was mature enough to foster native critics with new questions: what made the United States distinct from the British Empire it had twice overcome? What was most essential to the young nation’s history? Or did its greatest achievement lie in having es­ caped history and thereby offering individuals the freedom to do so as well, as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman would suggest? Such ques­ tions were given new shape and vitality via the nation’s increasing—and increasingly vexed—contact with different nations and cultures, many of them marked by Catholicism. Melville experienced such contact on a per­ sonal level. Born on the same Manhattan block where Elizabeth Seton lived in the early 1800s and where her national shrine stands today, he matured during the antebellum decades in which the first major waves of Catholic immigrants began to flood into U.S. parishes like St. Peter’s—and in which U.S. expansion toward the Pacific brought war with newly independent Catholic Mexico.1 During this period, Melville would also spend crucial years at sea, traveling well beyond the borders of the United States. The shipboard experience that proved the source of his most enduring fiction helped him to achieve a transnational perspective on the nation his family had helped to establish; it also fueled his anxieties regarding the future of that nation and a distinctive concern with its place in the Americas at large, one that would shape his imagination profoundly. While serving aboard the U.S. Navy warship United States in 1844, Melville made a brief but unforgettable visit to Lima. Unlike cities he knew in New York and New England, the Peruvian city seemed to suggest the Old World—or perhaps even to predate it, for while Melville had previ­ ously visited the English port of Liverpool, he had never seen “a medieval cathedral town.”2 Lima seemed an American version of one, founded in 1535 and built around a cathedral that displayed the remains of its former archbishops in open coffins. The sight was shocking to a young sailor ac­ customed to plain Congregational churches, as was the landscape that sur­

Melville’s “Monkish Fables” 69

rounded the cathedral. Indeed, to Melville and his shipmates, everything about Peru suggested “pervasive neglect, decay, decline,” beginning with the port town of Callao, where “buzzards were allowed to gorge themselves, undisturbed, on the bodies of the dead” (HM 1:279). Such bodily corrup­ tion was conflated in the young writer’s mind with the moral corruption suggested to him by the traditional dress of the women of Lima, the sayay-manta, which left “only one dark eye visible” (1:281). Those mysteriously seductive eyes would return more than a decade later to threaten an inno­ cent U.S. sea captain at the beginning of Melville’s best-known Gothic tale, Benito Cereno (1855).3 Their lingering power and especially their “dark­ ness” reveal that in this brief but deeply affecting exposure to a South Ameri­can Catholic culture Melville perceived evidence of what in the nineteenth-­century United States would have been considered illicit sexual activity. Melville, in other words, not infrequently associated Catholicism with miscegenation, in keeping with his personal experience of Lima and main­ stream Anglo-American views of Spain and Latin America in particular. This pattern is clear in the character of Benito Cereno, a Catholic Spaniard who is described as “swarthy,” “dark,” and “yellow,” and compared to both an Inquisitor and a Jew; in the half-Cherokee Catholic Marylander Ungar, who visits the Holy Land in the long postbellum poem Clarel; and the “Cholo, or half-breed Indian” Catholic woman Hunilla in the collection of sketches entitled “The Encantadas.”4 The Peruvian Hunilla—like the resolutely penitential St. Rose of Lima, popularly identified as being of Inca descent in the maternal line—is described as embodying both “a Spanish and an Indian grief ” (E 161).5 She is also one of Melville’s most distinctive characters. Hunilla arguably reveals what is for Melville “an altogether new understanding of Christ, not as the teacher of unmanly patience, but as the man on the cross”—though here Christ’s “face” is that “of a brave and wor­ thy woman,” a face hardly prominent in Moby-Dick and Melville’s other novels.6 What is certain is that the extreme suffering of this Spanish-Indian woman of “Romish faith” on the seeming underside of the Western Hemi­ sphere marks her identity as antithetical to that of the comfortable, nomi­ nally Protestant Anglo-American bachelors whom Melville often satirized in his short fiction of the 1850s, most pointedly in “The Paradise of Bache­ lors and the Tartarus of Maids” (155).

70  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

While critics have examined Melville’s engagement with Catholicism extensively only with regard to Benito Cereno and Clarel (1876), Catholi­ cism in fact played a significant role in his imagination as early as 1850.7 By that year a number of negative reviews of his early books Typee and Omoo by evangelical Protestants had appeared, and they had suggested—­ outrageously but unforgettably—that Melville had a crypto-­Catholic agenda. Melville’s ever-broadening view of the dangers of nativism in this period, clearly revealed in his timely sympathy for Irish immigrants in Redburn (1849), was necessarily bound up with his view of Catholicism. So, too, were his criticisms of the notion of Manifest Destiny that had in­ formed the Mexican War—waged by the United States against an American nation that seemed to conform to neither Reformation nor Enlightenment ideals and that had proven disturbingly conducive to the “impurity” of miscegenation. Such concerns most obviously shape Benito Cereno, which uses a Latin American Catholic setting to provoke fears that in fact point obliquely to the shortcomings of the one nation in the Americas that hoped to have purified itself of the legacy of sin and failure it preferred to associate with the Old World and the old Church. “The Bell-Tower,” which along with Benito Cereno is frequently discussed as a Gothic fiction, does the same—with the difference that it is set in Italy rather than South America.8 But a number of Melville’s earlier fictions of the 1850s, too, turn on the presentation of a Catholicism imaginatively associated with a threat­ ening embodiment as well as with femininity, miscegenation, and the ne­ cessity of narrative ambiguity. Melville himself, it is important to recog­ nize, had a certain sincere fascination with Catholicism. He “seems to have found considerable beauty and power in Catholic devotional art and lit­ erature and the stories of the saints”; even the “ecclesial structure of the Catholic Church seems to have held considerable appeal for Melville to­ wards the end of his life.”9 In his fiction of the 1850s, however, Melville recognizes and speaks to his audience’s general fears regarding the faith. Catholicism therefore often—though not quite always—serves as a for­ eign specter of impurity, defeat, and death suppressed by but nonetheless haunting an Anglo-American culture that seeks to deny its own suscepti­ bility to each. “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” “The Encantadas,” and crucial portions of Moby-Dick follow this pattern, each bearing witness to the personal experience, the literature, and the broader

Melville’s “Monkish Fables” 71

culture that shaped Melville’s imagination—which I examine before turn­ ing to the texts themselves.

IMAGINING CATHOLICISM IN MELVILLE’S AMERICA

Melville’s family heritage inevitably reminded him that his nation’s Refor­ mation roots predisposed it to forthrightly anti-Catholic sentiments even as its Enlightenment roots predisposed it to more subtle ones. As he grew to maturity these sentiments were further colored both by U.S. anxieties regarding Catholic immigration from Europe and by the fact that the na­ tion found itself increasingly at odds with the long-established American Catholic presence to its west and south. Protestantism provided the United States with a radically different vision of the New World than the one sug­ gested to Melville in Lima’s Grand Cathedral: If the symbolic terrain of American Protestantism figured itself as clean, empty, and magically capable of change without decay, that of Catholicism was clogged with the filth of bodies. Emptied of Catholic artifacts, New England and Virginia churches presented studiously cleansed interiors. . . . Such interior emptiness . . . facilitated the Prot­ estant’s unmediated relation to the Holy Spirit; but the ideological af­ fection for emptiness also influenced the perception of the American landscape as empty of inhabitants and hence available for settlement.10 Furthermore, independent Peru and Mexico were different from the United States in large part because Catholic Spain had never conceived of America as “empty.” Spain’s ultimately “inclusive” approach toward natives of the Americas was, as historian J. H. Elliott has shown, radically different from England’s “exclusionary” approach. Put crudely, the Spanish impera­ tive at its typical worst was become one with us or die; the English counter­ part was move away and die. The comparative simplicity of the English approach, combined with a more entrepreneurial attitude toward coloniza­ tion and the fact that North America’s native population was smaller to begin with, made “success” easier to come by for the English colonists, as their refusal to take account of other races gave them “more freedom of

72  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

manoeuvre to make reality conform to the constructs of their imagina­ tions.” Shaping their America in their own image, the English created a more radically new world, one free of the “compromises” that Spain more often made with the American land and peoples it first encountered in 1492.11 Elliot’s observation here is essentially continuous with Mexican his­ torian Edmundo O’Gorman’s assertion in The Invention of America that the portion of the Americas under Spanish rule partly retained its pre-­ Columbian identity because it was viewed by the Spanish as an object not of transformation but of “grafting”; British North America, by contrast, was viewed by its settlers as purely a “frontier land in the sense of dynamic transformation,” a blank slate to be written on.12 Anglo-Protestantism, then, fostered a view of the American landscape itself as a vast tabula rasa, a blankness, a whiteness. In Melville’s time this view informed the rhetoric supporting U.S. expansion. The abstract notion of Manifest Destiny essentially overlooked the fact that native and Spanish American cultures alike stood between the United States and the Pacific even as arguments in support of the Mexican War straightforwardly deni­ grated Mexico, frequently in racial terms. Stephen F. Austin memorably prefigured such rhetoric in his 1836 characterization of the conflict be­ tween Mexico and Texas as nothing less than “a war of barbarism and of despotic principles, waged by the mongrel Spanish-Indian and Negro race, against civilization and the Anglo-American race.”13 Racial assumptions aside, the “barbarism and despotic principles” of nations such as Mexico could readily be conceived of as Catholic in origin.14 Clarel’s progressive Anglican priest Derwent demonstrates this in giving voice to the regnant nineteenth-century Anglo-American view that “The world is now too ­civilized / For Rome.”15 In the English-speaking world, such suspicions re­ garding Catholicism were fueled by a longstanding view of Spanish Catho­ lics in particular as barbaric. In Melville’s day as in Crèvecœur’s, the Black Legend of Spanish evil was imagined “around the historical facts of Spain’s imperial sway, Inquisition, and treatment of indigenous peoples in the Americas.” The English and U.S. version of the Black Legend contrasted real Spanish wrongdoings in the New World with supposed Anglo inno­ cence there—and, furthermore, subtly posited Spanish depravity as a result of miscegenation that had occurred on the Iberian Peninsula, pre-1492, due to the long presence there of the Moors.16 Mexicans and other Latin

Melville’s “Monkish Fables” 73

Americans, therefore, seemed in the antebellum United States to be doubly if not triply damned, twice-miscegenated “Indian” pagan and Spanish Catholic barbarians all at once.17 Such underlying assumptions shaped the most xenophobic and jingo­ istic aspects of the society into which Melville was born. He steadfastly re­ sisted those assumptions. Though the notion of Manifest Destiny “was not without a strong appeal” for Melville when it was first articulated in the Democratic Review in 1845—his family had deep ties to the Democratic Party—he nonetheless “ridiculed American chauvinism” at the outbreak of the Mexican War and later satirized the war’s conduct in the periodical ­Yankee Doodle (HM 1:535–37). Writing Mardi in the year U.S. victory in the war was sealed, he inserted into his ultimately ill-received political al­ legory a mysteriously authored scroll that “attacks the Puritan idea of America as the chosen land and of Americans as the chosen people, an idea that had recently given credence to the extra-legal notion of Manifest ­Destiny”; here Melville clearly presents his own “indictments of the errors” of the United States, most recently embodied in its “aggression against Mexico” (1:605).18 In doing so Melville did not support Catholicism but, rather, con­ demned a secular ideology that he intuited as being partly derived from Puritan sources. Yet it was in relation to Catholic Mexico that he voiced such condemnation, and in Redburn he reacted directly to anti-Catholic domestic politics. Written at the height of Ireland’s Great Famine and at a time when nativist politicians dominated New York City, the novel features a semi-autobiographical narrator who empathizes extensively with Irish emigrants sailing from Liverpool to the United States (1:641). Speaking broadly to a U.S. citizenry considering the question “as to whether such multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American shores,” Redburn exhorts that “they have God’s right to come; though they bring all Ireland and her miseries with them.” Melville’s own most extensive ex­ posure to Catholics had in fact been to Irish who were fleeing the Great Famine and the British Empire that had helped to create it. Redburn notes ironically what Melville himself had likely observed as a young sailor on the Liverpool docks: the presence of “vast quantities of produce, imported from starving Ireland.”19 Indeed, the entire Melville family was significantly impacted by Irish immigrants who began pouring into New York and New England in the

74  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

early 1840s. In 1843, Melville’s elder brother Gansevoort, to the conster­ nation of at least one uncle who did not like any “unseemly meddling with Papists,” established himself as a hero to the New York Irish via his elo­ quent speeches in favor of Daniel O’Connell (1:318–19). Yet even as Gan­ sevoort allied himself with the cause of emancipating Catholic Ireland, his sister Augusta was distributing pious Protestant tracts in the hopes of con­ verting Irish immigrants in upstate New York—a homegrown mission ac­ tivity that “bemused” Herman as he wrote critically in Typee of Protestant missionaries in the South Pacific (1:364). The Melvilles had more intimate contact with the Irish servants they personally employed. In 1851, Herman hired an Irishman “plucked fresh off the boat” as a hand at the family’s Massachusetts farmhouse Arrowhead, and the extended family employed a number of live-in Irish servants—all female—at their New York City resi­ dences between 1850 and 1855 (1:869; 2:197–99). At Arrowhead, which was then Melville’s own primary residence, “so many of the Catholic cooks had the same name that ‘Mary’ became the generic term, and the family invested progressively less effort in getting to know the servants as indi­ viduals, since they tended to disappear abruptly” (2:199). Melville’s ten­ dency in the 1850s to gender Catholicism as female must in part have re­ flected his ongoing awareness of the lives of these women, who were a direct source of concern to the women in his own family. As late as 1863, Augusta and Melville’s wife Lizzie complained mildly about their servant women’s desire for proximity to Catholic churches; and in order to console a troubled “Mary,” Augusta had to place an advertisement in the New York Herald seeking news of her recently immigrated brother, who had arrived in New York City in the wake of the draft riots only to mysteriously disap­ pear (2:542). Those riots, in which Irish immigrants set themselves against free Af­ rican Americans, might be seen as exemplifying the Irish bid to become officially white, to position themselves closer to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant mainstream that nativists feared they would taint.20 In Melville’s antebel­ lum United States they remained separate from that mainstream, deemed racially inferior as Celts even as they were linked by their religious practice to the Latin worlds of the Mediterranean and the southerly Americas alike. The decision during the war of 1846–48 of some Irish soldiers, the San Patricio Battalion, to desert the U.S. Army and join the Mexican cause cer­ tainly captured the imagination of nativists, and perhaps of Melville as

Melville’s “Monkish Fables” 75

well.21 In Benito Cereno, the author—recalling a Liverpool statue of Lord Nelson standing over chained prisoners—conflated Irish emigrants with the African slaves who had been a major part of the Liverpool trade earlier in the nineteenth century, so surely he might associate the Catholic Irish with Catholic Mexico.22 Events of his day conspired to make him do so. His brother-in-law, on attending a “great Democratic war meeting in Tam­ many Hall” in January 1848, reported hearing a voice from the crowd cry out: “If England attempts to annex Mexico, we shall annex Ireland to be even with her!” (1:581). That voice bears witness to the fact that Melville saw Catholic peoples in defeat on both sides of the Atlantic, whether at the hands of the dominant English or the rising Americans whose endorsement of racial Anglo-Saxonism was evolving in relation to earlier Puritan the­ ology as well as nineteenth-century science.23 Melville always tended to identify with the defeated and the outcast, regardless of creed—hence he could complain in 1850 that his unappre­ ciated Mardi had been “driven forth like a wild, mystic Mormon into shelterless exile.”24 Yet in comparison with Mormons and the Pacific is­ landers whom Melville wrote of sympathetically in the 1840s, Catholics seemed to many Anglo-Americans to represent a numerically larger future threat as well as a nagging reminder of their own pre-Reformation past, a past they sought to fully escape. The intensity of such anxieties was pre­ sented to Melville personally in the form of outraged reviews of Typee and Omoo by Protestant periodicals. Both books reflected his experience of life among Polynesians in the early 1840s. Not only did Melville, the review­ ers observed, openly criticize Protestant missionaries in the first book, he let Catholic clergy off all too easily in the second. While he did present Catholic clergy as “lustful and winebibing” in Omoo, his ongoing portrayal of Protestant missionaries as “bigoted sectarians” and “political meddlers” seemed far more hostile to most evangelical Protestant reviewers.25 Melville, therefore, became inclined to identify with Catholics because they and he now had something in common: they were both favorite tar­ gets of the evangelical Protestant press. By November 1850, the negative reviews of Typee and Omoo had reached such a state that Melville’s friend Evert A. Duyckinck—an Episcopalian—felt compelled to respond directly to a particularly savage attack on Melville by a British Protestant periodi­ cal. In New York’s Literary World, Duyckinck forthrightly defended Mel­ ville against a transatlantic “anti-popery mania” that had gone so far as to

76  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

depict the author as a “Jesuit in disguise, bent on the destruction of Protes­ tantism in the Islands”—much as publications such as the American Protestant Vindicator were warning that Irish Jesuits had infiltrated the United States with the intent of placing the nation under Vatican control.26 In the midst of such paranoid speculation, Melville, roundly “persecuted by re­ viewers belonging to American Protestant sects” and repeatedly accused of Catholic sympathies, began to see himself “as suffering at the hands of a speech-suppressing modern Inquisition” that had its cultural roots in Pu­ ritan New England rather than Spain or Rome.27 By the early 1850s, too, Melville was no longer the carefree and newly prosperous bachelor he had been on publication of Typee. He was married, a father to two boys by 1851, to a girl in 1853 and another in 1855. Yet even as his family and financial pressures grew, his book sales declined: he saw Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852) largely ignored by the reading public. While the first novel re-created the all-male shipboard life now so far behind him, Pierre reflected his own increased perception of his identity within family. Melville’s short fiction of the 1850s, written for magazines out of pressing financial need, must be read with these new circumstances in mind. His perceived domestic captivity—surrounded at home by his children and ever-pregnant wife along with the Irish “Marys”—inevitably informed his imagination, now bachelor no longer, even as he sought new ways to please a reading public he had come to disdain. Increasingly alien­ ated from and angry with his audience, he wanted both to publish his fic­ tion and to subtly criticize the readers who bought it. In writing a new Gothic fiction he would do both, and Catholicism provided a powerful nexus of images and associations that he would draw on in doing so. It would be overly simplistic to call Melville’s interest in the Gothic solely a function of his desire to reach a broad audience (one accustomed to consuming more overtly anti-Catholic forms of discourse as well).28 But surely the genre seemed a likely one for popular success. Pierre (1852) had followed early U.S. Gothic patterns in its depiction of an accursed family akin to those readers had previously encountered in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. Melville was familiar not only with these but also with foundational English Gothic texts: he owned and read Horace Wal­ pole’s The Castle of Otranto after 1849; references in his work from the

Melville’s “Monkish Fables” 77

­ id-1850s on clearly indicate his reading of the fiction of Ann Radcliffe; m and some early critics, at least, suggest his familiarity with Matthew Lewis’s The Monk.29 As detailed in my introduction, these are the very works that chart in early modern Britain “the death of the old world of Catholicism, communalism, feudalism, and the rise in its place of the Protestant subject, individual, modern, secular,” and “capitalist.”30 The earliest English Gothic novels place this triumphant “Protestant subject”—or, better, modern ­subject—against a Catholicism associated with the past, but they do not merely celebrate his triumph. For “the Gothic” itself is finally not ideo­ logically stable; it deploys “a series of ambivalent gestures, of contradictory poses.”31 Specifically, “the Gothic does not attempt to resurrect the old [i.e., pre-modern and Catholic] order by reinvesting it with an invincible super­ natural aura, nor does it attempt to lay it bare as an imposture; but, like Walpole in his prefaces to Otranto, it appears to do both at the same time.” Such observations regarding narrative imposture, religion, and the rise of the nation-­state in Britain in fact apply directly to Melville’s own fictions of United States and the Americas. So too does the fact that in early nineteenth-­century Gothic fiction “what come into focus as objects of pos­ sible supernaturalization are the bodies” that modern ideologies “most keenly contest,” including those of women, “Catholic revenants,” and blacks.32 Such bodies threaten the modern subject, figured as middle- to upper-class, white, and male precisely because in this milieu it is the middle-­­class white male who seems most unhindered by embodiment and therefore best representative of “Enlightenment beliefs in the self as uni­ tary, reasonable, and located somewhere above and beyond the body.”33 In Gothic fiction, however, such models of an ostensibly desirable individual autonomy are ultimately confronted with the complete breakdown of di­ chotomies, with an intermingling between seemingly opposed states of being—past and present, black and white, male and female—that horrifies the modern mind. Such Gothic complexity in Melville’s work is unquestionably a func­ tion of the author’s American milieu. Citizens of his young United States had not only inherited English desires to exorcise the medieval European past but also, due to immigration patterns, developed pronounced anxi­ eties about a possible Catholic future; furthermore, they were confronted with a distinctly American Catholic past and present to their south in the

78  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

former Spanish colonies. U.S. Protestants had even tended to view the original inhabitants of the Americas, with their pre-modern priesthoods and rituals, as quasi-Catholic. “Puritan and later Protestant captivity nar­ ratives” had strangely resembled Gothic texts as they posited a “demonic” kinship between “the Catholic European and the American Indian.”34 This perceived kinship was subtly encoded for generations in the New England Primer, a vital educational tool in the young republic that in its many edi­ tions “indexes the susceptibility of later eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century white Protestants . . . to the parts of the Puritan narrative that could stand unrevised in subsequent projects of nation building.”35 The New England Primer taught children to be literate adult citizens—good readers of black and white texts—in part by associating “Indianness” both with a depraved illiteracy and with “the Catholic ‘Man of Sin,’” a figure of the pope as an Antichrist who is characterized by an “unwieldy physicality,” a gross em­­ bodi­ment and carnality.36 The roots of this approach to forming U.S. citi­ zens ultimately lay in a Puritan New England in which both “Indians and Catholics” (specifically, French Canadians) were viewed as threats to be continually pushed back into fading borderlands, to the edges of “an ex­ panding Anglo-Protestantism’s receding American frontiers.”37 Such frontiers were also associated with a natural world perceived as disorderly and threatening. In its desire to eliminate that world, to achieve an “adult” intellectual detachment from and mastery over nature, a Protestant-­cum-Enlightenment modernity is related to an early nineteenth-­ century U.S. tendency to associate masculinity with self-control and an ­accompanying “fear of the feminine” manifest in U.S. Gothic fiction.38 The feminine is feared and resented in part because it is associated with the limitations of the body. It is above all the mother’s body that reminds the willfully autonomous individual that it did not create itself—and re­ mains radically dependent on a larger natural world. This view corresponds in part to Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection with regard to the Gothic.39 It can be extended to encompass the autonomous individual’s desire to re­ ject not only the mother but also the “Catholic Other,” the Church (or, better, the medieval Christendom) that did not quite give birth to but in some sense nurtured the modern nation-state, which in England and the United States definitively rejected it.40 Melville’s association of Catholicism and the feminine in his fiction, then, was shaped by such patterns in earlier

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Gothic literature as well as by his family’s female servants—and perhaps by his increased awareness of devotional practices among such Catholic im­ migrants, including devotion to the Virgin Mary, the Sacred Heart, and “the suffering Jesus, the Jesus of the Passion rather than Jesus the teacher or the Risen Lord.”41 Melville’s fiction of the 1850s most obviously employs Catholic imag­ ery and characters to speak to his Anglo-American audience’s immediate fears and prejudices regarding nationality and race as well as religion. More profoundly, however, Catholicism here serves to evoke deeper human fears and at times pathos regarding the travails of embodiment and the inevita­ bility of moral shortcoming, defeat, suffering, and death. On one level, then, Melville’s Catholic or quasi-Catholic characters simply experience what the historical human community—not only designated “others” such as women, nonwhites, and the lower classes—has always experienced. But the fictions considered here also point obliquely, as Letters from an American Farmer does, to the folly of both U.S. hopes for avoiding such experience and the dichotomizing thought that underlies those hopes: that is, they critique the notion of U.S. exceptionalism as they play on fears of the col­ lapse of utopian borders that would seal the nation from a corruption as­ sociated with Catholicism. Benito Cereno and “The Bell-Tower” most ob­ viously demonstrate this thesis, as they portray the failings of seemingly Catholic characters and cultures only in order to anticipate the catastrophe awaiting the slaveholding United States; these stories thereby undermine the assumptions of an Anglo-Protestant culture which—in part by its ­“inculcation of evolutionary outlooks and other forms of ‘new science’”— had begun “to refashion its millennialist drives under the new rubric of ‘progress’ as it charted a new course or at least found new channels for its dream of American religious empire.’”42 Yet even earlier in Melville’s o­ euvre Catholics cast a troubling shadow across this seemingly bright vista. In “The Town-Ho’s Story” at the heart of Moby-Dick, in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” and in “The Encantadas” the author suggests to his U.S. readers that they are bound more closely to the Catho­ lics of Europe and the Americas than they yet realize, and that acceptance of the inevitability of moral ambiguity and worldly defeat—here portrayed as Catholic and catholic all at once—is both more humane and more in­ escapably human than is the triumphalist vision of their own culture.

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MONKISH FABLES: READING THE FICTION

The complex images of Catholicism so prominent in Melville’s short fic­ tions of the 1850s are subtly prefigured in Moby-Dick (1851). In two early chapters, Melville briefly but powerfully deploys conventional Gothic as­ sociations of Catholicism with potent evil as well as prevailing U.S. asso­ ciations of Catholicism with paganism. In “The Ship,” the Pequod is intro­ duced as at once a bone-laden “cannibal of a craft” and a structure out of the medieval past: “her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne,” and her “ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flagstone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled” (MD 69).43 In “The Quarter-Deck” Ahab, dramatically an­ nouncing his plan to hunt the white whale, plays the role of “Pope” to Queegueg, Tashtego, and Daggoo, whom he deems his “sweet cardinals” even as he performs a parody of a Catholic Mass complete with “murder­ ous chalices” (142). Ahab, here pope and pagan at once, is thus introduced in a tradition of Gothic villainy immediately recognizable to Melville’s contemporary readers. Fewer, perhaps, were prepared for the chapter “Fast Fish and Loose Fish,” wherein the narrator Ishmael subversively reflects on those who con­ trol “property” in Western culture. His satirical commentary on “the Arch­ bishop of Savesoul’s income of £100,000, seized from . . . hundreds of thousands of broken-back laborers (all sure of heaven without any ­Savesoul’s help)” (310) surely seemed to U.S. readers comfortably anti-­hierarchical and anti-European, if not necessarily anti-Catholic; his depiction of Anglo-­ American males claiming women and slaves as their own “Fast-Fish,” how­ ever, provided a more unsettling meditation on U.S. domestic politics in 1851. Ishmael’s suggestion that the United States increasingly resembles imperial England on the international front is similarly unsettling. “What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish?” Ishmael asks rhetorically; and “What at last will Mexico be to the United States?” but a fish to be harpooned and made fast to the U.S. ship of state? In Ishmael’s mid-nineteenth-century Atlantic world, the dominant “har­ pooneers” are Protestant, and the Fast-Fish often Catholic—though such has not always been the case. “What was America in 1492,” he asks, “but

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a Loose-Fish in which Columbus stuck the royal standard by way of waif­ ing it for his royal master and mistress?” (309–10). The difference between those who employed Columbus and those who live in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, as Melville imagines it, is that the Spanish and their descendants recognize that they are not in­ nocent. His own countrymen do not. The chapter “The Town-Ho’s Story,” placed at the center of Moby-Dick, is both framed and profoundly in­ formed by such juxtaposition of a self-professedly guilty Catholic Latin America with a self-professedly innocent Protestant United States. The chapter is central to the plot in that it contains the first actual report of the white whale at sea, a report from the ship Town-Ho that had been delivered in some form to Ahab; yet its more complex telling by Ishmael actually takes place after the larger story of the Pequod has ended.44 Here Ishmael presents himself—having survived Ahab’s madness—as an honorary Peru­ vian, lounging in Lima one “saint’s eve” with a group of Spanish compan­ ions. The tale he tells them regarding the ship Town-Ho is not the one that had been known to Ahab, the white New England captain, but instead one informed by a “darker thread,” a narrative thread originally confided “with Romish injunctions of secrecy” by three Spanish-speaking seamen to the Native American harpooner Tashtego (200).45 Ishmael’s own thirdhand tale, then, is a figuratively miscegenated one, and it is a “Romish” one, which he tells to a Peruvian audience that is ever-mindful of passing friars. It concludes with a rather ambiguous oath sworn on a “Holy Book” held by a “venerable priest”: the story of the Town-Ho’s rebellious sailor Steelkilt, authoritarian mate Radney, and a white whale who seems at once Jehovah-­like and demonic, is, Ishmael asserts, true “in its substance and its great items” if not in every literal detail (214). Here, then, Catholicism is associated both with racial and ethnic ambiguity and with the sort of ­ambiguous truth that Ahab himself—finally neither pope nor pagan but ­instead a nightmare version of the willfully autonomous self—finds dis­ tasteful.46 Ironically, however, it is not Ahab but Ishmael’s Catholic audi­ ence that articulates the straightforwardly dichotomous view of the West­ ern Hemisphere and the larger world preferred by Anglo-Americans: one of Ishmael’s Peruvian listeners (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) observes that denizens of “corrupt,” “dull, warm, most lazy and hereditary” Lima have tended to believe that in the “vigorous” North “the generations were cold

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and holy as the hills.” Yet what Ishmael’s narrative regarding the Town-Ho ultimately reveals to his audience is not that the United States is an excep­ tionally virtuous city on a hill but rather that no such exception can exist, for the entire world’s one Lima, as “corrupt as Lima.” Indeed, the world is perhaps most corrupt in the “holy” hills to the north, in the country of the Puritans, Ishmael asserts—for “sinners, gentlemen, most abound in holiest vicinities” (205–6).47 The paradoxical truth of this final assertion is supported by reference to the example of Venice as well as Lima: Italy’s “holy city of the blessed evangelist, St. Mark,” one of Ishmael’s listeners observes, has “churches more plentiful than billiard-tables,” yet is as “corrupt as Lima.” Both the Peruvian and the Italian Catholic cities were “associated in Melville’s mind” as locales “of super-subtle personal psychology, sexual deception, dangerous pushing of religious limits, and haunting, decaying architectural beauty.”48 Yet the dark narratives of Venice and Lima are here conflated with that of the young and presumably pure nation that gave birth to Steelkilt, a naïvely violent frontiersman turned seaman. The tale told in Lima depicts the Erie Canal on which Steelkilt began his nautical career as “one con­ tinual stream of Venetianly corrupt and often lawless life” running across New York to the Great Lakes—lakes “flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies” and harbor both “wild Afric beasts of prey” and “wild barbar­ ians, whose painted red faces flash from out their peltry wigwams” (205, 201). Melville here paints a Gothic vision of the supposedly unspoiled United States as tainted both by the moral corruption more typically as­ sociated with the two Catholic cities and by bodily corruption—that is, by death itself, the horrific death mandated by a violent natural order that sets animals and human beings alike at war with one another. “The TownHo’s Story” thereby undermines belief in U.S. exceptionalism and supports the novel’s larger critique of both the notion of Manifest Destiny and the modern Anglo-American ethos of masculine self-reliance: Ahab’s mono­ maniacal insistence that justice be carried out in accordance with his own self-­righteous moral vision and that his own bodily limitations be over­ come ultimately reflects a larger culture shaped by a fading Reformation belief in a Calvinist God and a rising Enlightenment belief that humans can and should use reason to dissect and dominate nature, a nature already being viewed in proto-Darwinian terms.

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So while the chapters “The Ship” and “The Quarter-Deck” seem to present Catholicism in fairly conventional Gothic terms, albeit with a mul­ tiracial twist appropriate to the Americas, “Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish” and “The Town-Ho’s Story” revise that presentation and begin to establish the pattern of Melville’s short fictions of the mid-1850s. There, Melville’s as­ sociation of a feminized and figuratively miscegenated Catholicism with defeat and with narrative ambiguity—with the unwritten or the unheard story—and his use of Catholic imagery to highlight human susceptibility to moral and bodily corruption are further deepened and tied to his devel­ oping critique of U.S. nationalism. “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” clearly mani­ fests this pattern. The diptych begins with the U.S. narrator’s account of his introduction to a group of comfortable Englishmen who—despite their superficially “monastic” surroundings—clearly exemplify the character­ istics of the modern self that asserts and enjoys its own autonomy. These faux-Templar bachelors who dwell near London’s Temple Bar are “entirely secularized,” the antithesis of long-dead medieval “monk-knights” who once knelt before the “consecrated Host.”49 They are capitalist foils of the “monk-giver of gratuitous ghostly counsel” whom the narrator imagines out of the feudal past: these modern bachelors provide only legal counsel, and only “for a fee.” In the opening paragraphs the narrator initially implies his preference for the Catholic past over the secular present, yet he also in­ tuits their essential continuity: the “worm of luxury,” he posits, corrupted the original Templars so “that a moral blight tainted at last this sacred Brotherhood” and “the sworn knights-bachelors grew to be but hypocrites and rakes” (PBTM 317). Such reflections on “sad history” and past sins are soon banished, however, as the narrator begins to joyfully recount his ex­ perience in the dwelling place of the present bachelors (318). In London, of all places, the American finds not grim Gothic tableaux but a surprising semblance of “Eden’s primal garden,” a place where “all sorts of pleasant stories”—and only pleasant stories—are told, where “comfort” is readily available (318, 321, 322). Melville’s readers might well expect the New World to be the appropriate site for such a paradise, but the author ulti­ mately makes clear here that only the leisure afforded to the mind of privi­ leged Anglo-Protestant men allows illusions of return to a prelapsarian state to exist in the first place.

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Despite their indulgence in the pleasures of the palate, these bache­ lors do largely live the life of the mind, steadfastly avoiding both physical labor and the female body: “these easy-hearted men had no wives or chil­ dren to give an anxious thought” (322). They are likewise liberated from supernatural and morbid meditations of the sort favored by the Knights Templar. Medieval men presumably felt the need for “Catholic miracles” due to their own experience of overwhelming “Pain!” or “Trouble!”; these modern bachelors, lacking the latter, have no interest in the former, view­ ing both as mere “monkish fables.” Recalling the complacent bliss of the bachelors moves the narrator to sing, “Carry me back to old Virginny!” (319). The reference is fitting, for the supreme rationalism of these mod­ ern English gentlemen—their essential optimism regarding the mind’s po­ tential once liberated from the past—calls to mind not so much the Puri­ tans as Thomas Jefferson. In his secular vision of virgin America, Jefferson saw himself as “arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves” and to achieve proper self-government via the “unbounded exercise of reason” in rebellion against the tyrannical British Empire.50 Melville, by contrast, is more interested in fundamental continuities between the dominant cul­ tures of England and the United States. In the first half of this diptych, Melville’s narrator presents the reader only with a vision of a pastoral post-Protestant paradise experienced by privileged Anglo-American males. For Jefferson, the United States could remain such only by avoiding manufacturing; this is the reason he would be appalled to encounter the second half of the diptych, “The Tartarus of Maids.” This nightmarish vision of New England opens with Gothic im­ agery that Melville’s readers would have wished to associate with preindus­ trial Europe: an isolated paper mill in which young women labor here ap­ pears as a “great whited sepulcher,” located in a hollow called “the Devil’s Dungeon” that is marked by the ruins of an overlooking sawmill with “a sort of feudal, Rhineland, and Thurmberg look.” As the narrator enters this hollow only after passing through a “Dantean gateway,” the setting is fur­ ther marked as being akin to the underworld as imagined in medieval Italy. This American hell, then, is somehow figured as Catholic, though like Dante’s it is simultaneously pagan—“Plutonian,” a “Tartarus” (324). Fur­ thermore, it is insistently associated with the female body through an

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elaborate allegory.51 Melville’s tale of laboring New England maids accord­ ingly unfolds as a monkish fable of everything the London bachelors and the Anglo-American imagination seeks to deny, rendering ambiguous—if not downright false—all that which the narrator seemed to experience in his English paradise. Just as “The Paradise of Bachelors” in part reflects Melville’s recollec­ tion of his 1849 visit to a gentlemen’s club in London, “The Tartarus of Maids” reimagines his 1851 visit to a paper mill in western Massachusetts (HM 1:685, 810). It is highly probable that the women he saw working at that mill were Catholic: “by the 1840s the initial wave of white Protestant operatives” in New England manufacturing centers “was already being re­ placed by a new generation of ethnic immigrant workers,” primarily im­ poverished women from Ireland and Quebec.52 That the women in Mel­ ville’s diptych are Catholic is suggested by the fact that their horrific mill and lodgings strangely resemble the bachelors’ “Temple Church amidst the surrounding houses and dormitories,” but with the crucial difference that the maids have eyes “supernatural” with “misery” as they labor in what amounts to a bizarre American convent (PBTM 326–27). In describing them the narrator is finally moved to invoke what his bachelor companions would deem Catholic superstition: the women resemble Christ in their “agony,” itself “dimly outlined” on the paper they produce “like the print of the tormented face on the handkerchief of Saint Veronica” (334). The blank paper here signifies the unwritten story underlying the pleasant tales favored by the bachelors: they benefit from the same trans­ atlantic economy that exploits the maids, made clear here via the presence of their shirts at the mill (330). This fact renders the diptych, viewed as a whole, disturbingly ambiguous. The maids’ half of the story is and stands to remain a dark one, as suggested not only by the supernatural reference to Christ’s Passion but also by an image that connects the maids’ misery with the natural aging process: the narrator observes one maid with a “young and fair” brow standing across from another whose brow has been “ruled and wrinkled,” figuratively marked, by time (328). The Lockean view of the individual self as tabula rasa is here invoked not in celebratory fashion but with grim foreboding regarding what nature has in store for human beings. And the factory itself—serviced by “Blood River,” filled with “abdominal heat,” and churning out a new sheet of paper every nine

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minutes—ultimately presents an even grimmer image of a natural order that seems to have constructed the female reproductive system as “a mere machine, the essence of which is unvarying punctuality and precision” (332). This narrative that places its hellish mill in a remote wilderness and presents machines as “iron animals” finally derives its specifically U.S. Gothic character, then, from its dark depiction of nature—a nature that includes the human body—as well as its religious references (328). Here and elsewhere, the evil present in Melville’s fictional world arises not merely from human agency but more fundamentally from a natural order that seems diabolically arranged. That order not only pits organism against ­organism—emphasized here by the narrator’s recurrent references to his seal-skin mittens and the buffalo and wolf furs covering his sleigh—but also traps the expansive human spirit inside an inevitably limiting body (325, 327, 335). This dualistic vision is as ancient as the Manichean Gnostics but in Melville’s time was newly informed by the modern insistence, Calvinis­ tic and Darwinian all at once, on a nature radically separated from divine grace. This view is both tentatively professed and critiqued by Melville himself, most profoundly in his simultaneously sympathetic and damn­ ing depiction of Ahab’s rebellion against nature in Moby-Dick.53 In “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” his narrator is tempted to such dualistic vision insofar as he presents the women as white spirits— their paleness, like that of Melville’s scrivener Bartleby, almost ghostly—­ imprisoned by the dark “iron animal” that is the body itself, a mechanistic structure presided over here by a “dark-complexioned” man identified as “Old Bach,” a veritable Gnostic demiurge whose darkness signifies his rule over the world of matter (328). Yet ultimately the narrator cannot accept the Gnostic notion that the world of spirit or mind—the transcendent Paradise of Bachelors—is the real world. Rather, he, like Melville, posits that the figuratively miscege­ nated reality of (white) spirit trapped in (dark) body, the reality of the ­suffering maids, is the true one. While that experience is predominantly gendered as feminine here, it is universally human, as revealed in the coun­ tenance of the newly married men the narrator has described in London at the very beginning of the narrative: such men resemble the older maids, “with ledger-lines ruled along their brows, thinking upon rise of bread and fall of babies” (316). The bachelors imagine themselves exempt from such

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marking, but they too will be darkened by the ravages of time, just as their lives of seeming intellectual innocence are marked here as morally tainted in that they seek to remain willfully ignorant of the “monkish fable” of the suffering masses. While the bachelors and, initially, the U.S. narrator pro­ fess an innocent faith in an Anglo-American culture that seems to have progressed beyond the experience of “pain” and “trouble,” the dark tale of female Catholic bodies that ends the diptych reveals the narrator’s tentative awakening to the fact that suppressed others and, ultimately, all of hu­ manity remain susceptible to such experience—an experience dictated by natural forces that seem so horrific as to demand supernatural ­referents. In “The Encantadas,” also written in 1853–54, Melville again uses Catholic imagery to fuse his presentation of the natural and the super­ natural. Here he presents his most memorable “Romish” character, H ­ unilla, in another seeming underworld that—as in “The Tartarus of Maids”— conflates images of human industry with a corrupt and corrupting natural order. Melville’s Galapagos or Enchanted Isles, despite their isolation off the coast of Latin America, resemble “five and twenty cinders dumped here and there in a city lot,” perhaps even in London or New York (E 126). The Spenserian epigraphs that introduce many of the sketches that make up “The Encantadas” initially seem to evoke the allegorical and heroic vision of The Faerie Queen, wherein the Red Cross Knight must overcome the (Spanish) Catholic duplicity represented by the false Duessa in order to achieve the (English) Protestant purity and salvation represented by Una. Yet Melville, in this tale of unrelenting woe, finally rejects that vision on multiple levels.54 “In no world but a fallen one could such lands” as the En­ cantadas “exist,” the narrator announces in Sketch First, seeming to echo the Calvinist doctrine familiar to Melville’s readers. By Sketch Second, however, his vision has ventured beyond the pale of Christian orthodoxy, meditating in Gnostic fashion on a natural order so horrific that only “a penal, or malignant, or downright diabolical enchanter” could have created it (127, 132). The grim Galapagos tortoise, which strangely calls to mind a shambling memento mori as well as a spectral “Roman Coliseum,” pro­ vides the immediate occasion for this reflection—one that employs Gothic convention in its dark evocation of the European past yet nonetheless, the narrator reports, continues to haunt him in the Adirondacks and at “revels held by candle-light in old-fashioned mansions” nearby (129, 131). Just as there are indeed “Two Sides to a Tortoise” which reflect one reality that is

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both “bright” and “dark,” so the seemingly bright United States and the dark Encantadas are in fact one America, and the New World at one with the Old (130). Melville most profoundly communicates this ambiguous truth via images of Catholicism, the faith that both is and emphatically is not the progressive Christianity of the United States. Where the Galapagos tortoise resembles both a memento of Catholic Europe and the Coliseum of pagan-cum-Catholic Rome, Rock Rodondo of Sketch Third—prefiguring the strangely monastic Spanish ship San Dominick of Benito Cereno as well as the central structure of “The BellTower”—resembles Venice’s “famous Campanile or detached Bell Tower of St. Mark” (134). Here the natural and the Catholic supernatural are again conflated, as the “ghostly” rock resembles an “abbey” where birds raise a “demoniac din” yet later “celebrate their matins,” evil and holy all at once (134, 136). A Catholic ambiguity is the dominant characteristic of nature here: pelicans appear as “sea Friars of Orders Gray,” and the “gray alba­ tross,” too, is neither black nor white, just as the penguin is “neither fish, flesh, nor fowl” and therefore, “as an edible, pertaining neither to Carnival nor Lent; without exception the most ambiguous and least lovely creature yet discovered by man” (135). There are nonetheless a few seeming in­ stances of unqualified beauty in this world, as seen in one “snow-white an­ gelic” bird and in the “fairy fish” that swim beneath Rock Rodondo (136). So there are two sides to this scene as well, though Melville ends with his typical emphasis on the dark so as to unsettle an Anglo-American audience accustomed to the bright. The generally isolated fish around the rock im­ mediately rush to the hooks of occasional passing fishermen, leading the narrator to exclaim: “Poor fish of Rodondo! In your victimized confidence, you are of the number of those who inconsiderately trust, while they do not understand, human nature” (136). Appropriately, then, the sketches proceed to shift from meditations on a nature that seems diabolically designed—meditations perhaps not alto­ gether inappropriate in Charles Darwin’s laboratory—to meditations on human history. Sketch Fourth through Sketch Seventh weave the putatively dark narrative of South America’s Encantadas into the putatively bright his­ torical narrative of the United States. Sketch Fourth depicts a “Pisgah” view from the Rock, an allusion to the Puritan view of New England as well as the Old Testament Canaan; here that view reveals the Encantadas as a “boundless watery Kentucky” where “Daniel Boone would have dwelt con­

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tent” (137). This blasted archipelago, then, somehow re­sembles the U.S. frontier, a resemblance developed and extended in subsequent sketches. In Sketch Fifth the U.S. warship Essex masquerades as an English warship in order to better fight the British Empire in 1813; in Sketch Sixth bucca­ neers, during respites from “the toils of piratic war” against the Spanish, come intermittently to the Encantadas “to say their prayers” and pose as “meditative philosophers, rural poets, and seat-­builders” (146). Taken to­ gether, these sketches suggest that all seeming civilization is built on vi­ olence; that a U.S. warship is little different from a British imperial one, or a pirate ship looting the Spanish; and that the United States itself has been the home of outlaws and the site of horrors such as those character­ istic of the Encantadas. While the assertion of this complex truth—as op­ posed to the simple one that the United States is the bright exception to the general darkness of human history—might seem to reflect a “superstitious conceit” such as that deemed characteristic of the Spanish here, the nar­ rative as a whole does indeed suggest that the Encantadas and the United States are simply two sides to one American tortoise (138). Sketch Seventh initially seems to complicate this claim. Its depiction of a Latin American monarch might well seem to confirm U.S. biases re­ garding the Spanish: the Creole “Dog-King” of Charles’s Isle is straight­ forwardly presented as a savage tyrant who seems to derive pleasure from tormenting his subjects, and his overthrow by rebellious subjects at least initially seems to confirm U.S. democratic principles. But Sketch Ninth, with its depiction of Oberlus—whose “fiery red” hair suggests his origins in northern Europe—ultimately provides a mirror image of the Latin Ameri­ can king’s qualities in a plausibly Anglo-American frame. This “wild white creature” brings “into this savage region qualities more diabolical than are to be found among any of the surrounding cannibals” (162–63). Ober­ lus’s enslavement of other human beings—beginning with a “negro”—­ manifests a clear “delight in tyranny and cruelty” that goes so far as to make the D ­ og-King’s seem, by comparison, to be “in some degree influenced by not unworthy motives” (164–65). “The Encantadas” as a whole, then, does not promote the Black Legend of Spanish cruelty and Anglo-American ­innocence; rather, the Oberlus sketch presents “an allegorical history of slavery in the New World” that is finally directed at U.S. proslavery ­apologists.55 Yet such political critique is bound up with larger questions. The misanthropic Anglo-American slave master Oberlus, p ­ resented in

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more intimate detail than the Dog-King, finally seems the nearer avatar of the “penal, or malignant, or downright diabolical enchanter” who has de­ signed the Encantadas and the natural order itself—a figure deeply akin to Old Bach, and to Ahab, who finally comes to resemble what he sees and hates in the form of the whale (132). That pale transcending enchanter who rules the dark world of matter is finally the primary antagonist of “The Encantadas,” and its central pro­ tagonist is Hunilla. This Catholic woman, whose story is placed between that of Oberlus and the Dog-King, occupies for a brief moment at the be­ ginning of Sketch Eighth something like the elevated and seemingly bodi­ less perspective that Melville’s slavers, London bachelors, and Ahab alike strive to attain—with the crucial difference that she is not radically indi­ vidualistic, as they are, but instead bound by love to others. From a “lofty cliff ” she looks down through tree limbs, as through “an oval frame,” on her brother and husband at sea; but this pleasing aesthetic distance is ir­ revocably destroyed as “the invisible painter,” that malignant enchanter who rules nature here, destroys her family before her eyes (154). Hunilla cannot deny her own embodiment as she buries the drowned body of her husband and searches endlessly for that of her brother: “the strong per­ suasions of her Romish faith” compel her to attend to their corpses and, therefore, remind her of her inevitable place in the natural order (155). It is not in transcending the body, then, but rather in experiencing its limitations that this mixed-race woman—who would have seemed to Spenser a corrupt Catholic Duessa rather than a pure Protestant Una—­ becomes Melville’s tragic heroine. “The Encantadas” thereby becomes a narrative wherein there is no triumphant Red Cross Knight; there is only Hunilla and the crucifix she holds “like an ancient graven knocker long plied in vain” over her husband’s buried remains (161). For Melville, it is precisely in her unanswered prayers to the “Holy Virgin” and presumably to Christ, as in her grief at once “Spanish” and “Indian,” that Hunilla be­ comes exemplary (156, 161). Melville does not mock Christian faith or “confidence” here, as he often does in the 1850s. He does not mock ­Hunilla’s “Romish faith,” that is, precisely because it is so clearly defeated and seemingly unworthy of confidence: “Humanity, thou strong thing,” the narrator exclaims, “I worship thee, not in the laureled victor, but in this vanquished one,” in Hunilla and the vanquished peoples whose fate she embodies (157).

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Like the tortoise of Sketch Second, Hunilla becomes a walking memento mori largely due to—not despite—the fact that her story cannot be fully told. In the same manner her sketch portrays human nature itself ­ambiguously, juxtaposing the sailors who sympathetically rescue her with those who presumably raped her. She exemplifies a “victimized confidence” in human nature just as the fish at Rodondo do, sure as both are victims of the larger natural order that killed her brother and husband and that will ultimately kill her. Though she escapes the prison of the Encantadas at the end of Sketch Eighth, she cannot escape the body, the inevitable suffering and death mandated by nature—here represented in the ass with “armorial cross” on which she finally rides home, like Christ on Palm Sunday, seem­ ingly already crucified but with yet more pain ahead (162). Even the figuratively Anglo-American Oberlus—try Ahab-like though he does to attain the masterful elevation of the modern subject, lording it over a band of amoral “ranging Cow-Boys of the sea” on his island ­frontier—will be subject to a similar fate. Imprisoned in Payta at the end of Sketch Ninth, he too remains subject to the larger natural order that in­ evitably sets organisms against one another and ultimately mandates death for all, as Sketch Tenth reminds the reader with its bloody depiction of man against seal. So too, the narrative concludes, the monkish fable of the Encantadas will finally encompass Payta and the Americas at large along with the Old World: “It is but fit that like those old monastic institutions of Europe, whose inmates go not out of their own halls to be inurned, but are entombed there where they die; the Encantadas too should bury their own dead, even as the great general monastery of earth does hers” (172). That “Potter’s Field” which is earth—itself explicitly associated with a “monkish” Catholicism here—inevitably unites the living with the dead, white with black, male with female, those deemed good with those deemed evil. And, Melville tells his comfortable Anglo-American reader, you your­ self will not escape it.

CONCLUSION: A FALL IN THE AMERICAS

For all his craft, Melville had little confidence that the majority of his au­ dience would heed—or even fully grasp—his message. This is made clear in Benito Cereno, which, like “The Bell-Tower,” appeared in 1855 and

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hardly needs explication as a “monkish fable.” The story (or novella, as it is sometimes classified) has received a wealth of commentary and marks the clear culmination of the Gothic patterns identified in the texts discussed above.56 Set aboard a seemingly haunted Spanish slave ship off the coast of Latin America, a ship that strangely resembles both a seductive Peruvian woman and “a monastery in the Pyrenees,” Benito Cereno features a U.S. sea captain who boards the apparently disabled Spanish vessel in a gesture of seemingly innocent goodwill (BC 48). Consistently identified as “the American,” this New Englander is insistently white (in opposition to the African slaves); insistently male (his ship is named the Bachelor’s Delight); insistently rational (in opposition to the apparently superstitious Spanish captain Cereno); and essentially secular, indulging in occasional vague sen­ timents that “some one above” watches over him, but generally trusting in his own abilities (77).57 He is insistently self-reliant both in this sense and in that he is a proud democrat, a self-made man who on this maritime frontier has earned his captain’s rank—unlike Cereno, who presumably in­ herited it. Indeed, the Spaniard, while not as obviously alien as the Afri­ cans, differs from the U.S. captain in every respect: he is neither black nor white but suspiciously off-white, with “yellow” hands and a “dark” coun­ tenance; he is male but effeminate, wearing an empty scabbard rather than a sword; he and his crew appear as cravenly superstitious and submissively religious, mouthing prayers of supplication to the Blessed Virgin. Further­ more, Cereno—in contrast to the U.S. captain, whose physical frame, like his technology, seems to serve him primarily as an effective weapon—is disturbingly embodied: his cadaverous appearance throughout the narra­ tive suggests that he is a kind of zombie, at once living and dead. This as­ pect of the Spaniard’s appearance not only stresses his embodiment as a form of limiting enclosure but also befits his ultimate sense that the past is always present. These motifs of enclosure and of haunting culminate in the narrative’s final image of Cereno, dead inside a Peruvian monastery where he has retreated to meditate on the trauma occasioned by his own history of complicity in the slave trade. By contrast, the U.S. captain—who has himself ultimately, violently, put down a slave rebellion aboard the ­Spaniard’s ship—walks away blithely convinced of his own innocence and, furthermore, that “the past is passed; why moralize upon it?” (116). Benito Cereno, then, is a Gothic fiction not only in its horrific action and quasi-medieval setting—the slaves themselves initially seem to re­

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semble “black monks,” and the perennial specter of the Inquisition haunts the U.S. captain’s mind—but also in its forthright concern with ambiguous histories (49). The American here has faith in a “Providence” that he con­ ceives of in only the most general terms, being primarily convinced that it definitively protects him (97). His accompanying blindness to the com­ plexities of history, moral and otherwise, make him unable to properly read his own present. The slaves have in fact taken over the ship before he even boards it, forcing the Spanish captain to act out a role designed to lead the American to his doom. The American, however, cannot see this because of his aforementioned characteristics—more specifically manifested here both in his racial biases and in his tendency to believe in the goodness of human nature, which together have blinded him to the fact that the institution of slavery is evil. After the main action is complete and the American’s crew has captured the slaves by force, excerpts from official Spanish documents written to condemn the rebellious slaves are inserted into the text, only to be subtly called into question by the omniscient narrator (i.e., Melville)— just as “the American’s” self-righteous sense of his role in maintaining le­ gitimate authority in the New World here is undermined in his final con­ versation with the Spanish captain. While the thoroughly defeated Cereno has become incipiently aware that the history his own Catholic nation has tried to write in the Americas is lacking, the triumphant U.S. captain has no sense whatsoever that he and his nation are flawed—and, accordingly, emerges as the chief horror in this Gothic tale. Published at the height of the slavery crisis, yet set in the late eigh­ teenth century, the text’s larger significance is clear: here Melville breaks down national borders as he concisely considers the entire history of slav­ ery in the Americas, alluding to specific events ranging from its origins in Hispaniola and its first major defeat in Haiti to the Amistad incident and the U.S. passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. Given that by 1855 slavery had been outlawed in almost all of Latin America, and that Toussaint Louver­ ture was a devout Catholic, Melville might be read here as in part critiqu­ ing his nation’s assumption that its principles provided the best basis for a universal moral and political order, or at least that it was putting those principles into practice.58 The text’s repeated monastic imagery and pre­ sumable allusions to Bartolomé de Las Casas—the Dominican credited both with first advocating the importation of African slaves to the New

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World and with later becoming the first outspoken opponent of slavery in the Americas—do not simplistically suggest that the Latin Catholic South has been morally superior to the Anglo-American North. Rather, Benito Cereno as a whole conveys the need for the United States to recognize its own morally ambiguous history, its kinship with Latin America, rather than trumpeting its exceptionalism. It does so via its implicit commentary on both slaveholding in the southern United States and the legacy of the Mexican-American War. The former is clear enough: early critics read the decadent aristocratic “Spaniard” as in part a stand-in for southern planters, and “the American” as a northerner complicit in capturing fugitive slaves. More interesting, however, are readings of Benito Cereno as critically re­ sponding to the mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-American desire to control a seemingly disorderly Latin America. During this period many in the United States sought to impose “democratic” authority on a region that— seemingly retrograde in its politics as well as its religion—was lacking the full benefits of Reformation-cum-Enlightenment values that ensured indi­ vidual autonomy, material prosperity, and the separation of peoples into clearly dichotomized categories such as elect or damned, progressive or re­ gressive, white or black.59 That desire was widespread enough across the nation to garner adequate popular support for the notion of Manifest Des­ tiny generally and the Mexican-American War specifically. Melville had seen his fellow citizens support that war and intuited a larger catastrophe approaching the United States in 1855, a catastrophe most of his readers wished to ignore. He feared that most of them re­ sembled his American captain, who—though complicit in the evil of slav­ ery just as Cereno has been—finally proves too resolutely naïve to be long haunted by the Spaniard’s closing meditations. Nonetheless, Melville surely hoped for a few perceptive readers who might be haunted both by Cereno’s ghostly counsel and by the story “The Bell-Tower,” which only initially seems to confirm conventional associations of Gothic horror with Ca­ tholicism. Though set in Italy, this tale of an early modern republic char­ acterized by an excessive faith in rationalism and a willful ignorance of hid­ den violence in its origins in fact reflects Melville’s vision of flaws in the U.S. founding.60 Furthermore, it reflects flaws in the potentially restrictive intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment itself. That figuratively masculine legacy is represented here in the person of a motherless foundling, a vision­

Melville’s “Monkish Fables” 95

ary architect who in the process of building a great tower to demonstrate his absolute mastery over nature almost incidentally kills a laborer. It is a legacy that had in the United States proven quite compatible with rigid ­racial categorizations—as exemplified by Jefferson’s Notes on the State of ­Virginia—and thereby condoned what Melville had by 1855 come to see as the Original Sin of the nation whose founders had hoped to leave sin behind. In “The Bell-Tower,” the architect’s hooded mechanical slave, a dark “domino” akin to the hooded Dominicans that the American captain in Benito Cereno initially envisions patrolling the decks of the San Dominick, suggests both that the U.S. sin of slavery merits monkish meditations such as those finally engaged in by Cereno and that it might occasion the cataclysmic destruction ultimately visited on the architect and the society that supports him. In “The Bell-Tower,” that destruction might seem to be warranted due to a corruption associated with Catholicism, as a priest here grants easy “absolution” to the murderous architect. It is better understood, however, as the bitter fruit of a modern program of self-interested rational­ ism, as evidenced by the crowds in the story who begin spending ancient “saints’ days” paying “homage” instead to their great architect.61 Such de­ struction, that is, might be invited by a post-Enlightenment obsession with a future in which secular masters have been freed from labor—from the body and from time—by a technology that subjugates nature and, figura­ tively, women and other races to their will (all suggested in the elaborately decorated clock inside the story’s great tower). There can be no clearer fig­ ure of the modern subject—the “new social and cultural divinity” of Anglo-­ American society—than Melville’s architect in “The Bell-Tower,” a man who is idolatrous and idolized all at once. In its final sentence, “The Bell-Tower” presents itself as a simple mo­ rality tale wherein “pride” leads to a “fall.” Yet finally it is of a piece with the other fictions discussed here in turning aside from a U.S. faith in per­ fectibility to whisper—with Romish secrecy—that the fall into sin and death comes for all. Alongside their expected Gothic association of Ca­ tholicism with corruption and doom runs a yet darker narrative thread, one meant to vex the U.S. subject who wishes to assert his own exemption from such limitations. The defeated, the humbled, and those confessedly com­ plicit in guilt might well possess some knowledge that is lacking in the proud, the victorious, and the supposedly innocent. Hence, in Melville’s

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short fictions of the 1850s, “monkish” images of Catholics suffering pain and trouble appear to haunt the newly ascendant Anglo-Americans—not only because of the currently defeated status of Catholics in the United States, the Americas, and the Western world, but also because of their catho­licity. Darkly embodying the general run of human experience across time as well as across race and gender, Melville’s Catholics cast a long shadow over the bright triumphalist dreams of the putatively pure Anglo-­ Protestant mind, a shadow that reaches from the Mediterranean across the Atlantic and into an American world that it reveals to be not so new after all. Had Melville in the 1850s been interested in or capable of offering some vision of hope for the Americas, he might have done more of what he began to attempt in “The Encantadas” with Hunilla, more to articulate without irony a “depth of sympathy” with the “suffering” of others who somehow present the face of Christ to the world—here, the face of a South American mestiza.62 Had he lived into the twentieth century, he would have found a challenge to do so in response to a woman whose life was dis­ tantly bound up with his own: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s youngest daughter Rose. Born in 1851—the same year Melville dedicated Moby-Dick to her father—Rose Hawthorne would in her middle years endure a difficult mar­ riage to an alcoholic. In 1891, the year of Melville’s death, she converted to Catholicism. Widowed in 1898, she became a Dominican nun and founded an order devoted to providing hospice care to impoverished pa­ tients with incurable cancer—having been moved to do so in part by the death of her close friend Emma Lazarus, a Jewish poet best known for writ­ ing the words of welcome to immigrants inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty in 1903. Rose Hawthorne set up her first hospice home among poor immigrants in the slums of New York City. Having taken the name Mother Mary Alphonsa for herself, she chose as patron for her new order the first Catholic saint born in the Americas: St. Rose of Lima.63 Shocking as her story would have been to her own Puritan forebears, it might well have seemed fitting to the man who had imagined Hunilla.

