Doctrine and Difference (Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature) [1 ed.] 103236873X, 9781032368733

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Doctrine and Diference

Doctrine and Diference: The Thematic Scale of Classic American Literature aims to expand and deepen our knowledge into the inquiry of “contextual historicism,” observing writers of the American nineteenth century and their vastly difering approaches to perceptions such as race, gender, and national identity. Ranging from the religious acuities of the frst American Puritans to the more secularized literary awakening of the American Renaissance and into late-century texts that deliberately resist the limits of received religious and political opinion, this volume seeks to uncover a history of human thought within classic American Literature. This volume critically observes these survivable works of literature, presenting insight into the “diference” made by conversation, dispute, and dramatized selfdoubt within novels and poems of the historical past. Michael J. Colacurcio received his AB (1958) in Philosophy and MA (1959) in English from Xavier University in Cincinnati; taking his Ph.D. (1963) at the University of Illinois, he began teaching American Literature at Cornell University, winning a distinguished teaching award in 1974. Following a series of essays on classic American authors, he published his study of Hawthorne’s early tales, The Province of Piety (1984). Moving to UCLA in 1985, he brought out Doctrine and Diference: Studies in the Literature of New England in 1997 with Routledge. He received a teaching award in 2001 and was promoted to Distinguished Professor in 2002; he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. Godly Letters: Studies in the Literature of the American Puritans appeared in 2006. Religion and its Reformation in America, an anthology of religious texts from 1600 to 1730, appeared in 2020—as did a two-volume critical study called Emerson and Other Minds. Forthcoming is a volume of Colacurcio’s collected essays on Hawthorne called Hawthorne’s Histories, Hawthorne’s World and, in the planning stage, a monograph entitled Puritanism and American Literature.

Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature

Recent titles include: Memory in German Romanticism Imagination, Image, Reception Edited by Christopher R. Clason, Joseph D. Rockelmann and Christina M. Weiler Keats and Scepticism Li Ou Prepossessing Henry James The Strange Freedom Julián Jiménez Hefernan Liberalism, Theology, and the Performative in Antebellum American Literature Patrick McDonald Strangers and the Enchantment of Space in Victorian Fiction, 1830–1865 Kristen Pond The Ambivalent Detective in Victorian Sensation Novels Dickens, Braddon, and Collins Sarah Yoon Doctrine and Diference The Thematic Scale of Classic American Literature Michael J. Colacurcio For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studiesin-Nineteenth-Century-Literature/book-series/RSNCL

Doctrine and Diference The Thematic Scale of Classic American Literature

Michael J. Colacurcio

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Michael J. Colacurcio The right of Michael J. Colacurcio to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-36873-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-36874-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-33426-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003334262 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Permissions Preface: Literature, History, Politics, Philosophy

vi vii

1

“A Strange Poise of Spirit”: The Life and Deaths of Thomas Shepard

2

Maypole and Surplice: Hawthorne and the (Re-)Writing of History

45

3

Idealism as it Appears: Refractions of Emerson in Hawthorne’s Mosses

76

4

“All but Madness”: Blasphemy and Skepticism in Moby-Dick

96

5

Taps of Drums and Pieces of Battles: Whitman and Melville on the Unwritten War

115

6

Sage of Amherst: Dickinson as Part-time Transcendentalist

176

7

Regional Men (Not So Much from Mars)

190

8

Modern Instances: Love and Marriage after Hawthorne

203

9

Democracy and Esther: Henry Adams’ Flirtation with Pragmatism

237

Index

254

1

Permissions

Chapter 1 Colacurcio, Michael J., “A Strange Poise of Spirit: The Life and Deaths of Thomas Shepard” from Godly Letters: The Literature of the American Puritans. University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher. Chapter 2 Material from “Pious Image and Political Myth” from The Province of Piety, Colacurcio, Michael J. Copyright 1995, Duke University Press. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher. Chapter 9 Copyright © 1967 The American Studies Association. This article frst appeared in American Quarterly, Volume 19, Number 1, Spring 1967. Published with permission by John Hopkins University Press.

Preface Literature, History, Politics, Philosophy

Everything is political: no one practicing literary criticism in the American Academy is allowed to doubt that hard-won, now-obvious truth. But, as everything is also historical, it helps from time to time to advert to the fact that voting issues in 1860 were not quite the same as those today; and that voters then did not enjoy the advantage of noticing how their electoral decisions worked out in the long run. The Civil War ended slavery, but at a cost no one alive, on either side, could possibly have imagined in advance. And it may well have made racism worse. In any case, the best book on the Intellectual history of slavery makes it clear that the problem was not how could anybody in their right mind have believed in the legitimacy of such an abhorrent practice but, rather, how and when did people fnally decide that it really was abhorrent.1 Clearly, almost everyone alive today would have thought and felt diferently about many things then. So it makes some sense for history—and for a criticism that aspires to be at least minimally historicist—to do more than discover where writers were, by our enlightened standards, terribly wrong. What did they think then? And, so far as we can discover, why? And then—after one very deep breath—with what degree of credible complexity did they construct a text to refect their doubts and decisions? It’s harder than dancing on the grave of a son-ofa-bitch, but honest scholarship may require it. Hawthorne (for example) has more to say than that Lincoln was kind of ugly and that ending slavery might be best left up to God.2 So too with Whitman and Melville who, unlike Hawthorne, invested a good deal of serious, poetic, one might risk saying painful, efort in an extended text about the meaning of the war during which Abraham Lincoln issued, with a full sense of its extra-constitutional status, his momentous Emancipation Proclamation. Both had been, more noticeably than Hawthorne, opponents of slavery, but neither had been, all along, an Abolitionist in the radical sense of wishing the North to separate from the

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South. And it has been hard to believe that the complex dramatic representation of the shipboard slave revolt called “Benito Cereno” exists merely to second the notion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, namely that slavery is evil and that Africans hate slavery just as much as you would, Mr. Whiteprivilege. Way back in the 1970s, Saunders Redding, the Grandfather of African-American Studies, tried to assure me, after his visit to one very tense seminar, that it’s really about American Innocence. Times change. Babo may or may not be simply enacting Jeferson, ofering us a needful version of Douglass’ “Heroic Slave,” but he’s no Uncle Tom, and the violence he unleashes, utterly forbidden in the ordinary Slave Narrative, is supposed to terrify somebody. In no event would he be invited to appear on CNN. With other political issues much the same. Some canonic American writers were on the right track, students of history and precocious agents of social enlightenment. Others, not so much. We could, of course, teach the ones and not the others. But not if our loyalty is conscientiously historicist— committing us to represent the literary past in something like its dialogic complexity. Starting with those much-maligned—but also very ably-expressed and widely-investigated—Puritans. Patriarchal they undoubtedly were, but they also produced, if only by reaction, the woman Anne Hutchinson, whom we honor as the long-term Godmother of American feminism: they questioned her right to teach theology, if only as a sort of unpaid graduate assistant to the voluminous and not entirely orthodox John Cotton; she asked them to show where the interdiction was written; they showed her a text; she showed them many others. The winners write the history. On the other hand, however, all these Puritan men, who so automatically assumed their right to rule, also held that the human soul is essentially female; so they, quite like biological women, had to prepare themselves to be united to the Bridegroom Christ, the only male character in their soteriological drama. So the problem of Puritanism and Gender is probably harder than it has often been made to appear. A little less destabilizing is the entirely admirable poetry of Anne Bradstreet who, writing from within the system, found plenty of room to question one of its founding premises. Of course, you have to love your house on high more than your cozy little home in Ipswich: Duh! But is it really possible for a sane person—say a mother—to love God more than the fruit of her womb? Susan Warner will be trying to teach that moral solecism to her ten-year-old daughter in 1850, in a novel which missed the canon only because male critics are evil; but don’t be surprised if the long and laborious tradition of “weaned afections” produces, sooner or later, a cohort of women and mothers writing novels that sacralize the human sentiments as such. One of them will even end American slavery by making men as sensitive as women.

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To be sure, there were many other issues of literary moment, some of them a little too technical for the interests of students working forty hours a week but otherwise liberated from the rigors of otherworldly theology. And yet a precious remnant fnds themselves caught up in the question of whether Roger Williams is a better prophet of the doctrine of the separation of Church and State than, say, Thomas Jeferson. Maybe the Church has as much to gain from “separation” as the State. And, while we are at or near the subject, where is it written that the lucky accident of America is the antitype of the biblical Israel? Re-read your Augustine: His kingdom is not of this world. And, by the way, can you really go three thousand miles away to institute and practice a treasonable religion and not be something like a Separatist?3 It can get harder than that, of course. Arch exhorter Thomas Hooker so believes in a strenuous “preparation for salvation” that he marches of to Connecticut to stay out of the way of John Cotton, who is convinced that all the “holy violence” in the world is nothing to the purpose of providing latter-day Calvinists with something like an “assurance of salvation”: the Spirit will testify; that is to say, you just know. And where does this leave Thomas Shepard? According to an autobiography some students of American culture are supposed to read, he came over here only after being hounded by Bishop Laud’s “pursuivants” and “apparitors” from one end of the Kingdom to the other, only to fnd that the vaunted refuge God provided for his saints was awash in an ugly “Antinomian Controversy”—as if truly good works were no evidence of salvation. Who’s to blame for this? Anne Hutchinson? Or, really, John Cotton? Well, let’s ask him about it: “Sixteen Questions” might just about cover it. But sixteen answers only deepen the confusion: do good works count or not? Yes, but not as “primitive comfort”: only as they witness the authenticity of some anterior experience of God’s own spirit. Hmm. Maybe we should go after the person Hawthorne would call “the woman” after all. And so, as Henry James might say, there we are. Who would not want to pursue such a story? Well, don’t get me started. Equally fascinating is the now-correct, now-painful literary account of the founding of the New Nation. “All men are created equal,” right? Then why do you hold slaves, Mr. Jeferson? Or, more searchingly, how, holding slaves, could you write what you did in your Notes on the State of Virginia?—that you “tremble for [your] country when [you] refect” that a just God cannot long abide that institution.4 And, BTW, to what old-fashioned genre does that strange book belong? A little late for come-to-America propaganda. Maybe it’s a ground-plan for the entire Republic. Can we read its deep commitment to the smallest possible government, along with its single-minded agrarianism, as an alternative to the bigger-is-better theory of The Federalist? And what place will there be, in either scheme,

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for the subaltern voices of people like Occam, Hammond, Hall, Equiano, and Wheatley? Certainly one for Dr. Franklin—the students love to call him “Ben”—who, when they would not let him go to sea and become Melville, not only invented the lightning rod but also, in the memorable words of D. H. Lawrence, “set up [a] dummy of a perfect citizen as a pattern to America.”5 And, plus, when this little scapegrace ran of from Boston to Philadelphia, he was actually breaking his indenture: “Henceforth be masterless,” as sang the servants who ran of from Plymouth to Merry Mount. If Franklin, then why not Hector St. John de Crevecoeur who, besides having too many names, authoritatively denied the existence of anything like hyphenate identities in America, where everyone was a farmer: whalemen merely “ploughed the sea.” Then too, his pattern American surely deserves a second look: Farmer James (no, not John) just loves to help the new arrivals; “valuable cargo,” he calls them. And, sacralizing private ownership of precious American soil, he helps Andrew the Hebidian to secure some native land on a thirty-year lease. Whoops. And if a multi-layered and fnally secularized Autobiography, and a gathering of Letters fctional enough to be an almost-epistolary novel, then why not the conscientious Journal of a man who loved all creatures great and small and who helped teach the Northern states of not-quite-united America that slavery is against a commandment written in the human heart? That’s right, the Quakers were the frst proper Abolitionists in America; and Woolman was, even before his Friends thought to publish his book, this tireless, itinerant bearer of the holy word went to meeting after meeting on purpose to profess the Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not slavery.” And who says the Canon of Revelation ended with the death of the last Apostle, whoever he was, whenever that happened to be? There never has been nor ever will be more Spirit than is now, as Emerson knew and as Whitman would say in almost so many words. So if Edwards on depravity, then surely Woolman on conscience. St. Woolman, we ought to call him, remembering all the while that while he taught us the Eleventh Commandment, he also hated Christmas, liquor, colored clothes and dirt. Oh dear: why cannot our political heroes say just one thing? Like Thoreau, clearly indebted to Woolman’s doctrine of simplicity, who insists that we lighten our carbon footprint but appears to ignore the fact that corporate economies are always more efcient. Who sounds a little silly on the subject of “chastity,” who loves trees more than people, and would just as soon wish government would give itself a rest. Then too—as somebody famous once said— “Remember the Ladies.” Phillis Wheatley, yes, we mentioned her; Jeferson judged her third-rate, but what did he know? She may call herself lucky to have been brought from Africa to Jesus Christ, and then learn to love George Washington just as much as George Whitfeld, but her political poems prove she knows a

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thing or two about liberty. Somebody else will have to ask what the hell she has to do with the fourth of July, but in the meantime, she will write a poem “On Imagination,” which, in addition to proving that African American women can write “Pre-Romantic” poems at least as good as the “Ode to Fancy” of a homey like Philip Freneau, suggests that only in realms of one’s own imaginings can one be truly free. Like Poe said, “Hear, hear.” And don’t think women can’t write novels: Brockden Brown gets a lot of credit for inventing Hawthorne and Faulkner, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge (a little less) for introducing heteroglossia into an ongoing satire sworn at the outset to discover, express, and maintain—with or without a French-style Academy—an absolutely pure standard for the American language. But Rowson and Foster count for at least as much, the one proving that books can be a lot shorter than Clarissa and still fairly raise the question of why one sauce does not serve both goose and gander, the other more searchingly exploring the issue of love and friendship, social pressure and personal choice, in a world where women are taught to believe that their only safety is in marriage, and men are permitted to believe that coquetry deserves rape. All a pretty interesting story, genderwise: Brackenridge writes for men, as clearly as Rowson and (famously) Foster for women. But what happens when a would-be member of the Philadelphia Illuminati writes in the persona of a woman? And creates, in the process, a pretty convincing example of the untrustworthy narrator? Telling, in one very long and then one very short letter, a story that either does or does not prove that only crazy persons say they hear the voice of God. And that Abraham must have been “hearing things.” Why would anybody do that? And then go on to create a free-thinking female protagonist who stabs with a penknife the would-be rapist who misunderstood the limits of her illumination. OK, men are bad, but who the hell are the Illuminati? But then here we are—almost without knowing it—more and more involved in the post-revolutionary task of creating an authentic American literature, full of this, that, and the other. Just like England. How is that supposed to work? Everybody in the eighteenth century thinks that the Epic is the best thing since artisan bread (or craft beer), but nobody in either country could do it convincingly—certainly not Barlow in The Columbiad; or Dwight in The Conquest of Canaan. Guess it ended when Milton chose Adam and Christ instead of King Arthur. Better luck with the Comedy of Manners, even if for one time only, as Royall Tyler’s The Contrast manages to summarize, epitomize, and deconstruct that wellpracticed genre: we don’t do manners here—remember?—we’re “Nature’s Nation.”6 But just in case you think an American cannot do satire, read John Trumbull, whose works may be distantly indebted to those of Alexander Pope, but as a whole, “Progress of Dulness” is a lot funnier than “The Dunciad,” invokes a more credible standard of education, and is

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shorter. And how are you going to explain that, before he recruited Puritan Connecticut for the pre-romantic genre that included the loco-descriptive “Cooper’s Hill” of John Denham and, more authoritatively, the “Windsor Forest” of Alexander Pope—and way before he wrote the Travels that a Melville persona put down in order to take up Hawthorne’s Mosses— he had the idea of answering a clerical colleague’s long-withheld book on “The Salvation of All Men” with a mock-heroic poem in which a mockheroic Satan rehearses the ups and down’s of his Anti-Christian Kingdom, in perfectly well-turned and fercely satiric Popean couplets: Oh, Boy, I’ve got ‘em now; they don’t believe in hell. And if you think satires need satiric “characters,” here are some bad theologians in place of Pope’s bad poets. I know: let Jonathan Edwards Jr. play the part of Addison. Who would not weep? Indeed. But then, who would have imagined that a Connecticut Wit—oxymoron, one would have thought—could have produced a Milton’s Satan-speaking zeugma? Well, it had to begin somewhere. And it could not have been easy. After all, they had Shakespeare and Milton. And then a daunting output of “Major Romantic Lyrics.” You expect Roy Tyler and Tim Dwight and Phil Freneau to compete with that? Especially when almost-expat Washington Irving appears to love it all so well. He’s teaching us how to celebrate a “Merry Christmas,” despite our post-Puritan prejudice; that’s good, but what about all that other stuf? Who’s buried in Shakespeare’s tomb? And who ain’t buried in Westminster Abbey? Tell us, Geofrey Crayon, or Peter Pencil, or whoever your nom de plume is meant to recall: do we have to read all the way back to 1400? We believe in the Scottish Common Sense Philosophers, but who again are the Scottish Chaucerians? I know you love everything old, but in our Medieval period, they hunted and gathered and carved pictures in caves. Give us a break. OK, William Cullen Bryant may not really be an “American Wordsworth”—thank God for that, or he might have thought that “The Growth of the Poet’s Mind” was a Miltonic subject and written poems even more boring than “The Excursion”: no wonder the Yale Romanticists turned to Theory. Major Romantic or not, he’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp rejoinder. A “Yellow Violet” in spring and a “Fringed Gentian” in fall inspire sober moral meditations; as does the more famous “Waterfowl”: Where ya goin’ Duckie? Sorry, it’s serious: the bird knows where it is going, and the poet does not; then too, the bird will arrive fnally, where many others of his kind are resting, if not nesting, and in joyous community “scream among [his] fellows.” Editor Bryant knows screaming only as the top note of American political discourse. Serious too, to the point of being archetypal, is Bryant’s poetic invention of American Romanticism: “Surely joy,” Thoreau will proclaim in a review of some more or less scientifc reports on what grows and moves in Massachusetts—handed of to him by Emerson,

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whose naturalism was and would remain somewhat more conceptual— “Surely joy is the condition of life.” Natural life, that is—even as he found it defnitively invoked in Bryant’s “Inscription,” which had itself learned a thing or two from Bradstreet’s “Contemplations.” Social life, not so much. Politics, not at all. Disgusted with all that, are you, then “Enter this wild wood/And view the haunts of Nature.” But if and only if “thou hast learned a truth which needs/No school of long experience, that the world/Is full of guilt and misery, and hast seen/Enough of all its sorrows, crimes, and cares,/ To tire thee of it, enter this wild wood.” Sooner or later, in fact, you will be greeted, with loving recognition, by something called the “correspondent breeze.” It’s just about perfect, so don’t try to dress it up later in a “Forest Hymn” which hands it all over to an Architectural Father. The point, after all, is Joy, not Faith. And not politics either, in an Era of So-So Feelings. On the other hand, if you want not a “wood” nor a “forest,” but a veritable “frontier,” complete with a frontiersman falling afoul of what they’re calling civilization, well, there’s James Fenimore Cooper, competing now with Child and Sedgwick, rather better than Southern counterpart William Gilmore Simms, but not good enough to please Mark Twain, whose compendious list of Cooper’s “Literary Ofenses” omit the question of “nature faking,” including the very sensitive issue of just how much the author really knew about indigenous character and speech. Leave that to D. H. Lawrence. Escaping the notice of both these severe critics are the three novels that make up the “Littlepage Trilogy,” especially Satanstoe, which, moving us from commercial New York City to the less urbanized town of Albany, then on to the upstate frontier itself, essays to measure, in each of these venues, the strength and weakness of character of the mixed North American population—British, newly American, and Indigenous. And of course, there was Edgar Poe—don’t call him “Allan,” as that son-of-a-bitch never would adopt him. Was he not a Major American Author? James and Eliot said no, but the French thought otherwise. So did one of our own Laureates, Richard Wilbur, who, while teaching for a time at Harvard, wrote an Introduction dedicated to the proposition that “from frst to last . . . Poe’s vision of things was cosmic in extent.”7 What if he was right? Right at the beginning, after all, there was “Al Aaraaf,” which, in addition to having too many alphas, manages meaningfully to suggest that if something called “Science” (of which he knew quite a lot) had, for those unclear on the concept, obviated “Myth”—or just made it a poetic embarrassment—the solution might well be to make up some myths of our own. Et Voila: instead of Diana in her car, learning to downshift, we presume, angels in service to a God we do not seem to know, deeply concerned about the fall of latter-day Earthlings, away from music and into something like Facebook. Could they manage to wake us up? So one

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particular angel—Ligeia, borrowed from Milton and set aside for a tale of her own (a horror story only if you say so)—drops in on one Angelo, the most beauty-aspiring of all mortals; just now dead, he revels in the company of Ianthe, formerly his Muse, now his very Sweetopuss. Don’t be too surprised if even he cannot hear the Song of the Spheres for the beating of his own heart. The fesh is like that. And then, at or near the (untimely) end, Eureka, a proper cosmology, somewhere between Plotinus and the Big Bang Theory, and that in the form of a 100-page prose poem. Hard to read a lot of the post-Newtonian sentences, but the ending seems as familiar as Wordsworth: we grow up knowing things too good to be believed, but then our “world reason” helps us forget. Could we possibly manage somehow to remember?—like the nameless Narrator of “Ligeia”? Or nevermore, like the blighted loremonger in “The Raven?” Or, worst of all, can we—trying to make a buck in the market like everyone else—can we remember only the fact that we have forgotten the Platonic version of what Minister Shepard called our “frst love?” Moan it out: “Ulalume.” Wait—I forgot—these are only poems. Our question, as professors and students, is more like this: can we stop worrying about the spooky whiteness of Arthur Gordon Pym (not Prynne or Pue) long enough to learn to spell anamnesis? Or pause to consider that Poe wrote tales of terror and horror only after three volumes of poetry had fallen pretty much dead-born from the press? And that—quite like Emerson—he always considered himself essentially a poet? And that he came back to poetry at the end? And that Eureka is a poem? Well, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Me?—I’m just glad I don’t have to earn tenure in the 2020s. And so, quite probably, is Edgar Poe. But what if? What if we all spent as much time studying the language of music as we do that of computers? And learned to make poems instead of love or war? Just sayin’ . . . 2 In any event—“Whale ho!”—an American Renaissance, when topics including, but not limited to, those of race and gender engendered a literature of which the World would have to take notice. Who, now, “in all the four corners of the world,” would dare not read an American book? Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter, of course, but I’d run out of room if I tried to name all the novels, tales and sketches, poems, essays, and memoirs that overwhelm the poor student majoring in “English.” Maybe not everything, from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, but quite enough to keep a body busy: add in Chaucer, Spenser, Dryden, Pope, those curious “PreRomantics,” who wanted to be Wordsworth when they grew up, postRomantic poets like Tennyson, Browning and Arnold, Victorian Sages like Carlyle and somebody who got stoned in Venice, at very least: this is what American writers had to read. And now this?

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F. O. Matthiessen named Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman, but Poe and Dickinson insist on themselves, even if we apply only the old canonic standards. Then add—with or without some correspondent subtraction—Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Catharine Sedgwick, Lydia Maria Child, Margaret Fuller, Susan Warner, Louisa May Alcott, Alice Cary, Harriet Beecher Stowe, not to mention Transcendental names like Unitarian Godfather William Ellery Channing and his nephews (Ellery and W. H.), George Ripley, Theodore Parker, Orestes Brownson, Bronson Alcott, and Jones Very; and Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Philips, Henry Ward Beecher, and Julia Ward Howe. That will almost do. Unless we consider The South. Remember: it’s not entirely a New England Renaissance: a “Flowering,” perhaps, but that was another story. I don’t mean just the historical novelist William Gilmore Simms and the neo-Saxon poet Sidney Lanier: can you really aford to ignore what people like Thomas Roderick Dew and George Fitzhugh had to say, if not in plausible defense of their indefensible institution, then at least in critique of the “wage slavery” that enchained the emergent industrial system of the North? What if it turns out we were, in efect, “Cannibals All”? Of course, “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war,” convinced of certain important diferences: slavery could not end until men became more like women—more sentimental, so to speak, and more truly Christian. Frederick Douglass, on the other hand, was not sure Christianity was really on his side, obsessed as it was with humanity’s universal slavery to Satan and sin; so that his powerfully infuential account of slave life just across the Mason-Dixon Line could hardly take the well-established form of the Puritan conversion narrative: enslavement was their sin, not his. Then too, by 1855, he was revising his account to take it out of the hands of his white handlers, who wanted slaves to tell the facts and leave to them the ideology. What if he had wanted to be more than the poster boy of Abolition? What if telling his own “Free Story” would require yet a third version of his noble and necessary Narrative? Never of his escape, but more than his revival from “the dark night of slavery”? His “Life and Times” in fact. And though one can tell the frst, most famous part of his story in tandem with—as equal and opposite to the frst-world narrative of Thoreau, who wants to tell you how not to become “your own slave driver,” what other context might be required? Linda Brent is waiting in the wings, but how many “slave narratives” before? And how much of the wider tradition of African American Literature can (in practice), must (in all honesty) be included as well? David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, and William Wells Brown immediately suggest themselves. And I’ll think of more the next time I teach the course. But notice: a fully integrated canon can get pretty crowded. Who ya gonna drop?

xvi Preface Then too, before the issue of race slavery became the issue of overwhelming concern by the 1850s, how much of the issue it came (almost) to replace can we aford to ignore? A politician, if there ever was one, Jeferson died hoping Americans would yet embrace Unitarianism. So did William Ellery Channing. So, for a nanosecond, did Emerson, who then tried for a long time to reduce Historic Christianity to a Platonic Ethic, but said his last on the future of religion under the heading of “Worship,” though he had long since given up a belief in a God personal enough to take notice. Long and long he resisted politics in favor of teaching the world how to honor the moral sentiment with or without the endorsement of a latter-day teacher named Jesus. Hawthorne’s immediate ancestors were “Liberal Christians,” and he allowed a Unitarian minister to join him in wedlock to a would-be Transcendentalist; but the “liberal” premise does not come of very well in “The Celestial Rail-road” and, in any event, the lengthening shadow of Puritanism became his food subject. What sort of conscience—or “something in its stead”—was likely to succeed that strong, endarkening way of seeing the world? Politics would catch up—as it did to Emerson, after the new Fugitive Slave Law of 1850—but before the outrage of a book defending the Compromise policy of Franklin Pierce and way before the peacenik politics of “Chiefy About War Matters,” he felt compelled to look in on the issue of property and theft in New England and then, more searchingly, the extent to which the will to community could relieve civilization of one of its chief discontents, namely, the monogamous nuclear family. All of which may count for something, even if, in the end, he could name only Providence as the necessary—eventual—solution to the question of American slavery. Then, too, he may well have died of his inability to get over his crippling love of moral allegory. So maybe God got even. Melville will, of course, weigh in on the question which, by 1850, had overwhelmed all others: earlier on, one might hold, in Chardon Street, a “Convention of the Friends of Universal Reform,” whether the Universe liked it or not, but a decade later even the urgent Women’s Movement had to give place to something like Abolition, as conscientious Northerners— like the families of Emerson and Thoreau—found they could go to jail for setting some runaway slave on a path to the North Star. Yet neither the bipartite “Benito Cereno” nor the multiform Battle Pieces can be read as a piece of boilerplate Abolitionism; and before that, oh dear, what other subjects did this mid-life autodidact not attempt? Typee and Omoo are as anti-colonialist as you may please: the Islanders never had something or other till the missionaries got there, and the attempt to turn them into Connecticut-style Presbyterians appears to be their national ruin, quite possibly their extinction (“but we are dying”); but the issue of sex and culture have a wider, possibly a more urgent, application. Mardi—by the man whose “Yale College and his Harvard” was a whaling ship but who has just been

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“swimming through libraries”—is about everything under the sun, whether Taji hails from there or not. Late in its Grand Tour of all the real and all the possible countries hiding out in his allegorical South Seas, Melville does his number on the year 1848, when Americans learned, to their dismay, that Red Revolutions were not also White and Blue. Big doings abroad, but in the end, “The kings voted for themselves.” Back here in the over-there the Mardian Vivenza, all men are created equal except those from the tribe of Hamo; and, come to think of it, “Diabolus” may, in fact, be at home as well as “abroad.” But oh my dear, what else? You could say the disappearing Yillah is whiter than white for reasons of racial hysteria—like the climactic white-out at the end of A. G. Pym’s seagoing adventures—but only if you are a sworn enemy of explanations involving “Melville’s Neoplatonic Originals,” as Taji’s “blue-eyed One” appears to be playing a principal part is some pseudo-Platonic drama. The olive-skinned Islanders want to fush her down a whirlpool, thus guaranteeing fertility and increase. Kill them so that Taji’s overheated Romantic imagination, misrecognizing a hypostasis, can infate her to an object of worship. No wonder she disappears. The world will little note nor long remember what we say about Redburn and White-Jacket—“jobs of work,” their author said, such as other men do by chopping wood—but in the one, the politics of immigration (“The whole world is the patrimony of the whole world”) has to compete with the force of the bias hiding out in the myth of Old World and New: Redburn cannot seem to get over the nostalgia he read into his father’s Diary (or found at its pure source in Irving’s Sketchbook); and what the hell does Harry Bolton think either his homosexuality or his singing voice will be worth in New York Efng City? White Jacket ended fogging in the American Navy, right? And you can’t witness fogging without thinking Southern slavery, right? And don’t forget that guy’s jacket is not blue, like all the others. But also, don’t forget, when you come to Billy Budd— long after the slaves were emancipated in order to face race prejudice on their own account—that this is not the frst time Melville allegorized “The World in a Man of War”; imagined, that is, what the world would be like if Hobbes were right, so that promulgated law, such as the courts would decide, were the only standard of civil behavior. (How, then, would we know that slavery is always wrong?) And then Moby-Dick, which started out without Ahab (and maybe Ishmael as well), as things and stuf in the whaling industry, quite who eats when and who sleeps where in a Man of War, but which turned into a blasphemous revenger’s tragedy with “shanties of chapters” being carried hot to the printing in process and which ended, in England, without the Epilogue which saves the nominal narrator and so makes the book more possible than Mardi, where an insatiate Taji disappears up his own chimney. How can this Monstrosity of Whiteness not be about race?8 Long story.

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Short form: how long do you think New Englanders—or anybody else, for that matter—can keep thanking their One, all-powerful and all-holy God when things go well and blaming themselves when they do not? “Afiction,” right? Except with friends like that, you hardly need an enemy. And Ahab has had just about enough. He’s crazy, of course. After all, he was trying to kill the whale, which may have struck him from blindest instinct, so that his vendetta amounts to a sort of cosmic paranoia. Turns out to be not only a thankless but also a fatal task, but evidently, somebody had to do it. Shakespeare did it. Hawthorne, almost. Somebody has to let their “dark” (but not necessarily African) characters say what would be true in the worst-case scenario: The gods “kill us for their sport”; “There is no good on earth, and sin is but a name”; and then, fnally, “Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee,” but “come as mere supernal” and, well, what did you expect. Indeed, mild-mannered William Ellery Channing has said just about the same thing: “Our Creator has . . . waived his own claim on our veneration and obedience any farther that He discovers himself to us in characters of benevolence, equity, and righteousness.” And did no one get the point of Hume’s famous dichotomy: given the existence of Evil, He can be all-powerful or all-good but not both. Dualist, even rampantly polytheistic religions have a better chance. Take old Osiris of Egypt: win some, lose some; like, some days you eat the whale, some days the whale eats you. Well, no, not quite, as he does not appear to be carnivorous. But you get the point: don’t try to have it all one way. And yet on they go, year after year, those frst-form Dudleian Addresses, happily proving the existence of ONE HOLY GOD from the multiform face of now-peaceful/now-violent Nature. Ahab may be crazy, but the real question is, where had he been all these Puritanic years? Shepard came to the verge when, despite his heart-wrenching prayers, his wives and sons kept dying. Bradstreet the same, in the case of several grandchildren, and then the mother of the most precious one. “Let’s say He’s merciful as well as just.” Better hold that thought. And was Edward Taylor kidding when he reported that the death of yet another child, this one vomiting and screaming, almost tore up the root of his faith? Oh well, all such loves are, at best, nothing but natural virtue: you gotta love “Being in General” or it’s idolatry. But if Edwards, then surely Melville: opposite and, well, almost equal. Can’t have one without the other. Pierre, of course, cannot not be about gender. Just not in the way which proves that men are unfair to women and that testosterone is probably to blame. It’s about gender and sex and desire and the language we use to confuse our understanding of each. It’s about whatever we decide to name the practical issue of who fucks who[m], but also, and more theoretically, about the puzzling fact that evolution decided to separate homo erectus from femina totalis, the environment being so evidently female and

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two-sex procreation being both so very awkward and so totally unnecessary. Pre-Foucauldian homosocial man with four children and only a literary lover: can’t do much better than that. Except that Pierre is also about faith and evidence: why does Pierre believe Isabel is really his sister? Why does he call for a miracle to confrm it? And why, given the dramatic suffciency of this existential question, are there all those echoes of the public debate about “the evidences of revealed religion”? Looks like this man who had, as Hawthorne recognized, one of the purest hearts in the world, could never manage, when writing a novel, to will just one thing. And not in his short stories either. The problem of poverty looms large in many of them. One even seems to be about otherworldly religion as “the opium of the people,” but it stops well short of recommending Marxist revolution. Another—the frst one written, in fact—appears to question the entire ethic of Wall Street, but it cannot keep from wondering what it is that does not love a wall; and, truth be told, its reference to Edwards “on the will” places it squarely in the midst of an argument. From Augustine to Sartre, at least, about the importance of the negative in the theory of freedom. Also, there are domestic comedies in which the rules of genre appear to obviate the power of protest. The dark stories, too, appear to have their generic restrictions: is there really any help for Bartleby, who in the end seems to prefer just nothing at all? Or for Merrymusk, his rustic relative, who believes, with Socrates, that we get well only in death? And what of poor lonely Marianna? You could buy her a ticket to the mills on the Merrimac, but would she thrive in that Tartarus of Maids? Tragedies all. For which things there may be well-known rules of writing. Or, if not, Quick!—tell Oedipus not to sleep with his mother. And so the evidence begins to suggest, whether we like it or not, that some of the writers whose rare and magnetic skill of verbal expression we cannot fail to recognize did not feel from the outset the call to prophesy on matters of race and gender justice. The Christian episteme seems to be failing, and somebody needed to say something about that. Soon enough— or better late than never—most of them would realize that the bodies of black folks had to matter quite as much as the souls of white citizens. But not from the outset. A mature Whitman will try his best the write the “unwritten war” in 1865, but before that, though always a ferce hater of slavery, he had never been an Abolitionist of the Garrison-Phillips variety. The “Child,” he sang, and in the same book, the all-afrming adult that precocious child would become. The crossing of “Brooklyn Ferry” came to stand as a symbol of human life as itself a passage, from shore to shore, with everything that lay between. You saw it all, Reader—and I mean You, as you really read—isn’t it all just about as I predicted? Appearances all, as the mentor had taught and as Child himself had discovered, but what of that? I afrm its trustworthy expression of the Soul. And besides, Reality

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is what Poet and Reader afrm together in the episteme of the poem. Not only homosocial love—but human sex itself had to be outed in that same second edition of the Leaves of Grass; the memory and the dissociated fragments lingered to remind Americans that sex might be a more stable category than race. And even in the Battle Pieces, where not much is said about the odious iniquity of slavery, the issue of same-sex afection competes rather efectively with the close-in observation of death and dismemberment. Lincoln becomes his hero, of course, but his saving of the Union has something to do with that. And then there is the issue of post-war American greed and materialism—partly, but only partly redeemed by the linking of East and West, envisioned by Columbus, who never did get to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day. So many subjects. Almost makes you sorry you signed on as a Bard. You can make Emily Dickinson write about the War if you want, but it will be hard to convince R. W. Franklin or Thomas H. Johnson that the continuity of systematic racism was her food subject. Feminism is much closer to the mark, but even there, the waters run a little deep: the speaker in her poems is, as she herself confesses, “a supposed person.” Always female, only if you say so. If Empson had taught them in his ground-breaking poetry class, would his British students have recognized the voice as that of an anorexic New England female? Life, Love, Nature, Death— so thought the original editors. Funny, race and gender never occurred to them. Johnson calls her themes “existential,” but without reference to Sartre or Heidegger, it’s a little hard to tell what he means; perhaps he should have said that the speaker is someone to whom the troubled soul counts quite as much as the mortal body. Of course it matters that Emily Dickinson is a woman, writing in self-imposed seclusion, under the inhibiting authority of a father who called her back from college, in love with a woman who married her dumbass brother; publishing hardly at all but begging male editors to tell her yes, sending out poems as letters to a world that never wrote to her; but she has more to do than report on that. Say it out loud, Professor Johnson: her poems are insistently philosophical.9 (When they are not, also, wryly theological.) 3 And then the Realists, who thought the last part of Emerson’s “American Scholar” had got it just about right. Indeed, William Dean Howells, who loved “poor Real life,” could hardly have said it better: “I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.” But that was then, 1837, and this is now, 1880, and between 1870 and 1920, he wrote a novel on just about everything of interest in the American scene, letting the pieces of ideology fall wherever they might. As it turns out, a “Secretary of Society” can hardly be at the same time a Rabid Reformer. “Smiling

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Realist,” as they used to say: men and women, persons and places, manners and morals, ideas and sentiments, just nothing too ugly in a country where most things seem to go on “un-terribly.” But don’t think you can profess postbellum America without a good bit of it. Most enduringly, Lapham’s move from Vermont to Boston—and back. But also earlier, the idea of marrying in haste and repenting in Indiana: a “Modern Instance” indeed. And later on, besides a couple of Utopian novels, the “Hazard” of the Marches’ fortunes, in moving from Boston to New York. These for starters; then plan for the summer when, after Cooper, you read the other forty-some. And oh yes, if Howells had a Realist Precursor, was it not John William De Forest, whose post-War account of Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty spends less time hating slavery and the South and more on Captain Colburn’s discovery that New England and New Orleans are like diferent countries. Wait, wasn’t De Forest the same guy who invented the idea of “The Great American Novel”? Well, yes, but not something every budding fctionist has hiding in his drawer; rather, a literary fact already in evidence, namely, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and not because it started the great war that preceded modern memory, but because it managed to include so much: “great” here meaning “encompassing.” Of course, De Forest had not read James Baldwin’s discovery that Stowe actually hates and fears black people and that we all now read the book just to make ourselves feel morally superior.10 Still, the discovery that the USA was not all one place was timely enough. You could almost predict that Stowe would go on to be a Regionalist. But then, where does all this leave that arch-traitor Henry James, who thought you could still, at least in the context of Paris, discern “The American.” And who chose to write about France and Italy—as well as New York and Boston—from London?! Was he a Realist? Internally oriented? Roman psychologique? Certainly not roman de l’intrigue, as nothing ever happens in a James novel. Can we call it roman talkatif? Is that what you mean by “dramatize, dramatize”? Whatever: in any case, a mind too fne to be violated by any idea, however correct. What would Elizabeth Cady Stanton make of Daisy Miller? Or Margaret Fuller of Claire de Cintre? Or Betty Friedan of Isabel Archer? Or Gloria Steinem of Madame de Vionnet? Or, not to put too fne a point upon it, can any feminism quite rescue Milly Theale? And what do we think is happening when Priscilla and Zenobia turn into Verena Tarrant and Olive Chancellor? And while I’m on that subject, what exactly were James’ politics? Did he want to be T. S. Eliot when he grew up, an Anglican and a Royalist? Does he recommend that arch-revolutionaries choose suicide over assassination? Or more tellingly, to what degree does he agree with the reactionary—but also Hawthornean—position of Basil Ransom, that “The human race has got to

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bear its troubles”? Dear me: all this might distract one from the question of what exactly was James’ gender. Did it change with what Hemingway called his “tricycle accident”? So many questions, so few courses in American literature. On the other hand, what if James had “turned West,” like Samuel Langhorne Clemens? Would his “American” look more like Huckleberry Finn than like Christopher Newman? Got “sivilized,” would his Huck have gone to Europe to study Art? Or would he have stayed at home to manufacture wash tubs? Almost certainly, he would not have written a book that got itself banned, again and again, for using the N-word, even in indirect discourse, even in one of the most fercely anti-racist novels ever written. No, you have to change your name to do that. Let’s see: you don’t like the mild, passive Uncle Tom or the fercely activist Babo either one, then try on—say it—“Nigger Jim,” whose deep humanity loves a scapegrace runaway almost as much as his own freedom. Maybe more. Of course, the war is over now, as Twain looks back to old times on the big river, evidently, somebody still has to say it, “A man’s a man for a’ that.” And, regardless of color, some are more so than others. But if The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn tries its best to free Jim from the slavery of racial prejudice, it also wonders whether the “Slavery” from which Huck is feeing is quite the same. “They’re after us!” The hell they are: you’re supposed to be dead, remember; and what if they tried to teach you prayer along with grammar and syntax, is that the same as selling your wife and children down the river? Think about it. And think too—not you, Huck, but you, post-Christian optimist—is there really such a thing as “the good heart of a boy”? Were the Calvinists wrong about that? Is there, in fact, such a thing as conscience below conscience, humane sentiment beneath social introjection, so that you’re willing to go to hell for freeing a poor woman’s bought and paid-for slave? Talk to Edwards about that. But to Hester Prynne and Emily Dickinson as well. Then take a deep breath: time enough to talk about the “damned human race.” And then the Naturalists: were they all “desperately” so?—like old man Clemens who hated the fact that his tight-lipped and gritty theory of a boy’s natural goodness might be whistling in the wind? Did they love or hate the fact that Darwin knew better than Wordsworth, or even Thoreau, what it would mean to realize the full naturalness of the human creature? The story takes us from an ill-fated “Girl of the Streets” to a lass from the provinces who makes her way to stardom on the New York Stage. Along the way, it closely chronicles the bizarre life and absurd death of a quondam dentist who cannot face the desert and death without his pet canary. Aspiration, it appears, can redeem many things. For the theory, recall the experience of four men tossed in an open boat: not since Melville has anyone told the Universe where to get of. And how were we to expect the life

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of a small-town Methodist Minister to rehearse the progress of piety from the Great Awakening to Main Street? BTW, don’t forget what we used to call “local color”—before it turned out that several important writers from this late-century interest to which we used to condescend were, well, persons of color. And before we learned that Regionalism was a vital part of both Realism and Naturalism: quite like politics, reality is always local; and don’t presume you would be exactly the same person, with exactly the same unconscious prejudices, if you were born in Maine, or Louisiana, or Missouri, instead of Boston, New York, or San Francisco. What if places are almost as determinative as genders, of which there are almost as many? Can’t tell where Christopher Newman is from, but Huck’s from Missouri right enough, and Silas Lapham comes to Boston trailing clouds of Vermont. And then, when the plots get really local, can Jewett’s little “woods-girl” and Freeman’s “Nun” or “Mother” be from anywhere but the regions Nawth of Boston, where ofbrand puritanism went to die but didn’t? Edna Pontellier—what was her maiden name?—wanders onto Grande Isle from Kentucky (where Presbyterianism went to die but didn’t), and we easily note the efect of her ethnic diference; as to the rest of them, well, not since the primitive sociological discoveries of De Forest’s Captain Colburn had the curious character—and the faux french language of Creole Louisiana—so intrigued an American Secretary of Society. Evidently the Civil War had not reunited the American states in all possible senses. Alerted to the issue of how the Other Half lives, one might be more concerned with class diferences, but the issue or Region, along with the rise of a sociological science, further deepened the old-time question: colonies, provinces, would-be states, federated but far from unifed, ft to receive wave after wave of ethnically diverse immigrants; tell me again, “What is an American?” In the end, however, Literary Regionalism is not a particularly political category: often nostalgic in tone, the question is not really for or against this or that oddly provincial place; everybody is from somewhere, and hierarchical preference is merely prejudice. Yet, inevitable or not, the issue of these place-specifc texts is feminism: widely difering in age and station in life, little-girl Sylvia, Louisa Ellis, Sarah Penn, and Edna Pontellier all face issues that are quite gender-specifc; and, signifcantly, all have to face of against men—who, themselves diferent enough in some ways, are all rather lame representatives of the masculine possibility. Silvia’s would-be boyfriend kills the birds he pretends to love; Louisa’s long-absent fancé is a clumsy oaf, tracking in dust and knocking over lamps; Adoniram Penn (oh, please, can’t you just go with Ezekiel?) loves cows more than anything else in the world; and Leonce Pontellier, is, well, male chauvinist to a farethee-well. No wonder the women feel confused, or frustrated, or trapped. But who taught these redundantly literary ladies that it was ok to paint all

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regional boys and men with the same satiric brush? Are they still, in fact, the only thing there is to marry? Or if not, just say so. But even here, the question of “politics and” is a little complicated: Is Maine or marriage the issue in “The White Heron”? Is “The New England Nun” about male clumsiness or the Puritan conscience gone to seed? Is The Awakening about female freedom or the lure of the sea? Answer, in all cases, yes. Even committed feminists, that is to say, often enough have other fsh to fry. Better not come in here with any of that weak stuf about the Patriarchy. 4 So what? So, as we have always known, American literature is rather more philosophical than some others. Not having enough tea tables to support a proper novel of manners, it settled for “an original relation to the universe.” Yet was it not as well inescapably political, like everything else? Once upon a time, we thought it infra dig for would-be canonic writings to be “enlisted” in some local, voteable issue. Journalism, yes, not “literature.” What did we know? We thought “Benito Cereno” was about innocence, not race; The Scarlet Letter about guilt, not sex and gender. Well, times change, usually for the worse, but not always. With or without a sworn classroom duty to boldly begin and staunchly abet the salvation of the universe, we realize that there is no such thing as an “a-politics”—that public writings have public consequences, and that, whether they like it or not, authors cannot manage to hide the way they feel about the way their world is working. Ergo, Everything Is Political. But the question remains: is politics everything? In life, for example, does everybody fall in love for political reasons? Does party afliation always determine religious orientation? Do Republicans fear death less than Democrats? And in literature, do the multiform aspects of social justice exhaust the feld and defne the canon? If so, then much of what issued from the memorable writers of the American nineteenth century was a plentiful waste of time. (One had almost said “most,” but then who’s counting?) Nearly all of our old-canon writers wrote, for a time at least, about issues other than race and gender justice. We can blame them for this, but maybe read them anyway: what else did they think so important? And why? What made their moral episteme so diferent from our own? Did they afrm or deny values to which we can still relate? And even if not, where is it written that we do not owe ourselves an honest account of the conscience of our country, of our kind? And all this prescinding from the old standard of esthetic pleasure: is it now a sin to be dazzled by the way verbal genius can manage form so as to posit, intensify, challenge, and (almost) resolve semantic meaning? A frst-world concern? Then let us hope that one day the whole world will be frst.

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Meanwhile, we have to face the fact: nearly everybody in the nineteenth century—writers included—was, by our present standards, racist: they believed race was real, with characteristics that predicted outlook and behavior. Not all believed there was an exact hierarchy, though most Americans tended to prefer white skin and blue eyes. Almost certainly, only a small minority—growing smaller and smaller—thought that racial diference licensed slavery. And many of them positively hated it. But neither politicians nor writers knew exactly what to do about it. Buy out the slavers? Like the Brits in their West Indian possessions. Would that not concede the right of slave ownership? Was there enough money in the whole country to do it—even if the slavers would agree? Back in the 1780s, almost nobody in America thought slavery had a future. But then a booming cotton industry put The South on the world trade map: at issue was an entire economy, indeed a culture, one might almost say a country. So, no, they would never have agreed. Racist on its face, colonization had not worked out. That left separation: “No union with slaveholders.” Right, that’ll fx ‘em. But African Americans would still be enslaved, and as Emerson implied, the North would continue to buy their cheap cotton. And, as he said out loud, the “southern crocodile” would hardly grieve the separation. So Emerson—and some others—altogether convinced that Iniquity is indeed Evil—thought for a long time to write about other issues of the moment. From which we still may learn. Nor was everybody in the nineteenth century convinced that gender is a construct. And evidently, it required of the human race a considerable time to discover that the fact of motherhood and the ideology of chivalry did not entirely solve the problem of “what women want.” Or why it matters so intensely for them—and for others, with the other chromosome—to fnd out. Still learning. So that now we read all we can, not only of Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody and Sophia Ripley but of that other Sophia as well, whose husband damned a “scribbling mob” with whom he hated to compete but could not keep from seeing an analogy between Anne Hutchinson and Hester Prynne. And Emerson too, though he thought men were the sun and women the moon. And Melville who, though he appeared to like men better, thought a long time about mothers and sisters. And many others, as needed. Close to the heart of the human matter, the problem of men and women did not solve itself at once. And even now, those who consider it all but solved would do well to notice (if not to savor) the inspired confusion all along the way. Long time between the trials of Anne Hutchinson and the Convention at Seneca Falls; longer time since. It’s called history. To which some of us still feel a certain loyalty. Even if it is, largely, a history of error. We no longer believe much of what they did. But then, are

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they not the reason we do not? It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. But then it wasn’t. And here we are. Notes 1 See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Cornell, 1966), esp. 3–61. 2 For Hawthorne’s conservative, quasi-providential view of the tortured question of just how abolition might come about, see, frst, The Life of Franklin Pierce, in Centenary Edition, Vol. XXIII, 352; and later, “Chiefy about War Matters,” 431. 3 Well aware of the protest—of John Winthrop and others—that the Puritan “Errand” was in no way a separation, Edmund S. Morgan cogently suggests that you don’t go 3000 to do something illegal without something very like separation; see The Puritan Dilemma (Harper Collins, 1958), esp. 45–53. 4 See Notes on the State of Virginia (1982), 163. Ed. William Peden, University of North Carolina. 5 See Studies in Classic American Literature (Seltzer, 1923), 14. 6 Thus the formulation and claim of Perry Miller: see Nature’s Nation (Harvard, 1967). 7 See Richard Wilbur’s Introduction to Poe, in Perry Miller, ed., Major Writers of American Literature, I (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 373. 8 For the “whiteness” challenge, see Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 28.1 (Winter, 1989), 1–34. 9 On Thomas Johnson’s account, “Emily Dickinson was an existentialist in a period of transcendentalism” (Final Harvest (Little Brown, 1961), xiii); but so far as I can tell, she had not read Heidegger or Sartre; or even Kierkegaard, readily available in Swedish. 10 For a more or less polite deconstruction of Stowe’s superiority to nineteenthcentury race theory, see James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in Notes of a Native Son (Roberts, 1955).

1

“A Strange Poise of Spirit” The Life and Deaths of Thomas Shepard

Many students do not like to read autobiographies: they fnd them egotistical. A few of these purists can be got to admit they would like William Bradford’s Plymouth a little better if his book were more “personal,” if he somehow found a way to include more of his very own thoughts and feelings; but this particular admission in no way qualifes the generic suspicion. Some few can be jollied out of their superior conviction by the Thoreauvian suggestion that the habit of self-reference, explicit or not, is perfectly endemic and not at all optional. And a few more can be enlisted in favor of works in which a single human subject essays to represent the neglected interest of an oppressed class. But the prevailing prejudice remains. And when these “exacting children” read a life like that of Thomas Shepard, in which an unsuspecting son is being bound to love the thing an awesome God has condescended to teach his father, it bristles up with a moral vigor suddenly sure of its tone: Is there no end to this Puritan arrogance? Where does this guy get of? Sometimes, well after the fact, these students will read of the diference between the “majestic idea, that the destiny of nations should be revealed . . . on the cope of heaven” and the “disordered mental state” in which an individual man has “extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature”1 and say yes: that is what I mean exactly: Bradford’s providence guides a whole group, a biblical “people” aspiring to become an end-time “nation”; in Shepard God stoops to the reform of a man and his family. And even the professional apologist, well protected by his doctrine of historical criticism as a needful lesson in “otherness,” can hardly pretend not to see what they mean: by God’s design, beloved persons lose their lives to teach their ardent lovers not to love too much; and even more than in the famous case of Emerson, perhaps, “the costly price of sons and lovers” is never quite enough to introduce the author to the afect of divinity.2 Thus critique may see its work cut out: What singular events can have persuaded Shepard that, amidst the wreck of so many others, his own peculiar life was worth the saving? What love was this that seemed to tempt the Christian DOI: 10.4324/9781003334262-1

2 “A Strange Poise of Spirit” God more pointedly than hubris ever threatened Zeus? And what part can the poor surviving son be made to play in a drama in which Protestant Providence fnds time to sharpen up the rules of Puritan Romance? Most obviously, Thomas Shepard, Jr. (or Thomas Shepard, III, depending on how we count) serves as the frst fgure of relevant audience for a manuscript text written very close to the author’s private heart and probably not intended to serve, at some later time, as anything like a public apologia. Yet in spite of the most explicit dedication—“To my Dear Son Thomas Shepard with whom I leave these records of God’s great kindness to him” (33)3—one hesitates to say, simply and without the clutter of a dated literary terminology, that the literal son is the literal audience for a father’s literal confession, of purpose faithfully undertaken and of lapses honestly recognized; for, even if audience is not “always a fction,” a number of relevant considerations complicate the exigent Shepard case.4 First of all, though Shepard clearly sufers all the anxiety a Calvinist father may be forgiven to feel for a son whose title to salvation runs through loins other than his own, it is hard to believe that Shepard is innocent of the concern for the sons of New England more generally. A Father can hardly bear to lose a Son, but Reformation is a cause more general than that, and it would be a little cruel to imagine Shepard committing, in the frst few words of his life story, the very “familiar” sin his story sets out to thematize. And besides, Shepard, Jr. is, at the moment of his father’s writing, not quite old enough to get the full efect of the story; he needs to grow up to be its proper reader; indeed a proper reading will be the proof that he has in fact grown up. Perhaps he is to read it “now,” in the moment of inscriptive dedication, and then again and again in the years to come—in which case it will be the work of the text to make him into its own proper audience. Thus even the godliest of letters may require a scrap of what remains from the science of letters as such. And also, perhaps, a little patience; for it takes a while to discover why Shepard has needed to lay the trip of his own guilt so heavily on the head of the second son of his own frst name. We may pass over, on frst reading, the curious fact that Shepard explicitly locates his subject in God’s kindness “to him,” the son, and not to himself, the father and author. What we notice instead, perhaps, is that this momentary cancellation of the autobiographical self seems more than atoned in the next clause, which more than authoritatively invites the son to “learn to know and love the great and most high God, the God of his father” (33). We do not need our students to tell us that this formulation does more for the humble father than for the most high God. But sooner or later we do need to recognize that Shepard’s little preface is nothing but a dramatic culling out, a repetition in advance, of some of the central facts of the narrative itself; and that these same astonishing facts—of the painful death of a frst son

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and the almost equally painful birth of a second, of the sickness and recovery of that blessed survivor, of harrowing dangers and narrow escapes, of balked plans and eventual success against all odds—will all be narrated, in a far less threatening manner, at their proper place in Shepard’s (otherwise) strictly chronological account. Nothing new is being added here, that is to say, except the tone of grave paternal instruction. And before we decide just how much (oedipal) scandal is to be taken, perhaps we ought to wait to see what context may have prompted a prefatory tone so aggressively unsentimental. Yet no reading can fail to notice that Shepard’s rhetoric seems determined to raise the stakes as high as possible: And therefore know it: if thou shalt turn rebel against God and forsake God and care not for the knowledge of him nor to believe in his Son, the Lord will make all these mercies woes and all thy mother’s tears, prayers, and death to be a swift witness against thee at the great day. (36) Close examination of Shepard’s theology will assure us that this passage deploys the rhetoric of Calvinist self-fulfllment more securely than it implies a logic of Arminian conditionalist: as ever, your attitudes and actions will reveal your nature, regenerate or not.5 But will there not be in this case a certain sting? For the “mercies” of the paragraphs preceding have been not only to save and instruct the father, but also to preserve the fragile life of the mother, already bereft of one son named Thomas, until a second son of that name shall have been born and delivered up for baptism in a properly reformed church in New England. Predestination, it turns out, can breed some ironies of its own. Indeed one almost suspects that the real target of Shepard’s hostility is God: “Were we led all this way for/ Birth or Death?” But if the theological plot is somewhat too thick wherever we elect to take it up, perhaps it may help to remind ourselves that Shepard’s son grew into a New England life about as efective as any other in the second generation; that in fact his 1672 sermon called “Eye-Salve” completes the jeremiad analysis of Samuel Danforth’s “Errand” so efectively, indeed so brilliantly, as to assure us that the literal as well as the fgurative son had introjected without trauma the ferce reminders and prohibitions of the father.6 Closer to the rhetorical point, however, is our faint intuition that, where we hear only aggression, the son was supposed to sense wonder. Almost certainly written last, Shepard’s Preface is constituted of nothing but a personally pointed rehearsal of the very turning point of his story— the densely packed and well nigh incredible ending of his long maintained and fnally failed attempt to live the life of a conscientiously dissenting

4 “A Strange Poise of Spirit” minister of the Gospel of Christ within the Church of England; and of his involvement, thereupon, in a complex, intrigue-flled, at frst ill-starred and then very lucky attempt to get away to Massachusetts. What draws the son into the plot is less the father’s angry expectation that of course the son will neither understand nor care “what the father went through” in the interest of godliness but the uncanny way frst one son, who died just when the father fondly thought that prayer might intervene to spare his life, and then another, who lived in spite of the illness his chastened father “did expect would have been his death” (35), were themselves woven into a plot that pointed—beyond the private loves of any man—to the churches of New England as its only proper denouement. And thus, whatever the comparative burden of guilt, Shepard charges his son—and all who may feel his fate as a fgure of their own—with exactly the same task of interpretation he himself has had to face: What is the faithful man supposed to say when the ways of very God dip down to touch his individual self? Are we to suppose that, in these latter days, God’s converting power may touch the private heart alone, and never point the way to some proper task in life? Is this not a question that may occur to a moderate man as well as to a zealot? Perhaps the students have been too secure in the assurance of their tone. To think so is to propose that Freudian outrage is only one avenue by which to approach the “Autobiography” of Thomas Shepard. Competent fathers challenge uncertain sons along a spectrum that runs all the way from “Not at all, so far as I could help it,” to “No way less than God himself might ask”; and probably—if we could ever really know this sort of thing—Shepard’s son would have been perplexed if, morally speaking, his father had left him anything less than a personally emphatic version of the task to be faced by the Soul of the Calvinist as such. Of course he would grow up to make his father proud—and to redeem the deaths of his mother and older sibling as well; churlish it were to think of anything else. But what sense would this New World son be able to make of his father’s gradual, beclouded decision for New England? One option among many, for “life is very long”? A “happen,” like Emily Dickinson’s fnding her way into the seclusion of a lonely upper room? Another, later instance of getting out “while the getting was good”? A “prudent forecast on the probable issue of the great questions of Pauperism and Poverty”? A “yearning for peace and security beyond the reach of Laud’s long ecclesiastical arm”?7 Or something more: could the son in fact believe, with his father’s conviction hard-won, that the same (great) migration which persuaded Bradford to loose his pen in the service of Holy History had been sufcient to persuade those he supposed to be following his example? That the structure of these events reached further down into the lives of individuals than even the sympathetic outsider could well imagine? And that arrangements of

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these events had touched his own infant self—by design as well as implication—in just the way his father’s fnally aroused faith had dared suppose? Biographically, historically, the answer would seem to be yes: the public life of the son did full justice to the private faith of the father; and also no: the reality—or even the rumor—of “declension” proves that design in the womb or at the breast is not the same as adventures among pursuivants or upon the high seas.8 So that the literary argument turns back on the text of the father himself: how heartily has he received, how cogently arranged the evidences of design? And, more searchingly, what in the face of that design can he make of his own (“non-separatist”) delay? Perhaps one tarried on purpose to resist the call to be a Saint. The life of which provokes resistance of its own. Far more than Bradford, Shepard turns out to be a writer whose signifying system it is dangerous to enter without the protection of unfailing prejudice. Salvations are everywhere; without them his life simply disappears. Before the elongated and painful conversion at Cambridge, they fgure as needful preparations; afterwards, as so many reminders that he, like Bradford’s John Howland, was saved not for anything he was or had done but only for what God would set him yet to accomplish. So prevailing is the design of Shepard’s life that we may have to keep reminding ourselves that the efect is one of retrospect and possibly of writing itself; otherwise, Shepard should have seen the meaning of his life long before that moment (in the middle 1630s) when, noticing he “had been tossed from the south to the north of England and now could go no farther, [he] then began to listen to a call to New England” (55). Cynicism can turn this “call” into mere opportunism, of course, and the “Reasons” which follow (55–6) into that fimsy sort of self-deception by which one can always blame God or Reason “for every thing one has a mind to do.” But then if cynicism is what suits us best, we will have to begin much earlier: what really saved Tom Shepard was the series of lucky breaks that got him into Cambridge. For evidence, just count the “blind” towns he left behind before he found his way to the New England village rejoicing in the same numinous name; not London or Westminster, to be sure, but not bad for a little orphan boy from Towcester. But then we might have to explain how his life would have been diferent if the scholarship had been to Oxford. The rejection of his “Sophister” achievements as the pratings of a man “foolish and proud” (40) might be written of as a “sophomoric” echo of Augustine,9 whom lettered men might read in any corner of the kingdom; but for the equivalent of that series of faithful, heart-breaking preachers whose task it was indeed to break the natural heart of Thomas Shepard—Chadderton, Dickinson, Preston—one might search the Oxford lists in vain. A Shepard who went to the other, the Royalist University, might well have enjoyed a useful career as one more

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midwife assisting at the birth of “Anglicanism”; but for that sense of his “life” we would probably have had to wait for the Athenae Oxoniensis of Anthony a Wood.10 But then everything would indeed have been diferent if Shepard had not been a Puritan; from which we may learn the wisdom of letting Shepard name his own trump suit. Thomas Albro, Shepard’s most reverent nineteenth-century biographer, is convinced that we should list “a pious mother” among the earliest examples of a providential ordering of the life of his subject; but clearly it is sentiment that has generalized “a woman much aficted in conscience, sometimes even unto distraction” into an enveloping atmosphere of soft maternal discipline.11 Shepard is quick to assure us that his mother was “sweetly recovered” from her religious distraction before she died (in his fourth year) and that, probably at her death, she made many prayers for this her youngest son; but he makes almost as much of the example of his father, a “peacemaker” who, when he became competent to do so, “resolved to go and live . . . under a stirring ministry” (37–8). And what he appears to remember best is that, while his own mother was yet alive, he was sent away, during an outbreak of the plague, to live (and keep geese) with grandparents in “Fossecut, a most blind town and corner”; and from there to “Adthorp, a little blind town adjoining,” where he learned— dangerously, in Albro’s view—“to sing and sport as children do in those parts and dance at their Whitsun Ales.” And afterwards, that his father’s remarriage introduced him to a “woman who did let me see the diference between my own mother and a stepmother” (38). Even more poignant, perhaps—and most pointedly similar to the travails of his adult life—is the memory of the moment, some years later, when he prayed very strongly and heartily for the life of my father and made some covenant, if God would do it, to serve him better as knowing I should be left alone if he was gone. Yet the Lord took him away by death, and so I was left fatherless and motherless when I was about ten years old. (39) Here, plainly, is the kind of sentiment Shepard is unwilling to lavish on the image of his “Dear Son,” better protected from the uncertainties of childish life, as he may have thought, by the stability of his fatherhood. But if the death of either parent is part of some divine plan of “afiction,” designed to wean even the afections of the child away from the loves of this world, Shepard does not say so. Nor will he have learned the appropriate lesson by the time he is aficted with the death of his frst son. Still years away from his efective conversion, Shepard is evidently willing to let the feelings of the natural man speak for themselves—an indication of

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the emotional inertia which the call to sainthood must overcome, and a silent confession, perhaps, that preparations for salvation are not always recognized as such. The same history of “unsettlement”—a motive to Puritanism, in the mind of Shepard’s modern editor12—continues yet a while. The stepmother seems to have been willing enough to manage the young boy’s inheritance but not to supervise his education. Seeing this, his brother John intervenes with an informal adoption and, after an unhappy episode with a “cruel schoolmaster,” Shepard is fnally set upon a path that may lead to places other than hell or oblivion. The second schoolmaster, “an eminent preacher in those days,” eventually turns into “a great apostate and enemy to all righteousness”; but though Shepard fears in retrospect that this man did indeed go on to “commit the unpardonable sin,” he cannot deny the wholesomeness of his infuence at the time of his teaching. Reprobate or not, it so fell out by God’s providence that this man stirred up in my heart a love and desire of the honor of learning, and therefore I told my friends I would be a scholar. And so the Lord blessed me in my studies and gave me some knowledge of the Latin and Greek tongues. Thus, strangely enough, does Shepard begin to employ the discourse of providence. And though he is quick to remind us that his motive so far is only “ambition,” it appears that even this unregenerate passion may lead on to something more. Pained at his inept inability to take notes on sermons, he “prayed the Lord earnestly” for just that ability; and then—for which he sees “cause of wondering at the Lord’s providence”—the very next Sabbath, he “was able to take notes who the precedent Sabbath could do nothing at all that way” (39). Wonderful too is the memory of how “it pleased the Lord to put it into my brother’s heart to provide and to seek to prepare a place” at the University. And it is this large fact—of Shepard’s being admitted a pensioner to Emmanuel College (on February 10, 1619/20)—that gathers together many of the other, smaller ones and lifts them up out of the realm of the ordinary. And, as Shepard himself makes the point for us, there can be no ungodliness in recognizing Cambridge as the pinnacle of Shepard’s “preparation”: For I have oft thought what a woeful estate I had been left in if the Lord had left me in the profane, ignorant town of Towcester where I was born, that the Lord should pluck me out of that sink and Sodom, who was yet the least in my father’s house, forsaken of father and mother, yet that the Lord should fetch me out from thence with such a sweet hand. (40)

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A University education is by no means required for the salvation of a Puritan soul, but an educated ministry was becoming something like the chief glory of every reformed people. For the founding prophets of Massachusetts, Cambridge was the necessary school. “Conversion” there was not automatic, of course, and Shepard managed both to show of and to play around some before he began to get the ambient message. But when he did indeed begin to hear it—the bad news of sin that ran before the good news of grace—he felt the blast full bore: “the misery of every man out of Christ, viz., that whatever they did was sin”; which might apply to his sophomoric disputations as well as to his “lust and pride and gaming and bowling and drinking.” And even on that fateful morning after he was carried to the room of a friend “dead drunk,” when shame itself proposed “a course of meditation about the evil of sin and my own ways,” the work which Thomas Hooker would call “a holy kind of violence” was just beginning. The drama of this episode has seemed literary enough to fnd its way into the large and then the small collections of Perry Miller, as if this were the memorable moment of all the rest.13 But the unforgiving retrospect of the author himself suggests otherwise: for “although I was troubled for this sin, I did not know my sinful nature all this while” (41). And we ourselves, a section or two hence, will have to sound the depths of Shepard’s self-rejection, without which all talk of Providence were shameless self-regard. For the moment, however, it is enough to notice that one consequence of Shepard’s “Augustinian” conversion is to associate him with several generations of ministers who underwent similar experiences at Cambridge; and though not all the members of this “brotherhood” made their way to New England, virtually all went on from their “true sight of sin” to a truer sight of the function of the Church. For no surplice could sufce to whiten the heart of an unregenerate minister and no amount of sacred ritual— even the kind called “sacrament”—could substitute for Augustine’s radical “turning” from love of self to God.14 And, though Shepard does not throw himself all at once into movement of radical church reform, it does not take him long to realize that his “Puritan” conversion will have the most serious consequences for his ministerial career. Indeed his mentors seem to have joined him in his worry about “what would become of [him] when [he] was Master of Arts.” Serious deliberations attend the idea that a privately fnanced Lectureship15 might be assigned to “a great town in Essex called Coggeshall,” with Shepard as its frst endowed occupant. Only Hooker advises in the negative—knowing that the reguarly established minister in the town is “old yet sly and malicious,” and arguing that “it was dangerous and uncomfortable for little

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birds to build under the nests of old ravens and kites” (46). But then, at the very time and place of this debate about Puritan policy, representatives of Earle’s Colne appeared to request the Lectureship for their own town, by which providence this new fedged preacher “who was so young and weak and unexperienced and unft for so great a work,” was called to it by the unanimous decision of “twelve or sixteen” very accomplished ministers of Christ. Blessing upon blessing, for he might have been “cast away on a blind place,” or sent to be corrupted by the sins of “some gentleman’s house”; instead, however, it pleased the Lord, who had already led him “from the worst town, I think, in the world to the best place for knowledge and learning, viz., Cambridge,” stafed, just then, with “the most able men for preaching Christ in this latter age.” And when I came from thence the Lord sent me to the best country in England, viz., to Essex, and set me in the midst of the best ministry in the Country by whose monthly fasts and conferences I found much of God. And thus the Lord Jesus provided for me of all things of the best. (47) This might be pride but, as some Hawthorne Narrator might observe, it is supposed to be performing the work of humility, for the wonder is that God should touch the lowly. Nor is there any reason to suppose Shepard was thinking just this way when, in 1627, he left his residence with Thomas Weld and went to the newly created post at Earle’s Colne. He may well not have considered his “taking of orders” a “sinful” (47) compliance at that very time. Certainly he knew that a Lectureship was a way to work around England’s tightening control of its parish system and that, given the workings of that ingenious subterfuge, he was faring very well indeed. But someone has to get the lucky breaks, and Shepard’s “life” has not yet caught up with the moment of its own inspiration, which can hardly have come before the decision to leave for Massachusetts and may not have been confrmed until he realized his new identity as an exemplar of the New England Way. Others might be content to look back and see their life as a thing built up work by work, but Augustinian autobiography involves the interpretation of the works and days of an old self from the standpoint of one made new by grace.16 Yet now, as Shepard moves into the career of a minister working within the system but closely associated with older men working towards its subversion, his need for timely rescue can be predicted to increase. The work of “lecturing” at Earle’s Colne—on the “misery” of a people in sin, on “the remedy, Jesus Christ,” and on the behavior “answerable to [the] mercy

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[of] being redeemed by Christ”—goes very well; and this fact throws Satan predictably into a rage: the commissaries, registers, and others began to pursue me and to threaten me, as thinking I was a Nonconformable man (when for the most of that time I was not resolved either way, but was dark in those things). Yet the Lord having work to do in this place, kept me, a poor, ignorant thing, against them all until such a time as my work was done. For the moment Shepard is willing to cast the veil of a generalization over these salvations—from machinations his naivete may little have understood: “By strange and wonderful means . . . the Lord had one way or another to deliver me.” (48). But we get the idea that, in retrospect at least, the entirely pre-political work of preaching salvation in Christ and Him crucifed, even by a “poor, ignorant thing,” is coming to seem a task altogether worthy of the divine protection. And in the next ministerial moment the dangers become specifc indeed. As the Lectureship at Earle’s Colne expires after its term of three years, the grateful people of that town gather their own funds to keep their “extraordinary” preacher among them, even as its sponsors had hoped they might. For his part, Shepard sees that the endowment is now placed in the service of his native Towcester. And now, suddenly, he comes into sharp personal confict with the authorities whose system he has been more or less consciously undermining. He blames some failing in himself for incurring, by God’s will, the shame of an ofcial rebuke; but he leaves no doubt about the agency of his discipline: Bishop Laud is a “ferce enemy to all righteousness and a man ftted of God to be a scourge to his people” (49). Abruptly and angrily forbidden to exercise any sort of ministerial function within the diocese of London, Shepard lives for a time with friends, who are to him as “so many fathers and mothers”; and while meditating the full meaning of his humiliation, “the Lord let [him] see into the evil of the English ceremonies, cross, surplice, and kneeling” (50). Thus—if Shepard’s memory is faithful and honest—Laud has turned a moderate, possibly even a “conformable” man into a Puritan properly understood: for “Anglican” things cannot be “indiferent” so long as the word of man has made them a test of faith.17 So it is with a kind of odd appropriateness that Laud, on a tour of Essex, cites Shepard to appear a second time; and this time the angry prelate orders him out of his jurisdiction altogether. Unable to return to the University in accord with Laud’s dismissive suggestion, the pious young minister, so well launched and so favorably received, has now, literally, no place to turn. To complicate matters already difcult, Shepard now informs us—routinely and in the midst of sentences devoted to other weighty matters—that

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he “had about this time a great desire to change [his] estate by marriage.” Confessing, in a way that speaks volumes for the ways of a social world well lost, that he has been praying for three years that “the Lord would carry [him] to such a place where [he] might meet a yoke fellow,” Shepard seems to be implying that just about any means of support would be welcome at this time. A call to Yorkshire “to preach there in a gentleman’s house” suggests itself; so too does the possibility of New England; or of Ireland by way of Scotland. The outskirts, surely: well enough for the boy from Towcester, one supposes, unless that boy has been to school in Cambridge and to work in Essex County. But while these heavy matters hang in the balance, Shepard and his friend Weld are delegated by the local brotherhood to confront Laud publicly, before he has left their turf: was it, after all, acceptable “to let such a swine to root up God’s plants in Essex and not give him some check?” (50). But Laud can play the game as well. And as the young protesters approach his person, Weld, already under sentence of excommunication and hence risking checkmate, is “committed to the pursuivant and bound over to answer . . . the High Commission” for daring to appear on holy ground. As he tries to explain himself, Laud asks him if he intends to go to New England and, if so, will he please take Shepard with him. And now it is Shepard’s turn: While he was thus speaking I came into the crowd and heard the words. Others bid me go away, but neglecting to do it, a godly man pulled me with violence out of the crowd. And as soon as ever I was gone the apparitor calls for Mr. Shepard, and the pursuivant was sent presently after to fnd me out. But he that pulled me out . . . hastened our horses and away we rid as fast as we could. And so the Lord delivered me out of the hand of that lion a third time. (51) Lions do not always have hands, but Shepard’s metaphor is dead in only the most technical of senses. Fresh and lively here is the biblical echo: “your enemy is as a lion, going up and down, seeking whom he may devour.” Implied as well is a keen sense that Shepard’s frst two encounters with Laud had also involved deliverances; that given the power of the ofce and the mood of the man, this is now the third time the upstart has escaped arrest by ofcers of the State, in the service of a Church, whose odd Latinate names appear nowhere in the Acts of the Apostles, and whose ironic function it may have been to create or to confrm Puritans as well as to arrest them.18 However that may be, Shepard fnally understands that he can delay— one had almost said dally—no longer. Interpreting a series of invitations

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from private persons in Yorkshire as “the voice of the man of Macedonia, Come and help us,” he resolves “to follow the Lord to so remote and strange a place, the rather because I might be far from the hearing of the malicious Bishop Laud.” Magical rescue and urgent call aside, however, the tone of discouragement remembers itself: “with much grief of heart I forsook Essex and Earle’s Colne and they me, going, as it were, now I knew not whither” (51). Cambridge behind, remoteness and uncertainty ahead, what could now sustain this brilliant young failure but the Spirit of God and His grace? Of which there appears to be no lack. Saved by a “wonderful preservation” from violent food waters on the way to Yorkshire, Shepard is now made to profess that he “looked now upon [his] life as a new life given unto me, which I saw good reason to give up unto him and his service,” and this even though—or is it because?—“the Lord that had dealt only gently with me before began to afict me and to let me taste how good it was to be under his tutoring” (52). This odd preference for afiction may or may not suggest a certain religious masochism. It certainly appears to forget the moments of near despair in the dark night of the conversion at Cambridge; and if the forgetting is at all strategic, the suggestion may be that the entire experience there may have been initiatory rather than fnal, that Shepard has not entirely entered into the life of his redemption. Perhaps that fnality will come, whatever we decide to call it, when he shall have arrived at some confrming sense of why his fragile life and wayward soul were deemed worthy of saving in the frst place. Meanwhile, however, natural life goes on: moral afairs at the house of a gentleman of Buttercrambe are quite as bad as he once imagined such things might be; and, amidst a cast of characters with names that seem proleptic of Restoration Comedy, only the faithful attention of a few sincere souls can alleviate the depression into which the exiled Shepard has understandably fallen. A sermon preached at the “marriage of one Mr. Allured, a most profane young gentleman,” to the daughter of his patron, Sir Richard Darley, has the reassuring efect of touching both her heart and that of Mistress Margaret Touteville, soon to become Shepard’s own wife. Following these early examples, the whole Darley family is brought, if not to Christ, at least to such a favorable estimate of Thomas Shepard that they present their kinswoman to him not only freely but with an enlarged portion. And thus, says Shepard, the Lord answered his desires by giving him “a wife who was most incomparably loving to me and every way amiable and holy and endued with a very sweet spirit of prayer” (53). But though Shepard credits the Lord for being best unto him just when his “adversaries intended most hurt” to him, those adversaries press on him nevertheless; and, with the Laudean “Bishop Neile coming up to York, no friends could procure my liberty of him without subscription” (53–4)—without, that is

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to say, his unambiguous profession of loyalty to the church of Laud and of Charles I. And for this reversal of tendency there is now no chance. Happily, therefore, the Lord gives Shepard a call to a town in Northumberland—not “a place of subsistence with any comfort” but “far from any bishops.” Fit audience is found, however, and it is here that this determined preacher of sin and grace comes to understand the politics of Puritanism properly so called—“the ceremonies, church government and estate, and the unlawful standing of bishops” (54) Clearly we are coming to the end of something; and so, when he is once again forbidden to preach in public, his attention is turned at last toward New England—where Cotton, Hooker, Stone, and Weld have gone, where in consequence “most of the godly in England” (55) were now intending to go, and where—God knows, and Shepard too, though only in retrospect—his life has been tending all along. Following a call, then, “by diverse friends [already] on New England to come over and many in old England desiring me to go over and promising to go with me, I did thereupon resolve to go thither.” Yet there seems little enthusiasm for the Errand of Reformation; for what were now his options? Sooner or later, one fears, he will have to do better. The birth of a “son called Thomas, anno 1633” would seem to complicate the real-life arrangements, and surely Shepard might cite him as a reason for his lack of enthusiasm for a 3000-mile voyage to God knows what. But as Shepard is nearing the crisis of a “life” written to highlight manifold human failings in spite of redundant divine mercies, he is more caught up in the memory of his fear of his wife’s death at the hands of an unskillful midwife: But as the afiction was very bitter, so the Lord did teach me much by it, for I began to grow secretly proud and full of sensuality, delighting my soul in my dear wife more than in my God, whom I had promised better unto, and my spirit grew ferce in some things and secretly mindless of the souls of the people. “And so,” he concludes, as if unaware of the possible non sequitur, “I then began to listen to a call to New England” (55), as if that momentous public decision fgured chiefy as a way to atone for personal pride and sensuality. Perhaps we should not be surprised when the frst attempt at secret emigration does not prosper. God may or may not be resisting Shepard’s moral logic, but Shepard himself, catching up, now, with his own preface, and looking back on an attempt that failed and then one that succeeded— disturbingly like a child that died and then one that lived—may be searching for an explanation of why his life has required him not only to put the Creator ahead of all His lovely creatures, but also, as a consequence of that, to put the interest of the churches of New England ahead of the safety

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of his own soul. The hard part of Shepard’s “Autobiography,” that is to say, is not what Providence provided but what Reformation required. And it may clear the mind of cant to examine the conditions of a test we never ask ourselves to pass. The “reasons” which sway Shepard to New England are no more and no less interesting than any such exercise in the norming of afect: feelings are feelings, and the decision in the nervous system informs but does not consult the numbered list or indeed the Reason. But Shepard’s mental scheme names other “faculties” and, as we may surely sense, Puritans routinely measure the must by the terms of the may. And so the prime consideration—“I saw no call to any other place in old England”—is supplemented by the desire of friends, the sight of the Lord’s departure from England, an increasing sense of “the evil of ceremonies” and of “mixed communion,” the “duty to desire the fruition of all God’s ordinances,” the wishes of his wife, and no clear conviction of the need to “stay and sufer” when “the Lord had opened a door of escape” (55–6). A mixed bag, as Shepard honestly recognizes. Trying to fan the spark of a duty to love pure ordinances into the fame of a desire, he sets the concern for his “own quiet” against a vision of “the glory of those liberties in New England” and solemnly promises, in language that recalls the “new life” of his escape from drowning on his way to York, that “if ever I should come over, to live among God’s people as one come out from the dead” (56). Evidently the body of a list served the spirit of “meditation”—itself designed to make the good reason into the real.19 And the process continues. Friends “desire [him] to stay in the north and preach privately,” but a list of considerations countervails: fear of impending “trouble from King Charles”; no reason to work privately when he might “exercise [his] talent publicly in New England”; the hope these very friends might follow him there; a distaste of inficting “that rude place of the north” on his wife and child; and, fnally—back to the head of both lists—his “private liberty was daily threatened” (56). Having thus “decided,” he both preaches and privately bids farewell to his friends in the North and proceeds, “in a disguised manner,” to Ipswich and then to the familiar territory of Essex, there to wait the moment of Escape struggling to inscribe itself as Errand. This is the “most uncomfortable and fruitless time” of his entire life, Shepard credibly confesses, and not the least because his wife is again pregnant—with a child who would have to be baptized, to the delight of the discovering pursuivants; or not, to the scandal of many sound, sacramental Christians. “And therefore,” in prosecution of a purpose still somewhat hypothetical, and spurred on by the fact that “diverse godly Christians [were] resolved to go toward the latter end of the year if I would go, I did therefore resolve to go that year, the end of the summer I came from the north” (57). Very well, then: nothing truly difcult is ever easy. But surely exhaustion of the audience has not been Shepard’s primary purpose here. What he seems