C H A P T E R

3

FEAR, DESIRE, AND COMMUNION I N C H O P I N ’ S O L D L A LO U I S I A N E

Kate Chopin was born in 1850 in St. Louis, Missouri, near the geo­graphical center of a United States that was newly continental in scope. At the start of this decade, the same in which Melville entered his prime, Chopin’s na­ tive city would in certain respects have looked more familiar to J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur. From the perspective of westward-bound Anglo-­ Americans, it directly bordered a wild frontier. Yet it was also part of an older America that had long been La Louisiane, French and Catholic—as Chopin knew intimately through her bilingual maternal family and her education with the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. Drawing on this heritage and her mature experience of living in her husband’s native state of Loui­ siana, she would in the 1890s find success as a writer of local color fiction. From the beginning, however, her most powerful work revealed her famili­ arity with longstanding Gothic conventions, and her final fictions are in­ dicative of her immersion in a late nineteenth-century milieu in which the Gothic had evolved significantly. In order to establish what is distinctive about that milieu, I want to briefly consider Chopin’s 1899 novel The Awakening—which I will return to at the end of this chapter—in prepara­ tion for considering her oeuvre more generally in relation to Catholicism, American borders, and the Gothic. 97

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Chopin’s native region lay at the far western edge of a transatlantic Anglo-American sphere from which “the sea of faith” seemed to be “retreat­ ing” with “a melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” So English poet Mat­ thew Arnold put it in his 1867 poem “Dover Beach,” wherein the ebbing tide of Christian belief leaves behind a disenchanted natural world that fi­ nally offers humanity no hope. Pagan Sophocles, as imagined here, had heard in the ocean only an echo of “the turbid ebb and flow of human ­misery.” Confronted anew with such a prospect in the middle years of the nineteenth century, Arnold’s isolated speaker can only plead desperately to a lover: Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. This plea powerfully prefigures the experience of Chopin’s Edna Pontellier, the protagonist of The Awakening. Edna initially undergoes a seaside awak­ ening to a world that, in the company of a prospective new lover, indeed seems a promising land of dreams. Yet that world soon enough appears no better than the darkling plain feared by Arnold’s speaker. Despite discov­ ering and beginning to cultivate her own heretofore repressed erotic de­ sires, Edna fails to find enduring self-fulfillment and comes to feel en­ trapped by a larger world in which life seems a mere power struggle. At the end of the novel, she can only return to the sea alone, and drown. The Awakening can therefore be read as the culmination of Chopin’s own “darkening meditation on the meaning of human life and love in the light of Darwinian thought.” Her engagement with late nineteenth-­century science led her to create an essentially Romantic protagonist who finds it impossible to reconcile her spiritual desires with her physical ones: under­ standing that in Charles Darwin’s new universe “love has no claim to con­ stancy, that it beats in self-assertion to the evolutionary time of sexual se­

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lection, Chopin came to feel that the human spirit had been denied its place not only in a Christian universe but also in the more limited sphere of human courtship and love.”1 Accordingly, by the end of The Awakening, Chopin’s protagonist Edna finds some essential part of herself—mind, soul, or spirit—in direct “revolt” against “Nature.”2 This is the case despite the fact that Edna had earlier intuited nature as both catalyst of and means for her liberation from social restrictions. At a pivotal point in the novel, such liberation seems rendered concrete by Edna’s experience of attending Mass at the “Gothic church of Our Lady of Lourdes,” feeling overcome there with “oppression,” and promptly exiting to spend much of the day happily outdoors with her beloved on an isolated island (560–61). Chopin, who spent the majority of her life as a practicing Catholic, was quite familiar not only with “Gothic” churches but also with convents; she wrote ambivalently of them as enclosures elsewhere in her fiction. In her final novel, however, nature itself emerges as the ultimate limiting en­ closure. A general sense of the natural world—the world known and expe­ rienced by the body—as enclosing and limiting was more pronounced in Anglophone Gothic fiction of Chopin’s time than it had been at the time of the Enlightenment. As contemporary British fictions such as Oscar ­Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) suggested, even for white males “subjectivity could no longer be lo­ cated above and beyond the body if there was no soul, and there could be no soul if there was no longer a universal belief in a supernatural religion. Men, in other words, became like women: they were feminized in their re­ duction to the merciless demands of the physical, decaying, corruptible body.” Perhaps particularly in an Anglo-Protestant context in which faith was definitively interior, once “subjectivity no longer could be positioned in a spiritual, internal, bodiless realm, then the body itself, the external and mortal ontological being, became the final gothic reality for both men and women.”3 The Awakening, then—which has received myriad feminist ­readings—was written in an era in which Gothic fiction in fact tended to convey the “feminization” of all individuals, of men and women alike who were finally not autonomous masters but rather prisoners of the body and the natural world made known to them by it. In The Awakening, as we shall see, nature appears as increasingly en­ closing and malevolent, but also at points as fundamentally mysterious, its essence seemingly unspeakable. In this regard The Awakening exemplifies

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certain patterns in fin de siècle Gothic fiction, rendering the border be­ tween “supernaturalism” and that which is knowable by “science”—that is, between the supernatural and the natural—“as permeable,” and often em­ ploying a “gothic rhetoric of the ineffable.”4 The novel bespeaks an era in which the “implications of Darwinism” were “perceived as disastrous and traumatic—one might say ‘gothic’—by the majority of the population. Gothic fiction, working in the negative register of horror, brought this sense of trauma to vivid life.”5 Due largely to Chopin’s reading of Darwin, in The Awakening “life” is finally perceived by Edna Pontellier as “a mon­ ster,” a monster made up of “brutality” as much as “beauty” (618).6 It nec­ essarily appears as such in “a society that no longer holds out the comforts that accrue from a belief in immortality” because for individuals in that society life inevitably culminates in death—and “death [itself ] becomes the ultimate gothic nightmare, the unimaginable abyss into which one de­ scends” alone.7 Edna’s final immersion in the ocean in many ways seems just such a descent. Her act of swimming into the Gulf of Mexico can, however, be read not only as despairing suicide but also as a continuing, albeit con­ fused, bid to seek some good via nature. Patterns in the narrative suggest that in entering the sea Edna seeks to reenter the womb, to reunite herself with her own long-dead mother—and perhaps even with the Mother of God.8 This last possibility might seem unlikely, given Edna’s identity as a definitively “American woman,” an Anglo-Protestant whose widowed Cal­ vinist father has taught her nothing of devotion to the Blessed Mother (525). Edna’s life among Catholic Creoles in Louisiana, however, has cru­ cially exposed her to a maternal figure who seems to her a “Madonna”—at once foreign, potentially oppressive, nurturing, and beguiling (531). This Catholic woman calls Edna to some communion that seems both alien and enticing even as the novel as a whole emphasizes Edna’s individualistic fail­ ure to achieve communion on multiple levels, including communion with women of other races. These aspects of The Awakening are finally best un­ derstood in relation to Chopin’s own experience of the Catholic Church and decades spent living, reading, and writing on the western side of the lower Mississippi River Valley, in old La Louisiane. Too many literary scholars have implicitly dismissed much of that ex­ perience, or certainly Chopin’s Catholicism, as essentially irrelevant to her

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fiction—tending to portray her as a rebellious modern individual who simply cast off her childhood faith after age thirty.9 I contend otherwise, first outlining not only what is essential and distinctive about her particular experience of Catholicism but also how Louisiana Catholicism was gener­ ally presented in nineteenth-century literature. This background is essen­ tial to understanding Chopin’s early story “Désirée’s Baby,” which clearly demonstrates her engagement with U.S. Gothic tradition and helps to ­clarify her perceptions of race as shaped by Catholicism and particularly by the legacy of La Louisiane’s St. Rose Philippine Duchesne. The depiction of motherhood at the heart of this story—and some of Chopin’s short fic­ tion for children as well—demonstrates that her interwoven concerns with race and American borders are finally not separate from her insistent con­ cern with love. That concern manifests itself with regard to not only eros but also agape, both best understood in relation to her experience of Ca­ tholicism. The depiction of an eros that points insatiably beyond the self and finally beyond the natural world is particularly evident and powerful in Chopin’s unpublished collection A Vocation and a Voice (which manifests a fin de siècle decadence consistent with the Gothic in many respects).10 Ultimately, The Awakening itself is best understood in relation to these other fictions. Read in juxtaposition with them and essential Catholic so­ cial teachings of Chopin’s day, the novel finally communicates fears and anxieties regarding not the Catholic Church but rather the fate of the iso­ lated individual in a post-Darwinian universe. The essential loneliness and final powerlessness of such individuals is only heightened in a United States in which desire for personal autonomy separates woman from woman as well as races and classes from one another. As in earlier Gothic fictions, such borders around the willfully autonomous individual in the United States are portrayed in part as existing in relation to borders between na­ tions and cultures.

REGION AND RELIGION: ST. LOUIS, LA LOUISIANE, AND THE SISTERS OF THE SACRED HEART

Chopin experienced the Catholic Church in a largely Franco-American milieu that abutted the western frontier of an ever-expanding United

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States. A native of St. Louis, she inherited a direct connection to that city’s fading identity as riverside hub of France’s greater La Louisiane, which had stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes: her mother, grand­ mother, and great-grandmother were all Creole natives of the region who taught young Kate to speak French at home. These women had lived through the early nineteenth century, in which “both upper and lower Louisiana” had been “places of cultural mixing and contestation” and there­ fore essentially “frontier[s]” or “borderlands.”11 When Chopin was born in the wake of the Mexican-American War, St. Louis, despite having been U.S. territory since 1803, had in effect just ceased being the frontier itself. In the decade before her birth the city had begun rapidly expanding and in many respects assimilating into the larger nation. Some immigrants— like Chopin’s Irish father, who died when she was only five—supplemented the city’s historically Catholic population.12 The majority of newcomers, however, were Protestants or freethinkers of various sorts. These ranged from refined New Englanders such as Unitarian minister William Green­ leaf Eliot to German radicals who had a strong distrust of organized reli­ gion in general and Catholicism in particular. One of the latter, Heinrich Boernstein, wrote an 1852 urban Gothic novel entitled The Mysteries of St. Louis in which Jesuit priests hatched nefarious plots against democracy from their base at St. Louis University, where Chopin’s brothers enrolled as students.13 Chopin was raised in a devout and essentially matriarchal Catholic home, educated at convent schools, and formed her most enduring ­friendship—lasting from age five until her death in 1904—with a school­ mate named Kitty Garesché who emulated her teachers in becoming a Sa­ cred Heart nun. The French roots of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart only accentuated Chopin’s foundational experience of Catholicism as bound up with a Francophone feminine world. Her experience of Catholicism, fur­ thermore, was of a faith that finally did not draw a rigid border between natural and supernatural, body and spirit. The essential continuity between the two was emphasized for her in part by the fact that the schools the Sis­ ters of the Sacred Heart had “established in Missouri were on the forefront of a nineteenth-century Catholic revival that transplanted certain Euro­ pean devotional practices across the Atlantic, chief among them the vener­ ation of the sacred heart.”14 Such veneration was guided by anatomically correct images of the heart and always understood in relation to the

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­ ucharist—God’s very real body and blood—as proper object of Christian E desire. Devotion to the Sacred Heart, as opposed to the “secular brain,” spoke to and demanded the whole person.15 Chopin’s experience of such devotional practices and of the Eucharist itself instilled in her a native sense of what the Church has clarified in its theology and what Catholic artists have long intuited: that eros, radical desire for something outside the self in order to complete the self, is neither exclusively a function of the body nor inherently evil. Rather, it is proper to humanity, though properly com­ plemented and guided by agape—a radically self-giving love that is not ex­ clusively a function of the soul, as it is modeled by Christ precisely in the gift of his body in the Paschal Mystery.16 For the young Chopin, to be sure, agape was no less profoundly exemplified by Mary’s gift of her body, essen­ tial to the Incarnation. As a mature writer, Chopin did not express interest in theological questions as such outside her fiction. She clearly questioned many aspects of her childhood faith as she aged, drifting away from regular Catholic practice after the deaths of her husband and mother in the early 1880s. Yet she retained a strong emotional engagement with Kitty Garesché and other women religious whom she had known since childhood. Her final major work, The Awakening, is replete with passages that call into question the relationship between body and soul, some using Platonist language, others Christian. Her own mind—much like that of James Joyce and his artist-­ figure Stephen Dedalus, who helped inaugurate literary modernism not long after The Awakening was published—clearly remained “supersatu­ rated” with the religion that she apparently no longer practiced.17 Elements of and allusions to Christianity fill her short fiction as well as her two ­novels. “Of her ninety-six stories, she set five at Christmas and four at ­Easter, and religious diction suffuses” all of her work: “awakening, rapture, ecstasy, transfiguration, miracles, Christ, the Holy Ghost, Eve, Assump­ tion.”18 Yet she lived in a United States prone to see some of these—for ex­ ample, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the “ecstasy” asso­ ciated with female mystics such as St. Thérèse of Lisieux—not as Christian but as Catholic, which is to say foreign, decadent, corrupting, en­slaving, and effeminate. Such perceptions of Catholicism were necessarily emphasized to Cho­ pin by her experience of both living in and reading about the state of Loui­ siana. Between 1870 and 1884, she lived with her Creole husband both in

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New Orleans and in his native Natchitoches Parish, and though she re­ turned to St. Louis as widow and author, her most popular fictions were set downriver in Louisiana. Chopin had a ready affinity for the state’s en­ during French culture and also recognized it as of strong interest to readers in her era. When she began to write and to seek out a popular audience in the late 1880s, she knew that she was in some respects following in the footsteps of New Orleans writer George Washington Cable, who was not only the “breakthrough writer of ‘local color’ fiction” but also “the mostread U.S. fiction writer of the 1870s and 1880s.” The commercial success of Cable’s fictions such as The Grandissimes (1880) encouraged regional writers in general and Louisianans in particular “to capitalize upon the ­exoticist appetites” of a “metropolitan market” located primarily in the Northeast.19 In the eyes of Anglo-American readers, Louisiana was indeed ­exotic—a subregion of the United States that seemed nearly to blend into the mul­ tiethnic Caribbean in a manner at once titillating and disturbing. Cable’s popular Louisiana Creoles appeared as “indeterminate” in both national and racial terms: their “French and Spanish, African and Choctaw heri­ tages intermingle[d] inseparably.” Such characters “bore subversive poten­ tial in an increasingly white-supremacist nation.”20 Cable, despite being an opponent of nascent Jim Crow laws, did not seek to affirm that potential. He wrote as an outsider who sought to critique and improve—in many respects to purify—French Louisiana. A displaced “product of Virginian and New England ancestry” and “a devout Calvinist,” Cable displayed a personal “piety” that “could provoke exasperation in the famously skeptical Mark Twain,” his occasional partner on book tours. His largely didactic fic­ tions simultaneously conveyed both a “fascination” with the Creole popu­ lation “and stern disapproval of its perceived laziness and moral ­laxity.”21 His work thereby supported a late nineteenth-century cultural narrative in which such characters must be made subject to Anglo-American rule: in contrast to the “hybridity” of the Creoles, “Cable’s U.S. characters ap­ pear homogenous, coherent—natural imperial masters. They are mono­ lingual Anglophones to the point of comedy; they are unimpeachably ‘Anglo-­Saxon’ in descent. These linguistic and racial markers legitimate the political and military might of the United States in Cable’s stories, even to the Creoles who resent that power.”22 In Cable’s fiction, that is, Louisiana’s subjugation to the expanding Anglo-Protestant United States—which had

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begun with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase chronicled in The ­Grandissimes— provides a blueprint for the potential subjugation of a morally and ra­ cially unruly Caribbean and Latin American world in the late nineteenth century.23 Cable’s contemporary reviewers clearly recognized the extent to which his Creole stories “taught not only the Edenic promise of underde­ veloped, fertile lands, but also their fallen nature—the original sin of their coloniality and, implicitly, the possibility of their redemption with proper management by the United States.”24 Religion, then, was an often understated but nonetheless vital part of this master narrative. Louisiana Catholicism had long been perceived as maintaining disturbingly porous borders with non-Christian religions. In the nineteenth-century United States, “the Anglo-American eye was as fas­ cinated and disturbed by Catholicism in Louisiana as it was by v­ oodoo—for many of the same reasons.”25 Perceived Catholic susceptibility to religious syncretism was conflated with the perceived threat of racial permeability, just as the material practices that characterized Catholic worship were seen as bound up with the threat of “foreign” bodies contaminating a nation properly composed of the spiritual elect.26 In 1838, visiting English writer Harriet Martineau had powerfully demonstrated such Anglo-Protestant habits of thought. Martineau—a Unitarian and a Whig—described New Orleans’s Catholic cathedral as “the only one in the United States where all men meet together as brethren.” She did not, however, ­celebrate this fact. Rather, she described this intermingling in Gothic terms, as “one of those few spectacles which are apt to haunt the whole future life of the observer like a dream.” In the cathedral she witnessed “a ritual religion” involving “the most abject worship of things without meaning”: “The Spanish eye flashes from beneath the veil; the French creole countenance, painted high, is surmounted by the neat cap or the showy bonnet; while between them may be thrust a grey-headed mulatto, following with his stupid eyes the evolutions of the priest; or the devout negro woman telling her beads.”27 Cable’s postbellum fiction extended such earlier Anglo-Protestant views in­ sofar as it disapprovingly linked “Catholicism, miscegenation, and Creole culture,” simultaneously condemning Catholicism for its “essential hypoc­ risy” and “distortion” of the teachings of the Bible.28 In sum, Cable wrote religion in Louisiana in a manner consistent with his own clear vision of a Christianity that was properly Protestant, moralistic, and—above all—of the United States. Kate Chopin would follow his lead only in choosing to

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write about Louisiana. Otherwise, she differed radically from her influen­ tial predecessor on every one of these counts. The young Chopin did read John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the quint­ essential Anglo-Protestant allegory that was so popular in the nineteenth-­ century United States in part because of its simple moral message. More distinctively, however, she read Cecilia Mary Caddell’s Blind Agnese; or the Little Spouse of the Blessed Sacrament, a novel about an Italian beggar girl who makes her First Communion on the Feast of Corpus Christi before dying on the Feast of the Sacred Heart. Pious and long-suffering though Agnese may be, she is not rewarded via ascent to an abstractly conceived Celestial City, as is the protagonist of Pilgrim’s Progress. Rather, Agnese ex­ periences bodily union with Christ even before her death: “He Himself, in her first communion, had allowed her, by her own experience, ‘to taste and see that the Lord is sweet.’”29 Young Chopin read and treasured this book together with Kitty Garesché, the two girls being so taken with it that they swore to learn Italian together in secret. Chopin never sought to become a spouse of Christ as Garesché did. But her childhood engagement with this narrative—and with Garesché—intriguingly prefigures how Catholicism would shape her own mature art. That art was concerned not only with the human hunger for self-fulfillment, eros, but also with the relationship such desire bore to the self-giving love, agape, most powerfully embodied for Chopin by her maternal family and by the nuns who taught her. It was an art with no political or simple moralistic agenda, an art prone to explore and to cross borders between cultures as well as between matter and spirit. It was precisely her commitment to such art that kept her at least partly dissatisfied with post-Darwinian conceptions of humanity even as she sought to engage and explore them fully. In doing so she would mirror cer­ tain patterns in the fin de siècle Gothic in her late work, though Chopin demonstrated a proclivity for the Gothic even in her earlier fiction.

RACE, FRANCO-AMERICAN BORDERS, AND THE CHURCH OF ST. ROSE PHILIPPINE DUCHESNE

“Désirée’s Baby,” the most frequently discussed story in Chopin’s first col­ lection, Bayou Folk (1894), clearly demonstrates her familiarity with Anglo-­

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American Gothic conventions. Critics have favorably compared its empha­ sis on mystery, entrapment, and mounting horror with the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.30 The story features a faux-­feudal setting that follows Crèvecœur and Herman Melville in that it initially seems to transform Old World concerns with religion into New World concerns with race. The action takes place on a “sad-looking” antebellum plantation where “the roof came down black and steep like a cowl, reach­ ing out beyond the wide galleries that encircled the yellow stuccoed house” (243). There is the slightest hint of the monastery in the word “cowl”; but this sentence, like the narrative as a whole, primarily emphasizes color. “Désirée’s Baby” overtly depicts fears of miscegenation on a Creole planta­ tion where, ultimately, every inhabitant is marked as either “black” or “yel­ low.” The narrative primarily communicates the perspective of the “fair” plantation mistress Désirée as she slowly realizes that the son to whom she has just given birth has skin that seems to grow darker with each passing day (245). Her tyrannical husband Armand Aubigny, whose cruelty to his slaves begins to mount with his suspicions regarding the boy’s race, soon casts out his wife and the child. Though Aubigny has perhaps been in­ dulging in adultery with a slave woman named “La Blanche” himself, he never accuses his wife of being unfaithful to him. Rather, he suspects that ­Désirée—a foundling who had been adopted and raised by the mistress and master of a neighboring plantation—is of partial African descent. Re­ jected by her husband, Désirée walks away to drown herself and her son in the bayou before the narrative reveals its final secret. A long-­hidden letter from Aubigny’s mother, who died in France when he was young, is discov­ ered as Désirée’s belongings are being purged from the plantation house. The story ends with Armand reading his own mother’s words to his late father: she thanks God for the “blessing” of marriage and also “for having so arranged our lives that our dear Armand will never know that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of ­slavery”  (247). Concise and free of overt didacticism as the story is, it has received a number of interpretations. One question that remains open: in the “met­ ropolitan” U.S. market in which “Désirée’s Baby” was first read in 1893, was it viewed as damning Louisiana Creoles for their racism, for being racially mixed themselves, or for both? Whatever the answer, Chopin—­

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unlike Cable—never suggests that Anglo-American domination of the re­ gion would “correct” its complex racial situation. Her narrative also cru­ cially differs from those of Cable in that it firmly situates Louisiana in relation to France—triangulating, in a sense, with the third point being provided by Chopin’s predominantly Northeastern Anglo-American read­ ers. ­“Désirée’s Baby” thereby “hinges on differences between cultures” in a more complex way than Cable’s fiction does: here “the baby and Armand, while part black, are not part African American. Their black blood came to them from Africa by way of France,” where Armand’s parents chose to live together before his mother died. The racial fears that fuel the narrative, therefore, are not presented by Chopin as imports from Europe; rather, they are peculiar to the United States. Chopin, who read contemporary French literature and had visited Paris on her honeymoon, “understood that Parisians . . . carried racial assumptions of their own.” But she also imagined “that some kinds of racially mixed alliances might have been so­ cially possible in Paris when they were not in the United States.”31 In other words, Louisiana’s harsh racial strictures as depicted in “Désirée’s Baby” are not a function of the region being too French, African, or Caribbean, but rather of it being too much of a piece with the rest of the United States— where the nation’s highest court would soon uphold legal segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), a case that had its origins in 1892 New Orleans. Chopin’s instincts regarding French racial mores proved prophetic in the first half of the twentieth century, when African Americans ranging from St. Louis native Josephine Baker to Mississippi native Richard Wright embraced a Paris that they found less racially oppressive than the United States. Few of Chopin’s contemporaries even imagined such a possibility. “Désirée’s Baby,” therefore, is not only a Gothic text that can be read as “among the most powerful condemnations of racism in American litera­ ture.”32 It is also a Gothic text that, like the rest of Chopin’s work, reflects “the bilingualism and biculturalism that make her what she is: that rare nineteenth-century writer in the United States who sees beyond American values, who is . . . shaped as much by European as by American i­ nfluences— in the final analysis, not so much an American writer as a French-American writer.”33 This point is relevant to all of Chopin’s work, including The Awakening, where the “American” Edna must be distinguished from the “French-American” Chopin.34 But what, if anything, does this distinction

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have to do with religious faith? The critics who have rightly stressed Cho­ pin’s “biculturalism” have generally aligned it with her apparently “post-­ Christian” identity—and in fact the French writer she most preferred was Guy de Maupassant, no supporter of any church. Insofar as Chopin sought to avoid being a moralist, a writer of didac­ tic fiction, Maupassant was indeed an essential model for her. But an earlier and more fundamental influence on her imagination was the faith embod­ ied by both her devout mother and the Sacred Heart nuns, a Catholic Christianity that venerated Mary. Accordingly, it is crucial to recognize that insofar as religious questions are raised in “Désirée’s Baby,” they are raised in relation to gender. Désirée’s adoptive mother Madame Valmondé took the foundling girl in when she was a toddler because she saw her as a gift “from a beneficent Providence” (242). Assuming such providence is asso­ ciated with a God imagined as male, it initially seems to correspond to the fact that Désirée’s adoptive father is a kind man—as is her husband’s late father. Both of these characters, however, are mentioned only briefly, and in the end the most dominant man in Désirée’s life by far is her tyrannical husband. She finally feels trapped by the “Providence” attributable to a God whom she comes to view as akin to that husband. On being cast out by Aubigny, Désirée seems to feel that her “only recourse” is “to a heavenly Father, and His good will toward women is suspect, since Madame Val­ mondé’s prayers for Désirée and Madame Aubigny’s prayers for Armand have been answered with tragedy.”35 For this reason, Désirée drowns her­ self, just as Edna Pontellier will do. She has, however, overlooked one other possible course of action. Despite the fact that her baby has dark skin, ­Désirée’s adoptive mother has asked her to come “home,” “back to your mother who loves you. Come with your child” (246). Désirée’s very name raises questions about what the characters in the story desire, and why. As she walks off Aubigny’s plantation with her child, no longer desired by her husband, Désirée resembles a mendicant—a beg­ gar who opens her hands to receive charity—just as she did when she was found as a child. Sadly, she does not accept the unconditional agape offered to her by a mother who, though a plantation mistress herself, ultimately refuses to categorize her adopted daughter and grandson racially. How did Chopin, who grew up in a slaveholding family with pronounced Confed­ erate sympathies, even begin to envision the possibility of a mother who overlooked long-established borders between the races in the United States?

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An inescapable example presented to her from youth on was St. Rose Philippine Duchesne, who led the Sisters of the Sacred Heart from France to the United States and founded the convent school where Chopin re­ ceived her formal education. Born to a life of aristocratic privilege in France, Duchesne had joined the cloistered Sisters of the Visitation at age eighteen. In the wake of the French Revolution, however, she left that contemplative order to join the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, a new and more active order “committed to the revival of French Catholicism by placing service to others and evangelization of the faith through education at its core.”36 She developed a fervent desire to carry out this mission in the old French ter­ ritories in the multiracial center of North America and was granted per­ mission to do so in 1818. Duchesne’s mission in America would last until her death in St. Charles, Missouri, not far from St. Louis, in 1852. Duchesne’s work in the region was “pioneering” in that it was located on a North American frontier, but otherwise it was “not all that different from her work in France: the education of girls—poor as well as rich—to create a more stable Catholic society.”37 In fact, “the Sacred Heart sisters, much more so than other contemporaneous European women’s religious orders who migrated to America, remained in touch with their French roots, institutional and spiritual, even as the personnel became increasingly Americanized”—largely by incorporating novices born in European coun­ tries other than France, including Chopin’s own “beloved teacher” Mother Mary O’Meara, from Ireland.38 These nuns still sought “the spiritual per­ fection that the enclosed convent symbolized.”39 Yet such enclosure was not seen as incompatible with outreach to and engagement with children, nor was it associated with impermeable racial borders. Duchesne demonstrated this early in her career in America as she founded a school at St. Charles that educated girls of partial Indian descent alongside Europeans; she also hoped to establish a novitiate for Indian women.40 In doing so, Duchesne followed earlier French Catholic tradition in the Americas and also prefig­ ured “the two founding orders of women of color in the United States, the Oblate Sisters of Providence and the Sisters of the Holy Family,” which “identified themselves as French in language, culture, and religious tradi­ tion.”41 Both orders were active in New Orleans when Chopin lived there, Holy Family having been founded in the city in the 1840s by free women of color, the Oblate Sisters of Providence by a French-Haitian immigrant to Baltimore decades earlier.

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Duchesne, in keeping with the official position of the Catholic Church in her day, did not condemn the practice of slavery itself. But she took se­ riously the legacy of the Code Noir, which required masters to treat their slaves humanely and to provide them with Christian education and the sacraments. Her own desire to work closely with women of color stood in direct contrast to dominant U.S. practices. She “resisted American notions about racial difference” by “clinging to the seventeenth-century model of French and Indian accommodation” even as Missouri became a new U.S. state that was “increasingly identified with slave labor.”42 By 1830, Mis­ souri, influenced by Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, had “renounced its long tradition of intercultural mixing and trading with repeated insis­ tence that Indians, including mixed-race individuals, be moved outside of the state to make more room for white settlers and their slaves, effectively shifting the frontier to the western borders of the state.”43 In this milieu, Duchesne’s “sympathy for Indian displacement—if for no other reason than that it hampered her mission” to evangelize Indians—“put her at odds with the U.S. government” and kept her seeking to move farther west.44 She ultimately fulfilled her deepest sense of vocation by spending part of her final decade living with displaced Potawatomi Indians in Kansas, part of a Catholic mission there that showed greater attunement to and respect for Potawatomi culture than that demonstrated by competing Protestant missionaries in the area.45 In these and other respects, Duchesne went against many of the prevailing tendencies of American society in the first half of the nineteenth century. She was a Catholic evangelist during the Protestant Great Awakening, willing to convert by subter­ fuge if necessary. During a period of increasing emphasis on marriage and motherhood, she was not only celibate but a leader independent, by and large, of patriarchal authority, despite the nominal oversight of her bishop. She valued class distinction more than racial difference, keeping both nuns and pupils distinguished by social class, even while experimenting, however tentatively, with educating blacks. Yet her dis­ approval of Americans’ democratic and commercial values, manifested in her scorn for the material wealth and egalitarian customs of many of her pupils and their parents, did not prevent her from creating suc­ cessful educational institutions for young women on the frontier that perpetrated French values, ideas, language, and spiritual traditions,

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part of a cultural empire that replaced the lost political empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.46 Duchesne herself doubtless would have stressed that her goal was to further Catholicism first and foremost, and French culture only incidentally: she in fact successfully petitioned her order to allow prayers at her schools to be said in English.47 It is impossible to say precisely how much Chopin knew about Duchesne’s work. There can be no doubt, however, that Duchesne’s mem­ ory remained very much alive in Chopin’s school. Not officially canonized until 1988, Duchesne was at the time of her death in 1852 already “widely regarded in Catholic circles as a saint,” and doubtless even more so by members of her own order than by other Catholics.48 Kitty Garesché re­ flected such enduring devotion as late as 1930, when she wrote to Chopin’s first biographer that she and Kate had first met as “wee tots” at Sacred Heart Academy on Fifth street in St. Louis, “founded by our Venerable Mother Duchesne.”49 Chopin wrote with some admiration of Duchesne’s companion on her Potawatomi mission, the Jesuit Pierre-Jean de Smet, whose own mission work would eventually take him as far west as Oregon. He had worked intermittently at St. Louis University up until his death in 1873 and published several narratives of his travels that were well known in the city.50 In a St. Louis newspaper review in 1900, Chopin praised “our own well-beloved Father De Smet” as a regional writer, the very first to create the “Literary West,” because he wrote with simplicity and directness. Pinning his faith in God and General Harney, he invaded the great unknown West and conquered it with the abundance of his love. The red man was his most noble friend. Savage tribes became his “dear spiritual children.” Hell’s Gate Fork and Bitter Root Valley held no terrors for him. The mountains and the great plains were his inheritance. Of all this he tells, and when one has read there is left upon the mind a well-traced picture of the early West, by no means devoid of atmosphere and color.51 Straightforward as Chopin’s praise of de Smet’s writing ability is here, she includes a clear note of irony in observing that the Jesuit’s safety depended

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in part on the guns of William S. Harney—a sometimes brutal U.S. Army officer who had previously hung traitorous Catholic soldiers for switching sides during the Mexican-American War.52 This Belgian Jesuit who sought to be a “true friend to the Indian” found himself strangely linked to a man whose story was bound up with the U.S. narrative of Manifest Destiny.53 Chopin’s uncollected story “The Maid of Saint Phillipe,” her sole piece of historical fiction, is informed by some of the same dilemmas regarding American borders faced by de Smet and Duchesne. Set in 1765, the story concerns a small French village in western Illinois whose inhabitants are dismayed to learn that their territory will soon be occupied by hated En­ glish troops who are slowly marching west from the Alleghenies. Most of the villagers choose to cross the Mississippi to live in the new “trading post” of St. Louis despite the fact that this region, too, is technically no longer French, having recently been granted to the Spanish (713). But the young maid Marianne and her aged father decide to linger in their Illinois home— he so that he can soon die and be buried alongside his wife, she because “my life belongs to my father. I have but to follow his will; whatever that may be” (714). Marianne’s near-religious devotion to the old man here is at odds with the desire of a French army officer who begs her to marry him. As soon as Marianne’s father dies, the officer makes a final, desperate at­ tempt to lure her with him to France, to “a land, child, where men barter with gold, not with hides and peltries. Where you shall wear jewels and silks and walk upon soft and velvet carpets. Where life can be a round of pleasure. I do not say these things to tempt you; but to let you know that existence holds joys you do not dream of—that may be yours if you will” (717). In the end, Marianne rejects not only this vaguely satanic offer but also the thought of joining her fellow villagers in St. Louis. She announces that she “was not born to be the mother of slaves,” nor to be a slave herself. Rather than subjugation to the authority of any nation-state—whether En­ gland, Spain, or France—or to luxury, she chooses “the free air of forest and stream” and a life among the “Cherokees,” materially comfortless though it may be: “Hardship may await me, but let it be death rather than ­bondage” (718). The narrative has introduced Marianne as wearing “worn buckskin trappings” in which she looks “like a handsome boy rather than like the French girl of seventeen that she was” (711). Her story ends, too, in pioneer

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mode, as “with gun across her shoulder” she walks off into the “rising sun”—moving east rather than west, oddly, but clearly into territory that she envisions as not firmly held by any government (718). In this regard she clearly resembles James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumpo and any number of archetypal male figures in U.S. literature who heroically light out alone for uncivilized territories. Yet in other respects she resembles Rose Philippine Duchesne—who herself rejected marriage and luxurious com­ fort in France for a life among “Indians,” and who saw her celibate life of hardship on the frontier as paradoxically bound up with her true Christian freedom. Duchesne, however, was no Anglo-American frontiersman. She never carried a rifle. Nor did she travel alone, but always in community with her sisters and her Church. None of this is to say that Chopin consciously took Duchesne as any sort of model—nor that she did not chafe at what she saw as “petty legal­ isms” promulgated by the Catholic faith, particularly in her early fictions.54 And there is a good deal still to be said about her ambivalence regard­ ing Catholic monastic enclosures generally. But Duchesne’s story clearly exemplifies how Chopin’s experience of Catholicism fostered a sense of American borders and racial “difference” quite distinct from that common in other parts of the United States, as does her unpublished sketch “A Little Free-Mulatto.” Here the parents of a young mixed-race girl do not feel fully at ease either with whites or with “darkies.” Soon, however, they move to “L’Isle des Mulatres,” which is a “paradise” in part because the girl can go “off every morning to the convent where little children just like herself are taught by the sisters. Even in the church in which she, her mamma and papa make their Sunday devotions, they breathe an atmosphere which is native to them” (745). This church, then, is at once Roman Catholic and “native” to Louisiana soil—perhaps modeled on the Isle Brevelle commu­ nity, just south of Natchitoches on the Cane River, where in 1829 a group of gens de couleur libre “built the first Catholic church ever constructed by non-whites in American history” and lived lives “organized around the Catholic calendar and its devotions,” creating “a historical anomaly out of time and place in the American and Protestant Old South.”55 The church in Chopin’s story might from some perspectives seem a problematic ex­ ample of a community created to be “separate but equal.” That community has, however, been created on the initiative of the mulattoes themselves—

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much like the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans. Most import­ ant for Catholics such as Duchesne, that community properly conceived of itself as part of a larger Church that was at once diverse and united, as is perhaps suggested here by the fact that the racial identity of “the sisters” in the story is left unstated. Such unity amid racial diversity is stressed clearly in Chopin’s later story “A Vocation and a Voice,” which depicts a Catholic church in rural Louisiana with a “mixed congregation of whites and blacks” (852). “A Little Free-Mulatto” is less fully developed than “Odalie Misses Mass,” a story of importance for considering Chopin’s Catholicism in re­ lation not only to questions of race and gender but also to the body gener­ ally. Here young Odalie is initially en route to Mass with her mother and siblings on the Feast of the Assumption. They stop to display Odalie’s new dress at the home of the ancient African American woman who previously helped to raise her. “Aunt Pinky,” as the woman is called, has been left alone on this sweltering August day, and Odalie becomes so concerned for her wellbeing that her family finally goes on to Mass without her. Left to them­ selves, the girl and the old woman begin a conversation that is at once simple and subtly profound. Aunt Pinky begins by asking Odalie questions about her presumed future life, questions framed in relation to the sacra­ ments: “You gwine make yo’ fus’ c’mmunion?” Odalie already has. “You gwine git married?” (488). Then the older woman shifts to remembering the past: other young girls she cared for, her own forcibly dispersed family, and the evils of slavery. In Pinky’s mind, Odalie’s identity is confused with that of individuals long since passed away; the dead are made known by Odalie to Pinky and, through storytelling, by Pinky to Odalie. By the time the girl’s mother returns, Odalie is sitting at Pinky’s knee, and both have drifted off to sleep. Pinky, however, does not wake up—and as Odalie’s mother leads the girl away, “she spoke low and trod softly as gentle-souled women do, in the presence of the dead” (490). This story initially seems to celebrate the rebellious spirit of a young girl who intuitively resists the “legalism” of having to attend Mass on a holy day of obligation and instead chooses to tend to a poor, ill old woman who clearly deserves more respect and care than she has received in her long life. Yet in doing so, Odalie is not merely being rebellious; she is also living out Christ’s injunction to serve the poor and outcast in whom he is present.

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Christ’s teaching in this regard recalls and hones the Old Testament proc­ lamation that all humans—male and female alike—are made in the image of God. Chopin’s story emphasizes the female form of that image via its setting on the Feast of the Assumption, which celebrates Mary’s bodily en­ trance into heaven without suffering death. Mary, the first Christian, is also first to experience what properly awaits all human beings in resurrection: union of body and soul in the direct presence of God. This doctrine re­ garding the Assumption is consistent with Mary’s literal embodiment of agape. She epitomizes the goodness of the body because it is in and through her body that the transcendent God gives himself to humanity in the flesh. While Mary’s virginity obviously reflects her moral purity and capacity for spiritual love, neither of these is a function of disembodiment: the Virgin Mother cannot be a mother—not even the Mother of God—without a body because the God to whom she gives birth is God Incarnate. In Chopin’s story, it is difficult to say which of the characters is most Marian: Pinky, an embodiment of charitable maternity in a world marred by evil; Odalie, who serves Pinky charitably via her presence in the flesh (as Mary served her pregnant cousin Elizabeth and her own infant son); or even Odalie’s mother, whose initial dismay regarding Odalie’s disobe­ dience seems to shift to silent recognition of the girl’s insight, somewhat like Mary when she finds young Jesus teaching at the temple.56 For all these reasons, “Odalie Misses Mass” is far more hopeful than “Desiree’s Baby,” even comic in the traditional sense in that it stresses nascent union across ­social—here, racial—divides. So too do “The Maid of Saint Phillipe” and, perhaps, “A Little Free-Mulatto.” To varying degrees, these three stories concern the lives of children and reflect Chopin’s own happy childhood experience of a world apart, the world inside the convent, a world of chari­ table women.57

DESIRE, FEAR, AND THE LIMITS OF NATURE: A VOCATION AND A VOICE

Chopin is better known for writing eros than agape, however, and for writ­ ing adult despair rather than youthful hope. Such despair is most pro­ nounced in her final, unpublished story collection as well as her final novel.

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While not generally discussed as Gothic, these fictions are clearly marked by “a sense of gloom,” a “feeling that fulfillment is beyond reach”—that no matter what one pursues in search of happiness, “something just as impor­ tant must be left behind.”58 They focus relentlessly on near-­ineffable human desires that seem at once rooted in nature and frustrated by n ­ ature—or by nature and society alike. Chopin responded to both her lifelong Catholic milieu and her mature interest in the natural world as she explored such frustrations in stories from the unpublished collection A Vocation and a Voice, most of which were written shortly before or after The Awakening.59 Examination of the relationship between monastic enclosures and nature in these short fictions reveals patterns that are crucial to understanding Chopin’s work generally and to considering her final novel in relation to the Gothic tradition. The long story “A Vocation and a Voice” depicts an adolescent boy who, like Désirée, is a foundling and hungry for love. Having been taken in by a Catholic family at a young age and raised in their Church, he wan­ ders away and develops an incipiently sexual relationship with a young gypsy woman. This relationship troubles him so much that he chooses to become a monk—until, at the story’s conclusion, her alluring voice finally calls him out once again from behind monastic walls. The story is facilely read as contrasting a healthy natural eros with a repressive Catholicism. What complicates this reading is the fact that the boy is actually less trou­ bled by sexual desire itself than by a violent jealousy and anger that accom­ pany it: specifically, he is tempted to kill an abusive peddler who travels with and dominates his new lover. In the monastery, then, he seeks free­ dom not simply from lust but from an experience of life as power struggle, an experience that here seems bound up with sexual desire. When younger, he had relished escaping the confines of St. Louis’s Irish ghetto because he felt in the open countryside a “communion with something mysterious, greater than himself, that reached out in the far distance to touch him— something he called God. Whenever he had gone alone into the parish church at dusk and knelt before the red light of the tabernacle,” before the Eucharist, “he had known a feeling akin to this” (850). Before adolescence, then, the boy experienced the world of nature itself as sacramental, a visible manifestation of God’s presence. After awakening to his sexual desires, however, he begins to experience nature as a troublesome force that urges him to violent competition.60

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A variation on this theme is at the heart of the story “Lilacs.” Here a worldly and artistic young Parisian woman, Adrienne, annually returns to the convent where she was educated. She does so because she wishes to renew both her sense of childhood innocence and her close companionship with a certain sister. Critical readings of this story typically stress latent les­ bian desire in the companionship, along with the harshness of the mother superior—who at the end of the story suddenly bans Adrienne from the convent. Such readings are not necessarily inconsistent with the fact that the convent newly favors images of Joseph over those of Mary, and of Christ’s Sacred Heart over those of St. Catherine of Siena; such images may suggest that the sisters have recently taken a turn for the worse in venerat­ ing the masculine over the feminine (759–60). The text’s presentation of all these images is, however, directly colored by Adrienne’s perceptions— and her character is a decidedly dubious one. While she does seem a victim of sorts at the end, any proper reading of the story must pay heed to the fact that Adrienne herself is habitually cruel and abusive in her life outside the convent. In Paris she routinely toys with the feelings of male lovers who pursue her (discovery of such relationships is presented as one possible rea­ son for her final ban from the convent). She also has a habit of sadistically tormenting the elderly woman who serves as her maid and whom she views merely as a “thorn in her mistress’s side” (765). Adrienne’s libertine world outside the convent, then, is marked not by charity but by her own con­ stant quest to dominate others—including other women. While problems clearly exist inside the convent, they may plausibly be read as a sign that its enclosing walls are not too entrapping but instead too weak, that the sisters therein have conformed to the standards of the world. As in the Missouri countryside of “A Vocation and a Voice,” then, life outside monastic walls in Paris appears as a crude power struggle—and Adrienne’s desire to visit the convent is a function of her intermittent desire for freedom from that struggle. “Two Portraits” both extends this pattern and concisely demonstrates Chopin’s understanding of the body’s complex and central role in the Catholic faith. The story is a diptych, depicting what appear to be two possible destinies for a woman named Alberta. At the beginning of each “portrait,” young Alberta “put out her hands to touch things that pleased her and her lips to kiss them. Her eyes were deep brown wells that were

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drinking, drinking impressions and treasuring them in her soul. They were mysterious eyes and love looked out of them” (793, 795). In the first por­ trait, subtitled “The Wanton,” young Alberta tries to love her mother, who only beats her, and a male tutor who “fondles” her. These two individuals prove to be only the first in a succession of women and men whom she has “hardly the time to fix her affections upon . . . before they were gone again” (793). Never loved unconditionally, merely desired as an object for the pleasure of others, Alberta soon learns to use her body to bring her “love to squander and gold to squander” (794). Her eyes see a good deal of the world yet find in it nothing to hope for other than a final escape into “death and oblivion” (794). Having learned to manipulate the erotic de­ sire of others for her own power and material gain, Alberta’s greatest hope is that she can one day commit suicide as her mother did. Until then, men who deal with her “had best have a care,” for Alberta is self-reliant and ­predatory—a woman who “carries a knife” (795). This “wanton” Alberta is juxtaposed with the Alberta of the portrait “The Nun.” This alternate Alberta is raised not by an abusive mother but by “a very holy woman. . . . The thought of God alone dwelt in her mind, and his name and none other was on her lips.” The woman teaches young Alberta that “it is not with the hands and lips and eyes that we reach God, but with the soul; that the soul must be made perfect and the flesh sub­ dued. And what is the soul but the inward thought?” Paradoxically, how­ ever, this same unnamed woman introduces Alberta to the thought of God precisely by pointing to a material world that can be known only via the flesh: “the creeping insects, the blades of grass, the flowers and trees; the rain-drops falling from the clouds; the sky and the stars and the men and women moving on the earth” are presented to her as the creation of a God who “was great, was good, was the Supreme Love” (795). Young Alberta might well ask, then: can this God be known with the body, or not? The question remains open even as she matures and withdraws to a convent that is ostensibly devoted to a life of “benumbed senses” but where, none­ theless, she does not merely meditate on the idea of God. Rather, she per­ forms with her body the act of kneeling before “the Blessed Sacrament,” the Eucharist, with open “absorbing eyes that drink in the holy mystery”— an act of adoration that from a Puritan perspective would seem grossly sen­ sual idolatry (796). Soon the other nuns whisper that Alberta “sees visions”

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of Christ, the God who became flesh: in her states of “ecstasy” she “pressed her lips upon the bleeding wounds and the Divine Blood transfigured her. The Virgin Mary enfolded her in her mantle” (797). Such “visions” have apparent ramifications in the material world both within and beyond the walls of the convent. For it “is said that certain afflicted persons have been helped by her prayers. And others having abounding faith, have been cured of bodily ailments by the touch of her beautiful hands” (797). Alberta the cloistered nun apparently knows and manifests eros and agape alike with her body, then, whereas Alberta the worldly “wanton” knows only a crude eros—or, more accurately, how to manipulate the eros of others, as well as how to enact violence on them in order to protect herself and further her own interests.61 In none of these three stories, then, does a monastery or convent ulti­ mately figure as a mere enclosure that simply limits or entraps a protago­ nist. Rather, characters seem entrapped by a larger world that mandates an isolating and even a violent self-interest, itself often bound up with but not quite equivalent to eros. This pattern of despair, mapped out most clearly and concisely in the portrait of “wanton” Alberta, dominates the remainder of A Vocation and a Voice. The collection as a whole is far less concerned with the shortcomings or hypocrisy of the religious than it is with the cruel inconstancy of erotic desire between humans and the inevitable frustration of such desire on natural terms alone, including its ultimate subordination to aging and death. Some stories, however, stress that eros—desire that bears witness to the radical incompleteness of the isolated individual and properly involves body and soul alike—is compatible with or parallel to Catholic practice. This is clear both in the portrait of Alberta the nun and in the stories of other characters who exhibit a passionate yearning for ­fulfillment. Some look to nature as a sign of or portal to something beyond the natural. “An Idle Fellow” concerns a scholar who has grown weary of books and admires a friend who instead pays attention to the natural world and human beings alike: “He is very wise, he knows the language of God which I have not learned” (755). This sketch pairs readily with “The Night Came Slowly,” in which a more misanthropic speaker asserts: “I am losing my in­ terest in human beings. . . . I want neither books nor men. They make me suffer.” Only the natural world interests him, and he revels particularly in

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its hidden aspects, in the nighttime that “means mystery.” The sketch ends with his complaint regarding a foolish man who teaches a Bible class: “What does he know of Christ? I would rather ask the stars: they have seen him” (772). Nature is here presented not just as an end in itself but as the key to approaching the Christian God, just as at the beginning of the portrait of Alberta the nun and in the intuition of the young boy who links nature with the Eucharist in “A Vocation and a Voice.” The experi­ ence of these Catholic characters differs radically from that of the evangeli­ cal teacher presented in “The Night Came Slowly,” who seems blind to nature and favors not so much a book (the Bible) as his own forceful inter­ pretation of it, he with his “red cheeks and bold eyes and coarse manners and speech” (772). Many of the other stories in A Vocation and a Voice depict human be­ ings suffering at the hands of other human beings and nature alike, afflicted by a constant eros that will not leave them in peace. This pattern is estab­ lished most conventionally in “The Kiss,” wherein a calculating woman who has married for money appears “hungry” for a kiss from her former lover at her wedding reception. The man denies her, as he has realized that “kissing women” is “dangerous.” The new bride is left to think, resignedly, that “a person can’t have everything in this world; and it was a little unrea­ sonable of her to expect it” (777). But most characters here do not accept disappointment so placidly. In “Her Letters,” a sickly woman who has secretly engaged in an adul­ terous affair rapturously hoards the love-letters that remain from it, taking one up and savoring it as a sort of Aphrodisiac Eucharist: “With her sharp white teeth she tore the far right corner from the letter, where the name was written; she bit the torn scrap and tasted it between her lips and upon her tongue like some god-given morsel” (779). Unable to bring herself to destroy the letters, she keeps them hidden along with an instruction to her husband that on her death he should not read but instead immediately de­ stroy them. When the time comes, the trusting widower does so—only to soon be driven mad by the suspicion that he was cuckolded and drown himself in the same river in which he had thrown the letters. The fickleness and cruelty often bound up with erotic love between human beings is highlighted here and in “Two Summers and Two Souls,” wherein a young man begs a young woman for love “as a mendicant might

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beg for alms, without reserve and without shame,” only to be cautiously rebuffed (786). A year later, it is the woman’s turn to be overwhelmed by eros, and she suddenly writes to the now-distant man with the same desir­ ous abandon he had demonstrated toward her. The young man reads her letter with “something keener than indifference—something engendered by revolt” and by his newfound recognition of the “singular delusion that love is eternal.” He ends by going to the woman, but not to tell her “the truth.” He goes only to take advantage of her, or perhaps unwittingly to switch roles yet again, just as “he would have gone unflinchingly to meet the business obligation that he knew would leave him bankrupt” (788). Crueler yet is eros and nature itself in “The Unexpected,” wherein a young woman’s fiancée is stricken with a serious disease while traveling. When she is first told of the illness, the news does nothing to calm her “sen­ suous fever of expectancy” as she eagerly anticipates her beloved’s return. Yet when he does arrive, she finds herself repulsed: “the lips with which he had kissed her so hungrily, and with which he was kissing her now, were dry and parched, and his breath” was now “tainted” (790). The young man tells her that he wishes to marry her quickly so that she can have his for­ tune if he dies. As he drifts off to sleep, however, she flees “as if Death him­ self pursued her” (791). She rushes out into “the weedy smell of summer; the drone of the insects; the sky and the clouds, and the quivering, lambent air. She was alone with nature; her pulses beating in unison with its sensu­ ous throb” (792). She speaks as if addressing nature itself—foliage, insects, sky—and announces that not even for his fortune will she ever marry the sickly man who not very long ago was “an almost perfect specimen of youthful health, strength, and manly beauty” (789). Though nature had granted him youth and beauty, it has taken them away as well—and in effect taken the two lovers away from one another. “The Recovery” is similar in some respects. In this case, however, eros ­finally seems at odds with or thwarted by an aging and a mortality that are a function not of disease, but of health! A thirty-five-year-old woman who has been blind for fifteen years suddenly recovers her sight. Gazing on the beauty of a clear June day, she immediately experiences something won­ drous and revelatory: her simple exclamation is “Oh, my God!” (812). Then, however, she sees her own body reflected in a mirror—and is shocked to find that she looks like her mother. “They lied; they all lied to me,” she whispers, blaming her family and longstanding suitor for not communi­

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cating the facts regarding her aging body over the years (813). No one is truly to blame here but nature itself, of course, and even the natural faculty of sight—her recovered vision—is at best a mixed blessing. While the “blessed light had given her back the world, life, love,” it had simultane­ ously “robbed her of her illusions; it had stolen away her youth.” Her faith­ ful suitor, who has patiently awaited her recovery and at age forty still has a “splendid physique” himself, gently offers her his continuing love and companionship in the remaining years ahead (814). Yet the woman wishes to be alone, to go back again “into the dark to think.” Nonetheless, she in­ tuits that closing her eyes will bring her no solace: though she “might hope, and she might wait and she might pray” for the return of her lost youth, all her “hope and prayer and waiting would avail her nothing” (815). She ends sobbing, turning away from the suitor who steadfastly pursues her as she buries her face in her own arm. Shocked by the cruelty she has experi­ enced at the hands of nature, she seeks only to protect herself from a threat­ ening world—more like Alberta the wanton than Alberta the nun. Taken as a whole, the stories of A Vocation and a Voice provide a range of variations on eros that might be compared with the poetry of John Donne in their consistent interest in the relationship between “profane” love and sacred love—a relationship Chopin had explored in relation to Catholicism in earlier stories such as “Love on the Bon-Dieu,” “A Senti­ mental Soul,” and “At Chênière Caminada.”62 One of her late stories, “A Morning Walk”—originally titled “An Easter Day Conversion”—shows a happy confluence of sacred and profane love of the sort that Donne stressed in his own late work.63 Here a single, middle-aged man of scientific tem­ perament who “liked to observe insect life at close range” and to “dis­ member” the “delicate, sweet bodies” of flowers for the “purpose of practi­ cal and profitable investigation” is suddenly charmed by a younger woman (891). On Easter morning, he follows her into a church. Sitting beside her, and attuned to the natural world via the half-open stained glass windows, he hears the words “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” He suddenly ex­ periences “the poet’s vision” of “the life that is within and the life that is without, pulsing in unison, breathing the harmony of an undivided exis­ tence” (893).64 This is precisely the vision that Edna Pontellier is not granted in The Awakening, where Chopin’s own perspective on her is at times as coolly de­ tached as that of a scientist observing an insect. To the reader, however, the

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novel as a whole may well convey the horror of Edna’s final isolation. Edna herself may be held partly responsible for that isolation—in part a function of her identity as a woman of Anglo-Protestant upbringing who is aroused by but cannot satisfactorily immerse herself in a Creole Catholic culture. To understand her and her predicament, we must better understand Cho­ pin and her milieu precisely in the late 1890s, when the novel, which had the working title A Solitary Soul, was published.

THE AWAKENING: AN “AMERICAN WOMAN” AND THE LIMITS OF INDIVIDUALISM

The fictions of A Vocation and a Voice make clear that by the second half of the 1890s, Chopin was reflecting increasingly on the limitations and ul­ timate fate of the body. At this point in her life she had experienced the deaths of her father, husband, and mother as well as other members of her extended family, and her own health seemed to be deteriorating.65 Ap­ proaching age fifty, she knew that the body could seem as much a curse as a blessing, and eros merely deceptive and fleeting. Yet Chopin simulta­ neously wanted to affirm the goodness of the body and love alike. Ulti­ mately, she would have to weigh these concerns in a manner consistent both with the mature intellectual interests she had developed in an increas­ ingly a­ gnostic world and with her more foundational experience of Catholic ­womanhood—as daughter, convent student, wife, and mother. All played a role in writing the novel for which she would become best known, The ­Awakening. Chopin’s journal of 1894 contains an extended entry that conveys a holistic sense of the complexity of her engagement with these issues at the beginning of the final decade of her life—and the most crucial years of her literary career. The entry dated May 22, written shortly after she completed “Lilacs,” begins by recounting her trip to a Sacred Heart convent near St. Louis to visit her former classmate Liza, now a nun. The opening para­ graph strikingly juxtaposes Chopin’s mixed admiration and disdain for the life of the nuns with her own pride in observing and experiencing the natural world. Yet she also notes that nature seems to have been crueler to her own body than to that of the nuns, whose lives are attuned to the su­

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pernatural yet not altogether unmarked by eros. Indeed, she identifies these women formed in the Church with the Greek goddess of the soul who wed Eros himself: Those nuns seem to retain or gain a certain beauty with their advanc­ ing years which we women in the world are strangers to. The unchang­ ing form of their garments through years and years seems to impart a distinct character to their bodily movements. . . . The conditions under which these women live are such as keep them young and fresh in heart and in visage. One day—usually one hey-day of youth they kneel before the altar of a God whom they have learned to worship and they give themselves wholly—body and spirit into his keeping. They have only to remain faithful through the years, these modern Psyches, to the lover who lavishes all his precious gifts upon them in the darkness—the most precious of which is perpetual youth. I won­ der what Liza thought as she looked into my face. I know she was re­ membering my pink cheeks of more than twenty years ago and my brown hair and innocent young face. I do not know whether she could see that I had loved—lovers who were not divine—and hated and suf­ fered and been glad. She could see, no doubt the stamp which a thou­ sand things had left upon my face, but she could not read it. She, with her lover in the dark. He has not anointed her eyes for perfect vision. She does not need it—in the dark.—When we came away, my friend who had gone with me said: “Would you not give anything to have her vocation and happy life?” There was a long beaten path spreading before us; the grass grew along its edges and the branches of trees in their thick rich May garb hung over the path like an arbor, making a long vista that ended in a green blur. An old man—a plain old man leaning on a cane was walking down the path holding a small child by the hand and a little dog was trotting beside them. “I would rather be that dog” I answered her. I know she was disgusted and took it for ir­ reverence and I did not take the trouble to explain that this was a little picture of life and that what we had left was a phantasmagoria.66 The paragraph as a whole makes clear that Chopin was far from indifferent toward the Sacred Heart sisters. She remained passionately moved by those

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women whom she had first encountered as representing a Mother Church that pointed toward the supernatural. At the same time, her conclusion makes clear that in 1894 she saw her own first allegiance as being to nature itself—despite the fact that nature had worn down and “stamped” her own body in a process here associated not only with the passing of time gener­ ally but with corporeal lovers in particular. The substantial paragraph that immediately follows continues to re­ flect extensively on love and the body. Here, however, Chopin explicitly considers life and aging in relation to the family rather than the individual, and she does so with a final yearning for a supernatural not entirely sepa­ rate from the natural—a yearning for resurrected bodies. That yearning is profoundly connected to her memory of her own first experience of child­ birth. With no transition whatsoever from her reflection on the convent, Chopin suddenly begins writing both of the birth of her first child and of her desire for the resurrection of the dead: This is Jean’s birthday—twenty-three years old today! How curiously the past effaces itself for me. I sometimes regret that it is so; for there must be a certain pleasure in retrospection. I cannot live through yes­ terday or tomorrow. It is why the dead in their character of dead have no hold upon me. I cannot connect my mother or husband or any of those I have lost with those mounds of earth out at Calvary Cemetery. I cannot visit graves and stand contemplating at them as some people do, and seem to love to do. If it were possible for my husband and my mother to come back to earth, I feel that I would unhesitatingly give up every thing that has come into my life since they left it and join my existence again with theirs. To do that, I would have to forget the past ten years of my growth—my real growth. But I would take a little wis­ dom with me; it would be the spirit of a perfect acquiescence.—This is a long way from Jean, 23 years ago. I can remember yet that hot southern day on Magazine Street in New Orleans. The noises of the street coming through the open windows; that heaviness with which I dragged myself about; my husband’s and mother’s solicitude; old ­Alexandrine the quadroon nurse with her high bandana tignon, her hoop earrings and placid smile; old Doctor Faget; the smell of chloro­ form, and then waking at 6 in the evening from out of a stupor to see

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in my mothers arms a little piece of humanity all dressed in white which they told me was my little son! The sensation with which I touched my lips and my finger tips to his soft flesh only comes once to a mother. It must be the pure animal sensation; nothing spiritual could be so real—so poignant.67 The language Chopin employs in articulating this memory clearly resem­ bles the climactic passage in The Awakening in which Adele Ratignolle gives birth while Edna Pontellier looks on. In the novel, Edna recoils as she recalls her own such experiences as a form of horrific “torture” man­ dated by “Nature”; immediately thereafter, she flees her own children and husband to drown herself (648). One thing that the journal paragraph as a whole emphasizes, then, is that in at least some respects Chopin identi­ fied less with Edna than with the happily married Adele—who seeks fulfill­ ment in family and in maternal relationship, neither of which is rendered in the journal entry as abstractly “spiritual.” Rather, they are profoundly ­embodied. The passage’s emphasis on the ultimate primacy of human relationship over individualistic notions of “growth” also provides a firm basis for the contention that Chopin is finally best understood neither as romantic, deca­dent aesthete, nor feminist reformer. She is a writer profoundly at­ tuned to familial relationship as well as to the necessary demands of a larger social order—tinged though such orders inevitably are with injustice. Nei­ ther families nor societies can exist unless individuals constantly adjust and at times sacrifice their own personal desires in relation to those of other ­individuals.68 Chopin’s consistent awareness of this fact may be partly at­ tributable to her “tragic view of the human condition,” a view “derived from a Catholic sensibility that persisted long after Chopin had abandoned regular Catholic practice.”69 In The Awakening, what appears as most tragic are not those individuals who recognize the inevitability of shaping their own identities in relation to necessarily limiting social roles: these include both the “mother-woman” Adele and the independent artist Mlle. Reisz, who abides and indeed in a sense embraces her label as “spinster.” Rather, the tragic individual is Edna, who even after her rejection of her prescribed social role as mother proves unable either to remake herself as independent artist or to find enduring satisfaction for her ardent erotic desires.

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Edna had occasional bouts of religious enthusiasm as a young girl, openly defied her Presbyterian father to marry a Catholic (of sorts), and is on one level seeking affection to fill the void created long ago by the death of her mother. For all of these reasons she might have been happier had she entered the convent—where Alberta the nun, after all, seems to find some measure of individual fulfillment in community. As it is, Edna follows more closely in the footsteps of Alberta the wanton. Her initial erotic ex­ perience in the novel only further enmeshes her in a world characterized by self-interested domination and predation—as practiced in different ways by her husband, by the seducer Alcee Arobin, and in turn by Edna herself.70 She finally finds hope only in the promise of solitary death. At the same time, Edna’s final entry into the sea can itself be read more positively as an unconscious attempt to reenter the womb in search of fulfillment or even to partake of an experience of mystical union with the divine.71 Her desire for such union—which broadly resembles that of Alberta the nun— is made difficult to discern by the fact that the novel presents “two com­ peting levels of discourse.” One is “a realist, naturalist language influenced by Protestant scientific traditions (particularly Darwinism)” that “even when refracted through liberal feminism” finally communicates “a ‘mascu­ linist’ version of the universe.”72 This is, in specifically Kristevan terms, a language of “order and domination,” of “self and other,” that is opposed to “unity” and emphasizes “differences based on class, gender, creed.”73 It is, in other words, a language that emphasizes borders—the language that generally characterizes Edna’s development in the novel. Crucially, though, her potential “awakening” is initially set in motion by and culminates in an experience communicated on the terms of the other level of discourse: “an irrational, impressionistic language of Catholic motherhood” that “chal­lenges phallocentric culture and also the direction of bourgeois femi­ nist thought.”74 The predominance of the former language in Edna’s experience is a result of her identity as a definitively “American” Anglo-Protestant, a Ken­ tucky Presbyterian—albeit one “with a small infusion of French which seemed to have been lost in dilution” prior to her immersion in Loui­ siana Creole life (525). The form of Protestantism that arguably domi­ nated nineteenth-century Anglo-American public life generally appeared as “rational,” “masculinist,” and “capitalist” in that it tended to foster little

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or “no sense” of “an embodied soul, or even of an embodied self, merely a body as purely distinct from the soul as owner is to property.”75 But how might Chopin herself have understood such an implicitly masculine “Protestant individualism” of the sort that “allowed capitalist enterprise and the fetishising of the autonomous self to emerge”?76 Considering this question—and a few final aspects of Chopin’s experience of Catholicism as ­countercultural—is essential to understanding how The Awakening re­ sponds to the Anglo-A­merican Gothic tradition. The same “focus on individual autonomy” that had featured promi­ nently in the U.S. abolitionist movement nurtured “a concomitant anti-­ Catholicism” in the postbellum nation, an anti-Catholicism that became enmeshed with the mainstream of the women’s rights movement.77 In this era Catholics themselves generally resisted “an individualist language of women’s rights,” maintaining that the most fundamental unit of society was to be found in “the family, not the individual”: “Of unmarried women, only nuns, women organized in a corporate body, received unqualified Catholic approval.”78 Catholics in Chopin’s United States were, however, not uninterested in the improvement of the lot of women, and the domi­ nant Anglo-Protestant culture itself held certain negative stereotypes of women. “Catholics did not always oppose women’s suffrage,” while “many non-Catholic intellectuals did,” sometimes precisely because they feared the vote of Catholic women. Boston’s Francis Parkman warned that “suf­ frage for women meant power for priests, since Catholic women would follow clerical commands with ‘edifying docility and zeal.’”79 Such argu­ ments went hand in hand with increasing demands in the postbellum era for education that transformed children into good U.S. citizens—that is, assertive, independent, and manly citizens. In 1871, Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson, later U.S. vice president under Ulysses S. Grant, directly played on fears of an effeminizing Catholicism that ran counter to U.S ideals as he made a “well-publicized” call for a strong national public school system to replace local and religious schools. Wilson argued that the “vir­ tue” of strong national systems of education that weeded out Catholic in­ fluence had been made clear by the results of the Franco-Prussian War: the Prussian Protestants who were forging an emergent German nation-state had easily crushed French opponents, who were, as Wilson put it, “igno­ rant, priest-ridden and emasculated.”80

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Chopin had been on her honeymoon in Europe when that war broke out. She characterized Germans generally as “phlegmatic,” and her sympa­ thies were clearly with the beleaguered French as she attended a Mass in Paris during the fighting.81 She had occasion to reflect further on such divi­ sions when she returned to a St. Louis increasingly marked by the legacy of freethinking “German radicals” and of German American Union soldiers who had treated her mother cruelly while occupying her house during the Civil War.82 Her closest Germanic friend in St. Louis was Austrian immi­ grant Dr. Frederick Kolbenheyer, an agnostic who encouraged her interest in Darwin—and is generally cited as a primary influence in weakening her ties to the Catholic Church after the deaths of her husband and mother in the 1880s. Kolbenheyer would in part be reflected in the character of Dr. Mandelet in The Awakening, a knowledgeable and generally understand­ ing man—albeit one somewhat condescending in his view of “Woman” as “a very peculiar and delicate organism,” and suspicious of “pseudo-­ intellectual” and “super-spiritual” women’s groups especially (596–97). In the latter regard the doctor resembles the mature Chopin herself, to a degree. She actively avoided association with a club designed to be “an organized center of thought and action among the women of St. Louis” that had been founded in part by the Unitarian poet and biographer ­Charlotte Stearns Eliot.83 Chopin cast a disdainful eye on the activities of such “self-righteous reformers and high-minded intellectuals” generally, in­ cluding Harriet Worthington, a St. Louis woman who “trumpeted” the linked causes of women’s rights, temperance, and “her own militant Prot­ estantism.” Rather than clubbing with these “Protestant, starchy, and up­ right” women, Chopin often enjoyed the company of a Jewish friend, Rosa Sonne­schein.84 She had already been shaped by a French Catholic culture that held on its own terms that women were and should strive to remain the intellectual equals of men—a view fostered in her Sacred Heart school.85 Furthermore, she had experienced and enjoyed Creole social customs that were viewed as morally suspect in these St. Louis women’s clubs and other late nineteenth-century Anglo-American circles: customs of mixed-gender drinking, smoking, and risqué storytelling. Chopin herself saw such habits as merely “the conditions of civility” and accordingly reproduced them in her fiction with “no specific intent to shock or make a point.”86 Indeed, the whole thought of using literature to “make a point” was alien to her, as she

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revealed in writing scathingly of the director of a St. Louis “Modern Novel Club” designed “to promote appreciation of contemporary novels about social problems.” Chopin describes this wealthy woman as obsessed in an abstract way with the condition of women and “the working classes,” and as puritanical in the general sense: “Work” is her watch word. She wants to make life purer, sweeter, better worth living. . . . Intentions pile up before her like a mountain, and the sum of her energies is Zero! It is well that such a spirit does not ever recognize the futility of effort. A little grain of wisdom learned from the gospel of selfishness—what an invaluable lesson—lost upon ears that will not hear.87 Chopin, then, had reasons for associating Protestantism—certainly the Protestantism of the upper-class St. Louis of her day—with moralizing, as­ ceticism, and abstraction alike. But what did Catholicism have to do with the “gospel of selfishness” that she herself sometimes preferred to profess? Chopin obviously experienced Catholicism much more complexly than she did Protestantism, at times associating it with eros—with a desire for self-fulfillment that she imagined as having a strongly sensual dimen­ sion even in the lives of cloistered nuns. Yet she also could not help but ­associate it with agape, with an equally embodied self-giving charity. She knew that non-Catholics were entirely capable of such charity, as exempli­ fied by Dr. Kolbenheyer, who worked with immigrants in the slums of St. Louis. But the stories that had most powerfully shaped her imagination were those of the likes of Mother Duchesne, who sought in some ways not just to serve but to become one with the Potawatomi women.88 Nor were narratives of Catholic charity in Chopin’s milieu limited to the frontier world of old La Louisiane. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church was responding directly to the problems of the urban poor in the wake of rapid industrialization on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, the Catholic layman, lawyer, and Dante scholar Frederic ­Ozanam founded the St. Vincent de Paul Society in 1833 to collect and distribute material donations to the poor; St. Louis was directly affected by his efforts in 1845 as the society opened its first two North American chap­ ters there and, simultaneously, in Mexico City.89 Leo XIII responded to

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modern poverty more radically in 1891 when he issued a major encyclical regarding problems that he defined as associated with capitalism generally. For decades, European Catholic social thought had attacked “economic liberalism” and favored a more “social understanding of political econ­ omy”: the encyclical Rerum Novarum advanced such an understanding as it endorsed labor unions and government action to relieve the needs of the poor.90 Catholic voices in the United States were likewise critical of unbri­ dled capitalism. As early as 1869, the convert Orestes Brownson attacked “political economists” who “consider man only as a producing, distribut­ ing, and consuming machine.”91 And in direct contrast to the doctrine of manly self-reliance preached by the likes of Henry Wilson, the U.S. news­ paper Catholic World in 1878 observed that “the theory of ‘competition’ as a solution of social and industrial disorder is as baseless as it is immoral.” Whereas Adam Smith’s political economy falsely “makes the individual the unit of society,” the “true unit of society is the family.”92 In this way, Catho­ lic suspicion of a feminism that promoted autonomous selfhood went hand in hand with Catholic critiques of a capitalist economy. In The Awakening, Edna’s husband is consistently associated with such capitalism: he is absent from home except as a financial provider, views his wife as at once a trophy and an employee, and is obsessed with the accu­ mulation of material goods that he views as “household gods” (578). He is also thoroughly assimilated to Anglo-American society, the only Creole identified in the novel as speaking English “with no accent whatever” (585). Mr. Pontellier and Edna seem inverted images of one another in this regard, for she is “American” by birth and presumably in the process of adapting to Louisiana society. In fact, Edna and her husband are best un­ derstood as exemplifying two competing forms of radical individualism particularly characteristic of the United States. Mr. Pontellier is a utilitarian individualist who tends to reduce all reality to a capitalist economy and therefore to view not only his wife but everyone and everything as his po­ tential property; Edna, who ultimately comes to see property ownership as burdensome, is instead an expressive individualist in the mode of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and “Anglo-American Romanticism” generally. She is concerned with intuitively discovering and expressing what she feels is her unique—and therefore necessarily somewhat ­isolated— core of being. Different as they appear, then, both Pontelliers are finally

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ontological individualists who “see the individual as having a primary re­ ality” and recognize “society” only as “a second-order, derived or artificial construct.”93 Such radical individualism accounts for Edna’s final isolation from women as well as men, and in a sense for her ultimate suicide as well. She is not a feminist but an individualist who desires autonomous self­ hood. Nonetheless, Edna—like Chopin’s contemporary Charlotte Perkins Gilman—implicitly sees such selfhood as proper to economically privi­ leged white women alone.94 Edna is, Chopin’s narrative voice asserts, so “self-absorbed” as to be almost literally blind to the existence of the qua­ droon female servant who takes care of her children (582). In contrast to Edna, however, Chopin herself finally “transcends national or dominant Anglo-American cultural narratives” in such a way as to complicate the re­ current “American dream” that mere “personal self-satisfaction is what is necessary to constitute a good life.”95 Chopin’s complex portrayal of Creole society is crucial in this regard. Readers who overlook the radical individualism Edna shares with her hus­ band tend to see her as trapped not only in a U.S. patriarchal system but also in an exotic Caribbean border region that is at once primitively charm­ ing and threatening. She seems held captive among the Creoles, in effect, as the novel stresses captivity in its opening image of a caged parrot and makes clear from the beginning that Edna feels somewhat alien in south Louisiana. Contemporary views of the region among Chopin’s largely met­ ropolitan Anglo-American audience are concisely represented by an 1892 essay from The Chautauquan entitled “Creole Women.” Here the “Ameri­ can” side of New Orleans is approvingly described as “a progressive, a selfmade, a new city.” The “French or Creole Quarter,” by contrast, is “the old town, with little improvement since the days when the houses were first built. Occasionally, a creole family crosses the line, as it were, and goes to live up town, but they rarely become Americanized, for, above all things the creole is conservative.” For this reason, “creole women have large fami­ lies,” which “they do not regard as a misfortune, after the manner of some of their more progressive sisters.” Creole men and women alike are impov­ erished when compared to “Americans,” yet maintain a shabby gentility: “While there is about creole women that refinement that one admires, a noblesse oblige that one respects, a dependence that attracts love, it must be acknowledged that as a class they are not progressive”—certainly not ­interested in suffrage or in political questions generally.96

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Many of the traits popularly attributed to Creole women are directly reflected in The Awakening in the character of Adele Ratignolle, a seem­ ingly “faultless Madonna” (531). She is a representative “mother-woman” who resembles a “ministering angel” in that she has learned to “efface” her­ self as an individual. Furthermore, she is a female figure of the entire Cre­ ole Catholic community with which Edna vacations on Grande Isle—a community at once embracing and potentially smothering. No words can describe her “save the old ones that have served so often to picture the bygone heroine of romance and the fair lady of our dreams” (529). Resolutely maternal, Adele caresses Edna and speaks frequently of the body, particu­ larly of her own experiences of childbirth. Such candor is of a piece with a general candor regarding sexuality typical of the Creoles, who read books that to Edna seem pornographic—shocking to a woman whose visiting Presbyterian father is later depicted reading only the Bible (603). Adele, pregnant throughout the course of the novel, gives birth in its final pages. Edna is present at this scene, which reminds her of her own experiences both of giving birth and of being born: her accompanying reaction to a “Nature” that dictates the reproductive cycle and the embodiment of souls, and that connects her to her children, is one of overpowering horror (648). Because Adele is at the center of this scene, the older woman might ulti­ mately be read as belonging not in a “fair” romance but in a darker one—a Gothic tale. This dark aspect of the novel is clearly suggested by another Creole woman who is present from the very beginning of the narrative, ap­ pearing immediately before Edna and her potential lover Robert do. This unnamed “lady in black” has just returned from Mass on the neighboring island of Chênière Caminada and walks amid the vacation cottages, “tell­ ing her beads” on the rosary (522). She reappears throughout the first half of the novel, often dogging the trail of a pair of anonymous lovers, and “reading her devotions on the porch of a neighboring bath-house” even as Edna languishes in the company of Adele on the beach (537). Her presence foreshadows the fact that Edna’s own nascent dreams of erotic fulfillment with Robert will be haunted by and finally end with death. Taken together, this anonymous woman in black and Adele suggest the embodied experi­ ences that mark the twin poles of human experience: death and birth. Edna is both repulsed by and attracted to Adele, intuiting at one point that the Ratignolles seem to have attained that which she and her husband

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have not. At home in New Orleans they live in “commodious apartments” above the drug store Monsieur Ratignolle inherited from his father, and they enjoy the arts insofar as those arts are made enjoyable to others—that is, by hosting musical soirees. “There was something which Edna thought very French, very foreign, about their whole manner of living,” as the Ratignolles seem to have achieved a true “fusion” not only with one an­ other but also with the community around them, involving a general con­ tinuity between their public and their private lives (583, 585). Most of the novel is concerned with Edna’s traumatic failure to achieve either such ful­ filling union or a radical self-reliance. Eros, the novel suggests, using lan­ guage that is at times precisely Platonic, is profoundly human—more human than the cool financial calculus practiced by Mr. Pontellier. For the self simultaneously committed to autonomy, however, eros is finally self-­ defeating, a gadfly leading to the grave rather than to grace. Edna’s engage­ ment with both possibilities is demonstrated in a short early chapter that marks the turning point of the book. Some force that seems beyond ­herself—perhaps “the Holy Ghost”—“descends” on Edna and calls her to understand “her relations as an individual to the world within and about her.” Just as the third person of the Trinity is associated with the physical presence of water in Scripture, Edna’s potential transformation here is linked to the sea: “The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace” (535). Edna is in a sense born anew here, and in this new “beginning” in­ tensely experiences the human sense of division between soul and body— foregrounded here as uncertain, “tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly dis­ turbing” (535). The novel as a whole exemplifies certain patterns in a finde-siècle Gothic fiction impacted by Darwinism, including plots “­ readily identifiable as sensationalistic, excessive,” which figure “sexuality as horrific, identity as multiple,” and “the boundary between science and supernatu­ ralism as permeable”; and narratives that finally suggest “the inadequacy of language” by employing a “gothic rhetoric of the ineffable.”97 “­ Nature” is most clearly depicted as antagonistic in Edna’s reaction to Adele’s child­ birth, a reaction that occurs in the context of a mounting sense of entrap­ ment Edna has experienced on her return to urban New Orleans in the second part of the novel. Even before then, however, in the largely unde­ ­ ossibility veloped islands along the Gulf of Mexico, nature opens onto the p

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of the supernatural in such a way as to suggest not only melancholy but also horror. As Edna cries over her husband’s cruel hectoring near the be­ ginning, there “was no sound abroad except the hooting of an old owl in the top of a water-oak, and the everlasting voice of the sea. . . . It broke like a mournful lullaby upon the night” (526). The sounds of nature here be­ speak something beyond themselves, whether the Holy Spirit or Sirens, and they call forth in Edna an “indescribable oppression, which seemed to gen­ erate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul’s summer day. It was strange and unfamiliar; it was a mood” (527). This emphasis on a natural world that opens horrifically onto the pos­ sibility of the supernatural continues after an evening piano recital when someone, “perhaps” Edna’s newly beloved Robert, proposes “a bath at that mystic hour and under that mystic moon” (550). While Edna is swim­ ming, a “quick vision of death smote her soul,” a “flash of terror” (552). She soon tells Robert with consternation that “it is like a night in a dream. The people about me are like some uncanny, half-human beings. There must be spirits abroad to-night.” He replies playfully that on this night, “the twenty-eighth of August,” “a spirit that has haunted these shores for ages rises up from the Gulf. With its own penetrating vision the spirit seeks some one mortal worthy to hold him company, worthy of being exalted for a few hours into realms of the semi-celestials. . . . Perhaps he will never wholly release her from the spell” (553). The number 28 reflects Edna’s own age as well as the length of the menstrual cycle, and is further con­ nected to feminine identity by twin fourteen-year-old girls “clad in the ­Virgin’s colors” who appear in the previous chapter (546). August 28 is also the feast day of St. Augustine of Hippo. As recorded in his Confessions, ­Augustine struggled mightily as a youth to find the proper object of eros and was so troubled by the disjunction between his sensual life and his in­ terior one that he found himself deeply attracted to the radical sundering of body and soul characteristic of Manichaeism and Neoplatonism. Both stressed that the material world is entrapping, deceptive, and illusory. Au­ gustine finally deemed Manichaeism false and Platonism inferior to the Christian vision in which all that exists—matter and spirit—is God’s good creation, and all rightly loved in proper subordination to love of God the Creator.98

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Edna never gives serious consideration to Christianity as an adult, though she tells Adele at one point that when she was twelve “religion took a firm hold upon me.” This was the case despite the fact that she often ran “away from prayers, from the Presbyterian service, read in a spirit of gloom by my father that chills me yet to think of ” (538). She displays tendencies not inconsistent with Manichaeism or Platonism. She becomes prone to moments of radical despair in the face of a material world that not only offers sexual pleasure of the sort she experiences with Alcee, but in which at times “life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation” (587). Ac­ cordingly, she wishes to enter some higher realm via Robert—with whom she never becomes physically intimate and who also bears a striking and “pronounced” resemblance to her (524). Robert therefore approximates the archetypal “Platonic lover” as described in Plato’s Symposium, the lover who is literally one’s other (if not better) half. Edna tends to imagine him wist­ fully in language that is suggestive both of eros as described in that dialogue and, oddly, of a Gothic ineffability: “There came over her the acute long­ ing which always summoned into her spiritual vision the presence of the beloved one, overpowering her at once with a sense of the unattainable” (624).99 Edna’s failure to grow in the novel is in large part a function of her inability to reconcile her partly selfish desire for some higher spiritual ideal with her immediate material and social reality, including the many other individuals around her who do not serve her erotic needs in any immedi­ ately recognizable way. This reconciliation—which Augustine strove for via his sacramental entrance into the Church first introduced to him by his mother—would unite Edna with, among others, the quadroon servant whom she as yet cannot even see. Edna’s failure is a function of her succumbing to the same radically in­ dividualistic U.S. milieu that has enveloped her husband, as is suggested by the fact that her happiest moments in the novel occur in the least “American” part of Louisiana. Those moments are with Adele on Grande Isle, and with another woman on a yet farther island, Chênière Caminada. This island—in effect twice removed from the U.S. mainland— provides the setting of what is perhaps the novel’s most densely structured episode, which turns on both Gothic imagery and Eucharistic longing. It occurs the morning after August 28 and ends with an Acadian woman who tells

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s­ tories of “dead men” alongside a Gulf of Mexico that seems to hold “misty spirit forms” and “phantom ships”; it begins as Edna and Robert travel by boat with the unnamed lady in black and a mysterious Spanish girl to at­ tend Mass at “the quaint little Gothic church of Our Lady of Lourdes” (567, 560). The church itself soon seems stifling to Edna, who—physically exhausted from swimming the night before—leaves with Robert to rest at the nearby house of an Acadian woman (561). The interlude that follows is rich with Christian imagery: Edna wakes, appreciatively observes her own body, eats bread, drinks wine, and then proceeds outside to pluck a piece of fruit from a tree and throw it to Robert. The final element high­ lights the episode’s true complexity. This island on which it seems always to be “God’s day” is an Eden of sorts, and Edna an American Eve whose flight from the stifling interior of the Gothic church might seem to grant her the liberating solitude and closeness to nature prized by Emerson. Yet Emerson’s own essays, as we find later in The Awakening, in fact put her to sleep (605). Furthermore, in the episode itself Edna is neither completely self-reliant nor completely alone in nature. She is given shelter, food, and stories—not by anyone at the church, but by a generous Acadian woman. This woman, Madame Antoine, may therefore seem to serve as a sort of rival to the Church. Yet she is better understood as embodying a Franco-­ American culture profoundly shaped by Catholicism. In direct contrast to Edna’s thoroughly assimilated husband, Madame Antoine speaks “no En­ glish” at all, displays a “native hospitality” attentive to the needs of others, and elsewhere in Chopin’s fiction appears together with her son as very de­ vout (561–62).100 In a sense she displays all the best aspects of the ­convent— she is in effect cloistered on her island, which she has only left twice in her life—and of motherhood alike, as she lives with and enjoys the devoted companionship of her fisherman son. Edna’s own intermittent desire for a life like that of this woman—for continuing relationship based on something other than power and self-­ gratification—is manifest late in the novel, both in her attempt to host a dinner party in New Orleans and in her request that she be served fish for dinner just before she enters the sea for the final time. Both can be read as manifesting her unarticulated desire for a Eucharist that will bring to­ gether body and soul as well as self and others. As it is, Edna’s lingering inability to reconcile such divisions leads her longingly back toward the

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Gulf of Mexico, that foreign Gulf alongside which she once tasted hap­ piness with an Acadian woman and beyond which her beloved has been absent throughout most of the novel. The Awakening is Gothic because of that Gulf and the ghost associated with it—which may be akin to the Holy Ghost after all. Via Edna’s failed attempt to commune with such a ghost, Chopin reveals how frightening the fruits of eros might be in a “masculin­ ist” nation of relentlessly self-interested individuals, a nation wherein adop­ tive mothers such as Désirée’s Madame Valmondé and Kitty Garesché’s Rose Philippine Duchesne might seek their children in vain.

C H A P T E R

4

WA S T E L A N D S , B O R D E R H I S TO R I E S , G OT H I C F RO N T I E R S Faulkner, McCarthy, Percy

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Kate Chopin’s St. Louis played an unlikely role in the emergence of a new transatlantic perspective on Ca­ tholicism in U.S. literature. When the author died in 1904, a young girl named Pauline Pfeiffer had just begun her education at a local convent school that Chopin herself had attended.1 Some two decades later Pfeiffer would move to Paris, where she befriended Gertrude Stein, John Dos ­Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—and became Ernest Hemingway’s second wife, leading him to convert to Catholicism. Hemingway never became a model member of the Church, to be sure. Yet he did manifest a sincere en­ gagement with the possibility of Catholic faith in his novels and stories of the 1920s.2 Works such as In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises featured the majestic cathedrals and popular festivals of the Catholic Mediterranean even as they depicted wounded protagonists searching for hope and love amid the ruins of postwar Europe. In doing so, these fictions often directly echoed the highly influential poetry of yet another St. Louis native: T. S. Eliot. The poet’s family, which had roots in antebellum New England, stood at the very center of the late nineteenth-century Anglo-Protestant 141

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elite in St. Louis that Chopin had generally disdained; during his studies at Harvard and the Sorbonne, Eliot himself grew to regret his family’s Uni­ tarian and Puritan heritage, coming to see it as complicit in the emergence of a spiritually desiccated modernity. Settling in England and steadily deep­ ening his engagement with Christian tradition, he ultimately reversed the theological journey of his ancestors as he joined the Anglican Church in 1927 and declared himself an “anglo-catholic in religion” shortly thereaf­ ter.3 By the time of Eliot’s conversion he had become the single most prominent figure in Anglo-American literature, as avant-garde in poetic form as he was conservative in his commitment to European tradition. ­Almost every prominent U.S. writer of the era somehow responded to his 1922 poem The Waste Land, which announced the essential spiritual bar­ renness of the twentieth-century Western world. Wandering that same world, other U.S. literary modernists such as Katherine Anne Porter and Allen Tate would join Eliot and Hemingway alike in crossing American borders and in articulating some hunger for communion with an older Christian tradition. In their era, only one major writer maintained a strong interest in that tradition while also writing con­ sistently and broadly of the Americas: Willa Cather.4 She merits initial at­ tention in this chapter because her work can help us to understand how Catholicism seemed newly attractive to many U.S. artists at the beginning of the twentieth century, even as it continued to be often reviled and viewed as foreign in the nation at large. Her depiction of a Catholic Church taking fertile root in a desert in the novel Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) demonstrates this and can further help us to understand the U.S. Gothic in two ways. First, Cather’s novel writes Catholicism in such a way as to demonstrate precisely what the Gothic is not, modeling selves that are not fearfully obsessed with individualism and autonomy; second, and re­ latedly, it manifests a central concern with historiography in relation to ­Catholicism and American borders that is directly relevant to the Gothic novels that are this chapter’s primary concern. Those are the most ambi­ tious Gothic novels of William Faulkner and two of his legatees from the U.S. South—novels that, like Death Comes for the Archbishop, were written in the twentieth century but largely concerned with remembering the ­nineteenth. Faulkner, as we shall see, praised Cather on multiple occasions throughout his career and responded to her work obliquely in his own fic­

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tion. More obviously, however, Faulkner established himself as a modernist with a Gothic sensibility who alluded directly to the antebellum tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville—most pointedly in his multivocal narrative of the history of a haunted house, family, region, and hemisphere in Absalom, Absalom! This Gothic novel with a doomed nineteenth-century frontiersman at its center would serve as a partial model for the two other writers considered in this chapter, Cor­ mac McCarthy and Walker Percy. Like Faulkner, they would come to write the southern borders of the nation in light of earlier U.S. Gothic tradition even as they shared his general engagement with the modernist motif of Eliot’s The Waste Land: the wounded modern man seeking fertility in a landscape of barrenness, wholeness in a world of fragmentation, faith in an age of doubt.5 Percy was a convert to Catholicism; McCarthy was raised a Catholic; Faulkner knew the Catholic Church only indirectly. The differences among these three writers are, as we shall see, vital. But Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and Percy’s Lancelot are similar not only in their settings but also in their fundamental concern with historiogra­ phy in relation to Catholicism—a concern that ultimately hearkens back to the perceived crisis of authority in modernity manifested in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Specifically, the Gothic and therefore pro­ foundly ambiguous histories imagined in these three novels all play on longstanding Anglo-American fears regarding a Catholicism that along the southern borders of the United States threatens to break down rig­ idly conceived divisions between Anglo-American purity and Latin im­ purity, innocence and guilt, white and black, mind and body, “masculine” self-­reliance and ­“feminine” receptivity, present and past. Ultimately, these Gothic texts write the confrontation with Catholicism in such a way as to deconstruct myths of Anglo-American exceptionalism that feature the United States as purifying or righteously escaping the tainted past. Like Death Comes for the Archbishop, albeit much more darkly, these seemingly fantastical fictions profoundly undermine popular Anglo-American cul­ tural assumptions as they not only challenge a narrative of history as inevi­ tably progressive but also demonstrate the ultimate inability of the autono­ mous intellect—figured in these fictions as belonging to the insistently self-­reliant Anglo-American frontiersman—to author history.

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REIMAGINING CATHOLICISM IN THE AMERICAS: WILLA CATHER’S LATIN WEST

Cather was significantly older than Hemingway and Eliot, with one foot effectively in the nineteenth century, and she remained more firmly rooted in American geographies than did they. While these distinguishing factors informed both her attraction to Catholicism and her awareness of disdain for the faith in her contemporary United States, she is nonetheless repre­ sentative of trends in U.S. literary modernism generally—and a vital touch­ stone for understanding Faulkner’s particular engagement with Catholicism. These claims are best understood in relation to Death Comes for the Archbishop, which depicts the life of the first Catholic archbishop of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the wake of the Mexican-American War. Cather, raised a Baptist, had become an Episcopalian some five years before publishing the novel, and her interest in Catholicism had become increasingly evident in works such as The Professor’s House (1925) and My Mortal Enemy (1926).6 That interest was on full display in 1927 with the publication of Death Comes for the Archbishop, which would become one of her most acclaimed novels—and indisputably the most forthrightly positive depiction of the Catholic Church by any major U.S. novelist. The novel insistently emphasizes the manner in which that Church crosses na­ tional borders: the narrative opens in Rome and features a prelate from France who both respects Native Americans and is profoundly moved by the enduring faith of the Mexican Americans who form the vast majority of his new flock. Death Comes for the Archbishop was inspired not only by Cather’s visits to the southwestern United States but also by the attraction to French Catholicism that she first developed during her childhood in Ne­ braska via the influence of a nearby village of Quebecois immigrants.7 Cather had visited France in 1902 and again in the early 1920s. She ad­ mired Henry Adams’s Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904) to the point that the central “cathedral in Death Comes for the Archbishop might well be read as Cather’s counterpoint to Adams’s Chartres transported to the American Southwest,” albeit architecturally “Romanesque rather than Gothic.”8 In 1928, a year after the publication of Death Comes for the Archbishop, she visited Quebec and found there the inspiration for her novel Shadows on the Rock (1931), which “celebrates the French colonial experi­

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ence in North America as an alternative to the revolutionary severance from Europe that defines much of U.S. history.”9 Her interest in Catholi­ cism never abated, as at the time of her death she was working on a novel about the papacy set in medieval Avignon. Death Comes for the Archbishop is distinct from Cather’s other depic­ tions of Catholicism in that it directly confronts the question of borders in the Americas as viewed from the United States. Cather recognized that when New Mexico became a U.S. territory, its native Catholic inhabitants complicated longstanding Anglo-American narratives of national identity precisely because they were not “immigrants”: they lived on the same land that their ancestors had lived on for centuries, even as national borders shifted around them. Cather’s protagonist, like the actual archbishop on whom he is based, oversees the formation of the new archdiocese of Santa Fe in the early 1850s precisely because the United States has just forcibly annexed its current southwestern territory. Cather’s novel, then, considers the aftereffects of Manifest Destiny, the nineteenth-century notion that the United States would inevitably reach from sea to shining sea despite the fact that independent Mexico and numerous native tribes stood in its way. This notion is often held to be derived from certain aspects of North American Protestantism, as colonial New Englanders had been prone to interpret their military victories over Native Americans as prefigured by Old Testament accounts of Israel’s military victories. Yet it also has decid­ edly more modern sources. As Melville intimated in Benito Cereno and else­ where, nineteenth-century proponents of Manifest Destiny in fact spoke only very generally of “Providence,” without direct correlation to Scripture, and tended to the proto-Darwinian view that in the struggle for survival between races and nations the superior one would win—and the victory would be its own justification. Such views remained prominent in Cather’s early twentieth-century United States. Death Comes for the Archbishop can be read in part as a response to Anglo-Protestant hostility to rising Catholic immigration in the 1920s. Hostility to “Puritanism”—itself often defined quite loosely by popular critics such as H. L. Mencken—had in fact become some­ what intellectually fashionable in the United States, and in the decade of the Scopes Trial, Christianity in general began to be associated with benighted irrationalism on a heretofore unprecedented scale.10 Yet U.S.

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­ ational i­ dentity was still predominantly imagined “as white and Protestant n as much or even more so than it had ever been. The promotion of this es­ sentialist identity was not just a product of the Ku Klux Klan (which flour­ ished in this era) or other nativist and extremist sentiments. It exercised a firm hold over more educated” sectors of the population that defined themselves as “progressive.” For these, the legacy of the dissenting Prot­ estantism that had historically dominated the United States was essential to the nation’s “healthy democracy”—and to the ultimate evolution of “a secular modernity that would not be enslaved by myth and superstition.” Accordingly, a number of prominent literary critics in the 1920s and 1930s chafed against the historical setting of Cather’s novel and its interpreta­ tion of American culture. These self-professedly progressive critics found it inherently problematic that Cather’s French archbishop and his mestizo flock, representatives of a Roman Catholicism they deemed “inherently ret­ rograde,” were not presented by Cather as an “aberration” on U.S. soil but rather as an integral part of the American landscape.11 They objected to the fact that in Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather adamantly refused to af­ firm any necessary fundamental difference between a “progressive” United States and the supposedly less advanced nations of Europe—let alone Latin America.12 Belief in such fundamental difference was not inconsistent with Anglo-Saxon racialism in the early twentieth century and was often linked to what historians of the period have deemed Reform Darwinism, whereby government sought to oversee or at least encourage the proper “evolu­ tion” of the nation via scientifically guided reform programs (manifested most infamously by eugenics legislation, which had certain links to anti-­ immigration legislation). The essential “Protestant utopianism”—or, more accurately, post-­ Protestant utopianism—of such “progressive social reformers does not seem to have been widely shared by novelists” of this era, and certainly not by Cather.13 Death Comes for the Archbishop instead disrupts widespread assumptions in the 1920s regarding a self-professedly “progressive” but “nonetheless restrictively nationalist U.S. identity.”14 Cather’s positive ren­ dering in the novel of a culture shaped by pre-modern Christian tradition made her in some ways akin to Eliot, but her apparent conservatism in this regard perhaps seemed all the more threatening because she, unlike Eliot, stayed at home—she wrote of America. Furthermore, she, unlike Eliot, dis­

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played a pronounced “fondness for the hybrid” as she wrote about a defini­ tively transnational Church that insistently incorporated racial and ethnic complexity into itself.15 Intriguingly, Cather does not in the novel condemn the U.S. annex­ ation of the Southwest. Rather, she values the region and its Catholicism as contributing some positive good to the United States that the nation would otherwise not have, as a welcome check to monolithic notions of progressivism and national identity. Specifically, the Church in Death Comes for the Archbishop is characterized by a “maternal benevolence, clem­ ency, and inclusiveness” lacking in the nation at large.16 Her view in this regard both somewhat resembles and is less despairing than that of Henry Adams, whose 1918 autobiography—often deemed a hallmark text in the development of U.S. literary modernism—articulated his sense that British America’s willful distance from the faith of pre-modern Europe had been a cause of aesthetic if not spiritual deprivation in the United States.17 Cath­ er’s emphasis on Marian devotion in Death Comes for the Archbishop makes clear her agreement with Adams’s critique of modernity’s gradual turn to­ ward worship of the “Dynamo” rather than of the “Virgin”—that is, its commitment to the domination of nature via technology rather than the appreciation of nature’s fecundity previously enshrined by ancient Greeks and medieval Christians alike.18 Relatedly, Death Comes for the Archbishop as a whole rejects an evolutionist historicism that justified U.S. expansion on the basis of the nation’s apparent achievement of “social progress and secular enlightenment,” its budding advance beyond older religious and cultural traditions. A novel adhering to that sort of “evolutionist ideal”— itself essentially consistent with the notion of Manifest Destiny—would have focused not on the archbishop but on Kit Carson, a frontiersman of the sort whose conquest of the West was generally seen at the time as em­ ploying modern technology to eradicate pre-modern superstitions and spread the benefits of Anglo-American civilization.19 Carson does appear in Cather’s novel, but only to be “deliberately mar­ ginalized with regard to the central characters and, in terms of his persecu­ tion of the Navajo, termed ‘misguided.’” The novel therefore clearly favors the “aesthetic and religious” concerns of the archbishop and his flock over the expansionist ones epitomized by Carson and applauded by Cather’s critics, whose political bent made them “interested, unlike Cather herself,

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in a historical narrative with clear winners and losers.”20 What Cather is interested in instead is beauty, including the beauty of a Catholicism that she figures here as profoundly “maternal and sheltering.”21 Relatedly, she is interested in “the multiplicity and fortitude of Christian imagination.”22 That imagination is displayed in the novel via both the depiction of reli­ gious artifacts such as Archbishop Latour’s cathedral and the form of the narrative itself: Death Comes for the Archbishop “seems more like a saint’s life or a series of scenes from a stained-glass window than a full-fledged, mimetic narrative.”23 In effect, Cather’s approach to her subject demanded that she abandon narrative of the sort typified by the mainstream English novel in the nineteenth century. Her “open, paratactic form” followed cer­ tain medieval precedents, responded to Mexican American visual arts, and resisted the same post-Enlightenment narrative biases that had been re­ sisted decades earlier by Hawthorne and Melville—the former most fa­ mously in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables, wherein he pre­ sented his work not as an empiricist “Novel” but as a speculative “Romance” that embraced mystery.24 Hawthorne’s Romances, of course, were also Gothic, and his fixation on narrating Christianity and American history finally quite different from Cather’s as he emphasized darkness rather than light, tragedy rather than comedy, isolated individuals shut up in the privacy of their own hearts rather than a universal church in which they might come together to form one body.25 In all these respects, Hawthorne was less akin to Cather than to Faulkner. The Mississippi native would become the most influential novelist to extend earlier U.S. Gothic tradition into the twentieth century, yet as he began his career in the early 1920s, Faulkner was drawn to the decidedly un-Gothic fiction of Cather for several reasons. In some respects the older Cather modeled what he would become: a U.S. literary modern­ ist who loved and visited France but essentially stayed at home, combining experimental narrative forms with a deeply grounded American regional­ ism. Faulkner would praise Cather as an artist throughout his career and responded to her work obliquely in his own fiction; it is not unreasonable to assume that his occasional fictional renderings of Catholicism and of the Spanish legacy in the southern and western United States owe something to his reading of Death Comes for the Archbishop.26 Cather had, he undoubt­ edly recognized, written a very gentle sort of “anti-Western.” He would

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write tragically violent ones, helping to establish for the twentieth century a form of the Gothic that directly fosters a “critique of ideology” precisely because it recognizes that “challenging frontier myths” means challenging “myths of nation ­building.”27

GOTHIC FRONTIERSMEN, GOTHIC SOUTHS: FROM MELVILLE TO FAULKNER

Cather’s frontiersman Kit Carson inhabits a narrative peripheral to that of her Archbishop Latour—a clergyman who recognizes that he is constantly reliant on others, including the Virgin Mother who initially appears here with “a black reboso over her head, like a Mexican woman of the poor,” and that his own life is written only in collaboration with an Author other than himself.28 The three Gothic novels under primary consideration here, by contrast, are centrally concerned with figures more akin to Carson. Ac­ cordingly, it is important to consider the literary and historical models of the self-reliant frontiersman that were available to their authors. Faulkner, Percy, and McCarthy alike had their origins in the U.S. South—not Cho­ pin’s French Catholic Louisiana, but the Anglo-dominated uplands of north Mississippi, central Alabama, and east Tennessee, respectively. Earlier authors ranging from George Washington Harris and William Gilmore Simms to Mark Twain had written the frontier from this region, but gen­ erally in the vein of humor. In the nineteenth century, the frontier as Gothic site had been written most memorably in the North, and the emer­ gently nightmarish figure of the autonomous self transplanted from Britain to the Americas—including the southern Americas—most powerfully by Melville.29 As discussed in chapter 2, that willfully autonomous figure appears in Benito Cereno as “the American” Captain Delano—insistently white, masculine, rational, and “innocent”—whose marine environment is, as in Moby-­Dick and “The Encantadas,” partly representative of the frontier as conceived in the United States. While Melville’s aristocratic Spanish sea captain in part resembles a decadent southern slave owner, his U.S. cap­ tain parallels Kit Carson and other westward-bound frontiersmen in the wake of the Mexican-American War: that captain’s desire to reorganize

150  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

ad ­ isheveled Spanish ship off the South American coast reflects a mid-­ nineteenth-century Anglo-American desire to control a seemingly disor­ derly Latin America, to impose willful democratic authority on a region that lacked the full benefits of Reformation-cum-Enlightenment values.30 Such desire fostered popular support for the Mexican-American War and the general notion of Manifest Destiny throughout the nation as a whole, but it was particularly prominent among southern leaders due to their re­ gion’s proximity to Latin America, and made clear in the activity of south­ ern filibusters. In its subtle commentary on Manifest Destiny and the southern United States, therefore, Benito Cereno intriguingly figures that region as “a space of degrees of overlap between . . . the Yankee and the plantation,” a “simultaneous embodiment” of both a progressive, Anglo-­ dominated capitalist North and a multiracial Latin South that has never fully escaped its colonial past.31 Alluding to the U.S. South to profoundly complicate the apparent dichotomization of the Americas and the moral history that citizens of the United States have generally wanted to write for themselves, Benito Cereno set the mold for later Gothic novels by Faulk­ ner, McCarthy, and Percy alike. In those fictions, the character that Mel­ ville figures as “the American”—that is, the self-reliant and only apparently innocent frontiersman—becomes explicitly associated with the southern borders of the United States and, to varying degrees, a more obvious fig­ ure of horror himself. Melville’s representative American is drawn from a variety of sources. He is in part an ironic variation on the American Adam figure—an Adam, crucially, without an Eve—central to much of nineteenth-century U.S. ­literature.32 But a useful historical analogue for Melville’s representative American, figured more darkly in Moby-Dick’s Ahab and The Confidence Man’s “Indian-hater” Colonel John Moredock, is Andrew Jackson. Melville came of age during the presidency of this frontiersman who made his way to the White House. Born in the Carolina backcountry before moving west to Tennessee, Jackson was a professedly Presbyterian but largely unchurched slaveholder whose career included unrelenting warfare against Native Americans and the seizure of Florida from the Spanish on the prem­ ise that the disorderly region provided a refuge for runaway U.S. slaves.33 As witness to the age of Jacksonian democracy, Melville saw the rise of this common white man, a man devoid of any semblance of aristocratic descent

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who was nonetheless soon judged a seeming tyrant. Via Jackson, Melville also saw the U.S. South as playing a central role in the larger nation’s nar­ rative, as opposed to the peripheral, oppositional, or contrapuntally regres­ sive one many saw the region playing for a century after the Civil War. In that regard, Absalom, Absalom!, Blood Meridian, and Lancelot pick up where Melville left off. All three critique the U.S. myth of the selfmade man that Jackson in many ways made incarnate even as they simul­ taneously critique a regional myth in which the likes of Jackson seemingly had no place at all: the myth of a “Cavalier” U.S. South, a region right­ fully and placidly dominated by a genteel planter aristocracy that sup­ posedly embodied the best of early modern Europe. This myth is mem­ orably articulated in Reconstruction-era fictions such as Thomas Nelson Page’s “Marse Chan,” wherein a former slave narrates his service as faith­ ful retainer to a chivalrous Virginia gentleman—an Episcopalian like Page himself, ­presumably—who seems to have stepped out of the pages of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. The South is in fact the only region of the United States consistently to produce this sort of positive medievalism (or faux-­ medievalism, as Percy, for one, would insist). It was openly mocked for doing so by Mark Twain and more subtly critiqued by figures as diverse as Charles Chesnutt and W. J. Cash, all of whom finally saw the antebellum South’s system of chattel slavery for what it was, not a feudal idyll but a modern horror, and emphasized the region’s identity as being more pro­ foundly characterized by the self-made frontiersman than by the Cavalier.34 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, writers from the U.S. South such as Chesnutt and Chopin began to produce the most distinctive Gothic fiction within the nation (as Poe, a Virginian, had done in the 1830s and 1840s). Much of that fiction paid heed to the legacy of slavery as well as to the divide between “aristocratic” whites and poorer whites. In­ deed, the region has long been deemed exceptional within the nation in­ sofar as it has been perceived as long-settled yet perpetually undeveloped— deprived of the full benefits of the Enlightenment and haunted by a history of irrational violence both within the plantation manor and outside it, in rural settings that seem a strange mix of medieval squalor and enduring American frontier.35 For all these reasons the term “southern Gothic” can seem a literary cliché. Yet Absalom, Absalom!, Blood Meridian, and Lancelot avoid the triteness of such cliché and stand among the richest Gothic

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­ ctions the Americas have produced because of their connection to a fi broader tradition: like Benito Cereno, they emphasize the violence of the frontier even as they juxtapose the United States with a Latin Catholic cul­ ture that threatens to undermine dominant Anglo-Protestant narratives of individual, regional, and national identity.36 Each novel is explicitly con­ cerned with historiography, and each ultimately depicts a Gothic encoun­ ter with a Latin Catholic South and concordant experience of ambiguity that undermines not only the regional Cavalier myth but also, ultimately, the national myth of the self-reliant and in some sense “innocent” Anglo-­ Protestant frontiersman. Faulkner does so most profoundly in Absalom, Absalom!, a novel in which—to put it only a little too simply—nineteenth-century Mississippi planter Thomas Sutpen plays the role of Benito Cereno’s “innocent” American, and Charles Bon his Latin Catholic foil.37 Like Melville, whom he greatly admired, Faulkner was not a Catholic but a person of cosmo­ politan sensibilities who began writing during a period of intense anti-­ Catholic nativism and was profoundly interested in exploring the flaws and lacunae in his nation’s predominant narrative. Faulkner did so in north Mississippi, where Anglo-American Protestantism was quite explicitly placed at the heart of that narrative. When Faulkner’s young niece (whom he ultimately helped to raise) reported to his mother that she had been in­ troduced at school to the notion that “all men are created equal,” the older woman promptly qualified the lesson: “Yes they are, my lamb, with the ex­ ception of nigrahs, foreigners, Catholics, and Jews.”38 In Faulkner’s native milieu, then, some people were deemed more equal than others, and bor­ ders separating them from one another—borders both around and within the ­nation—were drawn quite clearly. Obsession with such borders was by no means exclusive to Mississippi. Faulkner began writing in the same larger United States that Cather re­ sponded to in Death Comes for the Archbishop, a nation in the grip of a wave of intense nativism directed at Catholics and others. Faulkner’s own reli­ gious identity was somewhat idiosyncratic. Raised a Methodist, and an en­ gaged reader of the Bible all his life, Faulkner became, like Cather, an ­Episcopalian—albeit an infrequently observant one who had no sustained interest in church or ecclesiology of any kind. In his fiction, he was inter­ ested in Catholicism and its image insofar as they might via contrast reveal

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flaws in his own culture’s longstanding notions of purity and American ex­ ceptionalism, as well as its strong tendency to value practical industry and individual economic advancement (a tendency emphasized by Max Weber in his landmark study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first translated into English in 1930). Faulkner absorbed and instinctively shared the critique of U.S. “Puritanism” that was in the air in his day, and he was accordingly interested in Catholicism insofar as it seemed to be ­associated with syncretism, cosmopolitanism, decadence, and aesthetic ­indulgence. All of these were suggested in an enthusiastic postcard that Faulkner sent home to Mississippi from the Piazza del Duomo in Milan in August 1925, during his first visit to Europe: “This Cathedral!” he wrote. “Can you imagine stone lace? Or frozen music? All covered with gargoyles like dogs, and mitred cardinals and mailed knights and saints pierced with arrows and beautiful naked Greek figures that have no religious significance whatever.”39 Faulkner also experienced urbane Catholic contrasts with the plainfolk Protestantism of his hometown during his sojourns in south Louisi­ ana, where he imagined that at least some people of French descent saw themselves as racially ambiguous: he spoke of “Cajuns” who distinguished between themselves and “white folks.”40 Faulkner was deeply affected by the time he spent in New Orleans, the city from which he had first sailed to Europe and which was popularly associated with open ethnic and racial mixing, moral depravity, and Catholicism alike.41 As he worked on his first novels in 1925 and 1926, Faulkner lived in the French Quarter among art­ ists who had there created a “Dixie bohemia” all their own; most were, like Faulkner himself, outsiders drawn by the city’s libertine ways and the exotic spectacle it seemed to offer. That spectacle included native Creoles, recently arrived Italian and Sicilian immigrants, and public displays of Catholic rit­ ual, of which Faulkner was highly aware: he lived within sight of the garden of St. Louis Cathedral and could observe there a number of “priests, nuns, altar boys, and communicants, a new experience for a north Mississippi native.”42 Peering out the window of his apartment, the young author took note of “Negro nuns” in particular. They were the most highly valued pe­ destrian targets in a BB gun marksmanship game he routinely played with a friend (the rules did not generally discriminate on the basis of creed, race, or gender, as bearded men were also valued targets).43 Faulkner’s inherited

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tendency to associate Catholicism with moral ambiguity—if not outright depravity—was doubtless heightened by the fact that in an era when liquor was legally prohibited, he regularly replenished his personal supply by buy­ ing surreptitiously from one of the priests at the cathedral.44 Faulkner’s association of Catholicism with aestheticism might have remained shallow had it been limited to his frequently self-indulgent ex­ periences in the French Quarter (where he completed none of his best work). He was presented with more refined and disciplined models of ar­ tistic beauty, however, in his brief experience of the architecture and city­ scapes of Catholic Europe and in his enduring engagement with the fic­ tion of James Joyce. Faulkner carefully and clandestinely observed the Irish writer—­Eliot’s only real rival in prominence in Anglophone literature at the time—at a café during his time in Paris in 1925.45 Even more so than Cather, Joyce demonstrated to Faulkner how a writer from the provinces might come to write a great transnational fiction: the author of Ulysses had emerged from an Ireland that seemed as thoroughly uncouth from a Brit­ ish perspective as Mississippi seemed from that of the larger United States. Furthermore, Joyce’s fiction was clearly grounded in a Catholicism that the Irish author seemed committed to transforming into a cosmo­politan aestheticism: he sought to enact the culmination of Western literary tradi­ tion in his role as a priest not of God but of art, “a priest of eternal imagi­ nation, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.” This, at least, is the goal of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, an aspiring poet who seeks to “fly by” the “nets” of “nationality, language,” and “religion” alike in a quest for radical ­autonomy—a quest viewed as partly misguided by Joyce himself and clearly complicated by the fact that Stephen finds the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas invaluable as a means of formulating his aesthetic.46 What is certain is that Faulkner found Stephen and his aesthetic formula­ tion significant enough to respond to it directly in his second novel, Mosquitoes (1927), which features an artist named Fairchild who roams New Orleans rather than Dublin and professes his own theory that art emerges from the artist’s “Passion Week of the heart.”47 Mosquitoes also contains intriguing discussion of the apparent limita­ tions of U.S. Protestantism. When Fairchild admits that he knows only “the Protestant religion,” a “Semitic man” with whom he is speaking dis­

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misses it as “the worst of all” religions: whereas “one can be a Catholic or a Jew and be religious at home,” Protestantism seems a cruel “sect” to “raise children into,” a faith seemingly “invented for the sole purpose of filling our jails and morgues and houses of detention.”48 The Semitic man sug­ gests here that U.S. Protestantism somehow tends to inspire an adversarial, violent, and isolating individualism. Just previously, he has stated that Jesus, himself a Jew, has been driven out of churches in the United States, leaving a “vacuum” in which there is no place for “humility.” Fairchild con­ curs that most U.S. Christians seem to lack a capacity for serious theo­ logical reflection: “Other nations seem able to entertain the possibility that God may not be a Rotarian or an Elk or a Boy Scout after all. We don’t.”49 Fairchild is not generally understood to be a representation of Faulkner himself, but the dialogue between these two characters clearly demonstrates the author’s awareness of the possible limitations of Christianity as gener­ ally practiced in the United States at the time that he was finishing his lit­ erary apprenticeship and about to establish himself as a master. Faulkner did so in the period between 1929 and 1936, when his out­ put included The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! All three novels have long been deemed Gothic in certain respects, and the first two can in distinct ways be read as preludes to the last. The Sound and the Fury has little to do with Catholicism and American borders, but it introduces the vital character of Quentin Compson, who seeks wholeness in a fragmented modern landscape in a manner that recalls The Waste Land. Quentin, however, is finally a failed seeker. Wounded by his father’s nihil­ ism, unable to reconcile himself to his family’s history and his sister’s emer­ gent sexuality, he drowns himself in Boston’s Charles River while a student at Harvard. Quentin’s time in Boston as recorded both here and in Absalom, Absalom!—the narrative frame of which is set shortly before his suicide in The Sound and the Fury—connects his native Mississippi to distant New England and to all that region has signified in the nation’s history. In The Sound and the Fury, just as Quentin is appalled by his sister’s loss of inno­ cence in sexual activity outside his family circle, he is appalled to discover that old Anglo-Protestant Boston has been tainted by unclean immigrants: his nation has become, he thinks, “land of the kike home of the wop.” His drowning, crucially, is preceded by his encounter with a young Italian girl. This girl and her brother—presumably Catholics—function as strange

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doubles for Quentin and his sister even as he sees the pair as “dirty” and racially suspect: the girl’s complexion resembles “a cup of milk dashed with coffee.”50 Faulkner would foreground his growing concern with race for the first time in Light in August (1932), a novel that not only directly confronts the legacy of slavery in the United States but also explicitly recalls the Mexican-­ American War and tensions between Calvinist insiders and Catholic out­ siders in U.S. history (with some possible reference to Cather’s image of Mexico).51 This novel is also more openly fraught with religious references and allusions than Faulkner’s earlier work. Light in August opens with a Madonna figure named Lena Grove, a pregnant woman dressed in blue who searches for the father of her unborn child; her ultimately comic story frames the tragedy of the novel’s protagonist, an orphan named Joe Christ­ mas. This obviously somewhat Christ-like figure is feared by other charac­ ters as being partly African, occasionally identified with Italians and Mexi­ cans, and described as looking like both a “monk” and a “Catholic choir boy.”52 He has been taken in and raised by a cruel Presbyterian man, one who echoes those Puritans who had rejected the celebration of Christ-Mass as he proclaims the very name “Christmas” as “heathenish,” exemplifying “sacrilege.”53 The stern, self-righteous, and sadistic nature of Christmas’s adoptive father clearly supports scholarly views that “Faulkner was a critic of Calvinism” insofar as it stressed the “doctrine of the elect” and the “ab­ solute sovereignty of God”—a God whom characters in Light in August experience as hostile, as both the “Player” and the “Opponent,” a God much like Ahab’s white whale.54 The novel’s concerns with religion and race alike coalesce in the cli­ max, when Christmas is ritually murdered by a local captain of the Na­ tional Guard. Here that entity is aptly named, as it serves to “police the bor­ ders of the body and the nation”: accordingly, the novel becomes “a Gothic fable of a militarized whiteness that reproduces the very violence, excess, and transgression it sets out to contain.”55 Proponents of “whiteness” in the novel fear African Americans, whom they see as “Gothic s­pecters”— but they fear uncertainty regarding race even more. Christmas is rumored to have a Mexican father, in part signifying Faulkner’s knowledge of the fact that Mexican migrants were increasingly present in Mississippi in the early 1930s.56 Faulkner drew not only on such contemporary regional pat­

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terns but also more longstanding national and hemispheric ones, includ­ ing a tendency in Anglo-Protestant America to conflate ethical and eth­ nic “blackness” in relation to French and Spanish Catholics as well as to Africans. In Light in August Faulkner firmly situates the origins of that tendency partly in Puritan-cum-Unitarian New England via the Burden family, whose strange racial and moral obsessions are here connected to the westward expansion of the nation in the middle decades of the nine­ teenth century—and to a southern history in which Joe Christmas seems doomed to his death.57 Absalom, Absalom! continues to develop many of these concerns even as it resurrects Quentin Compson, though readers of The Sound and the Fury know that he will commit suicide soon after the action of the novel, rendering him in effect a ghost from the outset. This most explicitly histo­ riographical of Faulkner’s novels straddles two centuries as it depicts Quen­ tin’s efforts in 1910 to piece together a coherent narrative of the apparently haunted Sutpen family and their doomed antebellum house. He attempts to do so with his Canadian roommate in a Harvard dorm room that is oddly Gothic, a “snug monastic” space where one young man from the South and another from Alberta find themselves “born half a continent apart yet joined, connected after a fashion in a sort of geographical tran­ substantiation by that Continental Trough, that [Mississippi] River” that Faulkner imagines as draining the whole of North America into the Gulf of Mexico.58 Appropriately so, for Absalom, Absalom! concerns the South, the United States, and the Americas at large. It devastatingly critiques the southern Cavalier myth as it stresses that the nominally aristocratic Sutpen clan, with their grotesquely large white manor house and plantation in north Mississippi, was in fact less than a generation removed from the pov­ erty and violence of the frontier. Patriarch Thomas Sutpen, a self-made man in the mode of Andrew Jackson, established his family here in order to escape not only his own humble western Virginia origins but also the perceived taint of blackness his name stood to acquire when he fathered an apparently mixed-race son during his brief marriage to a supposedly Span­ ish or Creole woman in the Caribbean. On the birth of this unacceptable heir, Sutpen—obsessed with maintaining what Quentin’s father calls his “innocence”—immediately fled back to the United States, to the “pecu­ liarly Anglo-Saxon” and “puritan” culture of north Mississippi (Quentin’s

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father’s words). He did so in order to escape a Latin world that in Absalom, Absalom! is forthrightly associated with the breakdown of racial dichoto­ mies (AA 86).59 Nonetheless (as best Quentin and Shreve can piece together, at least), Sutpen’s Haitian-born mulatto and androgynous son Bon—identified as “a Catholic of sorts”—emerges in New Orleans, that northernmost outpost of the Latin South, and travels into north Mississippi to threaten and fi­ nally destroy Sutpen’s bid to achieve his abstract design of purity (75). The contrast between the two worlds is concisely highlighted in Mr. Compson’s description of Sutpen’s younger and legitimate son Henry, who is mystified when he first enters “foreign and paradoxical” New Orleans: “this grim hu­ morless [Anglo-Protestant] yokel out of a granite heritage where even the houses, let alone the clothing and conduct, are built in the image of a jeal­ ous and sadistic Jehovah,” is suddenly confronted with a French Catholic “place whose citizens had created their All-Powerful and His supporting hierarchy-chorus of beautiful saints and handsome angels in the image of their houses and personal ornaments and voluptuous lives” (86). Bon gradually exposes Henry to the city with its architecture “a little curious, a little femininely flamboyant and therefore to Henry opulent, sensuous, sin­ ful” before finally introducing him to his own octoroon mistress—who lives behind “a curiously monastic doorway in a neighborhood a little deca­ dent, even a little sinister” (88).60 In Faulkner’s Gothic tale, then, as in Benito Cereno, regional and national obsessions with purity—moral and racial alike—are haunted by fears of Latin Catholic impurity. In Faulkner’s text, that impurity is connected explicitly to uncontrolled female fertility. The threat of such fertility is clearly represented by Sutpen’s first wife: his inability to categorize her body results in his first son being born with a racial identity as uncertain as that of Joe Christmas. Even outside the Ca­ ribbean world into which Bon is born, however, female bodies are feared by Sutpen in his quest to assert his autonomy. As a boy in western Virginia, first developing the ambition to leave his humble origins behind, Sutpen comes to view his own pregnant sister as a “beast”: he desires to transcend the reproductive cycle into which he and his family seem to have been born “as cattle, creatures heavy and without grace, brutely evacuated into a world without hope or purpose for them, who would in turn spawn with brutish and vicious prolixity, populate, double treble and compound” (190–91).