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to intend, rather, is partly to imitate the stuttering efect of conficted behavior; but also, and more importantly, to suggest that the decision was not at all easy to make and was anything but hasty or ill-considered. Just in case anyone should happen to ask. His surviving son, for example, who might want to know why he was not destined to go to the real Cambridge; or else, should his private story ever become public, some godly minister who had decided to stick it out in England, come hell or high water. To keep hiding out, if that is what it required, or to rot in prison, confrmed in the knowledge that sufering for the right is never in vain. But if the well-remembered reign of Mary had produced its list of Martyrs, had it not produced as well a share of Exiles? And had not the ones been about as well motivated as the others? And so Shepard is being careful to the point of redundancy. Having just here caught up with his Preface—abstracted in advance, and especially tailored for the ferce edifcation of the son just now about to be inconveniently born—Shepard has in mind the keenest issue raised by the Great Migration considered as a desertion of Mother Church in her hour of greatest need, as a separation in undeniable fact if not in debatable theory. Recognizing the pressure of this issue, Albro interrupts his running elaboration of Shepard’s own account to quote at length from the 1649 Preface to the Defense of the Answer which Shepard appears to have cowritten with John Allin; and Perry Miller’s anthologies, which gracefully slight the “Autobiography,” resolutely insist on this text, quite probably with the example of Albro in mind.20 While the body of this work tries to defend, from the explicit attack of “Presbyterian” reformers in England, the explicit workings of New England’s Congregational Way, Shepard’s Preface seeks to answer the more fundamental question of the very presence in New England of emigrated (not quite exiled) English Puritans: not “what sorts of things are you alienated radicals doing over there?” but “what in God’s name are you doing over there in the frst place?” And though some ten years separate the composition of the “Autobiography” from that of the Defense, Shepard is already sounding his special note—not instantaneous revelation of a blindingly clear mission in the wilderness just begging for typological translation but, given the “terrible paucity of alternatives,” emigration as an option a sane man might have to learn to love. Which he did. Not of himself, perhaps, and not all at once, but in due time and to good efect. Evidently New England had not been at all his own frst choice, but only God’s; and a fact like that the sane might not discover all at once. But what indeed were the alternatives? Inventing distinctions of reason to salve the conscience of compliance? As if the body of an English parish might house the soul of a covenant. Learning to “live without God’s ordinances” and (as Shepard recalls his debt to the moral support of other conscientious persons) without the “Communion of Saints which he called us unto, and our soules breathed after?” Joining together in “private

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separated Churches?” At some point, as we hear it in the prose, a strong conviction has replaced the endless listing and the stammering hesitation. Perhaps this is just where, like the second son, it had begun to be born. On one very sensitive point the skilled apologist even seems to echo and at the same time to strengthen the troubled confessor: as 1639 looked back to 1633–34, sufering for Christ was a possible but not an inevitable option, for “the Lord had opened a door of escape” (56); a decade later the alternative to fnding a way “to have flled the Prisons” has become “a wide doore . . . set open of liberty otherwise.”21 Yet Shepard’s main point in the Defense is not quite the inevitability or even, in the wake of a success they only dreamed of at Plymouth, the resplendent glory of the New English alternative. Rather—as if the subjective bias of the autobiographer had gone along to keep the mind of the disputants fastened on the thing that makes religion meaningful in the frst place—it is the almost paralyzing seriousness of those who took that option: the Lord alone knows “what prayers and tears,” what whole days of “fasting and prayer,” what “longings and pantings of heart,” what “serious consultations with one another” lay behind the conviction, of so many godly persons, that the risk of making it new in New England was an idea acceptable in heaven. It will embarrass our own sense of appropriate professional diction to read very much self-defense of this sort—this daring of God to judge the place where one of necessity stands, or in a pinch decides to go—but then that might be part of the point of reading godly letters in the frst place. Nor will Shepard let it rest with an account of Puritan deliberation. For in the end the talking mattered about as little as the lists. What mattered was the mood—what Shepard’s psychotheology calls the “strange poise of spirit the Lord hath laid upon many of our hearts.” “Poise,” on frst reading, might be archaic for “stasis,” some sense of being caught up in a moment of motivation degree zero; and that, except for Shepard’s wish to generalize the case, will stand very nicely for the mood and the manner that ran before the moment when he came to cast the die of his own volition. But in fact he seems to intend the more ordinary meaning of confdence based on competence. And strange it must have been, for what confdence could any of them have? And based on what competence?—those that can, do; the rest may only preach and duck. Wondering not at the sudden apparation of an apparitor, nor at the fery hunt of a pursuivant, they could not “but wonder at themselves,” that so many, and some so weak and tender, with such cheerfulness and constant resolutions against so many perswasions of friends, discouragements from ill report of this countrey, the straits, wants, and tryalls of Gods people in it, . . . should leave our accomodations and comforts,

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should forsake our dearest relations, Parents, brethren, Sisters, Christian acquaintances, overlooke all the dangers and difculties of the vast Seas, the thought thereof was a terrour to many and all this to go to a wildernesse, where wee could forcast nothing but care and temptations, onely in hope of enjoying Christ in his Ordinances [and] in the fellowship of his people.22 The passage runs on, but that is the nature of its (anti-sublime) structure: no amount of difculty then could disturb the resolve of these emigrants; and no analysis can now quite account for the way the calm had come about. Perhaps—after all discussion subsided—they gave it to one another. Perhaps that is what used to be meant by being “in the Spirit.” It may seem unfair to have leapt ahead to read the gloss of 1648 as a gloss on the gloss of 1639, but Albro did it frst; and even Perry Miller may have known what he was doing. The point, perhaps, is that this is what a man cumulatively convinced (and repeatedly saved) could not quite say in the earlier moment. Not that it was not true—and made up much later as a sort of lying for the right. But that it may have taken Shepard that long to realize what (he thought) was really going on. Remarkable providences there unmistakably were: any fool could see when luck ran long or often in his own favor. But maybe it took somewhat longer to notice how God might move in the mind of a group. What we need to remember, in any event, is that what Shepard tells his son—not yet part of the noosphere—is only a part of the truth. What, then? Circumstances delay departure until quite dangerously late in the season, and the Lord—“to chastise us for . . . hazarding ourselves in that manner,” and also (for He loveth cliches) to teach us “never to go about a sad business in the dark” (57)—sends a powerfully adverse wind; navigational catastrophe ensues, but not without providing the certain loss and then surprising salvation of a sailor “never able to swim but supported by a divine hand” (58). And “this man’s danger and deliverance is a type of ours” (58), insists Shepard, who, from the attention he gives to this frst ill-fated voyage to New England, may himself have been one of those in “terrour” of the sea. Catastrophic dangers persist, in any case, threatening all with death, driving the godly to prayer, and inspiring a “drunken fellow” named Mr. Cock to persuade the seamen to cut down the mainmast. This helps but, like many a second cause all by itself, not enough; and so Shepard and his colleague John Norton lead the ship’s crew and passengers in committing “their souls and bodies unto the Lord that gave them”; and only then did “the wind beg[i]n to abate” (60). So far, perhaps, we can hardly imagine any scenario signifcantly diferent: lots of people will pray when nothing else seems to be working. But Shepard goes on to register, implicitly, his diference from most people,

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then and now, insisting that he will remember this ultimate terror and the rescue beyond the moment when such a thing seemed possible. Indeed he will even renew his now familiar promise of newborn dedication: This deliverance was so great that I then did think if ever the Lord did bring me to shore again I should live like one . . . risen from the dead. This is one of those living mercies the Lord hath shown me, a mercy to myself, to my wife and child then living, and to my second son Thomas who was in the . . . womb of his dear mother. (60) We may here begin to resent Shepard’s incipient attempt to capture the conscience of the unborn with a dramatic confrmation of his own faith, but this application is hardly separable from Shepard’s general orientation toward the future. He knows that a man like himself—so “full of many temptations and weaknesses”—is hardly worth saving as such; and so he feels it as the part of gratitude properly considered to dedicate all future version of himself to the work to which he is seeking to join himself. From the point of view of the work yet to be accomplished, his unborn son is hardly more a prolepsis than his own future self. And so, if it seems inescapably prejudicial, in the manner of any strong parental belief, it is at least intelligible that Shepard should “desire this mercy should be remembered of my children and their children’s children when I . . . cannot praise the Lord in the land of the living anymore” (61). The more so, perhaps, because the efect is cumulative, for at this period the Lord simply kept on touching the entire family. And so, as if the “waters” of afiction were sufcient to purify the mixed intentions of the once competent but now hapless Thomas Shepard, the Lord sends the “fre” of a vomiting sickness to the son already in life. Aware of his own “fear, pride, carnal content, immoderate love of creatures and of my child especially,” Shepard tries to barter repentance in exchange for the child, “but the Lord would not be entreated” for its life; nor can a grieving—and possibly puzzled—Shepard be present at the funeral, “lest the pursuivants should apprehend me . . . which was a great afiction and very bitter to me and my dear wife,” who could also be taken away, as the future would prove. Understandably enough, therefore, Shepard begins to wonder if the decision for New England were not perhaps a mistake. Yet still there is the sight of that “door opened of escape,” and still, it appears, a certain “poise of spirit” in spite of everything. From which he concludes that the decision was indeed correct, but only the man himself was “unft”: “with such an unmortifed, hard, dark, formal, hypocritical heart . . . no wonder if the Lord did thus cross me” (61). Shepard is, of course, being as hard on himself as possible; every bit as hard, it would appear, as on his

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son. And before we complain that such formulaic self-accusation is a small price to pay for the assurance that God has involved Himself in one’s very own life, we ought recall that Shepard is appealing to God’s providence not as a reason for self-congratulation but as an occasion of enhanced self-demand. In this crisis at least, God intervenes not to reward and not even to reassure, but only to discipline and to challenge—to dare a man ready enough to settle for such virtue as may fall in the way of his professional exercises to look further into the various guises of own self-satisfaction and to require of himself the highest standard of public dedication. New England is God’s idea, not Shepard’s own. Nor has God decided to make the pursuit of Reform Abroad an obvious choice or an easy action. Others would decide as they must, but Shepard needs to be sure he is neither “running too far in a way of separation from the mixed assemblies in England” (62) nor seeking New England as a scene of peace, for himself and his precious family. Small wonder, then, if God should think to afict him in just that area. For if souls are indeed saved in groups, the scene of that salvation is the congregation, beside which, the nuclear family is an idol which—as Edwards’s rare lucidity will show—only sentiment will refuse to recognize as such.23 And so it takes a while. Friends are happy to provide for this family that would be holy all winter long and, in London in the spring, “the lord provided a very private place for us where my wife was brought to bed and delivered of my second son Thomas” who—like Cotton’s famous son Seaborn—“was not baptized until we came to New England” (62).24 Other providences also seem worth recording: the expectant mother falls down a fight of stairs without harm to herself or the child and a timely change of houses keeps Shepard one step ahead of the pursuivants. Soon enough, however, it comes time “to prepare for a removal once again to New England,” and once again there must be reasons, the chief of which is that the lesson of “unftness” has been learned. The voyage fnds Shepard mercifully protected from “the violence of sea sickness,” but in one of the many storms his wife “took such a cold and got such weakness as that she fell into consumption of which she afterwards died” (63). But not yet; in the meantime this nursing mother that would be in Israel was spared again when, in a violent shaking of the ship, “her head was pitched against an iron bolt” (63–4). For the rest of these personal matters we must return to the Preface: the second son’s failure to thrive; Shepard’s arguing, indeed bargaining with Him who giveth and taketh away; the sudden and strange healing, after that, of the “sore mouth which I did expect would have his death” (35); the wife’s instantaneous rescue by an invisible hand but also her more general preservation, from the consumption which threatened, until the safe arrival in New England could provide for the living son of Thomas Shepard both a tender nurse and proper baptism; the challenge to that son to know and serve

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the God of that baptism, lest the much disrupted life of his father—and the untimely deaths of both his mother and an older brother of his very name— should seem undergone in vain. A heavy trip, even by the standards of an age less sensitive to the autonomous being of the child.25 In the context of the narrative itself, however, the omission of this climactic stroke of guilty legacy has the efect of throwing the emphasis on matters more public, indeed more properly Puritan. And we need to remind ourselves that, however it turned out in literary fact,26 the prime motive of those who sought Reform in New England was not to entrap and then hamstring their ofspring. Contrasting with the condition of leaving England, the kind reception by friends indicates that the future will be diferent from the past. And, as if to keep this fact from seeming selfsh, Shepard records the fulfllment of a “great desire” of his (dying) wife, “to leave me in safety from the hand of my enemies and among God’s people, and also the child under God’s precious ordinances” (64); perhaps she was indeed a “most imcomparably loving” wife. More genuinely public is the fact—innocent to Shepard if not to those more deeply involved in a plot already in medias res27—that the congregation at Newtown is just then beginning its “removal to Hartford at Connecticut.” Thus Shepard and his party fnd “many houses empty and many persons willing to sell”; and fnding the situation mostly satisfactory, many of them “did desire to sit still and not to remove further.” Within a few months of their arrival, therefore, “there was a purpose to enter into church fellowship, which we did . . . about the end of the winter” (64). This ought to bring an important phase of Shepard’s life to what Henry James might call a “formal conclusion”; for surely the proper accomplishment of this New World beginning is both the goal which migrant Puritanism everywhere discovers itself to have been seeking, and also the end which authorizes the autobiographical gesture in the frst place—raising it, if only just barely, out of the level of the personal and onto that plane where the life of the saint may fairly merge with the fate of an enterprise in which Providence itself must take an active role.28 Complicating this happy merger of the intensely personal with the perfectly public, however, is the fact that a fortnight after [this founding] my dear wife Margaret died, being frst received into church fellowship which, as she much longed for, so the Lord did sweeten it unto her that she was hereby exceedingly cheered and comforted with a sense of God’s love, which continued until her last gasp. (64–5) Not the last nor yet the most sharply sorrowful of the deaths Shepard will have to record, it is in fact noteworthy for its extreme “composure”: never

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one to “rail,” Shepard seems more willing to accept this death than that of his frst son, already, or that of his second wife, in the future. Surely not an event Shepard could in any sense have desired, it seems nevertheless one for which he has prepared himself; and further, it is “balanced” by other, happier facts of saintly life—the safe arrival in the land of religious mission, the survival and baptism of the son who has somehow become identical with the second, successful attempt to reach that land, the foundation of yet another reformed church. For all of which the loving Margaret seems as grateful as the worried Shepard himself. But what makes her death bearable, fnally, is the way she herself is able to bear it—full of joy that her husband and son and herself are all safe in the church, the point of it all in the frst place. Probably Margaret Touteville Shepard could not have predicted that acceptance into a church which, most unlike the “mixed assemblies” of England, was instituted on purpose to receive only tried and tested saints into its communion, would be an occasion of overfowing joy; but, unless her husband is faking his facts, she seems to have found that acceptance comforting indeed. Worth dying for, almost. Or, if that thought were a little morose, worth living an entire life in the struggle to discover and to realize. No record of his wife’s confession of faith appears among those that now enlarge and adorn the modern edition of Shepard’s “Autobiography”; perhaps her redundantly verbal husband gave one on her own most modest behalf.29 But it is almost as if the still ardent but now strangely fulflled Margaret knows the meaning of her husband’s life better than he does himself. Unless we recall that, as Shepard is refectively writing rather than originally living that life, he may have found in her, for the moment at least, his own necessary symbol. Lovely women dying seem perpetually to be running that risk. And unless our theory of the family romance has failed us completely, the fate of the wife may be preferable to that of the son. But while we puzzle over the choice between dying into and living out the life of the most patriarchal (if not very patristic) Puritan church, the events of Shepard’s highly compressed yet swiftly variable narrative move right along. And not to any swift resolution either, as a new and disturbing set of historical questions—proper to the life of the churches but unexpected in a place that had been sought as a realm of answers—efectively disrupts his moment of spiritual poise and literary composure: No sooner were we thus set down and entered into church fellowship but the Lord exercised us and the whole country with the opinions of the Familists, begun by Mistress Hutchinson, raised up to a great height by Mr. Vane too suddenly chosen governor, and maintained too obscurely Mr. Cotton, and propegated too boldly by the members of Boston and some in other churches. (65)

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The unusually long sentence goes right on, inventing further parallel constructions to specify the deleterious efects of this multiplicity of personal causes, but the alert reader needs only the reference to the troublemakers as “Familists” to understand that Shepard’s outrage can hardly pause to be fair.30 But what energizes this passage is more its irony than its anger. Indeed Shepard’s efect is almost uncanny: “no sooner” had we reached the place the Lord Himself provided for perfect Reformation Practice than that same Lord “exercised us” with problems in the area of Salvation Theory we thought well settled and left behind. And as the pilgrim for “peace” is forced to discover that its time is not yet, we hear a tone that asks if not a resentful “Why me?” at least an exasperated “What next?” Shepard’s account of the “principal seed” of what has come to be known as the “Antinomian Controversy” is complex and multiform; and one incidental efect of our study of godly letters might well be to make it (and other such well considered formulations) roughly familiar if not altogether friendly. For the moment, however, it is enough to notice that some considerable persons seem to be putting forth a theory that would place sinful man’s timely, human discovery of his eternal “election” by God not at the end of a long and painful process of sorrowful introspection and (as it were) despair of one’s ability ever to deserve the favor of the Most Holy God; and not even, after that, in the midst of a “covenantal” process by which persons discover a new-found ability to perform some “spiritual” work which Scripture marks as a sort of condition (though not really a proper cause) of salvation; but only as a wonderful fact all by itself; or, as Shepard puts the detested position, “by an immediate revelation in an absolute promise” (65). Saints do not infer their salvation—Shepard is horrifed to hear—from any other process, fact, or condition; they know it directly, rather, as God makes it known to them as such. And of course there was, as the reader may properly fear, very much to be said on both sides. Much of what Shepard has to say—on the side of a painful “preparation” for salvation and on the thing itself as a sort of non-causal condition—is argued in the lengthy sermon sequences he delivered while trying to stay a step ahead of the pursuivants in England and was able much later able to put into print.31 The point here is simply that, as Shepard’s experience of religion was marked by “anxiety” at every turn, he could scarcely be expected to favor the “way” of spontaneous insight and perfect assurance. Indeed it is even possible to imagine that Shepard’s extended account of his grinding, seven-stage conversion experience at Cambridge was written, retrospectively, with the prophets of the “Faire and Easie Way”32 in Mind. Like Jonathan Edwards, perhaps, Shepard had “a variety of concerns and exercises about [his] soul” before he could mark the efcacious beginning of his conversion as such.33 The earnest prayers for the life of his

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father seem to have begun a process in which he thought he could see “the spirit of God wrastling with me” (40). And at Cambridge, afterwards, he was somewhat moved by the preaching of frst “old Doctor Chaderton” and then, “half a year after,” that of Mr. Dickinson. Then too, in the midst of a falling away from these salubrious infuences, there was the peripatetic dialogue with the “godly scholar” we have noticed before—a timely reminder, from the voice of a social peer, of the hopelessly sinful predicament of “every man out of Christ” (41). But probably this sort of on-again-of-again religion would have continued indefnitely if it had not been for the stif dose of self-revulsion that resulted from waking up, one Sabbath morning, “sick with [the] beastly carriage” that caused him in fact to be “carried,” unconscious, to the room of a sympathetic fellow scholar. One almost imagines that this unusual suspension of consciousness was somehow necessary—a parodic reminder, perhaps, that there can indeed be interruptions in the activity we reify and then thematize as the “self.” For a modern student, indeed, this dramatic lapse might have been quite enough to turn the life around. For Shepard, however, it leads not to the confession one is asked to make before other reforming alcoholics but to an extended moment of self-revelation “in the cornfelds” where he had gone, like Adam, perhaps, to hide from God. And though he can plainly see, in painful retrospect, that he “did not know [his] sinful nature all this while” (41), this moment of predictable shame verging toward an efcacious sight of an ingrained human sinfulness seems efectively to have begun the process by which his soul was turned from the life of sin to the love of God. It is, however, only the beginning; and though the seven steps or stages which follow involve some heavy going, it is a serious mistake to stop reading just here. For without some sense that Shepard’s rendition of a powerfully private experience is written both honestly and in animation of a technical understanding, of something scholarship has learned to call a “morphology of conversion,”34 nothing else about the remarkable thought-experiment of New England will make much sense. Dauntingly sincere, Shepard must nevertheless write his drama of religious crisis and resolution into a pattern which could stand the test of public scrutiny: not “I’m saved, I have God’s own word for it”; but here, in a series of stages, which make sense in relation to one another and to Scripture’s defnition of the end to be achieved, is the process by which I, like others before me, and as a model (perhaps) for those to come after, came to understand what Scripture means by “sin” as an inherent condition from which we need to be saved and by “faith” as the only means by which. Of course it could happen all at once: “What I choose is youse.”35 But such has been not at all Shepard’s own experience. Nor does it correspond very well with the (complementary) way his salvation taught him to read Scripture’s assembled account of how a Sovereign God has in fact decided

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to make known the otherwise mysterious decree of predestination—with and not without, in the overwhelming majority of cases, some painful period of prior preparation; for how could the subject of salvation appreciate (or for that matter even understand) the meaning of being saved without frst realizing that he was indeed lost? And, more emphatically still, in the act of accepting a gift freely ofered. True, that acceptance had to be an especially enabled and not a naturally free choice or the scheme ceased to be “Calvinist.”36 But an important point was being made nevertheless: one realized one’s salvation not “anyhow” but only in the new-found ability to answer a call one never could before: to accept, as it were, a new (Christic) identity in exchange for the one self-love had loved so long. And if something such were indeed the nexus of God’s plot, then the Sectaries who announced themselves “no sooner” than the moment of his arrival would soon fnd Shepard a formidable opponent indeed. Certainly no one holding their “immediatist” theory should attempt to join the particular church to which this tough-loving pastor (and his like-minded followers) held the keys. For when assurance has barely and dearly been wrested from prolonged anxiety, the tale of spiritual self-evidence is likely to sound not poised but merely complacent. In a second distinct step, then, it begins to be borne in upon the looseliving yet vividly impressionable Thomas Shepard that, in calling for the hearer of its word to “be renewed in the spirit of your mind” (41), the New Testament is requiring of the convert nothing less remarkable than a change of the image of self-identity and of the basis of motivation—a “personality change” if ever there was one. Accordingly, as Shepard listens to this call for renewal preached out of “Romans 12,” he seems to hear— in a frontal attack on the self-deceptive self-regard of the natural man as such—“the secrets of my soul . . . laid open before me,” as if someone had told the preacher “of all that ever I did, of all the turnings and deceits of my heart” (41–2). By all accounts Shepard’s own evangelical genius will master the lesson of this preaching, the trick and the truth of learning “to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men”; for the moment, however, he is ready to account Doctor Preston as “the most searching preacher in the world.” And, for that same moment, he must recognize that Preston has succeeded only partially in the game of “killing me softly.” For though Shepard may ftly “bless God I did see my frame and hypocrisy and self and secret sins,” the logic he is learning forces him equally to confess that he fnds as yet a “hard heart” that could not be appropriately “afected” (42) by that sight. And this is to say, in the terminology of his own sequence of sermons on “The Sound Believer,” that he has undergone the preparatory phase of “conviction” but not yet that of “compunction.”37 Students often afect not to understand this diference—between the clear intellectual recognition

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that one is indeed a sinner, “by nature,” and so continuously and without remission, and the passionate hatred of that very condition. Nor are they always assisted by reference to this pair of preparations as the inevitable outcome of the scholastic division of “faculties” into intellect and will, or yet as the creation of the Ramist bias of the binary. What they wish to know, it seems, is how could one see oneself as inevitably, and as it were hopelessly, involved in a world where every available option meant nothing but Self in one clever disguise or another and not be, well, moved by the discovery. Perhaps they ought to read their Hobbes as well as their Calvin, or their Hume, for humanistic self-acceptance may sufce if there truly is no alternative. What Shepard seems bound to believe, however, is that a full-blown religious renewal—the gradual conversion of Saint Augustine if not the instantaneous calling of the Apostle Paul—provides the possibility of self-overcoming; and that though one could, at the beginning, only undergo the regenerating process, it made good sense to do everything one could, if not to abet, then at least to contextualize the divine activity required. Accordingly, therefore, Shepard hastens to make the shameful gap between the adequate perception and the appropriate hatred of himself as “sinner”—toute crache if not par excellence—“the work of daily meditation” (42). And now the process appears to begin in earnest; for, whatever may be the modern tuition on the subject of the innocence of “feeling” as such, the psychological world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries makes no sense apart from the deeply held belief, of Reformation and Counter-Reformation alike, that one was well advised, not to feel the full force of one’s feelings, for that were tautology indeed, but to try to bring one’s forceful feelings into something like an appropriate relation to one’s crucial concepts. Sin is bad, granted. The worst, I hear you say? I guess you may be right. Well then, Sucker, is not your stupid, grinning afect just a little out of place? The dialogue is internal, of course; for, unlike an aroused conscience, Thomas Preston could hardly follow you around the entire day. Except as his preaching could be fairly internalized, precisely as “meditation.” So Shepard’s mind bears down on itself, in themes no less unsettling than they have come to be predictable: the evil of sin, the terror of God’s wrath, day of death, beauty of Christ, the deceitfulness of the human heart, etc.; but principally I found this my misery: sin . . . did lie light upon me as yet, yet I was much afraid of death and the fames of God’s wrath. (42) He knows, that is to say, the evil of sin, but he does not yet quite feel it. But, as meditation and writing are forever wedded, he takes a little book

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with him into the felds, to write down “what God taught me lest I should forget.” This process involves growth, he admits, but only in the awareness of his own confused questionings—“whether there were a God,” “whether Christ was the Messiah,” “whether the Scriptures were God’s word”; and whether, had he been educated diferently, he might just as well have come to believe that “Popery” or “Turkism” were the very truth; or even Grindletonian perfectionism, according to which the conscientious teaching of his mentors was all so much legalism. Shake hands on that, Sister Hutchinson. Delivered from that fatal error, after many prayers, the Lord let him see “the three main wounds in my soul”: (1) I could not feel sin as my greatest evil; (2) I could do nothing but I did seek myself in it and was imprisoned there, and though I desired to be a preacher, yet it was honor I did look to . . .; (3) I felt a depth of atheism and unbelief in the main matters of salvation and whether the Scriptures were God’s word. If the last of these self-accusations seems a little non-specifc, we should notice that in Shepard’s case it went to the extent of “secret and hellish blasphemy” whenever he read (or heard read) Scripture accounts of “Christ’s miracles,” with the result that he began to wonder if he had not “committed the unpardonable sin.” And so for three quarters of a year I had some strong temptations to run my head against walls and brain and kill myself. And so I did see, as I thought, God’s eternal reprobation of me, a fruit of which was this dereliction to these doubts and darkness, and I did see God like a consuming fre and an everlasting burning, and myself like a poor prisoner leading to that fre. Clearly in extremis—and not knowing what else to do—Shepard tries the bold experiment of imitating Christ: “when he was in an agony he prayed earnestly” (43). A good sign, this earnest praying, but not as yet “compunction.” For the fear of damnation seems to be counting for more than the pure detestation of the infnite evil of sin—a God-insult—precisely as such. Only within the prayer itself does Shepard begin to sense the problem—“myself so unholy and God so holy” as to make mediation seem quite out of the question. But this thought, instead of deepening or fxing the despair, calls forth instead a “spirit of prayer . . . for free mercy and pity”; so that the entire process so far can be seen as the Lord’s way of “helping me to see my unworthiness of any mercy and that I was worthy to be cast out of his sight and to leave myself with him to do with me what he would, and there and never until

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then I found rest” (43–4). A later generation of the New England Theology has taken credit (and then blame) for defning the sentiment of salvation as a “willingness to be damned for the Glory of God”; but if the awesome thought required august parentage, surely one might father it here.38 And if one were to accuse Shepard, at this moment, of having gone beyond compunction’s killing sense to some relief from the tricky problem of achieving some infnite negative afect, surely he might argue in his own defense that things come out even only when, one’s sinfulness being realized as indeed infnite, the entire question is left up to God alone. Then too, the process is by no means over; for though Shepard “went with a stayed heart to supper late that night,” it was not long before he again felt his “senselessness to sin and bondage to self” and his “heartlessness to any good and [his] loathing of God’s ways” (44). But even as we begin to grow restless with this process of advancing and falling back, the Lord intervenes with a paradoxical suggestion that may be just exactly the “grace” one needs in a system the unregenerate fnd nothing if not counterintuitive: “Be not discouraged therefore because thou art so vile, but make this double use of it: (1) loathe thyself the more; (2) feel a greater need and put a greater price on Jesus Christ, who only can redeem thee from all sin” (44–5). This peculiar strategy—of accentuating the negative—proves successful enough to suggest that Shepard may be learning to “beat Satan as it were with his own weapons,” to imagine that the “despair” of one’s own virtue may be but a necessary stage in a complex and relentless process. And he is pleased to observe that he was taught this “negative” way of working, from God himself, “before any man preached any such thing unto me” (45). And so, as the work of compunction begins to discover that hatred of sin is identically hatred of self, Shepard goes on to cultivate rather than repress that precise afect: “Why shall I seek the glory and good of myself who am the greatest enemy, worse than the devil can be, against myself, which self ruins me and blinds me, etc.” (45). One might object that there is at least one too many “selves” here, that Satan’s guile and God’s grace cannot both be targeting the selfsame entity; but this discovery would only serve to confrm, slightly in advance of Shepard’s own meticulous observation, that in despite of the hellish natural self, a regenerate Christ-self is in fact in the process of being born. And to remind us, perhaps, that some such multiplication of entities is a perfectly generic feature of all self-writing in the “Augustinian” tradition.39 Still, as we are dealing with a process rather than an instantaneous fact, Shepard goes on to confess that, though grace seems now to be guiding his inward motions and outward behaviors, he has as “yet no assurance Christ was mine.” And “therefore”—as the fourth stage dares to introduce itself— “the Lord . . . brought Dr. Preston to preach” the word in season—namely, that “all the good” of the redeemed is from Christ alone. The sinful human

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case is of course hopeless of itself: that is precisely why there is a Redeemer at all. Simple enough, it would seem; nor was there anything here a Cambridge lad had never heard before, more times than once. But never before, it would appear, had he ever been so perfectly prepared: for how could anyone be saved before he had really come to feel his own utter loss? And never before, in any event, had Shepard been able to accept terms or keep the condition of the wondrous ofer from beyond and in despite of the fallen self. I had heard many a time Christ freely ofered by his ministry if I would come in and receive him as Lord and Savior and Husband. But I found my heart ever unwilling to accept of Christ upon these terms; I found it impossible for me to keep that condition, and Christ was not so sweet as my lust. (45) As “lust” here comprehends much more than unruly sexual desire, so the construction of gender is not the only issue raised by the need for Shepard to accept Christ as “husband.” The “feminization” of the Soul by reason of its utterly dependent relation to a masculine Christ will no doubt have the widest possible implications for Puritan social policy;40 but here it is enough to observe that what Shepard’s unregenerate will has been resisting is dependency as such. Evidently his wish not to be a woman is not much diferent from his need to feel he can somehow save himself. To be sure, he must accept terms and keep conditions, but they are identically the ones he has been so glaringly unable to accept and keep before. If he must freely accept an ofer freely made, it must be thought that it is precisely the regenerate will (or self) which accepts, now, an ofer no former or lesser self could bear to entertain. Indeed it is in the act of accepting the ofer one never could accept before that the Saint begins to know himself as such. One might with some cogency argue that Shepard’s self-authorized account of the process of salvation presents a pattern more complicated than anything one can fnd in the lucid pages of Calvin’s Institutes; and even, from an older perspective still, that his “enabled activism” requires him to reduplicate the order of God’s redemptive activity—so that, in one (Biblical) act, God must “graciously” ofer a salvation well beyond anything required by justice, and then, in another (psychological) moment, provide the assistance required to enable acceptance of an ofer not “naturally” adapted to the fallen human faculties.41 But then the stress of one’s system always appears somewhere. And what Shepard’s activism wishes above all to emphasize is that salvation does not come in an “immediate revelation”—conveyed to or as it were imprinted upon a passive receptor.

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Elsewhere, of course, he is perfectly clear that it does not come by the natural man’s free choice as such: “after my conversion [I] was never tempted to Arminianism, my own experience so sensibly confuting the freedom of will” (73). Shepard might well agree with his sometime mentor Thomas Hooker that the natural man was “as free to go to the meeting house as to the alehouse,” but neither supposed this common sense of things told anything about what enabled one person to choose and another to refuse “Christ freely ofered by his ministry” (45).42 And even here Shepard is being about as careful as the recollection of one self by another may well permit: “I found therefore the Lord revealing free mercy” and knew that my only help was for Him “to give me Christ and enable me to believe in Christ and accept of him, and here I did rest” (45). Not, yet, as in an end attained, but in the efcacy of a process—involving the human will—that would work if only God so willed. Accordingly, therefore, Shepard comes to understand Christ’s perfect righteousness as the systematic counterpart to and substitute for the “poor sinner’s ungodliness,” while yet questioning “whether ever the Lord would apply this and give this unto me” (45). Until the very end, then, the issue remains unresolved. Hypothetically, still, the Lord makes Shepard see that to “so many as receive him, he gives power to be the sons of God.” “And”—he says, uniting clauses in which the eye of philosophy may detect a little slippage—“I saw the Lord gave me a heart to receive Christ with a naked hand, even naked Christ, and so the Lord gave me peace” (45–6). Again, the sexual relevance of all this nakedness must sooner or later have its due, but in the frst (consciously contextual) place one hears Shepard trying to place himself beyond the criticism of even the most radical of Protestant salvationalists. A bafed and balked Edward Johnson will ardently complain that “here”—in the midst of the so-called Antinomian Crisis—I am told that “I must take a naked Christ. [But] woe is me[:] if Christ be naked to me, wherewith shall I be cloathed?” Making a nice rhetorical point, in language more redolent of Luther than of Calvin, he means that unless privileged to wrap himself in the righteousness of Christ, he will be altogether unable to claim salvation. What Shepard wishes to stress, however, is that his (enabled) interest in Christ is in no way “extrinsic” and that it is without secondary considerations of any kind. To say that his own hand is naked is to remind himself that he has of himself absolutely nothing to ofer God or Christ in “condign” exchange nor as “congruous” inducement to the “bargain” of salvation.43 All he ever had he has needed to let slip away, and now, “without himself, then he has naught”: for only so can this greatest gift be thought to be entirely free. And Christ himself is naked in order to signify that Shepard loves and accepts and embraces him not, crassly, to validate his career as able minister of the Gospel, nor yet, with a little more fnesse, in order to share

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in all the plentitude of spiritual gifts which the Father has heaped on the head of his only-begotten Son, the frst epitome of all creation.44 Perhaps we are to hear Shepard saying, in the analogy one of his colleagues loved to press, that he has accepted Christ as the woman elects her husband, for the beauty of “the bare man himself,” and not for any of the gifts he may well bestow; and, if we are willing ourselves to press the paradox of a “willingness to be damned,” perhaps he is implying that he loves the loveliness of the Christ-idea whether he fnds himself saved therein or not. Certainly, as he will overwhelmingly demonstrate in his extended exposition of “The Parable of the Ten Virgins,” he is not willing to be thought of as the sort of legal professor who lies “poring on the law which Christ has abolished.”45 And, as no one’s assurance is ever perfect, perhaps Shepard’s “rest” and then his “peace” are those which lie—as Edwards would suspect and Emerson straitly teach—beyond every sort of concern with human personality, redeemed or not.46 But however we decide issues of such extremity, the length, the conceptual specifcity, the controlled activism, and the all but ultimate discomfort of Shepard’s experience is more than enough to prepare us for his utter impatience with the way of immediacy. We may wonder that the “Autobiography” makes no reference to the active part Shepard took in the irregular if only exploratory questioning of John Cotton, or in the notoriously mixed medium of the civil trial of Anne Hutchinson; and we may wince in dismay at his analogic discovery that Pequots and Opinionists “did arise” and “began to be crushed” (66) at about the same time. But his ironic handling of the arrival scene makes perfect sense in the light of what has gone before—as if one had lived out the career of painful education involved in properly deciding on and then faced the staggering difculty of getting to this place of peace, only to discover its equal mind upset by vulgar strife; and as if the soul-making discovery of salvation at the cost of self led only to a place where zeal beyond all public poise called even this killing condition “a way of works” (65). As if this newly arrived Shepard were not at all a faithful guide. As if his self-denying meditation—long inscribing itself, whenever it began to be written—needed to start anew, from diferent premises altogether. As if this particular “Autobiography” were but another pilgrim’s travelogue. Whose country had he come to now? Published for the frst time in 1832, Shepard’s “Autobiography” is not quite the “fair-copy,” “author’s last revision” we might wish. Some fnite literary entity appears to end a few pages after the climactic yet puzzling arrival in New England; and though this brief section stretches out to include the death of Shepard’s wife in April of 1645, it must both rush through and pass over many intervening matters to do so. And then—as if he were beginning to provide the sort of anticlimax Bradford achieves

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in writing on beyond his clear point of originary coherence—Shepard sets down several pages of numbered notations for “Anno 1639”—from which we learn, among other things, that “Mr. Cotton repents not, but is hid only” (74). After this annal there follows, in the “full correct text” of Michael McGifert (1972), a “Journal,” edited from a diferent manuscript and covering, in a series of discreet entries and at a length about twice that of the “Autobiography,” the period from November 25, 1640 to March 29, 1644; it presents the kind of thing we would expect to fnd in a diary never subsumed by the powerful form of thematic narrative.47 This “Journal”—a sort of ongoing afterword—might possess great interest for anyone who wishes to learn the variety of moods in which Shepard lived out the years following his climactic arrival in the haven God provided, even for those who did, for a good long time, seem only to stand and wait. And, because even the best made “text” bleeds over into something else, it is perfectly proper to imagine a larger project called “The SelfWritings of Thomas Shepard.”48 Yet the “Autobiography” has a formal impact all its own: Where Bradford’s “history” succeeds in its very failure to press its teleologic premise to a formal conclusion, Shepard produces, among other things, a connected and surprisingly coherent account of a life dominated by the progressive discovery, of a proud enough natural man, that God does indeed have Saints, called frst to accept Christ in place of their own good gift or precious project, and then again to carry out His work in the world. It may look from the outside like “Heroism,” in which the self makes good to strive beyond itself; but inside it has to feel like “Holiness,” wherein the will gets on by giving up. And woe to them that lose the sense. Suspicious it must always be, particularly in a professed Christian, to seem to learn the lesson once for all; but friendly to our mortalities, on the other hand, when Saints are such despite themselves. One particularly grim year at Cambridge may get you started on a path that leads to the lair of the Lion; and one season’s poise of spirit—when breeding bodies might seem concern enough—and you fnd yourself in the Wilderness, adding your individual mite to History’s gathering sense, bolstering thereby the uncertain confdence of those who went before, but discovering yourself (if only as a grammatical marker) in the middle of a sentence with many clauses already written out, demanding your tardy pronoun to agree; or dangle. Why were Hooker and Stone moving of to Connecticut? And why were the “members of Boston” so eager to propagate the opinion that “conditional evangelical promises to faith or sanctifcation” could never count as “frst evidence” (65)? First evidence of what? And why this need to know? Was everyone in New England writing a spiritual autobiography? The answers lie dispersed, in works Shepard was not privileged to write. But if his own story—beginning in some “blind town” overseas—delivers

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him to a New England he himself did not invent, that story does not quite end with the bewildering arrival toward which his whole “life” had been made to point. The Sectaries elicit a distress that almost hides itself as scorn; the destruction of the Pequots fgures as a “most dreadful” deliverance but, as Indians burn and bleed, the “hot fght” (67) tempts Shepard to dip his own pen in patriotic gore; and the wondrous gift of Harvard College lands in Shepard’s own town, which Providence kept “spotless from the contagion” (68) of the Opinionists. A divinely displaced person, Shepard sinks very low after the death of the ever ready Mr. Harlekenden, his “dear friend and most precious servant of Jesus Christ” (69); but the Lord is swift to revive him and even to bless his labors—as a preacher to his transplanted congregation and as an author published in England as well. And so—unlike the sobering example of Bradford’s Plymouth—it begins to look like a success story after all: “We march with . . . Providence cheery still.” Yet not to the very end. And not in the most personal terms. For though Shepard is only too willing to allow his public life to be gathered up into the project of New England, there to be authorized by a Province that really does know the diference between the life of a man and the fate of nations, he is also careful not to allow the evident success of a Holy State to cover over the sins of a man who, for all the importance of his enlisted public identity, cannot quite keep his soul in order. And so the “Autobiography” proper ends not with New England’s triumph over enemies—and certainly not with its author’s satisfaction at the appearance of his Sincere Convert and Sound Believer—but with Shepard’s continuing inability to learn the diference between the initial and the celestial love. For the Lord who, after the untimely death of one son and the unlikely survival of a second, took away, in His own time, the “incomparably loving” mother of both, seemed to repay it all by providing a second wife in the person of “the eldest daughter of Mr. Hooker” (69). But only to carry her away as well—again, in His own time—though not before she bore her part in three further births and two further deaths. As if some pregnant verses “Upon Wedlock and the Death of Children” were less the private consolation of some grievous metaphysical than the always already twice-told tale of Puritan love and death.49 Surely this too was not without meaning. The death of New England it could not signify: too many public signs said otherwise. Nor was there now any further reason to insist on its true meaning. The frst son named Thomas may have died to express the sense that, as churches and not families were to be the building blocks of the Puritan Utopia, one had better regard children in the promise and not in the fesh. But this lesson had surely been learned—well enough, if the spirit of the dedication to the second son Thomas is any indication; all too well, in the view of those students who regularly observe that the most

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dangerous thing that can happen to an American Puritan is to be loved too much by Thomas Shepard. And perhaps silence is the best commentary on Shepard’s confession that it “was no small afiction and heartbreaking to me that I should provoke the Lord to strike at my innocent children for my sake” (70). But the literary efect of Shepard’s account of the death of his second wife can survive the discovery, in any tone, that the God who giveth and taketh away may be regarding ends other than the observer’s needful education. The facts are simply that Joanna Hooker Shepard does die, that Thomas Shepard hates this fact about as much as any of us can possibly imagine, that this natural hatred cannot fail to constitute an occasion of blasphemy, and that—whyever the hell she is dying—Shepard has to say something other than God damn God. For Ahab is not yet. The moral context of the well composed death scene is Shepard’s sense of his life as a curious, almost a poised mixture of blessing and afiction: death of children but, after the death of the Pequots, “continued peace to the country,” most noticeable “when all England and Europe are in a fame.”50 Blessed he is, therefore, to fnd himself and his now expanding, now contracting family in “a land of peace,” even though it is also “a place of trial.” Stumbling over his own transitions, Shepard tries to write out a formula: “But the Lord hath not been wont to let me live long without some afiction or other, and yet ever mixed with some mercy.” And then, though the logic of his proposition is like a second nature, his recollection of persons utterly defeats the will to generalize: and therefore, April the second, 1646, as he gave me another son, John, so he took away my most dear, precious, meek and loving wife in childbed after three weeks lying in, having left behind her two hopeful branches, my dear children Samuel and John. (70) The account is going to get more painfully moving, but already we begin to believe the truth of what we have always said: zealots though they were, Puritans did indeed love their spouses and their children and—dare we notice it?—not always in moderation. Certainly Joanna Hooker, frst introduced in terms of her heritage, has come on to evince a passion more ferce and tender than the worshipful bride of Shepard’s youth; and, as we begin to assemble a mental anthology of subjects on which the New England Saints will risk all the poetry their prose can command, we should remind ourself that woman is often more than a match for saint. The mark of such poetry is that it starts and stops a number of times— reaching out for premature conclusions that will not stay put and having then to try again, learning along the way that “meditation” is itself part of the problem; for nothing one can say will cover the case entirely and,

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meanwhile, the activity of consciousness merely keeps alive the pain that will not be assuaged. If the issue were what Freud has taught the fashionable to call “mourning,” the process might well have an end; and surely some poem could be written from the moment when one has fnally felt his feeling long enough.51 But in the midst of Puritanism’s “great pain,” no such “formal feeling” will seem to come; so that, as often as not, the poem of (un-)weaned afections has to end not with some hard-won resolution, proving to reader and writer alike, that writing really can regulate desire, but with the bafed recognition that, say what one will, the pain remains about the same. Apostasy is possible—No, God, her death is not all right— but not even Emily Dickinson can get that note quite right. And in the seventeenth century this love that hates is one that dare not say its name. So the poem ends when it has done all it sanely can, when dearest earthly love has been remembered and rebuked about enough. Within the circumscribed but correspondingly intense possibilities of this discursive world, Shepard dares all he dares: This afiction was very heavy to me, for in it the Lord seemed to withdraw his tender care for me and mine which he graciously manifested by my dear wife; also refused to hear prayer when I did think he would have harkened and let me see his beauty in the land of the living in restoring her to health again; also in taking her away in the prime of her life when she might have lived to have glorifed the Lord long; also in threatening me to proceed in rooting out my family (70) Shepard tries to balance this rather long list of negative evidences by reminding himself that if he had “profted by former afictions of this nature I should not have had this scourge”; and also, at a somewhat higher level of argument, that “I am the Lord’s, and he may do with me what he will.” But then, as he remembers Joanna herself, in a relationship requiring very little of meditation to enliven, it becomes clear that the necessary work of weaning is yet to be done: But this loss was very great. She was a woman of incomparable meekness of spirit, toward myself especially, and very loving, of great prudence to take care for and order my family afairs, being neither too lavish nor too sordid in anything, so that I knew not what was under her hands. (70–1) Dispassionate criticism might judge that the needs of Thomas Shepard are a little too heavily intertwined with the surpassing virtue of Joanna Hooker,

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but then that is precisely the point: he cannot let go of a person who had become essential to his sense of well being. Would the Lord require him to face his life alone? For it was not as if her virtues were exclusively domestic. Surely a suffciently attentive God would know that “she loved God’s people dearly and [was] studious to proft by their fellowship, and therefore loved their company. She loved God’s word exceedingly and hence was glad she could read my notes which she had to muse on every week.” This time the voice of criticism wants to address Thomas Shepard directly: “How nice for you. How very lucky you were to fnd—the second time around—a partner who found yourself so much like both her God and her saintly father.” By now, however, Shepard is beginning to work toward a way of loving his Joanna in just the way she is loved of God. And toward the discovery that, standing together, he and God can withstand our cynicism and even our jokes. She had a spirit of prayer beyond ordinary of her time and experience. She was ft to die long before she did die, even after the death of her frstborn, which was a great afiction to her, but her work not being done then, she lived almost nine years with me and was the comfort of my life to me, and the last sacrament before her lying in seemed to be full of Christ and thereby ftted for heaven. The personal note remains (“the comfort of my life to me”), but now, instead of holding out for “his” beloved Joanna—together with him against God, as it were—Shepard is trying to learn, from her own luminous example of patient continuance in the face of keenest loss, that human love need not be idolatrous to be “true.” Doubtless he knows he must learn precisely this lesson before he sets out to record this last, most difcult chapter in his life as thematized to date, but it is surprising how far his pen will follow his memory in the direction of feelings that are simply ungovernable. Visited by premonitions that she would not survive this next experience of childbirth, she tells her husband that “we should love exceedingly together because we should not live long together” (71). And though Shepard can hardly bear to think she may be right, surely he treasures this poignant, desperate, sentiment beyond anything else she could have said under the circumstances—love to be made not in vain but the more intense from the thought that it soon will end. Shepard omits to say it in so many words but, given the situation, nothing of his could keep us from our own conclusion: If only she could hold that thought up to the end, the memory of love’s endurance might almost recompense the loss. It may not be surprising to learn that her dying mind moves on to other themes, but it requires more than the ordinary distaste for “superstition” to dispel the power of the deathbed drama that results.

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Predictably, “her fever took away her sleep”; and though this fevered state seemed to fll her head “with fantasies and distractions,” it was all, Shepard insists, “without raging.” And then, beyond this strategic denial of an uncomfortably predictive moral insanity, Shepard turns his wife’s last dissociated moments into a paradigm of spiritual sight so lucid as to convict himself of sentimental misdirection one last time. The night before she died she had about six hours unquiet sleep, but that so cooled and settled her head that when she knew none else so as to speak to them, yet she knew Jesus Christ and could speak to him, and therefor as soon as she awakened out of sleep she brake out into a most heavenly, heartbreaking prayer after Christ, her dear redeemer, for the spirit of life, and so continued praying until the last hour of her death—Lord, though I unworthy, Lord, one word, one word, etc.—and so gave up the ghost. (71) The fnal clause here suggests that Shepard is not everywhere victim of the overlay of Greek metaphysics on Christian hope: she died and no doubt. For the rest, she died afrming the reality of a world Shepard wishes he himself knew better or at all events more directly; and reminding him, with the painful directness of a deathbed reversal, that human loves cannot come frst or be remembered last. The question, emphatically, is not whether one believes Joanna Hooker has “really” seen Christ or, as psychic science must suspect, was merely wandering further into the hallucinatory wonders of her own “near death experience.” It is, rather, that Shepard is utterly convinced that she has; and that he regards this fact as the fttest possible ending for her exemplary Christian life, even though it balks his interest as a loving natural man. What he wants, surely, is for this memorably loving person to assure him that he himself is the last thing she will remember in life; and to know that her deepest hope is that he will remember her, with love, through all the days of duty that remain. And yet he knows that Joanna has another, a heavenly spouse whose claim is absolute and fnal. To love anything—or indeed anyone—better that this perfect soul mate is the simple standard by which all other sin is measured. And so Shepard must come to love the fact that in the end his dying wife loves the heavenly bridegroom more. Diferently, if one insists, yet throughout a life of loving service it might have been difcult to show that Joanna Hooker was beyond worshiping God in the image of Thomas Shepard. But now, as death breaks in with a lucidity all its own, Joanna forgets Thomas and remembers Christ.

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Neither the outcome nor its interpretation is quite inevitable. Surely orthodoxy itself could imagine a space in which Joanna’s last words were not “Lord, one word,” but “Thomas, pray with me, for favor with the Lord”; or even “Pray with me, Thomas, for our reunion in the Lord.”52 And clearly Shepard knows enough about the distempered mind to know that the name of the Lord is no guarantee against fantasy and distraction; God’s ways being strange, deathbed scenes may mean just nothing at all. Typically, however, Shepard is trying to do the very best with what he has been given. And that is to prove to himself that he can not merely accept but positively love the fact that his wife loves Christ more. This indeed will be the climactic trial of his afections: his are weaned exactly to the extent he can heartily endorse her fnal weaning of her own. Surely “we should love exceedingly together.” “My most dear, precious, meek and loving wife.” “Lord, one word.” Not my name but Thine be spoken. Do we need to say that Shepard seems only moderately successful at the task he has set himself, here, at the end of his “Autobiography” proper? That the dramatic presentation of his problem is more moving than anything his prose can conclude? Or that the point to emphasize—here and elsewhere in Puritan literature—is not whether writers can persuade us that, with efort and in grace, they are capable of perfect self-transcendence, but only that they regularly set themselves that precise standard and do not readily forgive themselves the failure? We, no doubt, can think of ways to avoid Shepard’s painful but typically Puritan confict: atheism, for one; afective incoherence, for another. Yet it may be useful to remind ourselves, from time to time, that it once made sense for men (and women) to take responsibility for their feelings as well as their actions. And that our own ethic—of “Love Among the Ruins”—may be no match for the analytic prediction that passionate commitment to anything less than “Beingin-General” is going to create as many problems as ever it can solve.53 In fact, given the drama of his fnal scene, Shepard’s concluding summary seems a little less than brilliantly climactic. The will to (prayerful) resistance having subsided, and no food of personal assurance there to ofset the loss, Shepard seems left with nothing better than a moral: “Thus God hath visited and scourged me for my sins and sought to wean me from this world, but I have ever found it a difcult thing to proft even but a little by the sorest and sharpest afictions” (71). We of course are far less sure than Shepard that this or any of the others he had to endure can truly qualify as “afictions”—losses sent on purpose to try the faith of the Saint whose motives seem a little various. But no theology of ours can deny him the right to learn what he can from such losses as do occur. Love them he cannot, despite love’s best example. To regulate his resistance he must heartily try. And try again. For to a man’s desire to have life his own way there seems no end.

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To try, therefore, and still to confess the failure: this seems the agitated center of Shepard’s mid-life stasis. To be sure, he is poised, now, among God’s people in New England, and the life-long call to draw him there is one he never can resent; for surely a Saint’s life is worth more than a man’s peace. But as a Saint would seem to be a man for all that, should it not please God to comfort him with modest family joys? To which it seems as yet there is no answer. So that lovers of resistance and of open form may take comfort from the frst “coda” to Shepard’s “Autobiography”—a list of “good things I have received from the Lord” which, though daunting in its length, omits family blessings almost altogether. No mention here of sons and lovers; only of “the God who took me up when my own mother died, who loved me, and when my stepmother cared not for me, and when lastly my father also died and forsook me, when I was young and little and could take no care of myself” (72). That, it would seem, is the personal life for which Shepard is forced, a little grimly, to settle: a God—and His People in New England—in place of nearer loves that would not last. “Poise of the Spirit,” that is to say, in place of comfort of the fesh. Perhaps we should not wonder, therefore, that Shepard tried so hard to give that frst surviving son to God. Or that “weaned afections” came to seem less a frst principle within the “Augustinian Strain of Piety” and more a tactic of survival in the world. For even if Deity were indeed “guiltless” in the deaths of Thomas Shepard’s mortal family, the lesson seemed hardly less severe: one never lost so much as not to lose so much again. At least one still had, in this case, the Church. Notes 1 Thus the Narrator of The Scarlet Letter formulates his response to Dimmesdale’s dubious sighting, in the chapter called “The Minister’s Vigil,” of his own scarlet A blazoned on the midnight sky. 2 The quote is from Emerson’s essay “Experience”; for discussion of Emerson’s own quasi-Puritan problem with love and religion, see Eric Selinger, 139–82. 3 All quotations from Shepard’s “Autobiography” are taken from Michael McGifert, ed., God’s Plot. 4 Daniel R. Shea supposes that Shepard’s preliminary address may have been written as late as 1649, the last year of his own life, when Thomas, Jr. would have been about thirteen years old; see 142. But it is just as likely to have been written at or near the same time as the rest of the “Autobiography” proper, which, though it stretches out to include events up to 1646, seems to have been conceived and organized from the standpoint of arrival, settlement, and frst preservation in New England (i.e., 1637–39). And for the incompleteness of all such arguments, see Walter J. Ong, S.J., 9–21. 5 The Sound Believer and (even more noticeably) The Sincere Convert often sound as if the energy of ministerial rhetoric were by itself sufcient to turn the sinner into the way of salvation; but they usually go on to apologize for giving that impression. For example: “It is true, God hath elected but few, and so the

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6

7 8

9

10

11 12 13

14 15 16

17 18 19

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Son hath shed his blood, and died for but a few; yet this is no excuse for thee to lie down and say, What should I seek out of myself for succor?” see John Albro, ed., Works, Vol. I, 54. The burden placed on Shepard’s surviving son has been well recognized: “spared by a merciful Providence, standing in the place of his brother, and given life by a mother who ofered up a holy curse in his name before she died of his ‘frowardness,’ [the surviving son] had been given much to contemplate in his father’s autobiographical directive”; see Shea, 144. Suggesting that the burden was one he learned to bear would be the fact that his Election Sermon of 1672 (“EyeSalve”) represents a perfect completion of the jeremiad argument laid out in Samuel Danforth’s more famous “Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness” (1670). For the Danforth sermon, see A. W. Plumstead, ed., Wall and Garden, 54–77. The “answering” sermon of Thomas Shepard, Jr. is usefully excerpted in Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco, eds., Puritans in America, 247–60. McGifert, Introduction to God’s Plot, 5. Beginning with Miller’s own dramatic treatment, critics have sought to determine and to convey a sense of the extent to which New England’s “declension” was real or merely “rhetorical”; recent works to argue for the latter position include Mark Peterson, esp. 4–7, 12–9; and Darren Stalof, esp. 141–68. Augustine famously rejects—as a sort of epitome of the old, unredeemed self— the young man’s love afair with rhetoric and disputation whereby “I was led astray myself and led others astray in turn”; see Confessions, 71. For Shepard’s close dependence on the Augustinian model, see Thomas Werge, 16–22. For the notable place of Cambridge in the Puritan movement, see William Haller, esp. 3–127; and cp. Patrick Collinson, 122–30. For an account which gives Oxford its own (lesser) place in the Puritan story, see Mark Curtis, esp. 165–226. Albro, “Life,” in Works, Vol.I, xiii–xiv. McGifert, Introduction to God’s Plot, 3–4. See Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, eds., The Puritans, Vol. II, 471–2; and cp. Miller, ed., The American Puritans, 226–7. Criticism has noticed that Shepard’s is the only autobiography to be represented in the Miller anthologies—or to be noticed in Kenneth Murdock; see Shea, 139; and cp. Mary Cappello, 49. Equally important, perhaps, is Miller’s reduction of Shepard’s long and painful conversion to its melodramatic beginning. For the tradition of interrelated conversions at Cambridge, see Haller, 49–82. For the origin, functioning, and eventual suppression of the privately endowed Lectureship, see Albro, “Life,” lxix–lxxx; and cp. Paul Seaver. For the importance of the example of Augustine to the entire tradition of Puritan autobiography, see Owen C. Watkins, esp. 37–88. And for Shepard’s position at the head of an important American tradition, see Emory Elliott, “New England Puritan Literature,” in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., Cambridge History of American Literature, 206–12. See Albro, “Life,” lxiii–lxvii. For an account of Laudian measures against suspected nonconformists, see Tom Webster, esp. 180–214; for the view that Laudian tactics may actually have created Puritans, see Albro, “Life,” lxxvi–lxxx. For the psychological (and literary) function of “meditation” in both Reformation and Counter-Reformation theory and practice, see Louis L. Martz, esp. 1–20, 118–24; and for a contemporaneous—Puritan, and somewhat

40

20

21 22 23 24

25

26

27 28 29

30

“A Strange Poise of Spirit” simpler—account, see Thomas Hooker, The Application of Redemption . . . The Ninth and Tenth Books, 210–17. There is something very “Millerlike” in Albro’s strategic appeal to Shepard’s Preface to “The Defence of the Answer” at the moment when he wishes to evoke the difculty of the Puritan decision to remove to New England; see “Life,” xc–xci. Quoted from Miller and Johnson, eds., Puritans, Vol. I, 119. Quoted from Miller and Johnson, eds., Puritans, Vol. I, 121. For the argument that partial or limited loves are inherently “selfsh” and are likely to become a scene of discord, see Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue, in Works, Vol. 8, esp. 551–60, 600–18. For John Cotton’s instructive, indeed originary act of delaying the baptism of his son, Seaborn, until the sacrament could be administered in a properly constituted particular church, see Richard S. Dunn, ed., Journal of John Winthrop, 95–6. Students are often upset to discover that the nurturant Anne Bradstreet was not herself above the “guilt trip”—particularly as her letter “To My Dear Children” is addressed from beyond the grave, to be read “when I am no more with you”; see Jeannine Hensley, ed., Works, 240. The logic of the jeremiads makes it clear that, by the 1660’s, New England’s “Errand” was thought to have been carried out not in the name of the Church of England but of the ofspring of the founders; but—quite like Shepard’s prefatory dedication to his son—the inheritance was seen not as burdensome but as liberation; see Thomas Shepard, Jr., “Eye Salve,” in Heimert and Delbance, eds., Puritans, esp. 254–8. For the New England context of Shepard’s appearance on the scene, see Winthrop, 156–7; 168–70. And cp. Samuel Eliot Morison, 111–19. For a learned and original account of the attempt at an identity of public and private selfhood in Puritan New England, see Sacvan Bercovitch, Puritan Origins, esp. 35–71. In the second edition of God’s Plot (1994), McGifert includes a generous selection of the public professions of saving faith made by persons who sought to enter Shepard’s particular church at Newtown (later, Cambridge) and recorded in Shepard’s own hand. Fifty-one such testimonies were frst printed in 1981; see George Selement and Bruce C. Wooley, eds., Thomas Shepard’s Confessions. For a review of this important publication, see Norman Pettit, “Grace and Conversion at Cambridge”; and for the bearing of these documents on the much vexed question of elite vs. popular religion in New England, see George Selement, David D. Hall, and Darrett B. Rutman. We have been aware since the publication of Edmund S. Morgan’s Visible Saints that the requiring of such professions were a distinguishing feature of New England Congregationalism, but a sampling of the professions themselves has enabled a new understanding of the popular reception of the inventions of rare religious sophistication. For important studies using these materials, see Patricia Caldwell; and Janice Knight, esp. 130–97. To refer to the party of Anne Hutchinson (which Shepard takes to include John Cotton) as “Familists” is to associate them with the perfectionism of Hendrik Niclaes and to imply that their “Family of Love” might be expected to sponsor some form of experimental free love; see William K. B. Stoever, 232; and cp. 232; and cp. Philip F. Gura,  54–6. Winthrop also invokes the same damaging name—in his Short Story of the Rise, Reign and Ruin of the Antinomians, Familists and Libertines.

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31 The Sincere Convert frst appeared in 1641, The Sound Believer in 1645. 32 As Andrew Delbanco observes, “the antinomian position implies a denial of [Shepard’s] whole psychology”; see “Thomas Shepard’s America.” 171. Indeed, the most grievous experiences in Shepard’s conversion experience pivot on the recollection of the tempting thought that the Familists’ “glorious state of perfection might . . . be the truth” and that anything else was so much legalism (42–3). For the “enthusiastic” backdrop of the “Antinomian Controversy,” see Emery Battis, 18–45; and cp. Gura, 49–92, 237–75. 33 For the “prehistory” of Edwards’ conversion experience, see his “Personal Narrative,” esp. 281–3. 34 On the development of a well articulated “morphology of conversion,” see Morgan, Visible Saints, 64–73; Caldwell, esp. 163–86; and Knight, esp. 164–97. 35 The paradoxically suggestive phrase in that of the twentieth-century poet William Snodgrass. 36 English and American Calvinists understood their position in opposition to the version of “Arminianism” condemned at the Synod of Dort (1619). In these terms, faith could be an act of the will (as well as a free gift), but it could not be one the unaided will of the natural man could make as such. 37 For Shepard’s particular emphasis on “contrition,” “compunction,” and “humiliation,” see The Sound Believer, in Albro, ed., Works, Vol. I, 115–90. For discussion of Shepard as a proper “Preparationist,” see Perry Miller, “‘Preparation for Salvation’ in Seventeenth-Century New England,” in Nature’s Nation; and cp. Norman Pettit, The Heart Prepared, 101–14. 38 For the setting and use of Samuel Hopkins’ formula of the “willingness to be damned for the glory of God,” see Bruce Kuklick, 43–55. 39 An essential feature of biography in the “Augustinian” tradition is that, given the post-conversion point of view, a new personality tells the story of an older, unredeemed self from the standpoint of regenerate insight; things that may have looked one way then, to the old self, appear in their true light only now; see Werge, esp. 17–19. 40 The foundational study of Puritan attitudes toward romantic and familial afection is Edmund. S. Morgan, The Puritan Family, esp. 29–86. Important modern studies include Philip Greven, esp. 21–148; David Leverenz, esp. 70–161; Charles Lloyd Cohen, esp. 75–110; Ivy Schweitzer, esp. 1–39; and see also my own essay, “The Woman’s Own Choice,” in Doctrine, 205–27. 41 Shepard would almost certainly have agreed with the pronouncement of the Continental Reformed Theologian Francis Turretin that “The absolute decree of saving individual persons does not make it impossible for conditions for gaining [salvation] to be wisely required of man, because God decreed salvation absolutely and antecedently without the intervention of any preceeding cause, but not consequently without means; indeed means are necessary for obtaining it”; see Institutio Theologiae Elenticae, in J. W. Beardslee, ed., 417. And cp. William Ames, esp. 152–71. 42 In the aftermath of the Calvinist Synod of Dort (1618–19), one became an “Arminian” if one were moved to concede that, in the last analysis, the problem of salvation lay as much in the ambiguity of human will as in the mystery of predestination. For Arminius it was enough to hold that God had “decreed to save” those whom “He knew from all eternity” would believe and persevere; and he dared to demand of the Orthodox whether the gift of faith ceases to be a pure gift just “because the beggar extends his hands to receive it?” Quoted from R. T. Kendall, 142–3. And cp. Carl Bangs, 206–21; and Keith L. Sprunger, esp. 145–52.

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43 “Condign” and “congruous” are the terms used by St. Thomas Aquinas to distinguish between the sort of strict merit that can obtain only between equals (and hence not ever between God and man) and a more approximate or analagous sort, in which the party of superior status freely chooses to invent and abide by a “ftting” set of conditions to be fulflled; see Summa Theologiae, “Treatise on Grace,” Q. CXIV. 44 Only with Emerson, perhaps, will the promises of 1 Corinthians 3 be applied to Man Himself; in the meantime, see Edward Taylor’s “Preparatory Meditations,” I, 30–6; in Stanford, ed., Poems, 48–60. 45 The quotation is from Edward Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Savior, 134. In the analogy of John Cotton, “a woman in true conjugal afection [will] look at no more but at the very bare man”; see Christ the Fountain of Life, 53. 46 For the interest of the “impersonal” in Edwards and Emerson, see the chapters devoted to those fgures in my own Doctrine and Diference, 61–176. 47 See Mc Gifert, ed., God’s Plot,  71–84. Kenneth Murdock gives 1637 as the terminus ad quem of the “Autobiography proper.” as 1637; see Literature and Theology, 111–12. 48 Such is the project of Mary Cappello (“Self-Defnition”). And for an attempt to read the tendency of Shepard’s life out of the sermons as well as the explicit self-writings, see Andrew Delbanco, 159–82. 49 For Edward Taylor’s striking version of a Shepard-like story of love and death, see “Upon Wedlock and the Death of Children,” in Stanford, ed., Poems, 468–70. 50 Mary Cappello notes a certain “tension” in many of Shepard’s attempts to total up his private losses and public losses and his gains; see “Self-Defnition,” 37. 51 For an instructive example of the (post-)modern attempt to read “mourning” where the historicist would see the problem of “weaned afections,” see Mitchell Breitwiesser. 52 One thinks of the example of Anne Bradstreet: “To My Dear and Loving Husband” perfectly conforms its marital passion to the expectations of sainthood and immortality, whereas the poem “Before the Birth of One of Her Children” ends in the worry over her own “dear” remembrance; see Hensley, ed., Works, 224–5. 53 In Edwards’s memorable formulation, “Not only would afection to a private system, unsubordinated in regard to Being in general, have a tendency to opposition to the supreme object of virtuous afection, as its efect and consequence, but would become itself an opposition to that object”; either “God,” Edwards seems to mean, or something else in the place of God; see True Virtue.

Works Cited Albro, John A. “Life of Thomas Shepard.” Works of Thomas Shepard. 1967. 3 vols. Morgan, PA: Soli Deo Gloria, 1991. Vol. 1. Ames, William. The Marrow of Theology. Boston: Pilgrim, 1968. Aquinas, St. Thomas. “Treatise on Grace.” Summa Theologiae. Q.CXIV. Battis, Emery. Saints and Sectaries. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1962. Beardslee, J. W., ed. Reformed Dogmatics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1965.

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Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. The Cambridge History of American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. ———. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975. Bradstreet, Anne. The Works of Anne Bradstreet. Ed. Jeannine Hensley. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967. Breitwiesser, Mitchell. Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990. Caldwell, Patricia. The Puritan Conversion Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Cappello, Mary. “The Authority of Self-Defnition in Thomas Shepard’s Autobiography and Journal.” EAL 24 (1989): 35–41. Cogghen, Charles Lloyd. God’s Caress. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Colacurcio, Michael J. Doctrine and Diference. New York: Routledge, 1997. ———. “The Woman’s Own Choice.” Doctrine and Diference. 205–27. Collinson, Patrick. The Elizabethan Puritan Movement. 1967. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990. Cotton, John. Christ the Fountain of Life. New York: Arno P, 1972. Curtis, Mark. Oxford and Cambridge in Transition. Oxford: Clarendon, 1959. Delbanco, Andrew. “Thomas Shepard’s America.” Harvard Studies in English: Volume 8. Ed. Daniel Aaron. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982. 159–82. Edwards, Jonathan. A Jonathan Edwards Reader. Ed. John E. Smith, et al. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. ———. The Nature of True Virtue. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Paul Ramsey. Vol.8. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989. Elliott, Emory. “New England Puritan Literature.” The Cambridge History of American Literature. 206–12. Greven, Philip. The Protestant Temperament. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1977. Gura, Philip F. A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1984. Hall, David D. “Toward a History of Popular Religion in Early New England.” WMQ 41 (1984): 49–55. Haller, William. The Rise of Puritanism. 1938. New York: Harper, 1957. Heimert, Alan and Andrew Delbanco, eds. The Puritans in America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985. Hooker, Thomas. The Application of Redemption . . . The Ninth and Tenth Books. London, 1659. Johnson, Edward. Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour in New England. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967. Kendall, R.T. Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979. Knight, Janice. Orthodoxies in Massachusetts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Kuklick, Bruce. Churchmen and Philosophers. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985. Leverenz, David. The Language of Puritan Feeling. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. Martz, Louis L. The Poetry of Meditation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1954. McGifert, Michael, ed. God’s Plot: The Paradoxes of Puritan Piety. Being the Autobiography and Journal of Thomas Shepard. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1972.

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Miller, Perry, ed. The American Puritans. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1956. ———. “Preparation for Salvation in Seventeenth-Century New England.” Nature’s Nation. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967. 50–77. ———. and Thomas H. Johnson, eds., The Puritans. New York: Harper, 1963. Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Family. 1944. New York: Harper, 1966. ———. Visible Saints. New York: New York UP, 1963. Morison, Samuel Eliot. Builders of the Bay Colony. New York: Houghton Mifin, 1930. Murdock, Kenneth. Literature and Theology in Colonial New England. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1949. Ong, Walter J., S.J. “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction.” PMLA 90 (1975): 9–21. Peterson, Mark. The Price of Redemption. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. Pettit, Norman. “Grace and Conversion at Cambridge.” New England Quarterly 55 (1982): 596–603. ———. The Heart Prepared. New Haven: Yale UP, 1966. Plumstead, A.W., ed. The Wall and the Garden. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1968. Rutman, Darrett B. “New England as Idea and Society Revisited.” WMQ 41 (1984): 56–61. Schweitzer, Ivy. The Work of Self-Representation. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991. Seaver, Paul. The Puritan Lectureships. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1970. Selement, George. “The Meeting of Elite and Popular Minds at Cambridge.” WMQ 41 (1984): 32–48. Selinger, Eric. “Too Pathetic, Too Pitiable.” ESQ (1994): 139–82. Shea, Daniel B. Spiritual Autobiography in Early America. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968. Shepard, Thomas. Thomas Shepard’s Confessions. Ed. George Selement and Bruce C. Wooley. Colonial Society of Massachusetts Collections 58 (1981). ———. Works of Thomas Shepard. Ed. John A. Albro. 1967. 3 vols. Morgan, PA: Soli Deo Gloria, 1991. Shepard, Thomas, Jr. “Eye-Salve. . . .” 1672. The Puritans in America. 247–60. Sprunger, Keith L. The Learned Doctor William Ames. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1971. Stalof, Darren. The Making of an American Thinking Class. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Stoever, William K.B. A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1978. Taylor, Edward. “Preparatory Meditations.” The Poems of Edward Taylor. Ed. Donald E. Stanford. New Haven: Yale UP, Watkins, Owen C. The Puritan Experience. New York: Schocken, 1972. Webster, Tom. Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Werge, Thomas. Thomas Shepard. Boston: Twayne, 1987.

2

Maypole and Surplice Hawthorne and the (Re-)Writing of History

“The May-Pole of Merry Mount” is, I should judge, a major tale, but not quite in that full “psychological” sense. It is one of Hawthorne’s most richly learned and ironically manipulated stories; and it does mean to speculate seriously enough, about the relation between original Puritanism and “the future complexion of New England” (62).1 And yet, as deconstruction is never the whole story in Hawthorne, a certain burden of thematic meaning survives—moral without being “Puritanic,” in the sense in which the example of Endicott teaches us to defne that notion; and also political, as we come to realize the fusion of politics and piety in the Puritan world. And that latter point may yet serve as conclusion to both the discussion of this tale and to our whole eclectic chapter. For if Digby has represented, from a political or worldly point of view, the recessive strain of Puritanism, Endicott stands for the dominant. If his excision of a popish symbol from a military banner might be made to symbolize a certain Puritanic nicety of conscience which an otherwise bourgeois revolution seemed yet to require, then perhaps the conditions of honest citizenship demanded the honor of ambivalence. But if his hacking down of the maypole were taken to signify the castration of Nature considered as moral norm, or if his arrest of Blackstone were interpreted as a token of some fnal triumph over the values of Anglo-Catholic tradition, or if the induction of Edith and Edgar into the pious armies of the Puritan Israel were read as the crucial episode in some anti-Miltonic masterplot, then probably simple protest was much more in order. For unless you could deconstruct those allegories, there might be no more stories to tell. We can scarcely pass from “The Man of Adamant” to “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” without observing certain crucial diferences of literary manner as well as of historical material. Both are, loosely speaking, “allegories” of Puritan moral experience; and both evidently wish to locate some deep and even fundamental fact or condition. But otherwise the dissimilarities are so great as to suggest some basic diference in literary kind. The textures are diferent, and so are the epistemologies. Inviting historical suspicion, DOI: 10.4324/9781003334262-2

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“The Man of Adamant” yet manages to survive analysis; it stands as the enduring image of Puritan piety as it might operate “essentially”—if the One True Puritan were to follow the lead of his own moral logic, without signifcant opposition and hence without compromise; unopposed, that is, by such historical considerations as seem always to call for half-way concessions. It thus proposes a “timeless” defnition of Puritanism: the separating and even solitary search for the divine, untainted by human or natural circumstances. And it does so by means of an allegory of its own tendentious making; we resolve the tale’s thematic confict as soon as we concede that Digby really does embody essential Puritanism. But the convention of “The May-Pole” is signifcantly diferent. Its allegorical claim is not so much to the essential as to the originary; and, even so, it introduces us to a Puritanism already frmly located in time and place.2 At one level this means only that we have to take account of politics as well as of piety: Endicott has designs on Edith and Edgar, whereas Digby has absolutely none on Mary Gofe. But at another level it may suggest that the allegorical terms involved are not quite of the story’s own making. How could one story be at once both original and allegorical without calling attention to itself? If real existence is to abstract essence as dialectical contradiction is to monolithic tendency, then perhaps origins themselves are debatable. Perhaps we have not got back to frst things so much as to frst words.3 Possibly the story’s apparently innocent little headnote means to alert us to precisely this unsettling possibility: the allegory here may be thought to have occurred “almost spontaneously,” but perhaps this metamorphosis had taken place long before “the obscurest man of letters in America” ever thought to shut himself up in his famous “dismal chamber,” to force his own rude fngers in the production of certain “blasted allegories” of his very own; possibly “the facts recorded in the grave pages of our New England annalists” had long since “wrought themselves” just so. If this should indeed turn out to be the case, then it may well follow that the ponderous and prolifc moral choice ofered—Puritan or Reveller, Gloom or Jollity, even (in a slightly more demanding idiom) Grace or Nature—is entirely spurious, the product not of moral reality, adequately considered, but of somebody’s antique prejudice. A Puritanic reduction masquerading as a perfect dichotomy. Surely this is what the plot itself, in its own lowly and moralistic way, would lead us to discover. Endicott (except perhaps in one illogical moment) can see no grounds of truce or compromise with the Revellers; but the reader is supposed to be able to discern, in the fgures of Edith and Edgar, after they have quite fallen from their high places as Lord and Lady of the May, but quite apart from the Israelite identities Endicott is busy imagining for them, some possibility which the Puritan cannot as such conceive. We

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may or may not wish to erect, on the basis of a literary fgure so slender, an entire orthodoxy of “the middle way”; but we cannot clearly deconstruct the allegory until we have fairly construed the moral action.4 The frst fact we have to notice, accordingly, is that, as a group, the Revellers are awarded a rather sobering judgment long before Endicott thrusts his prying and prurient nose into the story at all; and that the judgment is more naturalistic than Puritanical. We may indeed require Endicott’s very own allegorical intelligence to learn (or to suspect) that what we are witnessing is in fact a cultic paganism of a rather fagrantly phallic sort, but the narrator, mere “Story Teller” though he may be, clearly knows enough to suggest that, in the latitudes of New England at least, May Day is scarcely a movable feast. Everything looks perfectly innocent and appealing: the gaily decked maypole, the silken banner, the splash of brilliant color all tempt us to conclude that the Revellers are indeed a “people of a Golden Age” exulting in a world of natural beauty, naturally innocent of anything like “ultimate concern.” But even before we are told that “May, or her mirthful spirit, dwelt all the year round at Merry Mount,” we already know that the true name of today’s bright day is “Midsummer Eve” (54–5). Surely joy is the condition of life!—except that always at our back we hear Andrew Marvell or Anne Bradstreet, if not Satchel Paige: something may be gaining.5 Possessed of his own elementary theory of history, the narrator hastens to warn us that “the wild throng that stood hand-in-hand about the Maypole” could not be “that of Fauns and Nymphs” translated from classic fable to western woods. These “Gothic Monsters” are not at all merely natural; they are, rather, men (and perhaps women) of quite another condition and stage of history. Northerners, and late arrivals on the poor scene of the chilly and fallen world, they are merely playing at the altogether more southerly and original myth of sunny innocence. In fact they are men imitating animals—not only the “stag” and the “wolf” but also, as their determined sexuality begins to insist upon itself, the “venerable he-goat” and the “bear erect” (55). Perhaps, if they are not merely playing, they are degenerating, even as a soberly scientifc “dispute of the new world” predicted they would.6 At best they are afecting the primitive: “the Salvage man, well known in heraldry”; and beside him the Indian hunter, “a nobler fgure but still a counterfeit” (56). The narrator has seen it all before, authentically; the colorful simulacrum seems merely pale. The Puritans who live nearby will inevitably label it all diabolical: the very idea that human beings should forsake civility in pursuit of their lower nature. Some “bewildered” forest wanderer, anticipating Coverdale, and with or without beneft of Milton, would likely fancy them the “Crew of Comus”: “some already transformed to brutes, some midway between man and beast; and others rioting in the fow of tipsey jollity that foreran

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the change” (56). The Dionysian, indeed; too poetical by half. The narrator merely fnds it out of place: inappropriate because removed from its proper natural phase, and faintly indecorous therefore. Afronted in some simple historic sense rather than outraged in any very complex theology, he merely assumes that we are all, by now, supposed to know better. Sobriety and decorum having occurred, human life is scarcely, in these latter days, any longer to be so defned or arranged. To say more were Puritanical.7 If he does indeed venture just a bit more, it is only after he has, in his own self-consciously inserted discussion of the relevant historical conditions, taken account of that “one stern band” who voyaged to the west “to pray” (59). And even then his judgment is noticeably more chaste than that of Endicott; it takes the tone of a wise refusal, and not at all of a categorical exclusion. The reader is well prepared to conclude that the Revellers are perfectly debased, having reduced man to the state of nature considered as an animal state, thus to relieve themselves of the burden of prudential refection and existential choice; that, as they are not truly animals whose only law is an instinct in harmony with natural process, nor truly primitives who may be somehow innocent of consciousness in its moral dimension, they are in fact the very basest of men. But the narrator accuses them only of falling prey to some age-old illusion which, though clearly errant, has yet misled many before and might even now deceive the not truly wary: The young deemed themselves happy. The elder spirits, if they knew that mirth was but the counterfeit of happiness, yet followed the false shadow wilfully, because at least her garments glittered brightest. Sworn trifers of a lifetime, they would not venture among the sober truth of life, not even to be truly blest. (59–60) Thus the Revellers come to seem not so much debased as simply deceived, even if self-deceived. Their “wild philosophy of pleasure” (in the narrator’s most severely judgmental characterization) is not so much idolatrous as it is merely idle. And in no case will it defraud our own moral maturity, any more than will the tyrannical sectarianism of Endicott and his Puritans. This is, after all, the nineteenth century. What positive philosophy of life this “sober” refusal may imply is a nice moral question indeed. And how it might serve an orphaned “Story Teller” in fight from a Puritanical guardian is a risky, ticklish, and speculative matter we must postpone for the present.8 But clearly even this narrator knows we do not need the help of Endicott in rejecting the Mount Wollaston Way. Whence we are led to suspect that the clash of categories Endicott introduces may aford more heat than light: allegorical oppositions are made in sectarian confict, not born of historical refection.