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Failing in Haiti to make good his escape from a reproductive cycle over which he is not master, Sutpen seeks again on arrival in Mississippi to as­ sert such mastery—which would entail producing an heir whom he envi­ sions simply as a replica of himself. He locates a pliant Anglo-Protestant bride whose suitability for such purposes is suggested by her surname, “Coldfield,” and guaranteed by the reputation of her father, a Methodist “puritan” who practices an ascetic capitalism that seems derived directly from Max Weber (32, 54).61 Ellen Coldfield’s sister Rosa—a self-righteous and furious zealot akin to Joe Christmas’s adoptive father—finds some semblance of peace and love only when Sutpen and other men in her life are off fighting the Civil War. She does so in a Mississippi setting now dominated by women and oddly colored by references to Catholicism. Rosa, her niece Judith, and Sutpen’s illegitimate slave daughter Clytie live together on the plantation like “three nuns in a barren and poverty-stricken convent,” working “with no distinction among us of age or color,” “as though we were one being” (124–25). These three women soon stand together over the grave of Bon, vaguely Christ-like albeit here un-resurrected, after a burial in which he is identified once again as a Catholic (123). Judith later appears as suffer­ ing witness to the eventual “Gethsemane” of Bon’s son (159, 169). That son had been introduced into the novel in New Orleans in the arms of his octoroon mother, who appears in some respects as a Madonna figure, “the eternal female, the eternal Who-suffers,” and thereby completely con­ founds “the puritan’s provincial mind” of Henry Sutpen, whose system of “morality” divides women into “ladies or whores or slaves” (91). Con­ sistently, then, a narrative of femininity, fertility, and suffering associated with Catholicism runs counter to the narrative of binary categorization and mastery that Sutpen seeks to perpetuate in order to assert his own au­ tonomy. As Faulkner’s representative “American,” Sutpen is at once more clearly deserving of moral censure and more ultimately pitiable than Melville’s in Benito Cereno; he finally resembles Ahab more than Captain Delano in this regard. And while Benito Cereno itself raises significant questions about the difficulty of historical interpretation via its insertion of a Spanish legal deposition into the narrative, Faulkner’s concern with historiography is both more explicit and more profound. Absalom, Absalom! is finally as

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much a story of Sutpen’s potential biographer Quentin as it is of Sutpen himself. As a “legendary figure of historical import” in Quentin’s commu­ nity, Sutpen seems a fitting subject that would “meet the genre standard of nineteenth-century biographies of ‘great men’” in the United States—often men of action and of the frontier such as Andrew Jackson, men whose lives were written by educated easterners into a biographical tradition that tended to privilege “egocentric individualism.”62 Quentin’s Harvard edu­ cation in 1910 bids fair to make him into such a biographer. But when confronted with the proliferating narrative perspectives that stem from re­ flection on Sutpen’s relationship with Bon, he is overwhelmed—and sub­ sequently driven to suicide—by his fruitless desire to find authority or meaning in a longstanding U.S. narrative dominated by seemingly selfmade and therefore god-like father figures. Sutpen has in fact naïvely tried to rival a transcendent Jehovah himself—but his own body, in its simple mortality and in its entangling encounters with women and the Latin world that spawns Bon, dooms him.63 Grappling with Sutpen’s story from New England, the budding moralistic biographer Quentin, like the will­ fully self-reliant frontiersman-turned-planter himself, finds that he cannot write the master providential narrative that would give Sutpen—or the na­ tion within the parameters of which he has sought to define himself—­ purpose or meaning or order. Faulkner’s impetus in creating Quentin was in part The Waste Land, with its final presentation of a speaker who seeks to “shore” the ruins of Western civilization by assembling “fragments” of meaning.64 Quentin’s failure to do so is—following The Sound and the Fury’s titular reference to Macbeth—a failure to construct a narrative that seems anything more than a tale told by an idiot, a failure to construct a narrative that signi­ fies something rather than nothing. Such a master narrative, Quentin is overwhelmed to discover, would necessarily concern not only his fami­ ly’s immediate community but also his American Hemisphere. Faulkner’s ambition in considering the latter had begun with Light in August and cul­ minated in Absalom, Absalom!—rightly deemed as anticipating a number of postmodern novels in the United States insofar as it is a pioneering example of historiographic metafiction that radically calls into question the nation’s favored historical narrative.65 Yet Absalom, Absalom! does so in large part by following patterns in Anglo-American Gothic literature—­including vital

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engagement with the hauntingly foreign specter of Catholicism—that date to the eighteenth century and The Castle of Otranto.

BLOOD MERIDIAN AND LANCELOT: BORDERS, BODIES, CHRIST

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) and Walker Percy’s Lancelot (1977) extend Faulkner’s Gothic vision of American borders in many respects. These two authors, however, are much more directly interested in theological questions than was Faulkner. Each experienced a Catholic Church that marked him for life. McCarthy was raised as part of a distinct Catholic minority in Appalachian east Tennessee and had a brother who entered a Jesuit seminary; he was rightly identified early in his career as a “novelist of religious feeling,” one whose engagement with ­Catholicism eventually became abundantly clear in novels set along the Mexican-­ American border.66 Percy was raised a nominal Protestant in Alabama and Mississippi and became a religious skeptic enamored of the scien­ tific method while a medical student in New York; after experiencing a severe bout of tuberculosis, he settled in New Orleans and converted to Catholicism. Percy’s long journey to faith—largely via his reading of Søren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoevsky along with Catholic intellectuals such as Jacques Maritain and Romano Guardini—has been well documented, and in this regard he is finally more akin to Flannery O’Connor than to Faulkner.67 By contrast, McCarthy, who rarely gives interviews and reso­ lutely avoids providing direct answers when he does, is generally assumed to be a lapsed Catholic, and was deemed a nihilist by early critics. Yet an abiding concern with Christianity has always been present in his work and has become increasingly evident in recent years.68 While Lancelot is Percy’s sole Gothic novel—and therefore something of an aberration for the author—reviewers noted McCarthy’s deep kinship to “Gothic masters” from the outset. His early novels Outer Dark and Child of God featured strikingly violent plots, archaic diction, and a southern Ap­ palachian setting rendered as essentially pre-modern, marked by a “wild­ ness” and “strange awfulness” seemingly foreign to most urbane readers in the United States. While McCarthy’s regional backwoods setting resembled Faulkner’s in some respects, a perceptive early reviewer recognized that his

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fiction lacked the earlier author’s “sociological dimension” and seemed in­ stead the work of an “allegorist” overtly focused on metaphysical questions: his apparent sense of “responsibility as a storyteller includes believing with his characters in the devil, or at least in the absolute destructiveness of evil.”69 McCarthy’s fourth novel, Suttree, set in and around his hometown of Knoxville, was immediately recognized as displaying “a freakish imagi­ native flair reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor.”70 It was also entirely dis­ tinct from his earlier work in that it featured an educated and self-aware protagonist who struggled to reject his family’s Catholic faith. In its depic­ tion of a dissolute intellectual in open rebellion against Christianity in an urban setting, Suttree had a pronounced kinship not only to O’Connor’s Wise Blood but also to Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.71 Like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, McCarthy’s Cornelius Suttree is a semi-autobiographical protagonist who attempts to define himself both in opposition and in continuing relation to Catholicism. Understanding his character is therefore vital to understanding McCarthy in general (and Blood Meridian in particular, as Suttree immediately preceded it). It is partly accurate to observe that Cornelius Suttree seems, “like Stephen Dedalus, an imperfectly lapsed Catholic left impaled upon the wrong end of a co­ herent theological dogma in which the world can only be a place of death and suffering.”72 Suttree’s childhood experience of the Church—perhaps marked by an Irish Jansenism—seems to fit longstanding Anglo-American associations of Catholicism with terror.73 Suttree was once devout, spend­ ing “a thousand hours or more” in the Church of the Immaculate Concep­ tion, where “the virtues of a stainless birth were not lost on him, no not on him”; there he spent “so many black Fridays in terror of his sins. Viceridden child, heart rotten with fear.”74 Suttree is specifically haunted by memories of the horrific rhetoric of certain priests, “grim and tireless in their ortho­ pedic moralizing,” “filled with tales of sin and unrepentant deaths and vi­ sions of hell and stories of levitation and possession and dogmas of semitic damnation” (S 254). The novel’s most frightening priest, however, is alto­ gether silent. This mysterious figure, whom Suttree encounters in the ruins of his old schoolhouse, emerges in a doorway like an apparition and pro­ ceeds to watch Suttree “like a piece of statuary. A catatonic shaman who spoke no word at all.” On leaving the schoolhouse, Suttree looks back to

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see “the shape of the priest in the baywindow watching” (305); at this point in the novel, Suttree himself has been staying at a boarding house and spending his nights leaning “in the octagonal windowbay and look[ing] out . . . like a child in a pulpit in the dark of an empty church” (304). Given this juxtaposition, it seems that the silent priest Suttree encounters in the schoolhouse is in fact himself—a twinned image like those that abound throughout the novel, corresponding to his own dead twin brother or to some other potential self, some “doublegoer” or “othersuttree” such as he sensed in the preceding chapter (287).75 Suttree’s engagement with Catholicism in the novel finally cannot be explained merely as a function of fear. He demonstrates an enduring fasci­ nation with the priesthood even in his description of himself as a “de­ frocked” Catholic, and when he wanders into the Church of the Immacu­ late Conception as an adult, one gentle priest smiles “sadly, but a smile for that” as he leaves (191, 255). Earlier, passed out after a drinking binge, “a dream of shriving came to him. He knelt on the cold stone flags at the chancel gate where the winey light of votive candles cast his querulous shadow behind him. He bent in tears until his forehead touched the stone” (78). The image here is obviously that of a penitent. In modern English, however, “shrive” is a transitive verb, so that Suttree here dreams not of confessing—or not merely of confessing—but of hearing a confession, even if it is that of his own “querulous shadow.” Furthermore, insofar as a priest is alter Christus, Suttree plays that role in the novel, problematically but insistently: the son of a woman named Grace, he prefers the company of poor fishermen, criminals, and prostitutes to that of the apparently righ­ teous, and two women mistake him for a holy bridegroom.76 The novel’s opening chapter clearly highlights Suttree’s identity as a potential follower of Christ when—on a Sunday morning—he fishes alone and “said that he might have been a fisher of men in another time but these fish now seemed task enough for him” (14). Suttree’s own identity is readily connected to that of the Fisher King, essential to Eliot in The Waste Land (and to Hemingway in In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises), a figure with deep roots in medieval Christendom. Suttree’s fishing and his interest in the natural world generally lead him be­ yond the bounds of his contemporary Anglo-American society to a Native American character who might be seen as a sacred hunter-priest, one who

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reveres the prey that he must kill. Suttree, like McCarthy himself, finally has a pronounced interest not so much in Christian rhetoric as in priest­ hood—Catholic or otherwise—largely because it recognizes and responds to a violence that is inevitably a part of the experience of the body.77 While the protagonist of Suttree might well be read as seeking to escape any monotheistic God and to reconcile himself to nature alone, at novel’s end he has done neither. As he flees an increasingly modernized Knoxville, pre­ sumably bound west, he is pursued by a mysterious “huntsman” and his “hounds” (471). These are plausibly representative of a cruel anthropomor­ phic God and a relentlessly predatory nature, respectively—combined by Melville into one leviathan in the novel McCarthy has named as his fa­ vorite, Moby-Dick.78 Suttree was McCarthy’s final novel set in the Appalachians, as he moved in the 1970s to west Texas and began to write novels of the Mexican-­ American border that brought him widespread popular acclaim. Blood ­Meridian, his first novel of the border, did not initially achieve such ac­ claim, yet has in intervening decades come to be considered his master­ piece. Set circa 1850 and therefore contemporaneous with the events of Moby-Dick, the novel features frontiersmen who hunt down and scalp Na­ tive Americans and Mexicans as readily as Ahab’s crew hunts down whales. Blood Meridian finally pays homage to Faulkner and Melville alike as it taps deeply into U.S. Gothic tradition with regard to Catholicism and American borders, albeit from McCarthy’s particular perspective as an Irish American of Catholic background. McCarthy’s antebellum protagonist, identified simply as “the kid,” re­ sembles Thomas Sutpen in that he is “oddly innocent” and leaves the Ap­ palachian east in his early teens to travel south and west toward an antebel­ lum frontier. On arrival there, he seems finally “divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.”79 Like Sutpen, the kid ultimately finds that he is not a self-reliant master of creation. Here the Mexican-­ American border rather than the Latin Caribbean is the setting of his un­ doing—and his antagonist, the seemingly superhuman character known as Judge Holden, or simply “the judge,” proves a horrific example of what

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Sutpen would have had to be in order to successfully author his own his­ tory. Blood Meridian not only depicts the genocide of Native Americans and the aftermath of the Mexican-American War but also becomes a his­ toriographical novel as it demonstrates how the judge deliberately obliter­ ates the histories of others in writing both his own history and that of an emergently imperial United States. Often those others—including, ultimately, the kid himself—are illit­ erate. The judge himself is at once supremely literate and, despite certain “gentlemanly” qualities, a triumphant example of the self-reliant Anglo-­ American frontiersman. Primarily a perverse figure of the Enlightenment, even a mad scientist of sorts, the not-just-white but albino judge none­ theless draws on the legacy of the Puritans when convenient: he refers to Mexicans as “mongrels” (pseudoscientific language) but to Native Ameri­ cans as “the heathen” (religious language). These two aspects of his char­ acter converge in the fact that he, like Oliver Cromwell, is both a moderni­ zing military leader who effectively employs new technologies and an iconoclast—one whose success in “purifying” the frontier in preparation for his new order involves destroying other human beings and their tradi­ tions, their material histories, including works of art they have produced.80 Cromwell did so during the same era in which Puritan settlers in America wrote natives out of their history. They did so not only by “likening Indi­ ans to beasts and colonists to biblical personae” in an unambiguously alle­ gorical manner, but also by representing the Native American “idolaters” as bereft of interiority, as actual “embodiments . . . of the Second Com­ mandment’s violation.” Accordingly, the natives themselves became appro­ priate objects of iconoclastic violence—violence resembling that exercised by Puritans on medieval Christian artifacts in the British Isles.81 The landscape of Blood Meridian is littered with ruined churches as well as ruined bodies (primarily native and Mexican). All suggest that the ultimate ruler of the novel’s landscape, Judge Holden, is not only the “supreme avatar” of European Enlightenment but also a thoroughgoing icono­clast in the manner of Cromwell, whose troops particularly sacked Catholic churches in Ireland during the seventeenth century.82 By por­ traying Holden in this light McCarthy might seem to be following the example of the Mexican War’s San Patricio Battalion, composed of Irish American conscripts who began fighting for Mexico when they witnessed

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and ­experienced anti-Catholic bias on the part of the U.S. Army, a bias that often carried racial overtones concerning Anglo-Saxon superiority.83 McCarthy’s interest in such is first revealed in Suttree. Cornelius Suttree dwells with a group of squatters and homeless people living beyond the “pale”—that is, the ­border—of respectable society. The novel’s prologue foreshadows the fact that those people will finally be displaced by an ad­ vancing civilization of dubious comparative value, much as the “teutonic” settlers of the New World, “lean aryans with their abrogate semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parables therein,” displaced Native ­Americans— and much as Cromwell and other Anglo-Saxon invaders displaced pagan-­ cum-Catholic Celts beyond the Pale in Ireland.84 These same patterns are at the heart of Blood Meridian, which most fully embodies McCarthy’s “devastating critique” of a “modernity that owes its existence to the Euro­ pean Enlightenment,” a critique that exists “within the subtexts” of all of McCarthy’s work.85 Suttree helps to illuminate that critique and to better understand how Blood Meridian finally both replicates and revises earlier Anglo-­American Gothic associations of Catholicism with horror. Whereas Suttree depicts a Catholicism that the protagonist often sees as oppressive and desires to es­ cape, Blood Meridian primarily depicts a Catholicism that is figuratively be­ sieged, wounded, even violently murdered—a Catholicism that will finally prove powerless to aid the protagonist. Suttree is haunted by memories of his childhood church and its “garish altars,” of himself kneeling “before this tabernacle where the wise high God himself lies sleeping in his golden cup”; in Blood Meridian, the kid enters a church where “the altars had been hauled down and the tabernacle looted and the great sleeping God of the Mexicans routed from his golden cup.” In this same church in Blood Meridian “a dead Christ in a glass bier lay broken in the chancel floor.”86 In the earlier novel, Suttree has dreamed of his lost twin, “a dead child in a glass bier”; associates Christ with fish and sees fish displayed on ice in “a long glass bier”; and visits his childhood Catholic school, where he encounters or envisions the silent priest in a window “like a prophet sealed in glass.”87 In Blood Meridian, such imagery is often explicitly connected to his­ torical and historiographical concerns. This fact is highlighted early in the narrative, when the kid first enters a Catholic church in San Antonio in the wake of the Mexican War. There he sees “an array of saints in their

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niches . . . shot up by American troops trying their rifles, the figures shorn of ears and noses. . . . The huge carved and paneled doors hung awap on their hinges and a carved stone Virgin held a headless child,” even as an ac­ tual child lies dead in the sacristy (BM 26). This is the novel’s first depic­ tion of a desecrated church, one that clearly prefigures the judge’s later de­ struction of material histories. McCarthy’s concerns here are not merely historical or political, however. The Catholic imagery in Blood Meridian has a more strictly religious, or ontological, significance as well, suggesting not only the apparent inefficacy of Christ’s death but also the inevitable horror implicit in a Darwinian natural world where the only Eucharist seems to be that which the kid finds in a second ruined church: “the scalped and naked and partly eaten bodies of some forty souls” who “lay in a great pool of their communal blood” (60). The Mexican landscape itself seems “a great stained altarstone,” red with “the blood of a thousand Christs” (102). This image concisely exemplifies how the natural world itself is ul­ timately figured as a haunted enclosure in the novel—as so often in Mel­ ville’s Gothic fiction, most notably “The Encantadas,” where the earth itself appears as a “great general monastery” that houses all the dead.88 The judge himself appears as “archimandrite” over a bloody anti-­ monastery of sorts near the novel’s conclusion (and frequently as a dark priest, yet insistently not a Christian one).89 In a crucial episode near the novel’s beginning, a group of American filibusters seeking to realize their self-interested version of Manifest Destiny enter Mexico only to be fallen on by Comanches and scalped, left “tonsured to the bone now . . . like maimed and naked monks” (54). These images demonstrate how Blood Meridian openly invites an intertextual reading with Melville’s fiction—not only Moby-­Dick and The Confidence Man, in fairly obvious ways, but also Benito Cereno, wherein the Spanish ship appears as haunted monastery. Much as the sea crew turned opportunistic bounty-seeking slave-hunters are in effect introduced by a seemingly benevolent American captain in Benito Cereno, the nominally civilized yet demonstrably savage frontiers­ men turned scalp-hunters who dominate Blood Meridian are introduced by the musings of a less obviously savage American adventurer. McCarthy’s Captain White (U.S. Army), leader of the filibusters, is a more openly ag­ gressive version of Melville’s American sea captain. In the wake of the Mexican War, White justifies his own land-grabbing invasion of Mexico

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using the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny—here used to condemn Mexicans in racial, moral, and religious terms. Mexicans are, White says, “a bunch of bar­barians that even the most biased in their favor will admit have no least notion in God’s earth of honor or justice or the meaning of republican gov­ ernment. . . . A race of degenerates. A mongrel race, little better than nig­ gers. And maybe no better. There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there’s no God in Mexico. Never will be” (33–34). While White’s comments here might seem Eurocentric in terms of race, his soon-stated fear that Mexico will one day fly a “European flag” is connected to his implicit disdain for its Old World faith, already suggested in the actions of the U.S. troops who have defaced Catholic churches. White is perhaps quasi-Puritanical in this regard. Yet McCarthy—writing in the Reagan era—is, like Melville, interested in how the language of Anglo-­Protestant Christianity seems to have merged with the language of capitalism, the language of self-interest and self-making. Hence the kid first learns of Captain White via a crude emissary who identifies himself as simply “white and christian” and urges the seemingly lost kid to join White’s filibusters—because he himself was lost and then found by the cap­ tain, raised up by him “like Lazarus. He set my feet on the path of righ­ teousness. . . . He seen something in me worth savin and I see it in you.” Therefore, the emissary preaches, the kid should join White’s gang as they continue to “whip up on the Mexicans” and gain their own property in doing so: “It’s a chance for ye to raise yourself in the world. You best make a move someway or another before ye go plumb in under” (28–30). This pseudo-Christian U.S. narrative of righteous and successful self-­ advancement, with its undertones of social Darwinism, does not hold, however. Beginning with the majority of the filibusters being “tonsured to the bone” and left to die “like maimed and naked monks” in the desert, the triumphalist Anglo-Americans in Blood Meridian cross the Mexican border only to encounter an ancient Catholic world of moral ambiguity and bodily suffering where their own previous certitudes are dispelled in a maelstrom of violence. Despite their attempts to assert their self-reliant masculinity, they are struck down so as to writhe with “a lurid female mo­ tion” or castrated and left as corpses “with strange menstrual wounds” (162, 153). The novel’s greatest horror comes in the penultimate chapter as the kid—who has begun to “speak with a strange urgency” of his previ­

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ous bloody deeds, perhaps desiring to confess them—comes upon a party of slaughtered Catholic penitents in the southwestern desert (305). Though he has fled from women his entire life, he earnestly makes his way through the corpses toward a woman who kneels statuesquely “in a small niche in the rocks,” a figure who resembles the Virgin of Guadalupe as her shawl is marked with “stars and quartermoons and other insignia of a provenance unknown to him.” In this novel of unremitting violence, the kid is sud­ denly overcome with the urge to do her some kindness, perhaps to redeem himself—but on speaking to her he realizes that “she had been dead in that place for years” (315).90 Immediately previous it has been suggested that the kid has the potential to become a historian, a “witness” of some sort, even a prophetic one. But still inarticulate and fundamentally ignorant ­regarding Christianity—he carries a Bible “no word of which he could read”—he is left to his own devices after his failed encounter with the woman and can only fall prey to the judge (312). In the final chapter the judge’s rhetoric and power finally overwhelm the kid as he is in effect swallowed up into the judge’s narrative (presum­ ably raped and killed) and into that waste land that here is the U.S. frontier itself. The cryptic epilogue offers a glimpse of a more fertile landscape and some meager hope that a larger story is still to be written. The primary nar­ rative of Blood Meridian, however, ends with the triumph of the judge, a nightmare figure of the triumphantly self-reliant Anglo frontiersman—and the only successfully autonomous individual in the novel, one who has written a history that McCarthy clearly reveals to be horrific. Though Blood Meridian initially invokes the Black Legend and the Anglo-American hor­ ror of miscegenation, the novel ultimately makes whiteness itself—the color of the judge—the source of horror. On a deeper level yet, the novel communicates the horror of a Manichean Gnostic vision of reality, in which the judge is evil “Jehovah,” the demiurge who rules over the world of matter. In Blood Meridian, therefore, McCarthy provides a dark per­ spective on longstanding foundations of the U.S. national narrative: a dual fixation on a combative Old Testament God and a fundamentally modern dream of mastery over nature. In doing so he creates a narrative of the human condition that is profoundly horrifying, one that offers no hope for escape except in death (or, possibly, in a kind of Gnostic transcendence

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a­ ccessible only to the artist).91 McCarthy therefore writes “his own anti-­ myth against the myth of American exceptionalism,” aligning himself with a long American “literary and cinematic tradition” of doing so, a tradition that prominently includes those Gothic authors who preceded him in ar­ ticulating a vision of American borders in relation to Catholicism.92 Finally, it is worth noting that the kid’s encounter with the woman who resembles the Virgin of Guadalupe happens in the spring of his “twenty-­ eighth year”: that is, the spring of 1861. Only those readers who recall that the kid was born in 1833 realize this. But in doing so we become aware that McCarthy has not highlighted so much as obscured the beginning of the Civil War, the event so often placed at the center of U.S. history. Mc­ Carthy has not told the familiar story of a northern United States led by Puritan-­Unitarian New Englanders overcoming a southern Confederate States led by Cavalier Episcopalians, with victor and vanquished together giving painful birth to a newly unified nation. Rather, McCarthy—like Melville and Faulkner before him—has told a Gothic tale of the Ameri­ cas at large. It is a nightmarish tale of the triumph of the autonomous self, plumbing the depths of radical individualism, and much of its power de­ rives from the density of its allusions to the Catholic faith that has histori­ cally marked the southernmost borders of the United States. Walker Percy tells a tale in Lancelot that is in some respects funda­ mentally similar. His novel is set in south Louisiana rather than the Mexico border region, however, and his concerns are at once more obviously per­ sonal and more overtly theological than McCarthy’s. Percy was born into an Anglo-Protestant family that—despite having achieved great wealth and political prominence in Alabama and the Mississippi Delta over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—was plagued by recurrent de­ pression. The family’s tragic past led one accomplished historian to delib­ erately evoke the Gothic literary tradition in the very title of his study The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy and Imagination in a Southern Family, which details a pattern of suicide that had claimed the life of Walker Per­ cy’s father and grandfather. Percy came to see this pattern as a function of the family’s code of honorable “Stoicism” and that code as the functional religion of many upper-class Anglo-Protestants in the U.S. South. It taught a form of virtue but simultaneously confirmed the modern Stoic, like Mar­

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cus Aurelius, in his choice of “the wintry kingdom of self ”; in the final analysis, it was radically individualistic and therefore radically opposed to the interrelated Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love.93 Stoicism was, as Percy saw it, also the code of Faulkner’s Compson family, and its essen­ tial propensity for fostering despair made Quentin Compson unable to confront a modernity in which his family’s favored narratives of region and nation seemed to be collapsing. Percy stated clearly that he wanted to write about a Quentin Compson who did not commit suicide.94 In Lancelot, Lance Lamar resembles the Quentin of Absalom, Absalom! in that he is a troubled man of the twentieth century who is attempting to reconstruct the American past (as well as his own recent past and, to a degree, the European past). Like Quentin, Lance is an Anglo-Protestant aristocrat forced to confront a hidden legacy of vi­ olent individualism in the United States that is shadowed and countered by a Catholicism that threatens to cross and break down borders. Percy’s novel culminates in the collapse of the ancestral house of Lamar, just as Faulkner’s does with the collapse of the house of Sutpen; both follow the example of “The Fall of the House of Usher” in this regard and directly al­ lude to other works by Poe.95 In fact, Poe provides the most crucial refer­ ence point for understanding Percy’s engagement with earlier U.S. Gothic tradition. Though Lancelot is set in 1976 and responds to a late twentieth-­ century U.S. culture that no antebellum author could have fully antici­ pated, the novel’s essential affinity with Poe’s fiction is suggested both by the intimate violence at the center of its plot and by its confessional form. Narrator Lance Lamar, heir to an Episcopalian family that has long felt dis­ placed in south Louisiana, has disintegrated into criminal madness (which is at first subtle) after discovering both his wife’s infidelity and the apparent erotic excesses of the entire United States in the wake of the Sexual Revo­ lution. From his hospital room Lance struggles to remember and tell his story to his lifelong friend Percival, a Catholic convert like Percy himself. The novel becomes broadly historiographical as Lance’s attempt to remem­ ber his own hidden violence involves remembering stories that he has been told regarding the deeds of his ancestors in relation to prominent historical figures including Robert E. Lee and Jim Bowie. Lance ultimately reveals that he has killed his wife’s lover and, inadvertently, her—along with a

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group of sexually unruly house guests. In doing so Lance, despite his pro­ tests against the morally depraved world around him, finally reveals himself to be the chief horror in the novel. He has no desire to receive the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation or any semblance thereof. His narrative, how­ ever, is confessional in that it culminates with his admission of his crime to Percival—who is a Catholic priest as well as a physician and friend—and thereby to the reader. Lancelot therefore resembles Poe stories such as “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” in each of which a murderous narrator slowly and tantalizingly reveals his crime to the reader, raising subtle questions about the nature of authorship and authority as he does so. Poe was of profound interest to Percy insofar as his work modeled en­ gagement with a modern Cartesianism that elevated the individual intellect over the limitations of the material world. Poe’s murderous narrators—who fear and are often moved to commit crime by their perception of the body’s corruptibility—often echo the “sound of philosophy” as established by René Descartes.96 All of Poe’s fiction is profoundly shaped by the fact that “the medieval idea of the homo toto, the whole and indissoluble man, [had been] supplanted during the Enlightenment by the concept of a self that divided at death.”97 Nowhere is this clearer than in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The house itself, which strangely resembles a human head, has a pronounced fissure running down its middle—reminiscent of Descartes’s mind-body split, corresponding in the story to the problematic relationship of the twins Roderick and Madeline Usher. It is this fissure that finally causes the entire structure to collapse, as later with the fall of the house of Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! and the house of Lamar in ­Lancelot. While the Usher manor is described in Poe’s text as “feudal,” it has been identified by many critics as suggestive of a plantation house in the author’s native Virginia. Furthermore, Roderick Usher bears some re­ semblance to antebellum Virginia’s plantation owners, including—in Allen Tate’s ­estimation—Thomas Jefferson of Monticello.98 Tate, a poet and critic from the U.S. South who was a devotee of T. S. Eliot and a 1950 convert to Catholicism, mentored Percy in certain re­ spects. He in effect taught Percy to read Poe, looking beneath the surfaces of his fiction to see how on the most profound level it chillingly exempli­ fies the pathology of Cartesian thought and a concomitant radical indi­ vidualism.99 Furthermore, Tate helped Percy to see such Cartesian indi­

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vidualism as inherent in his own national and regional milieu. His essay “The Angelic Imagination,” which equates the term “angel” with disem­ bodied intellect, briefly describes Poe’s antebellum Virginia as “a society committed to the rationalism of Descartes and Locke by that eminent angel of the rationalistic Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson.”100 Poe’s identity as Virginian is the primary subject of Tate’s essay “Our Cousin, Mr. Poe,” which describes the Richmond native as “a gentleman and a Southerner” whose protagonists are generally “hyperaesthetic egoist[s],” “dehumanized” men who seem to be mere “machines of sensation and will,” men whose violent betrayals of their own bodies and their human kin alike would in Dante’s schema merit “neither Purgatory nor Heaven; and only two sta­ tions in Hell.”101 Tate’s reading of Poe ultimately helped Percy to under­ stand a certain sort of romanticizing of the Confederacy as strangely bound up with “the narcissism-solipsism of the modern intellectual,” a connection he had previously sensed but not fully grasped.102 In Lancelot, Lance La­ ­ arrator—most mar’s dead father—whose figurative ghost still haunts the n obviously embodies this sort of self-isolating Romanticism. Lancelot should be read directly in light of Poe, then, albeit with two qualifications. First, Percy much more directly than Poe ultimately writes of a radical individualism rooted in a specifically American setting. He does so by making Lance not merely a somewhat “foreign” Gothic aristocrat but, more profoundly, a modern scientist-detective and finally a violently self-reliant frontiersman—the American Adam with a Bowie knife. Sec­ ond, Percy’s ultimate model for his confessional novel is Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. Odious narrator and all, Notes in fact owed a surpris­ ing debt to Poe, whose own fiction Dostoevsky helped introduce to Rus­ sian audiences.103 Poe, however, offers no explicit or implicit moral posi­ tion from which his confessional narrators might be judged; the Orthodox Dostoevsky gave full rein to the voice of his underground narrator precisely in the hope that the character’s entrapment by modernity and need for Christian redemption might thereby be more self-evident. Lancelot follows suit in this general strategy. Like Notes from Underground, it is narrated by a character whose diagnosis of the ills of his society is partly correct, but who must himself be properly diagnosed by the reader in order to grasp the necessity of the author’s subtle prescription. That prescription is a Chris­ tian Word that emphasizes the individual as profoundly embodied and as rightly bound to others by and through the body.104 In Lancelot, it is that

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Eucharist which offers, in the view of Percival and Percy alike, a potential vision and taste of the real and of true community—a vision and taste that Lance has failed to attain throughout the novel. On the surface level, Lancelot more readily resembles Poe’s fiction. The novel opens, like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” with a violent man locked in a cell, a man not entirely sure whether he has committed a crime or been diag­ nosed with a mental illness; it proceeds in parts along the lines of “The Cask of Amontillado,” detailing the narrator’s obsessions with honor and vengeance. It also resembles “The Purloined Letter”—a story briefly dis­ cussed by characters in the novel itself—in that Lance poses as a detective of sorts. The novel most consistently mirrors “The Fall of the House of Usher” as Lance’s narrative begins with a visit from his boyhood friend Per­ cival (reversing the narrator’s visit to his boyhood friend Roderick in Poe’s story); the ancestral family manor that provides the setting is irrevocably destroyed at the end; and the narrative turns on fear of and attempts to master not only female bodies but human bodies generally, ultimately re­ sponding to and revising earlier Gothic associations of women, entrapping embodiment, and Catholicism—all three of which are violently rejected by Lance. Lance in certain respects initially seems to be a stock villain from an early Gothic novel: he is aristocratic heir to a manor which, to visiting Mid­ western tourists, looks “as foreign . . . as Castel Gandolfo,” the summer resi­ dence of the pope; that manor is in overwhelmingly Catholic south Loui­ siana, which has its own faux-feudal history; and Lance has certain medieval obsessions, notably with his own perverse notion of chivalry.105 In fact, Lance has absorbed his father’s admiration not of the real Middle Ages but rather of the Middle Ages as imagined by British Presbyterian novelist Sir Walter Scott. Romantic novels such as Scott’s Ivanhoe—as Percy wrote ­elsewhere—featured “a Christianity which was aestheticized by medieval trappings and a chivalry abstracted from its sacramental setting.”106 In its Arthurian allusions Lancelot takes the bright nineteenth-century medieval­ ism of Scott and gives it a dark Gothic face, though it does so in a manner that, as with Poe, ultimately focuses on a modern rather than a medieval horror. Lance himself is openly post-Christian, and is depicted as a logical de­ scendant of the sort of Virginia gentleman of Poe’s era whom Tate described as “a deist by conviction and an Anglican or Presbyterian by habit.”107

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Lance’s Louisiana is less genteel than old Virginia, however, and more “Southern Western,” as he puts it—that is, closer to the frontier (L 92). As Lance’s father told it, the Lamars descend from “Tory English colo­ nials” who arrived in “corrupt” colonial Louisiana and fought to build their own “chaste and incorrupt little Anglican chapels” despite being surrounded on all sides by “savage Indians” and “superstitious Romans” alike (14, 116). This formulation of the Lamar family history strangely re­ sembles the captivity narratives of early New England Protestant settlers who routinely conflated hostile Native Americans with enclosing Roman ­Catholics—­narratives that in some respects prefigured and informed U.S. Gothic fictions.108 Lance’s father preferred to dream of a Louisiana some­ how Anglicized, “suffused by gentle Episcopal rectitude” of the sort he as­ sociates with Robert E. Lee. Lance himself—despite his vocal aversion to Christianity in general—at times prefers to posture not as an Episcopalian but as a radical Protestant in the mold of Cromwell: he is a puritan of sorts, one who will launch what he calls “a new Reformation” and save a corrupt America by violence (215, 177). Lance’s obsession with the seeming loss of “chivalry” in a United States in the throes of the Sexual Revolution is, therefore, more complicated than it seems. On one level it is a continuation of his father’s merely nostalgic fantasy of a purer past. Yet Lance is nightmarishly modern himself, a figure of a self-reliant rationality that is both strangely puritanical and narrowly dichotomizing. What he calls “chivalry” is in fact an outgrowth of the nineteenth-­century U.S. pattern Tate attributed to Poe, whose “exalted ­idealization of Woman . . . was only a little more humorless, because more ­intense, than the standard cult of Female Purity in the Old South.”109 That idealization is reflected in Poe’s quasi-Cartesian protagonists, who have a habit of professing “an impossibly high love of [woman], one that bypasses the body and moves in upon her spiritual essence.”110 Lance follows suit in his verbal reconstruction of his deceased wife Lucy, emphasizing her “opaque Georgia eyes” in contrast to his current wife Margot’s “sweet Texas ass”: Lucy “was a dream” and all the purer for it, as Lance tells it (85, 119). Lance does not, however, only fear female sexuality. He ultimately feels trapped by his own body. Lance’s Cartesian position of abstraction from his body is reflected in his description of his initial research regarding his wife’s infidelity, where

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he presents himself not as medieval knight but as a kind of scientist or de­ tective. Near the novel’s beginning he calmly describes his discovery, a year previous, that he was not the father of one of his children. Science not only aids him in this discovery as he notes and researches his daughter’s blood type but also seems to offer him some solace as he uncovers increasing evi­ dence of his wife’s infidelity. “As a physician,” he asks Percival, “wouldn’t you say that nothing more is involved [in the act of adultery] than the touch of one membrane against another? Cells touching cells” (16–17). Significantly, Lance as “scientist” is in fact merely a theorizing layman, one whose technological society has conditioned him to see himself as an all-transcending intellect that properly manipulates physical reality. Per­ cival, by contrast, is in fact both M.D. and priest—a proper authority, as Percy sees it, on body and soul all at once. Lance’s identity as detective, reflected in his reading of Raymond Chandler’s novels and references to the violent television show Mannix, is yet another nod to Poe, who is generally credited with inventing detective fiction.111 Lancelot specifically resembles “The Purloined Letter” in that the object of Lance’s search—sin—is hidden in plain sight (i.e., within him­ self ) and also in that the detective himself is morally tainted. Furthermore, as he conducts a solitary investigation into his wife’s and finally his entire community’s sexual degeneracy, Lance perfectly exemplifies the radical in­ dividualism underlying much popular U.S. detective fiction: the solitary investigator “boring into the center of society to find it rotten . . . consti­ tutes the fundamental drama” of the genre. The “mythology of American individualism” deeply informs such fiction, in which the isolated detective’s own “moral heroism is always just a step away from despair. . . . The hero’s lonely quest for moral excellence ends in absolute nihilism.”112 No better description exists for Lance’s state in the final pages of the novel. Yet this description applies equally well to another archetypal U.S. hero relevant to Lancelot: the frontiersman who has left civilization and its seemingly re­ strictive mores behind. Lance comes to see himself in this role late in the novel. He persistently recalls how his great-great-grandfather cut a man’s throat “from ear to ear” in a savage duel on a Mississippi River sandbar after the man insinuated that his wife had been unfaithful to him with an African American (155). Lance’s ancestor did so using not a broadsword but a Bowie knife—the

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same knife that Lance ultimately uses to kill his own wife’s lover. Lance himself, then, finally appears neither as medieval knight nor as Tory gentle­ man, but as a self-reliant frontiersman who willfully and violently inflicts his abstract designs on nature—here, on human bodies. In the story of Lance’s family history, Percy deconstructs his own family’s faux-­Christian aristocratic heritage and places at the center of U.S. history not Rob­ ert E. Lee or other aristocratic figures who might seem “as legendary and mythical as King Arthur and the Round Table,” but instead the likes of Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett—the American Adam with a Bowie knife (116).113 Legends concerning such figures are as close to an autochtho­ nous popular mythology as the United States has produced.114 Accordingly, whereas Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground and elsewhere tended to see the Russian “soil” as especially well-suited to nurturing Christianity in his nation’s common people, Percy in Lancelot does not posit U.S. soil or identity in any such light. Indeed, the only character who speaks of values springing from the “soil” is the utterly ungrounded film director Jacoby (114). This is ironic but also fitting, for Percy writes of a nation far re­ moved from that envisioned by the Jefferson who idealized the yeoman farmer. Lancelot’s United States is a place in which common citizens act “as if they lived out their entire lives in a dim charade, a shadowplay in which they were the shadows” and movie actors were “resplendent larger-thanlife beings”; they are prone to believe that their own “reality could only be found in the illusions” of mass media (152). The late twentieth-century ascendance of such media and accompanying blurring of the line between reality and simul­acra is a major theme in the novel, one connected to the tendency of Cartesian individualism to transform physical reality “into a mere hall of mirrors for the self-reflecting ego.”115 Indeed, playing roles and designing one’s own identity without regard to “soil” or nature might itself be seen as the essence of U.S. identity.116 What is most significant about Lance’s final fixation on the violence of the self-reliant frontiersman, then, may not be the frontiersman himself so much as Lance’s choice to play his role—as opposed to that of his father’s preferred Robert E. Lee, or some other figure altogether. Percival’s choice to dress as a priest in the closing chapters of the novel, accordingly, draws significant commentary from Lance (163). Yet there is clearly more to Percival’s identity than “mere” roleplaying. While the

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­ ovel’s consistent engagement with the interplay of different identities (and n of different texts) in part reflects Percy’s postmodern milieu, Percy cannot be deemed a literary postmodernist. He affirmed that Christianity itself guaranteed a number of essential “properties of the novel without which there is no novel,” among them “the density and linearity of time and the sacramental reality of things.”117 For Percy, that reality is grounded in God’s ongoing presence in all creation, a reality most fully revealed in Christ and the sacraments administered by Christ’s Church. Lance’s relationship to the Church and sacraments, then, is a crucial indicator of his relationship to reality as Percy sees it. A post-Protestant himself, Lance initially expresses some distant ad­ miration for Louisiana Catholic Creoles whom his father saw as merely “superstitious Romans” because despite their apparent moral laxity they— unlike his own family—seem to have found the “secret of leading ordinary lives well” (24). But Lance becomes increasingly angry with the Catholic Church for what he sees as its failure to establish and enforce clear moral dichotomies. The bulk of the narrative is, again, a monologue delivered Poe-like in a mental hospital room that doubles as a potential confessional booth. But this stock Gothic element is cast in a new light when Lance ex­ presses his anger at the Church’s apparent moral ambiguity: “With you,” he tells Percival, “everything seems to get dissolved in a kind of sorrow­ ful solution. Poor weak mankind! The trouble is that in your old toler­ ant Catholic world-weariness, you lose all distinctions. Love everything” (130–31). “Damn you and your God,” he rails later. “Between the two of you, you should have got it straight and had it one way or the other. Ei­ ther it [i.e., sex, or any other action] is good or it’s bad, but whichever it is, goddamn say so. Only you don’t. You fuck off somewhere in between. You want to have it both ways: good, but—bad only if—and so forth” (176). Lance is oddly innocent here, expressing a Manichean preference for see­ ing the world in black and white. Hence his anger at a Church which, as Flannery O’Connor once put it, is not necessarily composed of “good people”—the Creoles with their lax mores make this obvious to Lance— but “is composed of those who accept what she teaches, whether they are good or bad, and there is a constant struggle through the help of the sac­ raments to be good.”118 The Church’s complexity in this regard seems ef­ feminate to Lance, who explicitly blames the Church for “emasculating”

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the Christ he would prefer to follow—a Christ who would demand imme­ diate moral perfection rather than instituting the sacrament of confession for struggling sinners (178). Lance is such a sinner himself, in Percy’s view. And because Lance is speaking to a priest, Lancelot not only echoes Poe’s Gothic fiction (and the general form of Notes from Underground as a confessional novel); here, the actual sacrament of confession is directly relevant to the plot. Furthermore, the sacraments as a whole are crucial to understanding Percy’s ultimate re­ vision of the Gothic. For what is horrifying in Lancelot is not Percival’s ­Catholicism, which via the sacraments stresses the union of body and soul; what is horrifying is Lance’s own tendency to deny and distrust the body, to divide body and soul, or—more precisely—body and mind in two. While he prefers to contemplate his romantic “dream” of Lucy, as noted above, he is simultaneously drawn by lust to Margot’s body. This tension between romantic idealism and unbridled bodily urges culminates as Lance expresses his anger at a God or at least a nature which—his narrow per­ spective has convinced him—has designed men to be compulsory rapists and women to submit to rape. The “verdict of evolution” is that human beings are defined by “sexual aggression” ( 224). By the end of the novel, then, it becomes clear to Lance that human biology itself finally seems a trap, a limiting enclosure. In making this observation, Lance attempts to indict the God he has professed little faith in elsewhere, in a crypto-­Gnostic assertion that the natural world as he sees it is simply too malevolently de­ signed and entrapping not to have some sort of supernatural intelligence behind it. Elsewhere Lance expresses this conviction in ways that recall tradi­ tional Gothic associations of the body with a confining Catholicism. Mid­ way through the novel Lance compares his wife Margot’s body to the “ark” of the covenant and speaks of “eating” that body sexually, as if it were some kind of Eucharistic sacrament (171). Read in context, however, this ­debased—because merely naturalistic—“sacrament” only serves to place Lance in quasi-Darwinian competition with other sexual predators. The culmination of this pattern is the late scene in which Lance secretly ap­ proaches Margot and her new lover Jacoby together in bed, gathering his final evidence of her infidelity. The bed itself, he says, looks “like a cathe­ dral, a Gothic bed, posts as thick as trees, carved and fluted and tapering

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to spires and gargoyles above the canopy. The headboard was as massive and complex as an altar screen. Panels of openwork braced posts and rails like flying buttresses.” Lance kneels behind the bed to listen to Margot and her lover, who seem to be one body; he poses as “an unconsecrated priest hearing an impenitent confession” (237). This is in fact Lance and Margot’s own bed, and therefore an apt symbol of how Lance has come to see mar­ riage and sex itself: not as potentially saving sacrament, but as Gothic ­enclosure—as further emphasized when he mounts the bed and clasps the two lovers together so tightly as to begin suffocating them. If this were a tale by Poe, suffocation would be the end of it. Percy, however, leaves his novel open-ended: it finally becomes not a chilling monologue but a dialogue that points toward the possibility of Lance’s sal­ vation. Having reported his crimes to Percival (though not truly confessed them because he is as yet unrepentant), Lance begins the final chapter in a state of quiet despair. He knows that Percival agrees in part with his diag­ nosis of the ills of the contemporary United States. He asks sardonically how the priest intends to treat those ills: “So you plan to take a little church in Alabama, Father, preach the gospel, turn bread into flesh, forgive the sins of Buick dealers, give communion to suburban housewives?” (256). Given his solipsistic outrage at society and his distrust of the body as anything other than a useful weapon, nothing could seem more useless to Lance than all these flawed individuals coming together—in the flesh—to confess their sins and receive the word and body of Christ. But in answer to his question about the church and to broader questions as well, Percival begins to repeat one simple word: “yes.” The priest-physician—the Percival who is in part Percy himself—has listened intently throughout the novel, assuming a pos­ ture that some critics have seen as “feminine.”119 Now he begins to speak with authority and will presumably prescribe to Lance a regimen of charity, the agape-Eucharist that will ground his identity not in disembodied self-­ reliance but in embodied communion.120 So the novel ends with the be­ ginnings of a real dialogue and therefore the possibility that Lance’s en­ counter with Percival might become a saving confession after all—that via the Church that Percival serves Lance might escape not the body but rather a limiting intellectual inheritance that elevates the self-reliant mind above all else. Left to his own devices, Lance had become obsessed not with the seemingly endless possibilities offered to the autonomous self in the United

Waste Lands, Border Histories, Gothic Frontiers 181

States but with the apparently inescapable fact of natural depravity—­setting out on what he deemed a quest for the “Unholy Grail” (138). Lancelot has with good reason been called “the ultimate modernist Grail novel,” in which the narrator expresses “sorrow and pain for the loss of coherence in the universe.” Yet Lance’s self-referential confusion is such that “he iden­ tifies himself with the wrong part of the myth”: in truth he is “not Lance­ lot, but the Fisher King, wounded to the heart . . . with the world become waste through the poisoning of love.”121 Percy’s novel therefore engages in the ongoing literary dialogue with Eliot’s The Waste Land that also informs Absalom, Absalom! and Blood Meridian. Percy’s Catholic conviction distin­ guishes him from Faulkner and McCarthy, however—and links him more directly to Flannery O’Connor, whom he viewed as a model in some re­ spects. Percy once observed that to many modern readers the Good News no longer seems new in part because the very vocabulary of Christianity seems “worn out,” “defunct.” The writer who is Christian is therefore com­ pelled to use “every ounce of cunning, craft, and guile he can muster from the darker regions of his soul” to present the world he knows as a Christian anew: “The fictional use of violence, shock, comedy, insult, the bizarre are the everyday tools of his trade. . . . Flannery O’Connor conveyed baptism through its exaggeration, in one novel as a violent death by drowning.”122 Lancelot is Percy’s own most sustained attempt at such a strategy, and its complex approach to revitalizing a Christian message for his culture revises the U.S. Gothic tradition in relation to Catholicism in a manner funda­ mentally akin to that of O’Connor.

C H A P T E R

5

O ’ C O N N O R ’ S “ T RU E C O U N T RY ” Borders, Crossings, Pilgrims

Flannery O’Connor wrote in and of a post-1945 United States that was newly powerful on the global stage. Though she completed only two short novels and some two dozen short stories before her death in 1964, she is widely recognized as the most accomplished professing Catholic fiction writer ever to emerge from the United States, a master practitioner of the short story form, and a profound chronicler of some essential “meanness” in the national character.1 She is also frequently categorized as thoroughly Gothic in her imagination—though O’Connor herself generally disliked this categorization, and the term “Gothic” demands particularly careful re­ consideration when applied to her work. She has often been broadly char­ acterized as such in relation to William Faulkner, and increasingly as a predecessor to Cormac McCarthy, but is in fact better understood in rela­ tion to Walker Percy. Both were committed Catholics who in many ways sought to revise the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne and of Edgar Allan Poe into comic form. As my closing comments on Lancelot have suggested, O’Connor was the master and Percy the disciple in this regard, despite the fact that she was younger and had a shorter career. That intensely focused career is properly introduced in relation to her biography. Born in 1925, O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus at age 183

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twenty-­five and lived out her remaining fourteen years—during which all of her major work was produced—under the care of her mother in rural Georgia. She attained her artistic maturity as, in her own words, a “hermit novelist,” one whose most regular travel was to Mass in her small parish church.2 O’Connor had a particular interest in Christian monasticism and can be viewed as an anchoress of sorts, living far from the centers of her own civilization as St. Anthony the Great and others did in the latter years of the Roman Empire.3 She never held a hagiographical view of her own character. Her letters and essays emphasize this fact, as does her recently published prayer journal: her request there that God make her “a mystic, immediately,” reveals her characteristically wry wit as much as her sincere devotion.4 She knew that her vocation was to be an artist. She ultimately saw that vocation as aided by her near-monastic geographical stability, as she lived almost all of her adult years in or near the small city of Mil­ ledgeville. Nonetheless, O’Connor had also been shaped by and responded to a world well beyond the borders of rural Georgia. O’Connor was born and reared in the heart of the port city of Savan­ nah, where “the cosmopolitan center . . . hosted a dozen or more foreign consulates; strangers with accents did not draw stares on the streets; and a cavalcade of steamers embarked daily . . . to ports in Germany, Britain, and Japan.”5 Savannah was at the time “the last major stop” for U.S. ships en route to Latin America, and with its relatively influential Catholic popula­ tion and prominent cathedral the city was in certain respects less akin to inland Georgia than to Havana or Caracas.6 Here O’Connor, like Kate Chopin, received her formative education from women religious whose ­orders were active in North America but essentially not of it: these were Sisters of Mercy, mostly “Irish women in their late teens, newly arrived, trained in Baltimore, and whisked away to schools down the seaboard,” along with Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet who traced their roots to France.7 O’Connor was forced to leave Savannah in 1938 because of her father’s career troubles and developing illness (which was eventually diag­ nosed as lupus, the same disease that would later afflict her; it killed him within three years). Relocated to her mother’s hometown of Milledgeville at the start of her teen years, O’Connor experienced a new sense of being in the minority in a state with a long history of anti-Catholicism. Georgia had been settled in part to serve as a buffer protecting British Carolina from Spanish Florida, which in the late seventeenth century had

O’Connor’s “True Country” 185

begun offering “freedom and Catholic baptism to runaway slaves” from Carolina, fostering the formation of a town of free black and mulatto Catholics just north of St. Augustine.8 Accordingly, under Georgia’s found­ ing Trust in 1733 “Catholics were expressly banned” from the colony, “along with rum, lawyers, and blacks.”9 Even in the decade of O’Connor’s birth, fears of Catholicism in Georgia still ran as deep as those that had given shape to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Matthew ­Lewis’s The Monk. In 1916, the state had passed a Convent Inspection Act charging grand juries to search “Catholic convents, monasteries, and orphanages . . . for evidence of sexual immorality and to question all the ‘inmates,’ ensur­ ing that they were not held involuntarily”; in 1920, U.S. Senator Tom Wat­ son accused the bishop of Savannah of keeping missing girls in “white slave pens.”10 In her close-knit Catholic neighborhood in Savannah, the young O’Connor had been sheltered from such fears of the faith. In Milledgeville, she was near the heart of the state that had elected Watson to public office. O’Connor also experienced public education for the first time in Mil­ ledgeville, where she attended high school and then the Georgia State Col­ lege for Women (primarily a teacher’s college). Both institutions prided themselves on following national trends in pedagogy, yet O’Connor found the “progressive” education she received there limiting in many ways. Her schooling in Savannah had incorporated regular prayer and stressed a natu­ ral world with permeable borders—a nature that finally opened onto in­ finite grace, as manifested clearly in the closing visions of O’Connor’s ­mature stories “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” and “Revelation.” Her secu­ lar school days in Milledgeville, by contrast, opened with the Pledge of ­Allegiance and stressed the human intellect as a kind of “box” seeking to enclose a finite world that was entirely susceptible to rational analysis.11 O’Connor experienced in Milledgeville for the first time a reductive sci­ entism that she would dramatize in characters such as Rayber in The­ Violent Bear It Away, Sheppard of “The Lame Shall Enter First,” and Mr. Fortune of “A View of the Woods”—characters whose general faith in progress via technology is consistent with their pride in the possibilities for enterprising individuals in the United States. Such characters are in part fruits of the fact that O’Connor first experienced middle Georgia—and middle America, in a sense—as a place marked less by a zealous Protestant­ ism than by a faith in secular modernity, a place quite distinct from her childhood Catholic home by the sea.

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Catholicism continued to shape O’Connor’s complex relationship to place when she left Georgia to begin her literary career in 1945. At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, O’Connor’s faith often made her feel like an outsider among classmates who tended to be proudly unorthodox; for three years she worked distantly alongside them even as she attended daily morning Mass at a local parish where, though she “never knew a soul,” as “soon as I went in the door I was at home.”12 In Iowa and subsequently at the Yaddo writing colony in upstate New York, O’Connor’s Catholicism simultane­ ously isolated her and—crucially—connected her to a few prominent and well-traveled writers. These included Allen Tate, the former Vanderbilt Agrarian who would formally join the Catholic Church in 1950, and Rob­ ert Lowell, who had turned to Catholicism in rejecting his family’s Boston Puritan legacy (and who would later adapt Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno and two Hawthorne stories for the stage in his drama The Old Glory). O’Connor also met Tate’s wife Caroline Gordon, another Catholic convert who became an important mentor to the young writer and would later serve via correspondence as a personal link to French philosopher Jacques Maritain, who lived near Gordon and Tate at Princeton in the 1950s. As documented in O’Connor’s letters, essays, and book reviews, she was highly engaged with the work of Maritain and other contemporary Euro­ pean Catholic intellectuals, the French and Germans in particular. Sadly, as she wrote to a fellow Catholic fiction writer from the South, “Americans seem just to be producing pamphlets for the back of the Church (to be avoided at all costs) and installing heating systems” (CW 1038).13 Meeting Tate, Gordon, and Lowell gave O’Connor her first personal contact with a native Catholic intelligentsia in the United States, even as her experience of Catholicism outside Georgia provided her with constant reminders that her Church crossed borders of social class as well. While at Yaddo in 1948 she regularly attended Mass in Saratoga Springs with Irishborn servants, who were unsophisticated but deemed by O’Connor to be “morally superior” to most of the visiting artists (HB 363–64).14 From 1949 to 1950, she lived in entirely different circumstances, enjoying the peace of suburban Connecticut with the Catholic family of Yale classics professor Robert Fitzgerald. He was working at the time on a translation of Oedipus Rex, a drama that would profoundly influence O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood—in which the protagonist, a veteran recently returned

O’Connor’s “True Country” 187

from World War II, ultimately blinds himself in an apparent desire to at­ tain greater spiritual vision.15 He does so immediately after his U.S.-made car, readily recognizable as a symbol of individual autonomy, suffers a wreck that calls to mind Saul’s blinding encounter on the road to Damascus.16 Continuities between Sophocles and St. Paul—as between Vergil and Dante or Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas—and the joint challenges their lega­ cies posed to modernity were standard fare in the discussions O’Connor enjoyed with Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, Americans who were deeply versed in the pre-modern traditions of Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome alike. O’Connor would dwell on partial continuities between Catholic and ear­ lier pagan conceptions of the real for the rest of her life: in “Greenleaf,” for example, an invasive bull on an U.S. dairy farm becomes a figure of both Zeus and Christ, a divine force powerfully and troublesomely incarnate in a natural world that is finally beyond human ken and control. The onset of O’Connor’s lupus in late 1950 emphasized her own lack of mastery over the natural world, as the disease in effect took her by force back to Milledgeville and her mother’s care. As her body weakened, the two women chose to live not in town but in the nearby family farmhouse, where O’Connor would not have to climb stairs daily. She never forgot the broader world that she had experienced. She would continue to engage it via correspondence, occasional travel, and hospitality to guests who made the trek to visit her. Yet with “one eye squinted,” as she wrote to Lowell, she could “take” her illness and seclusion on a Georgia farm as a “blessing” and being walled in there as salvific for her art. The limitations on her en­ ergy imposed by her disease could help her to concentrate on the act of writing itself: “What you have to measure out, you come to observe closer or so I tell myself ” (CW 910). Furthermore, the geographic focus that came with such limitation immersed her in particularities of place in a manner that should be—as she suggested on a number of occasions—­inherently beneficial to any writer. Ultimately, she maintained that the “serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world, no matter how limited his scene. For him, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima affects life on the Oconee River, and there’s not anything he can do about it.”17 From her apparently secluded vantage point, O’Connor observed both her immediate countryside and her newly powerful nation very closely in­ deed. She wrote of attempts to maintain borders both around and within

188  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

an America that vigorously sought to affirm its exceptionalism in the wake of World War II, and she did so in a manner that resonated deeply with U.S. Gothic tradition. In what follows, I first demonstrate O’Connor’s selective engagement with that tradition via her depiction of willfully au­ tono­mous individuals who seek to escape or dominate the natural world, including the limiting body—which in O’Connor’s work is often associ­ ated with a poverty broadly construed. I then consider O’Connor’s fic­ tion in relation to borders between cultures and nations. Though she did not write of those borders so overtly as the other authors considered in this study, her fiction can be read fruitfully in dialogue with the work of Mexican American essayist Richard Rodriguez, who builds on the thought of Octavio Paz in his critical juxtaposition of the “competing theologies” that characterize the United States and Latin America. Finally, I demon­ strate how O’Connor’s fiction can be read in light of her subtle concern with Christian pilgrimage in relation to the Eucharist. This more properly theological analysis reflects O’Connor’s ultimate concerns about her char­ acters’ need to cross borders to discover their “true country.” Readings of particular texts by O’Connor in light of each of these schemata reveal just how fundamentally she rewrites earlier U.S. Gothic tradition in relation to Catholicism and American borders.

CATHOLICISM, O’CONNOR’S AMERICA, AND THE GOTHIC

In O’Connor’s rural hermitage she was nothing if not forthright regarding her faith. She explained to one correspondent that she was “a Catholic not like someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist but like someone else would be an atheist” (CW 930). This remark not only reflects her intense religious conviction but also provides a means by which to consider more broadly her experience of U.S. identity at mid-twentieth century. O’Con­ nor lived most of her life in a setting in which atheists and Roman Catho­ lics seemed almost equally displaced—equally foreign. In the early Cold War era, “Catholicism and Soviet communism” were sometimes deemed “parallel threats to American democracy” even in sophisticated academic settings.18 O’Connor lived more particularly in a U.S. Bible Belt domi­ nated by a politely acculturated mainline Protestantism in some quarters and a fervent evangelical Protestantism in others. She had far greater admi­

O’Connor’s “True Country” 189

ration for the latter. She once asserted half-jokingly that if she were not a Catholic, she would join a Pentecostal Holiness church, and she in many respects admired “old-time Southern fundamentalists”—who during the Eisenhower era were generally “poor and marginalized,” entirely discon­ nected from political power, and resistant to the consolidation of a bland, all-encompassing U.S. civil religion.19 Yet she finally saw such dissenting Protestants as practicing a form of Christianity that was unfortunately bound up with an isolating individualism. She at times described the “re­ ligion of the South” as very much consistent with the national ethos of the United States, as “a do-it-yourself religion”—one in which individual be­ lievers, often “full of unconscious pride,” seek out grace via “wise blood” (i.e., intuition) rather than the sacraments, and accordingly find themselves “in all sorts of ridiculous religious predicaments” (1107). Wise Blood (1952) features a believer raised in this manner who begins the novel attempting to move beyond Christianity altogether, to formulate and spread his own gospel of self-reliance. Yet the plot culminates in his sudden decision to begin practicing asceticism and radical mortification of the flesh. Nothing established O’Connor as a “Gothic” novelist so much as the scenes in which her protagonist Haze Motes blinds himself and wraps his chest in barbed wire. Though his self-blinding has precedent in the classical drama of Sophocles, his practices appear to Haze’s landlady to be disturbingly medieval, “something that people have quit doing—like boiling in oil or being a saint or walling up cats” (127). To her, Haze seems to embody a pre-modern, foreign, and potentially invasive Catholicism: he “might as well be one of them monks, she thought, he might as well be in a monkery”; he dines mysteriously in a “dark and filthy” institution “run by a foreigner”; and she “wouldn’t be surprised” if he “weren’t some kind a agent of the pope or got some connection with something funny” (123, 126, 127). The fears of the landlady—like those of the general U.S. popu­ lace she represents—are grounded not in any theology but rather in con­ cerns regarding the preservation of national borders. This fact is clearly in­ dicated in her reaction early in the novel when Haze introduces himself, her potential tenant, as a preacher of the “Church Without Christ.” “‘Prot­ estant?’ she asked suspiciously, ‘or something foreign?’” (60). To which Haze earnestly replies, “no mam”: he identifies his church of the autonomous self as definitively “Protestant” (and implicitly Anglo-­ Protestant, since he maintains that “Jesus is a trick on niggers”) (60, 43).

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Such dialogue in O’Connor’s fiction, like Haze’s story as a whole, reflects her general view of her characters—who are almost without exception U.S.born and either oblivious or openly opposed to Catholicism—as having “nothing to correct their practical heresies” and so working “them out dra­ matically,” in a manner at once “painful and touching and grimly comic” (1107). O’Connor wrote about such characters in part because she was a natural satirist who recognized her distance from them, but also, paradoxi­ cally, because she felt real kinship with them. Many professed belief in the same “fundamental doctrines” as those taught by her Church; some, as she informed an audience at Georgetown University, were mysteriously guided by “the Holy Spirit” to becomes members of “the invisible Church” (860). In O’Connor’s hermitage in Milledgeville, furthermore, she was simply surrounded by such characters. It was in this place that they—and she— would have to seek out what she deemed their “true c­ ountry.” O’Connor used this term in her 1957 essay “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” a response to a complaint in Life magazine that postwar U.S. fiction writers were not “speaking for” the United States—that is, that they were not celebrating it as prosperous, nearly classless, and “the most pow­ erful country in the world.” O’Connor rejected this complaint in part by distinguishing between the term “country” and the term “nation.” Speak­ ing explicitly “from the standpoint of the novelist with Christian con­ cerns,” O’Connor posed the question: What is such a writer going to take his “country” to be? The word usu­ ally suggested by literary folk in this connection would be “world,” but the word “country” will do; in fact, being homely, it will do better, for it suggests more. It suggests everything from the actual countryside that the novelist describes, on, to, and through the peculiar character­ istics of his region and his nation, and on, through, and under all of these to his true country, which the writer with Christian convictions will consider to be what is eternal and absolute. This covers consider­ able territory, and if one were talking of any other kind of writing than the writing of fiction, one would perhaps have to say “countries,” but it is the peculiar burden of the fiction writer that he has to make one country do for all and that he has to evoke that one country through the concrete particulars of a life that he can make believable. (801)

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O’Connor’s characters might seem as distinctly of the United States as one could possibly imagine; their dialects, like their manners and mores, are clearly of the particular countryside or region of America in which she lives. But in this essay and in her work as a whole, O’Connor clearly rejects the ultimate claims of any nation on human identity and sees all human beings as properly striving toward some “eternal and absolute” country that is greater than any nation-state. In describing the task of writing about such human beings and their overlapping “countries,” she repeatedly cites in her essays and letters the example of one earlier writer: Nathaniel Haw­ thorne, the “American” with whom she said she felt the greatest “kinship” (1157). She admired Hawthorne because he wrote “romances” that went beyond quotidian realism—beyond “mere problems” of a political or eco­ nomic nature—to “touch” humanity’s true country, that “realm which is the concern of prophets and poets.” Specifically, Hawthorne wrote “the dark and divisive romance-novel,” which is to say that he wrote Gothic ­fiction (818). Because O’Connor forthrightly identified herself as a “descendant” of Hawthorne—and, as we shall see, shared his critical engagement with the legacy of Puritanism in particular—she would presumably assent to inclu­ sion in a U.S. Gothic literary tradition that in large part began with him (1131). Though she resisted being called a Gothic novelist, she did so be­ cause the term “southern Gothic” had become a somewhat dismissive catchphrase in her era. Indeed, she disliked being categorized as a “south­ ern writer” in the 1950s precisely because for many of her contemporary readers “the term conjures up an image of Gothic monstrosities and the idea of a preoccupation with everything deformed and grotesque. Most of us [writers from the South] are considered, I believe, to be unhappy com­ binations of Poe and Erskine Caldwell” (802). Here as elsewhere, O’Con­ nor revealed some anxiety regarding her relationship to Poe—she once deemed him “an influence I would rather not think about”—but more so her recognition that her native region was being associated with the Gothic in a manner that was demeaning and reductive (950). If Faulkner had over­ come his own intermittent categorization as an outrageously “southern Gothic” writer by winning the Nobel Prize, in the popular imagination the Gothic was more firmly connected with the U.S. South by the likes of O’Connor’s fellow Georgian Caldwell. His widely read novel Tobacco

192  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

Road (1932) lacked Faulkner’s sophisticated perspective and narrative com­ plexity even as it provided a veritable formula for a subcategory of Gothic fiction focusing on the abject squalor and depravity of poor white south­ erners: Caldwell wrote of “an inbred lower class living in extreme isolation in closed communities, which are plagued by economic impoverishment, educational ignorance, religious fundamentalism, racial intolerance, ge­ netic deformities, perverted sexuality, and unrequited violence.”20 This is precisely the kind of fiction that O’Connor did not wish to be seen as ­writing—not necessarily because it carried the label “Gothic” or “gro­ tesque,” but because it was simultaneously confused with a kind of realism that might seem to U.S. urbanites to be at once journalistic and pleasingly voyeuristic. “I have found,” she wrote, “that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic” (815). Yet O’Connor’s fictions undeniably often bear a superficial resem­ blance to the Caldwell model of southern Gothic fiction, perhaps none more so than The Violent Bear It Away (1960). This particular novel drew a condescending review in a Catholic academic journal that linked O’Con­ nor’s work to The Castle of Otranto and a larger Gothic tradition that had always emphasized “forbidden violence” and other aberrant behaviors. The reviewer furthermore deemed O’Connor’s novel “distinctly anti-Catholic” in that it offered no “hope” to the reader and paralleled the fiction of con­ temporary writers such as J. D. Salinger and Vladimir Nabokov in provid­ ing no sense of “positive faith” in anything at all.21 In “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” O’Connor had already rejected such complaints pre­ cisely “from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy.” She did so in a man­ ner that clarified her challenge to the notion of American exceptionalism and of firm borders around and within the nation. Despite living in a post­ war United States that deemed itself nearly “classless,” she did indeed often find herself writing, she said, “about people who are poor, who are afflicted in both mind and body, who have little—or at best a distorted—sense of spiritual purpose, and whose actions apparently do not give the reader a great sense of the joy of life” (804). She suggested that there was perhaps “some ugly correlation between our unparalleled prosperity and the stri­ dency of these demands for a literature that shows us the joy of life”—that perhaps all was not as well in the United States as it might appear (803).

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Most radically of all, as she wrote elsewhere, she saw no final boundary be­ tween rich and poor: “Everybody, as far as I am concerned, is The Poor”— even U.S. readers of Life magazine circa 1957 (955). By this statement O’Connor means that “everybody” is lacking, that no human being is God, and that worldly divisions and dichotomies will fade on approach to our “true country.” Accordingly, many of her stories end with the humbling of the haughty and the rich (or at least the materi­ ally comfortable). Such characters may initially fixate on the shortcomings of poor “white trash” but themselves end up, as in “A Circle in the Fire,” by wearing looks of “misery” that “might have belonged to” a poor white or “a Negro” or even a war-weary “European”—looks of a misery that seems “new” to the character but is in fact profoundly “old,” much older than the United States (251). O’Connor desired that all her “Poor” might grasp the breadth of their true country and thereby escape the isolation and closed communities that characters wealthier than Caldwell’s live in, that Hawthorne’s self-righteous young Goodman Brown lived in long before. This desire is made most explicit in her fiction at the end of “Revelation,” in a joyfully purgatorial procession that clearly illustrates the well-known Gospel chiasmus regarding the first and the last. O’Connor’s fiction, then, is profoundly marked by a threatening breakdown of borders that is char­ acteristic of the larger U.S. Gothic tradition—but also by a comic hope generally alien to that ­tradition. The same is true of the focus on the body in O’Connor’s fiction. Her “Poor,” who some may view as diseased portions of the social body worthy of amputation, often have disturbingly grotesque bodies themselves. Yet O’Connor finally views the body as essential to human identity, and she does so precisely because of Catholic teaching. She wrote to a skeptical ­correspondent: I think that when I know what the laws of the flesh and the physical really are, then I will know what God is. We know them as we see them, not as God sees them. For me it is the virgin birth, the Incar­ nation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified. (953)

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O’Connor’s traditional characterization of the Church as maternal—as “she”—is significant here, in part because her focus on the body finally cannot be separated from questions regarding gender. In O’Connor’s fic­ tion, women and men alike often mistakenly worship the false “Cartesian ideal” of the “adult male consciousness” that seeks freedom from “both a childish dependence on its own body” and the seemingly “childish goal” of “connect[ing] with a feminine universe.”22 Furthermore, O’Connor’s female characters fail most profoundly only “when they imitate men who fail. And men fail most in their angelic attempts to transcend the realities of the body.”23 O’Connor’s protagonists, that is, generally seek to attain the paradise of Melville’s bachelors, of the modern subject, the autonomous in­ dividual; but her protagonists are often saved from that fate by the enclo­ sure of the body and of nature itself, a nature that O’Connor often figured as Catholic. Accordingly, association of Catholicism with a limiting em­ bodiment, a seemingly feminine or feminizing embodiment, runs through­ out O’Connor’s work—albeit with ultimately more hopeful implications than in much earlier Gothic fiction. Indeed, O’Connor has been read as a “corporeal feminist” who par­ ticularly values, even celebrates, the body.24 Yet most feminist critics have had a vexed response to her work. One’s focus on the “Female Gothic” yields a reading of O’Connor’s “A Stroke of Good Fortune” as “a story in which . . . pregnancy becomes a kind of Gothic horror, imprisoning its re­ luctant victim in a biological identity with her mother which is perceived as tantamount to death.”25 Protagonist Ruby Hill, who denies that she is pregnant and whose heavy body resembles a “funeral urn,” perceives a frightening staircase that she must climb in images that at once evoke the original Gothic—the stairs stick “straight up like steeple steps”—and fe­ male anatomy: the staircase resembles “a thin black rent in the middle of the house, covered with a mole-colored carpet that looked as if it grew from the floor” (184, 185). O’Connor herself wrote that “A Stroke of Good For­ tune” is “in its way, Catholic” as it disapprovingly depicts Ruby’s willful “rejection of life at the source”—though it is also, she believed, “too much of a farce to bear the weight” (939). Accordingly, this story, a revised frag­ ment of Wise Blood, is rightly described as tending toward “Gothic parody” even as it depicts an expectant mother who suffers “a martyrdom to the species” in her “Calvary-like ascent up the stairs, her cross no less burden­ some for its comic portrayal.”26

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In this feminist reading of O’Connor as Gothic, however, the religious motif is finally beside the larger point, which is tragic; O’Connor herself always saw the religious as central to her larger point, which is comic—in the sense that Dante was comic. Hence her description of her own disease-­ stricken body as a Gothic cathedral: on learning in 1956 that she would have to remain on crutches permanently, she announced that “I will hence­ forth be a structure with flying buttresses” (HB 151). No generic temple of the Holy Ghost, she preferred that she resemble Notre-Dame de Chartres. And in her fiction, the body and the larger natural world that individual­ istic and willfully masculine characters often fear as entrapping ­becomes, at last, a feminized gateway to the saving supernatural. This is perhaps most clear in “The River,” a story about a drowning that is on one level about the womb, about birth as well as death. Here the radically skeptical older man Mr. Paradise conceives of the body and nature itself as bloody traps that imprison the mind or spirit; the young boy Harry’s experience reveals that they can indeed be such, but also that they might be some­ thing more. The womb-like red river in which Harry is baptized and later drowns—the center of the natural world in this story—seems, so far as Mr. Paradise can see, to be merely smothering, a limiting enclosure. But a series of images associated with the Christian woman Mrs. Connin suggests that it is in fact a gateway. This maternal figure, at once life-giving and strangely skeletal in appearance, introduces the young boy and the reader alike to a vision of a nature that turns on the embodied realities of birth and death but ultimately opens onto a larger country. At the story’s beginning, Mrs. Connin’s hand takes Harry from his urban apartment and out into the countryside; at the end, it is somehow also her “long gentle hand” that fi­ nally waits to pull him swiftly forward into the water, into “the rich red river of Jesus’s Blood” and the “Kingdom of Christ” (CW 162, 171).27 A more insistently Catholic conflation of the natural and the super­ natural marks the end of “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” Here the young female protagonist enters a literal Catholic enclosure, a convent wherein the chapel has “a series of springing arches that ended with the one over the altar where the priest was kneeling in front of the monstrance, bowed low” (208). If this were a story by Poe or Melville, it would end with a body walled up beneath the altar, or girls chained alongside it, or a severed head alongside the monstrance. As it is, O’Connor’s protagonist exits the con­ vent safely—reminded of her own embodiment when an embracing nun’s

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crucifix is mashed into the side of her face—only to find that the natural world itself reflects a seemingly Catholic horror, the setting sun “a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood” (209). A feminist reading fo­ cused on the Gothic suggests that “underlying this vision of the blood of Christ is a vision” of the young girl’s “own bleeding body—more specifi­ cally, the blood of menstruation, the monthly stigmata of her femaleness.” Yet even in this reading, “the physical bloodiness” of the story’s final “epiph­ any” transforms the apparent “curse” of the female body into something most unexpected in Gothic fiction, “into a blessing.”28 The larger trope of nature as limiting Gothic enclosure is also transformed in the final image of the sun-Host, which leaves in its wake “a line in the sky like a red clay road hanging over the trees” (209). As in “The River,” the natural world— real, bloody, often violent and painful in and of itself—is presented as an enclosure that paradoxically becomes a passageway to another world, an­ other “country,” precisely by means of seeming limitation. O’Connor, then, generally offers a comic revision to established pat­ terns in U.S. Gothic literary tradition. In at least one story, however, she essentially conforms to it. For many readers who share O’Connor’s faith, “A View of the Woods” is her most troubling narrative precisely because it most closely fits the grim and despairing pattern of earlier U.S. Gothic fic­ tions. It is also the only story containing a character whom O’Connor her­ self saw as definitively “damned.”29 That character is Mark Fortune, a man whose obsessive desire to proclaim his autonomy and mastery ultimately leads to his destruction of the natural world and human life alike. For­ tune feels that in a nation of “free and equal” men it is his “patriotic” duty to transform a stretch of rural forestland into a commodity to be cleared and sold—to make way for gas stations and convenience stores (539). He seeks freedom not from a monastery or cathedral but from the limiting, inconvenient enclosure of the natural world itself. In the story, that natural world is complexly associated with the biological family and, ultimately, with Christ and his cross: at sunset, the forest that Fortune has in effect de­ clared war on appears increasingly disturbing to him, “as if someone were wounded behind the woods and the trees were bathed in blood” (538). His young granddaughter, whom he ardently desires to transform into a mere clone of himself, angers him as she comes to “prefer” the sight of the woods to the sight of him—which he blames on the fact that she shares the blood of his son-in-law, named Pitts (539).

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Like one of Poe’s self-reliant murderers, Fortune comes to believe that in order to be free he must wall up and destroy: wall up the land beneath highways and parking lots, wall up the Pitts blood and whatever undesir­ able aspects of the human gene pool it represents in order to purify his granddaughter of its perceived taint. The girl’s name, like that of Fortune’s mother, is Mary. In Fortune’s desire to assert his independent will, he fi­ nally kills her. Figuratively, then, Mark Fortune’s mother gives birth to that which ultimately destroys her, as Mother Nature has perhaps done with human beings. The name “Mary,” however, further links this young girl to the first Christian, to Christianity itself, and to the Church—which some­ how nurtured a modern Western culture marked in part by the radical in­ dividualism that Fortune insistently espouses. In the isolated and “damned” death of his character at the end of the story, O’Connor most fully depicts the nightmarish consequences of the triumph of the autonomous indi­ vidual, viewing “prophetically the attempt of Americans to live the Lockean dream of rationally calculating individual selves, united only for conve­ nience in the mutual domination and transformation of nature.”30 As we have seen, the early Gothic was associated with the “murder” of Catholicism in Britain; in “A View of the Woods,” the Anglo-American Mark Fortune murders a young girl who is associated with Christ and his mother in Georgia. Yet we are a long way from The Castle of Otranto and The Monk. Mary Fortune Pitts is no corrupt duke or cleric, and O’Connor does not suggest that the ultimate murder of Christianity would stem from the removal of “feudal” structures of any kind. Rather, it would be bound up with the destruction of nature and of the flawed human family itself, including children with traits deemed undesirable—all of the seeming en­ closures that Mary finally clings to and Mark Fortune fears, though clearly it is he whom the reader should fear most. Like her predecessors in U.S. Gothic fiction, O’Connor recognizes that nature and the body can them­ selves seem as troublesome and limiting as any church. Her sacramental faith, however, posits that they are necessary and essentially good, and that what is truly limiting is the transcending mind that would deny and de­ stroy them. Fortune’s “Lockean dream,” which depends so radically on mainte­ nance of the border between self and “other,” has historically dominated only one portion of the American Hemisphere—the United States. The question remains: how might O’Connor’s Gothic fiction be read in relation

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to American borders more broadly? Her work can be fruitfully understood in relation to such borders in two distinct ways, each of which comple­ ments and builds on my reading of her fiction thus far.

WHITE, BLACK, AND BROWN: READING O’CONNOR AFTER RICHARD RODRIGUEZ

O’Connor lived in an era when certain prominent writers from her re­ gion, including her acquaintance Katherine Anne Porter, wrote with some frequency of Latin Catholicism in direct relation to the southern borders of the United States. She never did so herself. Her most direct connec­ tions to Latin America occurred only through correspondence. A close Je­ suit friend who knew her story “The Displaced Person,” which concerns a Polish immigrant family, wrote her from Mexico in the early 1960s that he had found there “the real displaced person of the Americas”—the Vir­ gin of Guadalupe.31 Another correspondent, expatriate U.S. poet Elizabeth Bishop, sent O’Connor her translation of The Diary of Helena Morley, which depicts life in rural Brazil in the aftermath of slavery. O’Connor wrote back comparing Morley’s diary favorably with that of an antebellum New York woman who had moved to slaveholding Georgia: “It took her considerable time to become accustomed to living with ‘the black shad­ ows’ everywhere. I suppose the two races can live together more agreeably in a Catholic country” such as Brazil (CW 1062). O’Connor also expressed deep appreciation for a gift Bishop sent her that had been made by Brazil­ ian “natives”: a bottle containing “an altar with a Bible, chalice, and two fat candles on it, a cross above this with a ladder and the instruments of the crucifixtion [sic] on it, and on top of the cross a rooster.” O’Connor delightedly announced that “it’s very much to my taste” (HB 519). All of which is to say that O’Connor did not know a great deal about Latin America, but what she did know clearly intrigued her. The more in­ teresting question over time will be what Latin American writers displaced to the United States might think of her, and how they might be inclined to read her work. One such writer is Richard Rodriguez. A son of Mexican immigrants who lives in San Francisco, he has called himself “a queer Catholic Indian Spaniard at home in a temperate Chinese city in a fading

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blond state in a post-Protestant nation.”32 His fascination with Catholic-­ Protestant relationships in the Americas, his related interest in questions of race and ethnicity, and his explicit admiration of O’Connor makes their juxtaposition a promising one. Her Catholicism, he has said, “seemed iden­ tical with that of my grammar school Irish Sisters of Mercy,” and her stories end with “visions” or “effects” that are reminiscent of “Mexican retablos.” Furthermore, “their humor, or rather God’s humor,” has always “seemed very Mexican to me. So perverse. So richly ironic. So devastating to human vanity and ambition. If you want to make God laugh, just tell Him your plans. I think Flannery O’Connor would have found such a Mexican prov­ erb hilarious. And true.”33 Rodriguez is not a fiction writer but an inimitable essayist whose four books are—like Henry Adams’s Education—equal parts autobiographical reflection and cultural criticism.34 Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez documents his rearing in Sacramento by parents who successfully found their way into the middle class as well as his awareness of the experience of less fortunate Mexican farmworkers in rural Califor­ nia. Educated at parochial schools and then at Stanford, Columbia, and Berkeley, he studied John Milton and other canonical English authors be­ fore turning to journalism. From such diverse experience Rodriguez forged a valuable perspective. In school he “grew up on an east-west map of America, facing east,” and learning to see the United States in juxtaposition with Europe (B xiii). Accordingly, he is at ease citing—and critiquing— Alexis de Tocqueville or the Puritans. But, as his second book, Days of ­Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, most fully demonstrates, he also knows the work of Octavio Paz and José Vasconcelos. He knows both the cultural matrix in which citizens of the United States have histori­ cally seen themselves and the one they have growing cause to consider. “Be­ cause of Hispanics,” he writes in Brown: The Last Discovery of America, all Americans are learning for the first time since the Civil War “to see them­ selves in terms of a latitudinal vector, in terms of north-south” (xiii). Brown argues for our need to reimagine place and race alike as we enter the twenty-first century. But to read it as a book primarily concerned with race or geography is to ignore Rodriguez’s own desire—one O’Con­ nor would applaud—to write beyond “the boundaries of social science.” He asserts that “books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical” (12).

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Like Rodriguez’s first two books, Brown is often intentionally indirect, and this unified collection of personal essays is finally a meditation on both the nation’s experience and his own. He chooses to write about himself primarily only insofar as he is neither black nor white and “brown bleeds through the straight line” that the United States has historically drawn be­ tween races (xi). Like Walt Whitman, then, Rodriguez sometimes uses the first-person singular to write about America; but the generally detached and self-­dissembling voice that dominates his books finally owes less to the exuberant Whitman than to the brooding Adams who, regretting his Puri­ tan heritage, expressed his hunger for the riches of an older Catholic world that he felt had been lost to him in the United States. Indeed, it is religion that has most consistently been at the center of Rodriguez’s concerns. While his first three books might seem to be about class, ethnicity, and race, respectively, each is in fact about all three con­ cepts and, ultimately, about their limited value as concepts. Hence, in Brown “I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America” (xi). Days of Obligation is about ethnicity, “California and Mexico,” and “comedy and tragedy,” but most profoundly it is about “competing theologies.”35 In Brown, Rodriguez implicitly links those the­ ologies to race, observing that in the Americas the Latin South has histori­ cally had a far less rigid conception of race than has the Anglo North. Hence, “what Latin Americans might give the United States is a playful notion of race,” whereas “what the United States might give Latin America is a playful notion of culture” (142). While the United States’ dual Refor­ mation and Enlightenment heritage has seemingly enabled its citizens to easily cast off cultural legacies that they deem self-restrictive, U.S. society has long been marked by rigid racial boundaries. In Days of Obligation ­Rodriguez contends that those boundaries are ironically bound up with the very individualism that generally seems so liberating in the United States: “In Mexico the European and the Indian consorted. The ravishment of fabulous Tenochtitlan ended in a marriage of blood—a ‘cosmic race’” be­ fitting a Catholicism that stressed catholicity and community.36 In provin­ cial New England, on the other hand, “the European and the Indian drew apart to regard one another with suspicion over centuries. Miscegenation was a sin against Protestant individualism”—against the sectarian desire to maintain the integrity, the supposed purity, of the isolated self (DO 13).

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This desire, Rodriguez suggests, has profoundly shaped U.S. culture. Yet his Mexican family and the Irish-born nuns who ran his Sacramento school taught him that “the story of man was the story of sin, which could not be overcome with any such thing as a Declaration of Independence” (221). This is a lesson of which O’Connor surely would have approved. Her own fiction, which so often features the downfall of characters seeking to operate, grotesquely, in the mode of insistent self-reliance established by such post-Protestant U.S. thinkers as Benjamin Franklin and Ralph Waldo Emerson, plainly manifests her own such conviction. What is less obvious is the extent to which O’Connor’s literary vision consistently reveals her affirmation of Rodriguez’s notion of “brown”—not only in her refusal to let characters obsessed with affirming their purity escape knowledge of their sin, but in other crucial respects as well. For Rodriguez, “brown”—which he associates with Latin America and, more generally, with Catholicism—stands in contradistinction to what he deems the “Puritan” tendency to dichotomize not only human ­beings but also human experience into opposed categories such as “black” and “white.”37 Rodriguez acknowledges that he does not always speak of Puritanism in a precise theological or historical sense.38 Rather, he follows Octavio Paz, who in The Labyrinth of Solitude critiqued North America’s general “Puritanism” by contrasting it with what he saw as Mexican habits of thought: It seems to me that North Americans consider the world to be some­ thing that can be perfected, and that we consider it to be something that can be redeemed. Like their Puritan ancestors, we believe that sin and death constitute the ultimate basis of human life, but with the dif­ ference that the Puritan identifies purity with health. Therefore he ­believes in the purifying effects of asceticism, and the consequences are his cult of work for work’s sake, his serious approach to life, and his conviction that the body does not exist or at least cannot lose—or find—itself in another body. Every contact is a contamination. Foreign races, ideas, customs, and bodies carry within themselves the germs of perdition and impurity. Social hygiene complements that of the soul and the body. Mexicans, however, both ancient and modern, believe in communion and fiestas: there is no health without contact. Tlazol­ teotl, the Aztec goddess of filth and fecundity, of earthly and human

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moods, was also the goddess of steam baths, sexual love, and confes­ sion. And we have not changed very much, for Catholicism is also ­confession.39 Rodriguez ultimately associates such Mexican cultural patterns with brown­ness and, furthermore, expands Paz’s adversarial definition of Puri­ tanism, associating it with an inordinate urge “to find clarity or even the handprint of God within history in a way that does not admit to the un­ predictable or even the playful.”40 In the intermittently puritanical culture of the United States—where, he argues, even divisive “multiculturalists” unwittingly practice a secularized Puritanism—brown might be associated with racial and cultural miscegenation alike, as well as with perceived moral taint. All are implicit in Rodriguez’s observation that “there is no browner smear in the American imagination than the Rio Grande” (B xii). Against Puritanism he affirms brown “as impurity,” the impurity that is inevitably a part of human experience; he affirms it not as category but as alternative to categorization, as a hue that reflects the rich intermingling—what Ge­ rard Manley Hopkins deemed the “pied beauty”—characteristic of creation (xi). Yet the color also describes much more. Whereas “white is an impulse to remain innocent of history” and “the first white Americans imagined themselves innocent,” Christ himself does not always privilege such ap­ parent purity: “Christ used dirt and spit as a healing paste,” a brown “mix­ ture to restore sight” (139). Finally, “the love of God” itself, “the willingness of God to become man, to enter into history, is a very brown act. It is deeply paradoxical, and it engages all the failures and inevitabilities of our human bodies.”41 For Rodriguez, ultimately, to embrace brown is to embrace bodily cor­ ruption and death as inevitable parts of life instead of insisting on the di­ chotomy of suffering and health; the integral relationship of life, art, and faith instead of rigid Puritanical distinctions between “authentic” experi­ ence and inauthentic “theatricality”; a sacramental understanding of God’s presence in the world instead of a Manichean-cum-Cartesian assertion that matter and spirit are fundamentally separate; an inclusive view of human identity that encompasses a spectrum of interrelated complexions instead of rigidly labeling individuals as “black,” “white,” or otherwise; and an un­ predictable eros that in the face of puritanical social restraints passionately

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reaches out to yield life—including children who might well be neither white nor black, children who do not fit into the established scheme of things.42 In all of these respects (perhaps most surprisingly in the last) O’Connor’s fiction tends to affirm brownness even as it relentlessly satirizes “Puritan” characters who insist on categorizing and dichotomizing, on see­ ing in terms of black and white, and on repressing both eros and life itself. And reading such stories as “The Artificial Nigger,” “Parker’s Back,” and “The Displaced Person” with Rodriguez in mind can not only help to ­situate O’Connor’s oeuvre in larger American contexts but also foster a more holistic understanding of the many ways in which Catholicism shapes her fiction in relation to earlier U.S. Gothic tradition. “The Displaced Person” features xenophobic characters who violently resist a Catholicism that literally crosses national borders and confuses ra­ cial categories; “Parker’s Back” pits a crypto-Catholic lover of color against a radical Protestant iconoclast who preaches a black-and-white morality. A brown reading of O’Connor appropriately begins, however, with “The ­Artificial Nigger.” This story’s protagonist, Mr. Head, stands as a clear fig­ ure of Rodriguez’s broadly defined Puritanism. His concern with race is properly understood in relation to his eponymous tendency to value the mind and those borders drawn and maintained by the mind—including the border between self and other. Hence, “The Artificial Nigger” is also subtly concerned with birth and the body. While any number of O’Con­ nor’s fictions hinge on the construction and ultimate collapse of a set of binary oppositions, none does more so than this story: Mr. Head know­ ingly favors supposed moral purity to sin, white to black, and country to city; the narrative further demonstrates that he favors isolation to commu­ nity, independence to dependence, male to female, and, of course, mind to body.43 For Mr. Head these are not mere personal preferences but the “moral terms” by which he has “conceived” his own path in life and which he hopes to impart to his grandson Nelson during their daylong trip to At­ lanta (CW 211). O’Connor’s narrative voice therefore stresses from the ­beginning that the resolute opposition of these “terms” indeed depends on conceptions—that is, human constructs—that are necessarily limited and misleading. Most crucially, race itself is here presented as such a concep­ tion, the rigid separation of black and white as “artificial” in the worst sense

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of the word. Young Nelson experiences as much early in the story when he sees a man whom the narrative voice describes as “coffee-colored” and whom he perceives—in his own words—as “tan” (215–16). Only under the influence of the domineering Mr. Head does the boy begin to label in­ dividuals as black “niggers”: the old man himself admits that “a six-monthold child don’t know a nigger from anybody else” (213). It is a misguiding artifice, the “terms” and conceptions created by Mr. Head, that leads us to abstractly separate and label humans as black or white, whereas our eyes see a concrete world properly marked by all shades of color—a palette that, as Rodriguez would have it, blends to brown—at birth.44 Birth is itself a central motif in “The Artificial Nigger,” and Mr. Head’s journey in the course of the narrative might well be described as a process of rebirth out of a world colored—or deprived of color—by his narrow conceptions and into a world where he finally recognizes his own moral shortcomings as opposed to his purity; his necessary relation to and depen­ dence on others; and, at least tentatively, his own essential kinship with the people he has chosen to describe as “niggers.” That rebirth is prepared for by his forced confrontation and partial reconciliation with all that he has generally sought to define himself in opposition to, including the body and the city. O’Connor did not always see confrontation with the urban as a prerequisite for salvation, to be sure. Yet “The Artificial Nigger” resembles Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces in its forceful presentation of the city as “the necessary antidote to rural pride, smugness, and blind self-righteousness”; these three writers saw how rural life could foster a “self-absorption” necessarily more akin to the radically sectarian impulse of Puritanism than to their own more defini­ tively universal Catholicism.45 It is precisely Mr. Head’s self-righteousness and “rural pride” that shape his desire to give a simplistic picture of the city as evil to Nelson. The boy’s actual introduction to “the complex morality of the city” does not begin until he becomes increasingly aware of his own body and sees a black woman.46 Previously, Nelson “did not know any women” just as he has not known any blacks, having been isolated from both by his grandfather ever since his birth in the city—apparently out of wedlock—to Mr. Head’s daughter (220, 211). This history sheds some light on Mr. Head’s tendency to disparage women, along with the city and blacks, as sinful: all three are

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conflated in his vision of the urban sewer system’s “endless pitchblack ­tunnels,” which reach into “the lower parts of the world,” as “the entrance to hell” (220). Nelson begins to develop his own perspective on such mat­ ters when he meets a voluptuous African American woman after he and Mr. Head have begun to become more aware of their bodies, to sweat and to smell “the odor of dinners cooking” in the “colored neighborhood” they have wandered into (222). Encountering the woman makes Nelson feel “as if he were reeling down a pitchblack tunnel,” that is, back into the womb (223). This encounter firmly establishes the narrative’s linkage of the city, blackness, the body, and the feminine, all of which correspond to impurity in Mr. Head’s simplistic schema. And there is an undeniably erotic element to this scene as well, one rooted in but ultimately not lim­ ited to the flesh. O’Connor herself suggested as much when she wrote in a letter that she meant for this woman “to suggest the mystery of existence” to Nelson: “he not only has never seen a nigger but he didn’t know any women and I felt that such a black mountain of maternity would give him the required shock to start those black forms”—forms ultimately associated here with divine grace—“moving up from his unconscious” (931). Mr. Head senses the powerful effect the woman has had on Nelson and initially condemns him for acting irrationally, “like you don’t have any sense,” but he presumably is pleased when the boy subsequently grabs his hand—“a sign of dependence that he seldom showed” (223). Nelson’s experience in the city has begun to lead him to reject his grandfather’s combatively individualistic ethos and to value community—here generally associated with the “colored” neighborhoods where people sit outdoors— rather than the isolation represented by white neighborhoods “that might have been lived in or might not” or, worse, are “entirely deserted,” made up of “big white houses” that resemble “partially submerged icebergs in the distance” (221, 224, 228).47 Mr. Head himself has yet to experience any such doubts regarding his own self-sufficiency and is pleased with Nelson’s newly dependent character only because it seems to enhance the strength of his own. Yet in his foolhardy plan to further Nelson’s recognition of dependence he inadvertently destroys that recognition: isolating himself more fully than ever by hiding from and then denying “his own image and likeness” in Nelson in a moment of crisis, Mr. Head only pushes the boy to retaliate in kind (226). Despite the “black mysterious form” of grace that

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still has the capacity to “melt” Nelson’s angered “vision in one hot grasp,” he has been all too well indoctrinated in his grandfather’s Puritanism; too self-righteous to forgive, he begins merely drifting in the old man’s wake, the two of them seemingly having become cold and solitary as icebergs themselves (228). To Nelson, then, Mr. Head has become blackened, the embodiment of wrong, and himself a pure frozen self-righteous white; yet in the end brown prevails as the two are reconciled to one another—not sinless, to be sure, but flawed, forgiven, and forgiving. In the frequently debated conclu­ sion to the story, at least this much is certain: Mr. Head clearly acknowl­ edges what he could never have conceived of earlier, his own moral impu­ rity, and he and Nelson feel their “common defeat” rather than insisting on their individual self-sufficiency, all due to their encounter with a statue of an “artificial nigger,” which they feel “dissolving their differences like an action of mercy” (230). The statue dissolves other differences as well. The figure seems neither young nor old and is also more complexly colored than one might expect: “One of his eyes was entirely white and he held a piece of brown watermelon” (229). In the former regard he clearly resembles the pair before him since “Mr. Head looked like an ancient child and Nelson like a miniature old man” (230). And perhaps he resembles them in the latter regard as well. Mr. Head’s final comment of the story, “They ain’t got enough real ones here. They got to have an artificial one,” can be read as signifying his tentative recognition that in the city he—due to his poor white social origins, or Nelson’s recent denial of him, or both—has some­ how been treated as if he were “colored.” If the statue at least begins to dis­ solve Mr. Head’s sense of difference from African Americans, then what the “black mysterious form” of grace brings him here is, among other things, a sense of figurative brownness in terms of race. In his initial obsession with purity Mr. Head mirrors the most famous Brown in all of U.S. literature, young Goodman Brown—the Puritan who dooms himself by insisting on the white innocence of his own heart and the deceitful darkness of his neighbors, Indian and Anglo alike, rather than recognizing their mutually brown characters. In doing so, finally, Brown meets a sadder fate than does Mr. Head. Yet their journeys are similar in more ways than one. While both narratives initially seem straightforwardly allegorical, both ultimately portray protagonists whose major flaw lies pre­

O’Connor’s “True Country” 207

cisely in their habit of thinking too allegorically—that is, of thinking in terms of black and white. By writing “allegory that also critiques its own allegorical premises,” narratives that establish “conceptual dichotomies only to subvert them,” O’Connor and Hawthorne to varying degrees resist a U.S. literary tradition in which “Protestant romance” has tended to dis­ solve “the mundane world into a more lucid spiritual allegory.”48 Both join Rodriguez in favoring instead books that “confuse”—“a literature that is suffused with brown, with allusion, irony, paradox” (B xi, 12). As a Catholic proponent of brown in a nation that has historically tended to prefer starker shades of black and white, Rodriguez therefore helps us to better understand O’Connor in relation to earlier Gothic critiques of Puritan New England’s restrictive legacy. Specifically, he helps us to better under­ stand Toni Morrison’s quick praise of “The Artificial Nigger”—that “bril­ liant story”—alongside Melville’s portrayal of the horror of whiteness in Moby-Dick. Both authors, Morrison claims, challenge a preference among U.S. readers for “dehistoricizing allegory” that has too often made for “fore­ closure rather than disclosure” in the nation’s literature particularly in re­ gards to considerations of race.49 As we have seen, however, Mr. Head’s ultimate experience of brown­ ness in “The Artificial Nigger” is not only or primarily a matter of racial identification. Rather, it is inseparable from a proper sense of embodiment and of the inevitability of suffering. For Mr. Head these come hand in hand with his exposure to both women and the city as well as his growing sense of dependence on others. All of his original dichotomies, then, col­ lapse, though the three of these O’Connor saw herself as most funda­ mentally concerned with were that between moral purity and sinfulness; independence and dependence; and mind (or spirit) and body, which in turn suggests that between grace and nature. In each case she specifically credited Catholic doctrine with teaching her the significance of the latter and the value of a brown vision that somehow reconciled both. She un­ deniably believed that good and evil are separate categories, but she also undeniably stressed that Catholicism views human beings as inevitably a mixture of both. She essentially agreed with Rodriguez’s assertion that whereas “the call of evangelical Protestantism is a call to manhood, a call to responsibility,” the “Catholic Church assumes it is in the nature of men and women to fail. You can be a sinner and remain a Catholic. You must

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consider yourself a sinner to remain a good Catholic” (DO 182). Compare her remark: I think of the Protestant churches as being composed of people who are good, and I don’t mean this ironically. Most of the Protestants I know are good, if narrow sometimes. But the Catholic Church is com­ posed of those who accept what she teaches, whether they are good or bad, and there is a constant struggle through the help of the sacra­ ments to be good. (HB 346) Among Protestants she clearly preferred not those who straightforwardly value “good order and common sense and respectable behavior,” such as Ruby Turpin and Mrs. Cope and Mrs. May, but those whose great virtues are bound up with lesser vices, with impurities, however slight (CW 654). This latter category includes the Pentecostal Mrs. Greenleaf who prays fer­ vently but fails to keep a clean house and old Tarwater of The Violent Bear It Away, a bootlegger whom O’Connor described to a correspondent as a “prophet” but—tellingly—“not a puritan” (1107). O’Connor’s Catholicism further undergirds both her rejection of radical individualism and her vision of the compatibility of nature and grace. Writing to Betty Hester, she asserts that humanity’s “mutual inter­ dependence” is not a “conceit”: to claim that it is such “is far from Catholic doctrine; in fact it strikes me as highly Protestant, a sort of justification by faith. God became not only a man, but Man. This is the mystery of Re­ demption and our salvation is worked out on earth according as we love one another, see Christ in one another, etc., by works” (HB 102). Given this understanding of human nature and of salvation, it follows for O’Con­ nor that “Grace, to the Catholic way of thinking, can and does use as its medium the imperfect, purely human, and even ­hypocritical”—whereas “in the Protestant view, I think Grace and nature don’t have much to do with each other.” O’Connor forthrightly states that it is precisely her iden­ tity as a “Catholic writer” which therefore, in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” leads her to conceive of the Grandmother not as “pure evil” but in­ stead as a natural and flawed—as Rodriguez would have it, a brown— human being who nonetheless is also “a medium for Grace” (CW ­1125–26). Such a vision of the compatibility of grace and nature is central to ­Rodriguez’s notion of brownness, as suggested in his assertion that it is

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“a Catholic idea” that “the material world is redeemed” and—again—that the Incarnation is “a very brown act” (B 41–42). Grace and nature, in other words, may be different from one another, but in the Catholic view they are not as different as “black and white”; grace is not opposed to but builds on and perfects nature. O’Connor’s fundamental conviction in this regard, grounded in her reading of St. Thomas Aquinas, is perhaps con­ veyed most powerfully in her fiction at the conclusion of “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” in a young Catholic protagonist’s vision of the setting sun as “a bloody Host”—a vision that reflects her growing understanding of the intimate relationship between grace and nature that she has just seen enacted and revealed in Eucharistic Benediction. This vision, given that it occurs in the mind of a brilliantly imaginative girl who is clearly a young version of O’Connor herself, suggests a new topic to be considered under the rubric of “brown”: art. It also leads us to a story that has no Catholic characters but profoundly embodies O’Connor’s Catholic vision of art. “Parker’s Back” is indisputably illuminated by Rodriguez’s work, for in its portraits of Sarah Ruth and Parker it not only continues to elaborate on themes already discussed but also clearly depicts the open conflict of a “Pu­ ritan” who despises art and nature alike with a brown character who ulti­ mately experiences nature, art, and grace as a continuum. Sarah Ruth, as numerous critics have rightly noted, rejects O’Connor’s own sacramental view of the real. She is a Manichean Gnostic whose belief in the radical opposition of spirit and matter parallels René Descartes’s philosophical dualism, his insistence on the fundamental separation of mind and body. Such beliefs clearly shape Sarah Ruth’s attitude toward the body and, more generally, toward nature. She neglects tending to her own body; does not generally enjoy food, drink, or sex; refrains from leaving her front porch to enjoy the pleasures of the world; and, in the culmination of her asceticism, mercilessly beats the back of her tattooed husband Parker, with whom she has become one flesh. She prefers cultivating inner visions to opening her eyes to that which stands before her and, like Mr. Head, is a crusading moralist who is habitually distrustful of other human beings as well as the body. Sarah Ruth also resembles Mr. Head in that she is steadfastly “against color” (CW 655). Aside from her remark to Parker that tattooing one’s body is “no better than what a fool Indian would do,” there is no racial ele­ ment to this aspect of her character (660). Rather, in her obsession with

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purity, Sarah Ruth is opposed to human life itself, a life inevitably lived in the body, in nature, and—at least partly—in sinful shortcoming. Parker clearly embodies such life. He is “heavy” where she is underfed, enjoys drink and sex and all the pleasures of the world at large, which he has trav­ eled and made a part of his body via his gaudy tattoos (658). Whereas she has presumably avoided sin by spending her entire life at home, he has moral failings that are all too evident. Yet his figurative brownness, his color, is enticing even to Sarah Ruth; his erotic teasing causes “two circles of red” to appear “like apples on the girl’s cheeks and softened her appear­ ance” (657). When not under Parker’s influence, by contrast, she has “eyes grey and sharp like the points of two icepicks” and is “plain, plain”—plain, we might imagine, as a Puritan meeting house in old Massachusetts (655). Indeed, Sarah Ruth’s “Straight Gospel” creed follows the Puritans in holding that churches (as opposed to utilitarian meeting houses) are them­ selves inherently “idolatrous” (663). It is this conscious hostility to art that makes Sarah Ruth more precisely Puritan than Mr. Head. As Rodriguez recounts, “in England, Puritans were famous for their objection to the con­ fusion of the playhouse and to its seduction. . . . Theatrics were an offshoot of liturgy—of the Mass, of the Passion and miracle plays and the lewd plays that preceded Lent. Puritans believed men were created to stand in pure relationship to God. Puritans ordained no intermediaries—no king or bishop or actor; no mother of God, no liturgy” (B 50). Yet, sailing west to escape such “theatrics,” the New England Puritans—as Rodriguez, himself “Indian” as well as “Spaniard,” sees it—initially found themselves con­ fronted with impurity once again. Native Americans “painted their faces and stuck feathers in their hair and they wore the skins of the animals of the forest. . . . Indians were theatricals impersonating Nature, portraying their place in Nature. . . . And the Indians were royals; here was hierarchy and here was priesthood, even frippery. The costumes, the castes the Puri­ tans had fled in England, America provided in savage parody” (52). Rodriguez’s description readily calls to mind Hawthorne’s story “The May-pole of Merry Mount.” Here Plymouth Pilgrims assault a group of worldly English colonists—including artists and a Christian “priest, ca­ nonically dressed, yet decked with flowers, in heathen fashion”—who ap­ pear to them as “Gothic monsters” precisely because their essentially pre-­ Reformation Christianity seems more akin to the paganism of the native

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tribes they consort with than to the austere Puritan faith.50 In both Rodri­ guez’s and Hawthorne’s vision, the Native Americans are associated with nature, with art, and—strangely—with the older European religious tra­ ditions that the Puritans have rejected. O’Connor’s own “fool Indian,” as Sarah Ruth calls him, is surprisingly similar. Parker initially seems content with nature and with his unadorned body: he is “heavy and earnest, as or­ dinary as a loaf of bread” (CW 658). Yet when he sees a savagely dressed man at a fair whose skin is covered with tattoos that form “a single intri­ cate design of brilliant color,” he intuits that nature alone cannot fulfill all of his desires (657). Parker’s subsequent obsession with art, with acquiring tattoos—of royalty as well as assorted animals and “obscenities”—is inter­ preted by Sarah Ruth as “vanity,” the mere theatricality that Rodriguez’s Puritans would see as “inauthenticity” (659–60; B 52). Yet the permanent nature of the tattoos and the pain Parker experiences in acquiring them suggest that they are indeed somehow authentic. Clearly the most authentic of all is the final tattoo that graces his back, the end result of the eros that in one form or another has driven Parker throughout all his life. The Byzantine icon he is mysteriously drawn to in­ deed serves as no less, and finally more, than an “intermediary” between himself and God—an intermediary of the kind that the Puritans would not countenance and that Sarah Ruth denounces as idolatrous before perform­ ing an act of violent iconoclasm by striking the image on her husband’s back. In doing so she enacts her rejection of the flesh as well as of art and fails to understand that which O’Connor would have the reader glimpse: that Parker is no longer mere flesh, as “ordinary as a loaf of bread,” but somehow a part of the Body of Christ, somehow reconciling both spirit and matter, somehow—as the transubstantiation motif in the story ­suggests— participating in the brown act of the Incarnation as well as the Passion. And for all her violent opposition to color, all her self-­righteousness and general opposition to eros, Sarah Ruth is nonetheless about to enter such a brown history herself, one that dimly mirrors the central fact of the Incarnation: she is, thanks to Parker’s interest in sex, pregnant. Just as her husband’s un­ stinted desire has brought the wide world home to her in his body, just as it has united art and nature, so the two of them together have unexpectedly united flesh and spirit. Their brown union will via the pangs of childbirth bring new flesh into the world, just as Parker himself has been reborn in

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spirit as well as transformed in his flesh, “crying like a baby” as he reenters the inevitable pain of history at the end of the story (CW 675). Despite Sarah Ruth’s violent rejection of the stranger—Christ ­himself—whom Parker has brought into her house, the story is hopeful insofar as it ends with the onset or approach of new life. O’Connor’s ­oeuvre is often concerned with the manifestation of such life in a very literal sense. As implied earlier, her characters often struggle when confronted with un­ wanted or unexpected children. In “Greenleaf,” for example, Mrs. May si­ multaneously fears a Christ she associates with the erotic—“she thought the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom”—and the fertility of her neighbors (506).51 Here the multiplying Greenleaf children, rising from the “dirty” poor white origins of their fathers (recent veterans of World War II), learn to speak French and are bound for convent school courtesy of mothers newly arrived from Europe.52 Accordingly, this story associates Catholicism with both the ­leveling of class distinctions and some elements of “foreign” population growth. O’Connor’s general view of such matters is indicated in a 1959 letter in which she defended the Catholic rejection of artificial contracep­ tion by condemning the motives of some who attacked that teaching: “Not long ago a lady wrote a letter to Time and said the reason the Puerto Ricans were causing so much trouble in New York was on account of the Church’s stand on birth control. This is a typical ‘liberal’ view, but the Church is more liberal still” (HB 366). Voices that advocate contraception for Puerto Ricans, O’Connor sug­ gests, may be voices that fear not only the fruits of eros generally but also the browning of the United States specifically. Rodriguez’s familiarity with such voices is made clear in Days of Obligation, in which he powerfully pre­ figures his vision of Puritanism’s opposition to brown by describing a re­ current U.S. view of the Latin South: Time magazine dropped through the chute of my mailbox a few years ago with a cover story on Mexico entitled “The Population Curse.” From the vantage point of Sixth Avenue, the editors of Time-Life peer down into the basin of Mexico City—like peering down into the skull of a pumpkin—to contemplate the nightmare of fecundity, the tan­ gled mass of slime and hair and seed. America sees death in all that life; sees rot. Life—not illness and poverty; not death—life becomes the curse of Mexico City in the opinion of Time magazine. (DO 20–21)

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Here, strangely, Time becomes the voice of contemporary Puritanism. And Rodriguez himself might be recounting a scene from “The Artificial Nig­ ger” when he describes traveling to Mexico City, the supposed “capital of death,” only to find that “Life surges about me; wells up from the subways, wave upon wave; descends from the stairwells. Everywhere I look. Babies. Traffic. Food. Beggars. Life. Life coming upon me like sunstroke” (24). He might well be speaking of the same story when he figures the global South (Nelson’s city of birth?) as “the climate of the inevitable,” “the netherworld of biology, sex, hair, infection, blackened skin, multiplicity” and yet also the birthplace of “faith”; he speaks of the global North, by contrast (Mr. Head’s isolated home?), as a place where “pale, reasonable people speak ­quietly in large rooms about overpopulation” (B 165, 214). O’Connor’s fiction contains a number of such pale puritanical figures, more reasonable even than Mr. Head, who oppose not only her sacramen­ tal view of the real but also her accompanying conviction that suffering— an inevitable aspect of bodily experience—is an integral part of human life. Most prominent among these are Rayber of The Violent Bear It Away, who would like to prescribe euthanasia for children that do not conform to ex­ pected type, and Sheppard of “The Lame Shall Enter First,” whose single-­ minded desire to obscure what Rodriguez deems the brownness of bodily decay results in a sterile and, ultimately, a disastrously inhuman vision of the real.53 O’Connor, in her “Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann,” con­ nects her view of such characters to that of Hawthorne and goes so far as to present that New Englander of Puritan descent as crypto-­Catholic in light of both his life and such stories as “The Birth-Mark”—wherein the pale, reasonable scientist Aylmer becomes first an enemy of the color he sees as tainting his wife’s ivory cheek and, ultimately, an enemy of the in­ evitably flawed body and life itself. “A View of the Woods,” as implied ear­ lier in this chapter, can also be readily linked to these texts—all of which display a forceful resistance to brownness in the United States that in the twentieth century was perhaps most strikingly exemplified in the work of eugenics advocates.54 O’Connor recognized that Hawthorne’s Aylmer—despite being an Enlightenment man with no apparent religious commitment—is funda­ mentally similar to his colonial Puritans. Noting this similarity prepares the way for understanding “The Displaced Person” as the proper culmination of a brown reading of O’Connor’s work. This story on one level overtly

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satirizes the myth of the United States as at once a divinely ordained uto­ pia and a model of purity for the rest of the world. As we have seen, the Puritans provided one major strand of this myth of American excep­ tionalism, though it has a significant Enlightenment strand as well, itself perhaps perversely “theological” in its way.55 In O’Connor’s story, these strands are grotesquely represented by Mrs. Shortley and Mrs. McIntyre, respectively. Mrs. Shortley adopts a radical Protestant rhetoric worthy of William Bradford in her attempt to purify a Georgia farm that she sees as threatened by Catholic immigration; Mrs. McIntyre, the post-Protestant landowner, seems to embody Max Weber’s thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism regarding the general secularization of Yankee Calvinism in the United States. Here as elsewhere in O’Connor’s work, such Anglo-­Protestant characters offer negative comments regarding a Eu­ rope they see as not properly “advanced” or “reformed” and thereby suggest how the United States might at times seem committed to destroying dif­ ference in the name of an insistently American universalism. As O’Con­ nor’s contemporary Saul Bellow, a son of Russian Jewish immigrants, wryly observed: “we [in the United States] take foreigners to be incomplete Americans—convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.”56 In this story—one of only two by O’Connor to feature Catholic characters prominently—the foreigners are fleeing post–World War II Poland and the memory of concentration camps only to find the United States itself marked by dangerous notions of purity. From the outset these immigrants are associated with impurity in a general sense, and they finally threaten miscegenation. O’Connor’s narrative firmly associates their Catholicism with the brown “sin” most offensive to Mrs. Shortley and Mrs. McIntyre alike, an erotic offense that would collapse their most cherished dichotomy. It is fear of such collapsing borders—and violent action accompanying the fear—that makes the story Gothic. Mrs. Shortley’s paranoia regarding a seemingly invasive Catholicism is so obvious here as hardly to need ex­ plication. It is fueled partly by self-interested and essentially secular mo­ tives akin to those openly professed by Mrs. McIntyre, to be sure, as well as by the general xenophobia that Paz deems Puritanical: Mrs. Shortley suffers anxiety regarding her husband’s economic security in the face of im­ migration, and she is likely inclined to regard all foreigners as resembling “rats with typhoid fleas” who might somehow afflict the presumably healthy

O’Connor’s “True Country” 215

United States (CW 287). But she specifically fears the Polish Guizac family because “they did not have an advanced religion. There was no telling what all they believed since none of the foolishness had been reformed out of it” (288). Long before the arrival of the Guizacs, Mrs. Shortley acquired the definitively Puritan view—now drifted southward from New England—of Catholicism as evil, and, accordingly, she sees old Europe as “the devil’s ex­ periment station” (296). She therefore fears that the Polish immigrants will corrupt and destabilize the Georgia social order that, to her, seems a version of John Winthrop’s city on a hill. The disruptive priest who has helped the immigrants comes as an emissary of Satan, “to cause disputes, to uproot niggers, to plant the Whore of Babylon in the midst of the righteous!” (301). The supposedly pure social order Mrs. Shortley wishes to preserve is a rigorously segregated one, of course, and from the beginning she notes that one of the most threatening aspects of the Catholic immigrant is his blindness to its racial categories. She is deeply disturbed that when meeting Astor and Sulk, the African American farmworkers, Guizac “shook their hands, like he didn’t know the difference, like he might have been as black as them” (298).57 For Mrs. Shortley, then, the Catholic immigrant’s threat to collapse racial distinctions is only one way in which he is associated with impu­ rity: she imagines even “the Polish words, dirty and all-knowing and un­ reformed, flinging mud on the clean English words until everything was equally dirty” (300). Mrs. McIntyre’s standards for judging Guizac at first glance seem simpler. A woman of “practical” rather than “theological” temperament, she is nonetheless a Puritan in her way: when the priest speaks eagerly to her about the Second Coming, “Mrs. McIntyre’s face as­ sumed a set puritanical expression and she reddened. Christ in the conver­ sation embarrassed her the way sex had her mother” (316–17). A modern woman who has quashed eros in both pagan and Christian manifestations, what she desires is neither sex nor God but profit, and it is precisely her ­unyielding—even ascetic—devotion to the bottom line that initially makes her so receptive to the hardworking immigrant. Yet she has other priorities that come into conflict with that devotion. Even though her farm pros­ pers eco­nomically with Guizac, Mrs. McIntyre determines to dismiss him when he attempts to arrange a marriage between his cousin and Sulk. She is outraged and appalled that he would “bring this poor innocent child over

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here and try to marry her to a half-witted thieving black stinking nigger!” because a black man in Georgia simply “cannot have a white wife from Europe” (313). While Mrs. McIntyre lacks Mrs. Shortley’s theological bias against Europe, she clearly sees—and feels compelled to enforce—a rigid division between white and black, automatically associating the former with innocence and the latter with guilt and uncleanliness.58 Mrs. McIntyre’s habits of categorization are unsurprising in her mid-­ twentieth-century U.S. setting. What is more intriguing is that the threat of miscegenation, of black-white erotic union and brown offspring, which comes with the Catholic immigrant is inherently bound up with her larger fears about global overpopulation—and an approaching history that she feels she has thus far successfully avoided. She openly expresses her concern that the world at large is “swelling up” because people “have too many chil­ dren,” and after her discovery of Guizac’s miscegenating intentions she ­suddenly sees him as a generic alien once again, merely part of “the world’s overflow” (307–8, 315). His own body seems strangely uncategorizable: as Guizac explains his plan to her, she sees him anew, and his “whole face looked as if it might have been patched together out of several others” (313). To Mrs. McIntyre, the Catholic not only threatens to initiate the browning of the farm that, on a larger scale, signifies the United States; he has become figuratively brown himself. And brownness here, in keeping with Rodriguez’s vision, signifies not only racial and cultural complexity but also the knowledge of suffering that comes with embodiment, with ­living in history rather than escaping it via Puritanical schemes to return to radical innocence. In “The Displaced Person,” such knowledge has been granted to the Catholic Guizac due to his proximity to the Holocaust— and to old Astor due to his long experience as a black man in rural Geor­ gia, where he has lived longer than Mrs. McIntyre herself (305–6).59 The Catholic girl proposed as the bride who would unite the brown history of Astor’s people with that of the Guizacs is present in the story only in a photograph taken at her First Communion. The Eucharist at the center of that ceremony is significant elsewhere in the narrative as well— most directly so when the Displaced Person receives the sacrament after having been mortally wounded by Mrs. Shortley’s husband with the tacit approval of Mrs. McIntyre, as their mutual fear of violated borders has driven them to violence against the Catholic outsider. The story’s subtle

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emphasis on the Eucharist is broadly consistent with Rodriguez’s emphasis on brownness insofar as the sacrament manifests the essential continuity of nature and grace, revealing the Incarnation as an ongoing event in which God becomes directly manifest to the senses. At the same time, its pres­ ence raises properly theological—and more specifically ecclesiological—­ questions that cast a final light not only on “The Displaced Person” but also on O’Connor’s view of Catholicism in relation to American borders generally.