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The same undialectical point is suggested by the moral career of the Lord and the Lady of the Revellers themselves. Long before Endicott bursts in to place their fragile young consciences under permanent Puritanic arrest, and utterly without beneft of the narrator’s own elementary historical wisdom, Edith and Edgar have already begun to suspect the vanity of their mirthful young lives. Especially Edith, in whose eyes there appears, at the very climax of the wedding ceremony—itself a kind of sacramental epitome of Mount Wollaston’s religion of nature—an “almost pensive glance” (58). Oh, dear: what can the matter be? Has she stayed too long at the fair? Has she even, somehow, in spite of her garland of roses, weirdly remembered death? Edgar is no penseroso, but he knows enough to ask. Ah, yes, and not only death, dear Edgar, but what they will be calling appearance and reality: “I struggle as with a dream, and fancy that the shapes of our jovial friends are visionary, and their mirth unreal, and that we are no true Lord and Lady of the May. What is the mystery in my heart?” (58). No philosopher, Edgar is lucky to be spared his reply; for “just then, as if a spell had loosened them, down came a little shower of roses from the May-Pole” (58). The fairy tale is over: this is your life. What follows now can only be that other fall we call the fall. And whether the spell were on the leaves or on the lovers, it is Margaret they mourn for. After such pathos, presumably, all comments were fallacious. You see life this way or you don’t. If you do, you don’t need Endicott to crop your hair “in the true pumpkin-shell fashion” (66). And if you don’t, all it means is that you shouldn’t major in English: the cherries get only so ripe, and the Cavalier Poets get only one day in the Survey. But as fools do rush in, the narrator cannot forbear the insertion of his own thematic doggerel: “From the moment they truly loved” they had waked up, kissed the good life goodbye; nor would they ever waste “one regretful thought.” A few fragments shored against ruin, and then some “authentic passages from history.” Which is not to say that serious moral commentary is not possible, or even absolutely demanded: why is there an Ecclesiastes? and does his “unChristian wisdom” require Augustinian conversion or not? And even if so, where does this leave the problem of Calvin and the Covenants? It is only to suggest that the narrator hardly provides us with a model of what such commentary would sound like.9 Not only sex but the whole natural world for which it stands may be an unworkable arrangement; that were vanity with a vengeance, and it might well provoke the idea of depravity. Still the narrator can tell us only what we already recognize in the experience of Edith and Edgar: you don’t need Endicott to spoil your fun. Nor, we might add, Mencken or Hefner to defne your Puritanism. What all this further implies, pretty clearly, is that it requires a certain intellectual naiveté—a love of dialectical opposition for its own sake, or an

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infatuation with literary propositionality, or at the least a certain deafness to tone—to get very excited about the tale’s famous “ambivalence.” How can we fnd the endlessly subtle and self-protective Hawthorne hung up on the supposedly unmakable choice between Reveller and Puritan when a narrator this clearly overspecifed can easily sense that Edith and Edgar represent a distinct enough moral “third”? They outgrow Merry Mount before they even hear of Endicott’s “Israel.” Nor does it appear that they ever are really converted to his “way.” In “softening” that “iron man” (66) at last, they may be said to convert him as efectively as he them. It is just that he has the guns, and there is now no place else to go. In fact, Edith and Edgar have their very own symbol, itself a distinct third, a fact which surely counts for much in a tale so carefully overwrought. The Revellers have their maypole, Endicott his iron “head-piece and breastplate” (63), and the lovers their “fowery garland” (67), unwithered, as it heretically appears. Conceptually, we might be tempted to conclude that there is a certain splitting of the symbolic diference: the roses have originated in the symbol system of Merry Mount, and yet they have been thrown “over the heads of the Lord and Lady of the May” (66) by the same “gauntleted hand” which wielded the sword which hacked the maypole which Blackstone built. Except that the paired conceptions with which we have been dealing are not supposed to admit of this sort of compromise or synthesis. We readily understand how the altogether unsystematic narrator can evade the sharp edge of Endicott’s either/or; but it comes as something of a shock when Endicott himself appears to surrender his own categorical sovereignty. Perhaps—though the narrator can scarcely tell us this—it is the imperious exclusiveness of those very categories which we are supposed to be considering. Not whether, or (if so) in what way, we can make some defnitional TWO generate an existential third, but how we came to be dealing with that peculiarly idealized dichotomy in the frst place.10 If Puritans succeed in arresting the spread of a pagan cult in New England, or if they manage to place certain strayed and reveling Anglicans or other “dissenters” from the New England Way under house arrest to await deportation, or if they merely manage to arrest the development of plain people’s natural conscience, the event will indeed possess a certain historic signifcance. If lovers have to live in Salem because there is no place else to live (not even, any longer, Naumkeag), the fact must not escape our anthropological notice. And, as the author of “Dr. Bullivant” did not require the narrator of “Main Street” to tell him that Puritanism really is, on the whole, gloomier than most other things, we can safely imagine that, whatever is really going on, afairs will be less colorful and poetic if there turns out to be no efective appeal from Puritan conviction. But perhaps Jollity and Gloom may contend for empire without telling us anything at all about the ideal relation between the moral condition of primitive nature and the

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theological guarantee of a Puritanic state. And as that turns out to be the dichotomy Endicott holds in his perfectly binary mind, we fnd ourselves well warned, even by the soft distinctions of sobriety and sentiment. It is easy enough, of course, to eschew Endicott’s “morality” of power and sadistic cruelty: “bind the heathen crew, and bestow on them a small matter of stripes apiece, as earnest of our future justice”; “set some . . . in the stocks to rest themselves” for further penalties, “such as branding and cropping of ears”; and “shoot [the dancing bear] through the head” (64). Regular historians may argue the facts, and psychobiographers may debate the reason; but Hawthorne had hated Endicott since the 1829 headnote to “The Gentle Boy,” and it were irrelevant now to struggle with a given. Nor is it especially difcult to reject either Endicott’s own “esthetics” of iron or the more generalized Puritan “liturgy” and even “culture” of prayer and work and sermon and psalm. “A writer of story books” would rue it in 1849 no less than a Story Teller in 1835: having managed to “establish their jurisdiction” at the outset, the “spirits” of the “grizzled saints” would continue to “darken all the clime” of New England for many years to come; it might be “forever” (62). As Henry James observed, you had to deal with it, one way or another.11 What is harder to escape is Endicott’s “allegory.” Harder, because it is so difcult to recognize precisely as such, either as an allegory or as his. So inevitable have his attitudes come to seem that we continue to look elsewhere for the vision that raises the ragged realities of pre-colonial realpolitik to the status of an ontology—to the thinly abstractive mind of an author rather than to the densely symbolic activity of a protagonist. And yet the text really does insist that the allegory is, all “spontaneously,” Endicott’s own. And all the various pre-texts, in the “grave pages of our New England annalists,” force the same ironic conclusion: the only problem facing the adequately critical writer of the nineteenth century was what to make of an allegory which, composed long since, seemed quite to have imposed itself. By the time we hear Endicott speak of “Israel” (66) or even, much earlier, of a “wilderness” which “the Lord hath sanctifed . . . for his peculiar people” (63), the ideological overdetermination is already pretty far advanced. It is, already, too late to protest, for a certain highly articulated form of piety is merely receiving its appropriate civil-religious implementation. One can hardly object to Puritanism’s idolatrous defnition of America if one has already granted its Puritanic defnition of England. The moment to be astonished, therefore, is the very frst one, when Endicott boldly identifes Blackstone as the high-priest of an arch-pagan fertility cult.12 Endicott enters the story late, and only after his appearance has been largely prepared for by the narrator’s learned yet graceful little essay into the sociology of American colonization. Some adventurers to New England,

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who do not appear in the tale, have come three thousand miles “to barter glass beads”; others, whom we have already seen and soberly judged, have seized some rare opportunity to force Philosophy “to put on masques and play the fool”; and still others, about to appear for the frst time in their own proper persons, have come “to pray” (59). Their appropriate persona is, of course, “Endicott himself,” the “Puritan of Puritans.” And yet nothing in the weary and demystifed historiography of the narrator has quite prepared us for Endicott’s frst outrageous and typologically defnitive words: “Stand of, priest of Baal!” (63). Suddenly, the metaphysical stakes are raised well beyond what we took to be the house limit. Expecting a stern enough moralist, we encounter in addition a Prophet, one who judges not by the ordinary, timely social or moral appearances but by the absolute names of God’s own totalized and synchronous revelation. And even at the historic level, this one appears to know exactly what he is talking about, as if he had already read his Cotton Mather: “I know thee, Blackstone! Thou art the man, who couldst not abide the rule even of thine own corrupted church, and hast come hither to preach iniquity, and to give example of it in thy own life” (63). Of course this will not be tolerated. For “now shall it be seen that the Lord hath sanctifed this wilderness” for you know who.13 But by now it is, as I have suggested, already too late. By now all the dislocated reader can do—which he certainly ought to do—is notice the sober but curious footnote which suggests that, despite his bold religious confdence, Endicott seems to have made some awkward historical misidentifcation: “Did Governor Endicott speak less positively, we should suspect a mistake here. The Rev. Mr. Blackstone, though an eccentric, is not known to have been an immoral man. We rather doubt his identity with the priest of Merry Mount” (63). If this bizarre literary tactic does not arouse our historical suspicion, then I suppose nothing will. But if it does, we will instantly recall (or poke about to discover) that Blackstone, whatever his moral character, cannot be placed within many miles of Merry Mount on the day Endicott felled “the only May-Pole in New England” (63). Whether or not he was, that day, “seated on the back of a bull,” he was almost certainly tending his own garden on the crest of that “beacon hill” which dominates the peninsula of the bay of the Massachusetts. We can always say, of course, that Hawthorne has (once again) “altered history to suit his literary purposes.” But the case scarcely ends there, for evidently that funny footnote means to require of us a pretty severe and exacting inquiry into the explicitly relative (or “intertextual”) nature of those purposes. And this may involve both historical research on and thematic speculation about the signifcance of Blackstone.14 Yet even the most sophisticated efort of historical criticism will come too late unless we have already noticed what it is about Blackstone that so ofends the prophetic sense of John Endicott. When Endicott identifes his

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unwitting antagonist as a “priest of Baal,” he is not for the moment attending to his ceremonial maypole—in either its immemorial pagan or its too well remembered English signifcance. Nor is he concentrating primarily on the fowers and streamers into which it seems to have blossomed forth. Nor yet on the band of worshipers who surround it, either as sexually interested and therefore idolatrous or as gaily deluded and therefore merely idle. When he frst speaks, he is, in fact, “laying no reverent hand upon the surplice” (63) in which Blackstone, this “fgure of an English priest,” is quite “canonically dressed” (57). Here, evidently, is where Endicott’s own allegory properly begins. It begins with a category and a symbol which antedate the scrubby events of 1628 by many years; which can survive all possible defense of Blackstone’s moral character; and which by themselves, it almost seems, might well justify the dragging of Blackstone before a bar of judgment he did not, in literal fact, ever happen to have faced. Priestly vestments, indeed. As well dress yourself up in the fantastic regalia of the King of Christmas. Or sacramentalize a perfectly natural and (in another sense) entirely civil arrangement like marriage. If Blackstone were not at Merry Mount, well then he should have been. That is where he really belongs. Phallic maypole, fowers on the altar, surplice on the priest: things equal to the same thing all tell the same Holy History. More than this were pedantry, mere antiquarianism, of Germany and not of the Soul. Except that a complicated history of “source and infuence” does also hang hereby—and one we would do well to pursue; for to identify an allegory is not necessarily to deconstruct it. Therein lies not only the fun of a literary afterplay that is not quite “free” but also the power to free ourselves from the bonds of a semiological union made well but not wisely. Yes, Children, there really is a Santa Claus, despite Endicott. And quite possibly—though it will require more than the sketchy researches of Geoffrey Crayon to discover it—there may even be a Virginia lurking somewhere beneath the Puritan idea of America. But even if not, we need to be absolutely certain that Hawthorne’s own wizard hand has not involved itself in Endicott’s myth at all; that it was not Hawthorne himself who allegorized Endicott as that “Puritan of Puritans” who allegorized the historic opposition between Anglican and Puritan by raising it to the level of a theological dichotomy. For if that were so, then Endicott’s appropriation of Edith and Edgar would yet, as Henry James might say, “mean too much.” And all the elaborate Catholicism of The Marble Faun would turn out to mean just nothing at all. Fortunately, the story of the story is not that difcult to reconstruct, even at this distance. Though Blackstone’s fame remains, as it was in Hawthorne’s own day, far less widespread than Endicott’s own, his essential fact is not particularly far to seek. And though our prevailing version of

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literary history makes rather more of Milton and his Comus than of Strutt and his Book of Sports, the accidents of intellectual fashion have not rendered the signifcance of that once oddly relevant book entirely obscure. Moreover, as everyone is supposed to know, the entire maypole afair has something, however oblique, to do with those various “annalists” who gravely repeated an episode out of some ur and nearly eyewitness account; and, quite possibly, with that one most ungrave response an actual (and principal) participant is known to have written, as if in deliberate aid of our own deconstructive purposes. A bit of a jigsaw puzzle, no doubt; but then many of the pieces have already been identifed for us. All we have to do is pull them out of their pat little places. Of course Blackstone was not leading the Anglo-pagan services at Merry Mount the day Endicott cut down the maypole. But then, for all anyone paying strict attention to the available sources could ever learn, neither was anybody else. And that, surely, is what Hawthorne’s outrageous footnote means to force us to discover: the entire event is a fagrant fction, scarcely more so in his story than on the allegorical pages of those otherwise grave annalists. Except in the allegory of somebody else’s rampant theological imagination, nothing even remotely like the events of “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” had ever in fact occurred. All you have to do is read the available sources—without which the story itself is well nigh insignifcant—closely.15 What they reveal is the prime fact that by the time Endicott arrived on the New England scene at all (as late in the political reality as he appears in the symbolic fction), all the real action was over. Our suspicion that Blackstone is merely a convenient (clerical) standin for Thomas Morton, in a tale which centers on the obviously fctional career (and marriage) of Edith and Edgar anyway, falls to the ground the moment we recall that by the time Endicott appeared at Merry Mount, Morton was already on a ship back for England. Whatever his alleged penchant for paganism, or his self-confessed relish for bawdy poems, that worthy had long since been arrested and deported on charges of serious political misconduct, selling guns to the Indian braves and abusing their women. He would never be convicted of these grave charges, of course; and he would eventually return to cause yet further trouble, not only for pious New Englanders who never could get him convicted, but also for sober historians who are still fussing about the plausibility of all their various accusations.16 But the point here is very much simpler: Captain Miles Standish having already made his mock-heroic arrest (with a single bloody nose the only casualty on either side), nobody of any signifcance was at Merry Mount the day Endicott cut down the maypole. And thus the only action left for him was purely symbolic. What?! You arrested the Master of those Revels and left his MayPole standing? We’ll fx that: hack, hack. And, lest anyone miss the act

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of symbolism, let the name of this place henceforth be called “Mount Dagon,” even as Naumkeag must be known as Salem. By just such miracles of transignifcation, apparently, does the Lord sanctify a “wilderness for his peculiar people.” At one utterly fundamental level, all Hawthorne’s footnote about Endicott’s mis-identifcation of Blackstone forces us to do is inquire about “What Happened at Mount Wollaston?” (Every man his own David Levin.) And when we do, everything else falls out of place. What happened there was much or little, depending not only upon your (allegorical or real-political) point of view, but also—and very radically—on when you happen to be looking in on that sportive little unsettlement. Nobody ever was married there, so far as we can discover, by an Anglican priest or anybody else; but then everybody knows enough about the liberties of fction to guess that. Somebody was indeed arrested there, but not by Endicott; he comes later. He did indeed cut down their maypole; but by the time he did, that mystic symbol of such powerful Anglo-pagan potency had subsided, for all the powers of natural observation could discover, to the altogether more banal status of a common pine tree; one among many, even as Hawthorne’s Peter Palfrey forces Endicott to concede.17 To view it otherwise were to engage in a pursuit of signs that can only be called Puritanical. And yet, not to know about the real existence of some such allegorical pursuit, or to fail to notice its present relevance, is to beg for someone to revoke your history license. Ironical if that person were a mere romancer. The problem, of course, lies precisely in the way Bradford elected to tell his original and, to his otherwise modest mind, absolutely defnitive New-World allegory; and even more so, perhaps, in the way his various redactors—unwittingly, as it seems, and yet with perfect allegorical instinct—followed his allegorical lead. As there are really two issues, the real-politics of Indians with frearms and the mythopolitics of paganism, so there are two diferent “Merry Mount” occasions, each with its own appropriate story. A hard saying, perhaps, but the footnote forces it. One day, in 1628, long before any of us straggling planters (of Plymouth and elsewhere) had ever heard the magic name of Endicott, we all agreed that Thomas Morton was a clear and present danger to our common survival. Bead-traders and prayer-mongers achieved a rare meetings of minds: Morton had to be stopped; if not, then nobody would be contending for empire. So we all agreed to support the military expedition of Captain Standish, whatever the courts will decide about the limits of sovereignty in the midst of a territory so raggedly defned that, unless it all belong to God or Sir Ferdinando Gorges, nobody knows who rules. At all events, the expedition succeeded, and so we present you, Charles of England, with the miscreant Morton. You decide: is Separation a greater threat to your Majesty’s American strategy than drunken, cuckolded Indians with frearms?

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Just so, in rough paraphrase, would the story have to be told to a most un-Puritanical King, in the letter which accompanied Morton to England, to justify a para-constitutional arrest and deportation; and which was published, in due course, in the grave pages of the Massachusetts Historical Collections, to establish the base line of Hawthorne’s historical irony.18 But clearly that was not the only story Bradford felt needed telling. Nor, as it takes only very little literary sensitivity to notice, is it the one which really fred his imagination. Or, as it turns out, that of the other Morton— Nathaniel—in whose fliopietistic redaction of Bradford Hawthorne himself found the real (that is, the “allegorical”) story so faithfully quoted. For an entirely diferent audience, which is clearly supposed to include our own meta-historical selves, what really mattered was less Morton’s irresponsible Indian policy than his fagrant pagan example. And, correspondingly, the real triumph occurs not in Standish’s serio-comic arrest of Thomas Morton’s physical body, but in Endicott’s later (politically irrelevant) destruction of his pseudo-spiritual symbol; and, if we can bear one more turn, in his fnal (and true!) renaming of the much disputed “Mount” in question. We have come to regard the Puritan tendency to read Biblical eschatology into current events as very nearly innate. And yet here, for the moment at least, American politics are still politics as usual: whose guns, his territory. But from the very frst, it appears, religion is quite another story: whoever has the symbols, he has the minds and hearts of the people. And in Israel, we. Accordingly, therefore, Bradford’s remarkably full account of the Merry Mount episode, in his magisterial history Of Plymouth Plantation, does not scruple to attach extreme importance to the issue of Thomas Morton’s exemplary paganism. Nor does Nathaniel Morton’s later account lift a fnger from the scales to right the uneven balance. Following Bradford’s allegorical strategy very religiously, the text of New England’s Memorial (1669), plainly Hawthorne’s main “source” for “The May-Pole,” awards clear primacy of place to the story of Endicott and the Colorful Maypole, rather than to Standish and the Dangerous Firearms; that latter, we are left to conclude, is “mere history.”19 Nathaniel Morton even abets Bradford’s inspired tendency to obscure the actual chronology of events, leaving it to the “grave” but dangerously deconstructive footnote of a later editor to (almost) set the record straight. And yet even a romancer could take the point: you have to read the whole text, including the footnotes. Morton (that is, Nathaniel) patiently quotes Bradford’s account of the arrival of Captain Wollaston, of his rather vainglorious naming of his community after his own immodest self (as if Plymouth had been called “Bradford”), and of his somewhat precipitate departure for Virginia, to get rich quick by selling of “a great part of his servants.” He faithfully reproduces Bradford’s version of the rebellious “good counsel” given the remaining

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servants by the crafty but unscrupulous Thomas Morton, quondam “petty fogger at Furnival’s Inn”: stay as you are and be “carried away and sold for slaves with the rest,” or join with me and “be free from service, and we will converse, plant, trade and live together as equals.” He even adds Bradford’s own disclaimer, concerning the “essentialist” nature of his own historiography: “or [words] to the like efect.” He omits to quote D. H. Lawrence, of course, though we can scarcely close our ears to his own mode of editorializing: “Henceforth be masterless.”20 But he omits almost nothing from the passage which will make Bradford a Founder and Hawthorne an Ironist. The rebellious counsel being “easily followed,” they all “fell to great licentiousness of life, in all profaneness.” And that in no very original manner, as Nathaniel Morton recognizes what Bradford had already recognized as already a twice-told tale: The said Morton became lord of misrule, and maintained, as it were, a school of Atheism, and after they had got some goods into their hands, and got much by trading with the Indians, they spent it as vainly in quafing and drinking both wine and strong liquors in great excess, as some have reported, ten pounds worth in a morning, setting up a maypole, drinking and dancing about it, and frisking about it like so many fairies, or furies rather, yea and worse practices, as if they had anew revived and celebrated the feast of the Romans goddess Flora, or the beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians. The said Morton likewise, to shew his poetry, composed sundry rhymes and verses, some tending to lasciviousness, and others to the detraction and scandal of some persons names, which he afxed to his idle or idol may-pole; they changed also the name of their place, and instead of calling it Mount Wollaston, they called it the Merry Mount, as if this jollity would have lasted always.21 Without ceasing to be English—even specifcally “Anglican,” as that capacious concept grew latitudinarian enough to comprehend a Book of Sports as well as a Prayer Book—Morton’s merry men easily slip into the prepared identities (if not into all the precise practices) of classical pagans. Their maypole may be a cultivated idolatry or merely an unconscionable idleness, but evidently life is too short to waste on distinctions at that level: what possible Eden could a scoundrel’s “non serviam” ever restore? “What is truth?”—a jesting Thomas Morton might inquire; but neither the sober William Bradford nor the pious Nathaniel Morton could wait around for the answer. Nor, least of all, could John Endicott, as the now fully allegorical narrative races headlong to assure us. Or, rather, the narratives, as they now diverge signifcantly for the frst time. By now Nathaniel Morton has lost

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all control (either factual or rhetorical) over what actually happened. But even Bradford, sober historian that he is, overleaps everything else to tell his American audience what we really need to know: whatever other, petty or vulgar issues may have been involved, and whatever the military history of the matter, Endicott is the man who taught us all to spot a maypole for what it really is, and to act accordingly: But this continued not long, for after Morton was sent for England (as follows to be declared) shortly after came over that worthy gentleman Mr. John Endecott, who brought over a patent under the broad seal for the government of the Massachusetts. Who, visiting those parts, caused that maypole to be cut down and rebuked them for their profaneness and admonished them to look there should be better walking. So they or others now changed the name of their place again and called it Mount Dagon.22 To Endicott, apparently, a maypole expresses the phallic essence of AngloCatholic paganism, whether any one’s smutty poem is attached to it or not, and whatever one may read in the Book of Sports. And, no less signifcantly—as the practical distinction between idolatry and idleness rushes to its theoretic extinction—a land where such symbols are permitted to grow and fourish is always a land of perfect devil-worship. The Protestant Ethic is one thing; but Puritan Exegesis is quite another. Actually, of course, Bradford has tried to be careful. Perfectly aware that his unaccustomed rhetoric is making more ideological haste than historical goodspeed, he dutifully inserts that awkward parenthesis: “as follows to be declared.” At the risk of confusing the meaning with the mere facts, Bradford feels honor-bound to let us know that he knows that he is confating things, blurring details for the efect of a Truth in capital letters. And indeed the careful reader of his text really can fgure it out: this did not all happen at the same moment in time; Endicott is not even here yet, in this annal of 1628; he comes over to cut down the maypole (on purpose, as it almost seems) next year, in 1629, as you will see if you read on, as at one level you certainly should; and in the proximate mean time, as you will very shortly see, Standish will arrest and we will deport the troublesome supplier of arms. Even so, however, the course of his allegory is perfectly steady: Paganism is a Maypole, Puritanism an Endicott; and the repulsive appeal of the one attracts the violent dichotomies of the other like a theological magnet. All uncharged particles—like Standish and pieces and shot and powder—are left to be swept up by mere history; even though, rhetorically, the villainy of Thomas Morton’s Indian policy (not to mention his disruption of the supply side of the servant economy) does eventually draw forth its own

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rather vigorous condemnation. But if man cannot live by allegory alone, apparently Puritan historiography cannot live without it. And so, whatever the actualities, the “story” of Merry Mount involved, primarily and from the frst, Endicott and the Puritanic response to the Anglo-pagan symbolism of maypoles.23 It is hard to imagine just what, if anything, Hawthorne would have made of the entire episode if he had seen Bradford’s own account, and that only. Perhaps that version alone might have inspired some critical response, since it certainly does contain the stuf of allegory. But we can scarcely suppose that his tale would have been quite so devastating as in fact it is. For it is in Nathaniel Morton, as I have been suggesting, that things really get out of hand. And into mind. And the problem of Hawthorne’s response to this text is, if problematic and the subject of a certain critical risk, not at all hypothetical: this is the text Hawthorne took for his text. Nathaniel Morton changes only a few of Bradford’s words, and yet he somehow manages to change everything. All he does is omit Bradford’s dutiful, crucial, counterallegorical parenthesis: “as follows to be declared.” So that the unwary reader of New England’s Memorial is likely to be entirely deceived about what actually happened. All we can learn from Nathaniel Morton’s own text is that Endicott’s destruction of New England’s only maypole occurred “shortly after” the great instauration of Merry Mount. Possibly this redactor of Bradford was himself a little confused (or, on our behalf, a little bored) by some of the problems created by Bradford’s curious mixture of styles and genres.24 At any rate, he knew Reality when he saw it; and so he moved surely to complete Bradford’s allegorical work by eliminating all narrative awkwardness and chronological confusion. In the resulting text, the allegory became the history. The real meaning became not only the thing you needed to be concerned with, but in fact the only story that was really at all clear. But how did Hawthorne know this? Lacking the advantage of our own latter-day (Bercovitchean) suspicion, how was he to avoid simply being taken in, as an unwary and too clear-sighted Nathaniel Morton himself may have been, by the inevitable tendency of the Puritan mind? Or, to put the question less tendentiously, how could Hawthorne be expected to sense—not having access to Bradford’s ur account—that chronology was getting itself rearranged and that, in the process, Standish and the guns were losing out to Endicott and the maypole? For evidently he did sense just this, or else his funny little footnote is tasteless in the extreme. Obviously Bradford’s original letter would have helped, supposing one had read it carefully and thought to compare its story with that of the Memorial. So too would some other accounts of the entire episode, which made more of that political letter than of the theological spirit struggling here to free itself.25 Most important, however, and serving to clarify those

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other aids to interpretation, was the footnote supplied by Nathaniel Morton’s nineteenth-century editor: From the order of occurrences in this narrative, relative to Thomas Morton, it would be inferred, that the May-pole was cut down by Mr. Endicot, before Morton was arrested by Capt. Standish; but letters from Plymouth to the Council for New England, and to Sir Ferdinand Gorges, written to be sent to England, with the prisoner, bear the date June 9, 1628, which was more than two months before Mr. Endicot’s arrival at Salem.26 The note stops just short of ofering any criticism of Morton’s qualifcations as an historian, and yet the entire efect of his account is utterly undone. Filiopiety might motivate antiquarianism, but it could not, in the nineteenth century at least, pervert it from the gravity of its determinedly literalist aims. And so the footnote itself has a footnote, proving its case and suggesting, by the way, just how to go about conceiving “The MayPole of Merry Mount”: “See Gov. Bradford’s Letter Book, hist. coll., III, 62, 63.”27 There is no doubt that Hawthorne did indeed see that letter.28 And that it had made all the diference. Providing him with the facts required not only to set straight the chronological record but also to sort out the mix of issues, it showed him that Endicott’s real victory had been to get himself into the story at all. Having intruded himself into a place where he had no earthly business or historic jurisdiction, and into an afair already (in 1629) concluded in every way except the literary, Endicott had succeeded in warping all other stories into his own. Simply by cutting down the maypole when in fact nothing at all political depended on it, he had won at a stroke a contest of chronologies and even of deep historic issues in the name of Puritan Allegory: here is our meaning, don’t you see—hack, hack!—and Devil take the view of the King and his Council for New England. Hawthorne never could know the extent to which Endicott’s ideological swagger would upset the plain style of William Bradford. But he simply could not miss the fact that Nathaniel Morton had wrought an allegory: it said so, gravely, in a footnote,29 which Hawthorne is merely imitating in his own inspired footnote about Endicott’s mis-identifcation of Blackstone. What “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” has done, most simply, is to drag Blackstone into itself by the same allegorical logic which had drawn in Endicott in the frst place. And this whether we consider that logic as literal or as literary. At the one level it furnished Endicott with his only real motive for intruding at all: the history of this episode is incomplete until somebody cuts down that maypole. Who actually does so scarcely matters, before the fact; the gesture is what counts. But whosoever shall have the

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theological wit to do so shall in that very act become, and in aftertimes may well be remembered as, the “Puritan of Puritans”; as always, a representative savior is recognized not a priori and by ontological essence but only in the saving deed. Just so was Endicott recognized by Bradford and the annalists who followed him: endorsing his theologic intrusion, they validated his allegory at the literary level, where it frst blurred and then entirely obscured the ordinary process of historical narrative. In the story of guns and Indians, Endicott has (of course) no place; but when it comes to the triumph of Israel over Dagon, he is the man. Surely the mysterious process of historical “re-cognition” can go no further.30 Unless it goes all the way, paradoxically, and recognizes Blackstone as well. And why not? If grave annalists may so confate events as to allegorize reality, what may be forbidden the mere Story Teller?—especially if he furnish the footnote needed to deconstruct his own allegory; and, in the process, theirs. Surely the only (still) unfrocked Anglican priest currently at large in the chartered and about-to-be-encovenanted confnes of an England made eschatologically New by the advance of Holy History also belongs.31 Especially if “the Puritan” were, in reality, about to turn his attention from the maypole at Mount Wollaston to the surplice at Shawmut. Nobody seems to know where the author of The Scarlet Letter encountered the Europa-like image of Blackstone “seated on the back of a bull”;32 but the narrator of “The May-Pole” evidently assumes that his audience, provoked by a single, outrageous footnote, can easily learn a thing or two about Blackstone’s “canonical coat”—the Anglican surplice, that is, which he insisted on wearing even as he moved from the care of souls in England to the tending of an American garden. Pastures new, indeed. Nor should that audience be quite shocked to learn the Puritans’ response to this astonishing reversion to pastoral type. Dichotomy itself precluded the notion of a “minister” who lacked the proper correlative of a “settled congregation.” And even if one waived all such considerations of “science” as inappropriate to some raggedly pragmatic New World, did not that surplice symbolize, as fagrantly as the maypole itself (and far more plainly than a red cross in a militia banner), the entire religious order being rejected? No wonder the new men of the Massachusetts had it in for the coat of this failed-parson who was yet, perversely, no candidate for the brotherhood of Puritanism.33 There were, of course, certain embarrassing practical considerations to be got over. Blackstone, after all, had got there frst. And not only had he contributed to the fund for the suppression of Merry Mount, but his claim to possession of the entire Shawmut peninsula (then called “Blackstone’s Neck”) was strong enough to require a fnancial satisfaction well above the one the Dutch ofered the Indians for Manhattan. And had he not, from the frst (and with a “courtesy” Roger Williams would fnd more characteristic

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of the Indians than of the English), positively invited the newcomers to share in the benefts of the single spring of really decent water in the entire area? If Blackstone were to be displaced from this new “Boston,” surely the fact would call for some important historical notice. And if, as it turned out, it had got far less than it deserved, then it would have to serve as the originary event in Hawthorne’s own most complex myth of origins, The House of the Seven Gables; for there we are reminded that, long before anyone’s guilty art had ever mesmerized anyone else, somebody had gained a (clearly unjust) socio-political advantage by beating somebody else out of “a natural spring of soft and pleasant water—a rare treasure on the sea-girt peninsula.”34 A complex tale, as yet once-told. Here, however, the story is as distressingly simple as the historical record is maddeningly incomplete. Endicott’s “recognition” of Blackstone as the man who, unable to “abide the rule of [his] own corrupted church,” had come “hither” to preach and exemplify iniquity seems but a hostile version of Mather’s much-quoted quotation: “I came from England, because I did not like the lord-bishops; but I can’t join with you, because I would not be under the lord-brethren.” Though we may fairly detect here a faint hint of Bradford’s own (Lawrentian) suspicion of Thomas Morton (“Henceforth be masterless”), yet his overall account is surprisingly mild, characterizing Blackstone as a “Godly Episcopalian” or at least as one “commonly reckoned” to be such.35 Earlier annalists had been far less tolerant. Edward Johnson had found him singularly unft for the (true) task of “building the Temple,” despite his faunting of the “Canonicall Coate.” And William Hubbard, after quoting and amplifying Johnson, sought patiently to put the problem in its proper perspective: as “Antiquity was always wont to distinguish persons and places by their garb or habit,” and as Blackstone did, after all, insist on retaining that “canonical coat” as a “symbol of his former profession,” it is no wonder he ran into some sort of trouble: “For anyone to retain only the outward badge of his function, that never could pretend to any faculty therein, or exercise thereof, is, though no honor to himself, yet a dishonor and disparagement to the order he would thereby challenge acquaintance with.”36 Apparently an insult was to be taken, whether or not anybody had meant to give one; things mean what they mean. That Endicott’s—and, by now, Winthrop’s—“order” did somehow meet this “challenge” seems perfectly apparent, even though the original records are remarkably silent about exactly how. Following in Hawthorne’s footsteps, we can authoritatively discover that Blackstone was admitted as a “freeman” of the Massachusetts Bay Company, even though he steadfastly refused to join the New-World church-order; that he did indeed invite the new settlers to share the unique benefts of what a nineteenth-century antiquarian characterized, with astonishing innocence, as his “fountains of

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living water”; that he was, eventually, compensated for all the land he said he held; but that he did, before very long, depart Shawmut-turned-Boston for greener pastures.37 No one in the seventeenth century will say exactly when or why he left; and it might be somewhat too poetical to imagine that the sword of Endicott’s own keen faith ever quite cut of the signifcance of “Blackstone’s Neck.” And yet one extremely suggestive passage in Caleb Snow’s (nineteenth-century) History of Boston forces us, as it had forced Hawthorne, to raise the crucial question: what displaced Blackstone? After a rather full and fair summary of the whole elongated and intriguing Blackstone episode, Snow concludes with the following defensive but damaging summary: “We have no thought ‘that [Blackstone] was driven from Boston because he was an Episcopal minister,’ but a man may be very ill at ease in a place where he may be allowed to stay by suferance.”38 Exactly whose (quoted) charge he is dismissing Snow does not tell us; nor have modern researches (including those of the present “sub-sublibrarian”) been able to discover this possibly relevant fact. Perhaps Hawthorne would have known—it sounds like the remark of some embittered “Tory” historian. And possibly he himself knew (or thought he knew) whether this obvious, almost inevitable allegation were true (or false). But in any event things had already got close enough for allegory, particularly the sort the Puritan annalists themselves had bent their otherwise grave energies to invent. For, at the very least, the place was now being called “Boston” (rather than “Shawmut,” or “Blackstone’s Neck”); and, in some relation to this now familiar pattern of Puritan transignifcation, the original landlord had lapsed to a condition of “suferance.” One way or another, Blackstone was displaced from the fountainhead of New England history for the same (meta-political) reasons that had moved Endicott to destroy the original (meta-historical) symbolism of Merry Mount.39 Or, rather, for an a fortiori version of those same reasons. For, given the ascendancy of Endicott’s allegorical logic, a surplice at the heart of the Bay will prove altogether less tolerable than a maypole somewhere near the limits of Plymouth. Bradford had to be educated in this logic, to allow himself to be subsumed by it, even as he took pride in the validation it ofered. But probably we are to imagine Winthrop and his fellow expatriates as perfectly alert to all manner of symbolic possibilities from the outset. How could they not have been, given their extended Puritanic education in the England of the 1620s? A surplice at the center of their altogether exemplary City on a Hill was more than intolerable: it was precisely “unthinkable,” and this is what Johnson and Hubbard were struggling to suggest.40 If Blackstone’s surplice meant anything at all, it would express some perfectly unacceptable “challenge” to their own purifed New-World “order.” Springs of pure water to the contrary notwithstanding, how could the Truth come three thousand miles to have fellowship with the very lie it came to

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escape? And even if it seemed to mean just nothing at all—the aberrant gesture of a perfect “eccentric”—the case against it would be scarcely altered; how could rational men rest easy in the face of a “meaningless” symbol?41 All men drink the same natural waters, to be sure; but since things mean, a surplice in Boston will break the mind—even if the man who wears it prove only a disillusioned though still courteous eccentric personally intent on nothing more political than tending his own private garden. Of course things mean in diferent ways. At least part of the problem is that the surplice, like the Prayer Book itself, had been commanded, by earthly powers who had no divine right to issue any such commands, as a symbol of loyalty to a religious establishment which everywhere substituted its own inventions for the clear and permanent plan of Scripture. And yet its symbolism could scarcely be understood as merely conventional. If the maypole signifed the naturalistic substance of all merely human religions, then the surplice expressed the guilty wish to hide or clothe with spurious (“sacramental”) dignity all such spiritual nakedness. Surely, deep down, this is why the agents of antichrist have always, not quite unwittingly, commanded the use of supposedly sacred vestments: to dignify or to cover up their obvious pagan connection. Less obviously than the maypole, perhaps, but much more treacherously therefore, the surplice is also “of Baal.”42 Sinful still, whether its wearer be found explicitly idolatrous or merely idle, while others build the Temple. Well may Hawthorne’s Endicott hate the surplice of Blackstone, therefore; more than the maypole itself, as it almost seems. Particularly as it was but the next object to attract (and defne) the Puritanic attention. And most especially if, as Hawthorne’s footnote forces us to realize, the untold story of Blackstone and the Canonical Coat had, like the bungled story of Standish and the Dangerous Firearms, much more literally to do with the future complexion of New England than the much-told tale of Endicott’s curious experiment in the harvesting of pine trees. Or, to come at the problem of meaningfulness from the other direction (and so to preserve the full political signifcance of Endicott’s vaunted act of piety), we can observe that the maypole had itself been in a signifcant manner commanded—by the same pseudoreligious authority which prescribed both the surplice and the Prayer Book, and for many of the same not quite spiritual reasons. Nor can we, without some such observation, ever quite explain what Hawthorne’s otherwise merely pedantic reference to “Strutt’s Book of English Sports and Pastimes” has to do with the matter of Endicott and Blackstone. And, fnally, that same observation will alone account for the enduring signifcance, to Hawthorne’s tale, of the arguments expressed in Thomas Morton’s notorious New English Canaan, despite the strategically footnoted displacement of Morton by Blackstone.

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It turns out that Joseph Strutt’s compilation of The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801) was not the frst work in the rich bibliographical history of old England to become known as the Books of Sports. As J. Gary Williams has aptly pointed out, no less a personage than King James I had authored, in 1618, a far briefer document (an edict, actually) that came to be known by that same short title, even as it became the center of a signifcant controversy within the English Church, one which Strutt himself takes notice of.43 So that in a story about the origins of the Puritan diference, one handles the whole matter with extreme circumspection. The astonishing (and to the Puritans appalling) fact is that James, in response to popular protest against an increasing strictness of Sunday observance, had actually commanded that his edict in favor of “lawful recreations” be read from every pulpit in his realm. No one can prove that he intended, thereby, to elevate the Book of Nature to equal authority with the Book of Sacred Scripture, or to indicate the necessity of supplementing the holy Word of God with the parodic words of man; but neither should anyone be surprised if radical Puritans interpreted his command in just this drastic way. When ministers who could only “read” but not at all “open” the text of Scripture went “dumbly” on to the matter of sports and pastimes, it seems fair to say that theologic insult had been given as well as taken. And then, when that subtle ideologue Archbishop Laud persuaded Charles I to reissue and strengthen his father’s edict, the horrible meaning seemed explicit and complete. But even at the outset, the case was sufciently grave: all surplice-wearing, Prayer Book—reading (that is to say, all loyal “Anglican”) ministers were required to encourage, from every pulpit, on every Sunday and holy day in the Christian calendar, a fair sample of the Games People Play. Or at least English people, which for the purposes of the present monarch quite covered the relevant case. There will be no “beare or bull-baitings,” to be sure; and nothing must distract from “divine service.” But: It is our will, that after the end of divine service, our good people be not disturbed, letted, or discouraged from any lawful recreation, such as dancing, either for men or women; archery for men, leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation; nor for having of May-games, Whitsun-ales, and morris-daunces, and the setting up of May-poles, and other sports therewith used.44 Blue-nosed Sabbatarianism to the contrary, James wished vividly to suggest, the Sabbath was made for Man. In my realm, at least, no “puritanes or precise people” will prevent my people from playing all games in season, including May-games. To forbid which were, even in the name of grace, to denature a people.

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On one perfectly plausible and well-promulgated theory, of course, the King’s realm extended to New England without interruption; all English laws were to be obeyed there, without exception, and without let or hindrance. Bradford may have been blissfully ignorant of James’s unprecedented elevation of a Book of Sports to canonical status when, in 1621, he reprimanded some of his New-World workers for playing at “stoolball and such like sports” on “the day called Christmas Day”; but on certain related matters—like the diference between the civil and the religious observance of marriage—he was clearly (and proudly) aware of departing from the Anglican Way.45 And certainly Endicott himself was keenly aware, in 1628, that in cutting down “the only Maypole in New England” he was utterly nullifying the spirit (if not quite violating the letter) of the royal edict in favor of May Games. An English monarch might well interpret such an action as no less “rebellious” in implication than the defacing of a cross-bearing ensign or, indeed, as the rejection of the symbolism of the surplice. It may all hang together, in sociology as well as in law: no maypole, no King. Such, in any event, was Thomas Morton’s clear understanding of the matter when, in the New English Canaan, he defended his own conduct in terms of an express “Anglican” loyalty. Never convicted on the grave charges of gun-running, Morton essentially waves them away, stressing instead his own explicit and unshakable fdelity to the religious folkways of old England. Without at all falling into the terms of the accumulating Puritan allegory, indeed while mocking them rather efectively, Thomas Morton’s account of the much-vexed matter of Merry Mount nevertheless agrees with that of the Puritan annalists in one very important way: the really vital issue involved the political implications of religious symbolism. Deprived of the historical advantages of a Q. D. Leavis, Morton has no sobering refections about the mixed blessing of a Puritan success in America; in his singular view it would be all loss and no gain (and no wonder if the delicious waters of Blackstone’s spring should turn brackish). And lacking the theological resilience of a C. S. Lewis, he cannot quite suggest that since this really is Merry Middle Earth, we do require merry middle things; that a minister in a business suit (and “walking on rubberoid”) is a poor substitute for a priest treading a carpeted altar in celebration of a High Mass: “Io to Hymen” with a vengeance. But he does manage to suggest that his two English books—the Book of Sports and the Book of Common Prayer—go together, in a way that everyone can understand, both as commanded and as symbolic. And Hawthorne seems to have understood that the wearing of the surplice implied both understandings. The real source of all these difculties in New England, Morton specifcally argued, was simply that Captain Wollaston and his loyal Anglican comrades at Merry Mount quite openly conducted their religious services

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according to England’s own “Sacred Book of Common Prayer.” And similarly, that they, like their royal sovereign, thought it perfectly appropriate to indulge, on the Sabbath, in such “harmless mirth” as will be “made by young men that lived in hope to have wives brought over to them.” Their own behavior posing no credible threat to anybody, the problem arose only with the Puritans’ absurd but scarcely uncharacteristic response: of course they hated the Prayer Book, which their whole migration made bold to reject; and their hostility to “sport” was perfectly in keeping with the well-known tendency of “separatists” to make “much ado . . . about things that are indiferent.”46 What Morton cannot quite think to add is what the entirety of “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” footnotes and all, exists to remind us: that for the allegorical imagination of Puritanism there cannot really ever be any such thing. Not the traditional maypole of Thomas Morton; and still less, amidst the food of non-conforming ministers which soon began to fll up the Bay Colony, the canonical coat of the Reverend Mr. Blackstone. The law that links them can well be thought of as “literary,” in spite of the political implications which everywhere abound. But it had been discovered by story tellers of a far graver complexion than the nineteenth century could show. The best a modern writer could do was to indicate how that law had operated in the writing of history—wherever, indeed, the history got written at all. In the end it seems unlikely that the record ever can be set perfectly straight. Probably we never will discover, for example, the precise nature of the “mirthful” activities of Merry Mount; any more than we can hope, at this date and distance, to convict or acquit the absent Thomas Morton of selling guns to the Indians, or of threatening to disrupt New England’s needful supply of servants. But for the sake of reading that nth-told tale called “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” it is needless to know. Nor is it quite to the point, though here our own temptation may be somewhat stronger, to speculate about the degree of “pagan” sympathy which the narrative intelligence behind Hawthorne’s Story Teller may have felt for the fate of “jollity” at Merry Mount, even amidst the mainstream of a culture committed, on even its supposedly “liberal” side, to the gloomy instructions of works which emphasized the enduring importance of “Christian Sobriety.”47 The present story is not primarily about any of these more or less vital themes. It is, more nearly, about the cultural signifcance of the much re-told tale of the symbolic activity of Endicott; and about the largely untold story of Blackstone, which a mock-pedantic but actually quite literally imitative footnote forces us to reconstruct, even as we proceed to deconstruct almost everything else. Most precisely, it is about the allegorical logic according to which sportif persons like Blackstone and Morton can be displaced from

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reality almost as easily as Captain Standish can be left out of a story; and about the light a Book of Sports can throw on the signifcance of both. Accordingly, therefore, it may be more than poetic justice to let Joseph Strutt have the last word on this most astonishingly “provincial” aspect of Hawthorne’s tale. Formally, we will merely be explicating the full sense of Hawthorne’s “other” footnote (the headnote); and materially we will be completing our own account of the games being played here—by the Puritans and also by Hawthorne himself. No critic of “The May-Pole” has ever found it very rewarding to read every word of Strutt’s entire literary performance; a more laborious book about play can scarcely be imagined. Yes, we are likely to conclude fairly early on, “the masques, mummeries, and festive customs, described in the text” are indeed “in accordance with the manners of the age” (54); once again, for whatever reasons, Hawthorne has done his homework. Or, once we concede that retrospective sociological fdelity really is largely beside the point, we may rightly grasp that it is the earlier, ideological use of “the matter of Strutt” which really counts; that the real games are those of the King and of Endicott, and not those of the richly playful English past at all.48 And yet there may be one more point which some antiquarian reader of Strutt is supposed to get. And this in the very last words of his very long and (for most audiences) tolerably tedious book. The last few entries in Strutt’s work seem almost a sort of desperate appendix, devoted to the explication of some plates picturing children’s games which have no recorded name, and then to a mere listing of a few others of which the author has merely heard reference but which he is, in spite of his own really Herculean labors, absolutely unable to describe. Ideally, at the outset, and admirably, for the better part of 500 pages, he has been able to instruct his readers in the meaning of the suggestive old names and the precise rules for playing all sorts of wonderful, traditional games. But then, in the interest of the sort of completeness which only the antiquarian could love, he produces a mere list of literary references to games for which, we must suppose, the rules are irretrievably lost. At the very end of which, and constituting the ultimate entry in the entire book, the following unexplicated quotation from some “supposed correspondent” to The Spectator: “I desire to know if the merry game of the parson has lost his cloak is much in vogue amongst the ladies this Christmas, because I see they wear hoods of all colors, which I suppose is for that purpose.”49 One hesitates—even as with the para-textual ironies of newspaper reports on just when to celebrate the anniversary of “Lovewell’s Fight.” But how is it possible to say, in the latter days of these post-New-Critical years, just when the inter-textual jest has crawled too far? Every reader of “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” will surely have noticed that Endicott and his Puritans are presented as not without their

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own grotesque idea of fun and games. The heavy sociology of the narrator—“Woe to the [Puritan] youth or maiden who did but dream of a dance!” (61)—merely prepares us for the heavier irony of Endicott’s bitter cruelty: “I could fnd it in my heart to plant [this maypole] again, and give each of these bestial pagans one other dance around their idol. It would have served rarely for a whipping-post!” (64). A bad game this; and yet the sober truth of a certain sort of history appears to require its mention. And if so, might not an entirely diferent and more subtle sort permit the fnal, wry suggestion of another kind of game as well? Surely there is nothing new or surprising in the unhappy discovery of an ugly strain of moralistic cruelty in the Puritan character, whether or not it amounts to some species of sexually displaced and barely disguised sadomasochism. But can we truly say, amidst so many “authentic passages from history,” that games of hurting are those which most distinctively characterize and efectively exhaust the region of Puritan play? Evidently not. Where, for one thing, would this leave their love of allegory?50 And have we not already seen that Endicott has proven himself a better player at Parsons and Cloaks than Strutt himself? Strutt has recorded the bare notion, but Endicott has actually played the game—“experimentally,” as the Puritans might say. Thus in the end, the Blackstone footnote may be read playfully, as a footnote to Strutt as cogently as it must be identifed, gravely, as a note to the Puritan annalists themselves. So construed, it appears to read as follows: For further instructions on how to play at the game of “the parson has lost his cloak,” consult the “works” of John Endicott; he seems to have played some such game with the famous “Canonicall Coate” of a certain (otherwise obscure) Mr. Blackstone, just a short time after Captain Standish had mastered the Revellers at Merry Mount; Endicott must have been an expert player, for he seems to have won the contest and retired the trophy. Without which, where are now those ladies’ hoods of many colors? Where, indeed, in our wintry New England at least, is Christmas itself? It makes a nice footnote to a story which certainly seems to require one. And, in pointing to the theological basis of the Puritan tendency to subsume all “sports” into its own master game of allegory, it might well point to something like the true history of “The May-Pole of Merry Mount.” Notes 1 All citations of the text of “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (MM) are from Twice-told Tales. The tale frst appeared in The Token for 1836. 2 The problem of “origins” which are themselves somehow “historical” might constitute the true paradox of “Hawthorne’s Historical Allegory”; see Becker, Historical Allegory, 21–30.

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3 Peter Shaw, as we have seen, fnds Hawthorne like Bancroft in seeking “the meaning of America in its origins” (Ritual Typology, 483–84). And the “historical critics” of MM have been, similarly, a little too credulous and moralistic in their accounts—as if Hawthorne had, after all, found the incident which, in itself, explained or forecast everything else. See John C. Stubbs, The Pursuit of Form (University of Illinois Press, 1970), 75–8; Bell, Princeton U Press, Historical Romance, 119–26, 130–34; and Fossum, Everett/Edwards, Inviolable Circle, 59–64. 4 For the moralistic point of departure in MM (and for a reading which probably will not survive the criticism of Frederick Crews), see Chester E. Eisinger, “Hawthorne as Champion of the Middle Way,” New England Quarterly, 27 (1954), 27–52. 5 Somewhere at the back of MM we hear echoes of almost everything signifcantly said in the truly historic debate between Puritan and Cavalier; see Deming, “Use of the Past,” 279–87; and Doubleday, Early Tales, 97–100. 6 For a full-scale account of the prediction that all species would “degenerate” in America (whether anyone, following Thomas Morton, “went native” or not), see Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973). If from nowhere else, Hawthorne would certainly have been familiar with this (non-Miltonic) argument from Jeferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. 7 The classic study of the “American” fear of moral degeneration in the New World is Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization (Johns Hopkins Press, 1953), esp. 3–49. For the appropriate countertheme—of the redemptive quality of “savage” life—see Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence (Wesleyan University Press, 1973). Michael Zuckerman draws on the analysis of Slotkin in his study of the clash of values at Merry Mount; see “Pilgrims in the Wilderness,” New England Quarterly, 50 (1977), 255–77. 8 For evidence that MM was to have been part of “The Story Teller” (even if left over from “Provincial Tales”), see Seymour L. Gross, “Four Possible Additions to Hawthorne’s ‘Story Teller,’ ” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 51 (1957), 90–5. See also the proposals in my own fnal chapter. 9 For the best that moral commentary can do—the reader must choose between Christianity and paganism—see Sheldon W. Liebman, “Moral Choice in MM,” Studies in Short Fiction, 11 (1974), 173–80. 10 Since Fogle frst proposed that Hawthorne sympathized with the Revellers but recognized that “the Puritans are closer to reality” (Hawthorne’s Fiction, 64), few critics have been able to avoid the premise of “ambivalence”; some have even made this “the point.” Taylor has made MM occupy the dead center of Hawthorne’s spectrum (“Hawthorne’s Ambivalence,” 22–9). And Joseph J. Feeney proposes that “the plot manifestly favors the Puritans” while “imagery” as well as “sound and rhythm .  .  . favor the people of Merry Mount”; see “The Structure of Ambiguity in Hawthorne’s MM,” Studies in American Fiction, 3 (1975), 211–16. Eisinger proposes an “Hegelian” solution, with Edith and Edgar as the magical synthesis of an opposition otherwise supposed to be unresolvable; see “Middle Way,” 34–5. 11 Hawthorne (Cornell University Press, 1956), 45–6. Hawthorne’s specifc language for the probable shadow-efects of Puritanism may well contain an ironic echo of Cotton Mather’s “halcyon” prediction: despite unprecedented opposition by the Devil, the Puritan Way has planted its root deep, sent its boughs and

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branches both east and west, till all “the Hills were covered with the Shadow thereof” (Wonders, 15–6). Rightly sensing that Hawthorne has seized on the fact that a “decisive minority set themselves in absolute hostility to the immemorial culture of the English folk with its Catholic and ultimately pagan roots,” Q. D. Leavis immediately notices that some deep game is being played with the man Endicott “identifes” as Blackstone; see “Hawthorne as Poet,” 187–89. The nice parallelism of Endicott’s outrageous accusation clearly re-recalls that of Mather’s classic formula, itself echoed by Hutchinson, Alden Bradford, and Thomas Davis. Blackstone “would never join himself to any of our churches, giving this reason for it: ‘I came from England, because I did not like the lordbishops; but I can’t join you, because I would not be under the lord-brethren’ ” (Magnalia, I, 243). It has been perfectly clear since 1938 that Hawthorne’s use of Blackstone is, in the most basic sense, “unhistorical”; but few critics have known what to make of this odd but self-emphasized fact. Orians himself observes that “Hawthorne had to have an English priest for the exigencies of his plot,” but wishes he had chosen somebody like John Lyford, “a name more sullied in the pages of history” (that is, of Bradford); see “Hawthorne and MM,” 163–64. Doubleday agrees that Blackstone makes no ordinary historical sense in this tale; yet he wonders why Hawthorne did not follow the advice of William Howard Gardiner (in the pages of the North American Review) and give Blackstone his own sketch or tale (Early Tales, 97). Terrence Martin proposes that Hawthorne had originally meant the name which appeared in the Token version of MM—namely, the Ranter-Anabaptist Lawrence Claxton; and both he and Bell speculate learnedly on Hawthorne’s reason for changing Claxton to Blaxton (or Blackstone) in the Twice-told Tales; see Nathaniel Hawthorne, (Twayne Publishers, 1965), 87; and Historical Romance, 123. Taylor “concludes” his essay on the paradigmatic “ambivalence” of MM with a fascinating and largely accurate account of the “real” Blackstone; but, unable to make any decent sense of Hawthorne’s historical intentions, he merely nominates the undercutting of Endicott’s identifcation as “the strangest footnote in fction” (Hawthorne’s Ambivalence, 29–35). Only Leavis and (more precisely) Williams seem to sense that Hawthorne’s motives are in fact deeply historical; see “Hawthorne as Poet,” 188–189; and “History in MM,” 182–85. The critical history of MM may truly be said to begin with the observation of G. H. Orians: “To the student, Hawthorne’s MM would seem so patently historical as to make a study of its sources unnecessary.” What ensues then is a “source study” which indeed causes the question of history to disappear: “Hawthorne’s fancy falsifed the true confict” but realized the higher objective of a “fancy delicately spiritualized”; see “Hawthorne and MM,” 166–67. Yet it remains true that without some sense of the matter of Hawthorne’s “annalists,” MM is the next thing to unintelligible; and so it seems permissible to be as careful as possible. See McWilliams, “Fictions of Merry Mount,” 4–15. And cf. Minor W. Major, “William Bradford versus Thomas Morton,” Early American Literature, 5 (1970), 1–13. The recoverable chronology would seem to be this: the Wollaston community was established in 1625, with Morton taking it over in 1626 and observing his frst ofcial May Day in 1627; he was arrested, by Standish, for violation of a “royal edict” against providing Indians with frearms, in June 1628, even

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Maypole and Surplice as Endicott was preparing to sail for New England; Endicott’s ship probably “crossed” that of the deported Morton on his way back to England; Endicott arrived in New England in September 1628 and seems to have proceeded to the “discipline” of the leaderless (and hapless) Merry Mount almost at once. For the fullest review of these facts, see Charles Francis Adams, ed., The New English Canaan of Thomas Morton (Prince Society, 1883), 15–32. A clear enough summary is also provided by McWilliams (above). See “Governour Bradford’s Letter Book,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3 (1794), 60–5. Massachusetts Society of Mayfower Descendants. Orians refers to this document but does not propose it as a “source” (“Hawthorne and MM,” 164). See Nathaniel Morton, New England’s Memorial, John Davis, ed. (Crocker and Brewster, 1826), 135–41. Both Orians and Doubleday agree that this is one of Hawthorne’s prime sources. Morton, Memorial, 135–37. And cf. Bradford, Plymouth, 204–05. Though D. H. Lawrence did not think to make a culture-hero of Thomas Morton in his 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature, William Carlos Williams quickly corrected the oversight in his 1925 study, In the American Grain; and scholars such as Slotkin, Seelye, and Zuckerman (all cited above) have more than rescued this early prophet of “natural liberty” and/or non-Puritanic community. Morton, Memorial, 137. And cf. Bradford, Plymouth, 205–06. Bradford, Plymouth, 206. As Taylor observes, Bradford does indeed “bewaile” at length the socio-political wickedness of Morton’s (alleged) arms policy (“Hawthorne’s Ambivalence,” 30–31). But as the example of his redactors clearly indicates, it is not so much too little as too late: the chronology has already been blurred, and one allegorical image may outweigh any number of historical words. Having omitted Bradford’s crucial indication of the true chronology, Nathaniel Morton proceeds drastically to foreshorten his diatribe against the guns—“lest [he] should hold the reader too long in the relation of the particulars” (Memorial, 137–39). A formula for allegorical misprision, surely. As Orians points out, Neal’s History of New England treats only Morton’s (alleged) “trading in arms and ammunition,” and Morse and Parish’s Compendious History of New England (which Hawthorne may also have known) mentions only his (later) “arrest for the theft of a canoe” (“Hawthorne and MM,” 160). Memorial, 141. The editor is John Davis (see note 19). Ibid. Orians suggests that Hawthorne could have learned the correct chronology only in Felt’s Annals of Salem (“Hawthorne and MM,” 164). Yet the point is there, most explicitly, in Davis footnote to Nathaniel Morton; and this footnote is clearly more crucial than anything in Felt. Hawthorne borrowed the volume containing Bradford’s letter (see note 18) in November 1827 (Kesselring, Reading, 56). That he knew what he was reading is the burden of the present (not altogether positivist) argument. To claim that the allegory here is ultimately Endicott’s own is merely to notice that Hawthorne’s “annalists” were able to “recognize” in his actions far more meaning than most historians have been able to detect in those annalists themselves. Endicott’s authoritative biographer points out that, by the time Endicott arrived in New England, the entire Merry Mount afair had become “what might be called ‘ancient history.’” And, furthermore, “there is no reason to suppose that he believed Merrymount to be within his

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jurisdiction, though it later turned out so to be”; hence his entire venture had sprung “from a sense of curiosity or from a sense of duty, or both”; see Lawrence Shaw Mayo, John Endicott (Harvard University Press, 1936), 17. In McWilliams’ equally innocent formulation, Endicott’s most notorious deed “was historically little more than a dramatic gesture of moral disapproval” (“Fictions of Merry Mount,” 8). It would seem to depend on what you mean by “history.” Bradford makes much of the “recognition” his small company received from the Puritans who, along with Endicott, began to arrive in the Bay; and Nathaniel Morton dutifully repeats his words; see Plymouth, 223–25, 234–36; and cf. Memorial, 142–61. Yet for Hawthorne’s brand of history, the more signifcant fact had been the “prior” recognition of Endicott’s originary allegorical deed. Clearly (contra Orians and Martin) Blackstone was inevitable. Lyford was long since exposed as a mere scoundrel, belonging to ordinary history as ineluctably as Thomas Granger, the turkey-bugger. And Claxton was surely an editor’s misprision or a typesetter’s bungle: Ranters may fall to licentious behavior, predictably enough, but they seldom think to cloak their lusts in “the surplice.” For Blackstone as Europa-fgure, see Harry Levin, ed., The Scarlet Letter and Other Tales of the Puritans (Houghton Mifin, 1960), 106. For his embodiment of “European” arts and graces, see Leavis, “Hawthorne as Poet,” 189; and Bell, Historical Romance, 130. Much of the relevant information on Blackstone is conveniently summarized in Williams, “History in MM,” 180–83. The House of the Seven Gables (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965), 6. It seems obvious that the “Original Sin” in that romance has as much to do with the dispossession of Blackstone as with the more famous matter of witchcraft. Magnalia, I, 243. See Edward Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Savior, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd series, II (1814), 70; and William Hubbard, General History of New England, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd series, V (1815), 113. Hawthorne is known to have borrowed both these reprints of seventeenth-century histories (see Kesselring, Reading, 56); and Orians cites them both as “sources” (“Hawthorne and MM,” 163). One of Hawthorne’s most authoritative sources of information about Blackstone, clearly, had been a certain “Memoir of Mr. William Blackstone, An Early Planter of Boston,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd series, X (1823), 170–73. The phrase about “living waters” occurs (all innocent of typology) in the very next article, by the same hand, titled “On the Question—What Is the Meaning of the Aboriginal Phrase Shawmut?” (173–74). Caleb Snow, History of Boston (Abel Bowen, 1825), 52. Hubbard refers to Salem (despite its Old Testament provenance) as “the Christian name” of Naumkeag (General History, 112). Just so (pace, Williams), Shawmut—already “civilized” to Blackstone’s Neck—had to be “christened” as Boston. Being repeated, of course, is the most complex instance of all: Passonagessit, Wollaston, Merry Mount, Dagon, Quincy; the mind boggles. The crucial diference between the dispossession of Thomas

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Maypole and Surplice Morton and that of William Blackstone is that, as no plausible charge could ever be brought against Blackstone, he never could be deported; so he simply had to be left out of the record—till Hawthorne reattached him to the myth he helps defne. Johnson’s point, barely intelligible through his turgid prose, is that as “Mr. John Indicat” is the “ft instrument to begin [the] Wilderness-work” of templebuilding, Blackstone is inappropriate in the extreme (Wonder-Working Providence, 69); and Hubbard as much as labels Blackstone a mere “pretender” to true priesthood (General History, 113). “Eccentric” is the word of Caleb Snow (Boston, 51). Truly so, for the Puritan secret sat in the center and knew. As Williams notes, Hawthorne was well acquainted with the theological essence of the “vestarian controversy” from Neal’s History of the Puritans; see “History in MM,” 182–83. And he would also seem to have read William Ames’s Fresh Suit against Human Ceremonies in God’s Worship (Rotterdam, 1633), complete with Thomas Hooker’s own “Preface”; see Kesselring, Reading, 43. See Williams, “History in MM,” 183–85. Quoted from Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (Chatto and Windus, 1876), 44. Hawthorne had borrowed the 1810 edition of this (1801) work in March 1827; see Kesselring, Reading, 62. Bradford, Plymouth, 97, 86–7. Nathaniel Morton omits many of Bradford’s “Puritanical” details, but he faithfully repeats the symbolic fact which concludes Book I: the Pilgrims celebrated their very frst Christmas in the New World (referred to merely as the twenty-ffth day of December) by erecting “their frst house for common use” (Plymouth, 72). Quoted from the Adams edition of New English Canaan (see note 17), 278–83. For Hawthorne’s probable acquaintance with this work (contra Orians), see Williams, “History in MM,” 177–80. Criticism which stresses the “Puritan” sympathy of MM is likely to be assuming Bradford’s own theologistic evaluation of Morton’s revels (for example, Orians, Doubleday); that which finds a bit of the Reveller in Hawthorne the Artist is usually assuming a more mythic perspective (for example, Vickery, Deming). Hawthorne’s own view is less ultimate, more historical than either: Puritanism defines itself as the supplantation of the Myth of Nature by its Ramean opposite, the Myth of Grace. The odd result of this cultural totalization will be that the “liberal” Jonathan Mayhew will come to write the book—Christian Sobriety (Boston, 1763)—which turns Hawthorne’s Story Teller into a wandering reprobate (see the final chapter in this book). If I am correct to infer that Hawthorne’s interest in Strutt is more theopolitical than mytho-sociological, then it is probably irrelevant to decide whether William Hone’s Every-Day Book (William Tegg, 1826) was also a “source” for the “masques, mummeries, and festive customs, described in the text” (54) of MM. The proposal was frst made by Hofman (Form and Fable, 134–40), but it is disputed (on chronological grounds) by Doubleday: Hawthorne frst borrowed Hone in September 1835, too late to infuence a tale bound for the 1836 Token (Early Tales, 94). Sports and Pastimes, 513.

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50 For the “element of pleasure in legal violence” as the essence of the Puritan mentality here portrayed, see Crews, Sins, 18–19. And cf. the formula of Leavis: “And what did the Puritans worship? We are left in no doubt as to Hawthorne’s answer: Force” (“Hawthorne as Poet,” 191). While this verdict seems indeed more adequate than all talk of “balancing the claims of the heart and the head,” the true analysis may be deeper still: the Puritan’s application of power is often accompanied by some subtler sleight of symbols, whether or not naming is always itself an act of force.

3

Idealism as it Appears Refractions of Emerson in Hawthorne’s Mosses

Modern visitors to Concord may lavish more attention on the ministerial dwelling where Hawthorne lived for several years in the 1840s than on the house where Emerson spent most of his adult life, but in any event Hawthorne’s fctional sketch of “The Old Manse” clearly confers the pride of place on Emerson. Having taken up residence “at the opposite extremity of the village” from this rising star of American literature and philosophy, and confessing that his own modest little tales have been written at the desk where Emerson wrote Nature (1124).1 Hawthorne properly notices that this man at some extremity opposite him is indeed the center of present attention. The tone is satirical enough to indicate that much of this celebratory fuss may be misguided—only the terminally immature will rush to present their new thought for Emersonian certifcation—but the implication is clear: Emerson holds a certain key to the mentality that distinguishes Hawthorne’s post-Salem, present-day New England. And if Emerson, then idealism as well. For his vaunted “Transcendentalism,” which Hawthorne himself concedes to have its share “in all the current literature of the world” is, by Emerson’s own defnition, really only “Idealism as it appears in 1842” (193). And idealism, of course, is nothing but the way philosophy has found to prevent the idea of “matter”—which a Manichean Melville thought of as “God’s ancient enemy”—from dislodging the venerable notion of “spirit,” spreading out to take over the whole feld of explanation and, in time, of possible experience. Lose the belief in spirit, and its proper language will frst atrophy and then disappear; lose the language, and the experiences of the spiritual will soon enough become altogether incredible. Then “the physicians“—who say they are not “materialists”—tell us for the ninety-eight cents worth of chemicals that comprise our carbon-based body.2 Appropriately, then, many of the stories and sketches written at Concord and gathered up into the collection entitled Mosses from an Old Manse imply, if not always Emerson personally, then certainly the defnitive Transcendental problematic of matter and spirit. Though it may evoke DOI: 10.4324/9781003334262-3

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an idealism closer to that of Poe than that of the Concord School, still it has seemed not entirely inappropriate to regard “The Artist of the Beautiful” as “the sort of story Emerson might have written.”3 The action of “The Birthmark” refers us ambiguously to the eighteenth and the seventh centuries, but surely nothing could be closer to its surface than the question of what exactly we might still mean by “spirit”; it might even point us, through Ripley, to Herder for its inspiration. So, emphatically, does “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” which begins by noticing a widespread Transcendental Context, and then appears to gloss the position taken by Emerson and others in the notorious “Miracles Controversy” between the old-school faculty and the new-school students of the Harvard Divinity School.4 Some of the sketches bring us even closer: “The Celestial Rail-road” fails to name the name of Emerson, but who else could have posed for the portrait of the “Giant Transcendentalist” whose rhetoric sore puzzles the new age pilgrim? “Earth’s Holocaust” ends with what sounds like a paraphrase—perhaps a parody—of Emerson’s cautious, conservative response to what we have come to call “The Ferment.”5 And, as the title of this essay means already to imply, “The Hall of Fantasy” cannot be read without the apocalyptic conclusion of Emerson’s Nature pretty frmly in mind. And the “problem of Emerson” plot may even begin with “The Virtuoso’s Collection” which, abjuring materialism absolutely, appears to discover, with something like a full Emersonian sympathy, later to be severely qualifed, that the world is more real symbolically, in language, than any other way. 2 Written frst in Hawthorne’s Concord or so-called “Old Manse Period,” and then appearing last in the original (1846) edition of his Mosses from an Old Manse, “The Virtuoso’s Collection” may well invite thereby more attention than it has received. Melville appears to have noticed it: no mention of it in his famous 1850 review of “Hawthorne and his Mosses,” yet he seems to have caught part of the point of that sketch, as, in the famous “Try-Works” chapter of Moby-Dick, he echoes Hawthorne’s divided list of writers, serious and whimsical, spiritual and worldly: who else would have taught Melville that, sofa or not, the opposite of Rabelais is Cowper, that the haunted and Calvinist-condemned poet who, along with some other thinkers of “Night Thoughts,” prepared the serious reader “to break the green damp mold with the unfathomably wondrous Solomon”?6 But in any case the issue is more general than the easy-faith of the Liberal Christians. The “Virtuoso,” ultimately identifed as an avatar of “The Wandering Jew,” appears as nothing other than the consummate materialist: unable to appreciate the spiritual signifcance of the great literature of the world, he collects all its various symbols, literal, reifed, dead: worse than

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the bibliophile who collects and admires but never reads any of his wonderful books, he thinks of symbols as things. It might be hard to decide if Hawthorne had someone famous in mind— Pierre Bayle, perhaps, or some particular French Encyclopedist—but the habit of making odd, reductive pairings certainly suggests their procedure of defating the regnant Christian mythos with ironic, embarrassing comparisons.7 However that may be, it appears that Hawthorne both began and ended his critical treatment of the idealism that was fourishing in 1840’s Concord with a frm assurance of his own spiritual credentials: reducing the soul to the body would be like reducing a book to some material referent. Yet the critical questioning of the practical implications of creeds which, denying that matter is anything like a “substance,” understand it instead as but a projection of Mind which, someday, perhaps, some mind might be able to do without, is both clear and continuous. Beginning in “The Old Manse,” where Hawthorne places himself and Emerson at the opposite ends of something or other, daring to risk something like parodic quotation in “The Hall of Fantasy,” questioning the psychological basis of the urgent desire to transcend, tragically in “The Birthmark” and ironically in “The Artist of the Beautiful,” and reaching a crescendo in “Rapaccini’s Daughter,” where some idealistic Narrator’s manic proposal that the human body may be somehow poison but is not at the same time really real, Hawthorne appears to be encountering the ethos of ideality with the same sober but penetrating intelligence he had earlier trained on the creed and manners of the old-time Calvinists. He may even have proposed a linkage as, in “The Christmas Banquet,” where a recovered Puritan, cured of his need to fnd sin as his self of self, is permitted to tell the story of a man who, like the one Emerson projects in “Experience,” fnds that “the vast shadow of the phenomenal” (344) has begun to overtake himself as well. Puritanism is harsh, gloomy, right? The Transcendentalists, by contrast, are ever optimistic, by nature and to a man. Well maybe not entirely. Maybe the cure was worse than its correlative disease. Maybe, Waldo, “A guilty identity . . . was better than none.”8 Some speculative disassembly required. But frst the literal: the recognition that the stories contained in the Mosses were, most of them, written at the very desk where “Emerson wrote Nature” (1124.) Long story here—friends who, despite wide diferences of psychological outlook and literary manner, took long walks together, one of them to the Shaker Village at Hancock, probably skated together on the easily frozen Concord River, and seem even to have exchanged Journals. Short version: he lives here, famously; he’s the one all the aspiring young (and some older) writers and intellectuals come to visit. His town. Not even honored in my own town of witch-hunting Salem, I’m the outsider, the visitor, living

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in a house belonging to his family. So I better be nice. At all events, we live “at opposite ends of the village” but I’m close enough to the center of things to report on what goes down; and though it is impossible to ascribe the more practical, actively reformist side of “The Ferment” to the initially cautious and hesitant privatism of Emerson, Hawthorne may well be right in identifying him as the central spirit and guiding light of something or other. Visitors to the Manse, Hawthorne reports, got nothing so much a period of much-needed rest from an outside world than seems distraught with its own hectic energy: everybody in hot pursuit of something or other, as if the salvation of the world depended on their own tireless eforts. Give it a rest already. And so, as Hawthorne appears to understate the worth of his own hospitable ofering, his after-summer guests paid their host the highly acceptable compliment of falling asleep. I held it as proof, that they left their cares behind them, as they passed between the gate-posts, at the entrance of our avenue; and that the so powerful opiate was the abundance of peace and quiet, within and all around us. Others could give them pleasure and amusement; or instruction—these could be picked up anywhere—but it was for me to give them rest—rest, in a world of trouble. (1144). Indeed, as the argument persists in defying its own evident irony—“What better could be done for those weary and world-worn spirits?”—whom it proceeds to identify: energetic persons all, and all failing to fulfll some overruling purpose. What better? In fact, as the somnolent conceit continues to insist on itself, why not raise the happy discovery to the level of a theory? In fact, Were I to adopt a pet idea, as so many people do, and fondle it in my embraces to the exclusion of all others, it would be, that the great want which mankind labors under, at the present period, is—sleep. The world should recline its vast head on the frst convenient pillow, and take an age-long nap. (1145) “Distracted, through a morbid activity, and . . . preternaturally awake”— as if from too many Great Awakenings in a world that never really sleeps— it needs to calm itself way down. Give it a rest, as we would say. To one awakened literally, from an age-long nap, the tormenting visions of the present would “assume their true aspect and character.” Things might begin again, in a restored sense of “what is simple and right.”

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Of course the speaker knows he is being something like semi-ironic, and so he makes an immediate concession: Let not the above paragraph ever be quoted against the author; for though tinctured with a modicum of truth, it is the result and expression of what he knew, while he was writing to be but a distorted survey of the state and prospects of mankind. There were circumstances around me, which made it difcult to view the world precisely as it exists. (1145) And those had much to do with the physical presence and spreading infuence of Emerson—who, by the way, had brought the possibility of a precise perception of the world into serious question. More on that later. For now, do but consider the circumstances: stray but a mile or so from the restful sanity of the Manse and you meet with “stranger moral shapes of men than might have been encountered elsewhere, in a circuit of a thousand miles.” These hobgoblins of fesh and blood were attracted thither by the wide-spreading Infuence of a great original Thinker, who had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of out village. His mind acted upon other minds, of a certain constitution, with a wonderful magnetism, and drew many men upon long pilgrimages, to speak to him face to face. (1145) Encoded here, not very deeply, is a writer’s deliberate self-positioning: Emerson is not only the reason why a more cautious, more empirical mind has been momentarily seduced into the unwonted, and decidedly uncomfortable, position of a Theorist, but the point at some “extremity” from which he sees his pencil poised. Writing at Emerson’s very desk, to be sure, at a distance and, at times at least, from the opposite pole. Another introduction to the second important (but somewhat less prolifc) period of tale- writing might well be “The Celestial Rail-road,” which fnds Hawthorne’s post-Salem world curiously “liberal” as well as overstimulated and distracted. Rejecting the unedifying doctrine of hell as both un-biblical and unworthy of a benevolent God—even as Edwards’ opponent, Christian Charles Chauncy had earlier suggested—the “Liberal Christians,” now admitting themselves to be in fact “Unitarians,” were determined to make Christianity not only “rational” but also bright, happy, and attractive; so that one of its (fctional) representatives assured Hawthorne’s semi-competent Narrator that “Tophet has not even a

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metaphorical existence.” Even as earlier, we are assured that that conversation about religion “was thrown tastefully into the background,” so that “even an infdel would have heard little or nothing to shock his sensibility.” Indeed: Benjamin Franklin himself could hardly have said it better. And as the scope widens to include a renewed and reformed version of Bunyan’s Vanity Fair, the Narrator reports, with a suspiciously apparent enthusiasm, that in this sphere where humane culture appears to have replaced experimental religion, “any man can acquire an omnigenous erudition, without the trouble of learning to read” (818). Literature, that is to say, has become “etherealized by assuming for its medium the human voice.” Almost discovering, thereby, what our imitation of culture is pleased to reverence as “the spoken word.” Nor does it fail to imply Emerson as at least one source of the new Optimism, as Bunyan’s two anti-Puritan Giants—Pope and Pagan—have been adequately replaced by one “Giant Transcendentalist,” who cries out to the nominal Christians—on a train that runs past the precious place where Bunyan’s allegorical protagonist had been relieved of his burden of sin, on its way right past the Celestial City to, well, some other destination. One thinks of Emerson’s “Divinity School Address”: Reform or Apostasy? Does it mean to rescue or replace what people had learned to call “the essence of Christianity”? Formerly, of course, Hawthorne had made his ancestral Puritanism look pretty unattractive. Now, perhaps, at least in its Bunyanesque iteration, it begins to make its would-be replacement, Unitarianism—“Christianity Lite,” as one of my students called it; “Religion for Atheists with children,” in the memorable formulation of Professor David D. Hall—look exactly like a parody of True Religion. 3 Overall, however, it is the sense of moral and political disease—of trying too hard for something new, something better, something ideal that dominates the morale of Hawthorne’s Old Manse productions. Without specifc reference to Emerson himself, “Earth’s Holocaust” extends this sense of hectic dissatisfaction: why is almost everyone so hot to destroy almost everything? Some just barely competent Narrator suggests that a big-time Bonfre of the Vanities is beginning, which the reader easily recognizes as almost-postPuritan America: start by throwing in all those symbolic religious items with no mention in scripture and, while we’re about this grass-roots leveling, toss in the clap-trap of aristocracy, and then look around for everything else factitious and un-inevitable. Where might it end? Some readers may well think of the Chardon St. Convention which, in 1840, invited all manner of Friends of Universal Reform to come in and share the Spirit. That’s right: anybody interested in reforming anything. Or did they really mean anyone interested

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in reforming the Universe? Emerson himself did not attend; indeed he may have meant to satirize it in his 1844 sketch of “The New England Reformers,” but we have it on Hawthorne’s authority that the arch-reform of one really radical Reformer is close to the heart of the matter. So too concluded the author of the seminal work called “Freedom’s Ferment.” And indeed, an earlier Emerson text had defned Man as “The Reformer”—by nature and as such; and, with some modest demurrer to excuse his own relative quietism, had announced that We are to revise the whole of our social structure, the state, the school, religion, marriage, trade, science, and explore their foundations in our own nature; we are to see that the world not only ftted the former men, but fts us, and to clear ourselves of every usage that has not its roots in our own mind. (E&L, 146) So we are not too surprised when a telling allusion gives Emerson the climactic position in another version of some fnal purifcation in a sketch called “The Hall of Fantasy.” Once again, the “great original Thinker” has a lot to answer for. Looking at frst like a mere listing of present-day reformers and projectors—with all the proper names attached in the original magazine version—the sketch has nevertheless a somewhat complex structure and a richly ironic ending. Appearing at frst as a dumbed-down version of the author to fool the scrupulously literal-minded, a Narrator and a companion have been weighing the pros and cons of a life spent in pursuit of the better and its inevitable enemy, the best. In language that recalls “The Old Manse,” the Narrator characterizes the would-be dwellers in his allegoric Hall as “representatives of an unquiet period, when mankind is seeking to cast of the whole tissue of ancient custom, like a tattered garment.” Temperamentally skeptical—and more than a little worried about “dangerous tendencies”—the conservative Narrator nevertheless makes several important concessions to what Emerson was calling “the Newness.” First of all, he accepts his companion’s suggestion that as a card-carrying Democrat, his “faith in the ideal” may be deeper than he likes to admit. Then too, and rather like Emerson, he cannot but feel a “sympathy with the spirit” that moves so many to quarrel with the status quo, even as he rejects “all their schemes”: how not endorse “the struggle of the race after a better and purer life”? Of course he makes an exception for “the poet,” whose idealism knows itself as diferent from the world of “brick and mortar.” And in one very long speech he appears to endorse the idea of fantasy as such—a sort of super-faculty, subtending both fancy and imagination, that makes human life worth living.