CONCLUSION: PILGRIMAGE, EUCHARIST, AND BORDER CROSSINGS

The Protestant Christianity of O’Connor’s nation historically deempha­ sized the role of the body in worship, stressing direct interior experience of God’s grace rather than mediated experience of it via the sacraments, and the empty cross rather than the crucifix. Relatedly, such dissenting Protes­ tantism has tended to dissociate proper worship from sanctification of any place to which one might bodily travel—let alone places featuring the pre­ served bodies, relics, or statues of saints. Therefore, while Europe and Latin America alike are marked by prominent Catholic pilgrimage sites that in­ sistently implicate the body in worship, deep in the heart of U.S. “religious fervor, the Bible Belt,” the landscape itself “is amazingly secular.”60 Dwell­ ing in that landscape, O’Connor nonetheless believed that she bodily en­ countered God in the Eucharist, which she received daily throughout most of her adult life at the end of a short trek from her family farm to her small parish church. O’Connor deemed that Eucharist “the center of existence” and in a very real sense saw this journey, more so than the one visit to Rome she made in 1957, as the recurring pilgrimage that connected her to her Church and her God (CW 977).61 Accordingly, her fiction—most con­ sistently in her collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find—is subtly but ­profoundly shaped by a linked concern with pilgrimage and Eucharist. A further reading of “The Displaced Person,” as that collection’s final and longest story, and “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” the story placed at the collection’s center, in light of this concern makes clear how radi­ cally O’Connor transformed a U.S. Gothic tradition in which Catholic

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s­ acramental imagery had often been associated with mere horror. In these stories the Eucharist properly grounds bodies in place yet simultaneously breaks down unnatural borders between bodies, borders conceived of in nationalistic terms and otherwise. “The Displaced Person” is directly concerned with the manner in which a pilgrim Church that finds its center in the Eucharist must reach across U.S. borders. The narrative turns on the arrival in the United States of a migrant, that is, one who experiences the “bordered world” of modern nation-states from “below” and so is subject to violence—the opposite of cosmopolitan “tourists” who cross national borders while maintaining per­ sonal autonomy.62 Yet the Displaced Person is not only a migrant. In con­ junction with the priest who helps him to relocate to the United States, the Displaced Person is also representative of a Catholic Church exemplifying the injunction that, in a post-Constantinian era, “the church should em­ brace its status as pilgrim,” calling Christians to be “first members of the body of Christ, a body that crosses and transgresses national borders.” This church’s “pilgrim status” necessarily makes it “a liminal body in any bor­ dered nation-state” and “broader, more global and more catholic than any merely national identity”—though its catholicity differs from “mere cos­ mopolitanism” in that a truly catholic church must always “hallow the par­ ticular and the local,” exhibiting a humility that is “rooted in the humus of a particular place.”63 The Catholic Church’s identity in this regard is inseparable from its essential relationship to the Eucharist. In Christian tradition dating to at least the time of St. Augustine, one who consumes the Eucharist properly is consumed into the Body of Christ, becomes a part of the Body of Christ— that is, of the Church itself.64 Hence, “the Church and the Eucharist are formed by one another day by day.”65 Relatedly, the Church is inseparable from the Eucharist precisely in its identity as catholic. Whereas early dissi­ dent groups such as the Donatists attempted to identify “catholicity with the strict observance of the commandments,” the “great Church” followed Augustine in holding “that catholicity meant communion with the Church spread over the whole world. In Augustine this contention was linked to a high spirituality of Christian love as emanating from God and sealed by the Eucharist, the sacrament of universal communion.”66 Hence the term “catholic” properly “suggests the idea of an organic whole, of a co­

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hesion, of a firm synthesis, of a reality which is not scattered but, on the contrary, turned toward a center which assures its unity.”67 Because that center is present in every Eucharist, however, it is a “decentred centre,” and “the Catholica is in fact a region whose middle point is everywhere” that “the Eucharist is celebrated.” For this reason, the proper “condition of the Catholica is not Christendom—a permanent place with borders defensible by force—but diaspora.”68 The Displaced Person himself is a clearly a figure of diaspora, one ul­ timately put to death by hosts who are simultaneously nationalistic and self-interested. In this regard he, more than any other character in O’Con­ nor’s fiction, obviously resembles Christ—a resemblance implicit in the narrative long before Mrs. McIntyre openly states her belief that “Christ was just another D.P.” (320). From his initial appearance until his death, the Displaced Person is consistently associated with the Body of Christ— in a literal sense, in an ecclesiological sense, and in reference to the Eucha­ rist. In each of these senses, Mrs. Shortley and Mrs. McIntyre deem Christ’s body foreign to U.S. soil. The pattern begins as Mrs. Shortley anxiously associates the Polish immigrant and his family with suffering Jewish bod­ ies, bodies that seem to belong outside U.S. borders and that she knows only from film clips of the Holocaust, of “dead naked people all in a heap” (287).69 This image is mirrored but also extended in Mrs. McIntyre’s ulti­ mate perception of the Displaced Person’s own body: after he proposes a marriage that threatens to mingle legally segregated bodies and produce a strange nativity, his face appears as that of a composite “monster”—one that is, again, seemingly “patched together out of several others” (313). This representative of a pilgrim church that will unite diverse members across national borders is accordingly put to death by silent conspiracy. Be­ fore succumbing, however, he receives the Eucharist, albeit so quickly and unobtrusively that it might easily be overlooked. What does that act signify? To extend the Augustinian formulation above, “if in consuming the Eucharist we become the body of Christ, then we are called, in turn, to offer ourselves to be consumed by the world. The Eucharist is wholly kenotic in its form. To consume the Eucharist is . . . to be taken up into participation in something larger than the self.”70 This is what the Displaced Person has done consistently in the story, laboring not for himself but for his family and in turn a Church that he finally wishes

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to extend so far as literally to incorporate—by marriage—even those who are shunned and kept separate in the strange new nation in which he finds himself. As such he is a foil both to Mrs. McIntyre, who professes a doc­ trine of isolating economic self-interest, and Mrs. Shortley, who clings to her immediate family but in such a paranoid manner as to wall them off from others whom she sees as threatening. In the same manner she wishes to enforce borders around the United States, a nation she vaguely views as divinely ordained but in which notions of consumption are perhaps best represented by advertisements for medicines promising the regular func­ tioning of the digestive tract (302–3). The Displaced Person, in contrast to both, offers his life up for others. His death here finally must be inter­ preted in relation to the enduring presence of both the priest and a multi­ colored peacock—a traditional symbol of Christ’s resurrection, directly ­associated in the priest’s dialogue here with the transfigured body of Christ on earth—that continually parades through the farm. Taken together, the priest and the peacock communicate that even with the Displaced Person’s death the Body of Christ endures both in the Church and in God’s larger creation, as the “flowing” of Christ into the Eucharist is “the glowing core” about which “the cosmos” itself “crystallizes, or better, from which it ­radiates.”71 That the natural world itself bears partial witness to the reality of Church and Eucharist here is made clear in part by the fact that Mrs. Shortley so steadfastly ignores it: when the peacock leaps into a tree before her, her “unseeing eyes” fail to note its tail “full of fierce planets with eyes that were each ringed in green and set against a sun that was gold in one second’s light and salmon-colored in the next.” She might have been look­ ing at” a “map of the universe,” of creation itself, but she remains self-­ absorbed: “She was having an inner vision instead” (290–91). Nonetheless, Mrs. Shortley is presented with a subtle and paradoxically grim hope before the story’s end. Grasping frantically at the bodies of her own family mem­ bers as she suffers a stroke, she glimpses in her final moments “the tremen­ dous frontiers of her true country” and thereby begins passage into what O’Connor elsewhere deemed the invisible Church (305). An aging and ailing Mrs. McIntyre follows a similar path. After the death of the Dis­ placed Person, she loses both her property and her illusions of self-reliance; increasingly invalid, she enters a mild purgatory in which she must listen

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to her sole visitor—the priest—explain to her “the doctrines of the Church” (327). Whereas at the story’s beginning the faults of these Anglo-Protestant characters lay in their excessive sense of self-sufficiency and secure place­ ment within the borders of the United States, by story’s end they—despite their mutual responsibility for the Polish immigrant’s death—have them­ selves become salvifically displaced, potentially pilgrim in part through their experience of bodily suffering. What is most essential to proper pilgrimage as understood in Christian tradition? As it developed in the medieval era, the “primary motive of pil­ grimage was transformation of the self through the forgiveness of sin” as the pilgrim “responded to a discipline that had its source outside the self: God.” Though there have been undeniable historical overlaps in pilgrimage and tourism, proper pilgrims “did not travel to assert their freedom from necessity”—as tourists do—“but to respond to the necessity of their des­ tiny in God. Humility, therefore, was the essential virtue of the pilgrim. Pilgrimage was a kenotic movement, a stripping away of the external sources of stability in one’s life.”72 Furthermore, the proper pilgrim does not seek peripheries or borders for their own sakes but resolutely “moves toward the center of her world . . . toward God, as mediated through particular holy places (usually made so by their contact with particular holy persons or their material relics).”73 In doing so, the pilgrim must nonetheless “trans­ gress all artificial borders that impede the quest for communion with God and with other people”—and he must do so without succumbing to “a simple cosmopolitanism,” for “like the migrant and unlike the tourist, the pilgrim travels on foot and does not enjoy a commanding view of the globe from above.”74 In a Western ethos that has been exported across the globe in late modernity, tourists differ from pilgrims by seeking not a God who binds them to others but instead an individual “transcendence, of class and of limits more generally”; they are shaped by a consumer capitalist narrative that emphasizes “the freedom of the self to rise above material limits and to have access to an ever-expanding array of products and experiences.”75 Tourists therefore value their own boundless mobility—and even some tightly controlled experience of “otherness.” Just as surely, they depend on and continually reconstruct borders between themselves and others. O’Connor’s fiction is heavily populated with such tourists—Mr. Head is

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an apt example—and they often identify themselves as good U.S. citizens. Willing pilgrims, by contrast, are hard to find. With the complicated exception of the Displaced Person, O’Connor’s only character to complete a proper pilgrimage is also her only character to kneel in prayer before the Eucharist: the unnamed protagonist of “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” In doing so, this young girl is crucially as­ sisted by the sisters of St. Scholastica’s convent. Those committed to mo­ nastic life are obviously not known for their own mobility: “the monks of old slept in their coffins,” the perpetual tourist Mr. Shiftlet announces ear­ lier in the collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find, shortly before he steals a car. Yet in the medieval era, those in monastic life were those on whom pil­ grims depended. As mandated in the Rule of St. Scholastica’s twin brother, St. Bene­dict, monks offered hospitality to and even “revered” the pilgrim stranger as if he were Christ—rather than putting him to death as if he were Christ, as in “The Displaced Person.” The grounded stability of the monk made possible the pilgrim’s proper mobility toward God and, in turn, toward others. Calling the protagonist of “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” a willing pil­ grim might seem arguable insofar as she travels to the convent only under the guidance of her mother, and then to Eucharistic Benediction under that of a nun. During Benediction, however, this twelve-year-old girl be­ comes sincerely prayerful as she begins “to realize that she was in the pres­ ence of God,” a God whom she hopes will help her not to be so “mean” and “give so much sass.” Her desire for personal moral transformation soon fades into the background as “the priest raised the monstrance with the Host shining ivory-colored in the center of it” and she finds herself rather uncharacteristically thinking not of herself—not even of her faults—but of another, a hermaphroditic “freak” whom her cousins earlier observed at a carnival (208–9). The cousins and other visitors, tourists all, paid to view the difference of the “freak” at a comfortable distance. By contrast, the pro­ tagonist in the presence of the Eucharist begins to recognize the presence of God in this other person, a God toward whom both are drawing near. Here, she acts as pilgrim as she “preserves otherness precisely by not seek­ ing otherness for its own sake,” but instead by “moving toward a common center to which an infinite variety of itineraries is possible. If God, the Wholly Other, is at the center, and not the great Western Ego”—that is,

O’Connor’s “True Country” 223

the autonomous self—“then there can be room for genuine otherness among human beings.”76 Here that God is present in the Eucharist which is Christ’s self-­giving and therefore participates in the life of the Trinity, calling the members of a centered-yet-dispersed Church to bodily reach across borders to others as the Body of Christ.77 The protagonist of “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”— herself embraced by a nun who in part embodies the teaching of the Church—prepares to do so via her hospitable imagining of the hermaph­ rodite’s body not as merely defective or as spectacle but as somehow bearing witness to the image of God. In some respects this story’s strong emphasis on the body, together with the powerful closing image of the setting sun as a “Host,” might seem to emphasize the mystery of the Eucharist in relation to nature more so than in relation to human society. Yet beginning with its very title, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” is concerned with exploring how human beings made in the image of a Trinitarian God are simultaneously called to value the body (as temple) and called to communion with others (by and in the manner proper to the Holy Ghost). And it is altogether ap­ propriate that this story is placed at the very center of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, thereby establishing a basis for a proper reading of “The Displaced Person.” Though the latter story is obviously more concerned with the rela­ tionship between the Church and national borders, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”—more so than any other O’Connor fi ­ ction—makes clear how that Church in Eucharist calls its individual members to embrace the stranger. Some readers, to be sure, wish that call were more consistently ex­ plicit. Even those who admire O’Connor specifically for being one of the few orthodox Christian writers in the U.S. canon often find “Church” to be inadequately represented in her work. This may be a function of the fact that in O’Connor’s America, churches—including Catholic parishes— have too often had “the soul of a nation,” subordinating Christian iden­ tity to notions of U.S. identity and therefore helping to preclude experi­ ence of the Church as the “distinctive body of Christ.”78 Consideration of O’Connor’s work with attention to pilgrimage and Eucharist also helps to explain why this was the case. She lived in a milieu in which the presence of her Church and the embodied practice of her faith was in many respects alien, both historically and in relation to her contemporary moment. Willa Cather’s essentially pre-modern Catholics who constitute the Church in

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Death Comes for the Archbishop are characters not originally shaped on U.S. ground; O’Connor’s late modern Americans, divided by a national creed of individual autonomy and unhindered mobility in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and elsewhere, find it all too difficult to walk the grounded path that she believes leads to the Body of Christ. The collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find does provide readers a glimpse of that Eucharistic body in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” and “The Displaced Person” alike. In these stories more so than elsewhere in her work, O’Connor visibly represents a Church she experienced as liminal in a manner that was at once unsatisfying and filled with gracious poten­ tial. At the same time, both here and throughout her oeuvre, she revises the U.S. Gothic tradition and responds to the broader American milieu that she shares with writers as distinct from her as Rodriguez. She accordingly avoids the general tendency of early twentieth-century European Catholic writers—including Evelyn Waugh and, occasionally, Graham Greene—­ toward “triumphalist endings.”79 Specifically, she does not in her fiction exhibit any sense of “nostalgia” for “the social order and ecclesiastical au­ thority of an Age of Faith,” as such European writers often did. Rather, O’Connor participates in a tradition of “Catholic skepticism” that searches for signs of God “within the debris of contemporary c­ ivilization”—and, like Michel de Montaigne and Blaise Pascal, tends to glimpse “the pos­ sibilities of faith not within the archaic structures of feudalism but amid those lacunae and absences lurking within the brave new world of hu­ manist reason.”80 In doing so she in some ways prefigured and undeni­ ably served as a model for a generation of U.S. writers of Catholic back­ ground who might be deemed post-secular. As we shall see, some of those writers address borders in the Americas—and their nation’s larger Gothic ­tradition—even more directly than did she.

CODA Catholicism, American Borders, and the Gothic in Contemporary U.S. Fiction

In the spring of 2010, a variety of journalists and political pundits noted— with a certain awe—that the U.S. Supreme Court was, for the first time in its history, about to be without a single Protestant justice.1 Suddenly, it seemed, these commentators realized that three Jews and six Roman Catho­ lics of widely varying ethnic backgrounds were going to be responsible for interpreting a Constitution whose Framers who could hardly have imag­ ined a United States not dominated by Anglo-Protestants. What has at­ tracted far less attention—even among scholars ostensibly interested in questions of cultural diversity—is the fact that the nation’s literary elite has undergone a parallel shift. In 2006, The New York Times Book Review pub­ lished a widely discussed list of the best American novels of the preceding twenty-five years. The top five authors listed were Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, John Updike, and Phillip Roth. Readers fo­ cusing on race and gender will see here one African American woman and four white males. Those focusing on religion, however, will see one Prot­ estant (Updike, who died in 2009), one Jew (Roth), and three Catholics. I am, of course, applying these categorizations somewhat broadly here. While Updike was indeed a theologically engaged Christian who attended a variety of Protestant churches throughout his life, Roth is not an obser­ vant Jew. Of the three Catholics, only Morrison has recently—and, as we 225

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shall see, somewhat mysteriously—described herself as such. She is clearly not a Catholic writer in the sense that O’Connor and Percy were. To be sure, there are distinct “degrees of literary Catholicism,” as former National Endowment for the Arts chair Dana Gioia—a poet and a practicing Catho­ lic himself—has put it, identifying three such degrees: First, there are the writers who are practicing Catholics and remain ac­ tive in the Church. Second, there are cultural Catholics, writers who were raised in the faith and often educated in Catholic schools. Cul­ tural Catholics usually made no dramatic exit from the Church but instead gradually drifted away. Their worldview remains essentially Catholic, though their religious beliefs, if they still have any, are often unorthodox. Finally, there are anti-Catholic Catholics, writers who have broken with the Church but remain obsessed with its failings and injustices, both genuine and imaginary. All three of these groups have legitimate claims to literary attention. Though Morrison converted to Catholicism in her adolescence, she seems to have spent most of her life in closer proximity to the second group than the first (in which Gioia places Richard Rodriguez); DeLillo and Mc­ Carthy, too, belong in the second group. Regardless, if members of all three of these groupings are recognized as “Catholic writers,” then there are an astounding number of them at work in a variety of genres in the United States today.2 Yet they have gone almost entirely unmarked as such by lit­ erary scholars—even by those who have an explicit interest in religion. A few such scholars are interested in only the first kind of Catholic writer. A growing number are interested in writers who are somehow “postsecu­ lar,” but such scholars often avoid emphasizing the formation of any writ­ er’s imagination in a particular Christian church or tradition—sometimes out of sincere recognition of their limited ability to do so.3 My own concern in this particular study has not necessarily been with Catholic writers. It has been with writers who participate in an Anglo­ phone Gothic literary tradition in which Catholicism has proven essential to imagining borders around and within the American Hemisphere and, therefore, to imagining the United States itself. Yet the fact is that for de­ cades now—and for the very first time—many of the leading fiction writ­

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ers who might do so, many of the leading fiction writers in the nation, are of Catholic background if not conviction. Aside from those already named, Thomas Pynchon was raised Catholic and apparently practiced the faith at least through his college years (though he steadfastly refuses to reveal infor­ mation regarding his life or to comment on his own work, as has generally been the case for McCarthy and, to a lesser degree, DeLillo).4 Many of these leading contemporary novelists of Catholic background share an ap­ parent “postmodernism” that has an implicitly ethical rather than a merely “aesthetic” dimension: unlike some postmodern writers, they are not radi­ cally “skeptical toward narrative’s capacity to convey truth.” Specifically, they “share the view that nothing matters more than history and a belief in its possibilities.”5 Timothy Parrish makes this argument in From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction (2008), a study not directly concerned with religious identity. Yet the contemporary writers Parrish identifies—McCarthy, Morrison, Pynchon, DeLillo, Joan Didion, and Denis Johnson—are almost entirely of Catholic background; even the sole exception, Didion, has proven highly engaged by Catholi­ cism.6 These writers have created ambitious fictions that each in their own way “destroy the presumption that ‘American’ history is a coherent story of a single people committed to equal treatment for all”—that is, the story of the legacy of Anglo-Protestant “settlers” as articulated by Samuel Hunting­ ton (3). What is crucial is that in doing so these novelists are finally entirely distinct from Updike and Roth, whom Parrish identifies as celebratory “successors to the American individualist tradition” of Ralph Waldo Em­ erson and Walt Whitman. By contrast, their fictions “identify communities (rather than atomistic individuals) that are at odds with traditional repre­ sentations of American history.”7 Novels such as Blood Meridian, Beloved, Mason & Dixon, Underworld, and Fiskadoro suggest that such longstanding representations of U.S. history have simultaneously obscured and glorified a “U.S. imperialism at home” practiced by a “handful” of domineering “white people”—successfully autonomous selves, I would say, who con­ trolled and exploited others by walling off them and their stories.8 Whether or not these contemporary writers in fact see themselves as “historians,” as Parrish suggests, is debatable. What is undeniable is that they encourage their readers to reexamine traditional historical narratives and use “imagination to redraw the connections that those narratives wish

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to cut.”9 As we have seen, U.S. Gothic fiction has long been concerned with drawing connections across borders violently established in the process of nation-building—disturbing though those connections may often be. The specific power of Gothic fiction in this regard is reflected in the sole novel from the early twentieth century that Parrish examines as establishing an incipiently “postmodern” critical engagement with U.S. history: Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! If Parrish is right, then, a striking number of contem­ porary Catholic writers (broadly defined) mirror or directly respond to Faulkner’s great Gothic novel in their critical examination of U.S. history and identity.10 But to what extent do such writers engage the Gothic liter­ ary tradition at large, and what does their engagement have to do with bor­ ders between and within nations, peoples, and individuals—bodies and souls, matter and mind and spirit—in the Americas? Do such writers create Gothic fictions that directly respond to the enduring myth of the United States as exemplary and salvific nation in relation to a rightly abject Ca­ tholicism, as Crèvecœur first did? Do they deconstruct that myth only to present a tragic counter-narrative of enduring doom and despair, as Mel­ ville and Faulkner did? Do they ultimately present a comic corrective to it, as Percy and O’Connor sought to do? Do they display a primary concern with the fate of individual human beings and the larger human family apart from the fate of the nation-state, as Chopin—and, indeed, all of the earlier authors considered here—did? To what extent do contemporary Catholic authors write a Gothic fiction that seeks to smash the false idol of the nation-state, and to what extent do they point in relation to Catholi­ cism to some greater good that should be worshiped in its place? To answer all of these questions would require another book. Only a brief survey is possible here.

BORDERS, THE GOTHIC, AND CONTEMPORARY CATHOLIC IMAGINATIONS

Insofar as the Gothic is associated with terror, Don DeLillo—best known as a chronicler of technology and terrorism, of contemporary anxieties and dreads—begs to be examined as a Gothic writer. Born in 1936 to Italian immigrant parents, he attended Catholic schools in New York City and a

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Jesuit university, Fordham, in the 1950s. His comments on his upbringing are startling to most Catholics born after the Second Vatican Council: I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood. For a Catholic, nothing is too important to discuss or think about, because he’s raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and that if he doesn’t live his life in a certain way this death is simply the introduction to an eternity of pain. This re­ moves a hesitation a writer might otherwise feel when he’s approaching important subjects, eternal subjects. I think for a Catholic these things are part of ordinary life.11 DeLillo’s fascination with language not only as medium but also as theme— with language as a fundamentally mysterious phenomenon somehow bound to “last things”—has received compelling attention in the argument that DeLillo’s fiction seeks to “transfer” a “version of mysticism from the Catholic context into the literary one,” and it “does so through the model of the Latin mass.”12 More directly relevant to Gothic tradition is DeLillo’s recurrent fascination with figures whom he characterizes as “monks,” “mys­ tics,” and “ascetics”—figures who generally do not have any clear religious affiliation and who might work either for or against the “global capitalist system he so brilliantly maps” in his fiction.13 That system exists largely be­ cause DeLillo’s United States—the creation of bland post-Protestants with names like “David Bell” and “Bill Gray”—has successfully exported its cul­ ture of consumer capitalism to the world at large.14 In his fiction, “cadres of corporate managers, security agents, and spies” have shaped a nascent “global imperium” that seeks to counter and replace traditional religion by offering its own “promises of ultimate security, its insistence on absolute authority, its repudiation of dialogue and difference.”15 Underworld (1997), DeLillo’s most ambitious novel to date, exam­ ines the evolution of this imperium over the second half of the twentieth ­century—and is marked by such a subtle wealth of Gothic patterns and imagery that it has been examined as the culmination of “the Cold War gothic.”16 His earlier White Noise (1985), concerned from start to finish with a U.S. culture built on avoiding the fear of death, had featured in its penultimate chapter a harsh German nun who problematically introduces

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the possibility of religious faith into the novel: with her “stark face framed in the black veil,” revealing “teeth so old they were nearly transparent,” this Catholic woman complexly evokes the Gothic as she scolds the secular protagonist for not recognizing his own hidden need that “someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks that do not speak.”17 In Underworld, too, a strange nun becomes essential to the novel’s conclusion. Her name is Sister Edgar, and her “namesake” is finally revealed to be not a saint but the author of that “dark, croaking” poem “The Raven”: Edgar Allan Poe.18 Yet this Catholic woman is also strikingly juxtaposed with a very different Edgar, J. Edgar Hoover. The novel opens at a 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers game during which the FBI director becomes obsessed with wind­ blown remnants of a magazine reproduction of Pieter Bruegel’s sixteenth-­ century painting The Triumph of Death. For Hoover, its imagery ultimately calls to mind the Soviets, “a lonely tower standing on the Kazakh Test Site, the tower armed with the bomb . . . the Central Asian steppes, out where the enemy lives in long coats and fur caps, speaking that old weighted language of theirs, liturgical and grave.”19 What first introduces a truly profound sense of “Terror universal” into this twentieth-century tableau, however, is not nuclear weaponry but Bruegel’s Reformation-era art: there Hoover sees “a painting crowded with medieval figures who are dying or dead—a landscape of visionary havoc and ruin” that features “skeleton armies on the march. Men impaled on lances, hung from gibbets, drawn on spoked wheels. . . . Legions of the dead lining up behind shields made of coffin lids.” Here, Death himself rides horseback as he “presses people in haunted swarms toward the entrance of some helltrap, an oddly modern construction that could be a subway tunnel or office corridor.” The simple division Hoover wishes to draw between the United States and the Soviet Union—between “Us and Them,” he thinks—collapses here in the face of a stalking mortality, a confrontation with last things that marks American present and future as surely as medieval European past.20 McCarthy’s The Road (2006) goes even further in collapsing the late modern into the medieval.21 Midway through the novel, the door to an underground shelter is described in terms that might well call Bruegel to mind: “the faintly lit hatchway lay in the dark of the yard like a grave yawn­ ing at judgment day in some old apocalyptic painting.”22 In a sense, the novel as a whole is this image writ large, as McCarthy creates his own vi­

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sionary landscape of havoc and ruin. He does so in a place that was once the United States but now—due to either a nuclear exchange or a massive meteor strike, to what one might well call an act of God—is hardly a place at all. Neither the narrative voice nor the father and son who travel this waste land in search of the sea use place names. The father refers only once to what he calls the “state roads” because “they used to belong to the states. What used to be called states.” The son asks: “What happened to them”— that is, to the states?23 The father’s brief response and The Road as a whole make clear: the fifty states, the United States, and what happened to them finally do not matter. In this world beyond national borders, what matters is survival—a challenge not only for individuals but, more profoundly, for any semblance of family. Cannibalism has become widespread due to lack of other sources of food, and any sense of human dignity and communion seems in danger of being lost. As a single snowflake falls near the novel’s opening, the father “caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of Christendom”; he eventually comes to see his own son as a “golden chalice,” as “glowing in that waste like a tabernacle.”24 Through such images, the novel does not present the Eucharist as cannibalistic but, rather, suggests that without the Eucharist—without recognizing God as with us in the flesh—we will consume one another. The religious motifs in the novel are far too complex to trace in full here, but in part the narra­ tive clearly echoes longstanding Gothic associations of Catholicism with fearsome deprivation and death. Near the beginning, corpses piled in a ru­ ined city—the “mummied dead”—are described as “discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen.”25 Imagery specifically suggestive of the Franciscans occurs again midway through this novel that is dedicated to the aging author’s young son, John Francis McCarthy: not long before the father and son find a well-stocked underground shelter, for which they ultimately give thanks to the dead, the two of them “set out on the road again, slumped and cowled and shiv­ ering in their rags like mendicant friars sent forth to find their keep.”26 The world of The Road is finally the world of those who must die and of those who are radically dependent on gifts, the world not of any sheltering nation-­state but of all humanity; both the novel’s darkness and its more subtle light are limned in rich Catholic tones.27 McCarthy tends to employ not only images but also arcane diction— for example, “gryke,” “woad,” “dolmen”—that often evokes pre-modern

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settings. This habit dates to his earliest work, set in east Tennessee and en­ virons (where most scholars believe The Road is set). As suggested in chap­ ter 4, these early novels can be fruitfully examined as Gothic in relation to both McCarthy’s native region and his native religious tradition, both of which provide grounds for reading his work in relation to that of O’Con­ nor.28 McCarthy became better known, however, for writing about the bor­ derlands between the United States and Mexico, which raises a question that I have unhappily been unable to address in this study: in what ways does McCarthy’s Border Trilogy respond to Catholicism and U.S. Gothic tradition? That trilogy—consisting of All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998)—is viewed as a continuation of Blood Meridian by some scholars. One powerfully contends that in these four books McCarthy has drawn on the “language and rhetoric of the Bible to compose an ‘apocryphal’ narrative of the American Southwest, and by extension the United States at large, while exploring the human innate ten­ dency to evil in the line of Herman Melville and William Faulkner.”29 These novels draw on but ultimately subvert “the allegorical mode” estab­ lished by the Puritans as “the key to understanding and interpreting the American experience”; in doing so, they mark McCarthy as a practitioner of a “neo-Baroque” aesthetic akin to that of “many contemporary Latin American writers.”30 Though the three novels written in the 1990s lack the overtly Gothic features of Blood Meridian, there is no shortage of bodies, blood, and allusions to Catholicism in each—often directly tied to Mexican settings. Marian images abound; the title of The Crossing refers to crucifix­ ion as well as to transgression of national borders; elders warn that “if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do.”31 In All the Pretty Horses, one U.S.-born character in Mexico re­ ceives a beating and a subsequent transfusion of so much “Mexican” blood that he worries aloud whether or not he is still “American.” The protago­ nist responds to him, wisely, that “blood’s blood. It don’t know where it come from.”32 In these respects and others, “McCarthy provides an oppor­ tunity for us to go beyond the outmoded paradigm that posited a self-­ contained American literary history”—and a self-contained U.S historical narrative—“from Puritans to the present.”33 An examination of fictions by contemporary Mexican American au­ thors that evoke the Gothic in relation to Catholicism and the border is

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also, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this study. Such fictions clearly exist: Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo (2002), for example, features a young Mexican American girl who is literally haunted by the ghost of her grand­ mother as she travels back and forth between Chicago, Texas, and Mexico. If Cisneros is in many ways attracted to a U.S. narrative of self-invention and self-empowerment, one scholar argues that in Caramelo she, “like many other Latina/o authors,” nonetheless dramatizes her belief “in the ‘matrixed subject’ and thus rejects a dominant ‘liberal individualist’ cul­ tural model rooted in the autonomous self ”—a model that celebrates the breakdown of national borders only insofar as that breakdown is associated with radical freedom from any sense of place and tradition, with a cosmo­ politan hybridity that is largely a function of unfettered capitalism.34 In “this novel preoccupied with history and memory,” young Celaya Reyes can in fact only understand herself “through a reconsideration of the past” in relation to a specific community. She undergoes a “gothic quest for place” in which confronting the past “requires a spirited dialogue with the dead that delves into the wounds of history.” Caramelo’s specifically “gothic quality . . . helps Cisneros avoid serious pitfalls in the genre of magical ­realism,” itself sometimes popularly associated with mere quaintness and “cuteness.”35 Proper analysis of American borders in contemporary U.S. fiction should in fact take into account not only distinctions but also cor­ relations between magical realism and the Gothic. Magical realism is itself often viewed as an import into U.S. literary tradition via the influence of twentieth-century Latin American writers, and as particularly attractive to writers whose roots are entirely outside the Anglo-Protestant mainstream of that tradition. Yet this view is some­ what simplistic. Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez famously cited Mis­ sissippi’s William Faulkner as “in some sense a Caribbean” and therefore a “Latin American” writer.36 Furthermore, Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges ad­mired the Gothic romance of a writer from an America almost entirely ­antipodal to his own: Nathaniel Hawthorne. The nineteenth-century New Englander, as Lois Parkinson Zamora has demonstrated, was attractive to Borges and akin to later magical realists in his concern with “ghosts” that challenge “the modern divorce between matter and nonmatter, past and present, individual and community”: these profoundly “liminal” ghosts “exist in/between/on modernity’s boundaries of physical and spiritual,

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magical and real, and challenge the lines of demarcation.” Via such ghosts, Hawthorne’s antebellum Gothic fictions, as surely as any twentieth-­century Latin American novel, complicate the simple “binarisms, rationalisms, and reductive materialisms of Western modernity” as well as “modern ide­ ologies of individualism,” thereby “enlarging and enriching Western on­ tological understanding.” Zamora defines a literary “ghost” as “a spiritual force that enters the material world of the fiction and expresses itself as such” and deftly distinguishes two types: “an archetypal embodiment of cultural memory” that she sees exemplified in Faulkner’s work; and “a sym­ bolic repository of religious truth, a holy ghost” that has its ultimate origins outside history as exemplified in the fiction of O’Connor.37 Perhaps one es­ sential question should be asked not only of Cisneros’s heroine in Caramelo but also of Cisneros herself and of other contemporary Latina/o writers: which sort of ghost is la Virgen de Guadalupe, finally, to you? A similar question might be posed to Louise Erdrich, the most promi­ nent of a striking number of contemporary U.S. writers of Native American descent who can be placed on Gioia’s spectrum of degrees of literary Ca­ tholicism.38 Erdrich’s novels of Ojibwe life in the Dakotas and Minnesota, which began with Love Medicine in 1984, are too numerous to discuss in full here. With their recurrent setting and elaborately intertwined charac­ ters and families, they are adding up to something like Faulkner’s Yok­ napatawpha saga; and indeed, Erdrich has for more than two decades listed Faulkner as one of her most enduring literary influences—second, perhaps, only to O’Connor.39 She has also made it entirely clear that her childhood Catholic faith has shaped her identity at least as much as her Ojibwe heri­ tage and that, for her, the two are closely if not inseparably intertwined. She told an interviewer in 1986 that she had a “gothic-Catholic childhood” and in 2012 shed further light on this remark: The confessional screen, and the murmurs of the priest behind it, and the thought that everything you’re telling is under total secrecy, that did get to me as a child. . . . So I think when I started writing, it was with the sense that no one was going to read this. I could be in this secret world of characters and stories, places that I was creating, and that wherever the readers were, they were under oath not to reveal this to anybody.

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In the same 2012 interview she confesses her enduring love for “the ico­ nography of the Church, and a sort of helpless lust for the little statues of the Virgin” even as she also expresses some anger at the Church, par­ ticularly aspects of its historical treatment of women and Native Ameri­ cans.40 Yet she speaks of such issues in terms that are nuanced and personal rather than polemical and narrowly political. For example, she describes the “tragic” nature of missionaries who “often” perform their work “out of love,” yet too often “out of love” inadvertently “destroy the essence of the people they love”; and she remembers with admiration her grandfather, who “believed in the power of the traditional Ojibwe religion, and he also attended Catholic Mass,” thanks in part to priests on his reservation who at the time were “amenable” to his doing both.41 Erdrich’s fiction is set along the U.S.-Canadian border and—in ad­ dition to dealing directly with borders established around Ojibwe lands in the United States in the form of reservations—features a number of characters with intimate ties to French Canada. In some ways her nov­ els might seem most radical in how little attention they often pay to the larger U.S. nation as such. They focus on individual lives in her particular region, where Native Americans and settlers of European descent inter­ mingle ­(Erdrich herself is the daughter of a French-Ojibwe mother and a German American father); they provide glimpses into those lives that often seem as private and intimate as the confessional. These novels have received ­attention as fictions that make use of the conventions of “the Euro-Gothic” from Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto on” as well as those of “the American Gothic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”—though Erd­rich “grafts” these conventions “to Chippewa storytelling and long­ ings.”42 Tracks (1988), perhaps the most acclaimed of her early novels, turns largely on the juxtaposition of two women: a mysterious native “witch” or shaman woman and a nun of mixed French and Ojibwe descent. The nun, Pauline, has internalized a self-loathing that is properly read as reflecting a “manichaean form of Christianity” represented in the “extremes” of some missionaries who entirely rejected native cultures. Pauline’s fervent belief in the supernatural and practice of mortification of the flesh, however, is in fact consistent with the mystical traditions not only of medieval saints such as St. Teresa of Avila and St. Catherine of Siena but also of the Ojibwe themselves—“irrational, repressive, deviant, and mad” as all such practices

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appear within “a post-Enlightenment framework.”43 In Catholic tradition, the goal of such mysticism is not Manichean escape from the world but achievement of union with a kenotic Christ who grounds the mystic in re­ lation to the world—a world experienced in and responded to with charity. Such charity is strikingly modeled in Erdrich’s work not by Pauline but by Father Damien, a kind priest who is introduced in Tracks. In The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001) this priest is revealed to be a role-playing woman, a woman of European descent whose sense of voca­ tion is complex and conflicted—she has previously been a nun and also a married woman—but who is sincere in her devotion and comes to see the face of Christ in the Ojibwe she serves. In the latter novel, then, Erdrich dramatizes what one of her own characters calls a “sacrilege,” yet also “fi­ nally affirms the crucial role of the Church as a sacrament capable of me­ diating God’s presence.”44 Her own imagination, she has long reported, has been shaped not only by masters of the U.S. Gothic tradition but also by “nonfiction” including “the lives of the saints” and the “history of Catholic devotions” as well as “captivity narratives” of the colonial Ameri­ cas.45 Such reading has freed her imagination from the boundaries of the modern nation-­state as her fiction enacts dramas of encounter between Ca­ tholicism and “pagan” tradition that in certain fundamental respects might well be taking place in seventeenth-century Quebec or Peru—or even early medieval Europe, in the Church’s initial encounters with Celtic and Ger­ manic tribes. In fact, they take place during the long twentieth century and near the center of the North American continent, against the backdrop of an encircling and encroaching United States.46 Erdrich’s dramas of faith, eros, and agape in the north woods bear a certain resemblance to Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy (1991). Hansen is a rare example of an accomplished contemporary writer who represents, in Gioia’s terms, the first degree of literary Catholicism: a practicing Catholic throughout his life, Hansen was ordained a permanent deacon in the Arch­ diocese of San Jose in 2007 and speaks often and openly about his faith in relation to his fiction. A native of Nebraska, he first established his repu­ tation writing novels of the West such as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983)—a narrative of frontiersmen with guns that might be read as responding critically to the U.S. national ethos as it de­ picts, in his own words, “guys who were sons of preachers but did the

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wrong thing so blithely and persistently it was like they’d got their instruc­ tions all bollixed up.”47 Hansen’s most critically acclaimed novel thus far tells a different story entirely. Mariette in Ecstasy concerns women living close to nature in upstate New York circa 1900, in “a world as close and equivocal as Emily Dickinson’s, alive with the age-old American concerns of community and wildness, of sexual and spiritual immensities, of tran­ scendence and its discontents.”48 Yet in certain respects this novel seems not of the United States at all. For the women it depicts are nuns, members of the fictional Sisters of the Crucifixion, an order in exile: driven out of France by anticlerical legislation, many of the older sisters find their rural convent in America as much a “purgatory” as it is a haven.49 The young protagonist Mariette Baptiste is both American-born and bilingual (the novel subtly but consistently stresses New York state’s proximity to Franco­ phone Quebec). She joins the convent, she says, because she wishes to live a life of passionate devotion to Christ in communion with others and apart from the distractions of the secular world—a world represented in the novel by her father, a physician who has lost two daughters to the convent and is accordingly jealous of God. Yet Mariette becomes a polarizing figure within the convent itself precisely because she seems too worldly, too sen­ sual, and yet at the same time radically devout, if perhaps naïve. She soon appears to be either a saint or a fraud. On Christmas Eve, immediately after her biological sister has died of cancer, Mariette kneels in the oratory and is marked with wounds that resemble those of Christ: “Blood scribbles down her wrists and ankles and scrawls like red handwriting on the floor.”50 Such images highlight writing itself as a persistent theme in the novel, in which we know Mariette’s voice most extensively through the confes­ sional letters she writes to her priest, Father Marriott (whose name clearly marks him as in some sense her double). Here the natural world that ­surrounds the convent—a site of predators and pain as well as sublime beauty—seems to have an Author: in a cloud of fireflies, each insect appears as “a red dot, then a line, like a pen of red ink crossing a t.”51 Mariette in Ecstasy as a whole ultimately poses the question: is God the author of ­Mariette’s wounded body, or are the stigmata the creation of Mariette her­ self ? Relatedly, is there a firm boundary between grace and nature, or some essential continuity between the two—as suggested by the many ways in which the seasons of the year closely correspond to the liturgical calendar

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that organizes the narrative? These are the questions in which Hansen is most interested. As with Percy in Lancelot, his novel openly invites response to its deployment of Gothic conventions even as it radically revises U.S. Gothic tradition. Hansen knows that to contemporary U.S. readers, Mari­ ette seems a “throwback” to “gothic aspirers to sainthood” as she resembles one of those “late-medieval female mystics” who also intrigue Erdrich: women religious whose “often spectacular obsession with physical pain and its symbolic relation to Christ’s passion allowed them a heightened sense of participation in Christ’s redemptive suffering” and “tangible expe­ rience of eros in a life otherwise devoid of it.” Those mystics experienced their practice as affording “them a worthy role in a society that denigrated women.”52 Mariette herself is denigrated not by a patriarchal Church but by her own father, who is a devotee of reason rather than faith. Signifi­ cantly, this Enlightenment man is the novel’s only representative of the concerns of that nation which surrounds the convent. When Dr. Baptiste visits Mariette he speaks of “the great canal that is being built on the Isth­ mus of Panama,” “the Chicago White Sox beating the Chicago Cubs in the third annual World Series,” and his decision to vote “for Charles Evan Hughes for governor of New York.”53 Such concerns seem manifestly trivial to Mariette and to readers absorbed in the intimate world of this novel, a world at once natural and supernatural—a world that happens to be in the United States but is finally not of it. Hansen leaves the novel open-ended enough that readers can side with Dr. Baptiste and condemn Mariette as a fraud. Most, however, conclude that there is a ghost at work in the world of Mariette in Ecstasy, and it is no archetypal embodiment of cultural memory; rather, it is the Holy Ghost who brings Christ into the flesh and thereby provides the founda­ tion of the Church. Hansen’s convent of “almost medieval simplicity” is “never treated” by him as “freakish,” and in its final pages surprisingly ties that convent to the twentieth-century United States by depicting an older ­Mariette living outside the convent but longing for it, “making it impos­ sible to read the book as something that takes place safely long ago and far away, something that’s simply foreign.”54 Hansen thereby rewrites a long­ standing U.S. tradition of anti-convent literature that began with the likes of Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery (1836).55 He also produces a rare example of a work of contemporary literature that

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at once “dramatizes convincingly the possibility of the miraculous”—and arguably, almost incidentally, provides a means of reconsidering the U.S. “public sphere,” particularly the problematic relation between the “body politic” and the “body erotic.”56

TONI MORRISON’S A MERCY: AN AFRICAN CATHOLIC WOMAN HAUNTS AN AMERICAN HOUSE

No contemporary author displays the continuing evolution of U.S. Gothic fiction in relation to Catholicism and American borders more directly and profoundly than Toni Morrison in A Mercy (2008). The early consensus of reviewers and critics is that this novel is essential to her oeuvre—her “deep­ est excavation into American history” yet, and close kin to her masterpiece Beloved (1987) in its essential concern with the separation of a slave mother and child.57 Beloved firmly established Morrison as a Gothic author as its narrative of a ghost and a nineteenth-century haunted house directly re­ sponds to Faulkner and demands a radical reconsideration of the legacy of slavery in the United States. A Mercy ends with a seemingly haunted house as well, and the male figure who builds it clearly recalls Thomas Sutpen of Absalom, Absalom! Morrison’s Jacob Vaark is an orphan who builds a grand manor in the wilderness with profit made from slave labor—and gradually brings together a group of women of diverse racial backgrounds to form a community at the estate during his prolonged absences. A Mercy differs from Faulkner’s novel, however, both in its primary concern with the sto­ ries of the women and in its forthright concern with religious identity. The latter is in part a function of its setting. The novel takes place not in the United States but in Britain’s seventeenth-century American colonies, which might seem to represent “a multicultural America, prior to the invention of whiteness”—but where the racial divisions that would mark the future United States are already being drawn and where “religious intolerance” is on open display.58 The novel’s patriarch, Vaark, is Anglo-Dutch and lives in the intensely anti-Catholic colony of New York; his slight schooling took place in an English poorhouse where a “primer” memorized by his entire class taught him to “abhor that arrant whore of Rome.”59 His own Protes­ tant identity is described as “thin,” consisting of no more than a fear and

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disdain for “Papists,” whom he associates with enslavement of Europeans and Africans alike (M 32). The novel turns, however, on his own initial fearful journey into “Romish” Maryland, where he unexpectedly acquires an African slave girl (15). Vaark does so in hesitant trade with a Portuguese-­ born plantation owner whom he views as a decadent, treacherous, and ef­ feminate Catholic aristocrat—precisely as Melville’s U.S. captain in Benito Cereno views his Spanish counterpart, down to the specific detail of each protagonist noting that his Catholic foil carries a scabbard with no sword (29). By novel’s end, Vaark has died of smallpox. His white male inden­ tured servants see a light in his abandoned manor house that they attribute to his ghost. But in fact the light belongs to the slave girl, named Florens, who—it is finally revealed—has been writing the primary thread of the narrative itself on the walls of the manor. Florens is literate because a Catholic priest in Maryland, whom she deems “the only kind man I ever see,” ignored local law and clandestinely taught her how to write (8). Through her the house of Vaark, the deceased Anglo-Protestant male, “be­ comes, quite literally, the house of fiction, in which a black Catholic woman claims authorship.”60 A Mercy therefore directly engages the questions regarding authority and authorship foregrounded in the Gothic tradition by The Castle of Otranto, questions that had their roots in the long aftermath of the English Reformation (Vaark himself having been born into Oliver Cromwell’s En­ gland). And Florens’s identity as “black Catholic” author is all the more significant in light of the fact that Morrison began publicly identifying ­herself as Catholic shortly before the publication of A Mercy. In 2003, she first revealed that she had converted to Catholicism at age twelve and— having been born “Chloe”—took the name “Toni” from St. Anthony.61 In early 2004, she stated that “I had a Catholic education, even though my mother, who was very religious, was Protestant. As a child I was fascinated by the rituals of Catholicism, and I was strongly influenced by a cousin who was a Catholic.”62 She also consents to the interviewer’s suggestion that her “relationship with Catholicism” had come to an “end” at some in­ determinate point: “I don’t know how to explain it,” she responds. “It might surprise you to know that I had a moment of crisis on the occasion of Vatican II. . . . I suffered greatly from the abolition of Latin, which I saw as the unifying and universal language of the Church.”63 Yet Morrison in­

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dicates here her great “respect” for religious believers, and a year later af­ firmed her own faith, stating clearly in 2005 that “I am a Catholic.”64 ­Morrison scholars have begun to accept and discuss the significance of her Catholic identity as well as the question of why she previously abandoned or chose to obscure it.65 Such discussion will necessarily reshape assessment of Morrison’s oeu­ vre. Cornel West, who is not only a major scholar of African American cul­ ture but also Morrison’s former colleague at Princeton, spoke of her in 2013 in relation to Catholic activist Dorothy Day: Dorothy reminds me in so many ways of Toni Morrison. You know Toni Morrison is Catholic. Many people do not realize that she is one of the great Catholic writers. Like Flannery O’Connor, she has an ­incarnational conception of human existence. We Protestants are too individualistic. I think we need to learn from Catholics who are always centered on community.66 Morrison herself praised O’Connor in 2004 as “a great artist who hasn’t received the attention she deserves,” and their relationship deserves closer attention.67 The manipulative antagonists they depict in Beloved and The Violent Bear It Away, respectively, closely resemble one another as “school­ teachers” who represent post-Enlightenment habits of categorization that prove to be debilitating and dehumanizing.68 These two novels revise Gothic tradition as they demonstrate how an insistently rational secularism that seeks to associate religion with imprisoning “closure,” monastic or otherwise, can itself “serve as an agent of closure, shutting off whole realms of experience and speculation.”69 In 1997, Morrison published a novel that directly explores such competing notions of “closure” in regards to Ca­ tholicism and American borders. Paradise features an African American community in Oklahoma that attempts to establish a theocratic utopia, a city on a hill, but as “the narrative develops, their Protestantism is increas­ ingly associated with material greed rather than religious devotion.”70 This patriarchal community strikes out in violence against nearby women liv­ ing at a former convent under the influence of a leader named Consolata who practices “a new belief system” that is “informed by both her train­ ­ atholicism and her memory of cultures evolved by slaves in South ing in C America,” particularly the syncretistic religion Candomblé.71

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A Mercy is itself partly concerned with religious syncretism in America, which it presents less as a positive good than as a simple necessity. It does so most directly in the character of Lina, a Native American woman whose family and tribe have been wiped out by disease, who has suffered cruelty at the hands of Calvinists, and who now finds herself relying “on memory and her own resources: she cobbled together neglected rites, merged Eu­ rope medicine with native, scripture with lore” (56). A survivor, Lina is horribly scarred in some ways yet insightful in others. Her assessment of Vaark and his wife Rebekka—whose farm is near a village pointedly named “Milton” and whose children have all, like Lina’s own people, died at the hands of nature—is essential to the novel. From Lina’s perspective we see this displaced English couple beginning to live a version of what would in the future United States be deemed the American dream, here envisioned as pointedly post-Protestant: Sir and Mistress believed they could have honest free-thinking lives, yet without heirs, all their work meant less than a swallow’s nest. Their drift away from others produced a selfish privacy and they had lost the refuge and the consolation of a clan. Baptists, Presbyterians, tribe, army, family, some encircling outside thing was needed. Pride, she thought. Pride alone made them think that they needed only them­ selves, could shape life that way, like Adam and Eve, like gods from nowhere beholden to nothing but their own creations. (68–69). Lina recognizes that while she, Florens, and a white servant girl named Sor­ row who have been brought together on Vaark’s estate may seem to form a tentative community, in fact they are united only in mild bondage—­ bondage to Vaark’s desire to master nature and transform it into a com­ modity. She correctly sees that, though temporarily together, “they were not a family—not even a like-minded group. They were orphans, each and all” (69). The motif of orphanhood, of isolated individuals with no “encircling outside thing” to bind them together, is central to A Mercy. Vaark, who so clearly prefigures the U.S. ideal of the self-made man, exults in his own identity as wily orphan. While not overtly cruel, he “has a clever way of getting without giving” (7). He consistently seeks to remain autonomous

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and unattached to women and to nature as well as to any church. This is reflected in his relationship with Rebekka, whom he routinely leaves to care for his land and whom he deliberately sought out from England as “an un­ churched woman of childbearing age, obedient but not groveling, literate but not proud, independent but nurturing. And he would accept no scold” (23). As a rural landholder in colonial New York, Vaark bears a striking re­ semblance to Crèvecœur’s Farmer James in many respects. Yet he comes to realize “full well his shortcomings as a farmer—in fact his boredom with its confinement and routine” and, finding “commerce more to his taste,” becomes a trader, a capitalist with no embodied connection to his land. It is trade that leads him to Maryland, where he not only acquires Florens but also crucially decides to invest in “a remote labor force in Barbados”—to invest in slavery in another part of the Americas, but without the actual “intimacy of slave bodies,” which he generally finds appalling (40). The circumstances of this decision highlight the complex role of Ca­ tholicism in the novel, which in turn is essential to understanding fully its motif of orphanhood. The Portuguese slave master Vaark encounters in Maryland conforms to the patterns of the earliest Gothic fiction: he is in­ deed thoroughly depraved, and he and his wife together are ultimately sug­ gested to be complicit in the sexual abuse of their slaves. Yet these two hor­ rific Catholic characters function in the novel primarily so as to reveal more interesting—because more subtle—flaws in Vaark. These include his own insistently controlling masculinity, first reflected in his quick resentment when the Portuguese mistress surprisingly speaks to him “as though her po­ litical judgment were equal to a man’s” (20). Most crucially, Vaark’s desire for control over his own destiny fuels his blatant envy of the wealth of these decadent aristocrats. That envy makes him, the lowborn Anglo-Protestant come to North America, wish to equal or surpass them—to build a great manor house. He imagines that he can accomplish this in a manner that is “pure, noble even,” without the “pagan excess” that he sees exemplified in the morally “compromised” house of the Catholics (32). It is to further this design that Vaark invests in seemingly distant Caribbean slavery, so that while the evil of the Portuguese is made obvious from the outset, Vaark’s remains mostly hidden both from the reader and from himself—until, in “a manner that recalls a medieval morality tale, Vaark dies from smallpox precisely as his new mansion is finished.”72 His death in fact sets in motion

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the events with which this chronologically complicated narrative begins and ends, events stemming from the crisis of the female characters. With­ out Vaark, Florens and the other women—aware of their “orphanhood” yet longing not to be orphaned—seek fulfillment and salvation in ways that bespeak Christian desire. On one level, the women, unlike Vaark, simply and straightforwardly recognize that they are not self-sufficient. The Laodicean Rebekka has gen­ erally been prone to see God only as “a larger kind of king” and to see Vaark himself as God-like in his general absence (87). Yet she also intuits herself as similar to Job in some respects (107). When smallpox takes Vaark away and then afflicts but finally spares her, she begins to see herself as favored by God, but only in a cruel way that finally isolates her. In this she resem­ bles the “local Baptists” she had earlier disdained, who “tired her out with talk that never extended beyond their fences unless it went all the way to heaven” (108). In a different manner than Vaark, then, Rebekka finally builds a fence around herself—defining herself in exclusive relation to God and separating herself from others in doing so. Her possibility for a very different sort of relationship to God and others alike is suggested when, during her illness, she is visited by the kind ghosts of women whom she met while crossing the Atlantic aboard a ship tellingly named Angelus—the name of the traditional Catholic prayer celebrating the Incarnation as ac­ complished through the Virgin Mary, beginning with the Annunciation. In the belly of this ark, Rebekka and other orphaned women—prostitutes and thieves among them—became “the kind of family sea journeys create” and shared a meal (94). One “offered grace” as together they “sipped warm, spirited water and munched stale biscuits,” and “time became simply the running sea, unmarked, eternal, and of no matter” as they dined together in a realm beyond fences, beyond the borders of farms and cities, of colo­ nies and nation-states (99–100). The allusion to the Eucharist here must be juxtaposed with that of ­Florens in the preceding chapter. She was told by the “Reverend Father” who taught her to write in Maryland that “communion is the best hope, prayer the next” (80). While Florens does not doubt the priest’s kindness, as a teenager she has come to feel the need of not God but man—and one man in particular—to fulfill her. Florens’s chapters are written in language that sometimes evokes the Old Testament Song of Songs, addressed to a

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fugitive lover with whom she desperately seeks to reunite herself and whom she sees as a savior.73 This man is a free African who in his profession as blacksmith figures as a potential demiurge, one who ultimately charges ­Florens with lacking control over her body and her passions, with an ap­ parent lack of “mind, mind, mind” (166). In his insistence on mastery over the natural world the blacksmith resembles Vaark, himself figured earlier in a strange myth invented by Lina as a traveler who looks out over the ­wilderness and proclaims “Mine. Mine. Mine” (73). What Florens desires, by contrast, is not abstract mastery over or possession of any part of the natural world; what she desires is embodied union and love, love of a some­ what but not entirely different kind than Rebekka experienced with the women aboard the Angelus. At the moment that Florens is writing her por­ tion of the novel, what she most passionately desires is the blacksmith; throughout her life generally, what she has most desired is the mother from whom she was separated in Maryland. Unlike the older Lina, then, who is prone to a frightening stoicism, the sexually awakening Florens is unapolo­ getically marked by eros, and she is not content to be an orphan. Florens’s desire for lover and mother alike might, of course, be ap­ proached in merely psychoanalytic terms. Morrison herself recognizes the inescapable power of “human needs” and how they might limit the ability of humans to imagine God. Yet in doing so she goes on to speak without irony of a God whose “essence” must necessarily be infinite—beyond any­ thing the human psyche can fully grasp—and she discovers “with a slight shiver, that my own language becomes evangelical.”74 Morrison notes else­ where that A Mercy itself originated with the “language” of Florens, whose voice was given shape in part by the Church. Asked which character’s voice initially inspired the novel, Morrison responds: “I heard Florens’s first, the girl. And she approaches language in a slanted way. She can read and write; she learned from a Catholic priest under scary circumstances. . . . When she was with her mother she spoke Portuguese. She knows Latin.”75 In the novel itself, the priest who serves the Church is presented as somewhat naïve, incapable of grasping the full depths of the evil of the Portuguese slave owners and of slavery itself (see 191, 194–95). Yet he gave Florens the means to write the truth—risking death to do so—because “he believed we would love God more if we know the letters to read by” (191). Her char­ acterization of her words as a “confession,” among other details, indicates

246  Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination

that the priest also provided her with some religious education—though, as with Lina’s, that education has been imperfect and interrupted by the gen­ eral trauma of life in colonial America (6–7).76 The priest has nonetheless successfully taught Florens that “no matter what others may say,” she is not a “soulless animal, a curse” (195). Some of those “others,” significantly, in­ clude New England villagers whom Florens encounters—witch-hunting villagers who associate her with Satan, the “Black Man” himself (131). Yet even a member of Florens’s own race—the blacksmith, who is in his way a manipulative and secular scientist or technologist—sees her as a potential animal, and calls to mind Hawthorne’s Aylmer just as surely as the villag­ ers call to mind his Puritans. Vaark himself quietly sees Florens, like Lina and the other “waifs and whelps” he has assembled on his farm, as matter­ ing “less than a milch cow,” as a sort of substitute child for his wife but one that is ultimately expendable in the way that a pet might be (37, 30–31). Florens herself is a flawed character who is finally moved to regrettable violence out of despair—out of a desperate need to be loved in an America where she seems doomed to be a perpetual orphan. But the gift of language itself, nurtured here by the Church, marks her as indeed not a “soulless animal.” That language conveys her enduring if frustrated desire for salva­ tion and fulfillment, for embodied union, for some encircling outside thing. This desire might wrongly be overlooked because the novel ends in the word not of Florens but of her mother, who is revealed to have looked to Vaark rather than God to provide her daughter with some meaningful “mercy”—and, finally, to have misjudged his ability to do so. A Mercy is therefore in part concerned with the limits of the ability of human beings to save themselves. Belief in that ability—as articulated by the likes of Samuel Huntington and by the novel itself—can well be seen as a founding principle of the United States. If McCarthy’s The Road and DeLillo’s Underworld convey a chilling sense of the human predicament, of last things, by depicting the end of that nation, then Morrison’s A Mercy does so by showing its beginnings—with a sure sense that any nation made up of individuals who view themselves as “gods from nowhere beholden to nothing but their own creations” is doomed as surely as Vaark himself is. In this regard and others, A Mercy is a cornerstone of Morrison’s “often gothic, but always mystic, house of fiction.”77 The voice that gives it shape owes a clear debt to the author’s interest in a Catholic Church that she

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found attractive in part because of its emphasis on Latin as a “unifying and universal language.” A Mercy thereby marks a powerful continuation of the evolving U.S. Gothic tradition I have traced in this study even as it radi­ cally reconfigures the assumptions that shaped the emergence of the Gothic novel in eighteenth-century Britain. This twenty-first-century novel does so by depicting a Catholicism that appears in part as horrific and corrupt­ ing but is finally bound up with a potentially saving communal literacy—a literacy that spans national borders even as it highlights the inherent arti­ ficiality and contingency of such borders in the colonial Americas and ­beyond.

NOTES

Introduction 1. Goddu, Gothic America, 4. The centrality of Gothic fiction—sometimes deemed “dark romance”—to the U.S. canon has been recognized in major critical works ranging from Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) to Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1992). Some critics have been inclined to read Gothic fiction as merely arousing a pleasing fear in the reader or as reflecting individual obsessions best understood in light of psychoanalytic theory. Since the 1990s, however, critics have generally agreed that major authors in the United States have deployed the Gothic mode for sustained and serious critical engage­ ment of sociopolitical realities that must be understood in historical context. Goddu led this scholarly reconsideration in Gothic America, which emphasizes the Gothic’s role in depictions of race and slavery in U.S. literature. Recent works paying significant heed to U.S. Gothic fiction’s engagement with such realities include Lloyd-Smith, American Gothic Fiction; Martin and Savoy, American Gothic; and Crow, History of the Gothic. 2.  See Sage, Horror Fiction. 3.  On anti-Catholicism in the United States during the Cold War era, see McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, chapter 6. For the pervasiveness of anti-Catholicism in nineteenth-century U.S. culture, see Fenton, Religious Liberties; Franchot, Roads to Rome; and Griffin, Anti-Catholicism. 4. Huntington, Who Are We? 62–69. 5.  Ibid., 59. 6.  Ibid., 106. Speaking of Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, which de­ fines America as a “Protestant nation,” Budde takes the author to task for his “instrumentalist view of Christianity”—“that it has social value to the extent that it serves more valuable institutions and allegiances”—and emphasizes that such a view could not be more “at variance with an ecclesiology that takes the church and the Gospel seriously” (Borders of Baptism, 66).