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In one long speech he thanks God that “there is such a place of refuge from the gloom and chilliness of actual life.” Here may come the prisoner, the sick man, the exile, the aged, the mourner; so that “It may be said, in truth, that there is but half a life—the meaner and earthlier—for those who never fnd their way into the hall.” Then too, at a certain risk, can he fail to mention that, In the observatory of the edifce is kept that wonderful perspective glass, through which the shepherds of the Delectable Mountains showed Christian the far-of gleam of the Celestial City. The eye of Faith still loves to gaze through it. (741) Probably Hawthorne would side with Emerson against Freud on the question of the future of religion, but “fantasy” is not entirely unlike “illusion” and, devoid of appurtenances altogether imaginary, the project would lose a certain amount of its appeal. So for a time at least the verdict on fantasy seems a solid yes and no. Then comes the turn: from listing and prose opinion to dramatic confrontation. Where in fact is all this restless efort to redo the real likely to end? Just when the troubled Narrator decides to leave the hall—before he himself is “tempted to make a theory”—his ironic companion calls his attention to “one theory that swallows up and annihilates all others.” A theory of Rest, perhaps, but with a vengeance: the fery apocalypse of Adventist William Miller. Earth’s Holocaust indeed: Pre-millennialist that he was, “Father Miller” needed the Second Coming to occur before there could be anything like a thousand years of peace and justice on this sinful earth; burn up the whole thing and start afresh. No amount of what is called progress could rescue human history from its evil tendency, its ineluctable debt to depravity. No Nth Great Awakening (or even Hawthorne’s Great Ensleepening) need apply. Perhaps the earliest Christians had got it just about right: “Let this dirty world go to hell and thy kingdom come.” This is the way the world ends—even if some sensitive souls are heard to whimper. Like the Narrator. Admitting that Miller’s “relentless theory” may be in fact “the only method of getting mankind out of the various perplexities into which they have fallen,” he yet wishes that “the world might be permitted to endure, until some great moral shall have been evolved.” Why— echoing Emerson, no doubt—have the sphinx slay herself before the secret is revealed? Unpersuaded, his companion fnds the logic here a little too narrow: perhaps the secret may be revealed “after the fall of the curtain over our catastrophe”: what, for example, if our whole drama has been “performed for the instruction of another set of spectators”? What, he almost thinks to say, if we are but a chip in the computer of some more advanced

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race? But the dialogue goes on, the Narrator admitting that though “The poor old earth . . . has faults enough” he somehow “cannot bear to have her perish.” “No great matter,” comes the rejoinder: “The happiest of us has been weary of her, many a time and often” (742). And then, suddenly enough, the argument takes a somewhat more philosophical turn. One that implicates Emerson even more directly than the argument from riddle and sphinx. Famously—or so we ought to recall—Nature all but ended with the bold claims of a certain “Orphic poet,” taking up where the divine George Herbert necessarily left of, and beginning with the assertion that “The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit” (EL, 45). With this one-sentence summary of that (Transcendentalist) form of “Idealism as it appears in 1842,” the embattled Narrator, reduced to his last resources, takes direct issue: “the root of human nature strikes down deep into this earthly soil”—with the result that, happy or not, it is “but reluctantly that we submit to be transplanted, even for a higher cultivation in Heaven” (743). Later in life, in a voice less formally dramatized, Hawthorne will observe, unhappily, that “God wants short lives”; and elsewhere, with unconcealed bitterness, that “Nothing, not God himself, can compensate us for being born for a period short of all eternity”.9 Food for other thoughts. Here, for the moment at least, it is enough to observe that the protest against Father Miller is made in terms that are not materialist necessarily but are nevertheless deeply naturalist. With all due respect to the position taken in Emerson’s defnition of “The Transcendentalist.” Even though the protest has to admit and then dismiss a number of serio-comic objections to the imminent advent of eternity: “the lover” (still a virgin, no doubt) holds out for his “fore-shadowed bliss”; parents pray for a seventy-year lifetime for their children; a poet requires a posterity “to recognize the inspiration of his song”; reformers demand a thousand years to test their theories; an inventor enough time to try out his model; a miser, more time to make more money; and a little boy wants at least one more Christmas. Nor much here, the Narrator grants; but for himself—besides “a few private and personal ends”—his real desire is “our old mother’s prolonged existence, for her own dear sake” (743). To explain which, he requires a separate paragraph. “‘The poor old Earth!’” he repeats, capitalizing its cosmological denomination, What I should chiefy regret in her destruction would be that very earthliness, which no other sphere or state of existence can renew or compensate. The fragrance of fowers, and of new-mown hay; the genial warmth of sunshine, and the beauty of a sunset among clouds; the comfort and cheerful glow of the freside; the deliciousness of fruits, and of all good cheer (743)

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The list goes on, conceding that good persons will fnd “moral enjoyments . . . in any state of existence,” but fearing that “no other world can show us” anything like the above, and wondering if it might be lawful to regret the absence of “our mute four-footed friends, and the winged songsters of our woods even in the hallowed groves of Paradise.” Astonished, the usually temperate companion bursts out, “‘You speak like the very spirit of earth, imbued with a scent of freshly-turned soil!’” Think Emerson. No, better Thoreau, whose eco-theology is far less likely to turn natural fact into a symbol. No again. Surely the reference is to the lesser-known Concord prophet, William Ellery Channing, the younger, known as Ellery, whose signature poem, “The Earth Spirit” had recently appeared in the Dial, and which might go to prove, more than Emerson’s own signifcant protests, that, nothing like “ungrateful,” and having “no hostility to nature, but a child’s love to it,” the Idealist might well “expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons” (EL, 38). Daring to use Earth and Spirit in the same title, this “minor Transcendentalist” allows the Earth to speak for herself and, in her speech, touches most of the notes of the song of Hawthorne’s would-be naturalist. But source-hunting is hardly the point—which is, rather, that the debate going on has been between one more ironic avatar of Hawthorne the skeptical Concord outsider and some faintly recognizable spokesperson for the ideology of the “great original Thinker” at the “opposite extremity of [the] village” (1145). As the next, the fnal turn makes abundantly clear. Answering the Narrator’s more or less sentimental regret that all those earthy pleasures will be “eternally annihilated,” the calmly confdent companion assures his troubled friend that no one need fear Father Miller on that account. Like the televangelist whose Sunday morning sermon assured me that I could arrange my heaven in any way that suited me—earth-like but perfected, like my own “glorifed body.” For example, I could have my father at any age I might prefer, no matter what he happened to prefer: that would be his fantasy. So don’t despair, new-born Earth-Spirit: Standing here, in the Hall of Fantasy, we perceive what even the earthclogged intellect of man can do, in creating circumstances, which, though we call them shadowy and visionary, are scarcely more so than those that surround us in actual life. Doubt not, then, that man’s disembodied spirit may recreate Time and the World for itself, with all its peculiar enjoyments, should there still be such human yearnings amid life eternal and infnite. (744) You want earthiness, you can have it. It is, after all, just an idea. But, he soberly opines, “‘I doubt whether we shall be inclined to play such a poor

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scene over again.’” To which the un-consoled Narrator replies, “‘Oh, you are ungrateful to our Mother Earth!’” He for one “‘never will forget her.’” Evidently the consoler has missed the point. Namely, that it will never do to eat and drink and love and frolic in a world which we know is not really real. Not satisfed to have a Mother Earth to “‘exist merely in idea,’” he wants “‘Her round, solid self to endure interminably.’” Then, fearful for the moment that he may be over-playing the hand held by any human creature, dictating a plot to God, “‘Nevertheless, I confde the whole matter to Providence.’” “‘An excellent resolve,’” observes the companion. And this might well end the whole matter: the Sometime Sentimentalist having out-natured the Minor Transcendentalist—refusing at the same time to concede that Nature as Will and Idea is any substitute for hugging a tree—what else needs to be said? Unless one or the other is willing to risk some wry comment on epistemic discord as it came to appear in Concord in 1842. Well let’s just see. It being the dinner hour, the MT makes a friendly invitation: “‘Will you partake of my vegetable diet?’” OK, nothing but organic, free-range, grass-fed sprouts: we might have been expecting that. But maybe not the terms of response: “A thing so matter-of-fact as an invitation to dinner, even when the fare was to be nothing more substantial than vegetables and fruit, compelled us forthwith to remove from the Hall of Fantasy.” Talk, talk, talk, that is to say, when do we eat? In the self-critical formulation of an Emerson seeking “help” from certain “fneries and pedantries [of] thought,” “‘Children, eat your victuals, and say no more of it’” (478). Or we think of Berkeley (and then Edwards) apologizing for the solecism of asking whether we do not eat and drink ideas. Or of the sophomore who tries to explain to his roommate about the precious immaterialism of that rare and remarkable thinker, and for his pains gets himself kneed in the nuts. Yet somewhat more than standard undergraduate humor: we need to hear the learned philosophical pun in the word “substantial.” Have you eaten? Yes, but nothing very substantial, a few organic nuts and berries. But not by accident, right? I mean, berries are, unlike colors and quantities, actual substances, are they not? Berries do not inhere in other substances, do they? Oh, dear, was Aristotle in fact a naive realist? Or was he talking about no more than categories of predication? But what in the end do we really mean by “substance”? Anything that can exist all by itself? Would that not be God? Books to be written on this subject. But not by Hawthorne—who just wants to let you know that language is somewhat more “idealist” than other human habits. No more than Emerson could he make “respectable” this “perpetual belly.” Only that—no less doomed to milk the cow of the world—he was somewhat less inclined to “Whisper in her ear, ‘You are not true.’”10

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Again, the sketch could well end just here—the paradox of Idealism identifed and Emerson fully implied. But it goes one step further, frankly suggesting that Emerson’s style of fancy may be the ne plus ultra of universal reformation—Father Miller without a vengeance. Leaving the Hall, the odd couple pass several persons “who had been sent there in magnetic sleep”—by the quondam-transcendental artistry of Edgar Poe, no doubt, as in the next sentence the skeptical but strongly tempted Narrator regrets having to return to the “actual world” with those “hard angles,” temporarily hidden by the circle-making curtains borrowed from the deathchamber of a certain angel-muse named Ligeia. (They appear again in “The Birth-mark” where the attempt to turn a woman into an angel ends in the death of both.) But no, back to ordinary reality, with only an occasional visit to the Hall, “for the sake of spiritualizing the grossness of actual life, and prefguring a state, in which Idea shall be all in all.” Just as St. Paul had soberly taught. No, wait: he said God would be all in all. Then it must have been Emerson—in Nature’s own apocalyptic conclusion where, having learned from a certain “Orphic poet” that Original Man somehow made the world, we are encouraged to believe that, in the fnal state of the case, Ultimate Man will recover that magic power and recreate the world to suit, once again, his ideal self-image. And why not? On Emersonian premise, there is no mind higher than the One Mind in which all human beings participate—Man being the place (so to speak) where Spirit comes to consciousness; and since, in the local, epistemic case, the idea of the world is the product of the entirely subjective projection of every single individual; why not imagine the fnal act both to repeat the original and universalize the particular? There may be problems with this here theory, but they are not in any sense Hawthorne’s own. His job is merely to notice that Emerson is Father Miller without the melodrama. Thus the ironic structure of Hawthorne’s “Fantasy” seems clear and strong: Reformers, impatient with the merely real, Father Miller with one really radical solution, postponed, unfortunately, as predictions of the End have so often been, and Emerson, whose Idealism knows a trick worth two (or more) of all that. And not just then, when Nature’s last light shall have been put out, but now, here, already, in “the apocalypse of the mind” (EL, 2). Of course there is a sense in which a dyed-in-the-wool bibliolater like Miller and a liberated metaphysician like Emerson should not appear on the same planet, let alone the same page; but, under the aspect of the durability—the viability, in fact—of the world as given in the non-fantastic faculties of humankind, the connection is obvious: Idealism, along with the prediction that it will one day be as true in practice as it has come to seem inevitable now in theory, trumps even the aboriginal Christian aversion from the (apparently) real. Gross it may be—the Christians had called it “dirty”—but why do so many hate it so much?

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4 The more dramatic versions of this natural dissatisfaction, this agitated and unsettling lust for the ideal—the best which is the perennial enemy of the good, that perfect which is the death of the possible—may have as much to do with the allegory of Poe’s “Ligeia” as with Emerson’s prose account of romantic love as training wheels for virtue, but that hardly changes the general problem or the mood: Eureka is not yet, and Hawthorne may or may not have read “Al Aaraaf,” but “The Birth-mark” and “The Artist of the Beautiful” prove he knows what to think when feshly women are refned into allegories of ideal aspiration. As suggested above, Aylmer’s anxious watch over the perfected but dying body of his tragically willing wife appears to imitate the en-curtained moment when some nameless Narrator witnesses the power of his primary and secondary imagination to produce the Idea of a perfect Ligeia in the space once occupied by the beautiful but hapless real woman with too many names. Too bad she has to die. But then what subject could be more poetic? Shameless may be the allegory, but it may also make Edgar Poe not just a “freak with fancies” but in fact il migliore idealista. On the other hand, somebody thinks “The Artist of the Beautiful” the story Emerson would have written, had that remarkable writer ever deigned to embody one of his many voices in a dramatic character. And, to be sure, there is that “Poet” who “pursues a beauty, half-seen, which fies before him” (EL, 466), rather like a butterfy. But nowhere in Emerson is the slightest hint that the reproduction of this beauty in art can be anything like mechanical—as there emphatically is, almost comically, in “The Philosophy of Composition.” Beauty well may be, as in “The Poetic Principle,” the soul’s primary intimation of immortality, but poems get written one damn thing at a time. After creative intuition, techne. And besides, it’s not Emerson but Poe who, denying the possibility of a long poem, suggests the miniaturism of Owen Warland. Nor did Emerson ever suggest that it was all done “For Annie.” But hey, whoever said that there was only one way for Idealism to appear on or about 1842? Or that the Hedge Club owned the patent to Plotinian correctives to Kant? Nor was it as if Hawthorne did not owe his fctional rival a few borrowed details amounting to a kind of review. It’s just that you had to stray more than a mile or so from the Manse to get to where Emerson tended bar and bespoke idealism. Taking idealism in another, more fundamental and technical sense, “The Christmas Banquet” appears to comment directly on Emerson’s grasp of the psychological downside of the rueful discovery that “the vast shadow of the phenomenal” falls on persons as well as things, making love and friendship a little more perilous than often made to appear. Of course it comes as the second of a pair of stories, the frst of which has been shown to imply not

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Emerson but the would-be disciple Jones Very, who responded to Emerson’s call for prophets of the future to go it alone—“Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost”—with a series of sonnets in the voice of that same Ghostly Holy Spirit; and whose sense of “entire subjectivity” reminded Hawthorne of an early fantasy of his own, one Eliakim Abbott who preaches Jesus in the footsteps of an itinerant whose prime story implies Hume. But as autobiography is also a form of roman a clef, so, on the account of Herman Melville, both of Hawthorne’s “Allegories of the Heart” may invite a quasi-autobiographical reading. Till declared to be saved by Rosina’s magical cure—“Forget yourself in the idea of another”—the crazyguilty Roderick Elliston looks a little like the Hawthorne who for years cooped himself up in an attic, reading and writing about the “snaky tribe” of Cotton Mather’s Puritans. Whether guilty himself or not, no one has ever more needed to “open an intercourse with the world” than this long-time black-veiled loner. Credit Sophia: farewell to that “dismal and squalid” chamber; hello to love. Hello as a day job from Bancroft and the Democratic Party, and the bookstore-conversations of Margaret Fuller and to the public lectures of Emerson. Whose country have I come to now? Cured or not, the sick soul of “Egotism” becomes the provocative Narrator of “The Christmas Banquet”—imagining a character with a case that might be not so easy to handle. “Cure this,” a grateful but still resistant writer might be saying. You thought the old-time Puritans had exhausted the possibilities of self-entrapment—of “egotism” as the ironic result of that too full a meal of meditation on the true sight of sin—well think again. Here’s someone whose more rarefed form of egotism is that he can’t make anything outside himself seem real. Constantly present at a blasphemous (Voltaire-conceived) banquet at which the invited guests are all those who know the world chiefy as sufering and who are, as a result, apt to pick a quarrel with God: Joy to the world/Cause God don’t care. But wait, what the hell is Gervayse Hastings doing here, the guests all want to know. What has he ever sufered? He’s rich, healthy, well-married, well respected in the community; there must be some mistake. Be at peace, the stewards keep repeating; he’s got a real problem. He’s there, it appears, because he sufers his odd dissociation from the extra-mental world. He grieves it, one might say, but his grief is that he cannot really grieve. Quite like the Emerson, we begin to suspect, who, in the (infamous) beginning of the luminous and durable essay “Experience,” moves from his own shallow inability to keep the death of his precious son painfully before him to his more general sense of human epistemology as a sort of Platonic (or Cartesian) schizophrenia: as every “thing” is, after all, merely an idea, do not be surprised if sooner or later reality begins to seem a little “ghostlike.” But you’ll say, “Experience” is not yet published. Quite so, but that stubborn fact did not convince my determined graduate student,

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who inferred, quite plausibly, that in an act of Transcendental friendship, Hawthorne and Emerson had probably exchanged Journals. Or maybe they just talked it all out, on one of their long walks together, as to the Shaker community at Hancock. Whatever the fact, there is no doubt that the Hawthorne who had written “The Wives of the Dead” and “The Minister’s Black Veil,” was himself no stranger to what we might call the scandal of the subject. One way or another, Hawthorne’s unhealthy protagonist turned provocative narrator is presenting us with the case of a man to whom events and even persons are as but “shadows fickering on a wall”: four times the story says just so. Nor Emerson specifcally, to be sure, but only the most famous image surviving from the would-be epistemology of Plato, from whom Emerson surely learned a thing or two. Indeed, before there was “the Berkeleyan hypothesis” there had been the less overdetermined scene in the cave, which Emerson would be revisiting (and revising) in the late essay “Illusions.” No doubt even a so-so student like Hawthorne would have learned that lesson at an of-brand college in Maine. You could argue that, deep down, Hawthorne absorbed the reassuringly counter-idealist creed of Scottish common sense all too well; but the image of the shadows appears to have sunk deep into the mind of this essentially solitary man. And then he met Emerson: oh, dear, you too? 5 All but fnal in the Mosses from an Old Manse—and climactic, clearly, in Hawthorne’s career as a writer and collector of tales, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” leads us from a perfectly contemporaneous discourse about miracles to a long-since worried question about whether Truth can ever be all one thing. The road from Concord to Padua has proved well worth following but rather too long to retrace here. The shortcut: parodic miracles and the ambiguity of evidence: what if doctrine and its sign were, well, diferent? And, deeper down, what about the quasi-Manichean problem of Calvinism and the body: rotten root, as they had dared to say. Beatrice Rappaccini may or may not be contagious, but in any event Original Sin fgures as social disease; and—adding in another fesh-hating idiom—because reality is in the end ideal, the smart-ass narrator encourages sexual congress in any case. Beset manhood indeed: what would sex be like if we really believed St Augustine’s claim that the transmission of Original Sin was “seminal”? Or Berkeley’s embarrassed apology for implying that we eat and drink ideas? Like Somebody Famous once said, “We milk the cow of the world,” protesting all the while, “You are not true.” Pauline marriage may well fgure Christ and his Church, but had Swedenborg said the fnal word on the typology of “dreams, beasts, sex”?11 Especially this last? We need an easier way to begin—as with the fey headnote, not printed in all versions of the story—ascribing to the fctitious French writer “Aubepine,”

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a dumb enough way to name the fower to which, in English, Hawthorne famously added the fnale. And we probably fnd the French translations of Hawthorne’s various tales and sketches only mildly more amusing. What we need to take quite seriously, however, is the Narrator’s sense that Aubepine’s literary productions fall, sadly enough between “the great body of pen-andink men who address the intellect and sympathies of the multitude” and the “Transcendentalists (who under one name or another, have their share in all the current literature of the world).” Where, exactly? Well, somewhere between the Hawthorne who himself could not answer his wife’s demand to know if Beatrice were “angel or demon” and his Narrator who insists we remember our frst lesson in Plato: “There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the fnger” (999). The same Narrator knows this well enough to imply the relevance of one George Ripley—one-time colleague of Emerson in the too-too-common-sense religion called Unitarianism, the sowing-and-reaping friend of Hawthorne at Brook Farm, and the editor of a multi-volume literary collection called Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature. Why else would Hawthorne have referred to his faux French works as “specimens”? Ripley, we need to recall, was the man who, on behalf of a cadre of Harvard divinity students, dared to instruct their distinguished former professor (“Pope” Andrews Norton) that Hume was irrelevant because in fact miracles had little or nothing to do with the faith of ordinary Christians. Their “better evidence” was an intuitive recognition of the spiritual authority only the hopelessly obtuse would fail to recognize in the life and character of Jesus, a whole-hearted recognition and, if those were indeed different, endorsement of the salvifc nature of his teaching. Emerson had said as much earlier, before deciding that “historical Christianity,” founded and focused on the “person of Jesus” had become a “cult” like many another and that true religion was founded not on “The Authority of Jesus” but on the integrity of the Soul. So that, if Ripley, then Emerson too: miracles were one thing, faith quite another. Happily, for the not-quite Transcendental Christians, all the evidence pointed one way; beautiful person, captivating doctrine, and miracles of love and good will. But what if that were not always the case? What if, for example, the enthralled woman who could not keep from crying out, “Blessed be the womb that bore thee and the breasts that gave thee suck” had come forth from the crowd and, upon touching the hem of His garment, had shriveled into a heap of burnt ashes? Oh dear, who would ever imagine such a thing? Well, Hawthorne, it comes to appear. Certain that his young protagonist is shallow in the manner of Italian lovers, the Narrator, some sort of Transcendentalist, one gathers, is quick to blame Giovanni for failing to embrace his inamorata without question or scruple. And no doubt there is some deep problem about Giovanni’s decision to insist on some sort of a test that will settle the whole afair,

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one way or another: if her breath can indeed kill insects, then ipso facto her spirit will be proven evil, desperately wicked in fact. Vile empiricism, that. But the sore-puzzled Reader may well wonder—what if, poisoned in body by her father’s depraved science, her soul, her spirit, heart of hearts, her intentions remain altogether pure and innocent? As she herself insists: “Though my body be nourished with poison, my spirit is God’s creature” (1003). What, so far from home, is a poor medical student to do? Sufer “male horror” and leave his tale to the Feminist? Her body herself. What the hell is he dosing her with? Did he not read the case of Aylmer and Georgiana? So far, so bad, Naughty Natty: here’s where their theory of some “better mode of evidence” falls to the ground. But now, what about that premise, poisoned body/pure spirit. Apart from its function as the necessary premise—the donnee, so to speak—of some rarefed quarrel with the epistemology of a local sect of happifying Christians, whose idea is that? Not Calvin’s surely; on his account the good-refusing, evil-preferring spirit is at least as corrupt as the concupiscent body. Not that of Liberals, who hold that the human soul is born pure and innocent; and while admitting that the fallen creature has appetites that are hard to control, would fnd that the notion of an evil body smacks of Manicheanism. And if truly Hawthorne’s own, then let Feminist Criticism reign forever: male horror, beset manhood, and be done with it. The case looks pretty strong: why he could not be more afraid of her if he expected to contract of her some horrid social disease. Like Syphilis? Yes—that’s where those silver vials of Benvenuto Cellini come in. Who? Ask Carol Bensick.12 And don’t blame me: I never said it was going to be easy: Beatrice from Dante’s fourteenth-century drama of salvation and/or from Shelley’s closet drama about incest and parricide from a later century; Boy-God Vertumnus, as if to remind us that apples grow in gardens other than that in Eden (and that what you see is not always what you get); other gardens as well, more than at which you could shake a caduceus; and, yes the guy who gave his (many) syphilitic friends a dose of mercury in little silver vials. What does not make you stronger may well kill you— as the primitive pharmacy of Roger Chillingworth will go to prove. But what if the fear of VD should come to be associated with the afect of sex itself? Precipitous “decline in the sentiment,” as Henry James might well observe. But what else? And why-ever? Well, what if you really believed Augustine’s theory that original sin is transmitted “seminally”? Ah: Adam’s fault, you’ll say, for making out with Eve. But whose fault was that? Well, consider this: would not male self-reliance be perfect were it not for the seductive allure of Woman as such? So, Augustine was a Manichean after all. And St. Paul too, for that matter: “Better to marry than to burn”: Where did you prep? But you see the

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point. At the center of Rappaccini’s garden thrives a luxurious plant we can hardly keep from calling a bush: the tree of life appearing as the shrub of sin. Dr. Rappaccini may be some grotesque and parodic God, or he may be just some dumbass “Adam of this present world,” but the point is the same: God may or may not be “the author of sin,” but He sure has made it easy to pass around. Better not go there. Emerson and Ripley may be naïve about “the evidences of Christianity,” but they do not believe in two Gods. Melville may, but not Hawthorne. Vile it is to blame The Fall on The Woman. Worse, perhaps, to identify depravity with procreation. Sex—as Emerson once observed—is strange enough all by itself. But what about Padua? After all, Cellini tended bar in Florence, and that a century later than the precocious crisis of Faith to which the story demonstrably alludes. First of all, do we think Hawthorne was sourcefaking when, in the outsetting reference to “the great poem of his country” (976), he remarks that its author had placed one of Giovanni’s ancestors in hell? My money is on the bet of Robert Daly:13 if it’s not Averroes, then some precocious Paduan who learned from him the doctrine of the “two truths”—Revelation, one thing, Reason, quite another—which would overturn not only the theology of Dante himself, but the episteme of the entire Middle age. Truth is one, remember? Damn you, Averroes, or Marsilius, or Achillini: Ambiguity, Undecidability, the Plural Universe, that’s the modern problem. “Blessed be all simple emotions,” opines the nowobtuse, now-cogent Narrator; but how can you feel just one way when Truth is no longer just one thing. Who ya gonna believe? A doctrine may smile and smile and yet not be the One True Word. But here’s the problematic reminder: a famous, then forgotten Paduan controversy between Achillini and Pompanazzi predicts the nineteenthcentury “Miracles Controversy” close enough for fctional work; and the topos of the silver vials sheds lurid light on Giovanni’s crazy-making doubt; but perhaps those two stories do not quite hang together. Deep down, it appears, the question is the theology of sex: can we really believe it has anything to do with our now-slovenly, now-depraved moral condition? Walking in the footsteps of Sir Kenelm Digby,14 Aylmer No-name had tried to erase its reminder in Georgiana; here, with the help of the small-minded Baglioni, Giovani is trying to cure his Beatrice of something or other. Dante may well have been naïve to believe that his sublimated desire for a nine-year-old girl held the key to Paradise. And we need to remember it was Pagans not Christians who frst called the sexual parts, pudenda, i.e., shameful. But could a sane person really believe that procreation was identically the spread of depravity? Enough to make a person turn Shaker—to one community of which Hawthorne and Emerson once took a walk together. They both knew Ripley; they both had wives. I wonder what they talked about.

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6 Looking back, “A Virtuoso’s Collection” exists to prove its author could be as hard on some space-and-time-bound “materialism” as any Sage of Concord. And, on something of the same account, the earth-afrming opposition to the Holocaust of Father Miller in “The Hall of Fancy” gives testimony—along with the Thoreauvian passages on “The Old Manse”— that this sojourner in the town of Emerson may be thought to love Nature as well as the next soul sensitive to the green and growing. But what would it mean if Materialism and Idealism were not the perfect, non-deconstructable binary Emerson’s “Transcendentalist” had made them out to be? Or, to put it another way, were not the major Transcendentalists some signifcant sense also Naturalists? Could one be a full-on Naturalist without being a Materialist into the bargain? Of course, Emerson would argue, since Nature exists only as the form in which Spirit presently appears. But what about Hawthorne, who appears on the whole to believe in the “substantial” reality of the cow we milk? What would the card-carrying Transcendentalist say about him? What, more to the point, would we? No surprise, perhaps, if a mind so thoroughly devoted to the drama of consciousness—or else, in the Notebooks, so resolutely fastened on “the true and insignifcant”—should have failed to produce a fully developed Theory of Everything and, who knows, if Averroes and Achillini were right about the two truths, perhaps the sane man may fnd himself loving Nature not less than the Spirit. Oh, yes, Dualism: I’ve heard of that: two truths if there ever was one. How Western. How very Christian. But no: Hawthorne may have been one of the “great believers of his generation,” but the son who told us so was altogether unable to instruct us as to the exact nature of those beliefs.15 And so perhaps we can aford to let it rest: Hawthorne is the man who, after years in the attic with John Winthrop and Cotton Mather, came down and out among the Transcendentalists. Neighbor of Thoreau and the Channing of the moment, he saw himself as living and writing “at the opposite extremity” of the Village of Emerson. Whom he admired, and with whom, from time to time he begged to disagree. Which fact matters signifcantly to the understanding of both. Ideas have consequences. Some serve wonderfully to clear up the mess of our everyday experience. But some may make the matter worse. Notes 1 For the text of “The Old Manse,” see Roy Harvey Pearce, ed., Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches (Library of America, 1996), 1124. 2 For Emerson on the “physicians as ‘materialist,’” see “Experience,” in Joel Porte, ed., Essays and Lectures (Library of America, 1983), 475; for his defnition of “Transcendentalism,” see “The Transcendentalist,” E&L, 193. And for Hawthorne’s reference to the literary extent of Transcendentalism, see the

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frst paragraph of “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Pearce, ed., Hawthorne: Tales and Sketched, 975. See Millicent Bell, Hawthorne’s View of the Artist (SUNY Press, 1962), 94. For RD in the context of the so-called Miracles Controversy, see my “Better Mode of Evidence,” ESQ, 15 (1969), 12–22. For details of the controversy itself, see Perry Miller, ed., Harvard U Press, The Transcendentalists (1950), 157–246; and cp, William R. Hutchison, The Transcendentalist Ministers (Archon, 1072), 52–97. For the origin of a metaphor that has proved surprisingly durable (if also problematic), see Alice Felt Tyler, Minnesota U Press, Freedom’s Ferment (1944). See my “Artifcial Fire,” in Doctrine and Diference: Readings in Classic American Literature (Routledge, 2021), 119–36. For the Encyclopedists’ habit of reductionist comparison see Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (1959). The quote—from Frederick Crews’ discussion of Hawthorne’s “Puritan” identity—works rather better thematically than biographically, see Sins of the Fathers (1966), 27–38. And for an even wider application, see Sacvan Bercovitch, Puritan Origins of the American Self (Yale, 1975), esp. 1–34. See Vol. XII of the Centenary Hawthorne (1988), 529–30; and cp. Vol. XXI (1982), 153. For Emerson’s insatiable belly, see “Montaigne,” E&L, 705. The poem quoted is that of Richard Wilbur, “Epistemology II.” See Emerson, Nature, E&L, 7. See La Nouvelle Beatrice (Rutgers, 1984), esp. 93–112; and cp. “World Lit Hawthorne,” in Millicent Bell, ed., New Essays on Hawthorne’s Major Tales (Cambridge, 1993), 67–82. See Robert Daly, “Fideism and the Allusive Mode in RD,” NCF, 28.1 (1973), 25–37. For the example of Royal Society Member Sir Kenelm Digby behind the career of Hawthorne’s Aylmer, see Alfred S. Reid, “Hawthorne’s Humanism,” AL, 38.3 (1966), 337–51. See George Parsons Lathrop, A Study of Hawthorne (Osgood, 1876), 296.

4

“All but Madness” Blasphemy and Skepticism in Moby-Dick

What Melville says about Hawthorne—that he “says no in thunder”— has come to seem more a personal literary credo than a piece of ordinary criticism. Literally, of course, it is Ahab’s “quarrel with God,” but you don’t give your anti-hero all that energetic Shakespearian language without somewhere feeling a powerful will to denial. At least at times. By a certain point in his wobbly career, literary honesty appeared to demand that one not be afraid to let be said, out loud, the worst that could possibly be true about God and Man and Nature. At least by some character half-crazed by pain and loss. And what if the tormented man were wrong? He might die in the midst of his blasphemy, but his survivors, author and audience, would live to consider the alternatives: the cost of nihilism versus the value of the literary suspense called skepticism. Just so, one might argue, the structure of Moby-Dick: Ahab dead but Ishmael surviving to wonder about what otherwise—or what else—might be true. But it is also, and before that much-revised text made its “fuid” appearance, the burden of a letter—to Hawthorne, about what that daring writer appeared to share with the otherwise incomparable Shakespeare. Subtly, but disturbingly, they let their “dark characters” say things it were “madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint.”1 Melville names Lear on the Heath, but in fact it is the blinded Gloucester who asserts that the gods “kill us for their sport.” Closer to the moment of Melville’s own negative outburst—and though he may live to bite his tongue—it is some bewildered Goodman who declares that “There is no good on earth and evil is but a name.” Either will do for Ahabian pretext. And, in any event, the creation of Ahab seems well predicted or duly recorded in the pronouncement, in another letter to Hawthorne, that certain fearless truth seekers will see and say the worst. Whatever the consequences: they “may perish,” but so long as they live they insist on “treating with all Powers upon an equal basis.” For example, talk not to him of “blasphemy”; he’d “strike the sun” if he were by it “insulted” (133). Or, later, in an apotheosis of theological resistance—when the push DOI: 10.4324/9781003334262-4

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of vengeance has come to the shove of mere power, he would “kneel and kiss” some principle of goodness, but “come as mere supernal power” and he will spit fre back in its face. Whatever it is. However it threatens. True, Ahab has a softer, more humane side, to which Starbuck very efectively appeals, in the last chapter before the furious three-day chase, which ends badly, of course, for all except Ishmael—who appears himself to be lost in the novel’s frst printed version.2 But as it is probably Ahab’s defance that we remember, it falls to the one who “escaped alone to tell thee.” And, once we realize that the novel has been along, his retrospect, our re-readings pay close attention to the things he says later on in his account. Early on, he had appeared entirely ripe for an insane quest: reckless and more than a little defant—who, for God’s sake, would name himself Ishmael, bastardoutcast of the universe? He admires the insatiable Bulkington inordinately and, in the chapel full of monumental reminders of whalemen lost at sea, he dares “Jove” (though not quite Jehovah, let alone God) to so much as lay a glove on his immortal soul. Queequeg, the “soothing savage,” appears to calm him down for a while, but in the long retrospect he feels the need to confess: “my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been wedded with theirs” (144). But then, by Chapter 58, in fact, his tune begins to change: back in Chapter 23—the mysterious and metaphorical burial of Bulkington—Ishmael had vehemently instructed us that, whatever else might be true, it is every way “better . . . to perish in the howling infnite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee” (91); here, on the other hand, it appears the part of some wisdom to “push not of” (215). A lot going on here, obviously. Once upon a time, a footnote in a fairly authoritative edition of the novel saw ft to remind us that, in the latter chapter, we were already on an island in the middle of the ocean, so that some of-pushing has obviously taken place already.3 OK, I guess, but the tone has certainly changed. And so, importantly, has the construction of the fgure itself. Earlier—following Emerson and defying Augustine and Calvin4—Ishmael was encouraging us to dare to confront a “howling” opposition that was entirely external—the Self against the Forces, whatever the cost. Now, however, the geography is entirely internal: inside your own capacious consciousness, do you not fnd, lovingly, “one Insular Tahiti” of sober sanity, while all around it, but still entirely within yourself, a realm of “remorseless tribes,” a world of shark-eat-shark cannibalism. So that here—in the second of his three big readings of his experience5—Ishmael appears to be recording the beginnings of his gradual backing away from his initial sympathy with the destructive violence of Ahab’s cosmic paranoia. Inspired by the early encounter with Queequeg or not, it is this gradual, reasoned withdrawal which justifes Ishmael’s psychic survival. Bobbing up and down on Queequeg’s cofn, he lives to write the tale Ahab himself never could. And it is the development of this new intellectual caution—including, importantly, a considered skepticism about the

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possibility of ever knowing the external world—das ding an sich—that guarantees the narrative presence of Ishmael through the later portions of the novel and that, importantly, unifes the not-so-quarrelsome side of Melville’s subtle thematics. And it appears that this very turn—from blasphemous rage to a cautious and temperate skepticism—is well predicted in that letter to Hawthorne about a fearless confronting of those Powers who, as with Prometheus of old, appear to be withholding something from the merely mortal. Challenge them! Or, perhaps, after all, there is no such mystery. We incline to think that the Problem of the Universe is like the Freemason’s mighty secret, so terrible to all children. It turns out, at last, to consist in a triangle, a mallet, and an apron—nothing more! We incline to think that God cannot explain His own secrets, and that He would like a little information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us. (565) The letter goes on, of course, to suggest, in a tone signifcantly less composed and resolute, how the mad search for the solution to the Problem of the Universe appears inevitably to begin: as soon as you say “Me, God, a Nature,” all sorts of funky things begin to happen. But who says that— Plato, Descartes, Emerson? And does he mean three separate Entities or some marvelous humanoid Three in One?—like Emily Dickinson’s Triform Giant, who sleeps wherever he wants.6 Whatever: whether Melville will ever be “done changing”—or get the last of his “shanties of chapters” to the publisher before Ishmael perishes with the rest of his blaspheming crew—the skeptical possibility survives. In a universe where God Himself may not know how many “hypostases” are required to change a light bulb, it probably is the part of wisdom to be cautious about the nature and extent of human knowledge: ontology back then; epistemology, now: unhappy discovery, but “too late to be helped.”7 And so it makes some sense to look closely at how and where, in Melville’s philosophical novel about knowing great whales and deep secrets— where Thoreau wished only to “know beans”—ontological hubris begins to give place to epistemological modesty. And to how, and how deeply, the question is embedded in the novel’s structure. It may even make sense to ask, cautiously, whether the sense of Ishmael’s developing skepticism may owe something to that of Emerson, whose essay on “Montaigne” spells out a sense of that position quite like that which emerges in the fuid Melville text. Sometimes in very similar language. Emerson of course would pray to put anything like Melville’s hard-to-rule Manicheanism behind him, like Jesus with the blandishments of Satan, but the Melville who called his Optimist contemporary a “deep diver,” may share with him some of the

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thoughts which permit us to recognize the “later Emerson” as something of a “negative thinker.”8 2 As to the more general argument—that some not entirely sotto voce skepticism competes with the blatant blasphemy in the thematic construction of Moby-Dick—it begins fairly early in the novel. Famously, Chapter 42—“The Whiteness of the Whale”—contextualizes, if it does not entirely take back, what is said about the subterranean meaning of the white whale in Chapter 41, “Moby-Dick.” Ahab is almost certain that the “salt-sea mastodon” that unmanned him can fairly stand as a palpable epitome of the “that intangible malignity which has been from the beginning”; sooner or later, “all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personifed, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick” (148). Yet the whale, as Ahab had patiently explained to Starbuck—is, like so much else—but “as a pasteboard mask”; so that, if a man would strike at the evil lurking behind, he must “strike through the mask!” And yet a subtle doubt shadows the deadly dogma: Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefy what I hate: and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. (133) Crazy, then, it is to attack the self-selected symbol, whether it is “meaningful” or not, rather like Hawthorne’s Aylmer and the little pink hand. Hating nihility at least as much as malignity, Ahab, wounded to the quick, will kill the whale in any case. “Talk not to [him] of blasphemy”; he’d “strike the sun.” And Ishmael has sworn to go along. Yet the thought that almost distracts Ahab from an almost settled case of cosmic paranoia—that there is no lurking secret, that the universe is just so many triangles and mallets—is the thought that Ishmael works up into a whole chapter—on the whale’s whiteness which, Toni Morrison to the contrary notwithstanding, and with the looming example of Poe’s Gordon Pym behind it—constitutes a prime example of those “Episodes in the Conquest of Void in the 19th century.”9 What could all that talk about whiteness mean except as a matter of race? Well, just maybe, for Ishmael who got along with the three non-white harpooneers pretty well, maybe it was indeed the thought of an “indefniteness” which “stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation” (157). The “problem of the twentieth century” may well be “the color line” but, whether we like it or not, the nineteenth century still had room

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to worry the “problem of Evil” and, worse perhaps, to live with certain intimations of indeterminacy. And so Ishmael himself goes crazy on the subject: what if there’s just nothing at all behind appearances? Think about it: whiteness!—“in essence . . . not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors.” Think about it: where does this leave “every stately or lovely emblazoning— the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterfies, and the butterfy cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without.” (157) What?!—are we forced to conclude that “all deifed Nature absolutely paints like a harlot?” A conceit that would elude even Emerson, who said almost everything else about the question of “Illusions.”10 Call this Epistemological Puritanism. And what if not even appearances are real? And more such disturbing suggestions, lavish and unrestrained. So that what the man who slept with the Islander of Color asks us to consider is—Ahab in or Ahab out—“Wonder ye then at the fery hunt?” (157). Other sorts of epistemological questioning will follow along later in the narrative but, as I have suggested, there are less strenuous versions of the question of knowing and not knowing even earlier. What else are we to make of the “Extracts” which, on the matter of the meaning of the book’s subject, run from the dogmatic theological certainty that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the whale, to the more pragmatic suggestions that the whale may be dangerous but hunting him is jolly fun and—who knows?—the whale may be himself the Almighty. And in the very frst chapter, what do we imagine all those shore-assembled water-gazers are staring at? Did it take Robert Frost to suggest that the fact they can neither “look out far” nor “look in deep” does not keep them from looking? Maybe they are wondering about “The Shape of Water”? What’s really up with Bulkington—why does he hate the land so much? And what really happened to him?—except that this ultimate water gazer found himself replaced by an ultimate-ultimate water-gazer. And Queequeg: who the hell is he? What do we suppose he is thinking when he looks at the memorials in the Whalemen’s Chapel? What does this pagan—out to study the ways of the Christian world—think about the meaning of life? And death? What do the “unnecessary duplicates”11 Peleg and Bildad really think about the quondam Quaker Ahab—what do they mean by a “Grand, ungodly, godlike man?” And why are the three non-white harponeers so eager to help Ahab kill the White Man’s Cartesian God? More than enough to suggest

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that in a world where nobody—not even the novelist—can ever know enough, there are probably hell’s own supply of things that cannot ever be entirely explained. But the cloud of unknowing begins to get thick with Chapter 58. Like many of the symbolizing chapters in the novel, “Brit” begins innocently enough: Right whales, “secure from the attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod,” are swimming through large patches of the grassy substance on which they almost silently feed, might look “more like lifeless masses of rock than anything else”—as hunters in India “will sometimes pass on the plains of recumbent elephants without knowing them to be such, taking them for bare, blackened elevations of the soil.” And even persons who know better can hardly imagine that these “leviathans of the sea” are “instinct . . . with the same sort of life that lives in a dog or a horse” (213–14). This problem of ascription leads on to a meditation on the perceived diferences between the land and the sea: wherein difer they, so that “a miracle upon one is not a miracle upon the other?” The ground opened miraculously to swallow “Korah and his company,” but the “sea swallows up ships and crews” without batting an eye. Next, the murderous quality of the sea itself, slaughtering aliens and guests alike. Think of it: “Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe” (215). Another “giant in might, where might is right” (15). And then, at last, the passage which recalls and appears to recant the advice to defy the deep-sea terrors. Land and sea: safety and danger, both now moved inside. An ocean of savage madness surrounding “one insular Tahiti”: “Push not of.” Caution, that is to say, arising from a meditation of mystery. And, founded in a skepticism in which Ahab himself seems to participate, the new caution will continue. Chapters of honest-to-God whaling pour out and fourish. Next up, “a great white mass” (215) turns out to be not Moby Dick but a “squid,” which some believe to be the sperm whale’s “only food” and which may be the reality of somebody’s “great Kraken” (216). Then, after some needful instructions concerning the “sometimes horrible whale-line,” “Stubb Kills” and dines on a whale. Whaling matters are momentarily interrupted by Queequeg’s racist declaration that the god who made the sharks viciously snapping at the whale remains must be “one dam Injin” (233). But though philosophy may come hard out of blubber, it comes with a force of its own. At whatever cost to the novel’s consistency in point of view, Chapter 70, “The Sphinx,” gives us Ahab’s one-sided conversation with the severed head of a sperm whale. Speak to the mystery, he beseeches. Explain why the ocean indiscriminately drowns so many, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Why did the murdering pirates get happily away, “while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms.” As if we needed to be reminded that

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Ahab has indeed a point: virtue may not always be rewarded with death, but often enough. So, speak: “O head! Thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infdel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!” (238). Anger lapsing to silence. Like, elsewhere, “the voice of our God.” There will be no answer, let it be. Two chapters later, “The Monkey-Rope” forces Ishmael to face the fact that, as elsewhere, self-reliance has its limits in the business of whaling, so that one had better form a theory somewhat more sociable than the one that had led him to deify Bulkington and make “Knights and Squires” out of the “simple, separate” men who had the misfortune to sign on to the crew of the “vindictive” Pequod. More of this later, as an incipient sense of other-reliance appears to come along with Ishmael’s growing suspicion that questions which imply their answers had best be left un-asked. And that theories that explain too much are somewhat worse than none at all. Just so the philosophic lesson arising from the “Contrasted View” of a “right whale’s head hoisted opposite” that of a sperm whale. One head, the ship leans way over, but then, “by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may well believe.” And just so, a refective, increasingly skeptical Ishmael suggests, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in a very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! Throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will foat light and right. (250) Stable versus unstable equilibrium—not too surprising a conclusion, perhaps, from the man who, on the subject of Queequeg’s problematic relation to philosophy, sets down his opinion that the man who “gives himself out for a philosopher” must, “like the dyspeptic old woman, have broken his digester” (55). But that was in spite of his intensely theological burial of Bulkington, his metaphysical elevation of Mates and Harpooneers to the status of “Knights and Squires,” his apparent sympathy with the “deep men” who sense a certain “malignity which has been from the beginning” (156) and, above all, his extended disquisition on the epistemology of whiteness. Some things may lie “deeper than Ishmael can go” (158); but he it is who has assured us that “all truth is profound” (157)—so that his dismissal of philosophy may touch ostentatious profession rather than the private meditation. In any case, the philosophy continues, at least in the minimalist case we call skepticism. Chapter 79, “The Prairie,” suggests that we were probably wrong if we thought the book’s prolifc assemblage of scientifc

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“cetology” would let us into the secret of a whale’s private subjectivity. Trying all things, achieving what he can, Ishmael chooses to regard the Sperm Whale “Physiognomically.” Why not? All’s fair in war and literary anatomy. Most impressive to him—“sublime,” in fact—is “the full front of his head.” Inspired wackiness follows, leading to the conclusion that the forefront of the whale bears “Lavater’s mark of genius.” More soberly, however, who can really read any other being? Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But where is the Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face. . . . If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I put that brow before you. Read it if you can. (262–3) To be sure, there is some intellectual showing-of on display here, as somebody knows a lot more than “unlettered Ishmael,” but the emerging thematic point is clear enough: it is going to be somewhat harder to read whales than it was to know beans. So that, theosophies based on certain knowledge may involve as much projection as inference. Just so, as examples of not-knowing seem regularly interspersed among chapters of graphic on-site description, Chapter 85, “The Fountain”— again a metaphor—dares us to discover how the sperm whale’s spout is related to his breathing and, not to put too fne a point upon it, what his curious, misty, behind-head spout exactly is. “Speak out,” some imagined listener responds to Ishmael’s detailed but inconclusive musings. Close observation reveals that “there is an undeviating rhyme between the periods of his jets and the ordinary periods of respiration.” OK: “You have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not tell water from air?” Ya’d almost think . . . well, a lot of things. But consider, My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the knottiest of all. And, as for the whale’s spout, you might almost stand in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely. (280) That is to say, even if you still thought our categories, of sight and of rational discrimination, rendered a perfect re-presentation of what they are calling das ding an sich. Ask Thoreau—he who would “write nature”—to tell you about “Haze,” the funky metamorph that aroused then defeats your will to metaphor. And while I’m on the subject of what we can and cannot accomplish, let me suggest that, as “the jet . . . fairly spouted into

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your eyes,” then “The wisest thing an observer can do . . . is to let the deadly spout alone” (280). But even this sea-going Pragmatism is not the last word in this jocular account of the limits of empiricism. Epistemology may prevent ontology, but the mind keeps at it. So Ishmael, like some latter-day metaphysical poet on speed, makes the whole question of knowing a thing into a serio-comic drama about the pretention to profundity and also, in point of serious fact, about the proper stance of the person who is learning to know his limits. Even as Emerson had outlined it in his respectful account of “Montaigne; or, The Skeptic.” Thoreau may “know beans,” but Ishmael cannot know the spout. “Still,” he assures us, as if he were quite serious, “we can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish.” And then the now-familiar manic whimsy breaks loose. My theory, which is mine, Ishmael tells us, is that the spout of the deep-diving whale is “nothing but mist,” such as spouts from the heads of all “ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on.” Consider in fact his personal example: While composing a little treatise on eternity, I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw refected there, a curious involved worming undulation in the atmosphere over my head. (280) Deep thoughts, six cups of hot tea, thin shingled attic, August noon: QED. But think about it: how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold . . . his vast mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that a vapor—as you will sometimes see it—glorifed by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts. (280) And then, suddenly enough, but with an efect becoming familiar, a turn to the perfectly serious. Indeed, it is as if Ishmael’s will to the truth has us frmly be the lapels: For, d’ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infdel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye. (280)

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And it makes as well a man who appears to agree with Emerson on the “right ground of the skeptic”: “Not at all of universal denying, nor of universal doubting—doubting even that he doubts,” but one who, like the emergent Ishmael, is learning to self-identify not as the Nay-sayer his author once appeared to deify, but as that equal-eyed “Considerer”— the prudent, taking in sail, counting stock, husbanding his means, believing that man has too many enemies, that that he can aford to be his own; that we cannot give ourselves too many advantages, in this unequal confict, with powers so vast and unweariable ranged on the [other] side.12 We may even see this new Ishmael as Emerson’s ironic “popinjay,” “bobbing up and down,” not in every danger perhaps, but on Queequeg’s cofn at the end. For the moment at least—“when shall we be done changing”?— Melville as another man who answered all the dogmatic knowers with “Que sais-je?”—what after all does one simple person really know, for sure, about all the important questions? Far from the Ishmael who signifed on Bulkington in Chapter 23 but, as we have already learned, the morale of the “howling infnite” is not as simple as once it defantly seemed. 3 The epitome of this advancing, pervading skepticism—leading to a rather precise deconstruction of the genre of quest-romance—comes, famously, in Chapter 99, “The Doubloon,” in which when crazy-witty Pip reduces the epistemology of multiform subjectivity to the stability of a well-evolved English grammar. Each of the main characters takes a turn at the tempting but essentially gratuitous project of interpreting the symbolic meaning of the images on the gorgeous South American coin Ahab has long since nailed to the mast. If I recall correctly, there used to be, back in the day, a “casebook” called “Moby-Dick as Doubloon,”13 proving the Latin maxim—tot homini, tot sententiae—which Melville translated as “many men have many minds”; so many readers, so many readings. Just so here: the self-asserting Ahab valorizes the “ever-egotistical . . . mountain-tops,” “proud as Lucifer” (318); he fnds all three; he even allegorizes each individual peak in his own egotistical image. Starbuck next: seeking to shore up his shaken faith, he fnds, for a moment at least, a comforting type of the Trinity in the triumvirate mountains. Valley of the Shadow below, of course, but well illuminated by the “sun of Righteousness”; but what if “at midnight, we would fain snatch some sweet solace” from that wonderful sun . . ., oh dear. Stop here: “This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me. I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely” (319)—as it will again in “The Gilder,” when the thought of “teeth-tiered sharks” causes him to pray for “faith [to]

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oust fact,” and “fancy [to] oust memory”; and yet again, at the very end, when his “fdeism”—weak faith, on Melville’s account—cannot face up to the charges Ahab levels against God and the world. Another subject. Here, the bonanza of interpretation continues: fnding the coin eminently spendable but otherwise “queer,” Stubb decides nevertheless to “try [his] hand at raising a meaning out of these queer curvicues.” Seeking help from a Massachusetts almanac, which gives only the “bare words and facts,” leaving himself—welcome to the club—to “come in and supply the thoughts,” he nevertheless speaks right up, as if his text were a person: “Look, you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter,” and then proceeds to prove his ripping story as good as his worried word. Until, interrupted by Flask, he hides out to hear another symbolic rendering: “nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, . . . so what’s this staring been about?” Sixteen dollars, “that’s nine hundred and sixty cigars. I won’t smoke dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, . . . so here goes Flask aloft to spy ‘em out.” Then, with Stubb still observing—and, that’s right, no point of view character to tell the tale to Henry James—“our old Manxman,” learned in “signs,” taught to him “two score years ago, by the old witch in Copenhagen.” And then Queequeg, looking “like the signs of the zodiac himself” but, on Stubb’s account, taking the doubloon “for an old button of some king’s trousers.” And then “that ghost-devil, Fedallah,” saying nothing, but bowing to the “sun on the coin—fre-worshiper, depend on it.” (319–20). And then, fnally—except for Stubb’s truncated commentary—the conclusion of this inspired imitation of a universe of strong readers, the grammatical reduction of “poor” Pip, who “too has been watching all these interpreters” (320), Stubb included. Back from the near-death drowning of his ordinary wit, here he comes “with that unearthly idiot face. Stand away again and hear him. Hark!” “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.” “Upon my soul, he’s been studying Murray’s Grammar.” (321) Indeed: where else does one learn to distinguish you from ye? But then it comes again, too famously to require repeating here. Has not Stubb pointed the lesson already?—“another rendering . . . but still one text.” After the basic lesson in the Grammar of Criticism, however, comes something a little more surprising: Craziness we properly expect: Deconstruction, not so much. I and you and he and we and ye and they all look and “are all bats; and I’m a crow, especially when I stand atop of this pine tree here.” And by the way, there’s the “scare-crow”—“two bones stuck in a pair of old trousers, and two more poked into the sleeves of an old jacket.”

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And by the way, as long as I’m delivering my “crazy-witty” commentary—and whether Stubb hangs around to hear it or not— Here’s the ship’s navel, this doubloon here, and here they are all on fre to unscrew it. But, unscrew your navel, and what’s the consequence? Then again, if it stays here, that’s ugly, too, for when aught’s nailed to the mast it’s a sign things grow desperate. (321) Freud, Derrida, Lacan, ye oughts be living at this hour. Or not. And no, Mr. Footnote: it’s not that your “backside” or your “rectum falls of.” No, your asshole falls out: How else rhyme it with El Paso? And, plus, when the Theorist unscrews the navel of an otherwise tightly constructed work of literature, the whole thing falls apart. So here: where it turns out to be a bad mistake to “dream with [your] hand on the helm” (214), risking thereby the very life your project was invented to abet or even enhance, more basic still is the error of discovering and instantiating one life-image as the symbolic key to it all. As in the rampant interpretation of Stubb, just before. Or, obviously, in the case of Ahab. Life goes on, with or without a reason for being. Just nuke the whales so we can hunt them at night and, like a ship without a whale’s head on either side, life will be a sailing smooth enough. Worst case: come home and write some personal essays. Between these two elementary lessons in skepticism as a survival skill, in Chapter 102, comes the scene in which Ishmael (but not Ahab) witnesses the deep-sea amours of the largest mammals in the world: why they are hardly monsters at all; look how the Lord Whale guards the harem. How humanoid. Also intervening, and more vital still, to the theme of “other-reliance” which seems necessarily to accompany the discovery of the noetic incompetence of the human subject, is the hand-squeezing scene in which Ishmael once again loses his will to violence. Once before, smoking island pot in bed with Queequeg, he had begun to feel “a melting” in himself: “No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfsh world. This soothing savage has redeemed it” (56). So here: for the moment at least, and “sentimentally,” as Ishmael confesses, the hot hatred is gone away: Oh! My dear fellow beings, why should we cherish any social ascerbities . . . Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of human kindness. (309) And, along with this meta-sexual merging, a tentative goodbye to the pain involved in the life of the mind: experience teaches that “in all cases man

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must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity, not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy.” Or, if the mind survive, and with it the need to write, do but consider the remaining topics: “the wife, the hearth, the bed, the table, the saddle, the freside, the country” (309). Sound familiar? Reminiscent or predictive, the topics are uncannily similar to those which Emerson treasured most in Montaigne, his “Representative” skeptic: his “house and barns,” his “father, [his] wife and [his] tenants, [his] knives and forks,” his meat and drink. Missing from Ishmael’s list is anything like Emerson’s memory of Montaigne’s “old lean bald pate,” but the sense of life’s “attainable felicities” is about the same. Evidently a certain spermatic humanism goes along with the acceptance of philosophical incapacity. And whatever an irrepressible Melville may decide to attempt in the future, Ishmael at least will probably not be attempting, “with a fne crow quill, a fne romance” (E&L, 699). Then—just before a line of the *’s we have been taught to recognize as a sign of the “shanties of chapter” problem—another turn, comic at frst, like the sentimental gazing above, but susceptible nevertheless of being treated as a learned conceit, pointing again to the emergent theme of “attainable felicity.” Emerson may fudge the question of which choir of angels know and which love the most, but Ishmael presses no such distinction: “In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti” (309). What?!—are angels also homosexual? Well, not necessarily. But can we not imagine them as “spermatic”? Remember Samyaza, the angel of high rank who, according to the Book of Enoch, led a rebellion of angels hell-bent of having sex with human women and producing thereby “beautiful and comely daughters.” OK: they were the lucky ones; the others do but what they can. But wait? Why are they not, like the men without women on the Pequod, all sitting around a vast vat or tub of this soothing, intoxicating substance? Well because, on one theory at least (that of Thomas Aquinas, in fact), every angel is a separate species. Necessarily so: as it is diferent “matter” which diferentiates humans and other animals within the same essential “kind,” and since all the angels are pure spirit—no matter, no “parts outside of parts”—well you see the problem. There’s Transcendental Selfhood for you. Loneliness too, if we extrapolate from Emerson’s neo-Cartesian model of human subjectivity. Call that “the angelic fallacy” if you will, but for the angels it’s merely the state of the case. And no phallussy. So there they are, lined up, each one alone, each one separate, and each with his(?), her(?), its(?) hands(?)—remember, it’s only a vision—in a separate jar of spermaceti. Ask any one of them: what’s it like being an angel? Well, it’s kind of cool being immortal: you know, with nothing corruptible in your un-composition; but somehow I feel like “we must get down

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to earth at times, relax, relieve the tension.” Sometimes I almost wish I could fall into something like a cycle of regeneration. But hush, here comes God, perfectly happy, it appears, to be the only One. Unless of course He’s really Three. But whether we extend the fantasy or not, the thematic impulse seems clear: with the acceptance of human fnitude comes not only undoubtable doubts and doubtful intuitions, but a sense that, as we are indeed all in this together, we appear to require the spermatic connection. Surely it helps to soothe the ferceness with which we respond to the world’s insult to our queenly personality. As Paracelsus almost said, sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of an angry Quarrel with God. Nor, in the task of pressing philosophy from blubber, should we fail to notice, in a chapter called “The Castaway,” what has become of Pip’s rational mind. Sharp he had been. As, besides Starbuck, only he ever thought to record his dissent from the project of trying to get even with the white man’s God. With men of color brashly assisting. In the midst of a squall—“Who’d go climbing for chestnuts now?”—they say, what?— “jump, my jollies!” Well, “Lord help such jollies!” And what was all that terrifc talk about a white whale? Spare me from that. Oh, thou big white God aloft somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear! (151) This might be racism—using a small black boy to represent minimum humanity—but its humanistic intent seems almost admirable: somewhere, at some level of consciousness without a project—without, in any case, a Quarrel—somebody is supposed to know that the human race had better not go out of its way to make trouble for itself. As Emerson suggests, again seeming to hear it from Montaigne, “Our condition as men is risky and ticklish enough.” And then what, for this “most insignifcant of the Pequod’s crew”? Overboard, left alone, “bobbing up and down” on an endless sea, as his betters turn aside and give chase to a group of whales, he is rescued from terror and death at last, with a soul all but drowned. Carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; . . . Pip saw the multitudinous God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the frmament of waters heaved the colossal world. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefor his shipmates called him mad. (308)

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This we are to remember when Pip is so placed as to make the fnal remark on what to make of the project of symbolic searching. Meanwhile we are not to confuse Ishmael’s emerging sense of intellectual caution as a faithful form of lying for the right, or pretending not to see the problem. As we learn from Chapter 96, the third of Ishmael’s general thematic pronouncements. Instruction the frst, in Chapter 23: in a violent world, safety is no substitute for daring opposition. Then, in Chapter 58: No, wait, what if this violence is largely internal? Best hold hard to the possible peace. Then, fnally—and just before Ahab’s violent and vengeful rush to his paranoid, hubristic, and therefore fatal climax—a balanced consideration of the alternatives. On the one hand, you would not want to be Ahab; he, after all, is acting on a belief a “good man” would hardly dare consider. On the other, however, this Promethean personage is fnding out, for you, what it might really be like to say “No in thunder.” Or, to change the fgure, to spit fre back into the face of the fre. So maybe you had needed to go along on this voyage to somewhere near the bitter end. Lucky to survive, no doubt. And grateful for that. But grateful too for the ultimacy of the learning experience. With a figure of fire, now, replacing that of the ocean, the advice is to “look not too long” into its face. As it well appears, a certain wouldbe Prometheus of Hawthorne had done, night after night, sitting by the fiery kiln of his latter-day Calvinism. Indeed, as I have tried to show elsewhere,14 in Chapter 96 (“The Try-Works”) Melville appears to be re-reading “Ethan Brand”: having treated it somewhat condescendingly in a letter of May, 1851,15 he comes back to it here with a deeper understanding and a renewed respect. Ethan Brand as a good guy, a sensitive and sympathetic human who, thinking on the fires of hell and wondering what offense might be so ultimate as to merit a fate so dire, went looking for the “unpardonable sin,” so that humans might avoid it at all cost. Or, if one were a proper Calvinist, one could at least know—and not like the tortured mother who, in the faithful account of John Winthrop, threw her baby down a well, just to settle the question of her fate. Along the way, something went wrong—it’s an abortive story, so don’t ask—and he turned himself into a monster. With Ahab, we infer, pretty much the same: another well-motivated Prometheus who, already possessed of the civilizing fire which turns lime to constructive bricks or blubber to precious oil, needs now to challenge the Gods in the stronghold of their last, last secret. Again, something went wrong: personal affront all but obliterating the general pain, inquest became vendetta. Yet Ahab’s insanity is not without foundation: paranoid he may be, but there may well be enemies. Maps no longer say “Here there be dragons,” but does that prove the negative? Evidently no “good man” will dare a fght to the death with the “Powers,” but here and there a look into the

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abyss is not entirely inappropriate. Go on the voyage and learn, there, the limits of human resistance. And of human knowledge. Resistance in faith may serve the turn for souls more pious than daring, but in the end a little humility seems not out of place. 4 Contending with, and tending to overshadow Ishmael’s fragmented novel of education, is the proper denouement of the drama of Ahab—allowed, in frantic opposition to all this salvifc wisdom, his proper tragic transfguration, beginning immediately after the paradigmatic rehearsal of “The Doubloon.” Undismayed by the story of the captain who, having lost an arm to the reaping jaws of Moby Dick and learned caution thereby, Ahab, his blood boiling, wants only to know “which way [the whale was] heading?” (325). Calling the carpenter Prometheus but declaring himself “proud as a Greek god” (345), he curses his indebtedness to the fesh. In a near fatal exchange with a still resistant Starbuck, he declares his authority parallel to that of the “one god that is Lord over the earth” (347). Vowing not to shave until, well, we know, he has the ship’s blacksmith forge his razors into the point of one fatal harpoon and, with the blood of his three harpooneers, baptizes it “in nomine diaboli” (326), the book’s secret motto, as confessed in another letter to Hawthorne. More impersonally, he declares his quadrant a “Foolish toy,” unable as it is to point the way to the great white whale. Yet to declare himself “lord of the level lodestone” (374), he here vows henceforth the “level dead-reckoning” (363). His climax comes in Ch 119, “The Candles,” in which faming masts, possibly borrowed from the pine trees in “Young Goodman Brown.” serve Ahab as proper symbol of the mysterious Power he has sworn to identify and oppose. Nor actually dangerous, but fearsome to the superstitious sailors, the “corposants” serve well enough the purpose of the man who believes in lower and lower levels of natural symbolism. And so it all comes out. Harmless enough in themselves, yet full of frightful signifcance to the superstitious sailors, the faming “corposants”: are real enough to provide Ahab with a climactic occasion—addressing the “clear spirit of fre” with “worship [by] defance.” “I own thy speechless, placeless power,” but will to the death “dispute it unconditional, unintegral mastery in me.” In the midst of the personifed impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but as point at best; whencesoe’er I came; whencesoe’er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. . . . Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there’s that in here that remains indiferent. (367)

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Even as a mild-mannered Christian had said: God himself has forbidden us “to prostrate ourselves before mere power.” Other associations also suggest themselves. Identifying the soul as female, Ahab appears to be mixing in with his Zoroastrian worship of fre with an important premise of the Gnostics, of which more later. For the moment the “repeated fashes of lightning” appear to ignore both the sectarian inconsistency and the heightened rhetoric of resistance—which, undaunted, repeats its embattled defance: I said I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst but blind; but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can be ashes. Take the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter hands. I would not take it. (367) And then, thankful not to have been blinded by the light “leap[ing] out of darkness,” Ahab’s maddened syncretism returns to the female: Oh, thou magnanimous! Now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! What hast thou done with her? (367) A less gendered sense of “some unsufusing thing beyond” hints at the possibility of a truce but, not to be pacifed, Ahab identifes himself with the fre and worships it, “defyingly” (367). Melville at the top of his Quarrel. After, and in spite of, all this life-cancelling and death-defying protest—and challenging its unpardonable fnality—is the attainable vision of love and friendship ofered by Starbuck in the last scene before the fateful three-day chase. It almost works: Nantucket, home, mild weather, freside, decent fare upon the table, wife, child. Felicity altogether attainable. Yes, Starbuck, yes: why should I “keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time?” But no: the thought of the Quarrel comes back. “Where do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?” (390). And here the carefully protected faith of Starbuck cannot keep pace. The Quarrel subsides, and for the moment, thinking of hay mowers in the Andes, Ahab turns into the King who thinks that “ripeness is all.” But it is too late: the frightened mate had already “stolen away,” leaving Ahab with the mysterious Fedallah on the other side of the ship—and reader with Ishmael bobbing up and down on Queequeg’s coffn, a cosmic accident, with yet a thematic remainder. Of course the survival of Ishmael is, in one important sense, utterly gratuitous, a happy accident on a frantic ocean in a complex universe with

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strict laws but without a scintilla of sentience. And this whatever we decide about the originally absent Epilogue. There he is, bobbing up and down on Queequeg’s cofn when all the rest have sunk to the bottom, like those memorialized in Father Mapple’s house of prayer. Or imagined in Ahab’s inquisition of the severed head of a sperm whale. By no stretch of the imagination can we suppose that, for just this once, the Universe decided to spare a man whose evolving wisdom has somehow earned him the right. No, the survival is not moral but literary: somebody has to live on or the tale cannot fairly be told—just ask the British reviewers. And yet, accident for accident, there is the curious fact of Queequeg’s cofn—a symbol of death turned into a gift of life. Rather like the cross, as somebody has noticed. What?—does this make Queequeg the sort of a Christ Figure English Majors used to love before they got political religion? Probably not: in no sense does he die “that others may live.” Not even in the manner of Bartleby, who exists to his proper Narrator as “the least of these, my brethren.” Rather, the fnal reminder of Queequeq exists to suggest that, as his soothing savagery has ofered Ishmael an alternative to the exacerbating anger of Ahab, his traveler’s curiosity to Ahab’s deadly quest for absolute knowledge, so there may be a sense in which the Islander’s prephilosophic Paganism may ofer the possibility of Life After Monotheism. Including Historical Christianity. And especially the sort that drove Ahab to the last-last crime of blasphemy, and his end-time biographer to live out the thought that he might be Ishmael in Calvin’s sense as he most certainly was in that of Augustine: once-born, likely to stay that way, and looking therefore for a felicity more plausibly attainable than salvation. Why not try the self-contented way of a “pagan friend,” even if he worships a little black icon and does, now and then, try “peddling his head around . . . town”? Could work. One has heard of worse. Notes 1 See “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850), quoted from Herschel Parker, ed., Moby-Dick (Norton, 2018), 550. 2 Three separate reviews of the frst (British) edition of M-D—printed without the “Epilogue”—point out that, without a survivor to tell the tale, Melville’s tale is a fctional impossibility; see Lorie Roberson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography (Clarkson Potter, 1996), 646. 3 Thus Charles Feidelson attempts to reconcile the apparent contradiction between Ishmael’s thematic advice in Chapters 23 and 58; see, Moby-Dick (Bobbs Merrill, 1964), 148–9. 4 See Thomas Werge, “Moby-Dick and the Calvinist Tradition,” Studies in the Novel, 1.4 (1969), 484–506. 5 Besides Chapter 23 (“better to perish”) and Chapter 58 (“Push not of”), we have Chapter 96 (“Look not too long,” but do look!). 6 See Emily Dickinson, #1269 in R. W. Franklin, ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Harvard, 2005), 495.

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7 See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” in Essays and Lectures (Library of America, 1983), 487. 8 [[Endnote missing]] 9 See Robert M. Adams, Nil (Oxford, 1968). 10 See Essays and Lectures, 1113–324. 11 See Harrison Hayford, “Unnecessary Duplicates: A Key to the Writing of M-D,” in Faith Pullin, ed., New Perspectives on Melville (Kent State, 1978), 128–61. 12 See “Montaigne; or The Skeptic,” Essays and Lectures, 695. 13 See Herschel Parker, ed., M-D as Doubloon (Norton, 1970). 14 See “Artifcial Fire: Melville and the Mythology of ‘Ethan Brand,’” Doctrine and Diference: Readings in Classic American Literature (Routledge, 2021), 119–36. 15 See Parker, ed. M-D, 567–8.

5

Taps of Drums and Pieces of Battles Whitman and Melville on the Unwritten War

Once it seemed quite settled. By Walt Whitman, no less: “The real war will never get in the books.”1 Certainly it is not there in the belated but ever popular Red Badge of Courage (1895) which, in response to an overfow of interest in military matters, tries to portray the psyche of a novice combatant; but his agon could be sufered in just about any war. As Melville had said, “What like a bullet can undeceive?”2 Nearer to the military moment, the much longer Miss Ravenel’s Conversion (1867) seeks to be encompassing—what its author really meant by “great”—but, at heart a social novel, what it most memorably ofers is a knowing of what it was like for a Presbyterian Colonel from a wintry Connecticut to fnd himself frst in sunny South Carolina, and then in New Orleans, where the bougainvillea overfower at every season and where gentlemen keep, in a Quarter they do not have in New England, well, you know: “Voila qui est permi, bien que ce n’est pas joli.” Realism, right enough, but not quite the “real war.” And then what? James and Howells and Twain are great writers—Realists, in one degree or another: having been in the war, Christopher Newman is now eager for “the pursuits of peace.” Silas Lapham has been there too, and in one fatal dinner party, waxes eloquent about its morale. And Twain is still remembering and evading in Huckleberry Finn, whose child hero goes of in the end to “the territory,” Oklahoma, no doubt, but not far from Kansas and Nebraska. This is not to say that the psyche and the imagination of these authors were not profoundly afected by their contemporaneous but second-hand experience of the war; even the reclusive Emily Dickinson can be shown to register its efect.3 But nowhere is it their donnee. And so, not very recently but in due time, the inevitable book: The Unwritten War.4 Why, wondered Harvard Americanist Daniel Aaron, had so monumentally signifcant an event in American history not produced a food of high-level attempts to write the great American novel? Everybody talked about it. And not everybody believed the task defed the collective literary talent. Yet year after year went by and nobody seemed to DOI: 10.4324/9781003334262-5

116 Taps of Drums and Pieces of Battles be producing a compendious, defnitive representation of the motives for, events within, and responses to the war that (just barely) saved a Union that, perilous from the outset, had come to signify more than an aggregation of the contiguous, and that (with lurking ambiguity) to make good on the founding premise, namely, that all men are created equal. Everybody is there, in Aaron’s magisterial survey—Simms, Lowell, Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville and, from the next literary generation, Adams, James, Howells, Twain, De Forest, Bierce, Tourgee, Crane, Frederic. Everybody has something to say, so that, here and elsewhere, it would be false to suggest that the subject has defed the comprehensive notice of intellectual history. But literature, especially the novel—not so much. And so this major work stops well short of declaring its title ironic. Recently, a learned young scholar has ofered a mild-mannered but signifcant challenge to the lingering premise of literary absence. No newly discovered novels, to be sure, but a food of war poems. Concentrated primarily on “images” of the war, redundantly provided by a vigorous “print culture,” The Scars We Carve also recovers some properly literary responses. Not all candidates for an elite canon, perhaps, but not insignifcant for that reason. One is especially fascinated by a chapter called “The Left-Arm Corps,” ofering an account of the penmanship contests for soldiers who had lost their right arm in battle and also an array of poems by the soldiers so maimed. Cogently she observes that Whitman who said that certain aspects of soldier sufering “perhaps must not and should not be” written had said so only after the fact of his own intensely “corporeal” poems. And so at some level the real-enough war was being written really enough. Real enough for government work and most emphatically, painfully written.5 But what had we really meant, “unwritten”? Too staggeringly important a subject to be left relatively unexplored in fction, but too painfully complex an event to dare the imagination of Romance? Or—with Whitman’s painful front-line experience in mind—tragic beyond the reach of language, literary or otherwise. Like War Itself. Like all deaths that, however heroic, seem nevertheless unnecessary, especially when their prologue is the agony of dismemberment. What were we expecting? Not the Iliad, presumably, as nobody stole anybody’s woman and nobody sulked in a tent. Or Caesar’s Gallic Wars, as Gaul is no longer divided into three parts. Not War and Peace, as that concerned somebody else’s war, sixty years ago. Or A Farewell to Arms, either, as even that nearly contemporaneous meditation required the would-be warrior to intervene abroad. And Catch-22 only if you had wanted irony instead of pathos. What if it should turn out that writing war is even harder than writing “nature”?6 So we are left with what we have. And anyone who has closely read the extended poetic sequences of Whitman and Melville may be tempted to

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conclude that we are luckier than we had any real right to expect. Consider: A card-carrying Transcendentalist—the man who just a decade before had sent forth his poetic “Child” to seek and afrm just about everything its eyes could see—went to the front and was stunned to see gore that defed patriotic interpretation and to hear groans and death-rattle from young men who might have been sons and lovers. And Melville, certifable Manichean—who went to sea with Ahab but whom age and fatherhood kept at home to devour newspaper accounts of battles which marked the turning tides of a war which slaughtered millions and which nobody really wanted—well, he put aside his once-rampant, now-disciplined prose and, like an aeolian harp, sang whatever was in the wind. Just about everything. Then too, as if to prove that even harps have feelings, he hummed an undersong of puzzled concern. To be sure, slavery was unspeakably evil—“man’s foulest crime,”7 if the truth were to be told—but to what high creed might the facts of war be brought in to testify? And, trading in wicked typology for bad allegory, did anyone really suppose that a genteel man like Robert E. Lee and a vulgarian like Ulysses S. Grant were standing in for a fallen but militant and a glorious but vindictive angel? Not bloody likely. Whitman, that is to say, gives us more than we ever wanted to know about the pain of being there. And, force at a distance, Melville provides the needful counterpart of thinking then. Not everything, perhaps, but better than a poke in the eye with a levelled bayonet. 2 The deep story of Drum Taps (1865) may well involve the precise sort of love Walt Whitman rather graphically represents himself as bestowing on the wounded and dying men he attended in the months he spent as a nurse at or near the battle-front. Kisses and “responding kisses”: then, “never on earth again responding”8 They called him “Uncle,” but his warm and tender motions seem anything but avuncular. But that would be another subject: same sex love and same sex language in an age before Foucault and even Freud. Here however, something a little more simply literary: patriotism without theodicy, surrendering to deeper realities of love and death and mystery and memory. Could have been a novel. But not from an open-shirted carpenter who loved opera and invented free verse. And well worth writing in any form. Anthologized versions of this ffty-three (then eventually forty-three) poem sequence rarely include its very frst poem, “First 0 Songs for a Prelude,” ffty-eight lines of plausible patriotism, preferring instead to begin with the more nearly ironic “Eighteen Sixty-One” or the excited yet “terrible” sound of “Beat! Beat! Drums!” Fair enough, one supposes, if the project is to discern and re-present “the best that had been thought and said.” Or if, with the advantage of hindsight, we wish to pass over what

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may not bear repeating in our corrected voices. But if one wishes to observe just how Whitman wrote the war—including the sense of invented poetic sequence or inevitable self-editing—one had better begin at the beginning, taking full pride in how Whitman’s “peerless” (305) Manhattan led all the rest in signing up for the chance to be heroic: Lightly strike on the stretch’d tympanum pride and joy in my city, How she led the rest to arms, how she gave the cue, How at once with lithe limbs unwaiting a moment she sprang, . . . How your soft opera-hyphen music changed, and the drum and ffe were heard in their stead, How you led to the war, (that shall serve for our prelude songs of soldiers,) How Manhattan drum-taps led. (305) If this were all, it might be somewhat too much. But then enthusiasm is like that. Without which, even so sober an observer as Charles Chauncy had been constrained to admit, nothing much gets done.9 And surely the cause, it is just. And so the poem exults: no parade or pageant now; rather the drumtaps signal “The young men falling in and arming.” Mechanics, lawyers, salesmen, bookkeepers—all gather in “squads,” “even boys,” the old men showing them “how to wear their accoutrements.” How good they all look: the poet would “love them,” would “hug them, with their brown faces.” “Flags fung” everywhere. “Tearful partings,” but the mother will speak no word to detain her son. “Enthusiasm, . . . wild cheers, . . . cannons” soon to cease their silence. No parade now: “War,” and an “armed race . . . advancing to welcome it.” What poet could now resist? Mannahatta a-march—and it’s O to sing it well! It’s O for a manly life in the camp. Thus the mood is allowed to continue, untroubled by the thought of what the poems to follow will be forced to discover. And we wonder: Are we reading the unmediated transcription of the writer’s initial exultation? Or is this some strategic preface, set up to be embarrassed and then undone by what the poet already knows is about to follow? Who knows? Writing is so hard. In any case, “you Mannahatta,” Often in peace and wealth you were pensive or covertly frown’d amid all your children, But now you smile with joy exulting old Mannahatta.

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“Mannahatta, my ass,” the reader wants to say; it’s New York Efng City, formerly New Amsterdam, which the Otherdamn Dutch bought from the Natives for ten cents on the wampum. But no, war poetry is not like that. Not yet. One might observe that the un-silenced cannons are about to “begin the red business,” but the effect is somewhat too slight to dampen the raving enthusiasm. Only vaguely, and after a while, do we realize that the drums are not yet said to “Beat”! And that “Taps” is— yes, already—a word for sleep and death. As if the synesthetic drums already sang the muted song of nightly bugles. Not mentioned here, God may or may not be nigh, but perhaps all is not entirely well in any case. Then—whatever our sense of afrmation or resistance—the mood is slightly altered in “Eighteen-Sixty-One.” One might well rejoice that there will be no more room for “dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses” ofered by “some pale poetling . . . lisping cadenzas pianos”: no worse, there is none, unless it were Whitman himself in the 1840s. On the other hand, however, this “Arm’d year—year of the struggle” is also a “terrible year.” Terrible yet not unimpressive, as suddenly one hears, not singing but shouting, “a strong man erect, clothed in blue clothes” and “carrying a rife”; hear the “sonorous voice ringing/across the continent,” a “masculine voice,” as if from a Manhattan workman, or else, allegorically, from some giant “Rapidly crossing the West.” Terrible year but also “robust year,” one that “suddenly sang by the mouths of the round-lipped cannon.” Repeated here, as resistless enthusiasm begins to feel the complexity of its occasion: “hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year.” Sad, perhaps, but not repentant. For when were drums and bugles ever the call to meditation? So “Beat! Beat! Drums!” and “Blow! Bugles! Blow”—and watch the result as the sounds now “burst like a ruthless force,/Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,/ Into the school where the scholar is studying”; disturb the bridegroom with his bride, distract even the peaceful farmer, ploughing or gathering. Some things can wait. Drums and bugles neither know nor care. No time for sleep. And, as the rumor of war fairly proves the “moral equivalent of war,” no time for “bargains” or “brokers” or “speculators.” “Would the talkers be talking?”—as they were at the beginning of some former “Song,” talking of “the beginning and the end.” Now is no time for talk. Even the lawyer and the judge feel the power of the moment: Make no parley—stop for no expostulation, Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer, Mind not the old man beseeching the young man . . .

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Mind, so to speak, only the “terrible drums,” as “loud you bugles blow.” Terrible, yet exhilarating. Potent enough to squelch the eforts of the poetling and to stop the mouth of feckless philosophy. Powerful enough, it may be, to stop the mind. Drums and bugles have that efect. So much for a three-beat Prelude. And quite enough to declare anything but unwritten the vital Prologue to the bitter story. Elsewhere, a “portent”: John Brown’s Body swinging in the wind, proving in conscientious retrospect that the American Civil War, if not quite inevitable, was nevertheless something that certain fatal causes could not un-cause. Here, in vivid memory only slightly tinged with conscience, the power of a militant now. Of drums. Of bugles. Of enthusiasm. Of masculine energy. Of a moment that seemed to sing itself. Sign up for slaughter? How could you not? Then, for a time at least, the anthologists may have their way. “From Paumanok Starting I Fly Like a Bird” is a poem (I guess) that only Whitman could have written: he will fy everywhere to sing “The idea of all, of the Western world one and inseparable/And then the song of each member of these states.” Oh yes, I remember that tired old topos: big deal in 1855, not so much next year when you sang about sex. Can’t this wait till some future “Passage”? More worth our time is his “Song of the Banner at Daybreak.” As Melville will ruefully observe, trees in spring need to be green, no matter what you say. Here, banners gotta fap. Just as Poets gotta sing. And, just less urgently, a child must talk to his father: What means the fapter? And so, in a canon where conversation poems are on sale everywhere, this unlooked-for addition: a frank exchange among characters named POET, PENNANT, CHILD, FATHER, and BANNER (who only speaks with PENNANT), a protective father is unable to quell the dangerous curiosity of his bannerawakened son, and the poet come to recognize and embrace his proper subject. War is, and the son, who wants to be the pennant, must know. War is, and the bard must sing in season, sing what the sword-shaped banner is singing: not “houses of peace” (315), not “farm produce,” not “superb ships,” “nor machinery, vehicles, trade, not revenues, but you as/henceforth I see you” (316). There was a child went forth to war. So be it. Less fagrant is the form, but more dangerous (and more self-indulgent) are the refections of “Rise of Days from Your Fathomless Deeps,” in which a speaker who has roamed everywhere looking for some peak experience begs the wind for some “loftier, fercer sweep” and, after mastering Niagara, the prairies, the Pacifc, and the “superb” play of thunder and lightning, comes to regard all this “menacing might” as but a preparation. The poetic stimulus, now, is not Niagara but “Torrents of Men,” flled with “passions” such as put the sea to shame. “Manhattan rising,” but so too “Cincinnati, Chicago, unchained”: “Democracy” on the march, “with

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desperate, vengeful port strides on.” The “fancied” sound of “a mournful wail and low sob” might well give pause, but no: Thunder on! Stride on, Democracy! Strike with vengeful/stroke And do you rise higher than ever yet O days, O cities! Crash heavier, heavier yet O storms! You have done me good . . . War, it appears, can make or break a poet. It damn near killed Hawthorne, but precipitated Melville into poetry. And here, by the speaker’s own manic confession, it is giving him what so long he sought. Sex!—until the world said no, not yet; and maybe not even that sleeping might require a bard. But now, War, streaming democratic anger. Who could resist that? Not the grateful speaker here. Hungering, hungering, hungering, for primal energy and Nature’s dauntlessness, I refresh’d my self with it only, I could relish it only, I waited the bursting forth of the pent fre—on the water and air I waited long; But now I no longer wait . . . Hence I will seek no more the food of the northern solitary wilds, No more the mountains roam or sail the stormy sea. (319) But while we are trying to compose ourselves with ironies like, “Tell us how you really feel, Walt,” the scene and the mood shift. And shift again. A short (and somewhat puzzling) poem permits the Union to ask “Virginia” why she strives against her Union when, she herself had “provided me Washington.” Then, feminized politics thrust aside, the poet’s own multiform “City of Ships” is instructed not to be afraid of becoming “warlike!” As he himself does not: Behold me—incarnate me as I have incarnated you! I have rejected nothing you ofer’d me—whom you adopted/I have adopted, Good or bad I never question you—I love all—I do not condemn any thing, I chant and celebrate all that is yours—yet peace no more, In peace I chanted peace, but now the drum of war is mine, War, red war is my song through your streets, O city! What the city responded is not recorded, but then doubtless drums and bugles and banners are already on the record. So that we may be surprised

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by the somber little fction that comes next: “The Centenarian’s Story”— told, it appears to a VOLUNTEER OF 1861–2 (AT WASHINGTON PARK, BROOKLYN, ASSISTING THE CENTENARIAN). Able to walk but almost blind, a lonely survivor of ’76 is brought to Washington Park, to observe “recruits . . . drilling and exercising,” and to express an agitated recollection of his part in a battle 85 years ago. And only now, with the memory of “that dead brigade,” do we fnd ourselves at or near the actual war. Wait: was all that some other kind of preface? Well, some things take time. Even now we are at the “red war,” but it is now more nearly a fact than a set of literary stances. The shift is sudden and, compared to what has gone before—militaristic bravado, just barely worried by thoughts of pain and death—surprisingly, toneless. As if the bard had turned himself into a camera, the thing just then beginning to force the patriotic spirit to witness the wounded fesh. But not yet. Only a nearly neutral sight of a “Cavalry Crossing a Ford”—“A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands,” with only the “betwixt” to identify the vision as poetic and, in the next line, only their “serpentine course” to suggest that we are well West of Eden. But think not, just look. “Behold,” even “the silvery river, in it the splashing horses loitering/stop to drink.” “Behold” as well the “brown-faced men, each group, each person a/picture.” Indeed. Some emerge, some just enter the ford, but it’s not Brooklyn Ferry, so there’s no Allegory of Life, just “The guidon fags futter[ing] gayly in the wind.” Of course we can notice the apparently innocent choice of “gayly.” Or we could worry the tonal diference between banners loudly, confdently “fapping” and fags more precariously “futtering”: what if the winds of war died down altogether? But the simpler point survives: he was the man; he was there. Perhaps he will yet even sufer. Much the same studied neutrality marks the “Bivouac on a Mountain Side.” “I see before me now a traveling army halting,/Below a fertile valley,” with barns and orchards; “Behind,” a mountain, with “rocks [and] clinging cedars.” And everywhere, “camp-fres scatter’d near and far”; and men and horses; and only the absence of a certain red wheelbarrow with its contextual chickens prevents the reader from pronouncing the word “imagist.” Photographic, more like, on the understanding that a camera has to be pointed, and may often betray a certain composition. Yet unlike the former poem, “Bivouac” pronounces the word “I.” And ends with an abrupt shift of focus: “And over all the sky—the sky!, far out of reach, studded,/breaking out, the eternal stars.” Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fy, fags gotta fap; just so, it appears, men gotta march: but the sky? What is the law of that? And what, under its aspect, is the meaning of anything that faps or marches? What if, under the aspect of eternity, reality is a bivouac?

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Or not. Criticism fourishes, but poetry witnesses “An Army on the March,” with “skirmishers in advance” and, after “now . . . a single shot” and “now an irregular volley,” the entire “army corps advances” (326). And then, somewhat more thematically, the sobering refections of one who sits “By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame.” Armies advance, but a ftful—futtering?—fame might well go out. While poets muse—noting frst “The tents of the sleeping army,” in “darkness lit by spots of kindled fre,” dwells instead on a “procession” of tender and wondrous thoughts, Of life and death, of home and the past and loved, and of those that are far away; A solemn and slow procession there as I sit on the ground, By the bivouac’s ftful fame. Being there is a remarkable thing, as German existentialism will suitably demonstrate, but the mind will wander and, by a ftful fame, night thoughts will come creeping in. Then, all suddenly, an astonishing change of perspective and a sharp turn to narrative form. Almost a short story involving “those that are far away”: in Ohio, say, and on a farm. What about them? They send their boys to war—for the Right, God knows—but what if God and the Right are not enough? Just so, in “Come up from the Fields Father,” where, after a loving evocation of rural prosperity in a full ripe autumn, a family must listen to an ofcial letter informing that their son and brother has been gravely wounded but “will soon be better,” while only the poet knows this “only son” is, even as they read, “dead already.” The poet can say, with the wisdom reserved to his kind, that the dead boy needs now never to be better, but what solace can he ofer the mother soon to be grieved? But the mother needs to be better, She with thin form presently drest in black, By day her meals untouch’d, then at night ftfully sleeping, often waking, In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing, O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw, To follow, to seek, to be with dear dead son. (328) Hermaphrodite this poet may be, but he is not a woman. Nor are the younger men he is about to love and nurse really his sons. But something he seems to know. High causes may require cures that cut deep. The slaves

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will soon be free, and the sacred Union safe, but for some losses there simply is no recompense. 3 With the remarkable poem called “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” we are, at last, into Whitman’s own most intimate experience of War and Love and Death. Suddenly there is more there there than we had any reason to suspect. Whitman’s account of the death of—and his afterdeath watch upon—a soldier identifed as “my son and my comrade”—is as moving in its mood as it is graphic in its representation; and even in a space where same-sex bonding appeared to be quite common,10 it is a poem that only the author of “Live Oak with Moss” could have written. To the son and comrade who “dropt at [his] side that day,” One look I but gave which your dear eyes return’d with a Look I shall never forget, O one touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground, Then onward I sped in the battle . . . Till late in the night relieved to the place at last I made my way Found you in death so cold, dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses (never again on earth responding) . . . (329) After this unlikely vigil, a march: not an advance this time but a retreat, a “March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown,” pausing, for a time, at “a large old church at the crossing roads, now an/impromptu hospital” where, in but a minute, the speaker sees “a sight beyond all the/ pictures and poems ever made,” Shadows of deepest black, just lit by moving candles and lamps . . . Vaguely I see on the foor, some in the pews laid down, At my feet more distinctly a soldier, a mere lad, in danger of bleeding to death (he is shot in the abdomen,) I stanch the blood temporarily, (the youngster’s face is white As a lily.)

(330)

Next, “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim,” ending in the possibility of religious uplift, but grim enough to require and to defy anything such. Three sights, at frst glance—“Three forms I see on stretchers lying,” each dead

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and covered with a “Gray and heavy blanket.” Lifting the blankets, one at a time: “Who are you, elderly man so gaunt and grim”? “Who are you my dear comrade?” No answer. Then “Who are you my child and/darling?” No answer. Then to the third—a face nor child, nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory; Young man I think I know you—I think this face is the face Of the Christ himself, Dead and divine brother of all, and here again he lies. Comrade, Darling, Christ. You know it’s serious when brother-Christ wins out over all other fgures of male bonding. Or when theology, however diluted, is enlisted in the cause of sufering humanity rather than the wounded Union. Mortality, skepticism, and same-sex love mark the next poem as well. Wandering “Toilsome” through “Virginia’s Woods,” the speaker stumbles across the grave of an unknown soldier, “hastily buried on the retreat,” and marked only by “a tablet scrawl’d and nail’d on the tree by the grave: Bold, cautious, true, and my loving comrade.” The subject of long musing, then and through “Many a changeful season to follow.” Often enough, alone, or on a crowded street Comes before me the unknown soldier’s grave, comes the inscription rude in Virginia’s woods, Bold, cautious, true, and my loving comrade. Boldness, as predicted by the drums; caution, once aware of live ammunition; truth, as our cause it is just; but in the end, and in the aftermath, the love of a comrade. And we are very close to the personal meaning of the evolving sequence. Yet suddenly, the political memory: “Not the Pilot,” “Not the pathfnder,” not anybody, we gather, has more solemnly charged himself “to compose a march for these States,/For a battle-call, rousing to arms if need be, years,/ centuries hence.” What has happened in this “Year that Trembled and Reel’d beneath me”? The “summer wind was warm enough,” yet somehow, A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken’d me, Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself, Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the bafed? And sullen hymns of defeat? Well, let’s see; not all dirges are cold. And maybe your call was to more than one kind of battle. In any case, some change is well under way. So that, the next poem—“The Wound-Dresser”—can stand as the epitome of something essential, whatever, in 186x, seemed the outlook for “these States.” In the long run, what really mattered?

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What, years hence, will this Romantic Poet “Wound-Dresser” be telling the curious children? First of all, (Aroused and angry, I’d thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war, But soon my fngers fail’d me, my face droop’d and I resigned myself, To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead;) (333) Could happen: better not send a poet to do the work of a politician. Or a man whose mother was a Quaker for that matter. Or a man who loved men, more than poetry, even. A long, thoughtful, sobering poem, “The Wound-Dresser” would be worth a full close reading in itself. About two-thirds through the sequence, it pretty well summarized the problem of the poet and the structure of the whole. A poet whose “bardic” ambitions called for optimistic celebration rather than gloomy jeremiad, and a loyal supporter of the Northern cause—of Abolition and of Union—he fnds himself dwelling instead on love and death, in the midst of a war not going all that well. Predictably, then, the emphasis turns inward, personal. Predictive, even: what in the end is all this going to mean? Will you, years hence, be talking of bravery, when both sides were “brave”? Or of “curious panics,/Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous”? Well remembering “soldiers’ perils [and] soldier’s joys,” what he will recall, “While the world of gain and appearance and mirth goes on,” is the fact that he, “Bearing the bandages, water and sponge” went “Straight and swift to [his] wounded.” As he says, “my wounded.” One of whom turns to him his “appealing eyes—poor boy! I never/knew you,/Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if/that would save you.” And two more numbered stanzas, one trying to persuade “beautiful death” to come “In mercy . . . quickly” and going on to specify the mutilations witnessed, faithfully, he does not “give out”; the other, remembering that it’s a memory, remembering that “Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d/and rested,/Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.” Wait, the war is over, the slaves are free: remember that! No, the poem is about the experience of war, not about its reason. Unless we wish to admit that Abolition is not the food subject of the Whitman who outgrew the innocent sexual curiosity of his “Child.” Much of the rest may pass in quicker review. The short poem, “Long, too Long America” suggests that after learning “from joys/and prosperity only,” the time has come for “crises of anguish,” thus to show the world “what your/children en-masse really are,” a thing which only “myself has

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yet conceived.” So much for the end of innocence, as in the next poem— “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun”—the emphasis is all on the nature of this poet’s proper task, not he “demanding,” indeed “incessantly asking” themes of romantic nature, in full-blown catalogue, including the “perfect child,” but the harder, less poetic matter of “my city.” One voice says, a little satirically, but with the urgency of some major romanticism, Give me to warble spontaneous songs recluse by myself, for my own ears only, Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again O Nature your primal sanities! But quite another replies, “Keep your woods O Nature.” Rather, “Give me faces and streets” and, in another catalogue, a whole list of citifed subjects bespeaking “intense life, full to repletion and varied.” The list includes “soldiers marching” on Broadway, “some returning with thinn’d ranks” but, just as emphatically, “the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel”: “O such for me.” As if the war itself had been a monumental distraction in the career of a poet who—quite like Emerson in his 1844 essay “Nature”11—was trying to outgrow some inherited but outmoded donnee. And so, whatever the efect of thematic distraction, a solemn poetic credo: Manhattan streets with their powerful throbs, with beating drums as now, The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank muskets, (even the sight of the wounded,) Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus! Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me. Thus we are forced to recall: God made the country, Whitman made the city. And the Civil War was forcing him to recall his fundamental premise: as Being is necessarily good, whatever is, is poetic. Bar rooms, OK. Hospitals, not so much. Unless poetry is meant to redeem death in beauty. Just so, in “Dirge for Two Veterans” the poet is frst wounded by the bugles and drums that herald, with “The last sunbeam” of a “fnish’d Sabbath,” the burial march of a father and son, fallen together, in the “foremost ranks” of some “ferce assault,” on their way, now, to a “double grave.” Some relief, no doubt, from the vision of “some mother’s large transparent face” in the dim light of the eastern sky, but more, it seems, in the poet’s transfguring sympathy: O strong death-march you please me! O moon immense with your silvery face you soothe me! O my soldiers twain! O veterans passing to burial!

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What I have I also give you. The moon gives you light And the bugles and the drums give you music, And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans, My heart gives you love. What more could anyone give the dead? But to the reader, the loving adoption of the soldiers in death suggests that where moon as well as sun gives light, where music acts the part of natural grace, no grief can annul the goodness of Being. No, Stephen Crane, War is not Kind, but neither is it the end of faith. Nor is it all “a little beyond.” These states too share in—may even epitomize—the mystery of the One, the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Or so we learn when “Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice,” proclaiming, frst of all, that “afection shall solve the problems of/freedom yet,” that “Those who love each other . . . shall make Columbia victorious.” Massachusetts shall call Missouri “comrade”; Maine, Carolina, and Oregon shall be “friends triune”; from Florida shall come perfumes to Michigan. War is carnage, but Love, it appears, shall in the end conquer all, if only it be something like the “manly afection” that makes it “customary in the houses and streets to see manly/afection”—to see “The most dauntless and rude [to] touch face to face lightly.” Were these many “looking to be held together by lawyers”/Or by “an agreement on a paper? or by arms?” Some mystery here: where St. Paul held marriage to be the type of the love of Christ for his Church; where Edwards believed gravity signifed “consent”; some new Prophet declares “manly afection” to typify the force by which “the world” and every “living thing . . . cohere.” If, in fagrant disarray, “these states” have ceased for a time to be the “greatest poem,” still the love that will yet unite them continues to reveal a universal secret. War, it appears, will reduce a poet to his frst principles. After this second climax—metaphysical rather than merely personal— things open up and, for a moment, become dramatic. In distress, an “Old General” gives orders which, though deadly, are received “with cheerfulness.” Lying beside his wife, and hearing the breath of his infant, an “Artilleryman” recalls every detail of the warfare, heeding not “The falling, dying,” but remembering, as from a hymn, the “bombs bursting in air,” and, more meticulously, the “vari-colored rockets.” Regarded by the speaker as “hardly human,” an ancient Ethiopian woman, tells, in three lines, the story of her savage enslavement, and yet comes forth, mysteriously, to greet “the Colors” as they pass. Then, for one brief moment, the poet himself: no parlor man, he “cannot beguile the time with talk.” Rather, he has “nourished the wounded and soothed many a dying/soldier/, And at intervals waiting or in the midst of camp,/composed these songs.”

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As if to assure himself that a man who loved opera really could sing a song of himself at war. Now fve very short poems: “A Race of Veterans,” once credulous and “abiding-tempere’d,” is declared a law unto itself, a “Race of passion and the storm”; accordingly, the world might “Take good notice” of the “hands of warning” which “Now and henceforth faunt from these shores”; a “Tan-Faced Prairie-Boy,” who “came, taciturn, with nothing to give,” is thanked for the look which gave the poet “more than all the gifts of the world”; the “Fair Moon” is entreated to “Pour softly down night’s nimbus foods on faces ghastly,/swollen purple.” And as if it were the lesson of the moon’s “unstinted nimbus,” “A Reconciliation,” in which the poet bends down and kisses lightly the face, in a cofn, of his “enemy . . . a man divine as myself [who] is dead.” Thus are we prepared for it all to be over. Just so, the next poem—“How Solemn as One by One”—is sub-titled (Washington City, 1865). Watching “the ranks returning worn and sweaty,” the poet whose “Brooklyn Ferry” made us advert to the fact that, as readers, we were as good as spoken to, individually, by his own very self, glances “upward out of [his] page,” to include us, as well as the returning soldiers, in his “solemn” meditation. To all of us, “kindred soul[s],” he whispers that behind the “mask” of individual personality dwells the thing we all “really are”—something “the bullet could never kill . . . Nor the bayonet stab, . . . The soul!” Tell that to those not returning “worn and sweaty,” but merely dead, our cynicism opposes, but the Emersonian Bard, the proper Transcendentalist is undeterred— The soul! Yourself I see, great as any, good as the best, Waiting secure and content, which the bullet could never kill, Nor the bayonet stab O friend. (345)— Forcing us to realize that, calling us “friend,” this quondam Quaker may be more real to us than he had been to any Union soldier. The soul may or may not be immortal, but language works wonders. But as the soul is indeed embodied, the transaction between poet and reader is not the only issue, lingering as the ranks return. Also, insistently, a memory of something said “As I Lay with my Head in Your Lap Camerado”—a “confession,” made then in the “open air” and resumed now: I know I am restless and make others so, I know my words are weapons full of danger, full of death, For I confront peace, security, and all the settled laws, to unsettle them . . .

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OK, I guess: “Merlin’s blows are strokes of fate,” and Emerson himself licensed you as Bard of the Union, but what exactly is the issue here? Mrs. Stowe and not you “wrote the book that started this great war”; you merely sang about some drums until your patriotism saw the gore. Better be something big. Yet the confessions, growing more defant, remain general, rhetorical one might almost say: I am more resolute because all have denied me than I could ever have been had all accepted me, I heed not and have never heeded either experience, cautions, majorities, not ridicule . . . Heaven and hell, “little or nothing to me.” But I remember, “Dear camerado!” that you were to be part of this heedless resistance: . . . I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still urge you, without the least idea what is our destination, Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’d and defeated. With the date of 1865 already on the record, the issue here can hardly be the war itself—whether to free the slaves or save the union—but only, in the words of Betsy Erkkila, to liberate “democratic—and homosexual— humanity,” to keep the American world, at least from lapsing back from “the true democracy of wartime comradeship toward the potentially oppressing structures of a peacetime—and heterosexual—economy.”12 As David Reynolds has observed, the war had permitted, perhaps even encouraged the frank expression of soldierly afection. He has even suggested that, in the 1860 edition of Leaves, the “Enfans de Adam” section had drawn more criticism than “Calamus.”13 What is not clear, however, is that Whitman ever took his own sexual boldness for granted; indeed, as here, he seemed to revel in its settled defance. Nor can our enlightened respect for unprejudiced sexual preference quite prevent us from noticing that Whitman’s Civil War poems have more to say about same sex love than about race slavery. Or that the explanation may lie very deep—namely, that it was an amativeness quite diferent from the urge to mate that was “the kelson of creation.” Upon it depended not only the survival of the several states but the intelligibility of what they used to call “The End for which God Created the Universe.” Thus it appears that Melville was not the only poet who believed that a true theology might well compete with a correct politics. On the one hand, the triumph of Love; on the other, the endurance of Evil. But more of that later. In the next moment, in a revival of something like patriotism, an eightline hymn to the fag, conceited as a “Delicate Cluster”: how he had heard

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this “cloth defant . . . fap and rustle,” and how, now, this “Flag cerulean” inspires him “to sing the song of you, my matron mighty!/My sacred one, my mother.” Not Lady Liberty, exactly, but poetry has licensed worse. And then, almost as that brief hymn had, for all its daring compression, seemed too much like an ordinary poem, an aggressive address “To a Certain Civilian”: “Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me?” I guess not; “born of the same as the war was born./The drum-corps rattle is ever to me sweet music.” Same with “the martial dirge.” And so, Civilian, “go lull yourself with what you can understand, and/piano tunes,/For I lull nobody, and you will never understand me.” (Like the maître d’ in the steak house who told me to drive my Prius back to Whole Foods and f*** myself.) Then back to the gender of Liberty, as some “Victress on the Peaks,” with “mighty brow regarding the world” which—“O Libertad”—had “vainly conspired against thee”; and, once again, to the sort of poetry appropriate to the occasion: No poem proud, I chanting bring to thee, nor mastery’s rapturous verse, But a cluster containing night’s darkness and blood-dripping wounds, And psalms of the dead. Liberty, and no doubt, but at what a cost. And yes, the self-reference is growing a little tiresome. And somebody should have told Whitman—and Emerson, who in poetic practice, knew better—that chanting is now best left to monks in monasteries. But a bard is a bard is a bard, and with no one to say “For God’s sake, just do it,” we take what we can get. Including, most cogently, the sense of an ending—to the “dreadful hours” with their “fears and doubts.” And, at the same time, a prayer for the courage to maintain enough of the war-spirit to enable battles yet to be fought. Watching, again, camera-like, the “slanted bayonets, whole forests of them,” “bristling” over the shoulders of rank after rank of returning soldiers, and addressing, in one long sentence, the “Spirit Whose Work is Done,” the poet asks that the “Spirit of hours I knew, all hectic red one day, but pale as/death next day,” will Touch my mouth ere you depart, press my lips close, Leave me your pulses of rage—bequeath them to me—fll me with currents convulsive, Let them scorch and blister out of my chants when you are gone, Let them identify you to the future in these songs. “Rage” may seem a little strong here, if not for the aroused patriots of the North or for the dedicated warriors who embodied and deployed

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their appetite for vengeance and slaughter, but for the poet whose mood has moved from militaristic excitement to a sobering empathy with the wounded and dying to an aggressive determination to keep some sense of the war’s deep meaning alive. The explanation, perhaps, is that for Whitman himself free poetic expression has been the proper sublimation of righteous anger. I don’t know where it’s like to go better. In any event, three more farewells to arms, from the nurse who bore nothing such. “Adieu to a Soldier” remembers having witnessed, and in some sense shared, “the strong/terrifc game” of “war and war’s expression.” Farewell to a “dear comrade” whose “mission is fulflled,” from one who, calling himself “more warlike,” is Still on our own campaigning bound, Through untried roads with ambushes opponents lined, Through many a sharp defeat and many a crisis, often bafed, Here marching, ever marching on, a war fght out—aye here, To fercer, weightier battles give expression. (349) Then, formally declaring that this “war is over,” “Turn O Libertad” instructs the poets of the future to get over their infatuation with the past— including, no doubt, their wish to belabor the un-writing of the painful one herein solemnly chanted—and notice “what remains remains for singers for you.” Duly “inured” by wars past and present, . . . turn, and be not alarmed O Libertad—turn your undying face, To where the future, greater than all the past, Is swiftly, surely preparing for you. (350) All right, then, Liberty, frst and last, and the war against slavery an undoubted part of that; a liberty including, perhaps epitomized by, the amative relation of wartime comrades, but expanding beyond all present attempts to imagine. Slavery ended, other wars remain. Finally—except for the several “MEMORIES OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN,” including the famous “Lilacs”—a song “To the Leaven’d Soil They Trod.” Out of his tent the poet comes and into the felds, the “fery felds” frst, then to “the endless vistas beyond”: South and North alike, and all part of “the general Western world,” and all must “attest [his] songs,” sung to “Alleghanian hills and the tireless Mississippi,” to rocks and trees and plains and “far-of sea and unseen winds.” Not Nature, exactly, as that tempting but exhausted topos was earlier foresworn, but America, the free America of an uncharted future. So constituted, all must attest. And in this

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fantasy at least they do: “responding they answer all, (but not in words,)/ The average earth, the witness of war and peace, acknowledges mutely.” Thus validated, a closing confession. And a plan: The prairie draws me close, as the father to the bosom broad the son, The Northern ice and rain that began me nourish me to the end, But the hot son of the South is to fully ripen my songs. And so—like it or not—a sort of last word concerns not slavery, not the Union, not the war, not the waste of human sufering, not manly afection, not liberty (however spelled), not the America of the future but the future of the poet himself. Like it or not, Drum Taps has been a “Song of Myself.” Largely but not entirely. Here he stands, he can no other. The last words may be “my songs,” but next to last are those that name “the South.” So that, whatever biography may be predicted, there is here a note of reconciliation. Brooklyn is not New England, God knows, but it certainly is North. Slavery ended—by death and sufering personally observed and adequately written—perhaps the time has come to learn, not how the other half lives exactly, but what else the states restored have to teach the poet who would sing it all. Once, we recall, there was, in a place called New Orleans, a “Live Oak with Moss.” What else might grow and thrive in that “hot sun”? 4 In the end one has to confess, Drum Taps is not without its lamentable, yet endemic self-reference. Emerson, we suspect, has a lot to answer for: Dante’s “praise” may be that “he dared to write his autobiography in colossal cipher,” but he did not keep saying he was doing so; and the second part of “Merlin” should have made it clear that all that talk about the heroism of the Bard was nostalgic and hyperbolic—in a word, a metaphor. The Poet is still Shelley’s unacknowledged lawgiver of the world, but in a diferent key. Deal with it. Yet Whitman is Whitman and we’re not. If we can forgive Father Hopkins his love afair with Anglo-Saxon, and T. S. Eliot his absurd belief that fragments can prevent ruin, then we can probably get past Whitman’s Whitmanics. Because, all in all, Drum Taps is a pretty good thing. Not better than Battle Pieces, perhaps, despite our instinctive bias in favor of somebody who stayed a while at the front. But good enough for seminar work. Not a novel and certainly not an epic, it is yet a convincing response to the paradox of horror in the service of virtue. Deepest down, it is a moving confession of a surprising education: a child went forth and, ZOT!—there were love and death ratifying the truth of democracy. Who knew? Not Stowe or Whittier. Or Garrison or Phillips or even Douglass. Melville, we might suspect, even though his “World in a Man of War” was not entirely predictive. If we are to believe Henry

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Adams, no one really wanted the war. And—without questioning for a moment the necessity of abolition—we are entitled to ask whether, knowing in advance the fnal cost in lives and treasure, would either side have gone to war. Who knew it would last not six weeks or six months but four years? And who knew what would happen if serried ranks—of heroes or traitors, either one—marched in line against a gun that was a machine? Battle Pieces knows some of that. It knows, perfectly well, that neither the faith of Youth nor purpose of Religion is any match for a well-aimed bullet. And it knows, even better, that while Right may indeed triumph in the long run, it may go through some pretty ugly stages. And in particular, it sadly knows that the abolition of the South’s peculiar institution of race slavery is not the same as eradicating Evil from the script of human history. It even dares to suggest that in somebody’s dire theodicy, slavery and war may be on the same side of the argument. But there are diferences as well. Published a year after the Whitman sequence, it reveals, at once, some important diferences that are almost certainly studied. Severely stanzaic from the outset, with nothing “free” about its fercely traditional verse, it is emphatically an old-style poem; it says nothing about singing; and, though the non-narrative poems reveal a speaker, nothing like the poet himself ever appears. The speaker doesn’t fy around anywhere; he doesn’t even get to the front. Un-enlisted, he is already deep in some historical meditation. In “The Portent (1859)” he asks of the reader some imagination: Don’t listen to drums or bugles, he says, just look: there’s “weird” John Brown, swinging from a tree. And think: what law? Pendular motion, for sure, but what else may be at issue? What discoverable prologue? What probable consequences? Emerson and Thoreau judged Brown a proper hero; Hawthorne opined that “no man was ever more justly hanged.” But what exactly Brown himself was thinking is hidden in what Melville calls “the cap”—either Brown’s own head, from the Latin caput, or else, by some poetic license, the hood over the head of a person about to be hanged. What tale may hang hereby? Accidental? What if his plot had succeeded? Fatal? To Brown himself, clearly, but what in that other sense? Somewhere between heroic and diabolic, “weird” means fated as well as passing strange, and meteors are known to pass as signs. But the “future veils its face.” So that, where Whitman is quite willing to sing his excited but risky song of heroic enlistment, Melville, writing about 1859 from the standpoint of 1865, is left to wonder: ominous John Brown appears to predict something. But what? And the mood of somber indecision continues, elaborately, in the next two poems. The frst, “Misgivings (1860)” reveals, in the midst of some ambiguous sturm und drang, a speaker musing “upon [his[country’s ills,”; sensing that some political “tempest” is “bursting from the waste of Time” and postulating, should the question ever arise, his own duplex conviction:

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wherever mysteriously stored, the storm is bursting, in one long line, “On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime” (3).14 Slavery, that is to say, is just as bad as it gets, and America—which he does not hate—is supposed to be the fulfllment of some deep-seated and long-held hope for the better. However that may be, “Nature’s dark side is heeded now” so that “optimist-cheer” must now be silent, as any child can tell that the metaphysical mixture of “shouts” and “torrents” herald the arrival of some dread force which, long out of sight and of mind, seems but to have been waiting its Time. Where now to turn for solace? For clarity? And for hopeful prediction? Sadly, however, the next poem, longer, murkier, dramatic without being the least conversational, ofers only “The Confict of Convictions (1860– 61).” At the moment of writing, presumably, the war is over, and Melville may or may not have felt he knew at the outset what it meant, and how, in Time or Providence, it was destined to end; but from the frst his aim seems to have been not to predict—and certainly not to pontifcate—but to represent the conficting beliefs at which an honest but troubled mind might snatch. What if it really is, theologically, a matter of “man’s latter fall,” a contest between Satan, “strong and hale” even in his “old age” and “Raphael a white enthusiast still”? Can Satan possibly win? “Events” challenge all “eager Hope.” A “bugle wails,” but it’s not Gabriel, and Heaven maintains an “ominous silence over all.” And what if it’s not that scenario at all? What if, in the course of history, bad things happen? And Nobody knows why? One more prefatory ofering of alternatives, before the account of Battles begins in earnest: “Apathy and Enthusiasm” frst records, in one long stanza of modifed anapests (and complicated rhyme scheme) the gloom of the North in the winter of 1860–61: events are all discouraging and leave someone feeling “The paralysis of arm/In the anguish of the heart”; a mother tells her two allegorical sons “Not in hatred so to part,” but notices that in fact “the fssure in the hearth” is “Growing momentarily more wide.” And it ends with no redeeming thought: Then the glances ‘tween the Fates, And the doubt on every side, And the patience under gloom In the stoniness that waits The fnality of doom. Nothing like this in Whitman, early or late. Dickinson, maybe. But then, while we wonder how this mood can be called apathy—except in some clinical sense where, as nothing can be done, there really is no point to feeling—a second (Roman-numbered) stanza continues the story:

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So the winter died despairing, And the weary weeks of Lent; And the ice-bound rivers melted, And the tomb of Faith was rent. Only now, fve lines in, do we get the turn—to an enthusiasm as problematic in practice as in theory was the apathy. Suddenly, in any case, we move from the death of faith and hope to their miraculous resurrection: O, the rising of the People, Came with springing of the grass, They rebounded from dejection After Easter came to pass. Passing over the chance to worry the question of Easter and Passover, we cannot fail to notice how Melville’s sense of the Christian year—indeed the Christian story—remains frmly in place, even as his irony everywhere else suggests the utter folly of reading ugly current events into the redemptive key of typology. Predictably, perhaps, “The young [are] all elation” at the sound of Sumter’s cannon, thinking, along with Whitman, no doubt, “how tame the Nation/In the age that went before.” But not just that: And Michael seemed gigantical,. The Arch-fend but a dwarf; And at the towers of Erebus Our striplings fung the scof. The poem ends with the Graybeards mourning the old days, remembering the Iroquois warning against permitting “young Indians [to] lead the war.” But the invocation of Michael and the Arch-fend is more troubling still: silently replacing Raphael and Gabriel, Michael cannot fail to win the day, the year, the millennium, the confict of history itself. The Closet Manichean will suspect that Satan’s stature remains undiminished, and the Practiced Skeptic will ask, what the hell are they doing here anyway? Some people suspect that Lincoln will think of a way to free the slaves. How’s that going to work? 5 With Easter and the spring thaw a memory, July, 1861 presents us with “THE MARCH INTO VIRGINIA” and, lest we forget, “Ending in the First Manassas.” Ending badly, but ofering the Ironist at a Distance his frst chance to capture the moment when naïve vainglory, whatever its

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manufactured ideology, to face the facts of war. Eventually. Perhaps some initial enthusiasm had been necessary: Did all the lets and bars appear To every just or larger end, Whence should come the trust and cheer? Youth must its ignorant impulse lend— Age fnds place in the rear. And, when you think about it, “All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys,/The champions and enthusiasts of the state.” Better they not know themselves as “Preparatives of fate.” But who knew? It all seemed so jovial: “The banners play, the bugles call/The air is blue and prodigal.” Just ask Whitman. So of they go: No berrying party, pleasure-wooed, No picnic party in the May, Ever went less loth than they Into that leafy neighborhood. In Bacchic glee they fle toward Fate, Moloch’s uninitiate; Of these glory-seeking youths, who “gayly go to fght,” some will “Perish, enlightened by the vollied glare”; others will “survive” and “Thy after shock, Manassas, share.” Further shocks to follow. Yet not all were so naïve. Not Nathaniel Lyon, seasoned veteran of Indian confict, defender of the Union in a divided Missouri, and the frst Northern General to be killed in this more civil war. “Prophetic, sad” was he, by Melville’s account: badly out-numbered in the “Battle of Springfeld, Missouri (August, 1861),” his motto seemed “‘‘Tis battle, or ‘tis shame.’” His story requires thirteen peculiar fve-line stanzas, the heroic tale of a wounded commander who refuses to give up leadership until quite dead. Somehow “This seer foresaw his soldier-doom,/ Yet willed the fght.” Forward always, “his only fight/Was up to Zion,/ Where prophets now and armies greet pale Lyon.” Apparently there is—for the poet who has not yet said “Ah, man is manly”—something like real heroism, perilous no doubt, but quite distinct from the boyish enthusiasm for fame and glory.15 Which reappear at once in “Ball’s Bluf,” the poet’s “Reverie” from later in 1861. Beginning with “a sight—saddest that eyes can see/Young soldiers marching lustily/Unto the wars.” With “ffes, and fags” and “ladies cheering,” they move “like Juny morning on the wave”: “life throb[bing] so strong,/How should they dream that Death in a rosy clime/Would come to

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thin their shining throng?” How indeed? “Youth feels immortal, like the gods sublime” (14). Then, in a third (seven-line) stanza, difcult to parse but painfully clear in tone, an afterthought: Weeks passed; and at my window, leaving bed, By night I mused, of easeful sleep bereft, On those brave boys (Ah War! thy theft): Some marching feet Found paused at last by clif’s Potomac cleft; Wakeful I mused, while in the street Far footfalls died away till none were left. Wait: is he here or there, by the Potomac? Is there any real marching in the street below? Or only a sad echo of the earlier, gleeful departure. Hard to tell. But the deep structure is perfectly clear: they marched to war till none were left. With the next poem (#8 in the sequence), we get an important intrusion into this somber rehearsal of doubt and grief. Almost manic by comparison, “Dupont’s Round Fight (November, 1861)” ofers a key moment in what an important early reading of the sequence identifed as a “cycle of law” (as opposed to a “cycle of evil),”16 taking us back, emphatically, to the question quietly lurking in “The Portent”: what law is it that causes John Brown to be “swaying” just so? Treason or Gravity? Answer, yes. Apples fall toward England and the Commonwealth of Virginia can scarcely permit some rabid Abolitionist to arm negro slaves for insurrection. But how are the two laws related? By universal correspondence or only in a pun? So here: some hopeful logic wants us to conclude that, sailing in some sort of circle, the signal success of the “the Fleet that warred for Right” proved the cosmic Identity of Law: circles are a lovely and efcient sort of motion, and in the end Right can never fail. Beginning happily, with a literary appeal to “time and measure,” a slightly jarring note is sounded with ambiguous reference to the “aim” of art; and when we notice that the poem’s three pat stanzas are delivered in that old-time hymn meter call “the fourteener,” the whole premise seems reduced to its mindless, sing-song simplicity. And, should we look for some deeper probing, consider the reference to “The rebel at Port Royal,”— a watery place in the rebellious South, to be sure, but—do we wish to deny Melville his hard-won learning?—not a bad name for a GeometerTheologian named Blaise Pascal, whose Pensees efectively resist the Cartesian (and soon to be regnant) preference for philosophy in the episteme of mathematics. See, Blaise, Old Buddy, trigonometry and ethics really are the same. Of course we can appeal to the premise of a plurality of speakers,

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but even this implies irony. Without which the verdict would be simple incoherence. From the outset, somebody thinks it’s all ok, but what do Arch-Entities Raphael, Gabriel and Michael have to do with analytic (Cartesian) geometry? Well identifed, on the other hand, is the speaker on “The Stone Fleet, An Old Sailor’s Lament” from December, 1861. Lamented is the ill-advised and in the end unsuccessful attempt to block Charleston harbor by sinking there, freighted with New England granite, some sixteen (namable) old whaling ships—of the sort Melville himself had gone whaling in some decades earlier. Melvillean too, at a deeper level, is the explicit moral. And all for naught. The waters pass— Currents will have their way; Nature is nobody’s ally; ‘tis well; The harbor is bettered—will stay. A failure, and complete, Was your Old Stone Fleet. Nature’s stunning neutrality will get a more poignant expression a bit later; here it is enough to observe that this Old Sailor did not write “Dupont’s Round Fight.” And to remind ourselves that, whatever we may decide about the governing intention of Battle Pieces, its author, quite like the aeolian harp he will declare himself in retrospect to have been,17 is perfectly willing to sing whatever is in the wind. Just so in the midst of a very long poem about the siege of Fort Donelson in February of 1862—the eventual capture of which proved a turning point in the war and was remembered also for Grant’s refusal of anything like terms of surrender. But the battle is lengthy and the victory is hard-won. Tensely, then, an anxious crowd is assembled, to hear the latest, and then the latest, news from the front. The bulletins come in italics, and as they report sufering in rainy, then snowy weather, a change of type gives us something of the crowd’s response. “Ugh! ugh! ‘Twill drag along—drag along,” Growled a cross patriot in the throng, Who holds a “battered umbrella” looking like “an ambulance-cover/Riddled with bullet-holes.” “Hurrah for Grant!” cried a stripling shrill; Three urchins joined him with a will, And some of taller stature cheered.

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Predictable enough: Enthusiasm is the youthful, but not the only response to the unpleasant details of extended warfare. But then, something a little more surprising: Meantime a Copperhead passed; he sneered. “Win or lose,” he pausing said, “Caps fy the same; all boys, mere boys; Anything to make a noise. Like to see the list of the dead” [?] Though cynically formulated, the thoughts of the peacenik merely emphasize those of poem’s meditative intelligence so far. And he continues, suggesting that the “‘craven Southerners’” will not go down easily. To which “A solid merchant, square and stout” is quick to assert that “We’ll beat in the end’.” And then, when the Copperhead declares that in any case “The county’s ruined,” the confutation comes in the form of snowball, driving the dissenter “round the corner.” To which “each by-stander said—Well suited him.” Caps gotta fy, but the news-bulletin poem goes on, for something like ten more harrowing pages, as if to confrm the Copperhead’s prediction that Nothing Truly Difcult is Ever Easy. Another thematic interruption suggests that, when things go badly for the One Just Cause, even patriots may muse on the “mystery” of “right and wrong”; on why for example, a fercely storming universe ofers “no quarter . . . to wounded men in wood,/Or true hearts yearning for the good” (27). And again, as the bitter and bloody events drag on, “many an earnest heart” was led to “fnd in himself some bitter thing,/Some hardness in his lot as harrowing/As Donelson.” Ah yes, the evident lack of present cosmic justice: “Melville’s Quarrel”— “A Mystery of Iniquity.” Glimpses did they seem to see? But then, at last, the victory. “Hand grasped hand, and glances met/ In happy triumph; eyes were wet.” Not to mention the fact that “to the punches brewed that night/Went little water.” Others, “in prayer, as these in glee,/Blessed heaven for the winter-victory.” And others, yet more sober, slept badly, rising early to snatch the “death list.” And then the authoritative fnal prayer: Ah God! May Time with happy haste Bring wail and triumph to a waste, And war be done; (33) Let “naught/Be left of trench or gun” and, more soberly still, let “Day/ In vain seek Donelson.” Which is to suggest that the best way to honor a famous victory in an ever so just war is to forget it. And yet the sequence

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must go right on, naming men and ship and places of battles. Pieces of a poem which hates war even more than Mrs. Roosevelt, or Fallah. Evidently there is something like a duty to remember what we need to forget. Ironically enough, therefore, the next poem sings the name and fate of a ship called “The Cumberland”—one of those “names there are of telling sound,/Whose voweled syllables free/Are pledge that they shall ever live renowned.” Of course she sank. What you mean, She? “There’s no denying/That she was ended—quelled.” Rammed, she was, by the newlylaunched Southern ironside named the Merrimack—which (who?) went on to destroy the already surrendered ship named Congress. Whoops. Big Bad Moment in Naval History. But oh, the Cumberland: her fag kept its patriot head above water. And oh, her “Goodly name,” singy-songy, goodly name, in a poem whose meter demands that we make two syllables out of the odd word “voweled.” Oh well, fags gotta fap. And no less do poems gotta be metrical. So sing it out, Idiots: Sounding name as ere was sung, Long they’ll roll it on the tongue— Cumberland! Cumberland! Evidently war, like poetry, aspires to the condition of music. (So perhaps does geometry.) And while we’re at it, sing, a little less ironically, the fame of John L. Worden (Who?—thank God for the footnotes), the commander of the fastresponding Monitor: Brave he was to seal himself up in some newly minted implement of war. How brave? Alcides, groping into haunted hell To bring forth King Admetus’ bride, Braved naught more vaguely direful and untried. (35) His prayer, that of a champion: let’s see “if I have a part/With men whose manhood never took denial.” So you fnd yourself “in the turret walled/ By adamant”: and so this new monstrosity of war may be in all “Its very strength and cunning [a] monstrous error”: when was that ever a bar. Stand up, my heart; be strong; what matter If here thou seest thy welded tomb? ..... First duty, duty next, and duty last; Ay, Turret, rivet me here to duty fast! (37)

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Duty-Duty-Doo. Not Frank Sinatra, but close enough for Government Work. “So nerved,” you fought “wisely and well,” so that you “twice live in life and story.” On the other hand, “over your Monitor dirges swell,/ In wind and wave that keep the rites of glory.” (Sic transit: Did I say I had to look at the footnotes?) Oh well, at least Worden knew that war was no picnic. And as it turns out, naval glory has itself a history, so that the name of Captain John Worden may not enjoy the same valeur as that of Admiral Horatio Nelson; nor will the renown of the Monitor ever compete with that of the storied old Temeraire which, thanks in part to a famous painting by J. M. W. Turner, may, in Melville’s own note, “stand for the poetic ideal of those grand old wooden ships,” outmoded but “fghting” till the end.18 Indeed, some “Utilitarian” might well think that, with the invention of the ironsides, the heroism went out of naval warfare altogether. Not much poetry here, but we can try: “Hail to victory without the gaud/Of glory”: no banners, just “plain mechanic power,” placing war where it belongs, “Among the trades and artisans.” Deadly battle, of course, this Merrimack and Monitor, yet not much “passion,” as “all went by crank,/Pivot and screw./And calculations of caloric.” Battle well known: the clank heard round the world. War shall go on, to the very end, “but warriors/Are now but operatives” (40). Hating war but loving heroism, the puzzled reader is pulled this way and that; and is left to wonder, What to make of a diminished thing? So much for the esthetics of declension. And enough, for the moment at least, from The Laureate—who wants to be a Bard when he grows up, which he never does.19 Back on land now, the troubled topos of glory gives place to that of somberness, to the point of silence. No irony now. Except that imposed by the genre itself: how could anyone in their right mind celebrate war without meaning something else? At least not after “Shiloh” (April, 1862) when, in a stunning defeat for the North, the South lost only 10, 694 men, compared to the North’s 13,047. Battle over, an “April rain” appears to solace “the parched ones stretched in pain.” On both sides, good and evil alike. In fact, the lone church there, that “echoed so many a parting groan,” echoed as well the “natural prayer/, Of dying foemen mingled there.” And then, as if to predict a poem called “The Man He Killed,” an ending it required some more than ordinary daring to write—with a parenthetic line like no other in the nineteenth century’s unwritten war: Foemen at morn, but friends at eve— Fame or country least their care: (What like a bullet can undeceive!) What indeed? But how dare he say “fame” and “country” and fail to mention “the world’s fairest hope” at war with “man’s foulest crime”?—unless

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with some sense that ninety-fve percent of the men who fought for the Confederacy owned no slaves, and that the North was fghting for the Union as bitterly as for anything else, and that youth may fght for the thrill of the fght, and one touch of ammo makes the whole world kin. And that the truth of history appears to require it. 6 “The Battle for the Mississippi” returns us not to the contested question of glory but to the deeply troubling ideology of Holy History: “When Israel camped by Migdol hoar,” it is written, “Moses sung and timbrels rung”; and, mirabile dictu, the Lord appeared as a “man of war.” More to the present point, some local confict seems “a war/Like Michael’s waged with leven.” But it ends on a more somber, less confdent note: the victors can but pray for their dead, and the narrating voice proposes that “There must be other, nobler worlds for them/Who nobly yield their lives in this.” Must be? Or what? And this skeptical faith leads us from the happy fantasy of Heavenly Right and Devilish Wrong to the stark realization, already ofered in “The Stone Fleet,” that, whatever part The God of Israel may deign to play in the Afairs of America, the Mind of God’s Nature could hardly care less. Witness “Malvern Hill,” where anthropomorphic apostrophe seems to be having its rhetorical way. Do “Ye elms that wave on Malvern Hill” recall “how McClellan’s men . . . stood at bay?”—prevented by Lee from moving on to Richmond. Maybe. What about the way we proved that “Reverse . . . was not defeat,” even though thousands there met the sod? Better had. In short, “Does Malvern Wood/Bethink itself, and muse and brood?” Could happen. And, on premise, why not? But let’s let the Elms speak for themselves, in short-line italics: We elms of Malvern Hill Remember every thing; But sap the twig will fll: Wag the world how it will, Leaves must be green in Spring. From the astonishment of this it is hard to recover. Of course, we already know that, though the warlike God of Israel may or may not have a chosen people still, certain it is that “Nature is nobody’s ally.” So why rub salt in the wound of our faith, however naive? Unless to suggest that Naturalism—the cosmic opposite to all forms of projective ideal fantasy—has to begin right here.20 What if anthropomorphism is, as Freud suspected, all of a piece? Do Elms answer questions? Do waves respect an open boat? Does Nature give one good goddam? Is the Lord a Warlord? A Father? Does He regulate the

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course of history? Does He answer prayers? (What you mean, He?) Pretty to think so, as “An honest God” is, after all, “the noblest work of man.” Not since 1832, with the beleaguered and belated publication of “My Uncle Molineux” has American Literature dared to ofer so stark a challenge to the prevailing politico-theology: citizens celebrating an important anniversary of 1776 may regard it as one of the three most important events in history, but Hawthorne’s fction rehearses it as a sort of Rum Riot; and the Man in the Moon, bound to witness all possible turnings in the world below, regards the rehearsal as “Frolicsome”; Oh, Boy, those earthlings they’re at it again.21 Here, the word of strategic ofence is—obviously— “wag”: “to move to and from or up and down, especially with quick jerky motions.” Accomplishing nothing, getting nowhere. Exactly: human history in a syllable. I asked the Aeolian Harp about this: “Did you really hear the elms?” “Yes.” “Did they really say ‘wag?’” “You’re just supposed to sing what you hear, you know.” “Well,” said the harp, risking a small fey smile, “I asked Mr. Melville about this, and he said it’s OK to take a tone.” Right. It’s what they used to call “literature.” But if the morale and the genre are now perfectly defned, the war drags but on, even as the un-ironic Copperhead predicted; so there must be more battle pieces. McClellan ofers the North a setback at Antietam, but wins the (almost) undying reverence of his “medalled soldiers”; indeed, even “The one armed lift the wine” as even Johnny Reb belongs to “The LeftArm Corps.” The “Battle of Stone River” revives the Northern Hope, but its poem hopes only for ultimate reconciliation, as in the (non-biblical) case of “Yorkist and Lancastrian,” where the “rival Roses warred for Sway—/ For Sway, but named the name of Right.” (Who wrote this? The Copperhead?) A long poem on how a line of Northern ships—“Gunboat and transport in Indian fle” successfully ran the Southern batteries, stealthily, and in spite of fres set to spy them out, takes pains to remind us of “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego,” proving once and for all that “The Lord, be sure, he helps his people, Ned” (50). Ned’s reply goes unrecorded, but the Reader knows the tune: small and large, now as then, God’s in His heaven and all’s Right with the North. And, at all events, “Porter proves himself a brave man’s son” (52). Not as brave as “Stonewall Jackson” perhaps, but, unlike the Civil War, the Book of Life is not a contest. “Mortally Wounded at Chancellorsville,” and that by his own troops, this already renowned hero of Chapultepec, gets two poems, one from a Northerner who challenges his right to praise one “who stoutly stood for Wrong.” Try this: “Dead is the Man whose Cause is Dead,” yet “Earnest in error,” was he; and “True as John Brown or steel.” But be clear: “We drop a tear on the bold Virginian’s bier,/Because no wreath we own.” Even if somebody else thinks they do, as in the poem “Ascribed to a Virginian,” who asserts that Jackson’s renown is one “Which not the North shall care to slur.” The future may

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well wonder how so great a man could have been so wrong, but “Stonewall followed his star,” even if that star may leave us, in the aftermath “puzzled.” Not about slavery, but about the meaning of the war. How to write about an unspeakably terrible means to an unarguably noble end? Then, all suddenly, “Gettysburg,”—a turning point in the war, a decisive Union victory that amounted to a “Check” to Lee’s invading armies, and which killed more soldiers than any other battle in American history. So let the celebration be muted. At frst it is not so at all. At frst, the Holy Historians appear to have won their ultimate rhetorical victory: O pride of the days in prime of the months Now trebled in great renown, When before the ark of our holy cause Fell Dagon down— (55) Miracle of miracles. No mere comparison now; rather, a plain typological fulfllment. We in the North are the bearers of the true and fnal ark—of liberty—and the South is, well, there’s more: Dagon foredoomed, who, armed and targed, Never his impious heart enlarged Beyond that hour; God walled his power, And there the last invader charged. (55) Holy History fulflled: we should have known it all along. Except that the plot may be read best from after the fact: So Far So God. And, except as the poem continues, a local tone rings a less biblical, more psychological truth of its own. [The Rebel] charged, and in that charge condensed His all of hate and all of fre; ..... Before him went the shriek of shells— Aerial screamings, taunts and yells; Of course, the infamous “Rebel yell”: but where is that in Deuteronomy? In the end, however, the Rebel’s “Pride was repelled by sterner pride,/And Right is a stronghold yet.” And why not?—as everywhere, Pride goeth before a Victory. And then, as the Typologist gives way to the Mourner, and then to the Laureate, the image of “the evening sun [dying] on the face of each lifeless one” and the prayerful prediction that “every bone/Shall rest in honor there” (56).

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As everywhere in the sequence, a priori biblical politics has to compete with observations rather more empirical. But none of the somber empiricism has quite prepared us the for the view we are about to get from “The HouseTop,” a “Night Piece” if there ever was one, a meditation on an event of July, 1863 impossible to understand as an antitype. Is there evil in the city and God has not done it? Well, He works in strange ways, but is the Kingdom really advanced by a draft riot? Sacvan Bercovitch, thou should’st be living at this hour.22 Man, given the proper context, may appear manly enough; but human nature is not all that liberalism may have hoped. And suddenly we are forced to realize that not all the emotions aroused by the righteous war against slavery are admirable, that the human savage is not everywhere noble. Accustomed as we have become to civilian burnings in the name of social justice, we may not be quite prepared for the moral terror and the political reaction expressed in Melville’s twenty-seven lines of un-rhymed pentameter. Replacing all sorts of fancy, pseudo-Elizabethan metricity, suddenly some blank Shakespearean verse arrives—as if to imply that somewhere in the English language there is a vision of “blackness” worthy to compete with the happiest news the Jewish and Christian scriptures can be thought to ofer. Later, of course, a poem about a picture will credit Shakespeare with having seen and assembled “man’s fnal lore”; but already he is on the record as being more than Hawthornean in his power to express the unlovely truth about man and the world.23 And here it is, full-bore. It’s night; it’s hot; one feels a dense oppression, “As tawny Tigers feel in matted shades.” It’s quiet; almost too quiet. “Yet ftfully from far breaks a mixed surf/Of mufed sound, the Atheist roar of riot.” Yonder, where parching Sirius set in drought, Balefully glares red Arson—there-and there. The town is taken by its rats—ship rats And rats of the wharves. What the hell? Can we not protest the nation’s frst act of military conscription?—particularly one that lets people buy their way out for three hundred dollars, thus placing the burden of fghting the war squarely on the poor. Well, yes and no. At least in the footnote that compares the atrocities committed to those infamously associated with the French Revolution.24 What civility in this citifed war? All civil charms And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe— Fear-bound, subjected to a better sway Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve, And man rebounds whole aeons back in nature. (57)

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De-evolution, back to the state of nature. What to expect? Depends on who you read. But don’t be surprised if the answer is Repression. Who ever said politics was always a matter of Right Reason? And so, “Wise Draco comes.” We don’t call him “Draconian” for nothing; Calvin we call “harsh,” but it’s pretty much the same thing—just ask Bill Watterson, who made a comedy of “Calvin and Hobbes.” A little more than a little below the angels, natural man is a wolf to man, so get yourself the hell out of the state of nature; and when there’s a contract, don’t ask, just obey. And thank God for martial law. Like the town which, “being thankful,” heeds not The grimy slur on the Republic’s faith implied, Which holds that Man is naturally good, And—more—is Nature’s Roman, never to be scourged. The waters here are pretty deep. Proceed with caution. The politics of White-Jacket look pretty liberal, as we sympathize with the man who imagines he’ll take a Hobbesian Captain overboard sooner than feel the sting of his lash. Some readers think the Jury is still out on Captain Vere, who would convince his (Lockean, jury-nullifying) ofcers that, as the law is the law, Billy Budd must be hanged; but a pretty good case can be made for the opposite, that—“Cynic tyrannies of honest kings” (57) to the contrary—Vere looks more like a Calvinist God as a needful hero of law and order. On the other hand, it has been hard to prove that Babo’s actions are nothing but those of any old “Heroic Slave.”25 So that the fnal word on Melville’s politics may yet to be spoken. But the case here seems somewhat simpler: liberal democracy may indeed be worth the risk, particularly if the alternative is a state-ism, where men march around to the martial music of whistles and drums when they are not at the guns. But on no credible account is man’s moral nature entirely innocent: protest is one thing; robbery and arson are probably something else. And given such a spontaneous overfow of uncivil emotion, what would you expect? Martial law may or may not be the necessary rule of navies but, given the unruly tendencies of the fallen human creature, once in a while the cops have to step in. Nor, in any case, can the American Civil War be entirely understood in terms of Heilsgeschichte. Epiphanies come whenever they come, and thematic outbursts do not always wait until the last page; but as wars have a life of their own, Battle Pieces goes right on. Nor do all of its aeolian speakers get the bitter point at once. Witness “Look-Out Mountain,” which causes someone to import “Kaf, the peak of Eblis,” into this nighttime “war of Wrong and Right.” Thank God the sun appears:

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God has glorifed the Mountain Where a Banner burneth bright, And the armies in the valley They are fortifed in right. Of course they are: nothing like sunlight and banners. And it never hurts to think a God who cares is on your side. Indeed, it might even cause the common soldiers to break away from their leader and capture “Chattanooga (November, 1863)” all on their own enthusiastic account. Some of them died, of course, but Forever they slumber young and fair, The smile upon them as they died; Their end attained, that end a height: Life was to these a dream fulflled, And death a starry night. (61) What else? Youth, it appears, is almost as gullible as theology. On the other hand—dragging on for two days, and costing an enormous number of Union lives and Grant almost his reputation—“The Armies of the Wilderness” ofers a dramatic “Confict of Convictions” that reminds us that part of the point of Battle Pieces is to report just about everything that was said on the complex martial occasion, and let the reader’s variable response to tone and always perilous instinct for irony handle the main thematic burden. Fourteeners in Roman tell, from on site, the story—history almost—of Unionists watching “The bravos of the Wrong” (61) playing “football,” then interrogating an intransigent Rebel captive, then narrating xxxx. Alternating, are shorter, Italic stanzas of a diferent meter, commenting, but also wondering. For example, xxxx. In the end, the two voices come round to about the same sad place. In the Roman, “None can narrate that strife in the pines/A seal is on it”; at issue, “A riddle of death, of which the slain/Sole survivors are.” And in the Italic: Long they withhold the roll Of the shroudless dead. It is right; Not yet can we bear the fare Of the funeral light. It had been “charge for charge, and shout for yell,” but the North has won: “Heaven lent strength, the Right strove well,” and, signifcantly “emerged” from the place called “Wilderness” (69). But the dead are still dead, and

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the Thematist appears to be wondering if, in type or in metaphor merely, we are not all in the wilderness still. Shorter, and less patently ironic, are some thoughts “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander” (undated)—as if The Laureate meant to generalize his point into a sort of theme song. “Ay, man is manly,” as he has all but said before. Not only is this hero of Spotsylvania handsome, making it “Cheering . . . To look upon a Chief like this”; but no doubt his moral lineage leads us back to the men of “Agincourt,” knightly Normans, in fact, from whom descend the Templars. So far so good, unless we remember that the studiously gay diners and incorrigibly cheerful wine bibbers in “The Paradise of Bachelors” were also Templars, sort of. But it’s more than cheerful: implied as well is something like a humanist theology. Nothing can lift the heart of man Like manhood in a fellow man. The thought of heaven’s great King afar But humbles us—too weak to scan; But manly greatness men can span, And feel the bonds that draw. (70) So thought Emily Dickinson: easier to choose a likeable human Christ than try to cozy up to some Badass Jehovah. And while I’m on the subject (of “Puritans in Spite”),26 why can’t the Evangelists read more like Orpheus?— whose songs did not condemn? If only True Religion were a little more friendly. Meanwhile, back down at the battle front, consider the signifcance of this cannon they call “The Swamp Angel.” What can I say? I devoutly wish this “Angel” were not “coal-black”; and that it had not a “thick Afric-lip.” But how do I feel about the fact that, like the Calvinist God, it “dooms by a far decree”? Get over it: it’s bombing the hell out of Charleston, which “proud City” calls upon the saint of her tall-towered church “in vain”: don’t they know that “Michael” is on our side, that he has indeed fed “To the Angel over the sea”? And then the somber second thought: Who weeps for the woeful City Let him weep for our guilty kind; Who joys at her wild despairing— Christ, the Forgiver, convert his mind. It’s a little too soon to sign the bottom line, but we are here close to the Melville who long since suggested that mature analysis had better

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throw in “something, somehow like original sin.” Evidently one can hate slavery and still not cheer for the fact that its ending had undone so many. But as prayers do not always end wars, we are treated to a thoughtful account of two important Union victories—Admiral Farragut’s in “The Battle for [Mobile] Bay” and Sheridan’s eleventh-hour success “At Silver Creek.” Beginning with an eight-line apostrophe to that “mystery of noble hearts,/To whom mysterious seas have been . . . A stern, sad discipline” (72), “Mobile Bay” patiently rehearses the costly victory in which Farragut, lashed to the rigging of his flagship, refuses to let his fleet turn back from a harbor thoroughly mined with, famously, those “damn” torpedoes. No “sprightly fife” to set the tone for this terrific encounter, only “a holy angel” (73) behind each man until, eventually, the Southern cannons having “disgorged” all their “Hate,” the “white flag showed” and “mad shouts went up.” But then the turn we have come to expect: “on the scarred fleet’s decks there lay,/A silent man for every silenced gun” (76). Next, with or without the fife, Sheridan and his “horse in ermine” thunder in to the last-ditch rescue, to the cheers of the ordinary soldiers, who recognize both “Horseman and horse,” who ride alike to glory. So be it: “There is glory for the brave/who lead and nobly save.” On the other hand, however, there is “no knowledge in the grave/Where the nameless followers sleep” (77). Evidently youthful enthusiasm has to be its own reward. As, “In the Prison Pen”: a captive, whose “vacant hands” bring on “the idiot-pain.” Unable to think he can yet hallucinate ghosts—“Like those on Virgil’s shore,” except that many of these are “gashed.” Under a smiting sun, like a wounded animal He totters to his lair— A den that sick hands dug in earth Ere famine wasted there . . . (78) Or, better perhaps, he simply drops dead there, alone “Till forth from the throngs they bear him dead—/Dead in his meagerness” (78). Which side he was on can scarcely matters; Sic transit gloria belli. Which some may learn without having to quite die. Even some ofcers. Consider “The College Colonel,” leading his regiment home. Not as they fled two years before, But a remnant half-tattered, and battered, and worn, Like castaway sailors, who—stunned By the surf’s loud roar,

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dragging their mates, possibly dead, “At last crawl spent, to shore,” as from some “Open Boat.” Oh yes, “There are welcoming shouts, and fags”; old men “of hat to the boy,” but it’s mostly lost on who “has lived a thousand years . . . in battle’s pains and prayers.” It is not that a leg is lost, It is not that an arm is maimed, It is not that the fever has wracked— Self he has long disclaimed. (79) Probably a New Englander: they call it Benevolence to Being in General. What then? But all through the Seven Days’ Fight, And deep in the Wilderness grim, And in the feld-hospital tent, And Petersburg crater, and dim Lean brooding in Libby, there came— Ah heaven!—what truth to him. (80) Something, it seems, can undeceive almost as well as a bullet which, though it can easily maim an arm or require the sacrifce of a leg, and spoil thereby the picnic in the glade, does not always penetrate to the heart of faith. All that sufering and death—as much as Whitman saw and more besides— and what if no one is keeping score? What if Being in General is, well, a little too general to keep a list of all who lived and died well or ill? What if the reward of Abolition is Death? No wonder a certain “Indian aloofness” is on the College Colonel’s brow? But is it some imagined Native American Stoicism? Or some wisdom of the mysterious East? But whatever toll the slaughter takes on the souls of the sensitive, and whatever the Compassionate Buddha may think of a holy war, “The Eagle of the Blue”—bird, in truth, but also the image on many of those waving banners Whitman had found unfappable—waves here to prove a faith that may be “scarred” but not killed. Can we learn his secret? Bird or image, he “Exulteth in the war”; “sober [his] hue,/His beauty is his power.” “Austere,” “Amid the scream of shells, his scream/Runs shrilling” (80). In short, “The pride of quenchless strength is his.” Immortal as it seems, “Well may we think his years are charmed—/The Eagle of the Blue” (81). Like we said, birds gotta fy, fags gotta fap, people gotta make symbols—which nations appropriate and poets duly indict. Ya’d almost think . . . But then, if poetry were the standard, you’d wonder why some god did not save McPherson, “Sarpedon the Great War,” who was

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“Killed in Front of Atlanta (July, 1864).” Zeus, who could have saved his Trojan namesake, at least gave a reason: the other gods would start wanting to save all their favorites. Here, no explanation, only a “Dirge,” one forced to notice that “Man is noble, man is brave,/But man’s a weed.” Best hope? “There’s a trumpet that shall rend/This soldier’s sleep.” Still, what you actually hear is the “Prayer and Volley” that duly “Sound/McPherson’s end” (82). Requiescat in silentio. Since, by October, 1864 the war is nearing its pre-literary end, and since the sympathetic Mourner has had so full a say in the not-quite-symphonic chorus of discordant voices, the reader must surely wonder if the enthusiastic Laureate has much energy left. And indeed, in recounting the “Destruction of the Ram Albemarle by the Torpedo-Launch,” he can only express wonder at young Lieutenant Cushing’s death-defying plan “to rig up a launch with a torpedo and go in and sink the Albemarle.” It worked, though their launch was destroyed and only “Cushing and one other” escaped death or capture.27 Think about it: His shallop—die or do! Into the food his life he threw, Yet lives—unscathed—a breathing thing To marvel at. (82) Forget those less lucky. The question here is what motivates such heedless heroism: “He has his fame;/But that mad dash at death, how name?” Life, you would think, would be more precious. “Had earth no charm to stay in the Boy/The martyr passion?” Do we dare to name it “death wish”? How can we not, as Life has more lures than any girl For youth and strength; puts forth a share Of beauty, hinting of yet rarer store; (83) Where? In some life beyond? That’s what Edgar Poe thinks: Beauty is our intimation of immortality. But what if not?—from the man who had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated.” For “life once over, who shall tell the rest?/Life is, of all we know, God’s best.” And so we wonder: What imps these eagles then, that they Fling disrespect on life by that proud way In which they soar above our lower clay. (83)

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But doubt aside, “In Cushing’s eager deed was shown/A spirit which brave poets own—/That scorn of life which earns life’s crown.” “Earns but not always wins” (83), as one may learn from the “unchristian wisdom of Ecclesiastes.” And suddenly we realize that the speaker was not the Laureate at all. The canny, cautious Thematist, rather, who knows enough to know there are, In war as in life, some things we cannot know. And that the cause of literature thrives thereby. Especially for those once-born sick souls who cannot “be comfortable in [their] unbelief.”28 7 December, 1864 gives us Sherman’s “March to the Sea,” poem number thirty-seven of the ffty-three in the frst version of Battle Pieces, and with it, the sense of rush towards the inevitable conclusion. There will be thematic interruptions, to be sure, but we know where the history is going. The North has won its way past its doubts of failure in spite of faith. We know that something like “The Surrender at Appomattox” is coming. Our only question: will we fnd the war to mean what it was supposed to have meant? Distinguishing the happifying verse of this frst glorious, then somewhat troubled account of a sweet (and largely unopposed) victory is the emphatic presence of a slightly varied yet stubbornly insistent refrain. Poetry with a vengeance. Repetition, it appears, is the mother of conviction. Some of the 60,000 men marching 285 miles—from “charred Atlanta” to the sea—must have sufered something or other, but the historical sources do not contradict the verdict of this poem’s distinguishing mark: “It was glorious glad marching,/That marching to the sea.” “A volley ahead”? They hear it; And the hear the repartee: Fighting was but frolic In that marching to the sea. (85) To repeat, almost: “It was glorious glad marching,/A marching bold and free.” Ah yes: this is what we came for. And—Malvern Elms to the contrary notwithstanding, “All nature felt their coming.” Birds and banners—and “slaves by thousands”—“marched beside the drumming,” and “joined the armies blue.” Victorious army on the march, they took what they needed. Was there “famine in the wake”? And “wailing”? And “blazing cinders sailing”? And “maniacs” running amok in towns? Well, they deserved it: “It was Treason’s Retribution.” No, wait, scratch that. With malice towards none, “Was the havoc, retribution?” “Howso’er”: they may little note nor long remember this or that, but indeed “They will long

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remember Sherman/Marching to the sea” (87). Winners write the history. Losers become Southern Agrarians. Poets take the hindmost. Fair is fair. On the other hand, however—and to be fairer than fair—might we not take notice of the “Frenzy” felt in the “Wake” of Sherman’s war-ending advance through the Carolinas in February, 1865? Last major battle of the war; Rebel forces exhausted; leaders all but admitting defeat. What?— Are we now too weak to “contend,” to “break/The sinews of the oppressor’s knee,/That grinds upon the neck” (87)? Wait, who are you to call them Oppressors? It’s your knee upon the Negro’s neck, just as in “Benito Cereno.” No, wait again, Delano was a Yankee. “Whose Foot on Whose Throat?”29 I can’t breathe. What was I saying? Shall we never have revenge? In any case, what were we thinking? Can we but curse their “Northern faces”? Pray that our Southern sun may wither these plunderers “from frozen Maine” and “Far Minnesota too.” Does everybody but Quentin Compson hate the South? Well then, here it is: We were sore deceived—an awful host! They move like a roaring wind, Have we gamed and lost? But even despair Shall never our hate rescind. Not quite what “Lee in the Capitol” will tell the Senators, but they will not be listening anyway. Treason defeated, the Confederacy, always already deconstructed, is Unionized at last. So be it. And so, let the ranting Typologist have his rampant way. “Dagon down”—at “Gettysburg,” two years, sixteen poems since, it’s Richmond now “Goes Babylon’s Way.” And as if to prove that God and History and Poetry are all the same thing, the italicized, one-line, pseudo-refrain: “Sing and Pray.” It went through some ugly stages, “But hearts unquelled at last deter/The helmed dilated Lucifer.” We kept our faith, if only barely. And in any case we “never our aim foreswore”: like the man said, confess and then shoot.30 Trying it was, when “Hell made loud hurrah,” But God is in Heaven, and Grant in the Town, And Right through might is Law— God’s way adore. (89) Wars end and Pippa Passes: Ergo, “All’s right with the world.” But the irony—always unremitting and generic—could hardly be heavier here. Only where a “Redeemer Nation” dares to read current events as Holy History do God and Grant go in the same short sentence—or Town borrow the capital letter from Heaven; and you can parse the relation right

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and might and law until you are blue in the face before making the fnal claim make sense. The slaves are free, but almost everybody else is dead. Retributive Reconstruction is waiting in the wings, and racism springs eternal: “God’s way adore.” Maybe some readers then, but now only if pretty far gone in some political religion. Adoration duly performed, “Surrender” swiftly ensues. A “joy-gun” celebrates “the sword that Grant received from Lee,” but a voice nearer that of the Laureate posits his own conclusion: “The warring eagles fold the wing,” yet not as with Caesar and Pompey at Pharsalia. But Treason thrown, though a giant grown, And Freedom’s larger play. All human tribes glad token see. In the close of the wars of Grant and Lee. If you say so. But you may be sure the English are still worried about the price of cotton. And as to the ensuing “Canticle,” one may wonder if the “Enthusiasm at the Close of the War” was quite “National,” as few in the South—part of the Nation, now, on premise—probably believe that their crushing defeat proves that, as the denouement of a plot at work “From times of endless date,” something called “Humanity” is necessarily “growing/ Toward the fulness of her fate” (92) As we will later learn, Lee is a strong believer in fate. A diferent one, of course: one older and somewhat more august than the North’s providential “Epic.”31 Similarly, only “The People” of the North think of Lincoln in death (15 April 1865) as “The Martyr.” Of course his murder was bad enough in any terms: “yearning,” he was, “to redeem the evil-willed,” but “They killed him in his kindness,” and worse, “They killed him from behind.” Sensing the anger of the Northerners—still called “The People”—the LaureateTurned-Mourner warns of such “When they bare the iron hand”; but it requires an author’s footnote to blow the whistle on the use of the conspiratorial “They.” Happily, he notes—and politely—“the feeling which would have charged the entire South for the crime of one assassin . . . died away with the natural excitement of the hour.” An editor’s note instructs us that in his own copy Melville would cross out the suggestion that “The Avenger takes [the] place” of “the Forgiver” (93). But Melville’s note is another clear sign that, dramatic and ironic, the poem is willing to say what the critical listener heard said. And the poem ends with the warning, repeated as a refrain, to “Beware the People weeping/When they bare the iron hand” (94). Then—astonishingly, and the risk of annulling the premise of harp in the wind, a bold thematic intrusion. Inspired not by a battle or a post-war confrontation but by “A Picture,” bearing the ominous title “The Coming

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Storm.” Not a meteoric omen, like John Brown, but an after-the-fact assertion that it had been the part of wisdom to expect the worst. “All feeling hearts must feel for him/Who felt this picture”—as, clearly, “Dim inklings from the shadowy sphere/Fixed him and fascinated here.” As we have been suggesting, the reader had better know more than a little about the military course and rhetorical venue of the Civil War, the War of Succession, the War Between the States. But, then and now, only those who remember Melville’s belated review of “Hawthorne and His Mosses” will hear the theological echo: “It is that blackness in Hawthorne . . . that so fxes and fascinates me.”32 Powerful in the blue-eyed Nathaniel, even if more so in Shakespeare. So here: some “demon-cloud” seems to have burst on this painter, “Shakespeare’s pensive child,” bearing “Hamlet in his heart.” So, set down this: No utter surprise can come to him Who reaches Shakespeare’s core; That which we seek and shun is there— Man’s fnal lore. Not, that is to say, America defeating Evil and thus leading the way to History’s fulfllment, but “something, somehow like original sin.” Or worse, as that is only the way we have chosen to blame ourselves for the fact that, though God’s creation, we cannot keep ourselves from sin and, Optimism to the contrary notwithstanding, and that, in a Universe that abets vice and virtue about alike, the gods appear to kill us for their sport. (No wonder some failed Jesuit thinks of Christ as God’s apology for a failed creation.)33 Even in a poetic fction studiedly dramatic, it appears, something or other will out. Is slavery an unspeakable evil? Of course. What were you expecting? Solution: ranks of men marching against machine guns. Back at the historical subject, “The Muster”—“Suggested by Two Days Review at Washington”—would compare the assembling of men to receive their war-time pay to the merging of rivers from all over, but somehow it lacks conviction; let Whitman do that, later, when East meets West meets East. Equally imagistic—and more nearly thematic— “Aurora—Borealis” is ofered to commemorate “The Dissolution of Armies at the Peace,” and in doing so it wonders at the “Retreatings and advancings” of the mysterious natural display itself. Awesome thing, and then it disappeared: Splendor and Terror gone— Portent or Promise—and gives way To pale, meek Dawn;

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John Brown, any idiot could read. But not this. The coming, going, Alike in wonder showing— Alike the God, Decreeing and commanding The million blades that glowed, The muster and disbanding— Midnight and Morn. (98) Nature, it appears, works in strange ways. And, like Nature’s God, they may not be ours. More humanely—and as in “The Martyr”—something of the charity Lincoln opposed to malice comes back to express itself in “Rebel Color Bearers at Shiloh,” elaborately subtitled, “A Plea Against the Vindictive Cry Raised by Civilians Shortly after the Surrender at Appomattox.” Proud they stand, these “martyrs for the Wrong,” but for God’s sake, don’t shoot. It was, there at Shiloh and elsewhere, violent, bloody, and sad; but it’s over: “Spare Spleen her ire,/And think how Grant met Lee” (96). Again, less dramatically, in “The Released Rebel Prisoner” who, but “dimly” aware of the “superstition” for which he fought, thinks of the “Seductive . . . Chiefs,” once his heroes—of Hill, and Ashby, and Stuart, all dead. He sees “our boys/[returning] From his wasted felds,” “Ladies feast[ing] them on strawberries,” and he thinks of “Home,” but the home he remembers is “gone!” And so he “lingers on/ In the City of the Foe”—“Waiting farther transportation for days . . . [wandering] penniless about the streets, of [lying] in their worn and patched gray uniforms under the trees of the Battery”34—while “His cousins and his countrymen/. . . see him listless go” (100). Humane too the wish that the “Grave Near Petersburg, Virginia” long be undisturbed: here lies not only “Daniel Drouth,” a fery Rebel, but also, equally fery, a Rebel cannon. “May his grave be green for many happy years,” and “May none disinter/The—Buried Gun.” As happy as any man might be about the ending of the South’s peculiar institution, may not one be almost as happy that the war is over? And now another picture from “The Spring Exhibition of the National Academy, 1865,” this one “An Idealized Portrait” which E. Vedder has called “Formerly a Slave.” Studiously mild, it yet begins with a glancing political pun: the African woman’s face is said to express the “suferance” of her race. Let’s see: what if we had ofered Babo the right to vote? In truth, “Her children’s children they shall know/The good withheld from her,” which she seems happily to foresee. In the meantime “Her dusky face is lit with sober light,/Sibylline, yet benign” (101). Or so the painter would have us believe. And then, matching this hopeful picture, an overpowering “Apparition”:

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somebody else has seemed to see something quite diferent: all suddenly there appeared, as if from nowhere, a violent volcano; and then, all suddenly—the image belying all possible geology—it disappeared. What to learn from that? Not really from nowhere, but from a feld “Long slept in pastoral green,/A goblin mountain was upheaved.” And—unless the “scared sense” was twice deceived—about the appearance as well as the reality—it was powerful but also ugly: “Marl-glen and slag-ravine.” Morally ugly too: “The unreserve of Ill was there,/The clinkers in their last retreat.” Somebody, it appears, has been exposed to an upsurge of Evil that, while it may have been itself in retreat or well repressed by somebody’s happy outlook. Somebody take notice! But then, ere the eye could take it in, Or mind could comprehension win, It sunk!—and at our feet. Ignoring the fact that Volcanos take some time appallingly to appear and, once having themselves asserted, they never do quite retract, the speaker goes on with his geological allegory: “So, then, Solidity’s a crust—/The core of fre below.” And then, the moral application, in the form of a notquite rhetorical question: All may go well for many a year, But who can think without a fear Of horrors that happen so? (102) Nobody in their right mind!—we rush to answer, even as we remind ourselves that not every patriotic American could recognize a killing four years’ war in the name of God and Virtue as in fact a “horror” burst through from some “unreserve of ill”; or feel its stupendous vital cost as a challenge the happy national mood. I mean, did it really appear without warning—without “Portent”? And was not a period of four years almost enough for the mind to take it in? Would twice that time have left it any less “unwritten”? A concluding poem will imagine that, to Lady Liberty, it was all something like a bad dream. Must have been: the earth is so green. Here, against all such naivete, illdisguised as the emphatic Thematist, the lurking Manichean insists that no amount of reassuring belief in the God who is in his heaven can obscure the fatal fact of the “fre below.” Sooner? Later? Once in a while? Every now and then? Whenever. Just don’t be surprised. Less theological, more irenic—more simply humanist—“Magnanimity Bafed” imagines a wounded Northern soldier who keeps reaching out

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in sympathy to a wounded Southerner in the same hospital. No response: does he hold a grudge, regarding his would-be comrade as still a “foe”? Even so, “I’ll [seize] this stubborn hand!” And then the witness: “He snatched it—it was dead” (103). Yet the lesson of “Fellowship” may well survive: to be sure, both “strove stoutly”; but “Man honors man” (102) more deeply in their mortality. A theme which continues in some refections “On the slain Collegians”: North and South, “Right” and “Wrong,” “The liberal arts and nurture sweet/Which gives his gentleness to man” instill as well a sense of “honor” (103) and a respect for “bravery.” Behold, therefore, the troops of “generous boys in happiness thus bred”; they Went from the North and came from the South, With golden mottoes in the mouth, To lie down midway on a bloody bed. Woe for the homes of the North, and, though it requires the frst line of a separate stanza, an equal “woe for the seats of the South.” These “seats,” we gather, were also homes. And more: “Alike in pride,” “Each would slay his Python”—caught as both sides were in “maxims by the temple taught.” A point worth making, as the South had its own ideological justifcation: less grandly theological than that of the North—and less well represented in the poem—something not simply WRONG appears to have motivated the rather large percentage of Southern warriors who did not own slaves.35 And, trained in the liberal arts or not, why do young men march so eagerly of to war? Or, at all events, why did they do so then—when media un-invented did not so insistently inquire “When will they ever learn?” Well, Afame with sympathies whose blaze Perforce enwrapped him—social laws, Friendship and kin, and by-gone days— Vows, kisses—every heart unmoors, And launches into the seas of wars. A pretty good list, for a man who only went there to see how his cousin was doing. And the application may not be sectional: What could they else—North or South? Each went forth with blessings given By priests and mothers in the name of heaven; And honor in all was chief. (104)

160 Taps of Drums and Pieces of Battles One Right, One Wrong: so be it. But all of them were young and so, not surprisingly, “Each grape to his cluster clung,” and, not to put too fne a point upon it, “All their elegies are sung.” As in twelve more lines of pity and sorrow for boys who died before knowing much at all of life, and all thinking of death as a “Sliding into some vernal sphere.” The war is over, and so is American slavery, but death is more fnal than either. So—as some later prose will duly instruct, and a fnal-fnal poem emphatically imply— let the celebration be muted. In any event, the sequence proceeds to end not in warning or in prayer, but in vision: somebody (who may know less than he is saying) is imagining a surviving “America,” she who has been through it all. She who might seem to have died but was merely asleep has now to face an uncertain future. But how? Chastened, perhaps? Strengthened, as we might imagine.? Matured, as we dare to hope? The visionary seems assured, but the reader, no doubt committed to the rule of “Law,” but probably a little suspicious of the cause of “empire,” may not be entirely convinced. Somebody—calling himself “I”—is pleased to see “a Banner in gladsome air” at or near the wings of the sunny, new (and newly completed) “Dome” of the Capitol. Symbolism enough, one might think; but no, the starry fag reminds the speaker of “Berenice’s hair,” so that some classical memory of feminine sacrifce is added to the backstory. In any event, all seems to be going well, as someone (else?) has told us it “may . . . for many a year.” The land reposed in peace below; The children in their glee Were folded to the exulting heart Of young Maternity. (105) OK, the country is a young mother; the “children” of all ages, her citizens. But then—eight-line stanza two—the vision changes, bringing with it a new set of capital-letter entities. With the banner streaming “in fght,” Valor with Valor strove, and died: Fierce was Despair, and cruel was Pride; And the lorn Mother speechless stood, Pale at the fury of her brood. (106) OK again, nobody really wanted the war. And nobody really rejoices when sibling rivalry turns to large-scale fratricide. What next? What happens next is more complex, and appears to require expansion to a fourteen-line not-sonnet. The young Mother appears quite dead: “the

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silk did wind/Her fair cold form” and “Little avails the shining shroud,/ Though ruddy in hue, to cheer or warm.” Liberty dead, wrapped in the Banner of Freedom. And yet a “watcher” is there to assure us that “She sleeps . . ., but is not dead.” Sleeping she may be, but far from peacefully, as the visionary speaker is sure he can read her dreams. But in that sleep contortion showed The terror of the vision there— A silent vision unavowed, Revealing earth’s foundation bare . . . (106) So, then, if not quite a dream within a dream, a vision within a vision. Liberty asleep, she nevertheless dreams the deeper sense of the waking world’s war. But “unavowed”? By whom? The grammar is a little slack. But who are we to revoke Melville’s poetic license? In any case, the truth will out: a silent, unavowed vision reveals “earth’s foundation bare, And Gorgon in her hidden place.” You mean. “horrors” really can “happen”? So feel her pain: It was a thing of fear to see So foul a dream upon so fair a face, And the dreamer lying in that starry shroud. (106) And yet, if she’s only sleeping . . . All right then, another stanza, sixteen lines this time: Berenice gets eight; Gorgon, fourteen; but who would be counting numbers when Liberty breaks forth from “trance, or death into promoted life.” Notice frst, “At her feet a shivered yoke”: thank God, “America slavery is no more.” But note as well that there is “in her aspect turned to heaven/No trace of passion or of strife.” Instead, A clear calm look. It spake of pain, But such as purifes from stain— Sharp pangs that never come again— “Spake” because it’s a poem. Hate to break it of just there, but the redemptive upturn comes on pretty fast: vision enough to keep the old-time practitioners of intellectual history for a paradigm or two. Whatever it was, it’s over. To somebody’s vision of something or other, it was all a bad dream. Whatever: the past is past, as the deluded ones say in Hawthorne. Think of the future. Think that her “clear calm look” bespeaks both “pangs that never come again,”

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And triumph repressed by knowledge meet, Power delicate, and hope grown wise, And youth matured for age’s seat— Law on her brow and empire in her eyes. (107) And—as long as we’re talking Hawthorne, “there peep forth the devil’s claws.”36 “Empire for Liberty,” as they used to say. Now, a new scene: Lincoln, as long ago we learned, went to war primarily to preserve the Union: if Germany and Russia were to be out for empire, then the various states scattered unevenly across a fair portion of the North American continent had better not be Balkanized.37 Empire again, but propagated now with power ever so “delicate.” And even the “Law” on her brow may bear a second look: better hope it’s not just the one the “courts will decide.” Otherwise the war against slavery was un-lawful.38 And, come to think of it, what law did the South break in efecting to secede? Maybe Lincoln’s “charity” would be a better tattoo for the brow of our middle-aged Mother. But wait: the poem is not over. With Ideology dwindling to fading sight, this concluding moment of vision. A little inconclusive: So she, with graver air and lifted fag; While the shadow, chased by light, Fled along the far-drawn height, And left her on the crag. (107) What means the “shadow”? Why is it “chased by light”? Is this still “The Light and the Dark”—like Hawthorne’s fction? Hard to decide. But as they say, “Thank Heaven, it was a dream.” Still, no amount of cheerful prediction can convince the resistant reader—or the body of historical opinion— that the Civil War really did constitute America’s right of passage, from the fantasy of Redeemer Nation to the reality of ordinary history. And here in fact, the optimistic prediction of secular maturity, is but the interpretation of what some visionary thinks his fantasy has learned from a dream. In reality, it took more than 150 years for conscientious President to apologize for the premise of American exceptionalism. And almost as long for a practicing academic to imagine a project called “America as an Ordinary Nation.”39 Beware of prediction as history. 7 Given the length of our analysis so far, the Reader will surely forgive the absence of s blow by blow commentary on the entire contents of the “Verses

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Inscriptive and Memorial,” which Melville added some months after the frst publication of Battle Pieces. The additions begin with a number of relatively short epitaphs for soldiers killed in the war—at Lexington, Missouri, for example, and Pea Ridge Arkansas, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and others. Sufce it here to say that the Melville who let at least a part of himself be expressed by the irrepressible Laureate has allowed that enthusiastic persona now to subside—but not to dwindle—into the solemn Mourner. Others might celebrate the triumph of good over evil: ultimate or momentary, a deed of history had been done. Melville will remember the dead: Requisecant in pace—but also in the hearts of those who would remember the price as well as the product of the bloody war between North and South. But what swells the new volume to half again the size of the original is the long poem called “The Scout Toward Aldie”—a stanzaic and balladlike account of the (in-)famous exploits of the Southern raider called the “Gray Ghost,” whose hit-and-run tactics proved terrifcally efective and whose very name instilled fear in the hearts of the Northern warriors. John S. Mosby was in fact his name, and though he fought for the Wrong, he seemed to teach Military History that the Native American knew something about efective warfare, namely, that you don’t have to march in wide lateral ranks against a Gatling gun. Of course the poem means to give the Devil his due: rather like Moby Dick he was felt somehow to be everywhere, and this man almost everyone knew by “rumor” (117) became a legend in his prime. And the place for a legend, clearly, is poetry. As an act of literary imagination, this long poem testifes to Melville’s unquenchable interest in narrative: events, events, events; and views, views, views; must there not be somewhere a story? Or the war would remain unwritten. And, as a proper poem, this work of 106 seven-line stanzas— always in tetrameter, always ending in a perfect couplet, and sometimes rhyming a,b,c,a,b,c,c—appears to express Melville’s curiosity about what one might call the epistemology of the ballad. As far as one can imagine from the episteme of the folk, and as distrustful as a working poet can be about the artful imitation of the supposedly primitive, Melville would yet like to see how the whole thing would look not from the adjusted standpoint of ideology but in the experience of enthusiastic participants. Maybe they fought for some principle, maybe for the love of adventure or the desire for glory. But fght they did. And probably they spoke the meaning of the moment. A literary risk worth taking. For example, Ay, there’s the place— There on the oozy ledge—’twas there We found the body (Blake’s, you know); Such whirlings, gurglings round the face— Shot drinking! (122)

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“Mosby” may say “in war all’s fair,” but it took Melville—even more than Whitman—to get the tired cliché together with the lively image. It’s not all of it so dramatic, but the efort is to imagine how it was to ride with and, on the other hand, to be threatened by the ubiquitous Mosby. Also to be passed over here with barely a mention is Melville’s prose “Supplement.” Well prepared for in poems the “Rebel Prisoner” and the “Slain Collegians,” Melville here ofers assurance that he—like Hawthorne, a “peaceable man,” and like Lincoln, a man without “malice”—did not personally mean all the violent and hostile things that got said by some of his poetic speakers. He has, as he declares, been “tempted to withdraw or to modify” some of them, lest they contribute to the infaming of passions on both sides.; but no, as after all they ofered “but dramatically and by way of a poetic record, the passions and epithets of civil war” (463). Of course he has always “abhorred slavery as an atheistical iniquity” (465), but he had other things to say as well; and he had meant to let a number of competing voices have their say. May not the long poem—as well as the novel—be allowed to be “dialogical”? (For a more “committed” performance, see “Everybody’s Protest Novel.”)40 But no account of the thematic burden of Battle Pieces—or of its complementary contrast to Whitman’s Drum Taps—would be complete without some fairly full recognition of the last two poems in the expanded version. Coming right after the quasi-tribute to the Raider Mosby comes a more sober, and indeed rather daring account of what a defeated but still rather heroic General Robert E. Lee tried to tell the U.S. Senate—about the mood of the South and, more searchingly, about how they might learn to think of themselves under the aspect of ordinary history. Many of the earlier poems had come close. Now at last, from an unexpected source: grow up. And then, fnally—and so as not to let the Hero of the Wrong have the last word—“A Meditation”—ascribed to “A Northerner” just come back from “The last of two funerals from the same homestead—those of a National and a Confederate Ofcer (brothers), his kinsmen, who had died from the efects of wounds received in the closing battles.” You guessed it; they are, like slavery, both still dead. As if to say, rejoice in virtue’s victory, but memento mori. In the end, it appears, a timely political caveat and then an irresistible memory of time. Consider Lee: “The captain who ferce armies led/Becomes a quiet seminary’s head.” Reconciled to “Fate,” and well “engrossed In studious cares and aims,” he’d just as soon forget it all—“Stuart and Stonewall dead/ Comrades and cause, station and riches lost” (146). It’s over, no “vain lament,” no ear for either “reproach” or “applause,” His doom accepts, perforce content, And acquiesces in asserted laws; Secluded now would pass his life, And leave to time the sequel of the strife. (146)

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But no: the stoic believer in fate, the conservative follower of law as “asserted,” is called to testify before the U.S. Congress: “Reasons of state . . . require the man,” and “promptly he comes,” by a route that leads through devastation and bitter memory—“the blackened homes,/And— last—the seat no more his own.” Full well does he rue all that which is “no more.” But “One burst of bitterness,” then “On he fared” (146) In sight of the renewed dome of the symbolic “Capitol,” he realizes that, had “had his blade been drawn/For yon starred fag,” he would not, as now, be summoned to testify but toasted and feted as a hero, like “Grant and Sherman.” Still, it must be hard for the Senators not to see “victor and vanquished both” in “The Chief who led invasion’s van” (147). And more: “Who looks at Lee must think of Washington.” But whatever their thoughts, they have their specifc questions to ask, all concerning the mood and so the potential loyalty of the wouldbe secessionists. Replying to the North’s “anxieties,” his answers are “Discreet”—“Briefy straightforward, coldly clear.” And then, this further opportunity: “If now,” the Senators, closing, say, “Aught else remain, speak out, we pray.” (148) In historical fact, as Melville’s own note attests, Lee responded with nothing but “a short personal explanation of some point in a previous answer,” and so, with a “few more brief questions and replies, the interview closed.”41 On the other hand, given so gorgeous a thematic opportunity—and with the invocation of a certain “poetical liberty,” the poem goes right on. Yet only after a long dramatic pause, in which the calm and patient Lee is made to consider whether to do more than “coldly to endure his doom.” Speak out? Ay, speak, and for the brave, Who else no voice or proxy have; Frankly their spokesman here become, And the fushed North from her own victory save. (148) The sentiments which follow—with or without reference to the peaceful words of the “Supplement”—are easy to recognize as the heart of the political sermon the human drama has been eager personally to deliver. Still, as the sense of the drama is fully sustained, the mood of the defeated hero is amply presented. For the sake of South and North together, then, and not for his own “galling load/of personal ill.” Which load was not small: “the inner feud/He, self-contained, a while withstood.”

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They waiting: In his troubled eye Shadows from clouds unseen they spy; They could not mark within his breast The pang which pleading thought oppressed: He spoke, nor felt the bitterness die. (149) “Spoke,” this time, not “spake”—as if to suggest that once in a while the diction of Poetry knows when to give place to the accents of Truth. Covering three full pages in a modern edition, Lee’s invented speech begins with a renewed pledge not to renew the fght for the South’ “Cause”: “‘All’s over now, and now I follow Fate.’” But it turns away from the personal almost at once: “‘But this is naught. A people call,’” a people whose land is “desolated,” a people who sufer “‘The brood of ills that press so sore/The natural ofspring of this civil war’”—elsewhere known as a war of secession. But what to say? “‘Thoughts knot with thoughts, and utterance check.’” Understandably silent in historical fact, in Melville’s fction he feels the deep thematic need to speak: The South would fain Feel peace, have quiet law again— Replant the trees for homestead-shade. (149) Fair enough, and about what one would expect from the conservative philosophy of a committed stoic: Right having brutalized and stultifed Wrong, time for “settled law.” Would you ask for more? “You ask if she recants: she yields.” And even more, in her defeat and in her mourning she would blend anew, As the bones of the slain in her forests do, Bewailed alike by us and you. (150) Learn from death, and don’t press the luck you please to nickname Providence. Or, words almost to that efect: “‘Push not your triumph; do not urge/Submissiveness beyond the verge.’” Do nothing to encourage “‘Intestine rancor.’” You won. You think your might has proven you Right. You won: “‘What sounder fruit than re-established law?’” Between which lines the reader will probably hear, “Don’t ask us to confess that stuf about Michael and Satan.” You won. Period.

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Then, skiting the verge of actual controversy, Lee refers, rhetorically to the hotly debatable issue of the war’s proximate cause: The censor’s charge I’ll not repeat, That meddlers kindled the war’s white heat— Vain inter meddlers or malign, Both of the palm and of the pine; I waive the thought—which never can be rife— Common’s the crime in every civil strife. (150) Then, waiving even that levelling thought, this from the Stoic: “‘But this I feel, that North and South were driven/By Fate to arms.’” God’s in his heaven, but Fate rules the world. A recognizable theology here: opposite and (some might say) equal to that of the North. Of course the Winners get to write the moral. Here the Loser is permitted the luxury of lodging a dissent. On any account, however, it quickly got out of hand: What thousands, truest souls, were tried— As never may any be again— All those who stemmed Secession’s pride, But at last were swept by the urgent tide Into the chasm. I know their pain. (151) Where is Hawthorne, now that we need a diferent bottom line?— “No human efort, on a grand scale has ever yet resulted according to the purpose of its projectors.”42 Or, even if it did, it went through some very ugly stages. Retreating from the verge, Lee ends his bold instruction in modesty with a parable, elaborately dramatizing one of the poem’s deepest beliefs, that a certain loyalty to kith and kin tells us anything about the actual motives of both sides in the war. It involves the cultural resistance of a “Moorish” maiden converted to Christianity: the priests would convince her that, to stay out of hell, she must “approve by deed/The faith she kept” by leaving her “old sir” and, more than that—as “Moor and Christian are at war”— she must “learn to hate [her] kin.” Too much to ask. All right then, she’ll go to hell. Application obvious: So in the South; vain every plea ‘Gainst Nature’s strong fdelity; True to the home and to the heart, Throngs cast their lot with kith and kin,

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Foreboding, cleaved to the natural part— Was this the unforgivable sin? (151) In the words of the “Supplement,” what do we mean by saying that “the South shows no penitence”? Would we require a “contrition” that, given the circumstances, could only be hypocritical? Enough that she has been taught “by the terrors of civil war to feel that Secession, like Slavery, is against Destiny.” Lee calls it Fate, but we get the point. So in conclusion—and to move from parable to history—let not the North “‘go Sylla’s way’” and, by proscribing, “‘prolong the evil day’” (151). What?— Confrm the curse? Infx the hate? In Union’s name forever alienate? (152) Shun, therefore, “To copy Europe in her worst estate—Forbear to wreak the ill you reprobate.” And then, even though this is not an epic, “He ceased.” “His earnestness unforeseen/Moved, but not swayed their former mien.” Righteousness is like that. And so they dismissed him—in person and, as we gather, in plea as well. Nothing more on them, but Forth he went Through vaulted walks in lengthened line Like porches erst upon the Palatine: (152) Warrior for the Wrong, he may have been, but undeniably thoughtful; and, on Melville’s sympathetic account, at least, something more historicist: Historic reveries their lesson lent, The Past her shadow through the Future sent. (152) Not to be surprised, we easily surmise, if Radical Reconstruction prove largely a failure. Northerners to the core, they needed to learn that “Patriotism is not baseness, neither is it inhumanity”; and even that “The mourners who bear fowers to the mounds of the Virginian and the Georgian dead are . . . as sacred in the eye of Heaven . . . as those who mourn the ‘Northern Martyrs.’” They had needed to listen. “But no.”

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Brave though the Soldier, grave his plea— Catching the light in the future’s skies, Instinct disowns each darkening prophecy: Faith in America never dies; Heaven shall the end ordained fulfll. We march with Providence cheery still. (152) And on that searingly ironic note the poetic sequence might well have ended: what would it take to convince the Redeemer Nation of the lesson Rome taught Augustine of old, namely, that the Kingdom of God is not of this world? A world where slavery has often fourished, where wars have occurred from time to time, and where, it well appears, sin has here and there been allowed to have its way. Yet the moral of the concluding “Meditation” is neither superfuous nor in the least surprising. If the Unionists cannot resist the temptation to read the will of God into the aim of Northern guns, let us pray that they pass up the chance to gloat. Learn mildness, if not from fctional speech of Robert E. Lee, then from some lines “Attributed to a Northerner after Attending the Last of Two Funerals from the Same Homestead—those of a National and a Confederate Ofcer (Brothers), his Kinsmen, Who Died from the Efects of Wounds Received in the Closing Battles.” Right and Wrong may be written in stone, but in poems, as in personal feelings, context appears to matter. So listen to someone wondering what to make of an unwanted war that ended just a little too late to spare, on either side, a person’s beloved brothers. Think, frst of all, of how “brotherly” many opposing soldiers must have felt “in the years that close,/When truce had stilled the sieging gun.” Had they not, . . . mounting on their works With mutual curious glance have run From face to face along the fronting show, And kinsman spied, or friend—even in a foe. (153) What thoughts? Had not “Something of a strange remorse/Rebelled against the sanctioned sin of blood/And Christian wars of natural brotherhood”? Quite likely: where is it written that the command not to kill is merely a conditional? In such a moment some “god within the breast,” some “witness that is man’s at birth” must have felt nothing but “Horror and anguish for the civil strife” (153). How reckon then of “North or South”? Might one even dare to ask the unholy, the treasonable question: “Can Africa pay back this blood/Spilt on Potomac’s shore?”

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Less dangerously, the brotherhood continues: how often was “The herald from the hostile [camp] treated as ‘guest and frank companion’”? Did they not smoke the “pipe of peace” even in the midst of War? And, somewhat less pacifcally, did they not talk about how they fought together in the “felds in Mexico”? Had no one ever heard foemen call to foemen, “As men who screened in tavern sit:/‘You bravely fght’? And then, ‘Toss us a biscuit’”? And “o’er the wall it sped. Surely there were instances when some pale and wounded boy cried out for help and, with no comrade close by, was saved by ‘a daring foe.’” And “Mark the great Captains on both sides”: “They all were messmates on the Hudson’s marge,/Beneath one roof they laid them down.” Not to mention that, in the present case, these two foemen were born of the same womb. “All men are brothers,” right? So, then, all wars are, to the same extent, fratricidal. But once in a while the dead metaphor comes shockingly alive. In death. Literal brothers or not, all men are mortal. Surely all this fatal fact must count for something. Of course “A darker side there is.” Remember?—“man’s foulest crime,” linked excruciatingly with “the world’s fairest hope.” An “atheistical iniquity” if there ever was one. But if men in truth “for new agreement yearn,” then best leave of the “old upbraiding”: “The South’s the sinner!” Well, so let it be; But shall the North sin worse, and stand the Pharisee? And then a fnal thought, in the form of a prayer, from the grieving Northerner, but with the full thematic second of the poem’s peaceful purpose: O, now that brave men yield the sword, Mine be the manful soldier-view; By how much more they boldly warred, By so much more is mercy due: When Vicksburg fell, and the moody fles marched out, Silent the victors stood, scorning to raise a shout. (155) A pretty big deal: “Hey, everybody, now we control the whole Mississippi River, isolating the would-be Confederate states to the West.” Oh, well, no, on second thought . . . Last word: Let now that better instinct rule. 8 Both versions of Battle Pieces are longer than the two, comparable editions of Whitman’s Drum Taps. They are also, formally, far less personal: Whitman was the man, he was there, he saw, he sufered; Melville may imagine himself close-in, but in fact he can only report from a distance. And of

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course he himself never appears. Whitman, on the other hand, self-conscious of his role as Bard and National Spokesman, is constantly presenting himself in situ, responding to his painful experiences, and questioning his changing attitudes. Yet as we learn to parse the Melville poem, to discover who is who among the voices that compete—often conficting, but sometimes overlapping—we recognize the revelation of some of Melville’s deepest beliefs. And they are not optimistic, not about the war, which has created problems as well as solved them, and not about the nature of man as therein revealed. Slavery is evil. But so is war. And so may be some principle deep down in things. And in human beings. Warriors can be courageous, sympathetic, even friendly, but they do kill the ones they would befriend. Nor, signifcantly, does Melville imply a very friendly view of the national character. Whitman may feel discouraged, but given his selfadopted role as poet of “These States” and, more deeply still, his standing identity as Universal Afrmer, he cannot let his last word be one of criticism. Which Melville, under no such self-imposed obligation, emphatically can: What?— “cheery still”?—after four unprecedented years of internecine bloodshed. And you call that “Providence”? You have to be kidding: with friends like that . . . You think because a volcano disappeared it was not a volcano? And that Lady Liberty lay herself down because she needed a little nap? Well, perhaps Optimism is like that: however founded—in the covenanted and unfailing good will of a personal God, or in the mighty premise that Being cannot be Evil—the whispering temptation Emerson’s “wicked Manichee” must ever be resisted. And no one told Melville that, war or no war, the literature of the American Renaissance was to be written in the “optative mood.” An important contrast, then, in two immediate writings of the war that ended American slavery: both proud enough of the triumph of truth, justice, and the American way; both, at the same time, horrifed at the cost of human life required; but then, one managing to look hopefully toward the future, in a world where the norm of goodness invites experience yet to be imagined; the other not so sure. Sure enough that goodness is not all there is, and wary therefore of the claim that certain “sharp pangs [will] never come again.” No law forbids “Convulsions” that came in a feld “Long slept in pastoral green” from erupting once more. “Gorgon” may be back in her “hidden place,” but for just how long? And so—while something or other, something fundamental, may be refusing to appear in the poems of two of America’s towering literary fgures, two things at least are clear: both writers took the occasion to say rather more than that slavery is of course an utterly unthinkable human arrangement; and neither could keep the facts of war separate from their most fundamental beliefs. For Whitman—as for some of the dramatic speakers in Battle Pieces— America’s Civil War was an enormous aberration, a painful but almost

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unthinkable interruption in the tendency of the Universe toward the better and the best. For Melville it was, though unpredictably terrible in the scale of its bloody execution, it was at the same time not entirely surprising. The enslavement of human beings is so utterly and obviously evil, it simply cannot be. Yet here it was, the fundamental economic principle of a vast geographical territory aspiring to become a nation state. And volubly defended—not just an economic necessity, inherited from times less enlightened and not a stubborn social fact but, given the facts of human diference, as a way of organizing recalcitrant human afairs; better, the defenders boldly asserted, than the “wage slavery” of the urbanizing and industrializing—ugly!—North. Of course we at the North know better, but we can’t make our government get rid of it. So, let the South go. To hell in its own handbasket. No, the precious Union! (And besides, we will still buy cheap cotton from the Confederacy of Slavery.) What kind of a world is that? Recognizable, Melville appears to have thought. Not unlike the history of things in general. Evil is. Wars will be. And now it’s our turn. So that, if the war’s not all there, something important is written, if not in blood, then in the passion of earnest literary thematics. Deo gratias. What is not there, in either sequence, is any systematic defense of the war as an absolute political necessity—to free from bondage a whole people, stolen from Africa, and thus clear “the nation with the soil of a church” from the de facto denial of its founding principle; or, alternatively, of the necessity to preserve the Union at all costs, when most Abolitionists thought secession by the North the pepper, peaceful solution. Lincoln appears to have felt both motived pretty strongly, but appears in both poems only when he has become a “Martyr.” And, down from that austere moral height, what did the Union’s ordinary soldiers think they were fghting for? Did sectional loyalty and a naïve desire for glory tell the whole story? And the same for the South: if the vast majority of soldiers did not and never expected to own slaves, what exactly was at stake for them? Did they think the plantation system was morally superior to what their betters were calling the “wage slavery” of the North? Slain or not, some of them were “Collegians”: did they imagine they were defending—with biblical endorsement and august classical precedent—a culture superior to that of the rampant materialism of the North? Were they, already, Agrarians in training? Hard questions—to which we may not yet have the defnitive answers. The truth may be that, as no one really wanted the war, no one really understood it either. Somebody who thought he was an instrument of God but may have been clinically insane stormed an armory and tried to arm the slaves for a war of self-liberation and, “justly” or not, he got hanged as a traitor. Portent, but of what? Then “they,” fearing Lincoln and the

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Abolitionists, fred on and captured “our” Fort Sumter, and after that the war was on, a matter frst of Drums and then of Battles. Wars are like that. And they never do really get into books. They have weapons of mass destruction. Whoops: nothing such. Oh well, at least we killed a tyrant. They crashed planes into our towers, so we went in after Al Qaeda; along the way we discovered and tried to help a sub-continent full of women in bondage. What did that mean? Ask CNN. No, ask FOX. No, ask the future. But don’t ask Paul Auster or Don DeLillo; not even Salman Rushdie. Like the rest of us, Novelists do what they can: ofering us a competent understanding of war does not appear to be one of them. And not poets either. Even Homer nods. So we have what we have. And lucky we are at that. Where is it written that Walt Whitman—he with the open shirt and a taste for the open road—would fnd himself in a military hospital, trying to make human sense out of wholesale slaughter in the name of freedom? Where the hell was quondam Abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier when Quaker push came to Military shove? Oh yeah, 1866 saw the publication of his downhome masterpiece, Snowbound. And the rest of the Fireside Gang? Lowell predicted that the slavery question would lead to war; he used his magazine position to praise Lincoln for his attempts to preserve the Union; and at the end he managed to complete and deliver at Harvard a “Commemoration Ode” on Harvard’s “Slain Collegians”; but he did not write the Uniad. His comrade Longfellow failed to ofer any sequel to his 1842 Poems on Slavery, and he spent most of the war translating Dante. Poe was still dead, so we get no sequel to the Whiteness Fantasy of Arthur Gordon Pym. Henry Timrod gave us a small sample of Southern ideology in his poem “Ethnogenesis” (1861) and some taste of Southern grief in his “Memorial Ode” of 1867; and after contributing to the Southern defense of Slavery, and ofering military advice to the Confederacy, William Gilmore Simms greeted the year 1863 with his backwoods novel of Paddy McGann. North and South, writers write what they can. Self-advertised as a peaceable man, Hawthorne had a mind too fne to be violated by an idea like the reason of war. And so, it fell to Melville, as to Whitman: recovered novelist and, since 1860 at least, would-be poet, unpleasant reality ofered him the opportunity to do what he could with the problem of Right and Wrong and War and Death. And, knowing as he did, that the best is the enemy of the good—so that anything worth doing is worth doing badly—he did pretty well. Better, I think, than Whitman, whose “Song” never can get over “Himself.” Incomplete, on premise, and a little too fussy with its verse form, but as with Whitman, better than we had any reason to expect. And with few exceptions, too goddam literary for a criticism conscientiously enlisted in the cause of Right Thinking. Whitman and Melville both hated slavery but, the Muse having a life of

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its own, both wrote poems and not position papers. And—better late than never—we really ought to notice. Notes 1 See Specimen Days (Rees and Welsh, 1882), 80. 2 See Battle Pieces, in Howard P. Vincent, ed., Collected Poems of Herman Melville (Hendricks House, 1947), 41. 3 See Leigh-Anne Marcellin. “Emily Dickinson’s Civil War Poetry,” Emily Dickinson Journal, 5.2 (1996), 107–12; and Jacob Stratman, “Emily Dickinson’s Civil War Poetry,” Teaching American Literature, 2.1 (Winter, 2008), 50–66. 4 See Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War (Knopf, 1973), esp. xiii–xix. 5 See Allison M. Johnson, The Scars We Carve (LSU, 2019), esp. 90–120. 6 For the difcult Thoreuavian project, see Sharon Cameron, Writing Nature (Chicago, 1985). 7 For Whitman, American slavery represented “the foulest crime in history” (“This Dust Was Once a Man”); for Melville, “mans’ foulest crime” defaced “the world’s fairest hope” (“Misgivings”). 8 Quotation from Drum Taps are taken from Francis Murphy, ed., Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems (Penguin, 1986). 9 For Chauncy’s defnition and critique, see “Enthusiasm Described and Cautioned Against,” in Alan Heimert and Perry Miller, eds., The Great Awakening (Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 228–56. 10 See David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America (Knopf, 1995), esp. 403–5. 11 For one of Emerson’s more important self-revisions, see the essay “Nature” the 1844 collection titled Essays, Second Series, in Joel Porte, ed., Emerson: Essays and Lectures (Library of America, 1933), 541–55. 12 See Whitman The Political Poet (Oxford, 1996), 220. 13 See Whitman’s America, 383–412. 14 Quotations of Battle Pieces are taken from Howard P. Vincent, ed., Collected Poems of Herman Melville (Hendricks House, 1947). 15 See Complete Poems, 69. 16 William H. Shurr, The Mystery of Iniquity (Kentucky, 1972),14–43. 17 In his very brief preface, Melville suggests that in these verses he seemed “to have but place a harp in a window”; see Collected Poems, 444. 18 See Complete Poems, 449. 19 My identifcation of the various speakers in Battle Pieces is slightly adapted from the scheme of Robert Milder; see Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine (Oxford, 2009), 175–9. 20 Elsewhere, Milton Stern treated much of Melville’s prose as, in philosophy if not in literary style, a proper naturalist; see The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville (University of Illinois Press, 1952), 1–28. 21 See my reading of “My Kinsman Major Molineux,” in Province of Piety (Harvard University Press, 1984), 130–53. 22 For the ironies drifting in and out of the American Puritan theory of history, see Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (University of Wisconsin, 1978), 3–30. 23 In “The Coming Storm,” Melville resumes the argument famously made in 1850 review of Hawthorne Mosses, that somewhere or other Shakespeare says all the dark, blasphemous things pious men are mostly afraid to think; see Complete Poems, 94.

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24 See Collected Poems, 446. 25 One, happifying (“Heartwarming”?) version of Babo’s character and motive might be supplied by the 1852 story by Frederick Douglass. 26 See my frst version of Doctrine and Diference (Routledge, 1997), 229–50. 27 Melville note suggests that the bloody battle in question is hardly to be represented as “one of the battles before Atlanta”; see Complete Poems, 454. 28 See Hawthorne: The English Notebooks (Centenary Edition, 1997), 163. 29 Such is the title of a necessary article by Glenn C. Altschuler, CLAJ, 183 (1975), 383–92. 30 The man in question being Perry Miller: the issue, logic of violence in a Bible Commonwealth; see Nature’s Nation (Harvard, 1967), 14–49. 31 For a convenient (and cogent) summary of the unwritten, widely assumed set of beliefs about the virtually theological meaning of the North’s struggle against slavery, see Aaron, Unwritten War, xiii–xiv. For a studied and convincing reading of Battle Pieces in the context, see Robert Milder, “The Rhetoric of Melville’s Battle Pieces,” NCL, 44 (1989), 173–200. 32 See “Hawthorne and his Mosses,” in Parker, ed., M-D, 550. 33 See Jack Miles, Christ (Knopf, 2001). 34 See Collected Poems, 457. 35 Experts disagree on the exact percentage, estimates ranging from 5 to 30 percent. On the other hand, liberal historians, eager to prove that the war really was all about slavery, remind us that many of the soldiers’ fathers were slave holders and that many soldiers who were not owners nevertheless expressed pro-slavery sentiment is their letters. See, for example, Joe Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army (Free Press, 2008); and cp. Colin Woodward, Marching Masters: Slavery, Race, and the Confederate Army (Virginia, 2014). 36 Responding to the Puritan theory of divinely sanctifed resistance, so observes a suddenly ironic Governor Thomas Hutchinson in Hawthorne’s “Edward Randolph’s Portrait.” 37 An Abolitionist right enough, Lincoln nevertheless declared himself more deeply loyal to the issue of the Union—a “Sacred Cause” in American political religion if ever there was one; see his letter to Horace Greeley, cited and discussed in Gregory A. Borchard, Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley (Southern Illinois, 2011), 78. For the more pragmatic side of Lincoln’s Unionism—the need for an empire to oppose empires forming elsewhere—see Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), 99–130. 38 For the issue of Lincoln’s Abolition Proclamation in the light of the Constitution, see James A. Dueholm, “A Bill of Lading Delivers the Goods: The Constitutionslity and Efect of the Emancipation Proclamation.” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association” 31, 1, Winter 2010, 22–38. 39 Long in coming, but welcome at last, the outline of the view that resists the login of the American jeremiad; see Richard Rosecrance, America as an Ordinary Country (Cornell, 1976). 40 No one, that is to say, will be tempted to read Melville’s Battle Pieces as James Baldwin says we all read Uncle Tom’s Cabin—to make ourselves feel better. 41 See Collected Poems, 460. 42 See Hawthorne, “Chiefy about War Matters” (Centenary Edition, XXIII, 1994), 431.

6

Sage of Amherst Dickinson as Part-time Transcendentalist

Ask any sophomore English major: having read Wordsworth at an early age, Emerson and Thoreau believed in “Nature.” So too, on the account of her frst editors, did little Emily Dickinson: one entire section (of four) dedicated to that pat Romantic topos. The problem is, in all these famous cases, the stance is not always worshipful. They all know the educational value of “One impulse from a vernal wood,” but they also know things taught otherwise, as by “all the sages.” Nor is their will to admire proof against the in-creep of irony. To be sure, Emerson can learn an important lesson from “The Humble-Bee,” “Wiser far than human seer”; nor, in “Waldeinsamkeit,” does he bother to “count the hours [spent] in wandering by the sea.” He even declares himself (in “Woodnotes,” I) “A minstrel of the natural year” for which title Thoreau would mount a conscious challenge, as both men boasted the sort of inquiry from which Nature could hide none of her wonderful secrets. But for the man who did philosophy in verse as well as is prose, the sum total of “Nature poems” is not that large. And from the frst there are countervailing considerations. “The Rhodora” appears to try conclusions with some fowery poems by William Cullen Bryant; but where the lonely and unlooked-for beauty of the Yellow Violet and the Fringed Gentian teach this would-be American Wordsworth the lessons of Loyalty and Hope, Emerson’s Rhodora dares to suggest, to a somewhat more metaphysical student, that the meaning of Beauty is Beauty. Which, as we learn from another poem of the same period, is something you can’t just walk out and collect: “Yield” your “self” or get out of the business. And if “Each and All” appears to dampen some of the enthusiasm which led Emerson, in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris—and again in the early stages of his frst public lecture—to declare “I will be a Naturalist,” it falls to a third poem of the early 1830s to modify the steady sacralization of Nature in his frst published work: a garden-variety New England “Snow-Storm” may leave a “frolic architecture” in the wake of its whirling whiteout, but it will freeze your ass without remorse. So that, as a later essay called “Nature” DOI: 10.4324/9781003334262-6

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will pointedly suggest, static nature (natura naturata) is altogether more friendly than the frantic and fearsome natura naturans for the sight of which the nurturing Mother Nature has not provided the proper eyes.1 The same essay even suggests that it may be a little late in the day to run on about the restorative and instructive value of Nature. “One can hardly speak of it without excess.” Indeed, “a dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. The fop of the felds is no better than his brother of Broadway.” So the model of a career in Nature and then assez de natur is already part of the American literary record. Indeed, were it not for a poem like Bryant’s defnitive “Inscription,” American Romanticism might require its own proper name. OK, what about Thoreau?—who assures us, early on, that health is in Nature and almost never in society. To be sure, he never repents his identity as self-designated Inspector of Snowstorms or self-licensed Interpreter of the Wind, still there is, in the poems written early in his career, a certain epistemological curiosity—and, often enough, a sense of humor—that identifes his verse productions as not just nature poems. With something like “The Inward Morning” in mind, Perry Miller once suggested that these tentative gestures at adequate self-expression do little more than versify Emersonian epistemology.2 Better if he had said Emersonian ethics, as one dominant note is the necessity of a self-reliance self-reliant enough to stay out of salons, avoid entangling alliances and, if necessary, make sure to displease one’s friends. Nature is there but, as in “The Summer Rain,” with the sort of enforced hyperbole that makes one run away from Homer, Shakespeare, and their wonderful sources in order to lie down in a bed of oats and get thoroughly drenched by a summer shower, so to be melted down—as never by mere sunshine—into some sort of “elf,” humanoid in form, but more a natural than a human creature; the goal, it appears, is not Nature but naturalness. Or, as in “Haze” where, with a sort of epistemological aggression produces a stunning series of verbal substitutions that try hard and fnally fail to render this transitional condition of Nature into words. “Writing Nature,” it turns out, is not that damn easy.3 And one is left wondering if the hazy matter of “Smoke,” which will reappear as a Promethean prayer for forgiveness in the “House-Warming” chapter of Walden, is in any sense a natural fact. Wood has had to be burned; smoke smutzes up the clear air; and a more fully naturalized creature would not have needed it in the frst place. Again, the lesson of naturalness. So too, often enough, with Emily Dickinson: nature in a new key. Love plus irony equals, what? Without quite suggesting that she learned the art of questioning the Nature that seemed to feed so much of her literary consciousness, it may at the same time be too little to say that she too is Romantic with a diference. Nature, yes, but don’t lose your head. And more: Ironic Transcendentalist. She loves the New England summer, and

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she has read with respect the urgent move from Nature to Idea in the sages of Concord; she knows how it feels to be alone in a crowd, to have no one on your side but Rectitude; but she is far from certain that her poetic energy is tough enough—masculine enough?—to toe that line forever. Like Hawthorne and Melville before her, she admired, but also wondered. 2 The original Todd-Higginson edition of the poems presents a separate section—after “Life” and “Love,”—on “Nature,” containing thirty-one oferings. And a later critic has insisted that many of Dickinson’s most memorable poems are precisely “vignettes”—perfectly capturing the essence of “a summer shower, a storm, a snowscape, the moon.”4 Nature and no doubt: the bees are there, of course, in numbers amounting to something like symptom. And the birds and the trees—not as many as the fowers, but enough to tempt an accounting. And the winds, not “howling at all hours,” to be sure, but often with emphasis of their own. A mountainous Mountain, one only, but imperial enough to insist on its self-reliant self. But also, a little less simply natural, the mornings, noons, afternoons, and nights of an observer who is doing somewhat more than savoring the charm. And above all, perhaps, the seasons, not simply observed and diferentiated as such, but watched for their pregnant passage, as if a mind not unused to philosophy were thinking about change, sein und zeit, one might almost say. Not “Time and Eternity” exactly—another editorial section in its own right—but more like temporality and transience. More obviously, a certain number of the Todd-Higginson poems might just as well bear a more social classifcation: “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church,” or example, is only tangentially about the “Bobolink” and the “Orchard.”5 To tell the truth, Nature is only one of the things that occupy Miss Dickinson’s stay-at-home Sunday Morning Service. More troubling still, did anyone ever manage to “think the Hemlock” into the same proposition as “Dnieper Wrestlers” (184–5)? And working it into a symbol of learning to take some analyzable pleasure in the least friendly circumstances? A correspondence not in anyone’s dictionary of such. Worst of all—if I may here confess a truth—I have taught that “certain Slant of light” without thinking “Nature” even once: it’s a natural light, of course, as natural as that which drew the movies to Southern California, but it immediately gets mixed up with something not light but heavy, like those over-civilized Cathedral tunes which hurt you on your sightless inside and suggest, more so even than the last days of autumn the “Seal” of the Soul in “Despair” (142–3). Or “Death.” Nature, if you say so. But then what ain’t? Thus it comes to appear that Dickinson, quite like Emerson and Thoreau, does something more than celebrate Nature. Grouped together, all three fgure as second- (or perhaps third-) wave Romantics. Neither Swedenborgian

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nor simply Wordsworthian, they appear to know that their subject is not Creation nor the Creator, but the mind’s unpredictable response to whatever the hell the world is ofering. To be sure, the primary experience of Joy is often there. As in a poem like “I taste a liquor never brewed”: there, most memorably, an interminably temperate person becomes “inebriate of Air.” Rather like Emerson who, after reporting in Nature that one cloudy day a simple breath of fresh air gave him an “exhilaration” so perfect that it brought him “to the brink of fear,” could also to pronounce that “the air is a cordial of incredible virtue” (E, 10)—a liquor as well as a medicine. Or like Thoreau, who reported in Walden that, having achieved in solitude and almost perfect harmony with Nature, feeling in fact “a part of herself,” and who also asked us white-wine-bibbers, scotch swillers, and tequila shooters, “Of all ebriosity,6 who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?” Possibly Dickinson (who, like my spell-check program) does not know that funky word for drunkenness, but she does her best with “Debauchee of dew” (96). And where is it written that American Romanticism cannot be somewhat humorous? Humorous, and also, often enough, somewhat ironic—because, curiously, the poem which presents the most simple and unadulterated love of Nature, in the Romantic sense, is also the poem which rejects the project as deeply suspicious and perhaps dangerous. “These are the days when birds come back”—Indian Summer, those irresistibly lovely days when, with God in his heaven, all seems right with the world. So lovely, in fact, a no less skeptical intelligence than that of Nathaniel Hawthorne proposed them as a proof of a “blissful Eternity”: for surely “our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, . . . unless we were meant to be immortal.” And Waldo Emerson as well. He may seem to take it back in the later stages of the surprisingly un-Transcendental essay “Nature” of 1844 but, philosophy aside, he knows the feeling: “The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and the warm wide felds. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough.”7 What need Hawthorne’s putative “Eternity”? So too, the Little Girl Ishmael: knowing better, she yet prays to partake of the “Sacrament of summer days,” to consume its “consecrated bread” and “immortal wine”—freely dealt to all creatures, as the open-communion Emerson had said so well. And yet the praying speaker is a “child,” parent of an adult who knows better. “The old-old sophistries of June” are—now at least—“A blue and gold mistake,” a “fraud that cannot cheat the Bee” (63), stunned to death by the frst killing frost. Evidently the woman who, alone in her family and social circle, never could confess conversion and so come forward to the Lord’s Supper, is also inclined to suspect, with Emerson, that, “like friendship,” perhaps, “the immortality of the soul is too good to be believed” (E, 343).

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And what, in this semi-skeptical context, are we to make of a poem like “Further in Summer than the Birds”? Not so far into the declining year as Indian Summer, crickets perform some “unobtrusive Mass” as if the natural world seems knowingly to celebrate its own impending death. Very gradual, to be sure, but to one clear efect: “Enlarging Loneliness.” Elsewhere, we are to presume, and earlier, other poetic people may see and hear the songs of familiar religion; but here, “a Druidic Diference/Enhances Nature now” (388–9). Some older, more determinedly naturalistic creed, we gather, more sensitive to the undersense of the song we hear. But what means “Enhances”? The diference makes Nature more truly meaningful, no doubt, but also, as the word doubles and ironizes its ordinary sense, it makes it infnitely sadder as well. If only summer were all the same. So drink up, all you poetic people. Posit anything you please. But beware: soon enough that “Slant of light” will imply “Despair” when it comes and “Death” when it goes. So that—at a level that might puzzle both Swedenborg and Emerson—things continue to mean. Just more things than dreamed of in their largely optimistic philosophy. Not quite Melville, but close. Then too, as her nature poems tend in the direction of certain other “Uses of Natural History,” so her sense of Transcendental Selfhood—inherited from the doubtless if tautological discovery of Descartes, and searching for sanction in the tempting but dangerous reasonings of Fichte—so her self-reliance poems appear to accept, at wonderful face value, the premise of divine authenticity, but then permit themselves to wonder. Does anyone really believe that, as thought predicts things, so the singular consciousness—that moi interior which alone keeps the pronoun “I” from becoming but a foating signifer—can aford to presume itself and, like Frank Sinatra at the Sands, demand to know what are all these others doing in my room? What must that feel like? Simple enough, at frst glance, is the superb selfshness of “The Soul selects her own Society.” No, sorry, on second glance: frst of all we have to imagine that the Soul is selecting not some carefully selected and highly privileged Other but, rather, her own precious Self. Then shut the door. What else to make of her “divine Majority” (189)? Three, perhaps, if you’re thinking, consubstantially, in the manner of post-Nicean Christianity; or four, if you’ve let that famous Trio into your private room. But never two. Other arithmetics are possible, as we will see below, but for the moment, the One will sufce. More nearly satiric is the poem that thinks of the self-reliant self as “Columnar,” whether we chose to hear that as phallic or not. Vital, however, is the way we choose to hear the words “How ample”: “Thank you, God”; or “Would it not be real nice?” “Ample” meaning more than suffcient, but also marvelously reassuring, the issue might be, who the hell

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would you have to be to feel that safe?—and not even in an alabaster chamber. You know who. So we go on with how it must feel: How good the Certainty That Lever cannot pry— And Wedge cannot divide Conviction—that Granitic base— Though None be on our side— (330–1). The point, then, is not to afrm or deny Emerson’s claim that the authority of private conscience is and must be absolute—whatever Scripture, the Pope, or the Populace may say—but to suggest how very comfortable it might be to hold that claim to heart. The One against all comers! Well, not exactly. Entities of Reason are not to be multiplied, of course, but even First Principles admit of analysis. And so we learn how it is, exactly, that the supreme confdence of the self-sufcing One is constituted: body and soul, we used to say; matter and spirit, for those who thought they knew what they meant by “substance”; but now what sufces “Us”—suddenly we are plural—in lieu of or as over and against a “Crowd”—is “Rectitude—/ And that Assembly—not far of/ From furthest Spirit—God” (331). In a poem about something like the One and the Many, the “Assembly” here must reference the familiar Triune Deity, but exactly how “far of” that close-knit assortment is from “furthest Spirit” does not appear. Clear enough, however, is that in positing the power of moral certitude against all else in heaven and earth, one is relying at last on Emerson’s “God within,” announced in so many words in the early sermons, and dramatically emphasized (if not quite defended) in the signature essay: “Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded” (268)? To say “God” would invite the usual theistic misunderstanding. “Dread Universal Essence” (E, 41). had served the purpose in the “Spirit” chapter of Nature. Here, a certain indirection has seemed safest: lying as we do “in the lap of immense intelligence” (269), we human beings “share the life by which things exist.” OK, Emily, God. But remember, “The explanation . . . is difcult” (485). Even more complex—and less easy to read as satire—is the poem about housing a “Giant.” Nature, then human nature, then the divine nature: what trinity this? Is this movement additive or merely analytic? And who, in any event, is observing the progress or conducting the analysis? Some “supposed person,”8 of course, but who is that this time? Well, someone who, having long believed, like any garden-variety Romantic, that “nature was enough” of a subject for poet or philosopher, was suddenly made aware that “human nature” had somehow managed to absorb that “other,” as “Parallax a

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Flame” (495). How might that have happened? Mentally, in any case, as parallax is less a natural fact than a curiosity of perception. Still, a surprising development as, with the confdent spread of positive science, precisely the opposite sort of absorption was to be expected: Oh, you thought human nature was something special, a spiritual thing essentially and, on the scale of Being, just a little lower than the angels. Well, think again: easier far to regard human being as another form that nature has been discovered to take; especially interesting to us, perhaps, as “human” has long seemed to us a distinguishing mark, but, when you think about it, one day matter acquired memory, and the rest is natural history. Thank you and good night. Unless an Irish Bishop, busily at work on the mysteries of human vision, should manage to determine otherwise. Then Hush, you arrogant materialists, with your dogmatic belief in something called “matter,” of which we can have no idea, whether simple or complex—Hush, and behold how a courageous (adequately empirical) thinker can account for the universe with only God, his ideas, and other conscious entities in his scholastic bag. Watch, that is to say, the way undoubtable Cartesian consciousness can quite easily absorb an ever-doubtable nature. Your only mistake, Rene, was to suspect and deny some “clever demon,” when the secret of material appearance was in fact an all-creative God, always at work furnishing ideas in an order so regular one could hardly resist calling them nature.9 For which relief, much thanks. Except that, from here to eternity, the new subject must necessarily be not the object but the subject. And who knows what further discoveries might be expected in that department? Well, Emerson knows: seeing that Fichte is to Kant as Berkeley had been to Locke, he found a way, once again, to turn an epistemology into a metaphysics, and this time without the happy but doubtful premise of a personal God. Consciousness implies an “object,” and human conscience is part of that divine equation. Ergo, to one of “Human nature just aware,” there seemed to be some need for there to be “added the divine.” Result: “Brief struggle for capacity”: Who, around here, is supposed to be containing who? Or whom, if anything like an “objective” case still matters. Well, let’s just see: if anything like Boyle’s law obtain in things even less stubbornly material than gasses, then surely “The power to contain/Is always as the contents.” From which it would seem to follow that the divine will win out every time: “But,” the poem says, meaning “so much as” “give a giant room/And you will lodge a Giant/And not a smaller man” (495). Like the man said, “Where does a Giant sleep? Anywhere he wants.” Or, back in the world of the poem itself, someone ofered, as the choice of selfinterpretation and self-evaluation—thing, mind, God—do not be surprised if the container in question manages to contain what had been thought to be Uncontained. Bingo. Unless the humanoid translation of Boyle’s law is

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no more than a recognizable delusion of grandeur. How very ample. And yet, how very nearly inevitable. 3 Finally, however, the most challenging of Emerson’s premises is that most purely philosophic one, his version of Berkeleyan immaterialism. And here the resistance seems to vanish almost entirely. At least to the epistemological side of the question. Unarguably, Dickinson seems to have recognized—once you learn to think about it—we cannot check the accuracy of our sense perceptions; so that in this one sense at least, esse est percipi. Whether she imagines that Berkeley’s all-creative God (or Fichte’s super-personal Ego) rescues her from the “labyrinth of [her] own perceptions” is another matter entirely. Emerson himself appears to lose some faith in this ontological version of his original Idealism, but on the epistemological side there was no going back. Fall of Man it may have been, but sooner or later the love of wisdom was bound to ask about the condition of its own lovely asking. And to Emily Dickinson, the noetic side of the question seemed intriguing enough. Enough to provoke some of the most philosophic of her poetic inquiries. Consider frst the amazing discovery that “Perception of an object costs/ Precise the Object’s loss” (446). Oh, dear: just when the students thought we had left all that “Transcendental” stuf behind, another mind-bender. Worse, perhaps, just when I have assured them we need not worry too much about capitalization (or multiform dashes), a small letter in one line, a capital in the next. In any event, a punning lesson in Epistemology 101: “object” always used to mean a real, existing, material, substantial thing— like a pencil or a desk; or, if you’re some kind of poet, a bird or a snake. Now, however, thanks to the concentrated inadvertence of John Locke and the inspired schizophrenia of George Berkeley, it now indicates whatever it is that can be “thrown against” a subject. That’s right, Dumbass, what is given in our experience are not things but ideas: prisoners of sensation, we have no way of knowing to what, if anything, our perceptions may correspond. Life may go on as usual, but philosophy—whatever that is—must do the best it can without the dogmatic guarantee of some sober-sided ding an sich. Oh, dear, again: I told you not to tell me that. Is this not, as Emerson says, “the fall of man”? “Once we lived in what we saw; now . . .” (E, 487); well, something like, what are the precise conditions of our seeing? No such problem for the Good Bishop: striking at the root of materialism once and for all, he had his personal and providential God to furnish, at every second of every day in every part of the world inhabited by conscious spirits, all the ideas needed to make a world in which to save or lose your soul. Fichte, too, found a way to get along, but probably he was not taught in the frst year at the Holyoke Female Seminary. In any event, the tight-lipped Sage of Amherst seems herself quite unperturbed: “Perception

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in itself a Gain/Replying to its Price” (446). Lose a thing, gain an idea: what a bargain. If God himself can do without a material creation, I guess we can too. Like I said, life goes on. And, as I say to my troubled students: “The idea of pizza tastes pretty much the same as the gooey substance.” Just don’t ask me about love and friendship. Or her: she might choose just herself. If this were all, it were much. But then, after this brief lesson in early modern epistemology—and without so much as a stanza break—four short lines on the related problem of perception and value: quite like “to be,” “to love,” is also a matter of that subjective thing called “perception.” Wait: did we not always suspect that beauty was in the mind of the beholder? With or without the authority of an 1878 novel by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford? Are not the revelations out of order here? Is it not that, always believing that beauty is subjective, why not learn that being is just so as well? Unless the poem, minimalist as it deliberately is, is about to take yet another turn, and in a quite unexpected direction. Not only is it that, in the absence of anything like an “Object Absolute,” we not only make up the values we seem to attach to the things we seem to perceive, but then—as a rare Transcendental Epistemology sufers an attack of a familiar Puritanic Perfectionism—we fnd ourselves “upbraid[ing] a Perfectness/That situates so far.” (446). OK, she only said the syntax. Elsewhere, she complains that we are taught to badmouth any beautiful thing that too competes with God. Here, what she appears to mean is that we may well blame Berkeley’s God, who might as easily have furnished us with His own—or Plato’s—perfect Ideas—for giving us only some crummy perception of this or that particular. Or something, in the hardest 8-line 14-er in all of American literature. Happily, some of Dickinson’s other Idealism poems are a little easier—if only because a little longer. “To hear an oriole sing,” for example, is a full ffteen lines long—although the unusual three-line, 3–3–2 stanzas shorten the efect and may make us wish for the familiar hymn meter. But whatever the count of syllables, “To hear an Oriole sing” is said to be either “a common thing—/Or only a divine.” It takes a while to get over the fey efect of “only,” but soon enough we realize we are in the domain of Idealism again: walk outside on any given summer day and—chirp, chirp—you may well be hearing God. Or does the “divine” name Berkeley? Or Emerson before his famous Divinity School apostasy? In any event, the order of philosophical difculty seems this time properly re-arranged: ‘tis the ear and not the bird which determines whether the song-as-heard be “Dun, or fair.” Me, I can’t tell an oriole from a cardinal, hardly from a blue jay, except in baseball. Be that as it may, the next stanza appears to up the ante: whether the song-as-heard “be Rune” or “be none” is entirely “of within.” Rune?—a mark or letter of mysterious or magic signifcance. Ah yes, we’re talking now not about value but about signifcance, about meaning. Oh, who cares?—only poets think they can understand bird-talk.

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Except that the inquiry into the limits of subjectivity goes right on. Close by, some common sense philosopher abruptly intrudes: “The Tune is in the Tree—” Wait, unpack that: a tune is a real thing—I’ll transcribe it, note for note. It’s being sung, so to speak, by a real bird in a real tree. Song, that is to say, is every bit as real as Being. No, well, yes, but only in a certain sense. Now hear the voice of the real, considered, adequate empiric, here called “The Skeptic,” but evoking Berkeley every bit as well as Hume, who is Berkeley without God (or Fichte without the Transcendental Ego): “‘No Sir! In Thee!’” (185–6). Now there it is: song, bird, tree are alike perceptions, as real as it gets, on one account, as real as humans can testify in any case. Esse est percipi: Being just like Beauty in the beholder. Of course it’s only a poem. So it may not matter how someone like a modest and reclusive Author may feel about what Emerson had ruefully called “these developments” (E, 489). Further balking our wish for a simple confession of deep authorial afect, “Within my Garden, rides a Bird” wins the Christopher Pearse Cranch prize for Transcendental Whimsy. (You remember him: famously, he drew the sketch of Emerson as an eyeball with a tall hat; and, plus, he was the one who reported that, at the frst meeting of the Hedge Club, everyone was waiting for someone to say the fnest thing that had ever been said.) Here, now, in his honor, is the funniest thing ever said about a hummingbird and a dog. To begin with, this funky little bird—who may or may not be one of God’s ideas—strikes a certain well-placed perceiver as riding on a unicycle. And suddenly we are made aware that “seeing” and “believing” is not so simple a problem as once we thought: poet or not, who in the whole history of post-Newtonian optics would seem to see something like that? A hummingbird, as everyone is presumed to know, is a trompe l’oeil if there ever was one: eventually, wheels will go backward in movies shot with the wrong camera speed, but for the moment, those “dizzy” wing-wheels seem just like they are going around in a perfect circle. What will she think of next? Well, for a moment at least, something less bizarre: something like sex in fact. Bee-like, that naughty little bird can go from fower to fower when, as everybody knows, no fower may go from bird to bird to bird. Just so, this brash summer lover—who keeps his sleeping bag rolled up and stashed behind your couch— . . . never stops, but slackens Above the ripest rose— Partakes without alighting And praises as he goes, Till every spice is tasted— (169)

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Ah, yes, thank you. But then the trompe de l’esprit comes right back— without a vengeance, perhaps, but without so much as a by your leave, as “his Fairy Gig/Reels in remoter atmospheres” (169). Like, he few away. And the bemused, bedazzled observer, well, let’s say she rejoins her Dog, of-rhyming it with Gig, achieving thereby one of the most memorable come-downs in the entire history of ironic bathos. And this just when I had told the students we need not obsess formal matters. Needing to ask someone, “Did you see that?”—and happy, under the noetic circumstance, not to be completely alone—she turns to said Dog as her only epistemic resort. . . . He and I, perplex us If positive, ‘twere we— Or bore the Garden in the Brain This Curiosity— (169–70) Students of Berkeley of not, we’ve all been there: did I hear thunder? There’s milk in the fridge if you want some. Shut the barn door or the horse will get out, whether you see him or not. But notice the precise form of the problem: are we “positive”? Which is to ask: given a certain number of well-controlled experiments, would a certain number of suitably trained observers reach the same conclusion? Well, ok, birds fy back and forth, whether the Wright brothers can make fapping wings or not; nor are hummingbirds any real exception to the rare science of fapter. On the other hand, however, who—before or, even as so instructed, since—will see a bird on a bike or think it a “travelling Mill” (169)? Probably not enough for positive science. And few if any dogs. In short, what the hell is not in the eye of this beholder of birds and bees? But the philosophic insult does not stop there. What saw you, Doggie mine? Well, fewer colors than you, my Poetic Mistress, but probably I’m somewhat better at motion. So, if what you’re asking simply was some “dizzy” thing really there, or was it a fgment of your so-fertile imagination, then do but observe stems of the fowers just now ravished before your sex-starved eyes: “just vibrating Blossoms!” (170). “Just” meaning “still” or “just barely,” but also, given the stipulated will to positivism, “justly,” i.e., “lawfully.” Ah, yes, pendular motion, the sort of thing that made John Brown swing so justly in a poem of Melville: upside-down here, but you can’t fool Mother Nature that easily: hanging down, or growing up, start it and it swings. Ergo, bird, real and not imaginary. Unless it should turn out that in the end it is “laws” which “make things what they are.” Wait: who said that? Waldo, of course, and that in church (E, 75). Existence may or not precede Essence, but we call it Nature because it’s

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(almost) always the same. So—absurdly—Doggie may be on to something, something “Exquisite.” “Elegant,” she might well have said. Like, science of the mind having fun with the play of imagination. Dog and Poet saw something: it moved. The rest may well be poetry. Like that other poet as good as said, the day his “Child Went Forth”: reality is what writer and reader can agree upon in language. Poetry is the formal contract—not to say the sacrament—of this hard-won epistemic understanding. Uncertain of many things, I, myself, am almost positive that hummingbirds never ride on unicycles. But I understand it when you say they do. And I am almost positive some others agree. We cannot know Who made the world. Or out of what. But having made language for ourselves, we have every right to relish its joyful possibilities, even at their most outrageous, and even when the laugh is largely on ourselves. August Comte might not approve. But the man who came to think of symbols as “Protean”—so that almost anything could be used to signify anything else—almost certainly would. And Dickinson herself, puzzled though she might be about the Gigantic Emersonian Self, owed much of her poetic elan to his emphatic and unfailing sense of the primacy of Mind. 4 So: was Dickinson a Transcendentalist? I don’t know: ask any sophomore English major with the full store of high-school defnitions frmly in mind. Was Jesus a Christian? Was Arthur Godfrey sincere? Was anybody one of those “things,” really? Well, OK, Emerson was indeed a Transcendentalist, if we accept his own defnition: “Idealism as it appears in 1842” (E, 193). With the quiet proviso that “Idealism” had two meanings in Nature: epistemologically, ideas were all we know for sure; and, for the moment at least, ideas are all that is really real. The frst endures to the end: “Illusions” is just a sad and sober name of constructive power of the human faculties. The other, well, not so much: as just about everyone has noticed, the “later Emerson” is not so sure his own mind is part or parcel of the One Mind that, for the sake of refection, had needed to outer itself. Too close to call? Welcome to the club. Plato thought someone called the Philosopher got out of the cave. No such luck in Emerson. And what about those other guys? Thoreau, probably, at least at the beginning: “Packed in my mind lie all the clothes/Which outward nature wears.” And maybe at the moment when the solitary pilgrim to Walden realizes that “Consciousness,” a sort of standing beside oneself in a sane sense, can “make us bad neighbors at times.” But less emphatically, certainly less triumphantly; and less and less as his interest in “the natural history of Massachusetts” became more and more minute. And Whitman? Well, yes, he too, at the beginning: his defnitive “Child” wolfs down a lot of reality but then come the “doubts.” Is any of this really real? Taking

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up the hint from the poem’s last revelation, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” announces, formalizes, the Writer/Reader contract implied in “Child.” Epistemic agreement, especially in a poem. And—come to think of it— what is so bad about Appearances? Do not they too “lend their parts to the Soul”? And then, in Democratic Vistas, the doctrine of “personalism”: What?!— I thought “the Soul knows no persons” (E, 81) So Emerson had boldly declared, and so it seems had the singer of the famous “Song,” which appears to express some generalized, inclusive identity. Philosophical ambiguities abound, but evidently Whitman was coming to value the individual realization more than the essential structure of the simple separate self, the God in me entirely justifying its random particularity. And of course he had already prophesied that, “struck from the foat,” he had received his identity “by [his] body” and would forever self-identify in just that way. I guess it was about time somebody blew the whistle on Descartes. But it was not Emerson. And, given the controlling Platonic heritage, it would require more than a few poetic efusions—and more even than Merleau-Ponty10—to bring that root question into steady focus. Whitman did what he could. And, unlike Thoreau, a disciple if there ever was one, however reluctant and reformed, Whitman experienced Emerson as force at a distance; some personal contact there was, but it came only after carrying him around for a while in his lunch pail. And—time and space being real enough in matters of literary history—neither was Dickinson part of the little group that began to meet at the home of Frederick Henry Hedge in 1836. Further, one could argue whether Calvinist Amherst was any less like post-Unitarian Concord than boisterous Brooklyn or mast-hemmed Manhattan. Literature as force at a distance. And Force among many: the British Metaphysicals, for example, Romantics, like Keats; and the reference in “This was a Poet” (206) is to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, not to the Sage of Concord. Sooner or later, however, one Sage seems bound to read another, so that it is hardly a surprise when a poet who writes about almost everything fnds herself writing about this or that. What matter is what happens then. What happens in literary infuence is almost never that a writer “borrows.” Rather, somebody says yes or no to somebody else. Emphatically or subtly, sometimes with disguise. And, most interesting of all, somebody feels the need to say yes but. Like, my God, I never saw that possibility proposed with such luminous authority; and yet I wonder if it’s quite so simple as you have made it memorably to appear. Nature, OK, that’s what we “see” and “hear.” The Simple Separate Self: well said, but harder for some of us than you appear to imagine; like Hawthorne, I go looking for myself and fnd, always, some “supposed person.” And Idealism, yes of course, how odd that anyone ever thought otherwise; but what after all is to be our latter-day response? You celebrate, and then lament; I play. And

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then I laugh. After all, is it not kind of funny that a simple separate person should have to ask anybody if they heard thunder? Call her then an ironic footnote. Less essential, perhaps, than her notations as a latter-day reprobate, spiting a Calvinism she could not entirely refute.; but cogent enough to count. Emerson? Yes, no, and maybe, with room for discussion in those compendious margins where syntax ends and refection begins. And let us remind ourselves: where else has so much been said, about the episteme of Concord, in so concise a form? Careful scholarship might elaborate for pages—as in a book I seem somehow to have written. Poetic genius was required to say somewhat less. Notes 1 For the Emerson poems mentioned here, see Harold Bloom and Paul Kane, ed., Emerson: Collected Poems and Translations (Library of America, 1994), 31. 189, 35, 31 9, 34. For the public version of his epiphany in the Jardin des Plantes, see “The Uses of Natural History,” in Stephen Whicher and Robert Spiller, eds., The Early Lectures of RWE (Harvard, 1959), 7–10; and, fnally, see “Nature,” in Joel Porte, ed., Emerson Essays and Lectures (Library of America, 1983), 545–6. 2 See Perry Miller, ed., The Transcendentalists (Harvard, 1950), 396. 3 Sharon Cameron, Writing Nature (Chicago, 1985). 4 Famously of course the Todd-Higginson edition of the Poems of Emily Dickinson (Roberts Brothers, 1890) features and section (one of four) on “Nature”; and, closer to the present, a number of critics have observed that many of Dickinson’s are vignettes of simple natural phenomena; see Vivian Pollak, Our Emily Dickinson (Penn, 2017), 4. 5 See R. W. Franklin, ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Harvard, 2005), 106. Further quotations from Dickinson’s poems are cited in the body of the text. 6 See Emerson, Nature, in E&P, 10; and cp Thoreau, Walden (Norton, 2008), 148. 7 See Hawthorne, “The Old Manse,” in Tales and Sketches (Library of America, 1996), 1143; and cp. Emerson, “Nature,” in E&P, 541. 8 See Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Selected Letters of Emily Dickinson (Harvard, 1986), 176. 9 One very early version of “Descartes’ Error” is surely Bishop Berkeley’s suggestion that it is in in fact the ever-active and all-creative God—and not some “clever demon”—who sponsors the illusion of materiality, 10 Whitman appears to have got there frst—“That I was, I knew was of my body—and what i/should be, I knew should be of my body” (“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”)—but existential metaphysics would wait for the of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (Gallimard, 1945); and see Mary Rose Barral, “Merleau-Ponty on the Body,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, 7 (1969), 171–9.

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Without suggesting that “enough already” has been written about the way(s) women have been made to appear in the works of canonical authors of British and American literature, it may nevertheless do no harm to notice that certain female writers—very good writers—have not always been fattering in their representation of the sex that used to rule. I have in mind certain so-called Regionalists of late nineteenth-century America— Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman from the region known as “Noth of Boston” and Kate Chopin from, well, South of New Orleans. Indeed, the presence of useless men seems almost as distinguishing as a mark as their wish to be somewhat nostalgic about the cultural regions we know as North of Boston and, well, South of New Orleans. If, in the genre we used to call “local color,”1 the fctional venue seems strategically diminished, so do the attractions of the boys and men living there. Tempting the still-conscientious teacher to ask his multiply-distracted class, what matters most here, region or gender? Take the example of Jewett’s “White Heron.” Set emphatically in The Country of the Pointed Firs, it is a cut or two above the level of anything in the more pedestrian collection so named. Indeed, it is one of the most poetic short stories in the language; its reputation will survive all manner of masculist protest. Quite short, and simple at frst glance, its memory lingers like a trip to the woods of one’s own; and the example of the “Dear loyalty” (111)2 of its female protagonist, sensitive, discerning, but too young to know what sex is all about, comes to seem a timeless moment in the evolution of feminist intelligence. But has her fateful choice—to protect a precious bird and disappoint a possible lover—been made perhaps a little too easy? We may readily forgive Jewett for the “red-faced boy” who, back in some newly industrialized town (probably Lowell), “used to chase and frighten” little Sylvia—presuming her name was Sylvia even before she was removed to the Maine woods; that was then and there and this is here and now. But the older boy, who whistles while he walks, who comes along with the gun, DOI: 10.4324/9781003334262-7

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who gives her a jack-knife, but who shoots and stufs the birds in which this remarkable “woods-girl” (104) utterly delights, whose idea was that? And did we really need to know that, hell-bent on fnding out the nesting place of his long-sought white heron, he takes “no notice of the family sorrows” as narrated by Sylvia’s fostering grandmother? Well, like they say, purity of heart is to will one thing. No doubt the awakening “woman’s heart” (108) in Sylvia sill, someday, somehow regret the loss of the love her “Dear loyalty” has cost her. To say nothing of the ten-dollar reward. But one simply cannot imagine a reader who would repent her refusal of a life in which she would “have served and followed [the boy] as a dog loves” (111). That’s right: they shall travel on to where the two shall be as one and a painfully negotiated fraction. But what if the boy, sensing the love and the loyalty in the heart of the girl, had been given a second thought? What then? Maybe he had read Thoreau—such persons do now and then wander of into Maine—and just then began to understand: you don’t shoot, you don’t capture, you don’t photograph, you don’t even try to outsmart the loon, who loved the pond before you ever decided to sojourn there. That’s right, equal creaturehood. Rare, perhaps, but possible: I have known men who do not nuke the whales so they can hunt them at night. But who knows? Maybe the interesting men are all Down West in the region of Boston, where women are women and men are, oh dear, not paragons of enlightened sensitivity there either. Not Silas Lapham, to be sure: refugee from rural Vermont, he fnds a stand of elms “sightly” enough, but he covers every rock and barn in Essex County with his mineral paint and, for good measure, pours it all over the guests at his frst formal dinner. And probably not Bromfeld Corey either, proving as he does that refnement is not all it’s cracked up to be: it can allow you to purchase—from a “swarthy fruiterer, and in his ‘own tongue,’” an apple, “apparently for the pleasure of holding it in his hand.” Ah yes, “Palpable and mute,” quite like a poem. And, later, at a crisis of social conscience, it can relish the fne distinction of “cutting his orange in the Neapolitan manner, and [eating] it in quarters.” And it can cause him to give up painting because, for all his sensitivity, his skill is only that of an amateur. But it cannot get him to do much of anything. But perhaps his son—a doer by economic fatality but, Harvard educated and with some skill in the modern foreign languages, he can almost talk books with Penelope Lapham. Certainly not Bartley Hubbard, who comes in trailing clouds of brutal ignorance from an earlier book. Well then, maybe the Reverend Mr. Sewell: he loves love and hates romance; can that be all bad? But this is merely to observe the obvious: not all male writers like all men. Certainly Henry James does not. He can be made to seem something of a hermaphrodite, but technically it was not a woman who dared to name a male character “Goodwood,” or who imagined the man who would have liked to be “Pope for the considerations.” And besides, unlike

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Howells, James has nothing to do with Regionalism. When the project of the “great”—i.e., the encompassing—American novel became suspect, he opted for Europe.3 Which it pleased him to think was not a region. Back home—in the “Burnt-over District,” no less—someone wrote the story of a puritanic but sexually embattled minister whose great awakening takes him out of the church and into the gospel of salesmanship. What would we say if a woman had written that? Or, what if some men hate men almost as much as women? (Yes, I mean that ambiguity of syntax. And yes, the problem is somewhat complicated.) 2 A slightly more challenging case of region and gender is clearly that of May E. Wilkins Freeman, whose account of “Mother” defes all feminist attempts to praise, and whose “New England Nun” suggests a frmness of character that makes her obsessive-compulsive disorder seem trivial by comparison. But she too makes men that only some rare judgment in charity can approve. Of dear, what if men were all there were to marry? As, talking straight to her daughter, our long-sufering Mother seems doomed to assume. But frst the less ambiguous case. Almost nothing could be clearer than that no sane man would want to marry Louisa Ellis, not as her elongated period of New England spinsterhood has allowed her to develop. Once upon a time the “winds of romance” may have “whistled . . . loud and sweet” (26)4 for her own dear self, but not as we—and the long-detained Joe Daggett—fnd her, happily harvesting her lettuce and having herself to tea. Of course, half of the tale hangs just thereby: he meant what he said and he said when he meant, said what he meant, a gentleman—however clumsy—is faithful one hundred percent. She too. And thereby hangs the other half. She’s obsessive and he’s, well, just a run-of-the-male, but the cases are structurally parallel. And texturally, the weight is more heavily against him than against her. Worst case scenario, he’ll wanna go out and shoot birds. Best case, he’ll build yet another barn to house more needless cows. And, in the present moment, what if he were to set Caesar, the chained-up dog, free to rampage? What woman in her right mind would marry a man like that? The case is pretty funny, but is it really quite fair? There she is, pecking away at her lettuce in a way that suggests a mild to moderate eating disorder as well as an advanced neat-freakiness, happy as a bird in a cage—no, not that one, Silly; she’s enslaved herself. But her little yellow canary can hardly be more upset by the mere entrance of, well, not “the enemy” precisely, but the fagrantly other gender. But she rallies: “Good evening,” she ofers, “with a kind of solemn cordiality.” Good evening, he returns, “in a loud voice.” Inside voice, Joe. Inside voice. Conversation ensues: he sitting “bolt-upright, she ‘gently erect.’” (23).

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Platitudes mostly, except for the premonitory mention of a certain Lily Dyer. Then the fuss about the ordering of the books: “What diference?” “I always.” Fair enough, except that his expression of incredulity is registered on a “large face.” Oooh, too big. He stays for a while, and nothing happens until, “Going out, he stumble[s] over a rug, and trying to recover himself, hit[s] Louisa’s work basket on the table, and knock[s] it on the foor” (24). Clumsy Oaf. Where did he prep? Was he raised in a barn? Did his parents fnd him under a bridge? The one, two-part faux pas might sufce here, but the slapstick continues: “He looked at Louisa, then at the rolling spools; he ducked himself awkwardly toward them, but she stopped him. ‘Never mind,’ said she; ‘I’ll pick them up after you’ve gone’” (24). Consummation devoutly to be wished. A certain “mild stifness” in her rebuke, to be sure, but perhaps his nervousness “made her constrained in her efort to reassure him” (25). Which is to suggest that her sensitivity is as endemic and incurable as his clumsiness. Taken to extreme, the one might indeed suggest unbalance, but the other disqualifes itself as such. Whatever could Lily Dyer see in a being of his kind? They’re both hysterically loyal—in the manner of Puritan conscience gone to seed. But consider the other terms: he should not marry her because she’s clinical OCD; she can’t marry him because—fair is fair—because he is, well, a man. Not altogether unlike the biblically over-named Adoniram Penn—as I have been implying. Like Joe Daggett, he once loved a woman, and promises were made: one of these days, a new house, a proper house, worthy of her worth and expressive of his regard (or his success). But then, sadly, he failed to disappear for fourteen years, and, sooner or later, his incorrigible maleness could not fail to appear: there is no evidence that he tracked in cow dung but, wherever he was raised, he imagines that man was born to raise a barn. There may be hope for his son, who is said to be in school: maybe in a century or two, men will become sensitive enough to register on the scale as instinctive to women as conscience itself; but in the present there is, or so it seems, almost none for Mrs. Sarah Penn—yes, she has a proper name, if only a married one—and for her daughter, Nanny, who is about to be married, to a man, in a well-worn house, altogether less attractive than the new barn Adoniram has been a-bildin’. You’d think he’d have some sense of courtesy. Or family pride. Or shame. But no. Sarah will soon be talking to Adoniram, plain enough, about her long-sufering silence, their status in the community, and about the dismal room in which their daughter is to be married. Can he seriously think this is right? Well, he “ain’t got nothin’ to say” (68). Now or later, until the very end. Assured that he is what he is, essentially and by right of masculine difference, his actions speak for themselves. But in advance of this the women have been talking, about the relation of men and women in what appears

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to be the design of Providence. To her daughter’s plausible complaint about her sad pre-marital situation, Mrs. Penn waxes philosophical: You ain’t found out yet we’re women-folks, Nanny Penn. . . . You ain’t seen enough of men-folks yet to. One of these days you’ll fnd out, an’ then you’ll know that we know only what men-folks think we do, so far as any use of it goes, an’ how we ought to reckon men-folks in with Providence, an’ not complain of what they do any more than we do of the weather. (66) This, of course, is a brilliant two-sentence epitome of the old-time gender problem: women have their place, and men know it well; indeed they have it on the Word of God. But it is also exactly the quasi-religious paradigm which “Mother,” Mrs. Sarah Penn—who probably had another name before she was married (except that would have been the name of her father)—exactly the dogma she is about to defy. Heroically, the tale quite properly insists: better than the Puritans at Plymouth, better than Wolfe at the Heights of Abraham; indeed, if Providence really were involved, her “revolt” would be nothing short of blasphemous defance, the Original Sin of American Feminism. But of course it was all said in irony. It’s just that, failing a revolution of some sort, little Nanny Penn had better know exactly what she’s in for. She protests: “‘I don’t believe George is anything like that.’” Of course not—that’s why I’m telling you: “‘You wait an’ see. I guess George Eastman ain’t no better than other men.’” On the other hand, however, it’s not your place to judge your father: “‘He can’t help it, ‘cause he don’t look at things jest the way we do.’” Gender may be a construct, as we like to say, but one so well constructed that men are its prisoner almost as much as women. And given this second-nature imprisonment, he ain’t all that bad: “‘We’ve been pretty comfortable here, after all. The roof don’t leak—ain’t never but once—that’s one thing. Father’s kept it shingled right up’” (66). Indeed: barns or no barns, he’d been a pretty good provider all these years; and, after all, what else are women supposed to want? (Ask Dr. Freud.) And then watch “Mother.” Well worth watching, in a tale well worth reading—now, in the latter days of the crusade assembled in the wake of her revolt—and well after, when all the genders have been frst identifed, valorized, and then deconstructed. Regionalism with a vengeance. Ms. Freeman may seem to be lauding herself when she praises the Webster-like power of her heroine’s rhetoric, but she has a point: her verbal defeat of the Reverend Mr. Hersey is complete; he may be a little wimpy, but with the confrontation scene ending in the surprising turn to “‘How is Mis’ Hersey?’” (76). The situational

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comedy is perfect. Adoniram may be strong and silent, and Sarah Penn may occasionally slip into standard English, but on the whole she talks Vermont better than Silas Lapham—as well, one might suggest, as Huck Finn talks Missoura. Another county heard from: brava! Sooner or later we’ll be hearing about kinky sex Up In Michigan and some hard times in Cannery Row. Not as good as a thousand points of light, perhaps, but better than rereading Emma for the third time. Sooner or later, we’ll have to relax and do American literature—not as such, to be sure, as there may be no such thing—but in the context of time and place, occasion and audience. Until that happy day you know darn well, Baby, women are women and men are, well, embattled. So that— It’s not enough to have the Old Barn Builder confessing, in tears, that he “hadn’t no idea” (78) the matter was all that important. Or that, through it all, Mother actually loves Father quite a lot. Second thought here is not an access of irony but an attack of sentiment. You either want the goddam new house or you don’t. You can’t brilliantly outfank your dumbass husband and have him too. But then it’s only a short story, among others, from a writer who—as my anthology’s introduction instructs me—would frequently return to the theme of “the potential for unpredictable revolt in outwardly meek and downtrodden natures.”5 You mean women are not the only such? But enough for the moment: men are massively insensitive and, when you get down to it, they are also pussies. As to those others, well, you know the drill: I am Woman, hear me roar. Until in the end she also whispers. Nice work if you can get it. 3 Maybe it’s diferent in the South. Particularly where it’s been Frenchifed. And also Espanicated. Maybe Creoles still know that men are men and women are women and ever the twin shall meet. Summer in and summer out, the families that meet on the Grand Isle created by Kate Chopin in The Awakening all appear to talk pretty openly about the facts of life. Newcomer Edna Pontellier hardly knows what to make of the elaborately firtatious Robert Lebrun, who cozies up to some married woman in every single swimming season. Innocently, everyone appears to assume. Nor has Edna ever met any woman quite like Adele Ratignolle. “Mother-woman” (51)6 with a vengeance, she is working on her fourth baby in seven years; but seems open as well to some sort of deep female friendship, ofering as she does her “gentle caress” (61). And, born and bred in Kentucky, where the Great Awakening morphed into the Cane Ridge Revival—what is Edna supposed to make of an accomplished seducer like Alcee Arobin? Of course these Creoles are all Catholic so that, unlike the New Orleans encountered by Captain Colburn in Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, there is no talk of men keeping mistresses; and Madame Ratignolle may go into the

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most “intimate detail” of one of her “accouchements,” but the motherwomen all appear to a maintain a “lofty chastity” (53). It’s just that, in this region of the American South, sex is out of the closet. Feminism is one thing: mouse-farm lust quite another. To be sure, Kentucky is not quite the poet’s “New England”—where “The wind is always north-north-east” and “Passion . . . is a soilure of the wits”; but nothing in her natal place, or on her father’s plantation in Mississippi, has quite prepared Edna (married-name Pontellier) for such a stif dose of sexual realism. Nor has anything in her romantic history so far: the “dignifed and sad-eyed cavalry ofcer who visited her father in Kentucky” the young gentleman who visited his fancée on the plantation near her father’s in Mississippi, and then, the most delicious delusion of all, the “face and fgure of a great tragedian” (62) know only from a faded photograph. Enter Leonce Pontellier, who courted Edna with a fattering devotion and somehow convinced her “fancy” that there was “sympathy and taste between them” (62). And now here she is, with a handbook chauvinist husband. Small wonder, then, if, great or not, her awakening to proper (Emersonian?) selfhood is primarily sexual in nature. Surely we see it coming. Poor Leonce Pontellier: it’s Sunday and the mocking-bird won’t let him read his day-old newspaper. (And what the hell language is “Sapristi” in any event?) Of course he wears glasses and, even at forty, “he stoop[s] a little” (43). He can’t believe that his wife and Robert Lebrun are up to anything; his judgment falls instead on the “folly” of their presuming to “bathe” (44)—they were swimming, goddamnit!—in the heat of the day. We hardly need to be told that, in noticing the sunburn of his wife, he looks at her “as one looks at a piece of personal property which has sufered some damage.” How not? Does not coverture cover that? Confdent in his sense of possession, he easily sends the pair of on their own. He himself is of to Klein’s for a game of billiards. He’ll come home for early dinner, or not, depending on how goes the game. He even takes, from her hand, the protective umbrella—parasol, in this case, not parapluie. Guess it never rains in Grand Isle. There’s more, of course—his obsession with Edna’s lack of obsession with mothering, his failure to notice her need for sleep, or sex. But what need? What, from a literary point of view, could possibly be better than what we have from the outset? Nobody needs to interview Leonce Pontellier for the Times-Picayune; or have him meet an old friend in anteroom of the Presbytere: what need lengthy exposition when a detail or two will work? Everyone involved will soon declare that Mister Pontellier—who does not always forget his promise to bring bonbons back for the boys—is “the best husband in the world.” And, for the wife agreeing that “she knew of none better” (50), what could be worse? Better than Joe Daggett by a damn sight. Count on it: Leonce Pontellier never knocked over anyone’s

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sewing table; and, gentle push coming to noticeable shove, I’ll bet he’d let you stack your books any way you damn please. And better far than cowman Adoniram Penn: no problem with social events in his house; and he’d almost let you have a room of your own. Unless, of course, civil possession is worse than natural stalemate. Ask the woman who obsessed the yellow wallpaper. Better to perish in the howling infnite. Or else, at all events, to listen long to the siren call of the sensual sea. But wait—that raises a hard question: is there such a thing as Feminist Tragedy? Is there not, in the whole fucking world, some acceptable alternative? Can’t she just open a little gift shop on the avenue, sell a few of her amateur paintings? Why does there have to be a Man? Hawthorne’s Zenobia thought all would be well for the dependent woman if only man were pure and strong. Might not its name be Robert Lebrun? Evidently not, though he looks pretty good at frst. He’s playing, of course, as he has been doing for the past eleven years, since he was ffteen. Madame. Ratignolle tries to warn him of: “she is not one of us” (64); she will misunderstand, think him serious. He protests that he is, as his selfindulgence requires him always to believe. But he assures her that “there is no earthly possibility of Mrs. Pontellier ever taking [him] seriously” (65). She’s playing too, or so she also thinks. But in some relation to his tireless teaching, she learns to swim. An awakening in its own right. And though he talks about himself rather too much—he’s “very young” (46) at twentysix, and knows no better; but he also lets her talk, and he listens, as we gather Leonce rarely does. And then, surprisingly, but without full selfconsciousness, she summons him one morning: they drink cofee together, talk about persons who are and who are not lovers—as the Lady in Black, tolling her beads, continues to walk in and out of the scene. Sailing across the bay to the Cheniere Caminada, Edna begins to feel liberated and so does not object when Robert proposes, in a low voice, “‘Let us go to Grand Terre, tomorrow’”; and then “‘the next day or the next we can sail to the Bayou Brulow.’” And then, the whole party goes “together up to the quaint little Gothic church of Our Lady of Lourdes”—as if, in addition to the “Gulf Spirit” (81–2). Catholic superstition were part of Edna’s mid-life temptation. And it gets deeper. Robert watches over her when she all but faints in the church. He stays with her when others of their Sunday-at-church party return to the island. He reassures her when she imagines that her husband will be worried: “He knows you are with me.” And, as the night comes on, he lies beside her, “occasionally picking at the hem of her muslin gown” (86). Back at Grand Isle, wondering why he has left her, she sings low “a little song that Robert had sung as they crossed the bay,” one whose every verse began and ended with “‘si tu savais’”(88); she remembers his voice as “musical and true” (89). If Leonce but knew. Or else, if either of the

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incipient lover but knew the true name of the game they were playing; or the game which life, and love, and summer was playing with them. But no. And you don’t have to read Emerson to know it. So that the illusion—at long last, love—is just about perfect. But then, all suddenly, it’s over: “‘I said all along I was going to Mexico’” (89). But why “‘tonight?’” To Edna it seems “‘perfectly preposterous and uncalled for.’” She had grown so used to “‘having [him] with her all the time’”—“‘thinking of how pleasant it would be to see [him] in the city next winter.’” He almost explains: “‘So was I, . . . Perhaps that’s the—. . . ’” But no: “‘Good-by.’” Suitably, if needlessly, the Narrator informs us that only now is Edna recognizing the “symptoms of infatuation” (93–4). And the Reader thinks, Oh dear, it’s like The Scarlet Letter: she’s awakened out of all that middle-class morality and he very clearly has not. So it comes as no surprise when, upon his return, he babbles on foolishly about his “longing,” about her being “not free” and about the possibility now, that Leonce might set her free. “Foolish boy,” she correctly names him: no longer anyone’s “possession,” (166–7) she is free to give herself where she chooses. So wait here Robert, and when she returns they will become proper lovers—a “modern instance,” surely. Poor foolish Robert: if only there were a scaffold on which he might die. Best moral alterative: “Good-by—because I love you” (172). Like the man said, “Woman is the nemesis of doubting man.”7 Leaving her with Alcee Arobin. He’s been fun at the race track, and when you are nighttime drunk and lifetime horny, well, you know. As Edna comes to realize, in one awakened direction he’d be just the frst of many: “To-day it is Arobin; to-morrow it will be someone else” (175). If only sex could be just sex. But no: as they used to say on the old Star Trek, you humans insist on adding many odd notions to the performance of the biological function. Something which the almost-competent Doctor Mandelet almost knows. The savvy southern doctor is not much like the wimpy New England minister, and in one late scene he almost gets it right: Romance is Nature’s “decoy to secure mothers for the race” (171). (Except perhaps for the Creoles, who do not seem to require it.) And, earlier, in invoking the need for “an inspired psychologist,” to handle the deeper problems of Edna, he comes within an ace of naming Freud. But then he goes on. He is, of course, right to suspect a “man in the case,” and too experienced in “Creole” to ask; but he is quite wrong in predicting that because “Most women are moody and whimsical,” this will all “pass happily” (119). And he is naïve to the point of cliché in his suspicion of some emergent “feminism”: No, Doc, there’s no “circle of pseudo-intellectual women” (118). It’s just Edna and sex. Or, is it something A Woman Said to the Universe? Leaving us with Victor Lebrun—interesting enough, as he seems to be getting over the Creole thing. Maybe, at the end of the movie, he will head

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North and hook up with young Sammy Penn. That’ll fx the Feminists. Maybe they’ll live in New York City: that’ll fx the Local Colorists. Theodore Dreiser appears to be in love with things and stuf in Chicago, but not even he can regionalize the Big Apple, 4 So it’s Edna and the sea. Gulf of Mexico, to be precise. There is—or so it seems to me—considerable ambiguity about the thematic intent of this story of the urgent awakening and then the untimely death of the onceillusioned, then conventionally unhappy Kentucky woman among the Creoles; one who, late in life, learns to swim and to read Waldo Emerson. But the adequacy of men to meet the needs of a woman so placed is not one of them. Edna dies lamenting the emotional failure of Robert Lebrun, wondering if Dr. Mandelet could understand, but the problem goes deeper than that. Evidently Kate Chopin believes that there are awakenings that can be a mixed blessing indeed: when Edna begins, with or without the aid of Emerson, “to realize her position in the universe as a human being,” she—or some Narrator she has not adequately distinguished from herself—observes that “This may seem a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight—perhaps more than the Holy Ghost is usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman” (57). But does she think that the Universe somehow dooms Feminism? The Catholic jargon of the passage suggests irony in some degree, but some non-sectarian point survives. Be careful of what you wish for. Especially if you don’t entirely understand the wish. Evidently Edna had not meant to commit suicide when she decided on a little cold-water swim before dinner: you don’t hang up your clothes and put on a bathing suit as an exit strategy. But then there she was, “Naked,” the Narrator says, in spite of the bathing suit, “naked under the sky,” and feeling like “some new-born creature.” Yes, the new birth, we’ve heard of that, even if it’s just the beginning of an “original relation,” like Whitman getting naked at the beginning of his revolutionary “Song.” Then too, there is seductive “voice of the sea, . . . whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude” (175). Ah, yes, transcendence. Or is it only the Unconscious? Ask Dr. Mandelet about that: could he almost name Jung? Swimming out, she remembers “Leonce and the children” as “part of her life” (176), but her husband has long ceased to matter and, as she assured her female friend, for her children she would give her “life” but not her “self” (97). Here, she assures herself, “they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul” (176). Leaving the reader to wonder what the woman who could not explain what she meant by “life’s delirium” (107) may have understood as the “soul.” And what in any case

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has the soul to do with sex? Go back? To what? A little art shop? Why not? Would it be so bad to organize, meeting there, a society of newly intellectual women, holding “Conversations”? Worked for some of them up in New England, in the last generation. But they were, for the time at least, thinking of themselves as women without men. Without sex. And what is so like sex as the sea? She swims out, remembering, but passing the point of no return. And so the story ends, leaving us to wonder which of the Mother Women will adopt the children? Will they be raised Creole? Catholic? And will they in any event read Emerson, who tells men—but maybe not women—how to live an awakened life when all that other stuf has lapsed into its proper historical place? But then you’d have to be more than a Regionalist to write that story. More than a Feminist as well. For the moment; however, the troubling story of a woman who certainly needed to discover that what she was living was not life. Having replaced her naïve Romantic illusions with a stifing marriage to a man who takes— not her, but his image of her—absolutely for granted, it is neither surprising nor very signifcantly blameworthy for her to fall into a summertime dalliance. But then it gets complicated. Is it Sex or Self? How are they related? Can you tell? Are there, on any model, sexual implications in Emerson’s doctrine of self-reliance? Chopin asks such hard questions. No wonder the answer is, in an Emersonian word, “difcult.” And, given the deep confusion into which Edna falls, probably there is no man, then or now, alive or dead, who could have led her into the light. When my three girl children asked me, each in turn, what was the meaning of life, I never once thought to say fnding your soul mate; opting for irony over faith or sentiment, I said, “a job with benefts.” Evidently frst phase feminism was about as far as I could go. But I silently hoped none of them would marry a man like Leonce Pontellier. Not to mention a Cow-Man, or Joe Daggett, or a boy who shoots birds he does not mean to eat. Men are not good enough for women, but some may well be somewhat better than others. Don’t get me wrong: Jewett and Freeman and Chopin are very good writers—better, probably, than Bret Harte and Hamlin Garland, who don’t write women all that well, and good enough to be mentioned in the same sentence with Samuel Clemens and Charles Chesnutt as far as the project of Regionalism is concerned. All three were up to something good. Sooner or later we had to learn: all politics is local and, as soon as you turn of the TV, so is all speech. Why cultivate “standard American”?—unless you want to sound like an Anchorperson? In that case you’ll try to pronounce “food” without the difcult oo sound, and then fnd yourself thinking that “begs the question” is smartass for demands to be asked. Words matter and they knew it. And their female characters are superb literary creations: Sylvia the “woods-girl,” Sarah Penn, and Edna Pontellier are all, in their way, as memorable as Hester Prynne. Even Louisa matters: choose

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obsession over submission every time. These too furnish their parts to the soul of the New Woman. Nothing in Howells and James can compare. But if you had wanted to know what a sympathetic representation of the Old Man would look like, here is hardly the place to look. The problem is not that us run-of-the-mill, boiler-plate male chauvinists refuse to recognize that there are men like the ones here represented. They exist—and many more, with faults at least as disenabling. Where, for example, are the Jock and the Nerd? Irving could do them. Hawthorne too. And what about the Jock who grows up to be an abuser? Or a rapist? Uglier by far than Alcee Arobin, whose worst fault is his cultivated and meretricious ability to ofer women what they only sort of want. Regional Women’s Regional Men are all better than those. They are—some of them at least—pleasing enough in their own hapless way. The bird-hunter gives you his pocket-knife; Joe Daggett would care for you if you let him; Father is, after all, kind of funny. Even Mr. Pontellier has his moments: what is a bewildered Old Man supposed to think of a confused New Woman? The problem is partly that they are, most of them, clichés, recognizable and totally acceptable in situation comedy, but maybe too easy to create and to recognize in an art enlisted in politics. Straw men, they are, so easy to knock down that, if they were the totality of the problem, Feminism would have triumphed, long ago, as easily as Mother turns Father from a Tyrant into a Pussy. Somehow it has to be harder. Or the problem does not look all that serious. Somewhere, that is to say, there has to be the admission that men can be complicated. In fction as in life; that they can be what we used to call “round characters”—as the women in these stories, even in the short ones, decidedly are. Robert Lebrun is rather well-developed, rather complicated, but he is, as Edna fnally realizes, not a man but a boy: romantic and naïve—hung up somewhere between sexual urgency and Catholic repression—he is the almost perfect equal and opposite of Alcee the Seducer. Closer to the mark, in this longer form of regionalist feminism, Chopin almost manages to ofer, in Dr. Mandelet, the possibility that men can be something other than the problem. Almost, but not quite. Is Dr. Mandelet married? If not, why not? If so, do the Mandelets have a social life? What do he and his wife talk about at the breakfast table? Is she interested in his work? Is he concerned for her to have an identity other than “Mrs. Mandelet”? Not much time for this, perhaps, as there clearly in none whatsoever in the short-form protests. Well, you pays your money and you takes your choice of genre. Protest is one thing; Reality, unfortunately, is something else. But who in the end can really blame these experimental feminists? Regional manners and local speech ofered an almost irresistible invitation to literary creativity. But the problem of fnding out what Women

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want—and if and how they might get it—simply imposed itself. They did what they could. Rather well, even if it did not all come out even. And no doubt men and women read them diferently. Men like to think they can take a joke. Especially in literature. But on behalf of that sorry-assed gender, I have to say, in life we try not to be one. (Just don’t ask our wives.) Notes 1 Replaced now by the word “Regionalism,” as the group of writers so designated turned to include several distinguished writers of color. 2 Citations of “The White Heron” refer to Allison Easton, ed., Sarah Orne Jewett, the Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories (Penguin, 1995). 3 For the true and original sense of the “great American novel project,” see the article of that title John William De Forest, in The Nation (January 9, 1868). 4 Citations of the Freeman stories refer to Sandra A. Zagarell, ed., Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, A New England Nun and Other Stories (Penguin, 2000). 5 See Robert S. Levine, gen. ed., The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. C (2017). 6 Citations of The Awakening refer to the edition of Sandra M. Gilbert (Penguin, 1984). 7 See D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Seltzer, 1923), 136.

8

Modern Instances Love and Marriage after Hawthorne

Apart from one perilous moment in the famous “forest scene,” there really are not many temptations of the fesh in The Scarlet Letter. Did Hester and Dimmesdale make love more than once, back then, well before the novel opens, deeply describing the penal jailhouse and the punitive scafold? And, do we read “Then, all was spoken!” (198)1 as a “fade to black”? It seems almost a sin to wonder. Hester may appear defant in the face of the assembled townspeople, divided between a sternly righteous will to uphold the terms of their covenant and a certain prurient curiosity about who, when, and where; but to her lawful husband she admits her guilt. Later, she asserts, what they did had a “consecration of its own” (195), but here, face to face with the man she thought was almost certainly dead, she makes the simple confession, “I have greatly wronged thee” (73). And so the moral we have all learned religiously to repeat: The Scarlet Letter is about guilt, not sex. Yet none of Hawthorne’s moral severity kept one reviewer from wondering if this fctional venture into the mores of the past did not signal the beginning in America of a lascivious tendency already well under way in France. After all, observed the same reviewer, the subject was nothing but the “nauseous amour of a Puritan pastor.”2 That’s right, you can’t make a baby without sexual intercourse, and you’re not supposed to do that outside the strict bounds of holy wedlock. In life or in fction. True, certain tales of seduction and abandonment fourished years before, when the novel was just getting its start in a territory not particularly friendly to fction as such. But back then, as in the case of Eliza Wharton, itself following closely on the case of the real-life Elizabeth Whitman, the guilty heroine had the good grace to die of her misdeed.3 Hester, by marked contrast, endures. Flourishes, even, making her single-mother way as an artisan in a colonial economy starved for art, and turning her scarlet A into a symbol of Ability; thinking her way entirely beyond the powerfully repressive Puritan episteme that constricts her guilty lover; leaving New England after the death of that troubled abandoner in residence and leading her daughter into meaningful life elsewhere; and, fnally, in something of a coda, DOI: 10.4324/9781003334262-8

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returning to the scene of her shame to nurse the spirit of women unfulflled by the patriarchy’s theory of love and marriage, becoming, in the end, a sort of prophet of Women’s Lib. So maybe Hawthorne is starting something after all. Something he swerves wide away from in The House of the Seven Gables, but to which he returns, emphatically, in The Blithedale Romance—which takes a hard look at one version of the sexual liberation Hester Prynne appeared to predict. With rumors of the complex-marriage experiment of John Humphrey Noyes’ Oneida community in the background, he weaves his major characters into a “veritable knot of polygamy”: nothing very explicit, to be sure, but in a world where “any individual, of either sex, [could] fall in love with any other, regardless of what would elsewhere be judged suitable and prudent,” non-standard sex is everywhere just below the surface.4 The view may be critical, as Hawthorne seems convinced that sex can never become quite “free” from competition and jealousy, but there it all is. In The House of the Seven Gables, by contrast, boy and girl discover a love which, more or less innocent of passion, is yet powerful enough to cure the curse of witchcraft and stolen property. In The Blithedale Romance, however, all hell breaks loose. Coverdale’s fnal confession names Priscilla, but it is Zenobia his eyes were undressing at the beginning of the story; and, with an ardent Melville in the background, critics think he might better have named Hollingsworth. And it hardly requires Henry James to suggest that Priscilla, who may have been a prostitute for Westervelt, who certainly prostitutes her talent as a medium, has a thing for Zenobia, who may also have been a working girl for the sleeze with the golden teeth. Hester might well be shocked. Pretty well aware of the problem of being “married but not mated,”5 Hawthorne yet worries that we may have to live with the civilized discontent of the monogamous nuclear family. But no one forced him to write a novel in which everyone is doing it to everyone else. 2 In any case, by the 1850s the cat—one had almost said “pussy”—is out of the bag. It might have required Whitman’s second preface to point out that no one in America was telling the truth about the facts of life, that sexuality itself needed to come out of the literary closet; but something of the same motive seems to drive the action of Melville’s Pierre (1852). Gay criticism may need to contend that the daring theme of incest is a displacement for the home truth of homosexuality—that Pierre’s true love is neither the light lady Lucy nor the dark lady Isabel but cousin Glen Stanley who, once the close youthful friend of the hero, comes to town to break up the ménage a trois and, in good Shakespeare fashion, make sure that everyone is dead at the end. Fine, but the sexual plot is deeper than that. Deep as Freud, it

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seems fair to say. Playing Romeo and Juliet with his ball-busting mother, Pierre courts the blonde girl next door chiefy because his mother requires it; and his chaste imagination trembles in fear that Lucy might break if ever he should mount her snow-driven purity. Meeting by accident a real live sexual turn-on for the frst time, he accepts her dubious claim to sisterhood, but carries her of to a pad in the city in any case. Mom may have known that Dad played around in his time, but at Saddle Meadows never is heard a discouraging word and the skies are still Christian all day. Write openly about same-sex love? Start anywhere and you come to that sooner or later. But do please start. From a man who had read Hawthorne but, in the wonderful moment of Renaissance, Whitman not yet. Then there is that “damned mob of scribbling women,” making a much better buck than The Scarlet Letter but failing of the canon until properly reclaimed by feminist scholars.6 No grown-up problem with unruly fesh in Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World (1850), where one learns that little girls have to love Jesus more than they love their mothers—Mama has weaned her own unruly afections already—or Jesus will not love them at all. And none in Maria Cummins’ The Lamplighter (1854), on which Hawthorne’s infamous letter pours its most bitter scorn, as this moral-to-a-fault, excessively coincidental, sentimental, not to say maudlin, super-best-seller. Ruth Hall (1855) suggests itself, which a follow-up letter praises—unreservedly, but in rather special terms, worth quoting. Not here identifed as Sarah Parton, Fanny Fern writes as if the devil was in her, and that is the only condition under which a woman ever writes anything worth reading . . . [Only] when they throw of the restraints of decency, and come before the public stark naked, as it were [are their] books sure to possess character and value. (308) Recalled here is Hawthorne’s earlier (1854) response to some domestic yet devilish and undressed American, again sent to him by Ticknor: “Those are admirable poems . . . but . . . what a strange propensity it is in these scribbling women to show of their hearts . . . for anybody to pry into that chooses!” (177). But then that devilish record of domestic failure is all in poetry. And when we turn to Ruth Hall, the devil is not in the details of marriage, as the only thing Ruth Hall (imitating Willis-Parton herself) could hold against her husband is a premature death, leaving her to scream her anger against his heartless parents. And leaving us to wonder why Hawthorne does not mention Alice Cary, whose 1852 feminist novel, Hagar, unappreciated in its own time, receives a long and sympathetic reading in Philip Gura’s “Rise of the American

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Novel.” He Ignores Cary’s later work, which amply provides the details of “How They Lived at Woodside and Throckmorton Hall,” and which deploys the example of four separate marriages to enforce the altogether un-hysterical lesson that neither cold calculation nor blind infatuation can guarantee the success of any long-term relationship. Overtitled as Married Not Mated—leading the innocent reader to expect a screed on “Women’s Rights, Women’s Wrongs”—it actually is broadly humorous in places, confusing its moral lesson with some heavy-handed comic relief. Received in the nineteenth century as “pleasant,” even “merry,” a competent modern critic fnds it “grim,” and, in another place, names it a pioneer example of “the literature of misery.”7 Not recovered for the canon, and not recognizable as a piece of enlisted feminism, it ofers no opinion on the present state or the supposable future of the institution of marriage.8 Shorter, more pointed, evidently conceived on a higher level, Cary’s Hagar (1852), a “dark, suggestive tale of adultery,” fgures as a signifcantly Hawthornean performance, involving as it does the seduction of the central character, the teen-aged Elsie, by a handsome young minister, named not Arthur but Nathaniel, which is close enough. He leaves her pregnant, fearful of taking up with a young and uneducated girl. And then the plot proliferates: in a completely independent story, one of two young men marries the sister of the other, and when they produce a child, they hire a nanny named who is actually Elsie. In a tavern one night, the unmarried young man sees and is intrigued by a man who turns out to be Nathaniel and follows him home; they converse and the younger man, fascinated by Nathaniel’s religious views, decides to become a minister himself. Fast forward ffteen years: the still unmarried man, now a minister, visits his married friend and meets Hagar the nanny who, Hester-Prynne-like, lives on the outskirts of town and has in the meanwhile become a sort of angel of mercy. He proposes; she consents; but on the morning of the wedding we fnd she has disappeared, leaving only a letter, identifying herself as Elsie and detailing her complex and implausible life—her afair with his religious mentor, his desertion, her following him to the city, the birth and his kidnapping of their baby; revealing also, how, years later, the grownup girl she had tended marries the much older Nathaniel, now become a famous author and how she became their maid. Enough here for several “B” movies, the letter yet goes on: Nathaniel eventually recognizes Elsie, in the act of discovering in a hidden cofn the skeleton of their child; he urges her to fee with him, to “defy what we cannot evade”; she almost agrees, but changing her mind, snatches the cofn and fees. Her last view of Nathaniel is as a “white face pressed against the bars [of a cart,] . . . eyes glaring like fre—. . . on the way to the mad-house!” (299–300). END OF LETTER. Now Arnold—remember him?—understands why she has taken

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her new name, as one who has chosen “to wander thirsty and alone in the desert” (300). Nina Baym and Judith Fetterley both dismiss this novel—the one for parodically bad writing, the other for incoherence—but Gura, eager to give the novel its due, suggests that it is a more honest and convincing account of women’s sexual inequality than many other contemporaneous protests. David Reynolds clearly prefers the later Married, not Mated, calling it a pioneer example of “the literature of misery” (398). Evidently the reader is free to decide: none of the above is a possible answer. Even more hopeless is the second novel of Lillie Devereux Blake, Rockford (1858). There, the unhappily married Mrs. Rockford’s attempt to conceal the adulterous parentage of her son leads to troubles she could scarcely anticipate: the son falls in love with her (late) lover’s legitimate daughter, his own half-sister and, growing ill of her inability to dissuade her otherwise obedient son from courting his sister (or of Dimmesdale’s guilt-disease), she writes out the secret and locks it in a drawer. Near death, she tells the son to read the note. He does and, after a fnal, friendly, flial meeting with the sister, decides to go abroad. His ship sinks, leaving the sister emotionally free to marry her brother’s friend, a scrupulous minister in love with her all along. The mother dies and, in defance of Hawthornean example, is buried in a grave next to her illicit lover: “so long separated, in death [they] slumbered side by side” (302). Far less mild is the Hawthornean protest of the later novel, Fettered for Life (1874). Become now a committed and active feminist, Blake now ofers us the story of a college-educated daughter, who defes her father in moving alone to New York, where she encounters and observes an array of vile and villainous men of all social classes virtually all of whom abuse the women in their lives. One of her only two supportive male friends is a woman pretending to be a man, the only way for her to have a successful career as New York City doctor. Blake’s only concession to convention is her decision to let her heroine, Laura, marry in the end the one male found to be worthy. 3 Unless we count The Marble Faun—which hesitates to forgive murder in the name of love, while proving (again) that Puritans can marry without lust—the next decade begins with Elsie Venner (1861), the frst of three “medicated novels” by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., which at frst glance appears to take up where some short stories of Hawthorne left of: if Roderick Elliston has swallowed a snake (sort of), and Beatrice Rappaccini is poisoned in her physical nature, then surely if Elsie’s mother was bitten by a snake while pregnant, her ofspring cannot fail to exhibit at least some of the traits of the mysterious serpent tribe. Unlike Hawthorne, whom Melville diagnosed as something like a closet Calvinist, Holmes is an avowed

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liberal: he may have complained to Harriet Beecher Stowe about some inherited inability to get the “iron of Calvinism” out of their blood, but one should not be surprised if his fctions reveal an attempt to do just that. Indeed Holmes’s own (second) preface confesses that his real subject is the moral absurdity of the prevailing doctrine of original sin: how could a being poisoned at conception possibly be guilty of the traits thereby inherited? Such a creature was to be pitied rather than called to divine judgment.9 In the end, of course, the troubled Elsie Venner is relieved of her snakelike traits and abilities. Rejected by the young student-teacher she has somehow learned to care for, she dies a fully human creature; and not before confessing her pure-hearted love for her father. So all’s well in the end. It’s not quite as reassuring as the ending of Hawthorne’s equally serpentine “Egotism,” where the female prophetess of the doctrine that love cures all declares that, whether real or merely typic, all that snaky stuf was nothing but some “dark fantasy,” meaningless under the aspect of eternity. But close enough for the liberal theology. Close enough, that is, to suggest that somebody else has been reassured by the happy ending of Emerson’s Nature where, under that aspect, things like spiders and snakes “shall be no more seen.”10 Yet, not even this programmatic optimism can erase the troubling suspicion, left over from the snake of Eden, that sex and sin were somehow coeval. It might require an unrepentant Frederick Crews to worry the psycho-sexual signifcance of the mysterious cave where the deviant Elsie Venner hides out; but it is hard to resist the intimation that when people witness Elsie’s wild dance performances they feel themselves made aware, if only subliminally, of a stark advertisement of the primal fact which the Puritan version of Victorian civility had agreed not to mention. The ordinary reader is left with the question of why Elsie has to die: is it really that unrequited love which has killed of few enough “Gentlemen”? The man she has learned to love has been very interested in her curious condition, very concerned for her fate; it would have been easy for this fascination to turn into love. But then what? Another, altogether less medicated novel. What would their married life be like? Would she have been just too sexy for the mildmannered medical student who kills his nemesis by accident? Or is there no strong reason for Holmes’ titular heroine to survive the collapse of her allegorical function? What if a guilty identity really was better than none? Closer yet to the marrow of Puritan Divinity—and produced just after the close of the “unwritten war”—the marital history of one Lillie Ravenel involves, along with a “Conversion from Secession to Loyalty,” involves as well her repenting an ill-starred alliance with a Southern-born, rather dashing but unprincipled Colonel Carter and the bestowing of her mature afections on a less glamorous but ever-virtuous Captain from Connecticut. Whew! What job of work will the immature but fourishing American

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novel not undertake? A good deal of the novel’s interest arises from Captain Colburne’s discovery that New Orleans is not at all like New England, that in a climate diferent enough to make it seem almost a diferent country, the senses blossom almost as lush as the bougainvillea; that the women there speak openly about intimate matters; and that the men— some of them at any rate—keep mistresses in a certain “quarter.” Pas jolie, as a representative character teaches us to say in French, but well enough permis (162).11 Almost an international novel, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion bespeaks the dreaded French infuence even more than does The Scarlet Letter. The warm Southern diference, splendidly invoked in a sonnet by E. A. Robinson, will be further explored in The Awakening by a liberated woman named Kate Chopin. For the moment, however, New England is allowed to win. And the Hawthorne who seemed dazzled by the feminist rebellion of Hester Prynne is controlled by the Hawthorne who brought Hester back to New England and a life of good works. But if conversion involves repentance for past mistakes, it cannot for that reason annul the memory. And the Lillie Ravenel who eventually marries Edward Colburne is not at all the same as the romantically illuded young woman he frst met. Bearing a child may or may not be “the Apotheosis of Womanhood” (372), but by most accounts it makes a big diference. Little enough is said about the “love” of Mr. and Mrs. Carter but, so far as I know, you can’t sleep with an experienced Southern Gentleman-Soldier and not know it. Then too, in her husband’s absence, Lillie gets to see more of the world—and the war—than anything for which her privileged life in New Orleans or South Carolina could have prepared her. A small female bildungsroman hides here. And thinking about the diference between stif and chilly New England and the warm and fowery South, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) permits the title character to discover, along with the Beauty of Union, the transcendent superiority of a certain Captain Colburne, who can love her well because he loves Virtue (if not the Union) even more. OK: if Puritanism did not win the Civil War—as it most assuredly did the Revolution—it was through no fault of John William De Forest.12 In the simpler case, Lillie Ravenel probably should have known better. Certainly her father knew: suspecting Carter’s morals, he warns his daughter that “he will make you miserable.” Knowing nothing of his actual life, he nevertheless recognizes the type: he was one of the class known in the world as “men about town”: a class not only obnoxious to the Doctor’s moral sentiments as the antipodes of his own purity, but also as being a natural product of that slaveholding system which he regarded as a compendium of injustice and wickedness. (188)

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The examples which follow feature the sin of dissolute drunkenness, but the narrator’s use of the word “purity” suggests that he suspects sexual immorality as well. But the father withholds his suspicions, and the silence permits his daughter her natural response to the fattery of the departing proposal of this worldly and handsome soldier. That and “the subtle and potent sense which draws the two sexes together [as] an inexorable despot” (173). He says this of Carter, who seems to be forgetting that Lillie is not rich, but no doubt it applies to Lillie as well. And she in complete innocence. But the reader knows what to expect. More complex—and dangerous, perhaps—is the experience of parttime Captain Colburne who fnds the American South not unattractive. In South Carolina, where both the novel and the war have their beginning. Even there, the dinner-party conversation of Southerners reminds him that “New [Haven] is not a lively nor a sociable place” (15). And from the outset he fnds the southern manners of the (then) Lieutenant-Colonel Carter quite agreeable. His frst sight of the deep South strikes him as “marsupial”; seeming to him entirely unsuitable for human habitation, it reminds him of Milton’s “Chaos” (110–11). But then—less than a page later, in one of the letters he writes back to Dr. Ravenel—this remarkable turn-around: We have sailed out of the marsupial period into the comparatively modern era of fuvial deposits and luxuriant vegetation. Give my compliments to Miss Ravenel and tell her that I modify my criticism on the scenery of Louisiana. On either side the land is a living emerald. The plantations are embowered in orange groves—in a glossy mass of brilliant, fragrant verdure. (111) Overcome by all this “tropical beauty,” Colburne, In his bookish New England imagination, seems to have imagined himself to have “lived a few thousands of years since yesterday” (90); but the wittier reader notices the passage from one domain to another, as if this were indeed an international novel: more than James in London, more like Howells in Florence, Colburne is discovering a strange new world. And ahead of him there is still the intriguing American section with its own French Quarter. Ladies there, as well as fowers, including the charming seductress Mrs. Larue, as able to befriend and instruct this Connecticut Yankee as to revise her political opinions depending on occasion and audience. An education in herself. But of course the education here is that of Lillie. Its climax comes as a shock: unlike Elsie Venner, Lillie Ravenel does not die of failed romance: to be sure, she faints dead away when she learns of her husband’s latest infdelity—and, at the same time, of his fraudulent fnancial enterprises; but she recovers herself, in time to think again about the man who could not

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quite propose to her on the eve of his departure into battle. And—happily enough, as the never-absent narrator insists on pointing out—the brave but perfdious one is killed in battle, relieving himself and all others concerned of having to face the painful scene of redundant accusation and preposterous excuse. Absent also is anything like a representation of what, in the long run, Mr. and Mrs. Colburne will be able to make of one another. De Forest’s encompassing work is even more insistently a novel than Holmes’ bare-bones efort and, with some sense of ordinary novelistic expectations in mind, he leaves us with nothing more than a three-page prediction: having learned what really matters, Lillie Ravenel can now almost do without her beloved father. And as for “soldier citizen” Colburne, have no fear, for he is “conscious of a loved and loving wife” and, plus, “a growing balance in the bank . . .” (485). Well, what could go wrong? Again, an emphatic refusal of the task of trying to show what, down from the altar, proper marital love can be expected to look like. As with Holmes, thematic appetite Is surely part of the problem. But so, surely, is some sense that the truth of such matters will bear hardly any looking into. Or, alternatively, that the form and the forum has not yet been revealed. 4 By the 1870s, when all proto-modern fction was breaking loose, we have to face up (and lose to) the complex examples of Howells and James, where love and marriage greatly matter, but mostly in a mood of politeness and almost never abstracted from the larger context of social class and manners. Twain too begins to loom in this decade, but Tom Sawyer appears to have sprung from his Platonic conception of himself, and Huck Finn, whose story was begun the same year, has a drunken and abusive father but no mother anywhere in sight or in memory. But, in the terms of one controlling myth, it is foolish to search for the Mother of the Old Adam. Nor does Twain ever fnd heterosexual romance to be his irresistible donnee. Not even later, in the throes of some desperate naturalism: evidently the way to deal with an unmanageable subject was to avoid it altogether. But in the master list of uneasy responses, repression counts. None of that in the smiling realism of William Dean Howells. Indeed, early and late, we are treated to the matrimonial success of the “prudently romantic”13 Basil March and his obliging wife, Isabel, altogether willing to hazard the new fortune of a move from Boston to New York—whither thou goest I will wither—and like her husband, in love, at the end as well as at the beginning, with her spouse and with the largely agreeable (if also satire-requiring) surfaces of American life. Call that Married and Mated. Not made in heaven, exactly, but warrantable in a way which that of the Hawthornes has turned out not to be. But not so fast: some critical clichés have their exception. For one thing, as Robert Gillespie has patiently

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shown, Howells’ fctional treatment of his own marriages went through several distinct phases; and more important, perhaps, their interactions are almost always mildly antagonistic—he taking always an interest in practical, common, and ordinary, she loving mystery, intrigue, sentiment and fancy. So that, although marriage must be regarded as a necessary institution, no one should expect a perfect harmony. Perfectly aware that “Marriage is primarily a sexual relationship”14 Howells knew as well that other considerations might well make the institution as difcult as it appeared to him to be inevitable. From the frst— and nowhere more noticeable than in A Hazard of New Fortunes—the marriage of Basil and Isabel March reveals more than a little of the strain biographers have read in that of the troubled author and his, well, codependent wife. On the compelling account of Kenneth Lynn, deliberately, Basil and Isabel are anagrams, emphasizing thereby both similarity and diference: and March, it turns out, is the month when the author met his wife, even as portrayed in the initiatory account called Their Wedding Journey (1872). And, famously, the “Hazard” of the Marches leaving a settled life and successful career in Boston for the challenges of the more complex and less friendly world of New York is the Howells’ own family story. And of course the move was made over Isabel’s protest that she detested New York as “so big and so hideous,” agreeing only on the condition of their fnding a proper house.15 Successful but troubled: such is the cordial disagreement that marks The Rise of Silas Lapham. Along the way, we are assured that novels that make too much of young love and fantasies of romance are exposed explicitly and as such, and in the end novel-readers are made to face the fact that families may lament the gaining of a daughter as well as the losing of a son and still not be “mean or unamiable people.”16 Less argumentatively—more novelistically—we fnd a wife, who had been her husband’s English teacher and then served for years as his (perhaps) over-active social conscience, herself falls into the trap of wishing to honor some novelistic ethic of needless self-sacrifce while her husband’s business is failing; and who suspects that he is having an afair with the war-widow he is generously helping to get by. More insightfully still, Howells notices that she both opposes and abets her husband’s social ambitions; indeed, the co-dependent drama of who really wants the new house (and why) is one of the fnest things in the novel. In nineteenth-century American fction, in fact, where class feelings are not supposed to exist. Conceived in the fastness of Vermont, the marriage endures, with signifcant stress, the pressures of the unfamiliar, often unfriendly pressures of Boston’s tightly bound social world; so that, in spite of their thwarted aspirations, both are probably happy enough to retreat to the place and the ethos that has made them the strong and imperfect characters they are. But it has not been easy. But the signature exception is A

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Modern Instance (1882)—that remarkable study of marrying in haste and repenting, not in Reno but in Indiana, as this is still the nineteenth century. A book that tries hard and just barely fails to demystify the sacrament of matrimony. Well, OK, it’s not really a sacrament in the territory of New England, to which the latter-day state of Maine sort of belongs. Luther may have eliminated that one alone with several others, and the Puritans had been careful to turn nuptials into a civil ceremony, but that did not keep writers like John Winthrop and John Cotton—with a certain mystical union clearly in mind—from treating the marriage promise as the epitome of all their covenants. Later in the century, and in a world elsewhere, none of this would seem threaten the moral fabric of human society, but here the issue appears to insist on itself. Protestant to the core, Milton might justify divorce, arguing that in marriage God wills actual happiness rather than mechanical fdelity, but it would be hard to show that the light of this cheery humanism dawned at once. Postponed from an earlier attempt, called “The New Medea,” painfully put aside after only a beginning, and taken up again in the midst of a crisis in the health of his daughter, the novel nevertheless begins with noticeable elan: the village where Marcia Gaylord met Bartley Hubbard is invoked in a frst paragraph that has been called “as gravely beautiful . . . as the celebrated opening of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.”17 And it faces up to the fact that the village of Equity has outlived its Puritan beginnings without a hint of reaction or hysteria: Religion there had largely ceased to be a fact of spiritual experience, and the visible church fourished on condition for the social needs of the community. It was practically understood that the salvation of one’s soul must not be made too depressing, or the young people would have nothing to do with it. (18) Like I told my class, “In case of a fre, the Unitarians would save the donuts.” More puritanic, oddly enough, is the stern morale of Marcia’s father, called Squire Gaylord, a convicted skeptic, agnostic but honest enough to take the theistic premise seriously. Yet his beloved daughter has grown up without much of what they used to call “Christian nurture,” in the utter lack of which one Bartley Hubbard can easily appear desirable. So it is not at all surprising that, with only instinct and what Jonathan Edwards would have called mere natural virtue to guide them, the two young people fall into a relationship, and then into a marriage, that goes well enough for a time but cannot endure much stress. Girlish innocence on the one side, jovial cynicism on the other. Probably not enough.

214 Modern Instances The frst date, at night and unchaperoned, might raise eyebrows elsewhere, but here, where some form of “the New England civilization . . . keeps its simplicity,” the incident “would have interested everyone, but shocked no one.” Silently observed, their frst kiss provokes Marcia’s alert and concerned father to ask, “Are you and Bartley Hubbard engaged?” And he solemnly warns his daughter that her love interest has in him “the making of a scoundrel.” (A certain Doctor Ravenel might had said something such to his daughter, in a book which taught Howells a thing or two about “realism.”) But nothing else is done to prevent nature from taking its course. And the reader is probably less alarmed: Romance in the Provinces; very interesting; let’s see where this is going. Lots of places, as it turns out. First, a broken engagement when, in an argument over Bartley’s relation to the red-haired ofce girl, he disgraces himself by knocking the ofce boy cold. Rejected by Marcia, and self-exiled to a logging-camp, Bartley learns the fascinating story of a half-educated self-made logger named Kinney which he will, later, something like plagiarize. Then of to Boston—with Marcia who, having recovered herself, joins Bartley and the train, forgives his past philandering, and accept his on-thespot proposal to get married by a dotty old Reverend who, we later learn, may have left out part of the ceremony. Their Boston days begin with a spending spree, interrupted by a visit from Marcia’s father who, accepting the hasty marriage as a fait accompli, tells his daughter that her place is beside her husband, whom he accepts without forgiving. Happily, an angry Bartley is absent from the parting. Bartley’s free-lance newspaper career goes well enough, as does their marriage—two country people more or less out of place in Boston—but Marcia thinks Bartley is not ambitious enough, and “one hot day in August, when Bartley had been doing nothing for a week,” she reverts “to the question of his taking up the law again” (151). Instead, he secures a “regular basis” at the Events and is assigned to the “‘Solid Men of Boston’” series, where we fnd him at the opening of Silas Lapham novel. Social relationships begin, in the proper novelistic manner, and the actual plot comes into view when Marcia meets and admires the lifestyle of the Hallecks. Then comes a baby, with its attendant enthusiasm; a visit from the father, after whom the Girl is named—Flavius becoming Flavia—and life goes on as Robert Frost might say, “un-terribly.” Flavia must have a church because, as Marcia refects, “One mustn’t be left too free. I’ve never had anyone to control me, and now I can’t control myself at the very times when I need to do it the most. . . . And . . . Bartley too” (202). And why not the religion of the Hallecks? They are good people, especially Ben. Marcia takes up with the baby; Bartley works hard but is bored at home; and then the frst crisis: in an argument about something else, Marcia brings up the matter of Hannah Morrison, Bartley loses his temper, and she locks him out. He wanders

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variously, has too much to drink, is brought home, dead drunk, by—oh dear—the virtuous lover from afar, Ben Halleck. And now, though only gradually, the rather slack story of banal domesticity begins to compete with a recognizably Hawthornean apologue of “conscience” or “something in its similitude.” Unaware of Bartley’s exact condition, and fearful for his life, Marcia begs Halleck to stay. Of course he cannot. But he will return after breakfast, just to be sure that nothing is really wrong. Hoping for much more but condemning the very hope. The uneven marriage plot continues until, in a crisis involving Bartley’s silent misuse of Kinney’s life story, Marcia declares that “‘There can’t be anything sacred in our marriage unless we trust each other in everything.’” Sacred? “‘Isn’t that rather a strong word to use in regard to our marriage?’” They recall the moment: had it not been after all a rather ragged afair?— with an aging minister who forgot to ask them for their intention. And Marcia is forced to confess that their union was “‘tainted with fraud from the beginning’” (256–7). With a marriage that might easily be annulled, what need a divorce? Now or later. But it comes to that in the end. Another quarrel about Hannah Morrison drives Bartley away—with, as will be the case of Dreiser’s Hurstwood, a considerable sum of money not his own. He disappears. Blaming herself, and taking noble Halleck’s advice, she searches; then she grieves; then settles into a life of her own, in Equity, with her daughter and her parents. Two years pass. When Ben Halleck, who has been abroad, returns, to ask the lawyer Atherton how Marcia is doing, if she has heard from her husband, and if he must not now be considered “dead.” But what “‘If he isn’t dead?’” What then? Well, the “argument,” as we used to say, that generated the book, just waiting to be posited. “Then he has abandoned her, and she has the right to be free: she can get a divorce!” “Oh,” said Atherton, compassionately, “has that poison got into you, Halleck? You might ask her, if she were a widow, to marry you; but how will you ask her, if she’s still a wife, to get a divorce and marry you? How will you suggest that to a woman whose constancy to her mistake has made her sacred to you?” (317) Sacred? Well, yes, somewhere somebody used to think so. But if the other word for modern is really secular, then what the hell? And so it rests for a time. Marcia is elated at Halleck’s return—proposing to his chagrin, “‘Now I know that we can fnd him.’” But no: by the spring Marcia has decided to go back to Equity: “‘I have given up. I have waited, hoping—hoping. But now I know that it is no use waiting any

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longer: he is dead.’” And just then, as luck (and the demands of moralism) would have it, the discovery, made by the sensitive and sufering Ben Halleck: alive and well and living in Indiana, Bartley Hubbard is suing Marcia Gaylord for “divorce on account of abandonment” (322). Shall he tell Marcia, resigned as she now is to his permanent absence? Indiana pretty far away from equity. But wait: the paper was delivered to Halleck by mistake; it was sent to her, “the notice that the law requires” so that she can “come and defend her cause” (324). So then it’s telegrams and of to Tecumseh County—Marcia refusing to go at frst, agreeing only when her father suggests that Bartley is about to turn “bigamist” (329). Courtroom drama, climaxing in Marcia’s insistence that Bartley not be imprisoned for his felonious behavior. He decamps for Whited Sepulcre, Arizona, where he is reported killed in a domestic dispute, At the end we have, disturbingly, a father’s angry vengeance, a lawyer’s theological hysteria, and a secret lover’s moral paralysis. Kenneth Lynn fnds this weak and disappointing, but his may not be the last word; for where else in the expanding but still restricted mentality of the American novel has any writer tried—at the expense of his own mental health— to posit a case he felt to be essentially undecidable? Of course Hallleck can marry the former Mrs. Hubbard: even the divorced Bartley urges it upon him. His anterior desire may have counted as lust; he may in fact have coveted his neighbor’s wife; but desire is not the same as intention, as even Jesus might be got to admit; and has he not, at every turn, spoken and acted on behalf of the sacredness of her ill-advised and in the end disastrous union? But will he? Is that “something in [the] similitude” of conscience able to forgive itself the sin of being glad the former husband is now, fnally, dead? Had this been his wish all along, belied by his scrupulously selfess behavior? Evidently the question turns on how Atherton will advise him—Atherton, the lawyer who had earlier advised against Halleck’s suggesting a divorce, on the ground that to do so would be to corrupt a “woman whose constancy has made her sacred to you,” and would, in wider social fact, Support . . . conditions that tempt people to marry with a mental reservation, and that weaken every marriage with the guilty hope of escape whenever a fckle mind, or secret lust, or wicked will may dictate. (319) And now, in a last-page conversation with a wife who cannot see what Ben Halleck sees in Marcia Gaylord-Hubbard, the well-married couple remind themselves that, though he once went away, “when he realized his feelings for her,” he did indeed come back; and that though “‘there was a time when he would have been glad to proft by a divorce’”; still “‘he never did.’”

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The same philosophical—but also psychological—moralist considers sending advice to Halleck on the premise that although, legally, “‘any man may ask her to marry him,’” it would be any man but the one who loved her during her husband’s life. That is, if he is such a man as Halleck. Of course it isn’t a question of gross black and white, mere right and wrong; there are degrees, there are shades. There might be redemption for another sort of man in such a marriage; but for Halleck there could only be loss— deterioration—lapse from the ideal. I should think he might sufer something of this even in her eyes. (362) Like Reuben in the eyes of Dorcas? Hawthorne has a lot to answer for. But not here. Here, we have only Clara Atherton’s Lynn-like judgment: “‘Oh how hard you are.’” And her fondly sentimental hope “‘You’re not going to write that to him’”? Well, is he? “‘Ah, I don’t know! I don’t know!’” Nor, it appears, does the author. If yes, then one more vote for Winthrop and St. Paul. Absurd, but not entirely un-admirable for that reason. The Ideal may not rage against the dying of its own lucid, lurid light, but evidently Howells, who knows which way the signs all point, is not the man to say that last good night. If, no, then let the games begin. One more instance in the unfolding of the modern: “I will love you until I don’t.” As literary periods are largely arbitrary—and paradigm shifts in the humanities largely a question of boredom—so epistemes of moral consciousness may come and go like a thief in the night. But just here, or so thought the smiling realist, there ought to be a marker. There are, of course, other “instances”—some in the wake of Howells’ and even a few that precede his rather daring example. Signifcantly, Kate Chopin’s frst novel, At Fault (1890), ofers the example of a highly principled woman not only refusing the proposal of a divorced man, but insisting that he remarry his divorced wife, leading one critic to nominate it “one of the frst novels in the United States to focus on the ethics of divorce.” More generally, Kimberley Freeman suggests that Howells, Wharton, McCarthy, and Updike count as an important tradition in the American novel; and J. H. Barnett, who suggests that Howells’ novel is the “frst full-length divorce novel of merit,” nevertheless studies a tradition beginning in 1858 and continuing well into the twentieth century. He discovers, for example, an 1858 novel by T. S. Arthur (better known as the author of a temperance novel called Ten Nights in a Bar-room) called The Hand but Not the Heart; but his best contribution may be the suggestion that there a history of the “novel of divorce” as truly as the one of “adultery.”18 And, from 1856, David Reynolds makes us aware of Laura Bullard’s Christine: Or, Woman’s Trials and Triumphs, which endorses “every demand of the

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sufrage movement,” including a relaxation of the divorce laws. Then, from the moment itself, there is James’ Portrait of a Lady. To be discussed below in other terms: for the moment we need to know that James may be responding to the pro-divorce position of much feminist ideology and also, importantly to the “divorce debates” of the 1860s and 70s, imagining “the possibility—indeed the desirability—of dissolving the marriage tie,” thus articulating some of the central arguments in favor of liberalized divorce.19 But it ends on a conservative note, agreeing more or less with Howells, but leaving his longtime friend the task of hysterical refutation. 5 Predictably, the “naturalistic” novels of the 1890s will only make things worse. But Henry James was only sometimes and ambiguously a Naturalist, and his interrogation of the fate of romance in the modern world began well before The Bostonians (1886), in which he brought “the decline of the sentiment of sex” to the center of the feld of modern fction. In fact, true love runs rough from the very outset. Few temptations of the fesh, to be sure, and no nauseous ministerial amours, but sufcient evidence to indicate that the happy plot of the marriage knot would hereafter be a distinguishing mark of unserious fction. Chivalry had died well before the Daimler-Benz motor car replaced the horse and carriage, and to the ever-single Henry James it would come as no surprise to learn that Sigmund Freud came late, and then just barely, to endorse the monogamous nuclear family as a necessary evil. Much of the early, tentative James can be passed over lightly enough, but even here there are clear anticipations of his later obsession with the question of love and marriage. And sex of course. “Daisy Miller” merely firts with the question, but Roderick Hudson (1876) avoids it head-on. It’s about “the Artist,” if you insist, but hardly in the abstract. The young sculptor requires a European education as much as had James himself; needing to be himself, he hates being watched by Roland Mallet, or by anyone, if only to become himself the watcher; what he cannot do, apparently, is fall passionately in love. But he does, and it is the end of him as an artist. He might have got on well enough with the innocent Mary Garland back in puritanic Massachusetts, but the more mysterious Christina Light is simply too strong a dose. Later James would thank “Art” for redeeming his (sexless) life from a solemn and endless sadness; but thus early did he decide that, to be pure, the passion for art was not to be shared or compromised. Similarly, The Europeans (1878) works hard on the cultural contrast between the manners of two visiting Europeans and their American relatives, but mating and marrying is rather more than a subtext. The premise, after all—the donnee, as a matter of fact—is the plan of a morganatic European woman to locate and secure a wealthy American husband; and

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although she returns, eventually and after several unsuccessful experiments, in the meantime a wonderful game of mismatch and mismate has broken out. Felix, the other European, ends up marrying Gertrude, one of the two eligible daughters of the kinsman and host of the Europeans, even though her puritanic father would greatly have preferred a union with an American minister—leaving the minister free to marry Charlotte, the host’s other daughter. Turns out the wealthy New Englander has, as well as the daughters, a son, Cliford, who has been “sent down” from Harvard for drunkenness. Surprisingly, his otherwise rigid father urges him to befriend and take lessons in emotional and life skills from the older and more experienced European woman, Eugenia, who suggests that he visit her in Germany. But before anything romantic can develop: returning from a stay in Newport, wealthy bachelor Robert Acton and Cliford discover one another, hence Eugenia’s insincerity, and Cliford is left to marry Acton’s less duplicitous sister. One’s tentative conclusion from all this redundant premarital emplotment is that the Master’s patient fctional attention is, with some exceptions, engaged less with the question of how monogamous marriages might be thought to work than with how the hell they come about in the frst place. Elsewhere, American romance had suggested that “Juxtaposition marries men.” But Melville is a simpler soul, right? Yet the work from the 1870s that stands out in this regard is The American (1876). Beginning with the refusal of some Christ-bearing New Man to fall for the come-on of the little French copyist, whose sexual availability is seen by her out-of-luck father as the only way to recover fortune and social standing, it proceeds by permitting a somewhat imaginative woman, unhappily married to a shallow and conventional co-expatriate, to introduce his to a highly cultured and something-like-beautiful and still rather young woman, released from an arranged and abusive marriage by the death of the husband, but bound by promise to marry again only at her mother’s discretion. That’s right, the family is, though aristocratic from the sixteenth century, themselves decidedly un-rich; Bellegardes, James has named the family, but they too are looking to sell the belle to the proper bidder. The New Man is very rich but altogether uncultured; more sensitive than his foil, the boorish husband of the would-be matchmaker—and in the 1907 Preface James confesses that in anything but a “romance” (12) the Bellegardes would have snapped him up but, given James’ his donnee—nice American guy woefully mistreated by people pretending to moral superiority—we get a tangled tale of their saying a condescending yes and then, when some English Lord shows up (Dumbass Deepmere), regretting to inform our hero that by and large and on the whole and in end they realize they cannot fnd it in themselves to accept a “commercial person” (218).20 OK: the man who would get culture and marry up, whose

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mantra has been “Energy and ingenuity can arrange everything” (113), fnds he must learn a painful, almost religious lesson: what part of no does he not understand? Take it to church. But wait: what about love? Or sex? Or the sentiment thereof? Well there’s some of that. One of the heroine’s brothers falls madly in lust with the sexy little copyist, dying in a needless duel, said absurdly to be about her “honor,” with the son of a brewer named something like Jollyfat, who happened to get of a lucky shot. There’s sentiment for you. Did I remember to say chivalry was over? But that leaves Newman and his beleaguered inamorata, the mysterious Madame Claire de Cintre. At the moment of his frst proposal—to a woman who seemed to him “rare and precious—a very expensive article” (110), she at frst refuses and then, threatened with his persistence, charges him to wait six months. After which, he tries to assure the still reluctant widow that with him she will be “as safe—as safe—. . . as in your father’s arms.” She thinks he simplifes things. He thinks it is indeed very simple: “We love each other.” But he is so diferent. Maybe just because he is so diferent. “My only reason—,” she blurts and then breaks of. “Your only reason,” the suitor intrudes, “in the midst of his golden sunrise” is that “you love me” (164). Well, yes, something like that; and then the opportunity to escape from my horrible family, the matriarch of which turns out to be a murderess. And what about the “Passionate Pilgrim” named Christopher Newman? Earlier on, the Narrator, introducing himself as Newman’s “biographer,” has sought to undercut the hero’s self-fattering sense that “he was not in love,” suggesting that his feeling a certain “heartache” (149) argued otherwise. But the reader can scarcely forget the sense that, from the frst, a highly stylish marriage had been part of Newman’s cultural program: to Tom Tristram he professed a passion for “the tallest mountains, and the bluest lakes, and the fnest pictures,” ending his list with emphasis on “the most beautiful women” (35); and, just later, to the more quizzical Mrs. Tristram, this only partly ironic confession: I want a great woman. I stick to that. . . . I have succeeded, and now what am I to do with my success? To make it perfect, as I see it, there must be a beautiful woman perched on the on the pile, like a statue on a monument. (44) And then, in the specifc case of Madame de Cintre, that remark about the “rare and expensive . . . article.” It gets a bit more serious, no doubt, or we would not be able to take Newman’s dashed hope at all seriously, but nowhere does James permit us to become overly romantic about his project.

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Ofered almost self-consciously as an ironic climax to a well-defned, “frst period” of heterosexual investigations, The Portrait of a Lady (1886) might almost go without saying. Starting, or very nearly so, with a love option obscenely named Caspar Goodwood, and proceeding to a Machiavellian mismatch to a man who would “like to be pope for the consideration” (227),21 it ofers very slender promise of sentimental reassurance. Isabel Archer’s gratuitous endowment makes it possible for her to explore—freely and, as it seems, dangerously—what life has to ofer a woman of sense and sensibility. No Daisy Miller, she. Apparently immune to Roman Fever, she nevertheless makes the mistake American novels warn against, of confusing culture and polite manners with character. Isabel quickly learns that she and the egotistical Osmond have almost nothing in common, but she becomes attached to Pansy, apparently the daughter of Osmond’s frst marriage but actually his illegitimate daughter with one Madame Merle, a really bad hat who plots behind the scenes. Isabel becomes resistant enough to deny her husband’s wish in visiting the death bed of the man whose endowment has enabled her disastrous experiment in female independence; but at the end it is unclear if she will return to Osmond or become, herself, a modern instance. And then there is The Bostonians (1886), most memorable of the three large quasi-naturalistic novels of James’ experimental second period—and the place where the daunted and diminished sentiment of sex has to be represented by a Southerner, a former confederate whose politics, the author suggests, are “some three hundred years behind the age” (193).22 The fact that in the end he wins the young and vibrant Verena Tarrant away from a Boston Marriage and a career in Professional Feminism may indicate that James himself is willing to admit that old-fashioned “sentiment” is now encumbered with premises less attractive; and there is no denying that Verena’s last-page tears predict a not altogether happy marital future, even as they reveal the sadness of the loss of a life (and a love) she might have had; but evidently James himself preferred it this way. And one can see why: never quite able to disregard the vulgarity of politics as such, the “mind so fne” as never to be violated by anything like ideas, could hardly fail to notice the unlovely side of the women’s movement. Leaving Olive is painful enough, but in the arms of her antique Southern Gentleman, Verena Tarrant is also escaping the world of her spirit-faking father and the indiscriminate enthusiasms of a prophet like the fighty Miss Birdseye. Nor from the same, “middle” period, can either The Princess Casamassima (1886) or The Tragic Muse (1890): in the frst case, a bookbinder, radicalized by an anarchist acquaintance, fnds suicide the only alternative to the mission to kill a Duke, hateful to him, it appears, as his mother had once been seduced by a Lord. And of course his death prevents any further association with Christina Light, left over from Roderick Hudson and now

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become a Princess, alienated from her husband. Evidently the very rich are diferent. Or maybe they’re just more European. In the latter, a scion of a British political family, having tried politics, resigns from Parliament and sets up as a painter, much to the dismay of his girlfriend, herself an ardent politician. For the rest, it’s a lot of falling in love at cross purposes, ending with some un-Jamesian marriages alleged to be happy. There’s even the suggestion that the would-be artist and his dyed-in-the-wool political girlfriend may marry after all. So: there may indeed be life after both politics and art, but we never get to see it. And readers, then and now, have not been convinced. The marital scene is hardly sunnier in the three big novels of the Major Phase. The Ambassadors (1901) appears to re-inscribe the renunciation theme of The American: the redundantly named Lambert Strether learns to love the desirable and available Maria Gostrey almost as much as he loves Europe, but feels in the end he must return to the dreary town of Woollett—whatever article they manufacture there—and to the dull and the moralistic Mrs. Newsome—whoever had once proposed to whom. His reason, as he explains to the lover he is jilting, is that he must not appear, “out of the whole afair, to have got anything for [himself.]” What about your European education, she wants to know, not only in art and culture, but in the senses, and in a morale that makes Chad Newsome’s afair with the rare and mysterious Madame de Vionnet appear in a light that shines dimly if at all in puritanic Massachusetts. Well that, OK, but not “you”— “It’s you who would make me wrong” (365).23 Make the wealthy and generous Mrs. Newsome into something like a procurer, one gathers. And so one almost sees the point. But still there is, on the other side, the love to which the pure-hearted Marie Gostrey has come to feel entitled. Chad may prove himself simply a cad, succumbing to the bribe of many American dollars but, with the example of Balzac in the background, Lewis Lambert Strether might be held to a higher, or at least a more complex standard. Dean Howells might help us here: is this not one of those beautiful sacrifces so beloved by the writers of romance? And, more psycho-sexually, does not one feel here, urgently, James’ own well-established will to abstinence? Ask Hemingway about the “tricycle accident.” Or is it in the end just cultural? Like the men said, Passion is in New England a “soilure of the wit,” and Puritanism is the “haunting fear that somewhere, someone may be happy.”24 Whatever the deep explanation, the fact of plot and theme is clear: Chad may play around with one or more partners thought to be inappropriate in Massachusetts, and the Ambassador sent to rescue him from sin may something like fall in love with a truly admirable woman whom, gay or not, James himself might well have married; but, with or without the sentiment of sex, no one here gets both married and well-mated.

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Richly admired by adoring Jacobites everywhere, The Wings of the Dove (1902) is all but self-parodic in the context of a search for suitable and satisfactory sex. One wonders where to begin. On the one hand there is, in the authoritative words of Leon Edel, James’ “myth of the ‘sacred woman,’” a kind of personal virgin-worship that he [unlike Henry Adams] disliked when he saw it in the church: Minnie Temple rediviva, sitting for a deathbed “Portrait.” Why not? Dante had accomplished much the same with his mystifcation of a pre-pubescent Italian chick. Except, on the other hand, that in this melodramatic tale, James would have to “gild the ugliness and the vulgarity with his prose and his style.”25 It works only if you say so. Rich but dying, Minnie-Milly loves Merton, who is betrothed to Kate; Kate denies to her that she loves Merton, telling him to be “kind” to her—marry her, in fact. Her last days will be sweet, and no doubt her “wings” will protect them both from beyond the grave; so, it appears will her money. Much of which she leaves to Merton, even after she learns of the plot. Giving the often dense Merton Densher—you guessed it—a matchless opportunity to renounce. Which he ofers to Kate: Ah, thank you, some dialogue after pages of unparagraphed prose, dictated to a willing amanuensis and allowed to stand by a respectful but incompetent editor. He will marry her “in an hour” if she chooses him over the money; marry him, that is to say, “as we were.” But then, as she says, shaking her head in refusal, “we shall never again be as we were” (403).26 Thank God for that: they could hardly have been worse. And so, after a little, proleptic necrophilia, Merton Densher will live on, in love with the memory of a saint he never truly loved as a woman. And without the woman for whom, on Edel’s account, a Jamesian male had fnally felt passion. (Some “young sculptor” in the biographical background, but that is not part of the donnee.) Not here, any longer, “‘Live all you can,’” as Strether found he could not quite, but love can endure from beyond the grave. And wasn’t it pretty ugly to think so? So that one begins to suspect that, if James was indeed the person to observe a certain remission in the mystique of romance, he may not have been, at the same time, the man to say what it ought to have been. Nor will the example of The Golden Bowl (1904) entirely correct that impression. More complex, more civilized—but ugly enough in its way— James’ master-story of fathers and daughters and friends and lovers and wives and mistresses adequately demonstrates how civility may learn to avoid unpleasantness and make the best of a bad situation, but it does nothing to counter our sense that James almost knows—almost gleefully rejoices in the fact—that sex and sentiment may not belong in the same sentence. Not since Caspar Goodwood has he dared to give a character a name like Fanny Assingham. Worse than anything in Dickens. And justnot-funny enough to make us suspect that his literary conscience is not always altogether “fne.”

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Indeed, how are we supposed to feel about a loving and devoted daughter who silently rescues her father from a situation in which his young wife is having an afair with an old lover who is also the daughter’s husband? By now we know that “Love won’t always do/What you want it to,” but this seem stretching the point. Not to mention the fact that Victorian convention might interpret the daughter’s love for the father as less electric than might Dr. Freud. James may have begun with the idea that the dilemma of the American artist was to be his master topic, but before long he seems to suspect that the performance of the heterosexual love he was never to know raised more problems than could be resolved in fction, long or short, written or dictated, novel or romance. And how could he not know his own (rather analytic) portraits were making matters worse? Secretaries of Society have the duty faithfully to record changes in manners and morals, but they need to remember that their recordings of social fact have a way of becoming normative. 6 Before the studied pessimism of the Master’s Major Phase, however, we encounter the degradation of the Naturalistic Nineties. Turns out there actually are fctional accounts of how the other half lives. Not enough, perhaps, but in Maggie (1893) Stephen Crane tells us, briefy enough, how a moral enough woman came to be a “Girl of the Streets.” Bad home life barely covers the case: drunken, abusive father has the good grace to die, but mother survives to provide drunken rages of her own; plus brother Jimmie, nice enough at frst but destined to turn rough and ugly. Plausibly enough Maggie falls in love with Jimmie’s bartender friend, Pete, who takes her to museums and to the theatre, where one night’s performance causes her to wonder whether “a girl who lived in a tenement and worked in a shirt factory” could acquire something like “culture and refnement” (54)27 Nor does her taking up with Pete make her “feel like a bad woman”—indeed “To her knowledge she had never seen any better.” But fantasy comes hard in bad neighborhoods, and when Maggie’s mother accuses her—in the Irish brogue the main characters all speak—of being “gone teh deh devil” (59), she becomes dependent on Pete for a place to live; and when he deserts her for “a woman of brilliance and audacity,” well, you get the idea. Yet no account is given of Maggie’s life as a prostitute. One brief (antepenultimate) chapter shows us “A girl of the painted cohorts of the city” wandering, from better to worse neighborhoods, down toward the river, fnding herself rejected by a representative series of possible clients, fastening at last on “a huge fat man in torn and greasy garments,” and hearing, far away, the “varied sounds of life, made joyous by distance and seeming unapproachableness, [that] came faintly and died away to silence.” The rest is, well, irony. Remember, this is literature and not yellow journalism.

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So we get one fnal scene in a “partitioned-of section of a saloon” (83), and then, fnally, the report of “A soiled unshaven man” saying to a woman sitting “at a table eating like a fat monk in a picture” that “‘Mag’s dead’” (87). Neighbors gather; Jimmy is sent for the body; and, to the satisfaction of the pious onlookers, who sing out, with proper call and response, that “Deh Lord gives and deh Lord takes away” (88), the hapless mother, fnding a voice that “arose like a scream of pain,” afrms, twice, “I’ll forgive her” (89) Crane, who elsewhere reminds us that there are no bricks to throw at the temple, can generously forgive the debasement of sex, but not the attempt to cover this—and other facts of elemental life—with the clichés of denial some call “faith.” Plainly, then, misery enough for a novella. Call it blast nouvelle. But for degradation full-time we have, at the end of the decade, McTeague (1899), by Frank Norris: from the moment this un-certifed (and, oh dear, also Irish) dentist, with no frst name meets Trina, girlfriend of his good friend, Marcus, things begin to go badly for this ordinary man. Clearly a product of (incomplete) evolution, he hardly knows what to think—indeed he hardly knows who he is—when he fnds Trina asleep, helpless in his dentist chair. But he too seems helpless, for evidently it is the “brute” and not the dentist who, aroused to uncustomary passion, kisses his patient full on the mouth. And this same lower self is full of violence as well as lust, as we learn in his fghts with his former “pal” Marcus—and of course in his eventual murder of Trina, from the fnal stages of which we are tastefully spared. Elsewhere, in Henry James, for example, the crimes committed in the name of love may bear the marks of civilized indirection, but here it’s all very nearly red in tooth and claw. Not of the surface, perhaps, but when kiss comes to push comes to shove. Of course there is more to the story than this, or Frank Norris would hardly count as a proper novelist. Marcus having generously stepped aside, the marriage of Trina and McTeague goes along pretty smoothly for a while—he admiring, feeling himself in love with the more refned and delicate partner; she in awe of his size and strength, begging him repeatedly to declare that his love for her is “big.” Nothing about their sex life, of course, as it will be some time before community morals will permit that sort of thing, but there is foreplay enough for the period. Troubles develop when—deus ex machina—Trina wins 50000 dollars in a lottery: he wants to spend, she wants to live (and even save) of of the interest. Things get much worse when Marcus, angry at having given up the girl and the money, reports to the authorities that McTeague has no proper license. Shocked, as we are not, that McTeague has never been to college, Trina nevertheless recovers herself, as a dutiful wife and a compulsive saver. She will continue her cottage-industry of creating model animals for Noah’s ark, and her husband will look for another line of work; besides, there is

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still the interest from the 5K—out of which she has gleefully saved a secret store of a few hundred dollars. McTeague never does fnd another steady job, his career as a manufacturer of dental supplies lasting only a week; and yet, with increasing tension, the marriage—and the ethos of the social novel—continues. McTeague no longer loves Trina in any proper sense, but he quite accepts that she is his life; and she, more and more insanely a miser, learns to accept, even take pleasure in his increasing brutality. Until one day, reduced to a daytime regime of aimless wandering, he simply drifts away. She searches, grieves, then almost accepts his disappearance. In the space of which. She begins to withdraw part of the capital from her invested winnings, eventually cashing out the entire amount—for the purpose, it seems, of making love to the beautiful coins in her mate-less marriage bed. In case you thought that women with some degree of refnement and a modicum of artistic skill were incapable of their own sort of degradation. But this is better than walking the streets, right? But then he returns: penniless and hungry, he demands the money. She refuses, arousing in him the brute, who brutally murders her, in a scene cut mercifully short. So ends the “Story of San Francisco.” Well appointed with minor characters, it has been “regionalist” as well as social-scientifc. The novel ends with McTeague hopelessly stranded in Death Valley— having fed from his crime and, on the way, introduced us to some so-far unfamiliar California geography. Alone, except for the dead body of his former pal, who had handcufed himself to the criminal in their fnal death struggle. And no witnesses except for his caged canary. What the hell is a brutish fugitive from civil justice doing with that damn thing? Why not?— as a newfound gold-mining “pardner” had suggested—why not “break its neck an’ chuck it” (292).28 The answer would be complicated. Why had McTeague earlier rejoiced so completely when he was able to recover his concertina from the pawnbroker to whom it had been sold? And why in the name of “desperate naturalism” had he acquired, cherished, refused to sell, then sold as a very last resort, the comical gold tooth that had crudely yet sentimentally marked his dental “Parlors”? Well, you guessed it: because on somebody’s more than Darwinian hypothesis, the brute has within himself the seeds of something fner. Not the soul of an Artist, perhaps, but of someone who almost knows that the love of beauty is our only intimation of immortality. A victim of his lower nature, McTeague perishes in the wilderness, a hunted and haunted criminal. But as they say, “The body dies/The body’s beauty lives.” Elsewhere, with the moral premise of Naturalism less explicit, Harold Frederick’s Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) do the worst they can, consistent with some loyalty to a competing, properly novelistic, obligation to the “regionalist” problem

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of comparative manners. Regional diferences matter very signifcantly in the latter, where we observe that an upbringing in Presbyterian Kentucky (and even the fantasy of romance with a Southern Ofcer) is no preparation for the socially open but sexually strict mores of the Catholic Creoles of New Orleans. But even the fateful, then fnally ironic career of Theron Ware is not without its comparative element: all goes well with the faith and the marriage of this recognizable product of the Burned Over District; but when the Methodist Bishop moves him to a more sophisticated Rochester (called “Octavius”), where the local priest has a red-headed female friend who plays the organ at his church and burns incense in her bedroom, things take a turn toward the tragic. Until it turns out that in the view of a suddenly-cynical author, the Reverend Mr. Ware had nothing like a soul to lose in the frst place. Impressed by the historical learning of the Catholic priest—you mean even Augustine knew Abraham was an allegory?—you mean my old ideas about him are outmoded?—Theron is also naively attracted to his lady friend, the artistic Celia Madden, who eventually admits him to her workroom and to another that is her “very own”; mistaking liberated firtation for sexual invitation, Theron utterly misinterprets the signifcance of what she intends as a good-bye kiss. In the meantime, however, another woman ofers Theron a diferent sort of temptation: moved by the dynamic and successful performance of a visiting Methodist Awakener, he asks of this Sister Soulsby if she were “at any time sincerely converted.” “Oh, bless you yes,” responded Sister Soulsby. Not only once—dozens of times—I may say every time. We [she and her husband] couldn’t do the good work if we weren’t. But that’s a matter of temperament—of emotions. (180)29 Well, yes, and isn’t it all? Nor is it a question of fraud and hypocrisy: “I say that Soulsby and I do good, and that we’re good fellows.” And here’s how it works: You heard us sign. Well, now, I was the singer of course, but Soulsby hardly knew one note from another. I taught him to sing, and he went at it patiently and diligently, like a little man. And I invented that scheme of fnding tunes which the crowd didn’t know, and so couldn’t break in on and smother. I simply took Chopin—he’s full of sixths, you know— and I got all sorts of melodies out of waltzes and mazurka and nocturnes and so on, and I trained Soulsby just to sing those sixths so as to make the harmony, and there you are. (181)

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Astonishing perhaps but, or her account, not corrupt or evil. It’s merely “machinery, management, organization. We take these tunes, written by a devil-may-care Pole who was living with George Sand openly at the time, and pass ‘em of on the brethren for hymns. It’s a fraud, yes; But it’s a good fraud. So they are all good frauds.” (181) Only question, can Theron too become a “good fraud,” like the Soulsbys— and the Catholic priest who may not actually believe in God? Probably not, she thinks: “Your intentions are all right, but your execution is hopelessly clumsy” (182). Indeed. The question thus placed, clearly enough, is what Freud calls “the future of an illusion”—and what Emerson had defended as the inextinguishable human instinct for “worship.”30 Can an overdetermined and fercely historicist creed like Methodism survive the radical historicization of the Christian myth? Theron has seen, in Fr. Forbes’ library, a book by Ernest Renan. Oh dear: Abraham is an allegory, but what if the historical Jesus never really existed? Would Christianity still be in some sense “true”? Paul had not thought so: “If Christ be not risen, our faith is vain.” The theological plot is really pretty thick, so that one is entitled to be disappointed when Theron’s wracking doubts solve themselves so easily. In medias res, however, we learn that Mrs. Alice Ware is not happy with the progress of her husband’s supposed “illumination.” He’s liking her less by comparison with his new friends: he thinks they’ll fnd her un-sophisticated; and she’s rightly concerned for their marriage, his faith and, accordingly, their living. She becomes good friends with a parishioner, who sends her fowers on an appropriate occasion; and he, ready for anything with the esthete who defnes her ethics as “Greek,” accuses his wife of infdelity. Cf. Goodman Brown and Frank Sinatra: “Maybe you’re accusin’ me of what you’re doin’ yourself.” Soon enough, however, the Priest and the Darwinist and the Esthete become convinced that the new, would-be addition to their privileged social set is a hopeless case: they can live comfortably with the new truths, but Theron’s incurable simplicity sees things as a matter of all or nothing. Where the hell did he prep? In the end, stinging with his one kiss from Celia, and dying to know her true feelings, he boards a train to pursue her—and Father Forbes, as it turns out—down to New York City. Celia explains the meaning of the kiss and, not incidentally, tells him to stop trying to involve her and Father Forbes in scandal. A rebufed Theron fnds his way to the Soulsbys, where he confesses, among other things, that he has stolen money from the church to fnance his visit to New York, and then falls asleep, leaving Brother Soulsby

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to telegraph his wife. Back in Octavius, the Wares consider their future: Alice convinces Theron to leave the ministry, and Soulsby has arranged for Theron to have a job in real estate in Seattle. He’s a good talker, why not? In fact, he refects, he may go into politics and become a senator. Alice has no interest in that, and Book V of the novel remains unwritten. What we get, adequately for novelistic purposes at least, is a speeded-up account of the space between a Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Conversions and Main Street. What we don’t get is an account of what Alice and Theron ever saw in one another; or, more generally, of what an ordinary, basically fundamentalist marriage is supposed to look like. She seems a sensible girl, reverent in her way, but certainly not saintly by the standard of the paradigmatic Sarah Edwards; he, a simple-minded man excited beyond his intelligence. Or else, more elementally, a simple organism who proves unable to thrive in a new environment but who, unlike Dreiser’s Hurstwood, fnds yet another, far to the West. Alice and Theron are a match well made in upstate New York, but not interesting enough to enrich the developing social history of this damn nation. Where the Rev. and Mrs. Ware seem happily married in the beginning— never suspecting what a change of venue will mean—Edna Pontellier fnds herself, from the outset, joined in holiest of sacramental matrimonies to a man designed by nature and refned by culture to be an epitome of selfsatisfed male condescension. Or, rather, we fnd her so: in nominal agreement with everyone in her social circle that Leonce Pontellier is “the best husband in the world” (50),31 she seems not entirely conscious of the hopeless nature of her situation. One had almost said “desperate,” for so it turns out in the end. There are important ambiguities about the ending of this disturbing novel, but none about the beginning: Edna’s marriage to a self-centered and insensitive man reads very nearly like a feminist cliché: he treats her as a possession and insists that she fuss mercilessly over the children, in the manner of the Creole “mother women” whose ethos appear to rule in the summer place called Grand Isle. She’s got to get out of this soul-killing situation. She does, emphatically. But what then? Evidently some other ideology is driving the tragic conclusion. Learning to swim is not high on the list of feminist objectives; nor is the sensuous lure of the sea one of its founding tropes. And “the idea of life’s delirium” sounds more like the home-made existentialism of Emily Dickinson than the platform of women’s rights convention. Like her friends, Edna thinks of her dalliance with the incurably firtatious Robert as innocent. So does her husband, partly because of Robert’s established reputation of time-sensitive summer romance, but also, in large measure, because of his self-satisfed male impercipience: how could any sensible woman fail to recognize himself as her inevitable completion? In

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the midst of his wife’s eventual declarations of independence, his friend, the observant and sometimes perceptive Dr. Mandelet, asks him, delicately enough, if another man is involved. Leonce is certain there is not, and they both content themselves with cliches about “intellectual women” who become “feminists.” Both think it will pass. What we have watched, in the meantime, is Edna becoming more and more dependent on the companionship—and the delicate admiration—of Robert Lebrun, the amateur romancer. At one point, she summons him to her presence; they sail of to church together, happily planning further excursions. She falls asleep; he watches over her, for a very long time. It’d like a fairy tale. They’re late returning? What will Leonce think? Not to worry, Robert suggests, “He knows I am with you.” Indeed. With both not-quite-lovers seriously involved, it is Robert who frst appears to realize how deep the waters have become: so he’s of to Mexico—as promised all along, but over Edna’s hurt and angry protest: “I’ve grown used to seeing you, to having you with me all the time” (93). He comes back, of course, hoping, naively, that Edna can persuade her husband to grant her a divorce. But by then it’s all diferent: back in the real world of New Orleans, and unwilling to remain “fettered for life,” Edna has undergone a very signifcant development—or, in any event, a radical change. She has, of course, already refused her husband’s late-night command to “come in the house immediately,” and her refusal includes a certain declaration of independence: “Don’t speak to me like that again; I shall not answer you”: she even commands him, “Leonce, go to bed” (78). But in Robert’s absence, her rebellion becomes more and more explicit: frst of all, she refuses to continue to be “at home,” weekly, to entertain the wives of his business friends; and, in an ensuing argument ostensibly about scorched fsh, he stomps out to eat at the club and she stamps on her wedding ring. Next day, she wonders about the wisdom of her action, but a dinner with her Creole friends, whose union has seemed so perfect, fails to restore Edna’s belief in the idea of “domestic harmony” (107). And then Edna’s semblance of domesticity disappears entirely. Maintaining a sublimated erotic relationship with Mme. Ratignolle, the ideal embodiment of the “mother women,” and developing one with the liberated piano-playing artiste, Mademoiselle Reisz, Edna begins to concentrate on her painting: does she have the courage of her artistic convictions? And—as Mlle. Reisz had been getting letters from Robert—does she know that he is in love with her? When Leonce leaves for a long business trip, and with his mother caring for the children, an emboldened Edna gives one last dinner party in the family residence, a small but “grand” (142) afair and then moves into a rental property she calls the “pigeon house.” From her studio there she begins to sell her paintings. And there it is that she conducts her passionate but loveless afair with the well-known womanizer,

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Alcee Arobin. Mme. Ratignolle warns her of the scandal, which will attach to herself should she continue visiting Edna; but the afair continues. Until Robert returns—from Mexico and from an afair of his own. Waiting for Mlle. Reisz in her apartment, Edna encounters Robert, come to visit her friend, not herself. The meeting is awkward and is interrupted by a visit from Arobin, who declares Robert a “fne fellow” (160); but later, in a meeting in the pigeon house, the two discover the power of their mutual love, exchanging a passionate kiss. But, he says, they cannot be together because she is a married woman: will Leonce grant her a divorce? Don’t be absurd: of course not; and besides, he does not own me. Time to grow up, “foolish boy” (167). And then the scene is interrupted: Mme. Ratignolle has “taken sick”—actually, it is an accouchement—and she requires Edna at her bedside. Edna fnds the scene of labor and childbirth unbearable; vaguely recalling the pain of her own birthings, “With an inward agony, with a faming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature, she witnessed the scene of torture” (170). The unedifying reality which, on the realistic account of Dr. Mandelet, the illusion of romance is meant to invite and disguise. Taking “no account of moral consequences” (171)—or of pain—Nature simply demands reproduction. Returning to the pigeon house, she fnds Robert gone, leaving only this note: “I love you. Good-by—because I love you” (172). Evidently all awakenings are not created equal, his, it appears, was merely erotic, leaving Edna alone with one which, quite unlike the enlightened Hester Prynne, she proves singularly unequipped to handle. Love and loss. Above all, confused with the rest, selfhood; her body, herself. And her own will, free from the meretricious conventions of possession. So what now? Hester sews, Edna could paint and sell the product; and/or, like some transcendental women before her she could turn the pigeon house into a book store and hold regular “conversations”—about women’s rights and other topics of moment, long said to lie outside women’s sphere. Of course there are the children, as Mme. Ratignolle has repeatedly reminded her: for them, she has vowed, she would sacrifce her life. But not her Self. Her friend does not understand. Did she? Do we? But what of “life’s delirium,” temporarily confused with a boy who wants sex and honor together? What, in short, about sex? Bad with Leonce, not good enough with Arobin, and not to be had with the silly boy. “To-day it is Arobin; to-morrow it will be someone else. It makes no diference to me, it doesn’t matter about Leonce Pontellier.” If only. . . There was no human being whom she wanted near her except Robert; and she even realized that the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of existence (175)

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What then? Indeed—with the “then” so clear to her now—what now? Returning to Grand Isle, an awakened but thoroughly disillusioned Edna decides to go for a climactic, transcendental swim—safely now, because, as part of the bodily dimension of her precocious mid-life unfolding, she has fnally learned the sea’s lovely secret. Leaving her clothes in the bath house, putting on and then taking of her bathing suit, she wades in, naked, and then proceeds to swim out where no woman has swum before. She drowns of course, and though it is not perfectly clear she had premeditated suicide,32 many things do fash before her mind: “the bluegrass meadow that she had traversed when a little child, . . . Leonce and the children . . . who need not have thought they could possess her body and soul.” She thought “How Mlle. Reisz would have laughed, perhaps sneered, if she knew! ‘And you call yourself an artist!’” She hears the words of Robert’s note: “‘Goodby—because I love you.’” “He would never understand.” “Perhaps Doctor Mandelet would have understood if she had seen him—but it was too late.” And more. To the very end: The old terror famed up and sank again. Edna heard her father’s voice and her Sister Margaret’s. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry ofcer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks flled the air. (176) The rest is ambiguity: evidently your life passes before your eyes whether you meant it or not. What is clear, however, is that a novel which begins as an emphatic women’s protest ends as a troubled and troublesome mirror for feminists. We have learned a lot, since 1899, about whether women can indeed “have it all”: sex without commitment, career undeterred by family, children without a husband—a Self, that is; an identity undefned by relationships. Pretty clearly, The Awakening calls the real-life performance of that dream into serious question. What we have not heard so often is whether such a splendid illusion was anywhere inspired in a woman who “fell asleep reading Emerson” (127). That of course is not the only thing that distinguishes Edna from her Creole friend; nor, is all likelihood, has the successfully emancipated Mlle. Reisz ever read a word of this founding prophet of American religion. But they both have diferent religions—Catholicism on the one hand, and Art on the other—neither particularly American. The Awakening is in no sense subtitled the Damnation of Edna Pontellier, but it does say something like be careful what you wish for. And, sympathetically read, it almost says, be careful how you read Emerson.

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He has, of course, been blamed for sanctioning, even encouraging, almost every sort of irresponsible self-indulgence. But not with entire fairness. As we may learn from a book like Emerson’s Demanding Optimism—or from a careful enough reading of his famous “Divinity School Address”33—the Emersonian Self is not free from but is in fact constituted by the sense of duty: you are precisely what you must do. He cannot, on premise, tell you what you must do; so you are perfectly free to fall into bad faith if you wish. But you can on no account divorce Emerson’s Self from the sense of Duty. He probably cannot be made into a proper feminist, but he is only partly to blame for Edna’s creative misreading. 7 All of which makes Howells’ experimental—and to him dangerous—foray into the question of marrying in haste and repenting in Indiana look cautious by comparison. Smiling realism indeed. But one way to recover the shock of the novel is to compare it with a short story by Mary Wilkins Freeman, where two young people—more mis-ft than Marcia and Bartley Hubbard ever were—fnd themselves on the verge of consummating a union neither one any longer wishes, just because once upon a time they promised. Of course “The New England Nun” is only a short story, and the terrifed reader can scarcely imagine what the details of the married life of Louisa Ellis and her childhood boyfriend might have been like. Worse, surely, than those discovered in the representative wedlock of Sarah and Adoniram Penn, where a woman’s signal moment of “revolt” barely disturbs her life of knowing but ironic resignation. Happily, Louisa discovers, quite by accident, that the man who, after fourteen years, has returned to keep his solemn promise, has found his mother’s sexy young housemaid more to his liking and his lust. In the end, their happy parting is as contractual as any formal marriage. Yes, that’s the way it used to be. Not everywhere, perhaps, but in the region North of Boston, where Puritanism went to die and never did quite. Conscience as uncompromising as that must seem nothing short of insanity; certainly it is no exception to the inviolable rules of Obsession and Compulsion. And yet a hint of nobility survives: Louisa and Joe embody the unapproachably high standard from which we have declined. Indeed, it is just because certain ancestors were so utterly strict can our own “modern” conscience can aford to compromise, make exception, fnd excuse. Even Hawthorne—himself an unforgiving analyst of “conscience, or something in its similitude”—would seem to see the point: Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages. (1039)

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But there can be no going back. Somewhere, somebody with a calmer conscience than that of William Dean Howells will have to look at the newfound facts of heterosexual life without hysteria. Without satire, even. Someone like Theodore Dreiser, whose extended but in the end inconclusive account of Sister Carrie (1900) contends that, though neither youthful experimentation nor mid-life resentment can quite license sexual irregularity, such things are hardly surprising in the history-long process of moral evolution. People used to be animals, driven everywhere to gratifcation by an inerrant instinct. Now—wonderful to tell—they have conscience also, a curious but uncertain guide to something called “happiness.” Of course it will go through some unpleasant stages. But what after all did you expect? Ok, Carrie Meeber has the morals of a fruit-fy. Or, more severely, she uses her sex to get on in the world. Do we really want her to end up in a dead-end marriage like that of her sister, who doesn’t even seem to know what she is missing? What might she make of Edna Pontellier’s theory of “life’s delirium”? Besides, she thought the innocently-womanizing Drouet was eventually going to marry her. Sex works that way sometimes, or so I have heard. And Hurstwood as well: to be sure, he clearly was a cut above the drummer with the shiny brown shoes: he, for sure, would never ask he to “waltz” when she was sufering an early dose of weltschmerz. That fact—the tempting image of the better—has to count for something. And in the end he does marry her. After his all-but-involuntary theft and a de facto kidnapping. It may seem a little un-feeling for her to leave him, rocking himself toward death as she has rocked herself into a fuller and richer life—but, though Hegel’s “Ideal” is indeed “a light that cannot fail,” no one ever said there would not be a price to pay. The ft survive, but only in their proper niche. Only the very fttest are ft to lead the way, onward and upward, even if they cannot quite see the light beyond. Love is a creature of the light but is not itself that light. Its proper name is not to be pronounced, but its handmaiden is desire. And marriage? Well, this too may pass. Gatsby wants to be married to a married woman and it does not end very well; Nick Carraway has his eye on Jordan Baker, but can he really marry another “bad driver”? Brett Ashley might be willing to marry her date to the bullfght, despite her proclivities and the nature of his wound, but Jake Barnes clearly knows better. In love with Ellen Olenska, Newland Archer lives out a proper marriage with the conventional May Welland, who lied about being pregnant; but, quite like a proper creature under the infuence of Henry James, he prefers giving up to having: that way no one is happy. The story goes on of course, with or without the example of Hawthorne. But for a literary period or two, the conclusion seems plain but grim: sex is real, love is an intriguing fantasy; and marriage is well, some words before a magistrate. And no one is there to turn the water to wine.

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Notes 1 Citations of The Scarlet Letter refer to the John Harvard Library Edition (2009). 2 See Arthur Cleveland Coxe, “The Writings of Hawthorne,” Church Review, 3 (1851), 489. 3 For the real-life background of Hannah Foster’s best-selling, The Coquette (1797), see Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word (Oxford, 1986), 144–50. 4 See the Broadview Edition of The Blithedale Romance (2015), 139, 120. And for an analysis of the non-standard sexual background of the novel—including the life and social works of John Humphrey Noyes—see my “Nobody’s Protest Novel,” NHR, 34.1 (2008), 1–39. 5 The allusion here is to the 1856 novel of that name by Alice Cary. 6 See William Charvatt, et al., eds., Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, XVII (1987), 304. For a temperate, second-round feminist response to Hawthorne’s unhappy characterization of the more successful female novelists, see Brenda Wineapple, Hawthorne: A Life (Random House, 2003), 282–4. And cp. Nina Baym, “Revisiting Hawthorne’s Feminism,” in Millicent Bell, ed., Hawthorne and the Real (Ohio State, 2005), 107–24. 7 The nineteenth-century response is by William Griswold, Descriptive List of Novels and Tales. Vol. 1 (William Griswold, 1893), 2; and cp. David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance (Oxford, 1988), 395. 8 No mention is made of Married but Not Mated in Emory Elliott, ed., The Columbia History of American Literature (1991) or Leonard Cassuto, gen. ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature (2011) or J. Gerald Kennedy and Leland S. Person, eds., The American Novel to 1870 (Oxford, 2014). 9 For the text of Elsie Venner—including both of Holmes’ Prefaces—see the 2007 reprint by BiblioBazaar. For Holmes’ remark about the “iron of Calvinism,” see Edward Waldo Emerson, ed., The Early Years of the Saturday Club (Houghton Mifin, 1918), 155. 10 See Essays and Lectures (Library of America, 1983), 48. 11 For the text of Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, see Sharon L. Gravett, editor (Nebraska, 1998). 12 See Sacvan Bercovitch, “How the Puritans Won the American Revolution,” Mass. Review, 17.4 (1976), 597–630; and cp. my own chapter, “Puritanism and Revolution,” in The Province of Piety (Harvard, 1984), 389–482. 13 See Robert Gillespie, “The Fictions of Basil March,” Colby Library Quarterly, 12.1 (March, 1976), 15. 14 See Edward Wagenknecht, William Dean Howells: He Friendly Eye (Oxford, 1969), 156. 15 See A Hazard of New Fortunes (Random House, 2002), 22. 16 See my essay, so titled, in Doctrine and Diference: Readings in Classic American Literature (Routledge, 2021), 247–63. 17 See Kenneth S. Lynn, William Dean Howells: An American Life (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 254. 18 The frst quotation is from the publisher’s description of their 2014 reprint of Chopin’s At Fault. The remaining are, in order, Kimberley Freeman, Love, American Style: Divorce and the American Novel (Routledge, 2003); and J. H. Barnett, Divorce and the American Divorce Novel (Penn, 1939; rpt., 2017), 82.

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19 See Reynolds (#7), 392. And Melissa Ganz, “‘Strange Opposition’: Portrait of a Lady and the Divorce Debates,” Henry James Review, 27 (2006), 156–74. 20 See James’ 1907 Preface to The American (Norton, 1978), 12. 21 See Portrait of a Lady (Norton, 2018). 22 See The Bostonians (Modern Library, 1956). 23 See The Ambassadors (Riverside, 1960). 24 The frst quote is from the remarkable poem “New England” by E. A. Robinson; the familiar cliché is from the satirical pen of H. L. Mencken. 25 See Leon Edel, Henry James: The Master (Lippincott, 1972), 112–13. 26 See The Wings of a Dove (Norton, 1978). 27 See Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Broadview, 2006). 28 See McTeague (Penguin, 1994). 29 For the text of Theron Ware, see the John Harvard Library edition by Everett Carter (Belknap. 1996). 30 See Emerson, “Worship,” in E&L, 1053–76. 31 For the text of The Awakening, see Sandra M. Gilbert, ed. (Penguin, 1984). For an edition which includes recent criticism, see Margo Culley, ed. (Norton Critical Edition, 2018). 32 On the comprehensive account of Mary Cuf, there are about fve versions of the ending: suicide as a faw, an unftting imposition of the conventional punishment of an adulteress; suicide as an essential part of the novel’s social critique; creative return to the feminine realm, evoking the mythic Aphrodite; a coldsober warning to feminist fantasy; or, fnally, who the hell knows? See “Edna’s Sense of an Ending,” Mississippi Quarterly, 69.3 (2016), 327–46. 33 Charged in his own generation with something called “Egotheism,” Emerson had yet to face the attacks of Yvor Winters and Quentin Anderson; for the one, Emerson’s religion was “a kind of good-natured self-indulgence”; see Maule’s Curse (1938), 126; for the other, at greater length and with a brave show of analytic determination, argues that Emerson ofered (and ofers) “the freedom to imagine themselves as possessed of a power .  .  . to dispose of the whole felt and imagined world as a woman arranges her skirt”; see The Imperial Self (Knopf, 1971), 56. On the other side, Gertrude Reif Hughes, Emerson’s Demanding Optimism (Louisiana State, 1984); and cp. my “Pleasing God: The Lucid Strife of Emerson’s ‘Address,’” Doctrine and Diference II (Routledge, 1997), 129–76.

9

Democracy and Esther Henry Adams’ Flirtation with Pragmatism

No doubt pragmatism is, as William James insisted, a new name for some very old ways of thinking. Certainly few teachers of American literature can reserve the word specifcally for the intellectual milieu of Peirce and James. The result is probably a lessening of the world’s supply of clear and distinct ideas, but it seems somehow unavoidable when there are so many temptations. When Benjamin Franklin abandons the mechanical deism of his pamphlet On Liberty and Necessity because this doctrine, “though it might be true, was not very useful,” most of us, I suspect, think “pragmatist.” There is also Huck Finn’s famous experience with the relationship between prayer and fshhooks. And more cogently there is Emerson; even if one shuns the Yankee-Plato view as too popular to be accurate, it is hard to overlook the famous pragmatic dictum in Nature that “the advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith is that it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind.” Evidently workability and human satisfactoriness are important to America’s highbrows and lowbrows alike. But one may recognize this evidence of a sort of pragmatism deeply rooted in the American character and still hesitate in the case of Henry Adams. Here it seems one ought to draw a line in order to keep the categories clear: no American, one could argue, ever searched more tirelessly for a single principle which, quite apart from human needs and wishes, would explain the ultimate Truth of the universe. Adams’ fnal reading of all history in terms of the super-abstraction of “force” adequately suggests, even to those who read it metaphorically, the lengths to which he was driven in search of a totally objective principle of unifed understanding. Indeed one can scarcely read William James’ defenses of “plural” explanations of the universe without almost imagining that his adversary is Henry Adams and not the idealist purveyors of the Hegelian Absolute.1 Nor is it ultimately my purpose to overturn the well-established view of Henry Adams as an absolutist. Indeed I shall end by supporting it—but, I hope, with important qualifcations. For there was, as it seems to me, a very strong drive toward DOI: 10.4324/9781003334262-9

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the practical, toward operation, toward power in Henry Adams; and more important, a very keen understanding of what would eventually become the philosophical position of William James. Several critics have already noted in passing certain pragmatic tendencies in Adams’ thought, chiefy in connection with Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres; one even points to a direct connection between him and the members of the Harvard Metaphysical Club of the early 1870s where pragmatism as a coherent system was formulated.2 The directness of this connection seems an open question, and in any case the clearest examples of Adams’ pragmatist leanings are his two underrated novels. Democracy (1880) deals with pragmatism of a rather popular sort, a kind James would later single out as a gross misunderstanding of his doctrine. But Esther (1884), written fourteen years before James’ ofcial announcement (in “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results”) of the name of his doctrine, and twelve years before the crucial “Will to Believe,” seems to anticipate, sympathize with, but ultimately judge in advance the cardinal tenet of James’ religious philosophy—that one may without dishonor, indeed everyone actually and necessarily does, give the assent of faith to propositions not susceptible of rational proof.3 Thus even though Henry Adams must not fnally be regarded as an adherent of Jamesean pragmatism, any more than of Franklin’s shopkeeper morality or Huck Finn’s fshhook theology, one important dimension of his interest for us must be his curious ambivalence toward the various American pragmatisms. The kind of pragmatism that is central to Democracy is certainly not that espoused by James or any of his followers. Senator Ratclife’s harangues on the need to stuf ballot boxes in order to preserve the Union are far diferent in tone and intention from Professor James’ lectures on the right to adopt beliefs that “help us to get into satisfactory relations with the other parts of our experience.” Despite the persistent charge of hostile critics that James made the end of favorable relations justify the means of adopting any belief whatsoever, his doctrine is in no sense reducible to a mere instrumental ethic.4 But it is just this sort of worthy-end-justifes-base-means instrumentalism which seems to attract Adams in Democracy. The ultimate fact about the novel may be Madeline Lee’s categorical rejection of Ratclife, but surely the more striking one is the strength of her attraction to him in the frst place. Even if one resists the temptation to read the novel as scarcely veiled autobiography, one cannot avoid the conclusion that Madeline Lee is a curious version of Adams himself.5 Her essential problem—to accept or reject the Washington morality of power—had recently been Adams’ own problem. Thus it must have taken considerable honesty and insight to create in Mrs. Lee the queer combination of idealism and ennui, reforming zeal and death wish, that brought her in touch with the temptation of

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political pragmatism. She can sound like Thoreau in expressing her desire to “get all that American life had to ofer, good or bad, and drink it down to the dregs,” but that is not her only tone. Like a passenger on a steamship who will not rest easily “until he has been in the engine room and talked with the engineer,” she wanted “to see with her own eyes the action of the primary forces.”6 And she may have been, as the narrator suggests, “eating her heart out because she could fnd no worthy object of sacrifce” (4), but at bottom “what she wanted, was POWER” (12). Clearly a confused woman at the opening of the novel, Mrs. Lee grows more so before she fnally sees herself plain. She comes to imagine that absolute primeval power is not incompatible with a worthy object of sacrifce. With Ratclife presumably she can have it both ways: she can control the mysterious sources of the great American political and governmental processes and reform them too. And with her naive ideas about America’s society of nature’s noblemen, she is in an extremely dangerous position for one about to engage in “something very like a firtation” with the incarnation of American “political genius.” For, as it turns out, Ratclife and his expressed doctrine are extremely seductive: “there was a certain bigness about the man; a keen practical sagacity; a bold freedom of self-assertion; a broad way of dealing with what he knew” (60). He publicly crucifes the would-be wit of Mr. French on the question of civil service reform; to his hard-headed realism it is only “a clock with a showy case and a sham works” (12). Under cross-examination by Mrs. Lee, who continues to hope that “respectable government” is not “impossible in a democracy,” Ratclife unfinchingly answers that “no representative government can long be much better or much worse than the society it represents. Purify society and you purify government. But try to purify government artifcially and you only aggravate the failure” (71). This is bold indeed. It calls to mind a whole tradition of tough-minded opposition to the idea of instant reform—Emerson, who distrusted the Brook Farm experiment because it did not aim to leaven “the whole lump of society”; Thoreau, who steadfastly denied that it was possible to “do a man good”; and even Hawthorne, who carefully detailed the futility of reform which did not begin with “that inward sphere.” Somewhat less favorably, though still perhaps respectably, one may think of those social theorists of Adams’ own day who, stressing the deterministic development of society, scorned “The absurd efort to make the world over.” Actually Ratclife holds none of these positions; he has, in fact, no position at all. But Madeline is kept ignorant of this fact. Adams himself was well aware of the authority such conservative positions might draw from the social implications of Darwinism,7 and for the sake of the novel’s conclusion Madeline is allowed to be properly impressed.

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Other characters ofer her alternatives to Ratclife’s view, but not strongly, and she can only wonder “Who and what is to be believed?” While thus trying to discover “whether America is right or wrong” (a question almost as simplistic as Esther’s “Is religion true?”), she defends Ratclife’s operational compromises by denying that a consummately efective politician need also be a crusader. Her mind, perilously balanced between power and sacrifce, is conspicuously tipping toward power. Mr. Gore senses the drift of her thinking and, though embarrassed by the need to verbalize it, ofers her the “fxed star” of his own political creed. “I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable result of what has gone before it. . . . I grant it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result worth an efort and a risk” (77). But this tentative, qualifed, evolutionary, trial-and-error doctrine is not the kind of absolute Mrs. Lee requires. It is in its own way rather pragmatic. Nor does the study of history ofer Madeline Lee any saving doctrine. More appealing than the present, perhaps, which is typifed by a mechanical nightmare of presidential handshaking, the mind of the past is nevertheless characterized by a hopeless fogging of political issues with “elaborate show-structures” of philosophy. Alongside these delusions Ratclife’s position again seems seductively real: “He had very little sympathy for thin moralizing, and a statesmanlike contempt for philosophical politics. He loved power, and he wanted to be president. That was enough” (85). At an important crisis in Madeline’s judgment of him, Ratclife very ingenuously (as it seems) reveals his part in rigging a presidential election. The government, he argues, had to be kept out of the hands of the rebels; the Union had to be saved. “I am not proud of the transaction, but I would do it again, and far worse if I thought it would save the country from disunion” (107). This is strong stuf—the only dogmas concern undeniably good ends, the means are totally open. And its efect is not lost on Madeline Lee. Not even comparison with George Washington, the touchstone of unequivocal honesty in public life, can weaken Ratclife’s appeal. Washington shows up lesser men who aspire to the ideal of political purity, but Ratclife lives in a diferent world. Pragmatism can judge virtue, but not the other way around. “If Washington were President now,” Ratclife afrms, “he would have to learn our ways or lose the next election. Only fools and theorists imagine that our society can be handled with kid gloves or long poles. One must make one’s self a part of it. If virtue won’t answer our purpose, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of ofce” (141). Surely this doctrine is mature, adult, undeceived. Deep down, perhaps, Madeline cannot fully accept Ratclife’s doctrine of “accepting the good with the bad

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together,” feeling that it is somehow “better to be a child and cry for the moon and stars”; but there is no doubt that she is being “tainted.” Adams is, of course, scoring satirical points at Ratclife’s expense throughout, and Madeline herself is far from ignorant of the boorishness of his private nature. She herself puts him in his place a number of times. But she never sees him at his worst—as the petty, intriguing, political manipulator whose real motivation is not “the Union,” nor even party loyalty, but only the crassest sort of unenlightened self-interest. Consequently she continues to deceive herself and believe the best of him. When Ratclife comes to her seeking “advice” on whether to accept a cabinet post, he has already decided how to trick the honest but naive new president into appointing him Secretary of the Treasury, despite the irreducible political and personal opposition between them. (He has also all but convinced Madeline that politics has nothing to do with morality.) Thus when in his “simple, straightforward, earnest” manner he asks for her opinion, she answers, bafed, that he should do “whatever is most for the public good.” What is most for the public good Madeline cannot decide; such questions are nearly always more tangled than those of “private right,” and Madeline’s confession that “life is more complicated than I thought” is in efect a surrender to Ratclife’s point of view. From this point until her fnal reversal, Madeline is much less hypothetical in her endorsement of Ratclife. “She reconciled herself to the Ratclifan morals, for she could see no choice.” She is never completely comfortable with a double standard of morality, but basically Ratclife seems to her to be “doing good with as pure means as he had at hand” (196). She is partly joking when she suggests to Mr. Gore that she has already taken the “frst step in politics” by having “got so far as to lose the distinction between right and wrong” (199), but her judgment of herself is truer than she knows. And thus, signifcantly, her latent sexual attraction to Ratclife now becomes more and more important; only after her evident fall from grace does she really become capable of marrying a man with whom, by education and native sensibility, she has nothing in common. Nothing, that is, except the love of power. Once she has denied the absolute primacy of the private moral imperative, she becomes capable of using Ratclife to satisfy her power-sacrifce-reform lust much as Ratclife uses everyone else. Evidently power morality corrupts absolutely. Madeline continues to deny to her friends that she is in any danger of marrying Ratclife. She regards Carrington’s hints about the Senator’s character as the moral fussiness of an incorrigible innocent. But to those strongly disposed to power, Washington is a dangerous moral climate indeed. Even as Ratclife proposes marriage to Mrs. Lee he makes a strong plea for his “position” that in politics it is utterly impossible to keep one’s hands clean: “To act with entire honesty

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and self-respect, one should always live in a pure atmosphere, and the atmosphere of politics is impure” (309). Playing masterfully on Madeline’s mixture of motives, he asks her to be the domestic purity in his otherwise sordid life and, per contra, to take her rightful place in public infuence. Nothing can now save Mrs. Lee from marrying a shabby political opportunist except Carrington’s revelation of the blackest episode of Ratclife’s career. The knowledge that Ratclife once took a bribe for approving a bill he opposed “on principle” clearly shows Mrs. Lee that had she married the Prairie Giant her life would have been “an endless succession of moral somersaults.” At frst she is enraged, chiefy with herself—that she could almost agree to marry a “man who could take money to betray public trust.” She guesses almost immediately that Ratclife will defend his action, but she also remembers his constant avowals that “if virtue did not answer his purpose he used vice” (335). The realization of the extent of her own involvement by “tacit assent,” of her radically mixed motives, and of her “weakness and self-deception,” results in a “helpless rage and despair,” a wish that “the universe were annihilated” (337). But Adams is not yet ready for an apocalypse, and by the time Ratclife pays his last call, Madeline has recovered herself considerably. Carrington’s letter had tried to demonstrate Ratclife’s perfect unscrupulosity, his lack of morality of any kind; but Madeline, idealistically, continues to grant him the integrity of his announced position—she tries not to judge what he had done “as a politician . . . according to his own moral code.” She claims only the right to “protect herself.” She tells Ratclife she has reverted to her “old decision,” that there is too great a philosophical diference between them: “You and I take very diferent views of life. I cannot accept yours, and you cannot practice on mine” (347). On his side Ratclife has ready a more or less convincing pragmatic justifcation of his action, the principle this time being “party loyalty”; his story is, of course, pure fabrication and would have brought out a “smile of professional pride” from his colleagues, had they been present. Madeline, guileless, accepts the story at face value. She is never fully undeceived about Ratclife, and this is certainly a key fact in estimating Adams’ exact attitude toward the crass sort of pragmatism he represents. In a sense the novel goes out of its way to have Mrs. Lee reject Senator Ratclife not as the self-interested blackguard he is but as a fairly consistent exponent of the whatever-must-be-done theory of politics. He repeats all his old generalities: constituents, party, people, union. He takes his stand once again on the premise of complexity: “there are conficting duties in all the transactions of life, except the simplest. However we may act, do what we may, we must violate some moral obligation” (356). He is so cogent, in fact, that Mrs. Lee loses her self-possession and retreats to the weaker

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ground that she is “not ftted for politics,” she would be a “drag” on him. She grants his sincerity and urges only her wish to get away from politics. Her ideas, she admits, were naive; her standards of purity would, no doubt, mean the end of democratic government. Nevertheless, she insists, “we must at all events . . . use our judgment according to our own consciences” (362). Earlier, with Sybil, Madeline had decided that Ratclife “talked about virtue and vice as a man who is color blind talks about red and green” (353), but this is not her fnal word. Now, granting him his position, and denying only its adequacy for her, she breaks with him only when he tries most blatantly to bribe her with the power of his eventual presidency. That the book should come out in favor of private conscience over public good is not surprising. Even Madeline’s wish to “live in the Great Pyramid and look out at the Polar Star” (370) is predictable enough. The search for a stable reality and a fxed moral star is a characteristic of Adams’ pursuit, and here the shifting, relative, equivocal morality of Ratclife calls forth, by reaction, the steady, the absolute, the univocal. But surely it is signifcant that Adams refuses to let the battle between Ratclife and Mrs. Lee ever be fairly joined on theoretical grounds. On the one hand, her rejection of him as a pragmatist and not simply as a villain tends to strengthen our sense of Adams’ own rejection; but on the other, the failure to answer the pragmatic arguments themselves seems to suggest that in Adams’ view they might be practiced without dishonor by somebody. Two things are clear: frst that pragmatic political principles may often serve to make simple amorality seem respectable; and second, even if this is not always so, they will not long satisfy persons of the most refned moral sensibility. Beyond this, however, Adams is ambiguous. Perhaps successful government does depend on the rather free use of power by men more honest than Ratclife but less scrupulous than Adams. Biographically considered, one might urge, Democracy dramatizes Adams’ firtation with the morality of Reconstruction politics; Mrs. Lee’s experience seems to be Adams’ recognition that, for him, private integrity and public power were incompatible. The conclusion was especially difcult to reach, and Adams hesitates to state it in general terms, because the history of the Adams family seemed to prove the opposite lesson. Nevertheless, in Democracy one can see Henry Adams consciously disciplining himself, trying to deal with what he considered the unruly drives in his nature. Power attracts, deranges the moral sensibility, as a strong man attracts an unstable woman. Evidently the best way to deal with such seductive temptations is to put them out of the mind entirely. Thus Adams’ solution and Madeline Lee’s were the same—fight from Washington. For although the “Conclusion” suggests that Madeline may come back to marry Carrington, the novel clearly ends with her departure. Nor would Adams ever return to Washington in a purely political capacity. Adams’ conclusion in favor of

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absolute private integrity (even when it cannot explain itself) would be the same whenever he took up the question of morality and power—notably in The Education. But it would be no less difcult to reach, and it would be marked by the same ambiguities. The argument from expediency was not an easy one for Adams to overcome. In Esther the problem of expediency is raised in a specifcally religious context. Although in one sense the novel is, as Ernest Samuels carefully shows, a tour de force on the relation of religion and science in the nineteenth century,8 it is also, and perhaps more centrally, a study of the absolutist and the pragmatist attitudes toward religion. Hazard and Strong agree, after all, that there is no essential confict between religion and science, and certainly neither feels such a confict. For Hazard, everything is religious: all thought and all being rise up to and are included in the universal I AM. For Strong, everything is just as simply secular: religious experience is completely foreign to his nature. More important, the novel is about the confict within Esther—and she knows and cares nothing about science. Her problem is not whether to believe in Hazard’s theology or in Strong’s archeology (and both clearly involve major acts of faith), but whether she may freely adopt faith at all, and if so, how to go about it. Esther’s problem, in short, concerns the “will to believe.”9 At stake, in terms proper to the late nineteenth century but susceptible of translation into more traditional ones, is the nature of faith. Is faith a completely mysterious, quasi-divine “free gift” which one, as if by election, either has or has not? Or is it in any sense acquirable by voluntary human action, either intellectual or devotional? Strong at frst urges Esther to accept the mysteries of religion in the same way he accepts those of science: they lead on to more conclusions and to a generally satisfactory life-experience; and, by living them, one can make them true. Even the traditionalistic Hazard, faced with the prospect of losing the scrupulously honest Esther, urges a less than absolute acceptance of his church’s dogmatic creed. And Esther herself tries, to the limit of her will, to will religious faith. Nothing happens. Once again the feminine character, symbol of Adams’ deepest moral sense, rejects all halfway measures.10 Esther’s rejection of the fashionable high churchmanship in Hazard’s religion is, of course, very easy to predict; her inheritance of old William Dudley’s “Puritan” force of character and simplicity of ethical vision takes care of that. But her waterfall worship is likely to seem a sport unless one sees that this ultimate anti-pragmatic action is also a vindication of her basic nature, which is as much pagan as puritan. Adams works very carefully to describe the Esther who is about to face the serious temptation of pragmatism. Instinctively moral, and deadly serious about such matters as getting married or joining the church, she is often as spontaneous and uninhibited as a natural phenomenon. Hazard’s opening sermon on

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the cosmological and historical omnipresence of the I AM does not touch her being: “I thought it very entertaining,” she informs her aunt. “I felt like a butterfy in a tulip bed. Mr. Hazard’s eyes are wonderful.”11 From the frst her response is to Hazard and not to his church, and it is decidedly “natural.” Wharton notices Esther’s paganism almost immediately; to him she belongs “to the next world which artists want to see, when paganism will come again and we give a divinity to every waterfall” (29). This anticipation of Esther’s fnal, spontaneous religion of nature is part of a pattern. Her charity—she visits the sick, a corporal work of mercy—is completely innocent of supernatural motive: “Esther got more pleasure out of it than the children” (52). She does not enjoy any aspect of Hazard’s worship service, his preaching least of all; but the empty church building itself she fnds a delightful place of “retreat and self-absorption, the dignity of silence which respects itself; the presence which was not to be touched or seen” (74). The church is, for Esther, chiefy the scene of her “ecclesiastical idyl,” a summer world of innocent art and love. Despite Hazard’s “deep instruction on the inferences to be drawn from the contents of crypts and catacombs,” she continues to care very little for “what the early Christians believed, either in religion or art” (93). And despite Wharton’s stern lectures on art, religion and life as struggle rather than joy, she continues to paint Catherine Brooke her own way—as the sanctity of naif and spontaneous joyfulness. In the end everyone admits that her picture is totally out of keeping with Wharton’s impressive medieval vision of the church but that it is nevertheless exactly right and perfectly true for Esther. Her idyl also includes translating Petrarch’s sonnets (her version of Strong’s heaven of reading novels in church), and falling in love with Hazard. But she grows no closer to the spirit of his Christianity. He may argue that the Christian God embraces and includes all secular life, but Esther merely annexes His symbolic church into her own private world of innocent paganism. The idyl ends abruptly with the intrusion of Wharton’s degenerate wife and the death of Esther’s father. One expects a certain transformation in Esther, but for all the obvious similarities and direct allusions to Hawthorne, this is not The Marble Faun revisited; Esther does not follow the prescribed course from innocent natural joy, to deadening spiritual gloom, to renewed Christian faith and hope on the other side of despair. That myth, indeed “as familiar as Hawthorne,” might by its very familiarity have sufced to shape the outcome of Esther’s experience, but Adams is telling a diferent story—the inability of some souls to generate faith, even under the most favorable “Hawthornean” conditions, and even with a number of excellent pragmatic reasons. Although Esther does not apply to Hazard for the conventional “religious help and consolation,” she does, out of her vein of natural, feminine

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mysticism, talk with him about “the purity of the soul, the victory of spirit over matter, and the peace of infnite love” (160). But it soon becomes evident that, though they are in love, they are not talking the same language, and that Hazard’s commitment to a religious creed stands between them. Again at his church, she fnds the music sympathetic, but “parts of the service jarred on her ear” and she “began to take bitter pleasure in thinking she had nothing, not even religious ideas, in common with the people who came between her and her lover. . . . By the time the creed was read, she could not honestly feel that she believed a word of it, or could force herself to say that she ever could believe it” (171–2). And yet this is precisely what she tries to do—generate a belief where none spontaneously exists. Her frst confdante and adviser in this matter is Catherine Brooke. This charming and ingenuous “sage hen” from the pragmatic American prairie has very little sympathy with the niceties of Esther’s ethical discriminations. The argument that Hazard’s congregation constitutes a rival is easily disposed of: on the basis of her personal experience with the Calvinistic Presbyterianism of the American West, Catherine advises Esther to thank God she lives in a “place where your friends let your soul alone.” Esther’s scruple that she can never believe what Hazard preaches Catherine declares beside the point: “You never heard your aunt troubling her head about what Mr. Murray says when he goes into court.” And yet cogent as Adams makes this seem, Esther rejects it for herself. She continues to feel that if she is to marry Hazard she must believe in dogmatic Christianity. She does indeed want to marry him; and so in one sense, certainly, she wants to believe. Thus, despite Hazard’s warning that her love will eventually settle the question of her faith, Esther sets out to learn theology. Catherine continues to advise the direct approach—“How many people at his church could tell you what they believe?”—but the matter is too serious for that, and Esther is led on in her study with a sort of fatal fascination that does not serve to increase her credulity. The matter is also too serious to be answered by Strong’s “droll” approach. Esther presses her cousin on the subject of religion as relentlessly as Madeline Lee pressed Gore on democracy. “Will you answer me a question? Say yes or no! . . . Is religion true?” (198). This is precisely the question William James was refusing to answer either yes or no, to the consternation of his critics—this and the lesser questions that comprise it. Does God exist personally? Is the universe one or many? Is the will free or determined? Is the soul immortal? To answer absolutely James felt was impossible; to answer pragmatically, that is in terms of the human meaningfulness of the various answers, he held to be not only legitimate but necessary. And Strong’s frst answer to Esther is cogently Jamesean. Concerning the “truth” of religion he is not competent to answer directly, but science, he says, is not true in the simplistic sense of her question. He

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personally does not “believe in it”; he “belongs to it” because he wants to “help make it truer.” Religion seems to him an analogous case. “There is no science which does not begin by requiring you to believe the incredible. . . . I tell you the solemn truth that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difcult to accept as any one of the axioms of physics” (199). Repeating the position of Catherine Brooke, he reminds Esther that the wife of his mathematical colleague never thinks to ask herself whether she believes a point has neither length, breadth nor thickness. But Esther cannot square this pragmatic doctrine with Strong’s habitual skepticism. She cannot believe he is serious, and to her this is a “matter of life and death.” Strong has not, however, been dishonest. His drollery is not irresponsible. He gives the impression of saying what, at one level of his mind, he really believes. But struck by Esther’s extreme earnestness, he goes on to answer her from another level. “The trouble with you is that you start wrong. . . . You need what is called faith and you are trying to get it by reason. It can’t be done. Faith is a state of mind, like love or jealousy. You can never reason yourself into it” (281). This, it hardly need be said, is precisely the doctrine of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. There too Adams would firt with the attractions of dogmatic religion as a life-philosophy: it must be true, look at the cathedrals it built. But his rejection would also be the same: the springs of faith lie deeper in the psychological makeup of man than either intellect or conscious will. However conclusively James might prove our right to adopt a rewarding belief, the problem of our ability remained and was by far the more important problem. But before the inefable absolute of Esther’s private moral nature is fnally vindicated, she must submit to a third pragmatic temptation, this time from Hazard himself. In their fnal interview, at Niagara Falls, she pleads her constitutional inability to accept dogmatic Christianity: “Some people are made with faith. I am made without it.” But Hazard scofs at this trife of “common, daily, matter-of-course fears and doubts.” It is, in his view, “a simple matter of will.” Pressed to the limit of his apologetical skill, he ofers her the example of his own deepest faith, based, as it turns out, on a version of Pascal’s wager. “What do you gain by getting rid of one incomprehensible only to put another in its place, and throw away your only hope besides? The atheists ofer no sort of bargain for one’s soul. Their scheme is all loss and no gain. At last both they and I come back to a confession of ignorance; the only diference is that my ignorance is joined with both faith and hope” (241). As Ernest Samuels has pointed out, this is the way James’ “Will to Believe” opens, and is, within the framework of his own highly original set of philosophical distinctions, the substance of his modern voluntaristic defense of faith.12 A retreat of this kind, to the skeptical fdeism of Pascal, represents quite a setback for Hazard. The sermon with which he opens the novel is as blatantly rationalistic as any page in Descartes and is full of

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Cartesian language. Pascal and Descartes, like St. Francis and St. Thomas, represented for Adams the polar opposites of Christian experience—the total distrust of human intelligence and consequent refuge in the absolute of faith on the one hand, and the confdent assertion of reason’s sure ability to establish the essential truths of religion on the other.13 Thus Hazard’s shift from the language of Descartes to that of Pascal represents a complete about-face, at least tactically, and brings the argument for religion into plainly pragmatic terms: grant that God and not-God are, in our ignorance, equiprobables; choose the more rewarding alternative. But Hazard’s pragmatism becomes even more ironic. Throughout the novel we are assured that Hazard’s “orthodoxy was his strong point,” and that “like most vigorous-minded men, seeing that there was no stopping place between dogma and negation, he preferred to accept dogma. Of all weaknesses he most disliked timid and half-hearted faith” (208). Esther herself has clearly seen these alternatives and has already rejected the “timid and half-hearted” alternative proposed by Catherine Brooke and George Strong. Now, shockingly enough, Hazard himself proposes it. “But I suppose you believe at last in something, do you not?” asked Hazard. “Somewhere there must be common ground for us to stand on; and our church makes large—I think too large, allowances for diference . . . There are scores of clergymen today in our pulpits who are in my eyes little better than open skeptics, yet I am not allowed to refuse communion with them. Why should you refuse it with me? You must at last trust in some mysterious and humanly incomprehensible form of words. Even Strong has to do this. Why may you not take mine?” (291–2) Here one expects the discussion to fy apart. Esther has already had her mystical insight into “the next world [as] a sort of great reservoir of truth” into which “whatever is true in us just pours . . . like rain drops” (273). But she restrains herself until Hazard fnally reveals the degree of restraint to which his partly selfsh passion will subject her. Esther sees that, even were she capable of it, her pragmatic acceptance of faith would in this case mean a complete loss of freedom. In a sense Esther falls back on a pragmatism of her own, deeper and more fundamental than Hazard’s. She insists on the right to a belief and a style of life more congenial to her nature than what Hazard proposes. Thus in the quarrel that fashes up concerning the “feshliness” of Hazard’s Christianity, the question is not one of true or false doctrine. A personal God, the resurrection of the body, the real presence in communion—all these are simply distasteful to Esther who fnds the idea of self loathsome. As strategy, then, Hazard’s fnal appeal to Esther’s female instincts (“Can

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you . . . think of a future existence where you will not meet once more father and mother, husband and children?”) is exactly wrong. Esther’s unfeshly paganism has already found concretion in the impersonal force of Niagara Falls. Hazard’s pragmatism seems to permit her to choose only absorption into the human and personal, say what he will about the infnite I AM. But Esther’s nature demands an absolute. From one point of view her religion pays as much attention to human psychic need as his; but her highest psychic need is ultimate selfessness. Given this need her fnal rejection of Hazard is as complete as Madeline Lee’s rejection of the infnitely more reprehensible Ratclife. One is tempted to say that Adams, as did Esther, rejects one pragmatic doctrine and accepts another—without challenging the basic pragmatic assumption of the relation between human truth and human need. Certainly Catherine Brooke, George Strong and (until the very end) Hazard are all sympathetic characters and make a strong statement of their case. Their advice to Esther is not, as I read the novel, irresponsible. The severe critics of Jamesean pragmatism, men like Huxley and Cliford, argued that belief in excess of evidence constitutes bad faith. This is certainly not Adams’ position.14 He actually goes far beyond James in asserting the degree to which even the “skeptical” scientist is forced to accept and endorse belief beyond the range of proof. And, as I have suggested, Esther’s fnal position itself looks a little pragmatic. But there is another way to state the case. Esther’s acceptance of a paganism congenial to her nature is not so free as Hazard says his own acceptance of Christianity has been, or as the reader guesses it has been. One suspects that Hazard’s arguments, whether out of Descartes or Pascal, are really quite after the fact. Hazard’s orthodoxy and Esther’s paganism seem equally, at bottom, biases of nature. It is probably safe to say that, were it possible for Esther to accept Christianity, it would also be moral. But the primary fact seems to be that it is impossible. Esther fnds that her will is as powerless as her intellect: one can will faith as little as one can reason it. Granted Esther may choose religion if she wishes; the problem is whether she really does wish. In fact, she both does and does not. She does insofar as she wishes to marry Hazard—a strong pragmatic motive indeed; but even stronger is another complex of wishes which do not entirely depend on her conscious will. Her puritan-paganism seems to put conventional Christianity beyond her range of real choices. For Esther Christianity is, in James’ phrase, not a “live option.” James admitted there might be persons for whom this would be so; and such persons were, of course, free to disbelieve. But James’ exception becomes Adams’ rule; James assumed the task of justifying belief, Adams tried to explain unbelief. For him faith was investigated more proftably as an ability than as a right. It is, perhaps, not much of a solution to say with Esther

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that some people are made with faith and some without, but on the whole this statement of the case seemed to Adams more honest, and more sound psychologically and theologically, than any other. For Adams, it appears, had already gone beyond James in the direction of anti-intellectualism. James stopped with the will; Adams went on to identify the locus of faith with the biological sources of consciousness. At this extreme faith turned out to be, as the church had always taught, a free gift. If the evidence of Esther is biographically trustworthy, Adams felt the lure of Jamesean logic quite keenly. If the matter could really be seen as open to argument, then the arguments James was coming to use were valid. But more deeply he seems to have felt that the problem of faith was not an open question, and that James’ prolonged efort to convince both scientists and clergymen that freely invested belief was honorable constituted misplaced ingenuity. One of his letters to James suggests as much.15 Of course one could believe if one so willed, and of course the role of the intellect would be ancillary at best, but the determinant in belief and nonbelief could not be merely the will. If the will ceased to depend on the intellect for its motives, it would have to depend on, indeed be identifed with, instinct. All this is merely to say that for Adams the problem of faith had ceased to be a moral problem and had become a psychological one. The ultimate explanation of Esther’s rejection of religion is to be found as deep in the unfathomable recesses of subconsciousness as Madeline’s rejection of political opportunism. Neither can answer pragmatic arguments and both have a strong desire to bend experience to their wills; but behind them both stands Henry Adams’ commitment to the moral integrity of the individual’s private nature.16 The pragmatism of Democracy is, of course, very diferent from that of Esther. They are alike only in their anti-dogmatism, their fexibility, their concern for the needs of practice as against those of pure speculation. But it is under this aspect that both had a certain appeal to Adams. The need to operate efectively in politics made some sort of operational compromise seem almost a necessity; and the constitutional need to view the world as a unity made the church an attractive option. Adams’ characteristic antiintellectualism—his doubt that reason had ever “got hold of one fact worth knowing,” his frequently expressed trust in the superiority of instinct— made pragmatism, anti-intellectual in all its varieties, a tempting solution to a number of dilemmas.17 But these anti-intellectual strains in Adams ultimately found a nonpragmatic expression. Philosophical pragmatism, in its emphasis on truth as something partly created by the total living human personality rather than as something fxed, fnal, “out there,” to be discovered merely, is obviously a forerunner of modern existentialism.18 Both doctrines oppose the “block universes” of nineteenth-century ideology; both seek to destroy the idealistic notion of a Truth which exists in formulations prior to all experience and the notion

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of a Reason which alleges to discover such a Truth; both urge, against the tyrannical claims of speculative intellect, that truth must be a function of man as a unifed subject of experience. One may argue that the reaction against ideology begins with the American pragmatists because of the unique efects of American experience: Americans seem always to have known that truths are forged in experience and that, in a sense, man makes himself. Culturally considered, American pragmatism, even of the Jamesean variety, may be as much an outgrowth of Franklin as a rejection of Hegel. However one assigns priorities, the complex of infuence afected Adams and James in common. But the late-nineteenth-century anti-intellectual reaction, fostered by the American experience, and given respectability by a Darwinian “logic of life,” could take more than one direction. It could lead to a simple “dynamic” morality of primeval power, the appeal of which Adams examines in Democracy. Or, coupled with a lingering belief in free will and responsibility, it could become a defense of the purely voluntary religious option in a world where, more and more, intellectuality meant science, skepticism and a purely secular response to the world; Esther seems to resolve Adams’ ambivalence on this alternative. Or fnally, and paradoxically, it might produce a determinist who was also a rigid moralist—in Herbert Schneider’s famous phrase, a “desperate naturalist”; in such a case one would have to rest on the moral sufciency of instinct pretty much unexplained and undefended. Hence none of the pragmatic arguments of either Democracy or Esther is ever answered; they are allowed to stand as if possessing a certain abstract validity as arguments, and in novels of ideas this is certainly signifcant. But the reader is to feel these arguments as unavailable to the characters Adams most approves. Perhaps the logic of power is the only politically workable one—evidently certain things had to be done; but Madeline Lee cannot accept it. Perhaps faith is the only salvation—the church alone, as Adams would demonstrate to himself in Mont-Saint-Michel, stands for unity; but Esther cannot accept it. Nor, in either case, could Adams. He could never accept either the determinist or the voluntary logic by itself. He could not feel that even the Jamesean pragmatism was completely faithful, as it claimed to be, to both objective scientifc and subjective religious logic. And because Henry Adams could not stop pursuing either one, his novels firt with but do not espouse any form of pragmatic doctrine. Notes 1 Lecture Four of Pragmatism, “The One and the Many,” asserts that to the radical empiricist, the world “is neither a universe pure and simple nor a multiverse pure and simple” but that “its various manners of being One suggest, for their accurate attainment, so many distinct programs of scientifc work”; this surely, if indirectly, comments on Adams’ attempt to fnd a single, scientifc explanation of history.

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2 Robert Hume has argued that for Adams “illusions carefully erected may well be honored for their convenience though not for their assured objective truth” (Runaway Star, Ithaca, 1951, 190); more cogently, perhaps, J. C. Levenson has observed that “with his pragmatic method, [Adams] ‘proved’ religion by its power to get things done” (The Mind and Art of Henry Adams, Boston, 1957, 271). Levenson also suggests that “Adams had more than a casual acquaintance with the founders of pragmatism” (130), but it is easy to overstate this connection. Peirce makes no mention of Adams in his report on the make-up of the Metaphysical Club (see Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, Boston, 1935, I, 534–5); and although Adams was at Harvard during the height of the club’s activity and was a member, with James, of an almost equally distinguished dining club, it is unlikely that he took part in the discussions which hammered out the early versions of pragmatism. His most signifcant connection with that philosophy, also mentioned by Levenson, may well have been his publication (in the North American Review for October 1871), of Peirce’s seminal article on Berkeley. 3 In asserting the primacy of the ethical and the religious in James’ philosophy, I am attending primarily to motive. Though an epistemology probably lies at the technical center of his system, that system is obviously less rigidly a logical doctrine than Peirce’s (see Perry, Thought and Character, 538–42); and James’ intention, as expressed in “The Present Dilemma in Philosophy” and “What Pragmatism Means,” is clearly to fnd a way to be religious without ceasing to be scientifc. 4 One might begin the study of James’ eforts to make himself absolutely clear to his critics in the “Author’s Preface” to The Meaning of Truth (1909). This had been preceded by A. O. Lovejoy’s “The Thirteen Pragmatisms” which may have suggested to James that in the long run, intelligent opposition to his system would stress not its “immorality” but its ambiguity (see The Journal of Philosophy, V, 1908, 5–12, 29–39). James had steadfastly refused to dissociate himself from the average philosophical man; with characteristic honesty and good humor, he adverted to the popular elements in his thought by repeatedly talking about the “cash value” of ideas and about his pragmatism as a “practicalism.” In doing so, unfortunately, he seems to have encouraged a less sophisticated understanding of his doctrine than it requires; even Peirce objected to his loose formulations and renamed his own doctrine “pragmaticism.” 5 For a full reading of Democracy as roman à clef, with a convincing discussion of its biographical implications, see Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams: The Middle Years (Cambridge, 1958), 68–97. 6 Henry Adams, Democracy (New York, 1933), 10. Further citations are identifed by page number in the text. 7 The key work on the implications of Darwin in American social theory is, of course, Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston, 1955). A useful briefer discussion of Darwin’s infuence on Adams and on the other philosophical minds of the period is Perry Miller’s “Introduction” to American Thought: Civil War to World War I (New York, 1954). 8 Middle Years, 218–58. Samuels is especially helpful in his identifcation of the personality and doctrine which lie behind Stephen Hazard and his insightful comparison of Esther with Hawthorne’s Marble Faun. This connection is far more signifcant than the vexing one of what Adams meant by choosing his heroine’s name from Hawthorne’s “Old Esther Dudley.” 9 “The Will to Believe,” delivered as a lecture to the Philosophy Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities in 1896, is, in my view, the clearest statement of the

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13

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religious import of James’ philosophy; accordingly, that essay forms the basis of my comparison between Adams and James. Also central, of course, is “Pragmatism and Religion,” the last essay in Pragmatism (1907). For a discussion of Adams’ view of the superiority of women and their instinctual natures, see E. N. Saveth, “The Heroines of Henry Adams,” American Quarterly, VIII (Summer 1956), 234–42. Henry Adams, Esther, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints (New York, 1938), 11. Further citations are included in the text. Middle Years,  255–6. In “The Will to Believe” James carefully explains that the “logic” of Pascal works only if the particular faith in question represents a “genuine option”—being “live” (really attractive), “forced” (based on a complete disjunction), and “momentous” (making noticeable life-diferences). I have discussed Adams’ attitudes toward the intellectualist and the fdeist strains of Christianity in an article based on the last three chapters of MontSaint-Michel and Chartres: “The Dynamo and the Angelic Doctor,” American Quarterly, XVII (Winter 1965), 696–712. James quotes both men in “The Will to Believe.” According to his self-defense there, the Huxley-Cliford position amounts to an unexamined acceptance of the axiom that it is “better [to] risk loss of truth than chance of error”; there is, he argues, no more reason to accept this than its opposite. A possible source for Esther is to be found in Adams’ letter to James of July 27, 1882 (see Harold Dean Cater, Henry Adams and his Friends, Boston, 1947,  121–2). Commenting on James’ “Rationality, Activity, and Faith,” Adams writes: “As I understand your faith, your X, your reaction of the individual on the cosmos, it is the old question of free will over again. You choose to assume your will is free. Good! Reason proves that the will cannot be free. Equally good! Free or not, the mere fact that a doubt can exist, proves that X must be a very microscopic quantity.” As Ernest Samuels suggests, the tone of Adams’ letter indicates an argument with self as much as with James (Middle Years, 233). Similarly, Adams’ markings in his copy of James’ Principles of Psychology reveal the objections of one who would, but could not, be convinced (see Max I. Baym, “William James and Henry Adams,” New England Quarterly, X [1937], 717–42). This unexplained absoluteness in Esther’s decision is the center of an article by Millicent Bell (“Adams’ Esther: The Morality of Taste,” New England Quarterly, XXXV [1962], 147–61), who complains that, for a novel of ideas, Esther is uncommonly private. Referring to Yvor Winters’ famous essay on Adams (see In Defense of Reason, Denver, 1947), she associates Esther’s “ethical instinct more refned than that of the church” with “the Protestant conscience severed from its support in theology and forced to operate by the rule of faith alone” (153). As Ernest Samuels has noted, Strong’s disparagement of man’s intellectual history echoes Adams’ own slur on James’ respect for great men: “Not one of them has ever got so far as to tell us a single fact worth knowing” (Cater, 122; quoted in Middle Years, 232). Although Adams’ boundless energy for investigation always makes him seem an enthusiastic and even idealistic intellectual, his failures and frustrations led him more and more to express philosophical ideas that are, as Yvor Winters has shown, profoundly anti-intellectual. A helpful introduction to the various reactions against nineteenth-century ideology is Morton White’s “The Decline and Fall of the Absolute,” introductory to The Age of Analysis (New York, 1955).

Index

Aaron, Daniel 115–16 Achillini 93, 94 Adams, Henry 237–9, 247, 250–1 “Adieu to a Soldier” 132 adultery 206–7, 209–11 Albro, Thomas 6, 17 “Allegories of the Heart” 89 Allin, John 15 Ambassadors, The 222 American, The 219–20, 222 American Romanticism 177, 188 anthropomorphism 143–4 anti-intellectualism 250 Antinomian Crisis 22, 29 Aquinas, Thomas 108 “Armies of the Wilderness, The” 148–9 Arminianism 29 Arthur Gordon Pym 173 “Artist of the Beautiful, The” 77, 78, 88 “As I Lay with my Head in Your Lap Camerado” 129–30 “At Silver Creek” 150 Augustine 97 Augustinian conversion 49; of Thomas Shepard, Jr. 8, 27, 29 Auster, Paul 173 autobiography 1, 89, 133, 238 “Autobiography” see Shepard, Thomas, Jr. Averroes 93, 94 Awakening, The 195–200, 226–33 Baal 52, 53 “Ball’s Bluf” 137–8 baptism 19–20

“Battle for [Mobile] Bay, The” 150 “Battle for the Mississippi, The” 143 “Battle of Springfeld, Missouri” 137 “Battle of Stone River, The” 144 Battle Pieces 133–43, 147–8, 153, 163, 171–2 Bayle, Pierre 78 Baym, Nina 207 “Beat! Beat! Drums!” 117, 119 Bensick, Carol 92 Berkeley, George 183, 184, 185, 186 birds: Dickinson and 184–6; Jewett and 190–1 “Birthmark, The” 77 “Bivouac on a Mountain Side” 122–3 Blake, Lillie Devereux 207 blasphemy 26, 99 Blithedale Romance, The 204 “Blow! Bugles! Blow!” 119 Book of Common Prayer 66–7 Book of Sports 54, 57, 58, 65–6, 68 Bostonians, The 218, 221 Bradford, William 1–2, 4, 5, 30, 32; “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” and 55–60 bribery 242 British Metaphysicals 188 Brown, John 120, 134, 156–7, 186 Bryant, William Cullen 176 Caesar’s Gallic Wars 116 Calvin, John 25, 28, 49, 92, 97 Calvinist theology 2–4, 207–8; Dickinson and 188–9; law and order in 147; predestination in 3, 22, 23–4; self-fulfllment in 3, 110

Index Cary, Alice 205–7 Catch-22 116 “Celestial Rail-road, The” 77 “Centenarian’s Story, The” 122 “Chaos” 210 Charles I, King 65 Chauncy, Charles 118 Chesnutt, Charles 200 Chillingworth, Roger 92 Chopin, Kate 190, 195–201, 226–7 “Christmas Banquet, The” 88 “City of Ships” 121 “College Colonel, The” 150–1 “Columnar” 180–1 “Coming Storm, The” 155–6 Comus 54 Cotton, John 29, 213 Country of the Pointed Firs, The 190 Cranch, Christopher Pearse 185 Crane, Stephen 128, 224 Cummins, Maria 205 cynicism 5, 35 Daly, Robert 93 Damnation of Theron Ware 226–30 Danforth, Samuel 3 Dante 93, 133, 173 Darley, Richard 12 Darwinism 239 deconstruction 106 Defense of the Answer 15–16 “Delicate Cluster” 130–1 DeLillo, Don 173 Democracy 238–44, 250–1 Democratic Vistas 188 Derrida, Jacques 107 Descartes, René 188, 247–8, 249 “Destruction of the Ram Albemarle by the Torpedo-Launch” 152 Dickinson, Emily 4, 34, 98, 115, 135, 149, 176; Calvinism and 188–9; on human and divine nature 181–2; idealism and 184, 187–8; nature explored by 177–83; on the self-reliant self 180–1; on the soul 180; Transcendental Selfhood and 180; use of birds by 184–6; use of dogs by 186–7; vignette poetry of 178 Digby, Kenelm 45–6, 93 “Dirge for Two Veterans” 127–8

255

“Dnieper Wrestlers” 178 dogmatic Christianity 247–8 dogs 186–7 Dreiser, Theodore 234 Drum Taps 117–24, 164, 170 “Dupont’s Round Fight” 138 “Earth’s Holocaust” 77, 81–6 ecclesiastical idyl 245 Edwards, Jonathan 22 “Eighteen Sixty-One” 117, 119 Eliot, T. S. 133 Elsie Venner 207–9 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: Berkeleyan immaterialism of 183; on the Brook Farm experiment 239; on God within 181; Hawthorne and 76–81; on illusions 100; on Jesus and historical Christianity 91; on John Brown 134; Melville and 97, 98–9, 105, 108, 109; on nature 176, 178–9; Nature 76–8, 127, 179, 181, 187, 208; paradox of idealism and 86–7; on perils of love and friendship 88–9; on reformers and projectors 82–3; Transcendentalism and 90, 187; war poetry by (see Drum Taps) Emerson’s Demanding Optimism 233 Epistemological Puritanism 100 epistemology 184, 188 Erkkila, Betsy 130 “Errand” 3 Esther 238, 240, 244–51 “Ethnogenesis” 173 Europeans, The 218–19 excommunication 11 existentialism 123 faith 244, 249–50 Fall of Man 183 Farewell to Arms, A 116, 213 female writers, 19th century 205–6; on loyalty and feminist intelligence 190–1; on marriage and men 192–5, 205–7; on sex and gender roles 195–201 Feminist Criticism 92 “Ferment, The” 77 Fettered for Life 207

256

Index

Fetterley, Judith 207 “First 0 Songs for a Prelude” 117–20 Foucault, Michel 117 Franklin, Benjamin 81, 237 Frederic, Harold 226–7 “Freedom’s Ferment” 82 Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins 190, 192–5, 200, 233 Freud, Sigmund 34, 83, 107, 117, 143, 204, 228 Friends of Universal Reform 81–2 “From Paumanok Starting I Fly Like a Bird” 120 Frost, Robert 100 “Further in Summer than the Birds” 180 Garland, Hamlin 200 “Gentle Boy, The” 51 Gettysburg, Battle at 145 “Giant” 181 Gillespie, Robert 211–12 “Give Me the Splendid Sun” 127 Gnosticism 112 God 188; anthropomorphism and 143–4; birds and 184–5; converting power of 4; cynicism toward 5, 35; design by 1; existing personally 246; grace of 27–8; idealism and Transcendentalism and 76–86; kindness of 2; love of 9, 20, 23; materialism and 183–4; moving in the mind of a group 17; pragmatism and 245, 247–8; predestination by 3, 22, 23–4; providence of 7, 19; quarreling with 96–8, 109, 112; rebellion against 3; redemption by 27–8; Shepard’s hostility toward 3, 5; Shepard’s questioning of 26; Spirit of 12; will of 10; wrath of 25; see also Jesus Christ Golden Bowl, The 223–4 grace of God 27–8 Grant, Ulysses S. 117, 148, 154, 157 Gura, Philip 205–6 Hagar 205–7 Hall, David D. 81 “Hall of Fantasy, The” 77, 78, 82, 86–7, 94

Harte, Bret 200 Harvard Divinity School 77 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 45, 62, 146, 179, 188, 233, 239; “Allegories of the Heart” 89; dissociation from extra-mental world 89–90; “Earth’s Holocaust” 77, 81–6; on future of religion 83; idealism and 76–7; Melville on 96; on moral and political disease 81–2; Mosses from an Old Manse 76–9, 90; “Rappaccini’s Daughter” 77, 78, 90–3; “The Artist of the Beautiful” 77, 78, 88; “The Virtuoso’s Collection” 77–8, 94; Transcendental friendship with Emerson 90; Transcendentalism and 76–81, 84, 94; war poetry by 121; see also “May-Pole of Merry Mount, The”; Scarlet Letter, The Hazard of New Fortunes, A 212 “Haze” 177 Hedge, Frederick Henry 188 Hegel, G. W. F. 251 Hegelian Absolute 237 Hemingway, Ernest 213, 222 Herbert, George 84 History of Boston 63 Hobbes, Thomas 25 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 207–8 Holy History 4, 53, 143, 145, 154 homosexuality 117, 204–5 Hooker, Thomas 8, 29, 32 House of the Seven Gables, The 62, 204 “House-Top, The” 146 Howells, William Dean 211–18, 222, 233–4 Howland, John 5 “How Solemn as One by One” 129 Hubbard, William 62 Huckleberry Finn 115, 211, 237, 238 human nature 181–2 Hume, David 25, 91, 185 Hungerford, Margaret Wolfe 184 Hutchinson, Anne 29 idealism 76–7, 78, 88, 183; Dickinson and 184, 187–8; paradox of 87;

Index and perils of love and friendship 88–9; of the soul and human body 78 Iliad 116 intellectual caution 97–8, 110 “In the Prison Pen” 150 “Inward Morning, The” 177 Ironic Transcendentalism 177–8 Jackson, Stonewall 144–5 James, Henry 20, 51, 53, 65, 92, 106, 204; on marriage 218–24; men portrayed in writing by 191–2; naturalism of 218, 221 James, William 237–8, 246, 247, 249–51 James I, King 65–6 Jesus Christ 29–31, 32, 91, 156; Joanna Hooker’s belief in 35–7; see also God Jewett, Sarah Orne 190–1, 200 Johnson, Edward 29, 62 Kant, Immanuel 182 Keats, John 188 Lacan, Jacques 107 Lamplighter, The 205 Leaves 130 Leavis, Q. D. 66 Lee, Robert E. 117, 154, 157, 164, 165 Lewis, C. S. 66 Liberal Christianity 67, 77, 80, 92, 146, 208 Lincoln, Abraham 155, 162, 172–3 “Live Oak with Moss” 124 Locke, John 183 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 173 “Long too Long America” 126–7 love: adultery and 206–7, 209–11; Henry James on 218–24; murder in the name of 207–8; power and 241–2; pragmatism and 241–2, 245–6; in protomodern fction 211; same-sex 117, 205; sex and 203–4; in war poetry 124–33, 151–2, 160–1, 173; see also marriage; sex lust 28 Lynn, Kenneth 212, 216 Lyon, Nathaniel 137

257

Maggie 224–6 “Malvern Hill” 143 Manicheanism 92–3, 98, 117 “Man of Adamant, The” 45 Marble Faun, The 53, 207–8 “MARCH INTO VIRGINIA, THE” 136–7 “March to the Sea” 153–4 marriage 11, 12–13, 226; adultery and 206–7; female writers on 192–5, 205–7; Henry James on 218–24; infdelity in 228–9; in proto-modern fction 211; Puritanism and 194–5, 203–4, 207, 213–14, 233; as sacrament 213; William Dean Howells on 211–18, 233–4; see also love; sex Married Not Mated 206–7 Marsilius 93 Massachusetts Bay Company 62 Massachusetts Historical Collections 56 materialism 94, 183–4 Mather, Cotton 52, 89, 94 “May-Pole of Merry Mount, The”: as allegory of Puritanism 45–7, 51, 58–9, 63–4, 67; arrest of the Master of Revels in 54–5; attempts to arrest spread of paganism in 50–1; distinction between Revellers and Puritans in 49–50; historical criticism of 52–63; instructions on how to play the maypole game in 69; Joseph Strutt and 65, 68–9; meta-historical symbolism of 63–4, 67–8; on mixed blessing of success of American Puritanism 66–7; narratives of 57–9; on observance of Sunday 65; paganism portrayed in 47–9, 58–9; plot of 46–7; Rev. Blackstone and 52–63, 67, 69; sobriety and decorum challenged in 47–8; sociology of American colonization in 51–2; thematic meaning of 45; William Bradford and 55–60 McGifert, Michael 31

258

Index

McTeague 225–6 Melville, Herman 76, 77, 117, 163; on Hawthorne 96, 156; on John Brown 120, 134, 156–7, 186; on sex 204–5; war poetry by 120, 121, 130, 146, 149, 153, 155, 163–70 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 188 Miller, Perry 8, 15, 17, 177 Miller, William 83, 84, 87, 94 Milton, John 210, 213 “Minister’s Black Veil, The” 90 “Miracles Controversy” 77 “Misgivings” 134–6 Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty 115, 195, 209–11 Moby-Dick 77; Ahab’s insanity in 110–11; Ahab’s quarrel with God in 96–8, 109, 112; Ahab’s superstition in 111; color explored in 99–100; on deep knowing 98–100; intellectual caution in 97–8, 110; notknowing in 103; pragmatism in 104; as quest-romance genre work 105–11; scenes of whaling in 101–4; skepticism depicted in 97–8, 102–5; softer side of Ahab in 97; soul of the female in 112; structure of 96; survival of Ishmael in 112–13; thematic construction of 99; as war story 117; Zoroastrianism in 112 Modern Instance, A 212–18 Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres 238, 247, 251 Morrison, Toni 99 Morton, Thomas 55–60, 62, 64, 66–7 Mosses from an Old Manse 76–9, 90 “Mother” 192–5 mourning 34, 145 “Muster, The” 156–7 “My Uncle Molineux” 144 naturalism 143–4, 218, 221, 226–7 Nature 76–8, 127, 179, 181, 187, 208, 237 New England: dangers of travel to 17–18; Shepard on spiritual success in 16–17; Shepard’s call to 13–16; Shepard’s

doubts about 18–19; Shepard’s reception on arrival in 19–20; sociology of American colonization in 51–2; see also Puritanism “New England Nun” 192–5 New England’s Memorial 56, 59 New English Canaan 64, 66 Norris, Frank 225 Norton, John 17 Noyes, John Humphrey 204 Of Plymouth Plantation 56 “Old Manse, The” 76, 81–2, 94 On Liberty and Necessity 237 original sin 90, 150, 208 “Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice” 128 Paganism 47–51, 58–9, 93, 113 “Parallax a Flame” 181–2 “Paradise of Bachelors, The” 149 Pascal, Blaise 138–9, 248, 249 philosophical pragmatism 250–1 “Philosophy of Composition, The” 88 Pierre 204–5 Plato 184, 187, 188 Plymouth 1–2, 32 Poe, Edgar Allen 77, 87, 88, 99, 152, 173 Poems on Slavery 173 political pragmatism 239–44 “Portent, The” 134 Portrait of a Lady, The 218, 221 pragmatism 104, 237; in Democracy 238–9; dogmatic Christianity and 247–8; in Esther 240, 244–51; faith and 244, 249–50; love and 241–2, 245–6; philosophical 250–1; political 239–44; reform and 239; skepticism and 247, 249 prayer 6, 22–3, 26–7, 37; in times of war 149–50, 154–5 Prayer Book 64–5, 67 predestination 3, 22–4 Preston, Thomas 25 Princess Casamassima, The 221 Problem of the Universe 98 prostitution 224–5 proto-modern fction 211 providence of God 7, 19

Index Puritanism: attempts to arrest spread of paganism by 50–1; Epistemological 100; marriage and 194–5, 207, 213–14, 233; mixed blessings of successful American 66–7; pragmatism and 244–51; single-mothers and 203–4; sobriety and decorum in 47–8; Sunday observance in 65; “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” as allegory of 45–7, 51, 58–9, 63–4, 67; Thomas Shepard on New England 6–9, 15, 20, 32–4; Transcendentalism and 76–81, 84 quest-romance genre 105–11 “Race of Veterans, A” 129 “Rappaccini’s Daughter” 77, 78, 90–3 “Rebel Color Bearers at Shiloh” 157 Reconstruction politics 243 Red Badge of Courage 115 redemption 27–8 regionalism 192, 201–2, 226–7; male chauvinism and 200–1; see also female writers, 19th century Reynolds, David 130, 207 “Rhodora, The” 176 Ripley, George 91 “Rise of Days from Your Fathomless Deeps” 120 Rise of Silas Lapham, The 212, 214 “Rise of the American Novel” 205–6 Rockford 207 Roderick Hudson 218, 221–2 Rushdie, Salman 173 Ruth Hall 205 salvation 5, 7, 12; through Jesus Christ 28–30; predestination and 3, 22–4 Samuels, Ernest 247 Scarlet Letter, The 61, 198, 203, 205 Scars We Carve, The 116 Schneider, Herbert 251 self-reliance 180–1 “Self-Writings of Thomas Shepard, The” 31 sex 231, 234; attraction and 241–2; gender roles and 195–9;

259

Henry James on 219–20, 223; homosexuality and 204–5; power and 241–2; prostitution and 224–6; Puritanism and 203–4; see also love; marriage “Shape of Water, The” 100 Shepard, Joanna Hooker 33–7 Shepard, Thomas, Jr.: on the Antinomian Controversy 22, 29; Augustinian conversion of 8, 27, 29; on baptism 19–20; on being in the Spirit 17; birth of frst son of 13; birth of second son of 19–20; on the call to New England 13–16; Calvinist theology of 2–4; charge to his son 4–5; on conscience of the unborn 18; on conviction 24–5; cynicism and 5, 35; death of frst son of 6, 18–19, 32; death of Joanna Hooker Shepard and 33–7; decision to leave Earle’s Colne 11–12; early career a minister 9–10; fnal scenes in autobiography of 37–8; frst wife of 12, 21, 30; intentions of autobiography of 14–15; Lectureship at Earle’s Colne 8–10; on lust 28; on marriage 11, 12–13; mixture of blessing and afiction in life of 32–4; mother of 6; move to Northumberland 13; on prayer 6, 22–3, 26–7, 37; on predestination 3, 22–4; Preface written by 3–4, 15, 19–20; on providence of God 7, 19; publication of “Autobiography” of 30–1; Puritanism and 6–9, 15, 20, 32–3; questioning of God by 26; on redemption 27–8; on religious renewal 24–5; on salvation 5, 7, 12, 22–4, 28–30; self-revelation of 23–4; as a sinner 25–7; university education of 5–8; writing style of 31–2 Sherman, William T. 153–4 “Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim, A” 124 sin: conviction of 24–7; original 90, 150, 208; sex and 77, 78, 90–3 Sincere Convert 32

260

Index

Sister Carrie 234 skepticism 97–8, 102–5; pragmatism and 247, 249 slavery 117, 126, 132, 150, 155, 161, 172–3 Snow, Caleb 63 Snowbound 173 social justice 146 “Song of the Banner at Daybreak” 120 “Soul selects her own Society, The” 180 Sound Believer 32 “Spirit Whose Work is Done” 131 Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, The 65 “Spring Exhibition of the National Academy, 1865” 157 “Stone Fleet, An Old Sailor’s Lament, The” 139 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 208 “Strange Poise of Spirit, A” see Shepard, Thomas, Jr. Strutt, Joseph 65, 68–9 “Summer Rain, The” 177 “Swamp Angel, The” 149 Their Wedding Journey 212 Theory of Everything 94 Thoreau, Henry David 98, 103–4, 134, 176–9, 187–8, 239 Timrod, Henry 173 “To a Certain Civilian” 131 Tom Sawyer 211 Touteville, Margaret 12, 21 Tragic Muse, The 221 Transcendentalism 76–86, 94; Emerson and 90, 187; ironic 177–8; materialism and 94; war stories and 117 Transcendental Selfhood 180 “Turn O Libertad” 132 Twain, Mark/Clemens, Samuel 115, 200, 211 Unitarianism 213 Unwritten War, The 115–16 Vedder, E. 157 “Verses Inscriptive and Memorial” 162–70 Very, Jones 89 “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” 124 “Virtuoso’s Collection, The” 77–8, 94

Walden 177, 179 Wandering Jew theme 77–8 War and Peace 116, 146 Warland, Owen 88 war literature 115–16, 133; Battle of Gettysburg in 145; Battle Pieces 133–43, 147–8, 153, 163, 171–2; bloodiness of the American Civil War represented in 171–2; celebrating victory of good over evil 163; close-in views of authors of 170–1; DrumTaps 117–24, 164, 170; glory explored in 143; love and death in 124–33, 151–2, 160–1, 173; prayer in 149–50, 154–5; righteousness of war and 145–7; Robert E. Lee and 117, 154, 157, 164, 165; self-reference of Emerson in 133; slavery and 117, 126, 132, 150, 155, 161, 172–3; Stonewall Jackson and 144–5; symbolism in 160, 165; Transcendentalism and 117; Ulysses S. Grant and 117, 148, 154, 157; vengeance in 153–4; on why men go to war 158–62, 172–3 Warner, Susan 205 Washington, George 240 Weld, Thomas 9 “White Heron” 190–1 White-Jacket 147 Whitman, Elizabeth 203 Whitman, Walt 115, 116, 187–8; on chanting 131; Drum Taps 117–24; sexual boldness in writing by 130; war poetry by 117–24, 130–2, 151, 164, 170 Whittier, John Greenleaf 173 Wide, Wide World 205 Williams, J. Gary 65 Wings of the Dove, The 223 Winthrop, John 94, 110, 213 “Wives of the Dead, The” 90 Wordsworth, William 176, 179 “Wound-Dresser, The” 125–6 yellow journalism 224 Zoroastrianism 112