249

250  Notes to Pages 3–7 7.  For example, Menand in “Patriot Games” rightly notes that Hunting­ ton is “not interested in values per se; he is interested in national security and national power.” 8. Huntington, Who Are We? xvi. 9. Fenton, Religious Liberties, 5. Fenton stresses that in early U.S. literature “Catholicism . . . operates as the institution against which U.S. liberalism can define itself ” (5). On the apparent connection between dissenting Protestant­ ism and an increasingly radical individualism in the United States, see Bellah, ­“Religion.” 10.  “Autonomy” as considered with regard to the individual here is implic­ itly atomistic, detached from any concept of a common good beyond the borders of the self. It operates on the assumption that the self finally cannot govern itself or pursue its own interest without isolation from or domination of other selves. 11.  On the connection of American exceptionalism and individualism to dissenting Protestantism, see Lipset, American Exceptionalism, 60–67. 12. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism, 17. Franchot is widely recognized as initiating this line of inquiry. 13. Fenton, Religious Liberties, 7. 14.  Other broad studies of responses to Catholicism in U.S. literature have focused overwhelmingly on nineteenth-century authors of Protestant back­ ground: for example, Franchot, Roads to Rome; Gatta, American Madonna; Grif­ fin, Anti-Catholicism; Fessenden, Culture and Redemption; Fenton, Religious Liberties. 15. Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 4. Fessenden ably demonstrates this claim with regard to American print culture ranging from colonial Puritan texts and the antebellum New England Primer to the fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others. Fessenden maintains that Protestantism’s emancipation from Catholicism has also historically set “the lim­ its” of secularism’s emancipation from religion: to be a good U.S. citizen—that is, increasingly, to be secular and individualistic—has been seen as first to be Protestant. 16.  The only previous studies to examine such a chronologically expansive range of U.S. authors in relation to Catholicism are Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions, and Labrie, The Catholic Imagination in American Literature. Those studies are broader than mine in some respects (e.g., they do not focus on Gothic fiction) and narrower in others (e.g., they treat neither the eighteenth nor the twenty-first century and do not give substantial consideration to depictions of Catholicism by major authors of Protestant background). 17. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism, 4. 18. Deneen, Democratic Faith, 287.

Notes to Pages 7–13 251 19.  Ibid., 5. 20. Ibid., 273. 21.  Ibid., building on Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites. 22. Schmitt, Alien Nation, 158. Goddu’s Gothic America presents a similar approach, as does Hoeveler’s The Gothic Ideology with particular attention to the overlap between anti-Catholicism and the sociopolitical discourse of Britain in the long nineteenth century. 23.  Baldick and Mighall, “Gothic Criticism,” 216. 24.  Ibid. Recent scholarship on the Americas that addresses the religious concerns I highlight here includes Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World; Richard­ son, Being-In-Christ; Goldschmidt and McAlister, Race, Nation, and Religion; and Pestana, Protestant Empire. Relatedly, scholars working in Hemispheric American studies have properly recognized that developing expanded “North-South” per­ spectives in the American Hemisphere must not blind us to how those are ­inevitably shaped in relation to “East-West”—that is, transatlantic—perspectives (Levander and Levine, Hemispheric American Studies, 14). 25. Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto profoundly undermines “the promise of current historiography—bolstered by John Locke and David Hume—of the ­possibility of accessing an ‘authentic’ past” (Mack, Literary Historicity, 125). 26.  Miles, “The Gothic and Ideology,” 61. 27. Ibid. 28. Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 5. 29.  Miles, “The Gothic and Ideology,” 63. 30. Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 114. 31.  Hogle, “Introduction,” 4. 32.  Hoeveler, “Inventing the Gothic Subject,” 6, 12–13. See also Hoeveler’s The Gothic Ideology. 33.  Hoeveler, “Inventing the Gothic Subject,” 6. 34.  Ibid., 9. 35.  Miles asserts that the Gothic calls all ideologies into question—not only those of the generally discredited past, but also those of any divinized present or future. Accordingly, Hoeveler’s overarching assertion that most early British Gothic fiction ultimately depicts the triumph of the Protestant subject even while subtly and subversively mourning the Catholic past is in concert with Miles’s characterization of the Gothic as “arising out of ” a “nascent modernity without taking [clear] positions on it” (“The Gothic and Ideology,” 58). See also Miles, “Abjection, Nationalism, and the Gothic,” which demonstrates that the British Gothic incorporated horrific images of Catholicism not only as Latin “other” but also as past British “other,” that is, the “superstitious feudal subject” or Jacobite.

252  Notes to Pages 13–17 Such images in effect suggested to British readers that ambiguously, frighteningly, the “other” is also us—if we should relapse (58). 36. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6–12. For Cavanaugh in Migrations of the Holy, “Anderson shows how texts such as daily newspapers helped create a sense of communion among the scattered people of emergent nations” and even how “the nation in Western civilization in many ways replaces the church in its role as the primary cultural institution that deals with death.” In the wake of “Christianity’s decline in the West,” nations “provide a new kind of salvation: my death is not in vain if it is for the nation, which lives on into a limitless future” (117–18). 37. Noble, Death of a Nation, xxv–xxvi. 38.  Ibid., 8–9. 39.  Ibid., xxvi. 40. Richter, The Progress of Romance, 161–62. 41.  Savoy, “The Rise of American Gothic,” 168. On Brown’s substantial engagement with Catholicism in his fiction, see Fenton, Religious Liberties, ­41–48. 42. Lloyd-Smith, American Gothic Fiction, 53. See also Goddu, Gothic America, on the difficulty of defining a Gothic genre because Gothic fiction “foregrounds its generic instability” even in a British context—and became even more unstable in an American one (4–5). 43.  Savoy, “The Rise of American Gothic,” 187. 44. Poe, Selected Writings, 354. 45. Franchot, Roads to Rome, 13–14. 46. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 42. 47. Franchot, Roads to Rome, xxii. 48. Gatta, American Madonna, 32. 49.  Lloyd-Smith, “Nineteenth-Century American Gothic,” 109–11. See also Lipset, American Exceptionalism, on an extraordinary tendency toward “moral absolutism” in the United States: in comparison with other Western ­societies, the United States seems a nation of “utopian moralists” whose commit­ ment to “destroy evil” and view “social and political dramas as morality plays, as battles between God and the Devil,” is related to its history of “Protestant sectar­ ianism” (63–65). 50.  Lloyd-Smith, “Nineteenth-Century American Gothic,” 119–20. 51.  See DeGuzman, Spain’s Long Shadow, especially 1–3 and 48–50. See also Fuchs, “The Spanish Race,” 96–98. 52. Fenton, Religious Liberties, 9. Here Fenton acknowledges the work of political theorists Carole Pateman and Charles Mills. 53.  Hoeveler, “Inventing the Gothic Subject,” 9.

Notes to Pages 17–23 253 54.  Many of Chopin’s and certain of O’Connor’s fictions, as demonstrated in chapters 3 and 5, feature female protagonists who seek to dominate others in order to achieve their own autonomy. So too does the African American male blacksmith in Morrison’s A Mercy, touched on in my coda here. 55.  For the most influential general study of Gnosticism, see Jonas, The Gnostic Religion. 56. Deneen, Democratic Faith, 6. Not unrelatedly, prominent political phi­ losopher Eric Voegelin characterized Puritans in England as utopians who mounted a “Gnostic Revolution” with lasting repercussions for Western moder­ nity (see Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, chapter 5). 57.  Bloom’s own analysis primarily derives from—and is favorably disposed toward—Valentinian Gnosticism. 58.  For a contemporary Protestant minister who in a sense continues Lee’s work, see Burfeind, Gnostic America. 59. Crow, History of the Gothic, 37. 60.  See chapter 2 here, especially regarding Melville’s “The Encantadas.” 61. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4. 62.  Hogle, “Introduction,” 7. 63.  See Welle, “The Evolution of the Assisi Gathering.” 64. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 17. 65.  Hogle, “Introduction,” 5, paraphrasing Kristeva. 66. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism, 7. For further discussion of abjection and Catholicism in the context of British nationalism, see Miles, “Abjection, Nation­ alism, and the Gothic.” 67.  Savoy, “The Rise of American Gothic,” 170–71. 68.  Ibid., 175. 69.  Sivils, “American Gothic and the Environment,” 123. On the “dualis­ tic” theology of the Puritans in this regard and its correction by later U.S. au­ thors, see Bilbro, Loving God’s Wildness. 70. Fiske, Miscellaneous Writings, 178. 71.  Sivils, “American Gothic and the Environment,” 124–25. 72. Kolodny, The Lay of the Land, provides the foundational study of how early Anglo-American males tended to figure the U.S. frontier in relation to the female body. 73. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 143–44. 74.  For an anthropological study suggesting that embodied Catholic prac­ tices foster connection to an “international” Church in much of Latin America, whereas a Protestant privileging of interiority in the United States has tended to foster churches conceived of as “local,” see Richardson, Being-In-Christ.

254  Notes to Pages 23–32 75.  For an overview of how the Church’s emphasis on the body continues to inform the Catholic literary imagination in the United States, see Waldmeir, Cathedrals of Bone. 76.  John Paul II, Ecclesia in America, in part citing his own earlier 1992 address to Latin American bishops: “America, which historically has been, and still is, a melting-pot of peoples, has recognized in the mestiza face of the Virgin of Tepeyac, ‘in Blessed Mary of Guadalupe, an impressive example of a perfectly inculturated evangelization.’ Consequently, not only in Central and South America, but in North America as well, the Virgin of Guadalupe is venerated as Queen of all America.” 77. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 410. 78.  R. F. Miller, “Dostoevsky and the Tale of Terror,” 106, 119. On the Russian author’s engagement with Poe and British Gothic fiction alike, see As­ trov, “Dostoievsky on Edgar Allan Poe,” and R. F. Miller, Dostoevsky’s Unfinished Journey, chapters 6 and 7. Dostoevsky’s Gothic proclivities are particularly sig­ nificant in that every one of the twentieth-century writers of U.S. Gothic fiction considered here—Faulkner, O’Connor, Percy, and McCarthy—identified him as a significant influence. 79. Noble, Death of a Nation, 1. 80. Cant, Cormac McCarthy, identifies McCarthy as only the most recent of prominent U.S. artists who construct “anti-myths against the myth of American exceptionalism” (255)—including Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Faulkner as well as John Ford and Sam Peckinpah. For a Catholic theological investigation of American exceptionalism as a form of idola­ try, see Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy. For a historical perspective on the capacity of U.S. civil religion to ingest and corrupt Christian teaching, see ­Gamble, In Search of the City on a Hill. 81. Yothers, Sacred Uncertainty, 181. Yothers also notes that in Clarel, Ungar has lost “faith in American exceptionalism” and in some of his arguments antici­ pates “the efforts of twentieth-century liberation theologians” (184). A “lapsed Catholic” who “sees the collapse of the faith as inevitable,” Ungar is so “infuriated by the individualism, imperialism, and shallowness of late nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture” that he seems “a prototype for Graham Greene” (184). 82. Franchot, Roads to Rome, 163. 83.  See Fenton, Religious Liberties, on “Protestant Blindness and the Limits of Liberal Pluralism in Benito Cereno” (114–20). Delano appears as a representa­ tive American in that “instead of seeing the liberal [U.S.] state enslaving black bodies,” he sees “a global Catholicism enslaving Protestant souls” (120). 84.  Morrison, “The Search,” 118.

Notes to Pages 33–35 255 85.  Birns, “Building the Cathedral,” 11; see also G. Reynolds, “The Ide­ ology of Cather’s Catholic Progressivism.” 86.  For an account of self-consciously Catholic novelists seeking to portray their Church positively to a popular audience in the mid-nineteenth century, see J. E. Ryan, Faithful Passages, chapter 3. Gatta’s American Madonna traces an af­ firmative fascination with the Virgin Mary—if not always the Catholic Church— in writers of Protestant background ranging from Margaret Fuller and Harriet Beecher Stowe to Harold Frederic, Henry Adams, and T. S. Eliot. The latter’s example shaped the lives and work of Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate, converts to Catholicism who played an important role in shaping a Catholic renaissance of sorts in American letters in the mid-twentieth century (F. O’Gorman, Peculiar Crossroads, chapter 2). This period saw the work of a variety of U.S. Catholic fiction writers whose intimate portrayal of the Church was essentially sympa­ thetic. These included not only popular successes such as Edwin O’Connor and Paul Horgan but also J. F. Powers, perhaps the most critically acclaimed Catholic fiction writer of this era aside from Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy. Fur­ thermore, Percy wrote fiction dealing directly with the Catholic Church in a way that O’Connor did not, and aside from Lancelot, none of his novels are Gothic in any substantive sense. The institutional Church—wounded from within and without, a sign of troubled hope—appears crucially at the end of every one of Percy’s fictions, and Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome strongly suggest that the United States as a whole stands in need of that Church even as those novels focus on an individual Catholic protagonist, Dr. Thomas More, in direct relation to his priest. 87.  Hauerwas and Wood, “How the Church Became Invisible,” 177, 180. 88.  Ibid., 177. 89.  Ibid., 159–60. 90.  Ibid., 165. 91.  For a concise and authoritative statement regarding the legacy of dis­ senting Protestantism in the United States in this regard, see Bellah, “Religion.” See also Lipset, American Exceptionalism, on the essential “sectarianism” of Chris­ tianity in the United States, the “only” historically Christian nation where “most churchgoers adhere to sects, mainly the Methodists and Baptists, but also hun­ dreds of others. Elsewhere in Christendom, the Anglican, Catholic, Lutheran, and Orthodox churches dominate” (19). 92.  Hauerwas and Wood, “How the Church Became Invisible,” 164–65, paraphrasing Cavanaugh, “The City.” A Catholic theologian, Cavanaugh has expanded his arguments regarding the competing claims of the Church and the nation-state on the bodies as well as the souls of Christians in both The Myth of Religious Violence and Migrations of the Holy.

256  Notes to Pages 35–37 93. Budde, Borders of Baptism, 4. 94. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 294–95. McGreevy ac­ knowledges Taylor as the source of his perspective on “individualism” here. Fen­ ton in Religious Liberties agrees implicitly with such critiques as she “casts a critical eye on the liberal logics of individualism and privacy that have long structured”—that is, limited—“discussions of pluralism, equality, and solidarity” in the United States (7). 95.  Hauerwas and Wood, “How the Church Became Invisible,” 159. 96. O’Connor, Collected Works, 818. Here, in the essay “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” O’Connor uses these terms with reference to a particular U.S. region. In light of this twentieth-century Georgia writer’s sense of close kinship to Hawthorne and his tales of colonial New England (see chapter 5), I am applying her terms to the entire nation’s Gothic literary ­tradition. 97. Rodriguez, Days of Obligation, 221. Rodriguez’s Brown deals with race more directly and reveals his growing admiration of evangelical Protestants and his recognition of the vitality of such Christians in Latin America. His oeuvre therefore ultimately speaks to all Christians regarding the necessity of a faith that crosses national borders, paralleling and directly informing the work of theolo­ gians and activists committed to achieving a Christian perspective on the U.S. border with Mexico (see Elizondo, Ways of the Cross, and Groody, “Globalizing Justice”). In turn, Elizondo himself, perhaps the most influential Latino theolo­ gian in the United States, has been linked to Rodriguez as an advocate of mestizage by scholars more attentive to ethnicity than to theology (see Rudin, “New Mestizos,” and Sollors, The Invention of Ethnicity, xvii). 98.  Rodriguez, “Extended Interview.” 99.  Rodriguez, “Mexicans in America.” Rodriguez directly decries Hun­ tington’s devaluing of Christianity in relation to “national” creed: “America spends precious little of its affinity for biblical language and allusion on the plight of the illegal laborer. On Mexican hillsides, the beatitudes are as real and as plen­ tiful as cardboard shanties. The Mexican peasant has the advantage, if you will allow me to call it that, of coming to America from a Catholic culture that hon­ ors suffering; that sees suffering as holy, and poverty as blessed, and therefore accords the poor a position (exactly opposite to the middle-class ethos of American Puritanism) over the middle class.” 100.  Rodriguez, “Q&A.” For more on the Church and migration, see Stowe, “A Theological Perspective”: in the 1952 Apostolic Constitution Exsul Familia Nazarethana, Pius XII “explicitly states that migration is a human right,” and the 2004 Pontifical Council on Migrants and Refugees “argues that migration was

Notes to Pages 37–46 257 gaining recognition as a natural right in the 1200s, long before the advent of the nation-state” (100). 101.  Francis, remarks before the 2013 conclave at which he was elected. Quoted in Duffy, “Who Is the Pope?” 102.  Francis, “Message for the World Day of Peace.” C H A P T E R 1 . 

Crèvecœur’s Mask of the Modern

1. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 3, 62. 2.  On literary New England’s tendency to conflate images of Native American paganism and Catholicism well into the nineteenth century, see Fes­ senden, Culture and Redemption, chapters 1–2. 3. Hoffman, Form and Fable, 34. 4. Philbrick, St. John de Crèvecoeur, employs the mask metaphor in chap­ ter 1, “The Man and His Masks,” but has little to say about Catholicism. 5.  Quoted in Goddu, Gothic America, 27. 6. Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer, 67. Hereafter folios to this work will be cited parenthetically in the text. 7.  On Crèvecœur as “embryonic novelist,” see Albert Stone, “Introduc­ tion” to Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer, 22. Stone follows D. H. Lawrence in seeing Crèvecœur as laying the “emotional” foundation of American literature. 8.  For example, Goddu’s Gothic America begins with a chapter on Letters from an American Farmer, and Crow’s American Gothic features it prominently. 9.  Ditmore, “‘O Supreme Being,’” refers to Letter III specifically in cor­ rectly asserting that “as famous as is James’s melting pot imagery, his discussion of religious belief and practice later in the same letter has been largely, and unde­ servedly, neglected” (78). Landsman’s “Pluralism, Protestantism, and Prosperity” is an important exception to this rule, as is J. E. Ryan’s Imaginary Friends, which provides a reading of the entirety of Letters with attention to Quakerism spe­ cifically. 10.  Bishop, “A Feeling Farmer,” 365. 11. Franklin, Autobiography, 10. Franklin met Crèvecœur in France and characterized him as an intelligent observer of the American scene (G. W. Allen and Asselineau, St. John de Crèvecoeur, 72). 12. Paine, The Age of Reason, in Collected Writings, 666. 13.  Ibid., 669. 14.  Ibid., 691.

258  Notes to Pages 46–57 15. Paine, Common Sense, in Collected Writings, 25. 16.  Ibid., 23. On Paine’s use of specifically anti-Catholic rhetoric in Common Sense, see Duncan, Citizens or Papists? 36. 17. Goddu, Gothic America, 16. 18. Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 4, speaking of general patterns in Anglo-American culture. 19.  Landsman, “Pluralism, Protestantism, and Prosperity,” 108. On this pattern generally, see also Fenton, Religious Liberties. 20. Philbrick, St. John de Crèvecoeur, 16. 21.  Burson, “The Catholic Enlightenment,” 65. 22.  G. W. Allen and Asselineau, St. John de Crèvecoeur, xviii. 23.  Ibid., 36, 40–41; Ditmore, “‘O Supreme Being,’” 80. Regarding the painting, see also Greeson, Our South, 22–25. 24.  G. W. Allen and Asselineau deem Seton to be Crèvecoeur’s “first and best friend in [British] North America” (St. John de Crèvecoeur, xvii). 25.  Ibid. Crèvecœur “was neither duke nor count, nor even baron, but a plain knight,” and he “did not share the prejudices of his class” (xxi). He sympa­ thized with many of the critiques of the aristocracy that fueled the French Revo­ lution, but like many “moderates” found himself frightened by the outbreak of the Revolution itself—during which a number of his “closest friends” were ulti­ mately “assassinated or guillotined” (170–71). 26.  Ibid., 211. 27.  Ibid., 3. 28.  Quoted in ibid., 4. 29.  Ibid., xxi–xxii. See also Adams, “The Historical Value of Crèvecoeur’s Voyage.” 30.  G. W. Allen and Asselineau, St. John de Crèvecoeur, 128. 31.  See Duncan, Citizens or Papists? 32.  G. W. Allen and Asselineau, St. John de Crèvecoeur, 129, 161. 33.  See Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire. 34. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 52. 35.  G. W. Allen and Asselineau, St. John de Crèvecoeur, 204–5. 36.  J. E. Ryan, Imaginary Friends, 83. 37.  For an overview of scholarly commentary on the Nantucket letters, see ibid., 81 and 88–90. 38. Moore, More Letters from the American Farmer, xxxiv–xxxvi. 39.  University of Pennsylvania Library, “Cultural Readings.” 40. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 403–4. 41.  On Crèvecœur’s widely varying narrators, see Moore, More Letters from the American Farmer, xx–xxi. Moore also provides “a reminder of the obvious”

Notes to Pages 58–62 259 with regard to the state of letters in the late eighteenth century: “Crèvecoeur and his readers were aware of the presence of novels and novelists, with their empha­ sis on character development” (lxiii). 42. Goddu’s Gothic America and Crow’s American Gothic stress Letter IX as most fully exemplifying the Gothic character of Letters from an American Farmer. Stone, building on Bewley’s Eccentric Design, observes Crèvecœur’s skillful em­ ployment of a “eucharistic idiom” (“Introduction” to Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer, 21). 43. Goddu, Gothic America, 20. 44.  On the recurrence of the “myth-image” of the “cannibal Eucharist” in literature of the U.S. frontier, see Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence. See Osborne, “American Antipathy,” for a highly relevant overview of how Crèvecœur finally paints nature darkly, inimically, even as “James’s affective relations to others—northern slaves, southern slaves, European peasants—produce a form of democratic sociability, but a highly problematic one in which the other is not preserved but consumed” (544). 45.  For consideration of how James’s brief comment on northern slavery constitutes a failed attempt to displace it beyond the borders of the emergent United States, see Greeson, Our South, 30. 46.  See Ditmore, “‘O Supreme Being.’” Finseth, in Shades of Green, recog­ nizes that here the text “illustrates the central and intractable problems of the­ odicy,” and suggests that slavery is at once “transgressive of nature and yet representative of the darkest forces of nature” itself (96). 47.  Quoted in Moore, More Letters from the American Farmer, xxv. Greeson, in Our South, characterizes James’s walking away from the slave to “break bread” with the planter as a sign that he is “fully enmeshed in the old Manichean dual­ ism of plantation slavery” (31–32). 48.  Osborne convincingly demonstrates how the naïve James becomes the “perfect vehicle” for Crèvecœur’s “critique of American liberalism” (“American Antipathy,” 544). Newman, Pace, and Koenig-Woodward report that the ma­ jority of current critics read Letters as in many respects “a deadpan satire of re­ publican political ideology with a finally quite conservative political message” (Transatlantic Romanticism, 96). 49. Nelson, National Manhood, 7, 9–10. 50.  L. R. Ryan, Old St. Peter’s, 42–45. See also Duncan, Citizens or Papists? 55–56. 51. Farley, History of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 6. 52.  G. W. Allen and Asselineau, St. John de Crèvecoeur, 129, 38. 53. Farley, History of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 7; Duncan, Citizens or Papists? 56.

260  Notes to Pages 62–69 54. Farley, History of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 7–8. See also Duncan, Citizens or Papists? 57. 55.  G. W. Allen and Asselineau, St. John de Crèvecoeur, 161; Mitchell, St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, 282. 56.  Jefferson, “Marriage certificate.” 57. Richards, Drama, Theatre, and Identity, 38–39. 58.  Ibid., 52. 59.  Ibid., 53. 60. Moore, More Letters from the American Farmer, 123. 61.  Philbrick identifies Crèvecœur’s sketch “The English and the French Before the Revolution” as largely “a nostalgic reminiscence of the simple and happy life of the French in Canada before the British conquest, one of the rare occasions on which Crèvecoeur confronts the audience without a mask on his face” (St. John de Crèvecoeur, 114). 62.  Landsman, “Pluralism, Protestantism, and Prosperity,” notes the “bla­ tantly anti-Catholic rhetoric of American opposition to the Quebec act” (108). See also the first chapter of Fenton, Religious Liberties, “Catholic Canadians and Protestant Pluralism in the Early Republic.” 63.  See L. R. Ryan, Old St. Peter’s, on Varela (164–69) and Toussaint ­(211–14). 64. Franchot, Roads to Rome, 299–300; L. R. Ryan, Old St. Peter’s, 65–69. 65.  Quoted in Franchot, Roads to Rome, 190. 66.  Quoted in ibid., 299. 67. Franchot, Roads to Rome, chapter 7. CHAPTER 2. 

Melville’s “Monkish Fables”

1.  On Melville’s birthplace and Seton, see Nevius and Nevius, Inside the Apple, 23. 2. Parker, Herman Melville, 1:280. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as HM. 3.  Watching from aboard his own ship Bachelor’s Delight, the captain ini­ tially perceives the Spanish ship San Dominick approaching in tandem with the sun itself, “which, wimpled by . . . low, creeping clouds, showed not unlike a Lima intriguante’s one sinister eye peering across the Plaza from the Indian loophole of her dusk saya-y-manta” (Melville, Benito Cereno, in The Piazza Tales, 47; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as BC). Given that nature itself has donned the guise of wimpled nun and Spanish-Indian seductress all at once,

Notes to Pages 69–72 261 Delano has good reason to fear that he is about to be deprived of his bachelor innocence. 4.  Melville, “The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles,” in The Piazza Tales, 152; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as E. Young, in Colonial Desire, demonstrates that prominent British theorists consistently cited South America as “the prime example of the degenerative results of racial hybridization” in the middle of the nineteenth century (175). On Anglo-American associations of Spain with miscegenation in Benito Cereno and elsewhere, see DeGuzman, Spain’s Long Shadow, especially 47–67. 5.  See Myers, “‘Redeemer of America.’” 6. Boyle, Sacred and Secular Scriptures, 204. 7. On Clarel and Catholicism, see the final chapter of Yothers, The Romance of the Holy Land, as well as Yothers, Sacred Uncertainty. Sedgwick, in Herman Melville, reads Clarel as revealing a Melville who seems “repelled by Protestantism” and strangely “drawn to Catholicism” (217). Walter Bezanson provides an overview of attempts by early critics to interpret Melville’s engage­ ment with Catholicism in Clarel (see Melville, Clarel, “Historical and Critical Note,” 549–51). While some characters in the poem dismiss Catholicism as merely reactionary, a sympathetically portrayed French Dominican describes himself as a “staunch Catholic Democrat.” He also asserts that, paradoxically, “Rome is the [true] Protestant to-day,” the revolutionary and countercultural voice, precisely because Protestantism so dominates modern Western culture (2.25.81, 2.25.106). 8.  Castranovo, “Radical Configurations of History,” demonstrates how “The Bell-Tower” depicts flaws in the U.S. founding despite its Italian setting. 9. Yothers, Sacred Uncertainty, 188. In Clarel, he contends, “Catholicism provides an alternative orthodoxy to both the religious orthodoxy of Protestant Biblicism and the economic orthodoxy of capitalist individualism. Secondly, Ca­ tholicism provides a potential justification for democracy that is grounded in a communitarian ethic rather than an individualistic ethic of accumulation. Third, a careful consideration of Catholicism, which was in many ways the ultimate religious bogeyman for nineteenth-century Americans, helped to open the door for a wider-ranging consideration of disparate non-Protestant religious tradi­ tions” (181). 10. Franchot, Roads to Rome, 25. 11. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 410. 12.  E. O’Gorman, The Invention of America, 142. 13.  Quoted in Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, 339. 14.  See Pinheiro, Missionaries of Republicanism.

262  Notes to Pages 72–76 15. Melville, Clarel, 222 (2.26.118–19). 16. DeGuzman, Spain’s Long Shadow, 1–4, xxiv. 17.  See Franchot, Roads to Rome, 43–44, on the antebellum U.S. tendency to see native tribes of the Americas as practicing an “indigenous Catholicism” associated with “illicit comminglings,” racial and otherwise. 18. In Mardi Melville also satirizes Catholicism in his depiction of Maramma, where a “pontiff ” rules unjustly over superstitious subjects. 19. Melville, Redburn, 292, 198. 20.  See Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, especially 48–49. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, notes that some nativists explicitly linked Ca­ tholicism to racial identity (69–70). 21.  See Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: “Accounts in the U.S. press always referred to San Patricio deserters as Irish,” though some historians suggest that as few as two-fifths were Irish-born. “There was an overwhelming need in the popular press to characterize unworthy behavior in some essentialist way, and the Irish were an opportune scapegoat” (108). 22.  See Stuckey, “The Tambourine in Glory,” 44, 54–59. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance, notes how Captain Delano’s mistaken vision of African rebels as monks “exemplifies the way in which fears of Catholic immigrants and blacks permeated one another in the mid-1850s” (225). 23.  While Anglo-Saxonism fueled the notion of Manifest Destiny, it simul­ taneously provided a rationale for limiting expansion: some U.S. citizens argued against annexing Mexico because they did not want new territories heavily popu­ lated by nonwhites and Catholics. See Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, 46–55. 24.  Melville, letter to Evert A. Duyckinck, in Melville, Moby-Dick, 469. Further references to Moby-Dick are to this edition and will be cited parentheti­ cally in the text as MD. 25.  Rev. Mr. Charles E. Hitchcock, Honolulu Polynesian (March 18, 1848), quoted in Hetherington, Melville’s Reviewers, 93. 26.  Evert A. Duyckinck, “A Defense against the ‘Anti-Popery Mania,’” New York Literary World, November 16, 1850, 393–94, reprinted in Moby-Dick, 507. See also Moby-Dick, 507n1, and Melville, The Confidence-Man, 79n1, on Mel­ ville’s satirical treatment of U.S. fears of the Jesuits. 27.  Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford, eds., Moby-Dick, 214n5. 28.  D. S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance, details the manner in which Melville’s United States was marked by the popularity of didactic “re­ form” literature that targeted Catholicism along with vices such as drinking and “illicit love” (64). At the same time, U.S. audiences enjoyed a “Dark Adventure” literature that “had roots in British Gothic fiction”—and that Melville absorbed and transformed most profoundly in Moby-Dick (190).

Notes to Pages 77–81 263 29. Sealts, Melville’s Reading, 105, 154, 225. See also Newton, “Melville and the Gothic Novel.” 30.  Hoeveler, “Inventing the Gothic Subject,” 11–13. 31.  Ibid., 13. 32.  Miles, “The Gothic and Ideology,” 65. Miles mentions “Benito Cereno” as exemplifying the last focus, though—given the Spanish captain’s effeminate and ghostly appearance—it in fact exemplifies all three. 33.  Hoeveler, “Inventing the Gothic Subject,” 9. 34. Franchot, Roads to Rome, 88–89. 35. Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 41. 36.  Ibid., 38, 54. 37.  Ibid., 32. For more on anxieties regarding French Canada, see Fenton, Religious Liberties, chapter 1, “Catholic Canadians and Protestant Pluralism in the Early Republic.” 38.  On gender and the early U.S. Gothic, see Lloyd-Smith, “Nineteenth-­ Century American Gothic,” 109–11, 119–20. 39.  Hogle, “Introduction,” following Kristeva, emphasizes abjection of the maternal body as a fundamental Gothic theme: Gothic fictions often respond to fear of some “boundary blurring source of ourselves that initially stems, the Gothic reveals, from the body of a woman” (10). 40.  Miles, “Abjection, Nationalism, and the Gothic,” 56. 41. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 27–29. 42.  Sherrill, “Melville and Religion,” 491. In this context it is worth noting that in Clarel, Ungar has lost “faith in American exceptionalism.” A “lapsed Catholic” who “sees the collapse of the faith as inevitable,” Ungar is “infuriated by the individualism, imperialism, and shallowness of late nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture” to the extent that he seems “a prototype for Graham Greene” (Yothers, Sacred Uncertainty, 184). 43.  Parker and Hayford note that Melville had visited both cathedrals in 1849 (Moby-Dick, 69nn8–9). 44.  “The Town-Ho’s Story” was published independently in Harper’s maga­ zine six weeks before the novel was published. Parker and Hayford suggest that novels such as Don Quixote and Tom Jones “provided precedents for the ‘interpo­ lation’ of long stories into the main story” and that this chapter is essential in many respects to the larger narrative of Moby-Dick (Moby-Dick, 199n1). 45.  I follow Parker and Hayford in the inference that Tashtego’s informers are Spanish-speaking (Moby-Dick, 200n1). 46.  Ahab despises anything “inscrutable” and desires to “strike through the mask”—the material world of appearances that he sees as obscuring some higher truth (Moby-Dick, 140). In this respect he might be seen as embodying what

264  Notes to Pages 82–92 Giles, in American Catholic Arts and Fictions, deems the spirit of “Protestant ro­ mance” insofar as it seeks to “dissolve the mundane world into a more lucid spiritual allegory” (168). 47.  Ishmael’s listeners therefore seem to intuit what Reddick, in “‘Some­ thing, somehow like Original Sin,’” demonstrates at length: “The Town-Ho’s Story” initially invites but finally subverts an allegorical reading. Steelkilt is not a pure Christ-figure, Radney not merely an embodiment of evil; rather, both are tainted. This reading is fundamental to a proper reading of the novel, as “both Radney and Steelkilt carry traits associated with both Ahab and the whale” (83). 48.  Parker and Hayford, Moby-Dick, 205n9. 49.  Melville, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” in The Piazza Tales, 317. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as PBTM. 50.  Jefferson, letter of June 24, 1826, quoted in Jayne, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, 172. 51.  See Wiegman, “Melville’s Geography of Gender.” 52. Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order, 186. In Lowell, Massachusetts, also, “the Irish first entered the mills in large numbers” between 1845 and 1850 (Dublin, Women at Work, 154). 53.  On Melville’s familiarity with Gnosticism in relation to Ahab’s “heresy” in Moby-Dick, see Dillingham, Melville’s Later Novels, chapter 4. For a broader reflection on Melville’s engagement with Gnosticism, see Versluis, The Esoteric Origins, especially 95–104. For Melville’s tendency to conflate Calvinism and Darwinism as positing a dark view of the material world, see his 1865 poem “The House-top,” wherein urban rioters who resemble animals in a jungle or desert must be overcome by brute force, thereby “corroborating Calvin’s creed” (64) regarding human depravity. 54.  See Moses, Melville’s Use of Spenser: in “The Encantadas” Melville “ma­ nipulate[es] Spenserian characters and meanings in ways which undermine—­ indeed, overturn—the pious moral at the end” of The Faerie Queene and its individual episodes (132). Melville’s decision to publish this piece initially under the pseudonym “Salvator Tarnmoor” (the first name Latinate and the surname invoking the Black Legend in its play on “Moor”) indicates that his sympathies do not lie entirely with the Anglo-American view of the New World or Spenser’s view of the course of Western history. 55. Karcher, Shadow Over the Promised Land, 114. 56.  Relevant readings of Benito Cereno include both those stressing the no­ vella’s condemnation of the Catholic Church’s role in the slave trade and those stressing its condemnation of a United States that wrongly deems itself morally superior to Catholic Latin America: in Burkholder, ed., Critical Essays, see, re­ spectively, Gloria Horsley-Meacham, “The Monastic Slaver: Images and Mean­ ing in ‘Benito Cereno,’” and Eric J. Sundquist’s “Benito Cereno and New World

Notes to Pages 92–99 265 Slavery,” which asserts that the novella plays on antebellum “American paranoia about Spanish, Catholic, slaveholding despotism” even as it undermines beliefs that the supposedly “Puritan, Anglo-Saxon spirit of liberty and religious free­ dom” has been perfectly manifested in the United States (156). See also Levine, Conspiracy and Romance; DeGuzman, Spain’s Long Shadow, 47–67; and Fran­ chot, Roads to Rome, 162–82. 57.  Melville’s American captain here profoundly validates Fessenden’s ob­ servation that even the dominant form of “secularism” in the United States is in some sense “Protestant” (Culture and Redemption, 4). His identity as a failed reader can also be linked to her analysis of early models of U.S. citizenship that valued immersion in a definitively Protestant culture of reading, writing, and spiritual interiority as the key to “redemption” from a limiting pre-modern past—a past first conceived of as Catholic and then as simply “religious” in any form deemed “irrational, regressive, or inscrutable” and therefore “foreign to democracy” (2). 58.  See Beecher, “Echoes of Toussaint Louverture,” on Melville’s interest in Louverture in regards to Benito Cereno. On the attempts of Anglo-Protestant abolitionists to “elide” the Catholicism of Louverture and independent Haiti, see Fenton, Religious Liberties, 110–13. Relatedly, Fenton shows how in Benito Cereno Melville “compellingly suggests that the U.S. liberal democratic tradition’s reliance upon anti-Catholic discourse is inseparable from its commitment to white supremacy. The American captain’s voyage charts . . . the destruction of the liberal fantasy that anti-Catholicism could serve as a tool for extending the boundaries of pluralism to include racial difference” (116–17). His fundamental mistake “mirrors the one that many antebellum Anglo-Protestants made when they viewed the scene of American slavery: instead of seeing the liberal state ­enslaving black bodies, they saw a global Catholicism enslaving Protestant souls” (120). 59.  See Allan Moore Emery, “‘Benito Cereno’ and Manifest Destiny,” in Burkholder, ed., Critical Essays, 99–115. 60.  See Castranovo, “Radical Configurations of History.” 61.  Melville, “The Bell-Tower,” in The Piazza Tales, 175–76. 62. Boyle, Sacred and Secular Scriptures, 203–4. 63. Valenti, To Myself a Stranger, 153, and Wineapple, Hawthorne, 4.

CHAPTER 3. 

Fear, Desire, and Communion in Chopin’s Old La Louisiane

1.  Bender, “The Teeth of Desire,” 89, 92. 2. Chopin, The Awakening, in Complete Novels and Stories, 648. Hereafter folios to this anthology appear parenthetically.

266  Notes to Pages 99–104 3.  Hoeveler, “Inventing the Gothic Subject,” 14. 4. Hurley, The Gothic Body, 13–14. The Awakening was written at the end of a century in which the “highly unstable” genre of the Gothic “scattered its ingredients into various modes” and during a decade that “saw a concentrated resurgence of Gothic fiction” in Britain and the United States alike (Hogle, “In­ troduction,” 1). 5. Hurley, The Gothic Body, 6. 6.  See Glendening, “Evolution, Narcissism, and Maladaptation,” 59–60. Glendening sees a similar pattern in the work of Thomas Hardy, whose Gothic fictions respond simultaneously to Darwin and to fears of Catholicism estab­ lished more than a century earlier. On the latter, see Riquelme, ed., Gothic and Modernism, 12–13. 7.  Hoeveler, “Inventing the Gothic Subject,” 14. 8.  Wolff, in “Thanatos and Eros,” is the first critic to discuss Edna’s long­ ing for the sea as desire to reenter the maternal womb. Killeen, in “Mother and Child,” draws on Kristeva as he stresses Chopin’s view of maternity in relation to Catholicism as relevant to The Awakening. 9.  For recent exceptions to this rule, see Giemza, Irish Catholic Writers, and J. E. Ryan, Faithful Passages. 10.  On Chopin and fin-de-siècle decadence, see Haddox, Fears and Fascinations. On fin-de-siècle decadence and the Gothic, see Navarette, Horror and the Fin-de-Siècle. 11. Curtis, Civilizing Habits, 96. 12.  For more on Chopin’s Irish connections, see Giemza, Irish Catholic Writers. 13.  On Boernstein’s novel, see McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 23; on Kate Chopin’s family connections to the university, see Toth, Unveiling Kate Chopin, 7, 25. 14. Curtis, Civilizing Habits, 95. 15.  See Stevens, “Sacred Heart and Secular Brain.” 16.  Part I of Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, clarifies pre­ cisely this understanding of eros and agape with ultimate reference to the Eucha­ rist (3–14) while simultaneously acknowledging that “tendencies” to denigrate eros and the body have indeed “always existed” in the Church (5). See also Tracy, “The Divided Consciousness of Augustine.” On the place of the body in the Catholic literary imagination, see Waldmeir, Cathedrals of Bone. 17. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist, 240. 18.  Wehner, “‘A lot up for grabs,’” 154. 19. Greeson, Our South, 261. 20.  Ibid., 266; see also Ladd, Nationalism and the Color Line.

Notes to Pages 104–111 267 21. Haddox, Fears and Fascinations, 32. 22. Greeson, Our South, 267. 23.  Ibid.: “Locally colored, creolized Louisiana finally validates the imperial nationhood of the United States. Poised on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, Cable’s enormously influential fiction offers [this Creole Catholic portion of ] the Reconstruction South as a stepping stone to U.S. occupation, intervention, and improvement further south, beyond the territorial contiguity of the national borders.” 24. Greeson, Our South, 265. 25.  Berman, “Impersonating the Creole,” 30. Also see Haddox, Fears and Fascinations. 26. Franchot, Roads to Rome, 12–13. 27. Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, 2:128–29. 28. Haddox, Fears and Fascinations, 34, 35. 29.  Quoted in Toth, Kate Chopin, 51. 30.  For example, see in Petry, ed., Critical Essays on Kate Chopin: Joseph J. Reilly, “Stories by Kate Chopin,” 73–74; and Bauer, “Armand Aubigny,” 173–74. 31. Koloski, Kate Chopin, 25. 32.  Ibid., 26. 33.  In Koloski, ed., Awakenings, see Bernard Koloski, “Feeling the Coun­ tercurrent,” 184–85. 34.  In Koloski, ed., Awakenings, see Mary E. Papke, “So Long As We Read Chopin,” 82–83. 35.  Anna Shannon Elfenbein, excerpted in Koloski, Kate Chopin, 120. 36. Curtis, Civilizing Habits, 41. 37. Ibid., 75. 38.  On the “Americanization” of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, see ibid., 95. On O’Meara, see Toth and Seyersted, eds., Kate Chopin’s Private Papers, 177. 39. Curtis, Civilizing Habits, 74. 40.  Ibid., 77, 94. 41.  Ibid., 59. 42.  Ibid., 96: “Duchesne arrived just as Missouri was making a definitive transformation from a site where individuals from mixed national, ethnic, and racial backgrounds interacted to one dominated by American laws, migrants, and culture.” 43.  Ibid., 83. 44.  Ibid., 95. 45.  Ibid., 90, 92–93, on Catholic enculturation. Neither Protestants nor Catholics “imagined a Christian faith that was somehow blended with traditional Potawatomi beliefs. Catholics, however, do appear to have been more adept at

268  Notes to Pages 112–123 using points of cultural contact as an entry to Catholic faith and practice. . . . Unlike Catholics, Baptists made little effort to learn about Potawatomi culture or make accommodations to it, preferring instead to rely on the transformative power of scripture” (93). 46.  Ibid., 95. 47. Woods, A History of the Catholic Church, 224. 48.  K. Woodward, Making Saints, 204. 49.  Quoted in Toth, Kate Chopin, 41. 50. Curtis, Civilizing Habits, 84–85. 51.  Chopin, “Development of the Literary West: A Review,” originally pub­ lished December 9, 1900, in the St. Louis Republic, reprinted in Toth and Seyer­ sted, eds., Kate Chopin’s Private Papers, 223. 52. Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair, 107. 53. Carriker, Father Peter John de Smet, 243. 54. Haddox, Fears and Fascinations, 87–88. 55. Woods, A History of the Catholic Church, 226; R. Miller, “The Failed Mission,” 167. 56.  The “temple” here is located at the feet of Aunt Pinky and therefore might seem placed in opposition to the official structure of the Catholic Church—a reading that would in turn run counter to arguments that the story patronizes Pinky as a stereotypical old darky. 57.  “Odalie Misses Mass” could therefore be fruitfully placed alongside other comic stories by Chopin that portray Christianity without any trace of irony or cynicism. For example, “Ozeme’s Holiday” depicts charity across racial borders with subtle Christian references; “A Matter of Prejudice” depicts charity across ethnic borders and is set on Christmas, as is “Mrs. Martel’s Christmas,” in which the border between the living and the dead—a border seemingly imposed by nature itself—collapses. 58. Koloski, Kate Chopin, 54. 59.  On the likely makeup of this intended collection, see Chopin, Collected Novels and Stories, 1058. 60.  Something similar happens to the young man Tonie in Chopin’s “At Chênière Caminada,” an 1894 story whose characters briefly reappear in The Awakening, though Tonie is more prone to viewing his beloved as an almost ethereal figure. 61. See also J. E. Ryan, Faithful Passages, 158–59: Alberta the nun is “steeped in mystic Catholic spirituality that makes her eventually capable of healing others,” “blending her powers of spiritual access with her unique physical sensibility.” The story as a whole traces “the relationship between Catholic em­ bodiment and feminine ecstasy.” 62.  Ibid., 153–56.

Notes to Pages 123–131 269 63.  On the title “An Easter Day Conversion,” see Complete Novels and Stories, 1057. 64.  See Wehner, “‘A lot up for grabs,’” 165–67, on this story’s general critical neglect. Wehner stresses the manner in which the “natural and the spiri­ tual, the material and the immaterial . . . converge” in such a way as to accom­ plish the protagonist’s “conversion” (166). 65.  Toth and Seyersted, eds., suggest in Kate Chopin’s Private Papers that by 1900 Chopin suffered from “a combination of diabetes (which could have caused her eye trouble) and emphysema” (300). 66.  Chopin’s journal, in Toth and Seyersted, eds., Kate Chopin’s Private ­Papers, 182–83. On the nun Chopin visited, “Liza” or Elise Miltenberger, see 177. 67. Ibid. 68.  In Chopin, The Awakening, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s characteriza­ tion of Chopin as a “genuinely institutional and essentially conservative person herself, even if one deeply aware of the hypocrisies and waste attached to social forms.” While “Edna’s subjective experience provides the critique of social insti­ tutions” in the novel, in turn “the reality of social institutions provides the cri­ tique of Edna’s subjectivity” (263). 69.  Ibid., 39. 70.  See Delbanco, Required Reading, on Edna’s tendency to “emulate” ex­ isting patterns of domination practiced by males in her society and her failure to “find some third way between the alternatives of submission and emulation when faced by those who regard power as the ground of all human relations” (106). 71.  See Wolff, “Thanatos and Eros.” 72.  Killeen, “Mother and Child,” 413. 73.  Ibid., 424. 74.  Ibid., 413–14. 75.  Ibid., 421. 76.  Ibid., 427. 77. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 94–95. 78.  Ibid., 96. 79.  Ibid., 95. 80.  Ibid., 113–14. 81.  Toth and Seyersted, eds., Kate Chopin’s Private Papers, 108, 120. 82. Toth, Kate Chopin, 68. 83. Toth, Unveiling Kate Chopin, 127–28. 84.  Ibid., 114–15. 85.  Ibid., 128–29. 86. Ziff, The American 1890s, quoted in Koloski, Kate Chopin, 11. 87.  Chopin, quoted in Toth, Unveiling Kate Chopin, 127.

270  Notes to Pages 131–141 88.  A contemporary account of Duchesne’s time at the Potawatomi mis­ sion, stored in the Archives of the Society of the Sacred Heart in St. Louis, reports that language barriers made it difficult for her to teach the native girls there, so she took it upon herself to engage in the most menial of chores: “to relieve the little Indian girls of vermin, to help at the washing, and at all that was hardest and most repugnant to nature” (quoted in Curtis, Civilizing Habits, 86). 89. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 128. 90.  Ibid., 130. 91.  Quoted in ibid., 131. 92. Ibid. 93.  Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 334. 94.  On Gilman, see Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, chapter 7. 95.  Papke, “So Long As We Read Chopin,” in Koloski, ed., Awakenings, 82. Papke notes specifically that Edna’s reading of Emerson puts her “to sleep as if to indicate that such self-reliance as Emerson trumpets is not for her, his vision of nature and man without a clear meaning for a woman” (82–83). Chopin herself clearly sensed the limits of the individualistic Romanticism typical of what Giles, in American Catholic Arts and Fictions, deems the “Protestant” mainstream of American literature established by Emerson (25). 96.  Reprinted in Chopin, The Awakening, 137–39. 97. Hurley, The Gothic Body, 13–14. 98.  Wehner, in “‘A lot up for grabs,’” wrongly equates Catholic Christianity with a Manichean asceticism. Tracy, in “The Divided Consciousness of Augus­ tine,” clarifies that Augustine opposed both “Manichaean despisement of the flesh” and pagan Platonist “overspiritualization” of eros. For Augustine, “the Christian should affirm the positive creational and incarnational (as John Donne insisted, even erotically carnal) reality of eros. . . . The Christian should also be suspect of the power of self-delusion and self-destruction in eros (as cupiditas) and realize that only the divine, pure gift of God’s love (agape) can sustain and transform eros from our hardened egoism” (101). 99.  This vision occurs at a meal Edna hosts that is attended by Robert’s brother Victor, who wields a “magician’s wand” and appears “Oriental,” a “graven image of Desire” (Chopin, Complete Novels and Stories, 624–25). 100.  Madame Antoine and her son also appear in the story “At Chênière Caminada.”

CHAPTER 4. 

Waste Lands, Border Histories, Gothic Frontiers

1.  Pfeiffer was educated at the St. Louis academy run by the Sisters of the Visitation, beginning first grade in 1901 (Hawkins, Unbelievable Happiness, 18).

Notes to Pages 141–147 271 Chopin attended the same academy in 1865, the only period of her schooling not spent with the Sisters of the Sacred Heart (Toth, Unveiling Kate Chopin, xiii). 2.  On Hemingway and Catholicism, see Stoneback, “In the Nominal Country of the Bogus” and “Pilgrimage Variations.” 3. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes, ix. 4.  For an overview of the way in which Cather’s interest in the southwest­ ern United States is tied to her interest in European Christianity, see John J. Murphy, “Holy Cities, Poor Savages, and the Science Culture: Positioning The Professor’s House,” in Swift and Urgo, eds., Willa Cather, 55–70. 5.  The Waste Land incorporates Gothic elements itself—for example, allu­ sions to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Given that the novels by Faulkner, McCarthy, and Percy considered in this chapter might all be deemed revenge tragedies, it is also worth noting that “by championing revenge tragedies as a critic and drawing on them in his poetry, Eliot established this unromantic dramatic form more prominently in the canon. . . . Filled as they are with anger, madness, and ven­ geance, revenge tragedies are central precursors for Gothic narrative and poetry, to which they bear evident kinship” (Riquelme, ed., Gothic and Modernism, 7). 6.  On Cather’s interest in Catholicism in My Mortal Enemy in particular, see J. E. Ryan, Faithful Passages, 169–71. On Cather’s connection to U.S. Catholic writers, see Romines, ed., Willa Cather’s Southern Connections: Elsa Nettels dis­ cusses Cather’s relationship to Allen Tate in “‘Aeneas at Washington’ and The Professor’s House,” and John J. Murphy discusses her affinities with Flannery O’Connor in “O’Connor’s Vision and Cather’s Fiction.” 7.  See Danker, “The Influence of Willa Cather’s French-Canadian Neigh­ bors.” 8.  Murphy, “Willa Cather’s Sheltering Art,” 217. 9.  See Murphy, “Shadows on the Rock.” 10.  The Puritans were roundly critiqued in the 1920s by figures ranging from H. L. Mencken to Vernon Parrington, as regretfully documented by Perry Miller in his appreciative recovery of Puritan thought in the middle decades of the twentieth century, beginning with Orthodoxy in Massachusetts (1933) and culminating perhaps with Errand into the Wilderness (1956). 11.  Birns, “Building the Cathedral,” 1. 12.  Ibid., 3. 13.  G. Reynolds, “The Ideology of Cather’s Catholic Progressivism,” 7. 14.  Birns, “Building the Cathedral,” 4. 15.  G. Reynolds, “The Ideology of Cather’s Catholic Progressivism,” 10. 16.  Murphy, “Willa Cather’s Sheltering Art,” 211. 17.  On Cather and The Education of Henry Adams, see Swift and Urgo, eds., Willa Cather, 7, 81.

272  Notes to Pages 147–151 18. Gatta, American Madonna, 112–13. In his critique of Puritanism, Adams resembled Eliot as he in effect repudiated the theology of his own ances­ tors, including Presidents John and John Quincy Adams. 19.  Birns, “Building the Cathedral,” 4. 20. Ibid. 21.  J. E. Ryan, Faithful Passages, 179. 22.  Birns, “Building the Cathedral,” 5. 23.  Ibid., 11. 24.  Regarding medieval precedents for the “paratactic” narrative style of Death Comes for the Archbishop, see G. Reynolds, “The Ideology of Cather’s Catholic Progressivism,” 26–27; regarding the precedent of Hawthorne and Mel­ ville, see ibid., 3. On Cather’s engagement with Mexican American visual arts, see Chinery, “Willa Cather and the Santos Tradition.” 25.  See Hauerwas and Wood, “How the Church Became Invisible,” on Cather’s novel as the sole representation of such a church in the U.S. canon, as discussed in my introduction. 26.  For an entire monograph devoted to the relationship between Faulkner and Cather, see Skaggs’s Axes—which suggests that Cather’s Kit Carson in Death Comes for the Archbishop may be modeled partly on Faulkner. 27.  Riquelme, ed., Gothic and Modernism, 13. 28. Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop, 28. Indeed, Latour and his companion, Father Joseph Vaillant, are themselves both somewhat “feminized in sensibility and affect” (J. E. Ryan, Faithful Passages, 178). 29.  Greeson, in Our South, demonstrates how Crèvecœur and Melville alike create narratives of the U.S. South that engage questions of U.S. exceptionalism within a national and hemispheric context. 30.  See Emery, “‘Benito Cereno’ and Manifest Destiny,” and see my discus­ sion of Benito Cereno in chapter 2. 31.  Smith and Cohn, eds., Look Away! 8. 32.  See Lewis, The American Adam. 33.  Early in Moby-Dick, Melville’s narrator Ishmael employs religious lan­ guage in citing Jackson as hand-picked champion of the God of the United States, a “great democratic God!...Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons” (103–4). 34. Cash’s The Mind of the South long received credit for its explicit decon­ struction of the Cavalier myth, but Chesnutt was depicting slave owners as low­ born, money-grubbing individualists in his short fiction of the 1880s, and Frederick Douglass even earlier.

Notes to Pages 151–156 273 35.  See Boyd, “Gothicism,” on the Gothic in the U.S. South. Greeson in Our South and Goddu in Gothic America identify Crèvecœur as progenitor of the “southern” Gothic in his depiction of slavery in Charleston. 36.  See Haddox, Fears and Fascinations, for more on Catholicism generally as a source of fear in the literature of the U.S. South. 37.  See Boyagoda, “Just Where and What Is ‘the (comparatively speaking) South,’” for a reading of Melville as prefiguring Faulkner in his juxtaposition of the U.S. South and the southern Americas at large. 38. Wells, Every Day by the Sun, 179. 39.  Faulkner postcard, quoted in Parini, One Matchless Time, 86. 40.  In his 1956 interview in The Paris Review, Faulkner tells a story of Cajuns who are baffled by the doings of “strange white folks” from Hollywood, “a lot of white people” who had shown up in their bayou and built a stage set. 41.  See, for example, Haddox, Fears and Fascinations, chapter 1, on Loui­ siana and Creole “Catholic Miscegenations.” 42.  Hamblin and Peek, A William Faulkner Encyclopedia, 268. 43. Reed, Dixie Bohemia, 14. 44.  Ibid., 20. 45. Gresset, A Faulkner Chronology, 22. 46. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist, 221, 203. For a compelling reading of Joyce’s distance from his semi-autobiographical protagonist, see Thornton, The Antimodernism of Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist.” 47.  The passage in question finally reveals Faulkner’s difference from Joyce more than their similarities: see Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy, 26. The fun­ damental similarities between Joyce’s first novel and Faulkner’s second were first explored by Warren, “Faulkner’s Portrait of the Artist.” 48. Faulkner, Mosquitoes, 42. 49.  Ibid., 40–41. 50. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 125. See Argiro, “‘As though we were kin,’” on Faulkner’s portrayal of Italians generally; for a different perspective, see Boyagoda, Race, Immigration, and American Identity, 91–95. 51.  See Lind, “The Calvinistic Burden of Light in August,” on religious tensions in Light in August; and Hays, “Racial Predestination in Light in August,” on race and religion in the novel. Regarding Cather’s influence on Light in August, see Zettsu, “Faulkner’s Mexican Connections.” 52. Faulkner, Light in August, 149, 150. While being tormented by his Calvinist father-figure, Christmas is also described as musing “like a hermit, contemplative and remote with ecstasy and selfcrucifixion” (159–60). As he speaks later to a woman, the two of them together resemble “two monks met during the hour of contemplation in a garden path” (184).

274  Notes to Pages 156–161 53. Ibid., 144. 54. C. R. Wilson, “William Faulkner and the Southern Religious Cul­ ture,” 22. 55.  Watson, ed., Faulkner and Whiteness, xxviii, summarizing Chuck Jack­ son’s argument in “American Emergencies: Whiteness, the National Guard, and Light in August” (189–206). 56.  See Duck, “Peripatetic Modernism.” 57.  See Ladd, Nationalism and the Color Line, 159–63. 58. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! 208. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as AA. 59.  On Faulkner’s use of the term “puritan” in this period, see Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy, 323–28, particularly with regard to Light in August. 60.  For more on Bon as “cultural shibboleth,” see Campbell, “‘The nigger that’s going to sleep with your sister,’” and especially Crowell, “The Picture of Charles Bon.” Crowell convincingly analyzes Bon’s aesthetic decadence and iden­ tity as “androgynous pseudoaristocrat” as indebted to Oscar Wilde. Crowell fails to note Wilde’s lifelong association with Catholicism, but she thoroughly links Absalom, Absalom! to the “modern gothic tale” The Picture of Dorian Gray—and highlights Wilde’s perceived racial ambiguity as an Irishman in a nineteenth-­ century milieu in which the Irish were frequently linked to Africans. 61.  See Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy, on the similar “puritanism” of Joe Christmas’s adoptive father: his “religion” “owes at least as much to Benjamin Franklin as to [John] Calvin” (324). 62.  Vernon, “Narrative Miscegenation,” 164–65. 63.  See Lindsey, “Disorder as Order,” on Sutpen as Jehovah. See Brooks, On the Prejudices, 156–58, on Sutpen as a “gnostic,” if not a Manichean; for a dif­ ferent perspective on Sutpen’s experience of embodiment as entrapping, see Ver­ non’s suggestion that Absalom, Absalom! corresponds in some ways to Victorian reactions to Darwinism as represented in Gothic fictions such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (“Narrative Miscegenation,” 159–60). 64.  See Weinstein, “‘Make it new,’” 345–46, for just one recent statement of the relationship between The Waste Land and the Quentin of The Sound and the Fury in particular. 65.  See Parrish, From the Civil War to the Apocalypse, and Duvall and Aba­ die, eds., Faulkner and Postmodernism. 66.  See Coles, “The Stranger,” 90. 67.  See F. O’Gorman, Peculiar Crossroads. 68.  For an early appreciation of McCarthy’s religious and moral sensibility, see Arnold, “Blood and Grace.” McCarthy’s The Road, the most acclaimed novel

Notes to Pages 162–166 275 of his late career, has been read by a number of critics as at least tentatively affir­ mative of traditional Christian virtues. 69.  See Davenport, “Appalachian Gothic.” 70.  Times Literary Supplement (London), quoted on back cover of McCar­ thy, Suttree. For more on McCarthy’s relationship to O’Connor, see F. O’Gor­ man, “Violence, Nature, and Prophecy.” 71.  For a lengthier reading of McCarthy and priesthood in relation to Joyce, see F. O’Gorman, “Joyce and Contesting Priesthoods.” 72. Bell, The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy, 69. 73.  On McCarthy and Jansenism, see Giemza, Irish Catholic Writers, 227. 74. McCarthy, Suttree, 253. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as S. 75.  Frank Dowling, who attended Knoxville’s Catholic High School four years ahead of McCarthy and later became a Jesuit priest, told me at the Suttree Silver Anniversary Conference in October 2004 that McCarthy’s brother Bill entered a Jesuit seminary in Louisiana in the late 1950s—at about the time that McCarthy began working on Suttree. 76.  On the “Christology” of Suttree, see Canfield, “The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” 683 passim. Canfield suggests that Suttree is “a double for McCarthy” who sees himself not only as an artist but “perhaps even a priest of art” (685). He further suggests that Suttree reveals McCarthy to be a “Catholic existentialist” (683, 686). 77.  See Spencer, “The Seventh Direction,” on Suttree’s interest in Native American religious practice, and also Spurgeon, “The Sacred Hunter.” 78.  See R. B. Woodward, “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction.” 79. McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 4–5. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as BM. 80.  Cromwell would be of particular interest to McCarthy given the au­ thor’s Irish Catholic upbringing (note the central presence of the Irish “expriest” Tobin, a kind of counterpart to the kid, in Blood Meridian). British and later Anglo-American colonial activity in the Americas bears at least a broad resem­ blance to British colonial activity in Ireland, where Anglo-Protestant settlers pushed native Irish Catholics farther and farther west. On McCarthy’s interest in Irish identity, see Brickman, “Imposition and Resistance in The Orchard Keeper”; Potts, “McCarthy, Mac Airt, and Mythology”; and especially Giemza, Irish Catholic Writers. 81. Fessenden, Culture and Redemption, 21, 23. 82.  On Holden, see Monk, “‘An Impulse to Action.’” 83. McCaffrey, Army of Manifest Destiny, 71–75, 113. 84. McCarthy, Suttree, 4. 85.  Monk, “‘An Impulse to Action,’” 83.

276  Notes to Pages 166–173 86. McCarthy, Suttree, 253; Blood Meridian, 60. 87. McCarthy, Suttree, 80, 220, 305. The emphasis on Christ-like corpses sealed in glass here mirrors O’Connor’s in Wise Blood, in which a shriveled mummy stolen from a museum display case is identified as Hazel Motes’s “new jesus.” On McCarthy’s response to O’Connor throughout his career, see F. O’Gorman, “Violence, Nature, and Prophecy.” 88.  For different but ultimately complementary perspectives on religious imagery in Blood Meridian, see also Spurgeon, “The Sacred Hunter.” 89.  Blood Meridian, 273. On the judge as usurper of Christian priesthood, see F. O’Gorman, “Joyce and Contesting Priesthoods.” 90.  Given his impending doom, the kid and the dead woman here mirror the image of the Virgin and decapitated child in the desecrated church at the novel’s beginning. For readings of Catholic iconography and the feminine in McCarthy’s Suttree, see Woodson, “Visual Rhetoric and Cognitive Identity in Suttree,” and Giemza, Irish Catholic Writers. 91.  On McCarthy as Gnostic artist in Blood Meridian, see Daugherty, “Gravers False and True.” On Gnosticism’s relevance to discussions of American literature and culture generally, see Bloom, The American Religion. 92.  See Cant, Cormac McCarthy. In addition to authors clearly associated with the Gothic—Hawthorne, Melville, and Faulkner—Cant includes Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, and Sam Peckinpah in his catalogue of U.S. artists who have created “anti-myths against the myth of American ex­ ceptionalism” (255). Twain excepted, all of these either have imaginations shaped by Catholic upbringing or favor settings rich in Catholic history and imagery. 93. Percy, Signposts, 84–85. 94.  Percy, “The Reentry Option,” 299–300. 95.  See, for instance, Quentin’s insistent repetition of “Nevermore” from Poe’s “The Raven” (Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! 298–99). 96.  See Cavell, “Being Odd, Getting Even,” 19–20, 33. On Poe’s relation­ ship to Descartes, also see Folks, “Poe and the Cogito.” For a lengthier treatment of Poe’s relationship to Percy, see F. O’Gorman, “Confessing the Horrors of Radical Individualism in Lancelot.” 97.  Kennedy, “Phantasms of Death,” 42. 98.  Leverenz, “Poe and Gentry Virginia,” 213, 221; Tate, Essays, 416. 99.  Tate’s provocatively paired essays “The Angelic Imagination: Poe as God” and “The Symbolic Imagination: The Mirrors of Dante” make this point directly and at length. On Percy’s indebtedness to these two essays, see F. O’Gor­ man, Peculiar Crossroads, 134–36. On Percy’s reading of other essays by Tate, see 119–24. 100. Tate, Essays, 416.

Notes to Pages 173–180 277 101. Ibid., 389, 395. 102.  Percy to Tate, quoted in Samway, Walker Percy, 228. 103.  For Dostoevsky’s reading of Poe, see Astrov, “Dostoievsky on Edgar Allan Poe,” and Frank, Dostoevsky, 74–75. On Dostoevsky and the Gothic more generally, see R. F. Miller, “Dostoevsky and the Tale of Terror” and Dostoevsky’s Unfinished Journey. 104.  For more on Notes from Underground in this regard, see F. O’Gorman, “Confessing the Horrors of Radical Individualism.” 105. Percy, Lancelot, 25. Hereafter cited in the text as L. 106.  Percy, “Stoicism in the South,” in Signposts, 85. 107. Tate, Essays, 416. 108. Franchot, Roads to Rome, 87–89. 109. Tate, Essays, 389. 110.  Ibid., 404. 111.  For a highly relevant discussion of Chandler as Gothic writer, see Charles J. Rzepka, “‘I’m in the business too’: Gothic Chivalry, Private Eyes, and Proxy Sex and Violence in Chandler’s The Big Sleep,” in Riquelme, ed., Gothic and Modernism, chapter 6. 112.  Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 145–46. 113.  For Percy’s association of Cartesian individualism with the “frontier hero” as depicted in Western films, see Desmond, Walker Percy’s Search, 13–14. 114.  See Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence. 115.  Folks, “Poe and the Cogito,” 58. Gothic fiction’s typical concern with illusion and the supernatural blends seamlessly with this aspect of the novel. 116.  Ralph Ellison associated American identity with role-playing in his novel Invisible Man, which Percy greatly admired. In Lancelot itself, the “fakery” Lance typically attributes to actors and Louisiana alike is in fact more broadly American, as exemplified by Margot’s lifelong attempt to act out the archetypal rags-to-riches narrative—poor country girl from west Texas transformed into grand aristocratic belle (119). 117.  Percy, “How to Be an American Novelist in Spite of Being Southern and Catholic,” in Signposts, 177–78. On Percy as “Christian realist,” see F. O’Gor­ man, Peculiar Crossroads, chapter 3. 118. O’Connor, The Habit of Being, 346. 119.  See Hebert, “Between Men.” 120.  See Desmond, Walker Percy’s Search, for a thorough examination of Percy’s thought regarding community and language in relation to the Eucharist. For Percy, Christ’s “transfigured and glorified body is the final answer to Des­ cartes’ mind-body split” and also “the ultimate sign of mystical community,

278  Notes to Pages 181–187 e­ nfleshed in the body and blood in the Eucharist . . . and in the many signs of the spirit that exist in the mystery of the communal, semiotic world” (257). 121.  Mahoney, ed., The Grail, 69–70. 122.  Percy, “Notes for a Novel about the End of the World,” in The Message in the Bottle, 118.

CHAPTER 5. 

O’Connor’s “True Country”

1.  Bruce Springsteen, in his 1998 interview with Will Percy (nephew of Walker Percy), speaks of how O’Connor’s stories “captured some part of the American character” that he had previously been unable to articulate himself: “They were a big, big revelation. She got to the heart of some part of meanness that she never spelled out, because if she spelled it out you wouldn’t be getting it” (“Rock and Read”). 2. O’Connor, Collected Writings, 1036. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CW. 3.  See Giannone, Flannery O’Connor. 4. O’Connor, A Prayer Journal, 38. 5. Gooch, Flannery, 14. 6.  Sessions, “Flannery O’Connor and Freud,” 4. 7. Giemza, Irish Catholic Writers, 164. 8. Woods, A History of the Catholic Church, 29. 9. Gooch, Flannery, 16. 10. Ibid. 11.  See ibid., 105, 113–14, on O’Connor’s quarrel with the social sciences and with a college course in modern philosophy that made Descartes its “hero.” O’Connor later wrote to a student regarding his fear of losing his faith in college: “One result of the stimulation of your intellectual life that takes place in college is usually a shrinking of the imaginative life” (Collected Works, 1164). The shriv­ eled imagination of the educated skeptic Rayber of The Violent Bear It Away— often identified in the novel simply as “the schoolteacher”—is connected to his view of the intellect as a box in which to place and dissect all reality, so that his own uncle fears being locked “inside the schoolteacher’s head” as it if were an “asylum” (Collected Works, 378). 12. O’Connor, The Habit of Being, 422. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as HB. 13.  See F. O’Gorman, Peculiar Crossroads, chapter 2. 14.  See also Giemza, Irish Catholic Writers, 173. 15.  See Fitzgerald, “Patterns of Friendship,” 414.

Notes to Pages 187–201 279 16.  See Ragen, A Wreck on the Road to Damascus. 17. O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 77. 18.  See McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 165–88. 19. Wood, Flannery O’Connor, 30, 33n37. See also Bacon, Flannery O’Connor. 20.  Boyd, “Gothicism,” 311. 21.  Bowen, “Hope vs. Despair,” 150–51. 22. Lake, The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor, 92. 23.  Ibid., 123. 24.  See N. Wilson, “Misfit Bodies and Errant Gender.” 25.  Kahane, “The Maternal Legacy,” 245. 26.  Ibid., 245–46. 27.  For Cormac McCarthy’s response in Blood Meridian to “The River” and The Violent Bear It Away alike, see F. O’Gorman, “Violence, Nature, and Proph­ ecy,” 157–60. 28.  Kahane, “The Maternal Legacy,” 250. 29.  See O’Connor, Complete Works, 1015. 30.  Roos, “The Political in Flannery O’Connor,” 179. 31.  Alexander, presentation on unpublished correspondence between Flan­ nery O’Connor and James McCown, SJ. 32. Rodriguez, Brown, 35. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as B. 33.  Rodriguez, “‘A Twenty-First Century Writer,’” 28. 34.  Shuter, in “The Confessions of Richard Rodriguez,” rightly notes that Rodriguez “can hardly be described as an ‘ethnic writer’ in any usual sense of the phrase” (95). Indeed, he notoriously critiqued bilingual education and affirma­ tive action in Hunger of Memory. Yet Days of Obligation revealed Rodriguez to be “neither an ideological nor even a particularly rigorous critic of the commitment to ethnic diversity shared by so many intellectuals and academics. He is both something less and something more,” a writer whose most fundamental “confes­ sional” model may well be Augustine (96). 35. Rodriguez, Days of Obligation, xvi; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as DO. McNamara, in “A Finer Grain,” links Days of Obligation to William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain: both works “play” an Anglo-Protestant American “against another American who is Spanish and Catholic, a fatalist who lives in the sure knowledge of tragedy and therefore does not fear betrayal by the world” (104–5). 36.  Rodriguez explicitly draws on Vasconcelos’s notion of Mexico as home to “the cosmic race.” 37.  To a degree, “brown” might be viewed as Rodriguez’s version of “hy­ bridity” and his contribution to postmodern critiques of a modern Western

280  Notes to Pages 201–207 r­ ationalism overly dependent on binary oppositions. Critics began discussing his work in such terms after the publication of Days, wherein Rodriguez “enacts a poetics of cultural miscegenation” as he tells “a story of making a hybrid life and culture” (McNamara, “A Finer Grain,” 106). De Castro, in “Richard Rodriguez in ‘Borderland,’” argues that beginning with Days, Rodriguez rejects any “binary view of identity” (104). For Rodriguez, the New World’s increasing hybridity is properly associated not with a dividing multiculturalism but rather with uni­ versalism. Rodriguez’s Catholic universalism specifically challenges “the linkage frequently made between the celebration of hybridity and multicultural propos­ als” (103). 38.  Rodriguez, “A Conversation,” 58. 39. Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, 24. 40.  Rodriguez, “A Conversation,” 58. 41.  Ibid., 59. 42.  See ibid., 58. When Rodriguez speaks of eros and eroticism, he is by his own account speaking of “more than hormones and mere sexuality”; he confirms that he is speaking of “something that encompasses the deepest reaches of our souls.” 43.  My reading of this story parallels Fowler, “Deconstructing Racial Dif­ ference.” Interpreting O’Connor’s resistance of what Fowler rightly identifies as the “artificial” divisions involved in the “social construction” of race in light of Rodriguez, however, integrates that resistance into O’Connor’s broader Catholic vision—for example, her insistence on the fundamental value of the body and of community (22). 44.  Fowler, in “Writing and Rewriting Race,” demonstrates O’Connor’s concerns in this regard in “Judgment Day,” arguing that the story “insists that our linguistic representations are our own inventions—and do not accurately reflect the mystery of the natural world. For example, language, which works by exclusion, categorizes people in terms of either/or divisions. In language, a person is either white or black, and white is defined as not black” (35). 45.  MacKethan, “Redeeming Blackness,” 29. 46. Ibid. 47.  Haddox, in “The City Reconsidered,” emphasizes these images of com­ munity and isolation in his reading of “The Artificial Nigger” through a “com­ munitarian lens” (4). 48. Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions, 89, 168. O’Connor explic­ itly stated that she hoped that she wrote “with less reliance on allegory” than Hawthorne did (“An Interview,” 240). Baker, in “Flannery O’Connor’s FourFold Method of Allegory,” argues that O’Connor’s occasional stated objections to allegorical fiction are in fact best understood as objections to abstraction.

Notes to Pages 207–215 281 O’Connor herself stated in a letter that “abstractions lead to thinness and allegory whereas in good fiction and drama you need to go through the concrete situation to some experience of mystery”; she also negatively associates allegory with “apologetic fiction,” that is, with a didacticism that presents moral messages in clear black and white terms (The Habit of Being, 516). On “The Artificial Nigger” and allegory, see also MacKethan, “Redeeming Blackness,” and W. R. Allen, “Mr. Head and Hawthorne.” 49. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 68–69. Morrison does not mention Benito Cereno, which depicts its quasi-Protestant U.S. captain as an allegorically minded reader who is thoroughly befuddled by the “gray” and figuratively mis­ cegenated Latin American seascape he perceives in relation to Catholic imagery. Granted the opportunity to see the world and himself as brown, to recognize his own nation’s complicity in the sin of slavery, he—like Goodman Brown, unlike Mr. Head—finally fails to do so. Benito Cereno “undermines the antithesis of American purity against European corruption by defining a New World system of slavery within an Old World [Catholic] paradigm” (Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions, 86). 50. Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown, 135. 51.  Mrs. Greenleaf, who bears a surprising resemblance to Paz’s Aztec god­ dess of filth and fecundity, provides clear evidence that not all of O’Connor’s Protestants are Puritans. Here, while the Laodicean Mrs. May appears as a sterile Puritan, the Greenleaf children are the fruit of a surprising “brown” Pentecostal-­ Catholic eroticism. 52.  Bacon, in Flannery O’Connor, links this story with both “A Circle in the Fire” and “The Displaced Person” as exemplifying O’Connor’s depiction of an “invaded pastoral,” dramatizing the fears of a supposedly innocent United States threatened by a hostile, encroaching outside world at the height of the Cold War. 53.  For Rodriguez, in “A Conversation,” Christianity is admirably “impure” in that “it has always confronted the body powerfully. I notice a number of friends who are dying have chosen to have their remains cremated. There is no corrupting body anymore. . . . But the corrupting body is for me central to my Mexican Catholicism” (59). 54.  See F. O’Gorman, “O’Connor and the Rhetoric of Eugenics.” 55.  See Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy, chapter 4, “Messianic Nation: A Christian Theological Critique of American Exceptionalism.” 56.  Bellow, “A Second Half Life,” 284. 57.  Donahoo, in “Subject to Limitations,” demonstrates that the Guizacs themselves are “relentlessly” described “in images that are connected to African Americans” throughout the story (22).

282  Notes to Pages 216–218 58.  Mrs. McIntyre’s vehement rejection of the marriage clearly stems from her notion of the moral impropriety of miscegenation. O’Connor ultimately agreed with Maritain that “biological” and “sociological” theories of race alike tended not only to deemphasize the “natural” unity of human beings but also to run counter to the “universalism” specifically valued by the Catholic Church (Russell, “Racial Integration,” 35). 59.  On Anglo-Protestant conceptions of blackness and fears of miscegena­ tion in “The Displaced Person,” see Paulson, Flannery O’Connor, 63–69. O’Con­ nor’s linkage of Catholicism and African Americans in the story can be read in light of the Ku Klux Klan’s denunciation of Catholics and blacks alike. O’Con­ nor’s association of Catholicism with miscegenation—an association intuitive to Paz and Rodriguez—is a more complex matter. In “The Displaced Person,” it fits with O’Connor’s tendency to see Catholicism as both admirably anti-modern and inevitably shaping the future. Compare with Rodriguez in Days of Obligation: “Mexico City stands as the last living medieval capital of the world” but is also the new “creation of a Spanish Catholicism that attempted to draw two continents together as one flesh. The success of Spanish Catholicism in Mexico resulted in a kind of proof—a profound concession to humanity: the mestizaje” (20). Therefore, Mexico City is also “the capital of modernity, for in the sixteenth century . . . under the patronage of the Queen of Heaven, Mexico initiated the task of the twenty-first century—the renewal of the old, the known world, through miscegenation. Mexico carries the idea of a round world to its biological conclusion” (24–25). 60. Richardson, Being-In-Christ, 234. 61.  Given O’Connor’s health, her possibilities for pilgrimage were limited, and the journey to daily Mass was not an inconsiderable one. She once suggested that she experienced sickness itself as a “place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe” (Collected Works, 997). Her one rushed pilgrimage to Lourdes and Rome was taxing for her and in some respects anticlimactic: “Shrines to the Virgin do not seem to increase my devotion to her” (1067). 62.  My analysis here draws directly on Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy, chapter 3, “Migrant, Tourist, Pilgrim, Monk: Identity and Mobility in a Global Age.” Bacon, Flannery O’Connor, and Wood, Flannery O’Connor, have previously documented O’Connor’s critical engagement with “the American Way of Life” as a civil religion, but Cavanaugh’s work provides an excellent standpoint from which to plumb the theological depths of that engagement. He engages Christian critiques of modern nationalism recently articulated by Protestant theologians— Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank, and Graham Ward—even as he builds on the work of major twentieth-century Catholic figures with regard to Eucharist and ecclesiology. Cavanaugh’s critique of nationalism, consumerism, and flawed no­

Notes to Pages 218–224 283 tions of “globalization” is particularly informed by the work of Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, two pivotal Europeans in Ressourcement theology. 63. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy, 86. O’Connor essentially agreed with this view of “catholicity,” though she expressed it with reference to literature rather than ecclesiology: in her essays and letters she consistently emphasized that no true artist creates from a merely cosmopolitan perspective. 64.  God’s words to Augustine as reported in Confessions make this clear: “I am the food of the fully grown; grow and you will feed on me. And you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me” (124). 65. Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 260. 66. Dulles, The Catholicity of the Church, 14. 67. Lubac, The Motherhood of the Church, 174. 68. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, 113–14. Here Cavanaugh builds directly on Balthasar, Explorations in Theology IV, 65–66. 69.  Catholics and Jews are also conflated briefly in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”: the Latin hymn Tantum Ergo, itself associated with Eucharistic Benedic­ tion, is mistakenly identified as “Jew singing” by a rural Protestant boy (Collected Works, 202). 70. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed, 84. 71. Balthasar, The von Balthasar Reader, 284. See also Cavanaugh, Being Consumed, 84. 72. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy, 79–80. 73.  Ibid., 80–81. 74. Ibid., 82. 75. Ibid., 76, 78. 76. Ibid., 83. 77.  Cavanaugh, in Being Consumed, elaborates on Balthasar’s theology of the Eucharist as participating in “the infinite fullness of the Trinitarian life”—and begins to outline the profound “social implications” of this participation for members of the Church (85–86). 78.  Hauerwas and Wood, “How the Church Became Invisible,” 160, 163. 79.  Reichardt, ed., Between Human & Divine, 6. She suggests that “the kind of confident, triumphalist endings of, for example, the multiple conversions and reconversions that conclude Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited or the new priest that suddenly appears on the final pages of Greene’s The Power and the Glory hardly seem possible” after World War II; O’Connor’s work provides a significant “tran­ sition point” between those writers and post–Second Vatican Council Catholic writers (5–6). 80. Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions, 525.

284  Notes to Pages 225–227

CODA

1.  See, for example, Liptak, “Stevens.” 2.  Gioia is primarily concerned with the decline of writers who are practic­ ing Catholics, or at least the decline of attention to such writers—both inside and outside the Catholic Church. Gregory Wolfe, editor of the journal Image, and Paul Elie, author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own, a study of midcen­ tury U.S. Catholic writers, joined Gioia in a lively dialogue on this issue in 2013 and 2014 in a variety of print and online forums. 3.  McClure, in Partial Faiths, rightly acknowledges that “religious traditions are bottomless. To become conversant with even one requires a life’s study, a life’s practice” (137). Hungerford is more attentive to and concerned with particular Christian traditions, and in Postmodern Belief, her study of U.S. literature since 1960, one of her most “surprising findings” is “the importance of the Roman Catholic religious imagination in the literature of this period” (24). Fessenden in Culture and Redemption discusses the possibility of “a Catholic secularism,” as­ serting that F. Scott Fitzgerald was “shaped far less by the possibility of remaining a believing Catholic than he was by the challenge of remaining a secular Catholic, of recovering Catholic difference as something richer and more variegated than a difference of belief ”—with “belief ” here having a meaning particular to the Protestant-cum-secular United States, as something interior, voluntary, privately chosen. “One direction such a Catholic secularism might take . . . is toward en­ gagement with new ways of being American, with forms of otherness that call to account a culture of ‘pluralism’ that most readily embraces diversity in the form of a marketplace of private religious faiths” (192). The “secular Catholic” Fessen­ den speaks of resembles the “cultural Catholic” identified by Ferraro, ed., in Catholic Lives, one who engages in the “development and deployment of Catholic ways of knowing and habits of being” but does so “outside the official precincts and sanctions, if not purview, of the Church.” Ferraro specifically cites “a coterie of artists and intellectuals, once raised in but now somewhat distant from immi­ grant devotionalism, whose work is deliberately, often tantalizingly, at times in­ sistently, ‘religious’—without being or wanting to be catechistic” (8). 4. Bloom, Thomas Pynchon, 12. For documentation of Pynchon’s alleged practice of attending Mass and going to confession during college, see Sales, “Meet Your Neighbor, Thomas Pynchon.” In Partial Faiths, McClure, who stresses DeLillo’s Catholic background and proclivities, never identifies Pynchon as Catholic. He does, however, provide a clear overview of Pynchon as opposed to Gnosticism, which with its “hatred of earthly things and dreams of radical transcendence” has shaped Western history and found its most recent expression

Notes to Pages 227–230 285 “in Calvinism, and finally in [Max] Weber’s new Calvinist elite of scientists, technicians, corporate chiefs, and bureaucrats. Dreams of ‘cosmic domination’ inspire all of these movements; and all are backed, in Gravity’s Rainbow, by su­ perhuman powers and principalities” (37). See also Eddins, The Gnostic Pynchon. 5. Parrish, From the Civil War to the Apocalypse, 5, 2. 6.  Didion, an Episcopalian, married Catholic writer John Gregory Dunne and directly responds to the legacy of Henry Adams in her novel that Parrish considers, Democracy—itself written not long after she wrote explicitly about Catholicism and the Americas in Salvador. 7. Parrish, From the Civil War to the Apocalypse, 37. 8.  Ibid., 3. 9. Cohen, After the End of History, 27. 10.  Parrish sees a number of the authors he considers, and Morrison in particular, as directly responding to Faulkner. His reading of Absalom, Absalom! differs from mine, positioning Faulkner as a largely unreconstructed Confederate in a way that overlooks Thomas Sutpen’s identity as embodiment of broader U.S. ideals. 11.  Quoted in Passaro, “Dangerous Don DeLillo.” It is also worth noting that DeLillo’s first published fiction, the story “The River Jordan,” shows the clear influence of O’Connor, as Hungerford observes (Postmodern Belief, 157n6). Giannone, in Flannery O’Connor, suggests DeLillo’s relation to O’Connor—and to Walker Percy—as in some sense a “moralist” concerned with critically depict­ ing the “capitalist junkyard” that is the late modern United States (2–3). 12. Hungerford, Postmodern Belief, 54. Hungerford asserts that McCarthy and Morrison, like DeLillo, have a “mystical understanding of form and lan­ guage” shaped by youthful “encounter” with Catholicism (24). 13. McClure, Partial Faiths, 63–64. 14.  On DeLillo’s tendency to create “WASP” protagonists, particularly in his early work, see Gardaphe, Italian Signs, 185–91. 15. McClure, Partial Faiths, 64. Along the borders of this imperium, “in foreign and domestic zones of misery,” dwell “Islamic militants, ecstatic Hindu pilgrims, Moonies, and Pentecostals.” If “DeLillo’s fiction relentlessly exposes the religious and quasi-religious roots of our contemporary woes,” however, “DeLillo also suggests, in work after work, that the only proper way of addressing these woes will likewise be religious” (64). Specifically, “if DeLillo consistently exposes and warns against ecstatic and ascetic forms of spiritual practice, he does so” by calling for some form of a “Church sacramental,” however provisional or carefully qualified that call may be (77–78). 16.  See McDonald, “‘Nothing you can believe is not coming true.’” 17. DeLillo, White Noise, 303–4.

286  Notes to Pages 230–234 18. DeLillo, Underworld, 775. 19.  Ibid., 50. 20.  Ibid., 41, 51. 21.  Adelman, in Sorrow’s Rigging, links DeLillo, McCarthy, and Robert Stone as lapsed Catholic writers whose views of the United States were shaped in part by the Vietnam conflict. Their novels, “born of a terror they cannot think away,” express their “panic at the death of hope”—hope in the nation and the Church alike (151). He examines the morbidly post-Christian imaginations of these three novelists in light of their engagement with earlier artists ranging from T. S. Eliot to Fyodor Dostoevsky and Dante. Adelman briefly admits, however, to McCarthy offering some “hope” in The Road (153). 22. McCarthy, The Road, 131. 23.  Ibid., 36. 24.  Ibid., 13, 64, 230. 25.  Ibid., 21. 26.  Ibid., 106. 27.  On McCarthy’s ethical and religious concerns in The Road, see, for ex­ ample, Cooper, “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” and DeCoste, “‘A thing that even death cannot undo.’” 28.  See F. O’Gorman, “Violence, Nature, and Prophecy.” 29. Broncano, Religion in Cormac McCarthy’s Fiction, 2. 30.  Ibid., 22, 31. 31. McCarthy, The Crossing, 45. 32. McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses, 210–11. 33.  Eaton, “Dis(re)membered Bodies,” 174. 34.  Wickelson, “Shaking Awake the Memory,” 95, responding in part to Vasquez, Triangulations. 35.  Ibid., 93–94. 36.  Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa, La novela en America Latina, 52–53. 37.  Zamora, “Magical Romance/Magical Realism,” 498–99. For her dis­ cussion of Hawthorne and Borges, with occasional reference to O’Connor, see 509–19. 38.  A partial list of names would include Sherman Alexie, Leslie Marmon Silko, and James Welch. Of these three, Alexie is perhaps the most favorably disposed toward the Church. On Alexie, see Gary M. Bouchard, “Our Litany: The Varied Voices and Common Vision of Three Contemporary Catholic Poets,” in Reichardt, ed., Between Human & Divine, 136–53. 39.  In her interview with Nancy Feyl Chavkin and Allan Chavkin in the early 1990s, Erdrich is asked a series of questions about authors who have influ­ enced her at different stages of her career; O’Connor and Faulkner are the only

Notes to Pages 235–238 287 two U.S. writers she names twice. Latin American authors such as Alejo Carpen­ tier and Gabriel Garcia Marquez are also prominent (232). In her 2012 interview with Keane, she again highlights O’Connor and Faulkner—along with Morrison and the midcentury Catholic fiction writer J. F. Powers—as influences. Stookey, in A Critical Companion to Louise Erdrich, concisely and effectively links Erdrich to Faulkner, O’Connor, Morrison, and Garcia Marquez (14–15). 40.  See Wachtel, “Louise Erdrich.” Erdrich’s remark regarding her “gothic-­ Catholic” childhood is in Berkley, “Louise Erdrich,” 58. 41.  See Erdrich’s interview with Bacon, in which she continues: “There is no tension in my own life regarding the two—I accept the Catholicism of many in my family. Ojibwe traditional practices are more meaningful to me, but I am not deeply religious anyway. That is to say, I do not have an assured faith. I am full of doubt. But even those who doubt can practice a faith, and can pray, and can try to act out of a tradition of kindness and love.” 42.  In Olson, ed., 21st-Century Gothic, see Danel Olson, “In Praise of She Wolves: The Native American Eco-Gothic of Louise Erdrich’s Four Souls,” 228. See also Burnham, “Is There an Indigenous Gothic?” 230–34. 43.  Friedman, “Identity Politics,” 120, 123. 44. Waldmeir, Cathedrals of Bone, 116. 45.  Erdrich, “An Interview,” 233. For an examination of captivity narratives of the Americas in relation to Catholicism and the emergence of magical realism, see Nava, Wonder and Exile. 46.  See Stookey, A Critical Companion to Louise Erdrich, 14–15, on the hidden significance to Tracks of federal legislation such as the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887. 47. Hansen, A Stay Against Confusion, 5. 48.  Pico Iyer, quoted in ibid., 9. 49. Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy, 28. 50.  Ibid., 107. 51.  Ibid., 58. 52. Detweiler, Uncivil Rites, 82–83. For Hansen’s engagement in the novel with the lives of nineteenth-century French women religious, see Arnell, “Wild Writing.” 53. Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy, 77. 54.  See Hampl, “Her Imitation of Christ.” 55. On Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, see Franchot, Roads to Rome, 135–61. “The consistent suggestion of sexuality in the gothic version” of the convent “reflects Protestant perceptions of convents as Catholic brothels as well as English and American fears that the Church would steal girls away from their natural, proper places with fathers and husbands, the ‘true’ owners of female

288  Notes to Pages 239–241 virginity.” In fact, “women frequently entered convents to withdraw from male authority and control” but Gothic “literature often inverts this important ele­ ment of vocation.” See Meoghan B. Cronin, “Maiden Mothers and Little Sisters: The Convent Novel Grows Up,” in Reichardt, ed., Between Human & Divine, 268. Cronin draws on Mourao, Altered Habits. 56. Detweiler, Uncivil Rites, 81, 307. 57.  See Gates, “Original Sins.” 58. Duvall, The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison, 160. Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997), set in the eighteenth century, is one of the few major contem­ porary novels to delve as far back historically as A Mercy—and perhaps merits comparison with Morrison’s novel in its concern with Christianity and American borders. Pynchon’s Rev. Cherrycoke is “obsessed by boundaries.” Unlike the sur­ veyors Mason and Dixon, he seeks not “to measure the world and make it known once and for all”: he “values mystery, doubt—the realm where his ‘true Christ’ lies” (Parrish, From the Civil War to the Apocalypse, 168). Furthermore, “through Cherrycoke’s eschatology of uncertainty, Pynchon is subtly subverting the tradi­ tional American exceptionalist myth in which Christ’s resurrection becomes a metaphor for the fulfillment of ” the United States (178). 59. Morrison, A Mercy, 15. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as M. 60. Duvall, The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison, 161. 61.  Ibid., 154. Also see Als, “Ghosts in the House.” 62.  Morrison, “The Search,” 117. 63.  Ibid., 118. 64.  Morrison, “Pam Houston Talks with Toni Morrison,” 254. 65.  For a useful overview of relevant biographical information and for Mor­ rison’s possible reasons for “hiding” her Catholicism, see Duvall, The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison, 154–56. 66.  West, “On the Legacy of Dorothy Day,” 6. Speaking here at a Catholic Worker house, West is making these broad claims somewhat casually. None­ theless, he knows Morrison and her work well enough to have some foundation for making them—just as he understands Catholicism in part via his close rela­ tionship at Princeton with prominent Catholic layman Robert George. 67.  Morrison, “The Search,” 121–22. 68.  Truffin, in Schoolhouse Gothic, examines depictions of the schoolteacher as exemplifying “the Enlightenment as curse” (8). She devotes one entire chapter to O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away and another to Morrison’s Beloved. See also F. O’Gorman, Peculiar Crossroads, 214–15. 69. McClure, Partial Faiths, 101. 70.  Terry, “A New World Religion?” 194. 71.  Ibid., 200.

Notes to Pages 243–246 289 72. Roynon, The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison, 80. 73. See A Mercy, 81–83, for example. 74.  Morrison, “The Search,” 118–19. 75.  Morrison, “Back Talk.” 76.  See Duvall, The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison, on the novel’s “postsecular blurring of sacramental Confession and juridical confession” (161). 77.  Ibid., 163. See also Ruth Bienstock Anolik, “Haunting Voices, Haunted Text: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy,” in Olson, ed., 21st-Century Gothic, 418–31.

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INDEX

abjection, theory of, 19–21, 78 Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner) characteristics of, 151–52 critique of the southern Cavalier myth, 157 figure of Charles Bon, 152, 158, 159, 160, 274n60 Gothic themes, 143 as historiographic metafiction, 143, 159–60, 228 image of New Orleans, 158 main characters, 152, 157 and Morrison’s A Mercy, 239 obsession with moral and racial purity, 158 and Percy’s Lancelot, 171–72 plot, 157–58 representation of femininity and fertility, 158–59 study of, 29, 30 Adams, Henry, 147 Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, 144 agape, 29, 103, 106, 116, 120 The Age of Reason (Paine), 46 American literature fascination with the Virgin Mary, 255n86 frontier in, 149 preferences of audience, 262n28

relation to Catholicism, 5, 6, 30–34, 143, 250n9, 284n3 representation of U.S. history in, 227 tradition of anti-convent, 238 Vietnam conflict and, 286n21 See also contemporary U.S. fiction; Gothic fiction American national identity, 2, 6, 277n116 American writers Anglo-Protestant, 26 associated with Gothic tradition, 4–5, 228, 276n92 attitude to Christianity, 35–36 Catholic background of, 225, 226–27, 255n86, 284n2 Mexican American authors, 232–33 of Native American descent, 234 postmodernism of, 227 Anglo-American colonialism, 165, 275n80 Anglo-American exceptionalism, myth of, 25–26, 252n49, 254nn80–81, 263n42 Anglo-Protestantism, 2–3 Calvinism and, 18, 39, 43, 82, 214 Arnold, Matthew “Dover Beach” poem, 98 Arobin, Alcee (fictional character), 128

313

314 Index “The Artificial Nigger” (O’Connor) allegorical thinking of protagonists, 206–7 binary oppositions in, 203 concept of race, 203–4 erotic element, 205 Morrison’s praise of, 207 obsession with purity, 206 presentation of the city, 204, 205 statue of an “artificial nigger,” 206 theme of birth, 204 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 283n64 Confessions, 136 Austin, Stephen F., 72 autonomy of individual, 4, 17, 21, 250n10 The Awakening (Chopin) appearance of nature, 99–100, 135–36 border between supernatural and natural, 100 characteristics of, 98–99 Dr. Mandelet (character), 130 eros in, 128, 135 as Gothic fiction, 29, 129, 139 language of, 128 Mr. Pontellier (character), 134–35 perception of life, 100 portrayal of Creole society, 133–34 publication of, 103 readers, 99 scene of birth-giving, 127, 134 symbolic number 28, 136 theme of death, 134 tragic individuals, 127–28 See also Pontellier, Edna (fictional character) Baker, Josephine, 108 Bellow, Saul, 214

“The Bell-Tower” (Melville), 94–95 Benedict XVI, Pope, 20 encyclical Deus Caritas Est, 266n16 Benito Cereno (Melville) criticism of American exception­ alism, 94, 265n56, 265n58 depiction of nature, 260n3 and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, 152, 158–59 figure of American sea captain, 92, 93, 149, 150, 254n83, 265n57, 281n49 as Gothic narrative, 27–28, 69, 70, 79 image of slaves, 92–93 influence on modernist Gothic fiction, 150, 152 and McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, 167 monastic imagery, 93–94 and Morrison’s A Mercy, 260 and national borders, 93, 150 plot, 92 relevance to history of slavery, 75, 93, 265n56 Spanish slave ship, 92, 260n3 vision of African rebels as monks, 262n22 Bishop, Elizabeth, 198 Black Legend of Spanish evil, 56–57, 72 Blood Meridian (McCarthy) American filibusters, 167 Catholic imagery in, 30, 166–67, 168–69, 276n90 characteristics of, 151–52 comparative perspective, 167 critique of modernity, 166 depiction of genocide of Native Americans, 165 depiction of landscape, 165, 167

Index 315 emphasis on Christ-like corpses, 166, 276n87 figure of Captain White, 167–68 figure of Judge Holden, 164–65, 168 as Gothic tale, 169–70 as historiographical novel, 165 language of self-interest and selfmaking, 168 main protagonist, 164–65 rhetoric of Manifest Destiny, 167–68 scenes of violence, 168–69 vision of American borders, 164–65, 169, 170 Bloom, Harold, 17, 18 Boernstein, Heinrich, 102 borders in American national identity, 21, 142 in contemporary U.S. fiction, 235 in Gothic literature, 19–20, 24–25, 142 Gothic relationship to, 7–8 between races and religions, 152 between self and other, 8, 23–24 tourism and reconstruction of, 221 Borges, Jorge Luis, 233 Bradford, William, 39 The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), 31 Brown, Charles Brockden, 14 Brownson, Orestes, 132 Bunyan, John Pilgrim’s Progress, 106 Cable, George Washington, 29 The Grandissimes, 104, 105 Caddell, Cecilia Mary Blind Agnese; or the Little Spouse of the Blessed Sacrament, 106

Caldwell, Erskine Tobacco Road, 191–92 Caramelo (Cisneros), 233 Carroll, John (bishop), 55 Cartesianism, 31, 34 and O’Connor, 194, 278n11 and Percy, 172–73, 175–77, 277nn113 in Poe, 172–73, 175, 276n96 Rodriguez rejection of, 202 Casas, Bartolomé de las, 56–57, 93–94 Cash, W. J., 151 The Castle of Otranto (Walpole), 9, 10–11 Cather, Willa identity, 29 interest in Catholicism, 142, 144–45 My Mortal Enemy, 144 The Professor’s House, 144 visit to France, 144 visit to Quebec, 144–45 See also Death Comes for the Archbishop (Cather) Catholicism in American literature, 6, 142 association with eros and agape, 103, 131 association with evil, 22 attacks on economic liberalism, 132 fears of, 2, 5, 129, 143 Gothic fiction and, 18–19, 26, 251n35 Manichean asceticism and, 270n98 mysticism and, 235–36 role of body in, 23, 118–19, 124–25, 126 in state of Georgia, 184–85 as threat to American democracy, 1–2, 188 view of family in, 129

316 Index Catholic World, 132 Cavanaugh, William T. Migrations of the Holy, 282n62 Chesnutt, Charles, 151 Chopin, Kate Cable’s influence on, 105–6 characterization of Germans, 130 death, 141 description of nuns, 125–26 early life, 28, 97, 101–2 education, 102, 270n1 experience of Catholicism, 99, 100–103, 127, 131 friends, 29, 102, 103, 130 honeymoon in Europe, 108, 130 journal of, 124–25 leadership, 130 literary career, 97 on love and the body, 126–27 mature art of, 106 Maupassant’s impact on, 109 personality, 109, 133, 269n68 praise of Father De Smet, 112 on racial assumptions of Parisians, 108 reading preferences, 106 reflections on aging, 126–27 residences, 103–4 understanding of role of body in Catholic faith, 118–19, 124–25, 126 value of familial relationship, 127 writing style, 116 Chopin’s fiction allusions to Christianity in, 103 “At Chênière Caminada,” 268n60 Bayou Folk, 106 children and childhood in, 116 depiction of Catholics, 129

“Désirée’s Baby,” 28–29, 106, 107–8, 109 early stories, 123 entrapped characters in, 120 eros in, 121–23 figure of young Alberta, 118–21, 123, 128, 268n61 “Her Letters,” 121 human desires in, 117–18, 120 human suffering in, 121 “An Idle Fellow,” 120 “The Kiss,” 121 “Lilacs,” 118, 124 “A Little Free-Mulatto,” 114–15 “The Maid of Saint Phillipe,” 113 “Modern Novel Club,” 131 “The Night Came Slowly,” 120–21 “Odalie Misses Mass,” 115–16, 268n57 portrayal of Creole society, 133 “The Recovery,” 122–23 A Solitary Soul, 124 “Two Portraits,” 118–20 “Two Summers and Two Souls,” 121–22 “The Unexpected,” 122 “A Vocation and a Voice,” 115, 117, 118, 121 A Vocation and a Voice (collection), 29, 101, 116–17, 120, 121, 123 See also The Awakening (Chopin) Christmas, Joe (fictional character), 103, 156–57, 158, 159, 273n52 Church as abject mother, 20 in American literature and imagina­ tion, 33–34 Cisneros, Sandra Caramelo, 233

Index 317 Compson, Quentin (fictional character), 155, 157, 159–60 contemporary U.S. fiction analysis of borders, 233, 235 collapse of modern and medieval, 230–31 Gothic tradition in, 231–32, 238 image of havoc and ruin, 230–31 magical realism, 233–34 practicing Catholic writers, 236 reference to Eucharist, 231 theme of universal terror, 230 convents, Protestant perception of, 287n55 Cooper, James Fenimore, 114 Crèvecœur, J. Hector St. John de aristocratic title, 258n25 attitude to Catholicism, 62, 63–64, 65 background, 40, 51 building of Catholic church in New York, 61–62 critique of American exception­ alism, 63 depiction of French Catholic Canada, 64 education, 51–52, 60, 110 “The English and the French Before the Revolution,” 260n61 family, 52, 53 fascination by antiquity, 53–54 friendship with Franklin, 53 Gothic imagination of, 66 “Hospitals,” 63–64 Landscapes, 55, 62–63 later years and death, 53 marriage, 52 military service, 52 religious beliefs, 53, 54–55

“Sketch of a Contrast Between the Spanish and the English Colonies,” 57 travels, 52–53 youth in Normandy, 53 See also Letters from an American Farmer (Crèvecœur) Cromwell, Oliver, 165, 275n80 Death Comes for the Archbishop (Cather) on American identity, 143, 146 character of Kit Carson, 147, 149 criticism of, 146 critique of modernity in, 147 depiction of the Catholic Church, 33–34, 142, 144, 145, 147 interest in beauty, 148 publication, 144 rejection of evolutionist historicism, 147 Declaration of Independence, 13 Dedalus, Stephen (fictional character), 162 DeLillo, Don characteristics of fiction of, 229 criticism of ascetic forms of spiritual practice, 285n15 early life, 228–29 education, 228–29 fascination with language, 229 recognition, 225 religious beliefs, 226 on religious roots of contemporary woes, 285n15 Underworld, 229, 230 universal terror in fiction of, 230 White Noise, 229–30 Deneen, Patrick, 7, 17 Descartes, René, 23, 172, 173, 209. See also Cartesianism

318 Index The Diary of Helena Morley, 198 Dickinson, Emily, 36 Didion, Joan, 227, 285n6 “The Displaced Person” (O’Connor) Anglo-Protestant characters, 220–21 Anglo-Protestant conceptions of blackness, 282n59 characteristics of, 214 death of the Displaced Person, 220–21 depiction of pilgrimage, 218 eros in, 215 fear of violated borders, 216–17 image of Catholic immigrant, 215–16, 218 notion of brown, 216 paranoia of invasive Catholicism, 214–15, 216 radical Protestant rhetoric, 214, 216 reference to the Eucharist, 219, 220 resemblance of Christ, 219 threat of miscegenation, 216, 282n59 Donne, John, 123 Dos Passos, John, 141 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Notes from Underground, 173, 177, 179 Duchesne, St. Rose Philippine attitude to slavery, 111 death of, 112 influence of Chopin, 112, 114 member of the Sacred Heart Sisters, 110 missionary in America, 110, 114 personality, 111–12, 267n42 Potawatomi mission, 111, 170n88 Duyckinck, Evert A., 75

Eliot, Charlotte Stearns, 130 Eliot, T. S., 30, 141–42 The Waste Land, 142 Elliott, J. H., 71, 72 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 7, 17, 35, 132, 227 “The Encantadas” (Melville) Catholic imagery, 87, 88, 90, 91 depiction of Latin American monarch, 89 depiction of natural world, 87–88 Galapagos tortoise, 87–88 main protagonist Hunilla, 87, 90–91 Oberlus sketch, 89–90 resemblance of the U.S. frontier, 89 English settlers in Americas, 24 Erdrich, Louise, 32, 234–35, 236, 286n39, 287n41 eros, 101, 103, 106, 116, 117, 120, 135, 211–12 Eucharist Catholic Church’s identity and, 218–19 in contemporary American fiction, 231 meaning of consumption of, 219–20 St. Augustine on, 218, 283n64 theology of the, 283n77 in Western modernity, perception of, 20 The Faerie Queene (Spenser), 19 Farmer James (fictional character), 41, 42, 43–44 Faulkner, William admiration of Piazza del Duomo in Milan, 153 attitude to Catholicism, 30, 153–55

Index 319 characteristics of novels of, 30, 155–56 Gothic tradition and, 1, 148–49 influence of, 234 James Joyce’s impact on, 154 Light in August, 30, 155, 156–57 literary reputation, 143 Mosquitoes, 154–55 praise of Cather, 142–43 religious identity, 152–53 religious references in works of, 156–57 The Sound and the Fury, 155–56, 160 story of Cajuns, 273n40 time spent in New Orleans, 153 Fenton, Elizabeth, 5 Fessenden, Tracy, 5 Fiske, John, 22 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 141, 284n3 Fitzgerald, Robert, 186 Franchot, Jenny, 5 Francis, Pope, 37 Franklin, Benjamin, 21, 42 Autobiography, 45 French Catholic Canada, 64 frontier in American literature. See borders Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 233 Garesché, Kitty, 102, 103, 106, 112 Georgia’s Convent Inspection Act, 185 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 133 Gioia, Dana, 226 Gnosticism, 17–18, 86–87, 169, 179, 209, 274n63, 284n4 Gordon, Caroline, 186, 255n86 Gothic fiction in American literature, 1, 3–4, 14, 26–27, 151

Anglo-American male figures in, 16–17 British origin of, 1, 8–9, 16 Catholicism and, 6, 7–8, 18–19, 25–26, 28, 32–33, 251n35 critical analysis of, 249n1 definition of, 8 democratic faith and, 7 depiction of American slavery in, 249n1 depiction of natural world, 22–23 dichotomies of fear in, 12–13, 16, 78 Enlightenment and, 12 formulations of race and gender, 24 function of hope, 18 geographical configurations, 9 and human body, 77, 263n39 ideal of autonomous individual, 17 middle-class ideology and, 11 narrative of history in, 9 national identity and, 13 Protestant individualism and, 11–12 role of borders in, 4, 5, 7–8, 16, 24–25, 142, 228 scholarship about, 5–6, 8–9 violence in, 5 The Grandissimes (Cable), 104, 105 Grant, Ulysses S., 129 Greene, Graham, 224 Grégoire, Abbé, 55 Griffin, Susan M., 5 Hansen, Ron, 238–39 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 236–37 Mariette in Ecstasy, 32, 236, 237 Harney, William S., 113 Harris, George Washington, 149 Hauerwas, Stanley, 34, 35

320 Index Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1, 15–16, 148 “The Birth-Mark,” 213 The House of the Seven Gables, 76, 148 “The May-pole of Merry Mount,” 210–11 The Scarlet Letter, 15 Hawthorne, Rose, 96 Hegel, G. W. F., 25 Hemingway, Ernest, 141 Hoeveler, Diane Long, 11–12, 16 Huntington, Samuel, 2–3, 35, 249n6 Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, 2 Indian Removal Act, 111 individualism, 35, 256n94 The Invention of America (E. O’Gor­ man), 72 Ireland’s Great Famine, 73 Jackson, Andrew, 150, 151 Jefferson, Thomas, 54, 62, 84, 172, 173 Notes on the State of Virginia, 95 John Paul II, Pope Ecclesia in America, 23, 254n76 Johnson, Denis, 227 Joyce, James, 103, 154 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 162 Kolbenheyer, Frederick, 130 Kristeva, Julia, 20–21, 78 Powers of Horror, 19 Lamar, Lance (fictional character) anger at Catholic Church, 178–79 confession, 180 as detective, 176

family history, 175 wife’s infidelity, 175–76, 179 Lancelot (Percy) affinity with Poe’s fiction, 171, 172, 173, 174, 179–80 Catholic imagery, 174, 178 characteristics of, 151–52, 181 female infidelity, 176–77 figure of Lance Lamar, 171–72, 173, 174 Gothic image of marriage and sex, 180 honor and vengeance, 174, 179 image of South Louisiana, 170, 175 influence of Dostoevsky on, 173, 177, 179 mythology of American hero, 176–77 Percival’s identity, 177–78, 180 plot, 171–72 Landscapes (Crèvecœur), 55, 62–63 The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (Erdrich), 236 Latin America Anglo-American views of, 69, 261n4 Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature, 21 Lazarus, Emma, 96 Lee, Philip J., 18 Lee, Robert E., 177 Leo XIII, Pope encyclical Rerum Novarum, 131–32 Letters from an American Farmer (Crèvecœur) challenge of borders, 49–50, 60, 65–66 comparison of South Carolina to Spanish America, 56, 57

Index 321 critique of Italian convents, 45 depiction of America, 41, 44, 49–50 depiction of the caged slave, 58–59 discussion of Christian faith, 48–49 on disparity between rich and poor, 57 Eucharistic images, 27, 42, 58 experience of war, 60 figure of minister, 47 gap between author and main character, 60–61 George Washington’s reaction to, 41 Gothic aspects of, 51 idea of clergyman in Protestant culture, 58 on individual autonomy of white men, 61 interpretations of, 40 on Italy, 65–66 main character, 60–61 on power of lawyers, 57 publication of, 40–41, 52 reflection on Christian churches, 42–43 on revolution, 41–42 on slavery, 42, 55, 56, 57–58, 59 statements about religion, 47–49 studies of, 26–27 translations of, 41 views of Quakers, 55–56 vision of the state of nature, 47, 50, 59–60 Lewis, Matthew The Monk, 9, 77 Light in August (Faulkner), 30, 155, 156–57 literary Catholicism, degrees of, 226 Louisiana, 104–5, 267n23 Love Medicine (Erdrich), 234

“The Maid of Saint Phillipe” (Chopin), 113–14 Manichaeism, 17–18, 24, 136–37, 270n98 Manifest Destiny, notion of, 70, 72, 73, 82, 94, 145, 150 Mariette in Ecstasy (Hansen), 236–38 Maritain, Jacques, 186 Martineau, Harriet, 105 McCarthy, Cormac All the Pretty Horses, 232 arcane diction in fiction of, 231–32 Blood Meridian, 29, 143, 232 borderland novels, 232 brother Bill, 275n75 characteristics of fiction of, 161–62 childhood, 161 Child of God, 161 Cities of the Plain, 232 The Crossing, 232 experience of Catholicism, 143, 161, 226 Gothic features in writing of, 232 investigation of American excep­ tionalism, 254n80 Outer Dark, 161 recognition, 225 The Road, 32, 230–32 Suttree, 162–64, 166 McCarthy, John Francis, 231 Melville, Herman American figures in fiction of, 150 on American foreign policy, 94 “The Bell-Tower,” 70, 79, 88, 91, 94–95 birth and childhood, 68 Catholic imagery in fiction of, 27–28, 79, 80, 95–96 Clarel, 70, 254n81, 263n42

322 Index Melville, Herman (cont.) condemnation of secular ideology, 73 criticism of American chauvinism, 73 depiction of female characters, 69 family, 73–74, 76 “The House-top” poem, 264n53 influence of Jackson on, 150–51 interest in Gothic literature, 76–77 interpretations of, 261n7 Mardi, 73, 75 marriage, 76 Omoo, 75 “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” 69, 70–71, 83–85 Pierre, 76 portrayal of Catholic clergy and Protestant missionaries, 75 pseudonym, 264n54 Redburn, 28, 70, 73 short fictions, 83, 95–96 travels, 68–69 Typee, 75 view of Catholicism, 69, 70, 74, 78–79, 261n9 view of material world, 264n53 See also “The Encantadas” (Melville); Moby-Dick (Melville) Mencken, H. L., 145 A Mercy (Morrison) depiction of Catholicism, 243, 244, 245, 247 depiction of women, 244–45 figure of Catholic priest, 245, 246 Gothic tradition and, 243, 247 human desires, 245, 246 image of death, 243–44 language of, 245, 246 limits of self-salvation, 246

main protagonist, 239–40, 243 motif of orphanhood, 242 plot, 242 questions of authority and author­ ship, 240 reviews of, 239 slave girl Florens, 240, 245–46 Mexican-American War, 150 Mexico American perception of, 72–73 conflict with Texas, 72 racial assumptions about, 72 Moby-Dick (Melville) critique of Anglo-American ethos, 82 description of Venice and Lima, 82 Gothic associations, 80–81 presentation of Catholicism, 70, 81, 83 religious language, 272n33 “The Town-Ho’s Story,” 79, 81, 82, 83, 263n44, 264n47 The Monk (Lewis), 9 Monk, Maria, 66 Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, 238 Morrison, Toni Beloved, 239 engagement with Catholicism, 67, 226, 240, 241 exploration of American borders, 241 as Gothic author, 1, 239 A Mercy, 32–33, 245 Paradise, 32, 241 praise of O’Connor, 207, 241 recognition of, 225 relations with Dorothy Day, 241 Motes, Haze (fictional character), 189–90

Index 323 The Mysteries of St. Louis (Boernstein), 102 The Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe), 9 nation-states, formation of, 13 Native Americans association with nature, 210–11 New England Primer, 78 New Orleans description of Catholic cathedral (Martineau), 105 ethnic and racial diversity of, 153 O’Connell, Daniel, 74 O’Connor, Flannery career, 31 Catholicism and, 186, 188–89, 207–8, 282n59, 283n63 on Catholic rejection of artificial contraception, 212 challenge of American exception­ alism, 192 characteristics of literary works of, 7, 31–32, 183, 255n86 characterization of the Church, 194 childhood, 183–84 on “country” vs. “nation,” 190–91 critique of Puritanism, 207 education, 184, 185, 278n11 encounter of God in Eucharist, 217 engagement with Gothic tradition, 188, 191, 192 feminist reading of, 194, 195 friendship with Elizabeth Bishop, 198 illness, 183–84, 187 impact of urban environment, 184 influence of Caldwell fiction on, 192 influence of Hawthorne on, 191, 193, 213

influence on Percy, 183 interest in Christian monasticism, 184 interest in Latin America, 198 life in suburban Connecticut, 186 on linguistic representations, 280n44 literary characters of, 190–91 objections to abstraction, 280n48 perception of Protestants, 208, 281n51 personal connections with writers, 186, 198 possibilities for pilgrimage, 282n61 reading of St. Thomas Aquinas, 209 rejection of individualism, 208 on relations of grace and nature, 208–9 relocation to Georgia, 184–85 reputation, 183 O’Connor’s fiction Anglo-Protestant characters in, 194, 214 binary oppositions in, 203 Bruce Springsteen on, 278n1 depiction of nature, 197 Eucharist in, 217–18, 222–23 “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” 190 focus on the body, 193–94, 196, 197 A Good Man Is Hard to Find, 217, 222, 224 Gothic tradition and, 194, 197, 224 “Greenleaf,” 187 “The Lame Shall Enter First,” 194 A Memoir of Mary Ann, 194 “Parker’s Back,” 203, 209–12 pilgrimage, 222, 223 presentation of fear of Catholicism, 214–15

324 Index O’Connor’s fiction (cont.) in relation to borders between cultures and nations, 188, 197–98 “Revelation,” 185 “The River,” 195, 196 “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” 194 “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” 185, 195–96, 209, 222–23, 224 “A View of the Woods,” 196–97, 213 The Violent Bear It Away, 192, 213 Wise Blood, 162, 186–87, 189, 276n87 See also “The Artificial Nigger” (O’Connor); “The Displaced Person” (O’Connor) “Odalie Misses Mass” (Chopin), 115–16 Of Plymouth Plantation (Bradford), 39 O’Gorman, Edmundo, 72 O’Meara, Mary, 110 Ozanam, Frederic, 131 Page, Thomas Nelson “Marse Chan,” 151 Paine, Thomas, 42, 46–47 The Age of Reason, 46 Common Sense, 46 “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (Melville), 69, 70–71 background story, 83, 85 Catholic imagery, 83, 84 figures of bachelors, 83, 84 Gothic imagery, 84 presentation of women, 85–86 vision of New England, 84–85 “Parker’s Back” (O’Connor), 203, 209–12

Parrish, Timothy From the Civil War to the Apocalypse, 227 Paz, Octavio, 31 The Labyrinth of Solitude, 201 Percy, Walker characteristics of fiction of, 255n86 childhood, 170 engagement with Catholicism, 7, 143 family’s code of honorable “Stoicism,” 170–71 The Moviegoer, 204 O’Connor’s influence on, 181 Poe’s influence on, 171, 172 on Walter Scott, 174 See also Lancelot (Percy) Pfeiffer, Pauline, 141 pilgrimage, 221–22 Pius XII, Pope, 37 Plato Symposium, 137 Poe, Edgar Allan, 1, 14–15 “The Black Cat,” 14–15 “The Fall of the House of Usher,” 76, 172 Pontellier, Edna (fictional character) Acadian woman and, 137, 138, 139 home in New Orleans, 135 identity, 128 immersion in the ocean, 100, 128, 135 isolation of, 123–24, 133, 270n95 as opposite to her husband, 132 personality, 127, 137, 269n70 reaction to Adele’s childbirth, 127, 135 relations with beloved Robert, 136, 137, 138 religious beliefs, 128, 137 view of property ownership, 132

Index 325 Porter, Katherine Anne, 142, 198 Potawatomi tribe and culture, 111–12, 267n45 Protestantism in Anglo-American public life, 128–29 vs. Catholicism, 71, 250n15 characteristics of, 217 link to Gnosticism, 18 perception of convents, 287n55 view of American landscape in, 72 Protestant utopianism, 146 Puritans and Puritanism, 39–40, 145, 201–2, 214, 271n10 Pynchon, Thomas, 227, 284n4 Mason & Dixon, 288n58 Quakers, 55–56 Radcliffe, Ann The Mysteries of Udolpho, 9 Ratignolle, Adele (fictional character), 127 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François, 55 Reed, Rebecca, 66 revenge tragedies, 271n5 The Road (McCarthy), 32, 230–32 Rodriguez, Richard Brown: The Last Discovery of America, 199–200, 256n97 on Christianity in America, 256n99 Days of Obligation, 36, 199, 200, 212 on eroticism, 280n42 Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, 199 literary works, 31, 199–200 notion of “brown,” 201, 202–3, 279n37

personality, 198–99 on Puritanism, 201, 202, 210 travel to Mexico City, 212–13 as writer, characteristics of, 279n34 Roth, Phillip, 225 Ruth, Sarah (fictional character), 209–10, 211–12 Savoy, Eric, 21, 22 The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), 15 Scott, Walter Ivanhoe, 174 self-made man, myth of, 151 Seton, Elizabeth Ann Bayley, 64, 65 Seton, William, 52, 54, 62 Shaw, Lemuel, 66 Simms, William Gilmore, 149 Sisters of Charity (religious order), 65 Smet, Pierre-Jean de, 112 Sonneschein, Rosa, 130 Spenser, Edmund The Faerie Queene, 19 Stein, Gertrude, 141 Stoker, Bram Dracula, 99 St. Peter’s Catholic Church, New York, 61–62, 64–65 Studies in Classic American Literature (Lawrence), 21 St. Vincent de Paul Society, 131 Sutpen, Thomas (fictional character), 157–58, 159–60 Suttree, Cornelius (fictional character), 162–64, 166 Tate, Allen, 142, 172–73, 186, 255n86 “The Angelic Imagination,” 173 “Our Cousin, Mr. Poe,” 173 Teresa of Avila, Saint, 20

326 Index Thoreau, Henry David, 36 Time (magazine), 212–13 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 29 Toole, John Kennedy A Confederacy of Dunces, 204 Toussaint, Pierre, 64, 65 Toussaint Louverture, François, 93, 265n58 Tracks (Erdrich), 235–36 Twain, Mark, 36, 149, 151 Underworld (DeLillo), 229, 230 Updike, John, 225 Usher, Roderick, 15 Vallejo, Jose, 64 Varela, Felix, 64, 65 “A Vocation and a Voice” (Chopin), 117

Walpole, Robert, 9–10 Washington, George, 41 Waugh, Evelyn, 224 Weber, Max, 159 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 153, 214 West, Cornel, 241 Whitman, Walt, 18, 132, 227 Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (Huntington), 2 Wilde, Oscar The Picture of Dorian Gray, 99 Wilson, Henry, 129, 132 Winthrop, John, 40 Wood, Ralph, 34, 35 Worthington, Harriet, 130 Wright, Richard, 108 Yankee Doodle (periodical), 73

Walpole, Horace, 54 The Castle of Otranto, 9, 10, 76, 143

Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 233

FARRELL O’GORMAN is professor of English at Belmont Abbey College. He is the author of Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction.