The Heroines of Henry Longfellow: Domestic, Defiant, Divine 1666913065, 9781666913064

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The Heroines of Henry Longfellow

The Heroines of Henry Longfellow Domestic, Defiant, Divine Timothy E. G. Bartel

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bartel, Timothy E. G., author.   Title: The heroines of Henry Longfellow : domestic, defiant, divine /     Timothy E.G. Bartel.   Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2022] | Includes bibliographical     references and index. | Summary: "The Heroines of Henry Longfellow:     Domestic, Defiant, Divine explores the major heroines of Henry Wadsworth     Longfellow. He argues that these oft-overlooked characters have great     significance for ongoing discussions within feminism and theology     concerning domesticity, political defiance, and the human quest for     union with the divine"-- Provided by publisher.   Identifiers: LCCN 2022029566 (print) | LCCN 2022029567 (ebook) | ISBN     9781666913064 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666913088 (paperback) | ISBN 9781666913071 (ebook)   Subjects: LCSH: Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 1807-1882--Criticism and     interpretation. | Women in literature. | Heroines in literature. |     Feminism in literature. | LCGFT: Literary criticism.  Classification: LCC PS2292.W6 B37 2022  (print) | LCC PS2292.W6  (ebook) |     DDC 811/.3--dc23/eng/20220623  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029566 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029567 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Introduction: Lives Infused with Light



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Chapter One: The Early Heroines: Preciosa, The Teacher, The Quadroon Girl

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Chapter Two: Evangeline: The First Masterpiece

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Chapter Three: The Middle Heroines: Elsie, Nokomis, Minnehaha, Priscilla 49 Chapter Four: Interlude: The Perspicacity of Beatrice



Chapter Five: The Later Heroines: Edith, The Mother, Elizabeth Chapter Six: The Last Heroine: Vittoria Colonna Chapter Seven: Domestic, Defiant, or Divine? Bibliography Index



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75 93 111

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About the Author



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Introduction Lives Infused with Light

“The martyrs always and perpetually remain brilliant in equal vigor and youth, brightly reflecting the glory of their innate brilliance.”1 These words by St. John Chrysostom are quoted, in Latin, at the end of an 1832 lecture by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In 1832, Longfellow was a rookie professor of modern languages at Bowdoin College, a small institution in Maine. Longfellow had spent the late 1820s in Europe, pursuing graduate studies in the modern languages, and he brought with him to Bowdoin educational techniques and concerns that were new to the American university system.2 Some of these innovations he had picked up from European universities, especially the German research university at Gottingen; others were idiosyncratic to himself. One of these idiosyncrasies was the inclusion of two lectures on the early Church Fathers at the beginning of his modern language classes. In “The Literary History of the Middle Ages,” Longfellow would explain that “the eloquence of the Christian Fathers flowed from a purer fountain than the streams of classic poetry . . . bright with the glories of revelation, and radiant with a more than earthly splendor.”3 By all rights, Longfellow should not have been interested in the Church Fathers. William Ellery Channing, the founder of the Unitarian Church of which Longfellow was a member, thought that the Church Fathers were a waste of time.4 But Longfellow had fallen in love with the Fathers during his time in Europe. In his 1835 travelogue, Outre-Mer, he recounts his meeting in the 1820s with an Italian monk who praised John Chrysostom highly and encouraged Longfellow to read the Fathers.5 The fruit of that conversation can be seen in the 1832 Chrysostom quotation above. In it Chrysostom describes the glory of the Christian martyrs in visceral terms—the imagery of light moves beyond figuration to a description of literal bodily illumination.

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Curiously, unlike the other quotations in the lectures, there is no commentary provided for the Chrysostom quotation; it is written on a sheet of scrap paper and appended to the lecture by the poet. However, what seems an afterthought about the glory of the early Christian martyrs would grow in the poet’s mind into a dominant vision of the whole of human life. But Longfellow would not use male figures—as Chrysostom does—to illustrate his vision. He would use heroines. From the beginning of his poetic career in 1839 to his death in 1882, Longfellow included in his poems around a dozen characters who could be considered heroines. Of these, there are six that could be called major heroines: Preciosa, Evangeline Bellefontaine, Elsie, Priscilla Mullins, Edith Christison, and Vittoria Colonna. These women drive the plots of their respective narrative and dramatic poems and reveal their heroism in two ways. First, they reconcile and harmonize their individual work—whether romantic, aesthetic, or political—with the call to live holy Christian lives. Second, they achieve a state of godlikeness that is manifested in bodily illumination with celestial light. WHY LONGFELLOW’S HEROINES? The life and afterlife of Longfellow have been recounted many times in the critical literature of the last 50 years, in part because of the immense irony of the story. First, his life: born in 1807, the son of a Portland lawyer, Longfellow longed for literary eminence as a young writer in an age before American writers were even a category in the Western consciousness. Longfellow began his career as a teacher of modern languages, virtually inventing, thanks to his time in Europe in the 1820s, a new way to teach languages to university students, a method that placed literature at its center. Longfellow’s first published works were prose, but he soon turned to poetry, and from 1839 to 1847 he wrote some of the first popular and talked-about books of poetry in American history, including Voices of the Night, Poems on Slavery (which was censored in the American South), and Evangeline, the first great long narrative poem of American history. By 1854, Longfellow had made enough money to retire from teaching and write for a living. The next decade saw his most famous poems: Song of Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish, and “Paul Revere’s Ride.” In 1867, he published the first complete American translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, setting the standard for all subsequent Dante scholarship in the United States. By the 1870s, his birthday was celebrated as a national holiday, his poems were translated and loved as far away as China, he met with Queen Victoria on a tour of Europe, and he entertained at his home some of the greatest writers of his age: Emerson, Dickens, even

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Oscar Wilde. When he died in 1882, Longfellow seemed to be a poet for the ages, the first definitive proof that American poetry could be read and loved the whole world over. But then came the afterlife: because Longfellow’s poems became a part of every American child’s schooling, they began to appear too official, stodgy, and old-fashioned. The first decade of the new century saw the emergence of modernist visions, which had little time for the conventional forms and subjects of the previous age. By 1939, Ludwig Lewisohn was asking: “Who, except wretched schoolchildren, now reads Longfellow?”6 By the mid-twentieth century, the most popular American poet of the nineteenth century was now considered a minor poet beside such major figures as Whitman and Dickinson. Some more aggressive critics, like Lewisohn, denied that Longfellow should be called a poet at all. Then came the rehabilitation. Newton Arvin gave Longfellow a positive—if reserved—treatment in his 1962 Longfellow: His Life and Work. By the 1990s, Longfellow seemed a historical underdog who had a chance to resurface as a poet worth reading. Dana Gioia’s “Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism” was one of the first postmodern looks at Longfellow, reexamining his popularity in the nineteenth century, and complicating what seemed a too easy dismissal by the modernists. The first decades of the twenty-first century have been a time of great biographical interest, with four major volumes (Christoph Irmscher’s Longfellow Redux and Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200, Charles Calhoun’s Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life, and Nicholas Basbanes’s Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) calling attention to Longfellow’s personal and professional accomplishments that modernism’s backlash had hid from view. We have also seen a host of articles over the past twenty years that have delved into Longfellow’s vast oeuvre. Longfellow’s view of national literature, Longfellow’s approach to translation, Longfellow’s abolitionism, Longfellow’s debt to Dante, Longfellow’s invention of the study of comparative literature: all of these subjects and more are emerging as avenues back into the work of a man who was in his own century the most beloved poet in the world and in the next century one of the most despised poets in the world. In 2014 many of these interests were joined in a valuable volume of essays called Reconsidering Longfellow. Still, none of the essays in the collection take as their subject Longfellow’s portrayal of women, let alone his heroines. Edward Cifelli’s Longfellow in Love turned its attention to the women Longfellow courted and married, but not so much the women in his literary works. The present book seeks to address this lack of critical interaction and add to the growing conversation about Longfellow and the place of women in his work. Perhaps this century can be one wherein a more balanced and

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thoughtful estimation of the poet can be achieved. This will take place only if critics and readers can ignore both the glimmer of fame and the tarnish of ill-repute and actually read the poems themselves. WHY LONGFELLOW’S HEROINES? The sad confluence of Longfellow’s modern disrepute and the flowering of twentieth-century literary criticism means that the poet who created some of the most important and beloved heroines of the nineteenth-century has been left out of the story about heroines and the literary depiction of women in twentieth-century criticism.7 For, except for Poe, no American poet of the nineteenth century created so many memorable and popular female protagonists. And unlike Poe, Longfellow was on the whole unwilling to subject his female protagonists to narrow social spheres and macabre demises. Instead, his female characters are overwhelmingly heroic and encouragingly diverse. While the main characters of Dickinson and Whitman are their own lyric selves, Longfellow’s main characters are Romani dancers, Jewish mothers, Dakota maidens, exiled wanderers, condemned heretics, and Catholic nuns. In fact, we must go outside the genre of poetry to find another writer so interested in writing female protagonists; the closest analogue among Longfellow’s contemporaries might be the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose Hester Prynne is arguably the most discussed heroine in American literature. The closest analogue to Longfellow among his poet-contemporaries is Tennyson. But, as Marion Shaw has argued, Tennyson’s women—Vivien, Guinevere, etc—often come out of their poems looking like the cause of all the trouble in their communities.8 This is a stark contrast to Longfellow who, in the words of Charles C. Calhoun, uses heroines like Evangeline to show that women can “redeem the misdeeds of men.”9 With only one exception,10 all of Longfellow’s female characters are sympathetic, though many are too minor or briefly sketched to count as heroines. For the sake of focus, then, I have chosen six major heroines, plus a handful of minor heroines, to focus on in my investigation. These protagonists span the whole of Longfellow’s five-decade career and feature in the majority of his dramatic and narrative poems. It is through examination of these heroines—their stories, their qualities, their development over the course of their poems—that I hope to show that Longfellow did indeed add to that list of Woolf’s “women who have burnt like beacons” in the poems of our history, women who challenge and complicate their culture’s expectations of how a woman should live, who, in the words of Samuel Johnson, “by conquering some calamities, and enduring others, teach us what we may hope, and what we can perform.”11

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THE CHARGE OF “DOMESTICITY” One of the major complaints of early twentieth-century critics about Longfellow is that he is at his core a sentimental man who celebrated the domestic sphere above all else. The critic Granville Hicks complained that Longfellow met “his fellow citizens only upon the level of domestic sentimentality.”12 According to Roy Harvey Pearce, the mid-twentieth-century historian of the American renaissance, Longfellow is ultimately a poet of the “hearthside” in whom “certitude is wholly domesticated.”13 Pearce contrasts Longfellow’s “striving to attain the certitude that life, after all, is not an empty dream” with Poe’s striving to “search [life] to its depth.”14 When he turns his eyes to Evangeline, Pearce describes the poem as a “story of the rewards of domestic piety, in spite of all the forces which might work against it.”15 This reading of Longfellow as a poet who celebrates domesticity16 suggests that Longfellow falls into that camp of poets whose chief is Coventry Patmore. Patmore wrote the popular nineteenth-century poem “The Angel in the House,” which famously celebrated the domestic woman, and has been criticized for practically incarcerating woman within the domestic sphere. For Pearce, Longfellow’s heroine in Evangeline has a primarily domestic piety—that is, a pious devotion to home and hearth, and, by implication, a pious devotion to home and hearth as the proper sphere of women. Recently, Annamaria Formichella Elsden has delineated three major meanings of the term domestic in the nineteenth century: In the first part of the nineteenth century, the term as it applied to the home, and especially to middle class women, became a powerful signifier; “‘the domestic sphere’ as woman’s ‘pro-per realm’” became codified (Cott 11). As early as 1545, however, “domestic” signified “pertaining to one’s own country,” in contrast to “foreign.” . . . A third meaning of “domestic”—referring to a wild creature made tame—also operates in this project, as “living under the care of Man” becomes a source of conflict for late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury middle-class White women (OED).17

It is the first definition of domestic that Pearce implies—the world within the doorway of the home. And it is this that Patmore celebrates, a sphere of fireplace and food and children, governed by the quiet wife. And this wife is in turn subordinate to, “under the care of,” a man. But it is the contention of this book that this domestic sphere is not what Longfellow primarily focuses on in his heroine-featuring narratives. Few of Longfellow’s heroines are wives; even fewer are mothers. And of all the scenes in which his heroines demonstrate their heroic qualities, scenes within the family home are in the minority. Longfellow’s heroines are too busy dancing on stage, awaiting sentence in

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prison, protesting in the streets, or wandering the wilderness. For their heroism lies not in their adherence to the domestic sphere, but in their discernment of their individual work, and in the harmonizing of that work with the highest quest of all—the quest for godlikeness. It is not the sphere or setting that matters so much as the performance of these activities. ORTHODOX FEMINISM It is in the interest of moving away from reductive readings of Longfellow as a poet of mere domesticity that I propose that we place Longfellow in conversation with the Orthodox Feminists. Longfellow’s ongoing characterization of his heroines as saints seeking godlikeness and illumination shares many affinities with the writings of these Christian thinkers, who, over the last three decades, have argued for a theological vision that holds the full humanity and potential godlikeness of woman as central concerns. In the latter half of the twentieth century, as Eastern Orthodox theologians from Russia and Greece have begun to engage with contemporary Western thought, some female Orthodox scholars have taken notice of and begun to engage the concerns and possibilities of feminist thought. Given that feminism did not originate in their cultures, these theologians have felt free to bring Eastern perspectives of gender, church, and authority to the conversation. As Elisabeth Behr-Sigel explains, The [twentieth-century] Orthodox Churches, either persecuted or tolerated as mere vestiges of a past that was soon to disappear completely, were . . . in a struggle for their very survival. Believing women courageously participated in the struggle. It is they—as we now know—who to a great extent secured the parishes of the Russian Church by assuming responsibility for them before the local Soviet authorities. For them, their Church is like an ancient vessel, both precious and fragile, that they must protect and preserve. Their vision is quite different from that of many western feminists, that of the Church as a male fortress to be besieged and eventually stormed.18

This non-Western experience of the Christian church as an institution that has been defended and preserved by women no less than men has lent a unique tenor to the writings of the Orthodox Feminists. They care deeply about women’s experience, rights, and power, but continue to look to Eastern Christian tradition to substantiate, defend, and further understand these contemporary realities. The thematic strain that runs through Orthodox feminist writings that I would like to explore is that of the full humanity and potential godlikeness of all women.

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If anyone is responsible for the current Orthodox conversation about feminism, it is Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, the late French theologian. She helped to coin the term “Orthodox feminism,” which, she explains, is concerned with the “struggle for the church to become a little more what it is in the mind of our God, One in three persons: a community, or rather a communion of persons in his likeness.”19 In her foundational 1982 essay, “Woman, too, is in the Image of God,” Behr-Sigel argues for an anthropology of gender based on the concepts of the image and likeness of God. The image of God, she explains, is “the proper capacity of the human being to transcend himself, to ‘participate in God.’”20 It “corresponds to the global, dynamic orientation in each existing human creature, increasingly called upon to go beyond himself or herself, to transcend his or her ‘nature.’ As such the image is both a gift and a task, the gift of ‘being,’ and the task of becoming ‘the likeness of God.’”21 In her conclusion, Behr-Sigel summarizes the thought of the Church Fathers on gender. They share, she says, the “conviction that men and women have an equal dignity, that they are bearers of the same divine image, and that they are called together to the same deification.”22 She laments that this “conception that the Fathers have transmitted to us [is] a talent that Christians have often buried underground and which others, who are not of the church (or at least do not claim to be of it), have sometimes managed to bear fruit, even though at times they in turn fall into the trap of other extravagances.”23 Though her metaphor here is mixed, it is clear that Behr-Sigel recognizes that the non-Christian feminist conversation has asked questions that we might bring to the Church Fathers; instead of stilted misogyny, she argues, we will find there a liberating and challenging vision of gender. A related issue that Behr-Sigel champions is the calling of the contemporary monastic not to live a cloistered life, but rather to live in the community of the city. She celebrates the life and work of St. Maria of Paris, who lived with and served the poor and homeless in Paris: Mother Maria dreamt of a creatively renewed monasticism . . . a monasticism not lived out behind protective walls but “in the world,” metaphorically speaking: fire and coals lit in the middle of the city. . . . To Monks and Nuns, Mother Maria believed she had to make this appeal: “Open your doors to homeless thieves . . . let the world enter.”24

Behr-Sigel highlights the luminosity of the new nun: “fire and coals” are what she offers to the city. This is no mere metaphor. “We are called,” she writes, “to take possession of that which we already possess, to become open to the light which already shines in the deepest part of ourselves. But from this inner sanctuary of the heart, illumined by the light of Christ, a light will shine upon the entire world ‘so that the world will be renewed and saved.’”25

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Sister Nonna Verna Harrison, following Behr-Sigel, also places the full humanity and potential godlikeness of woman at the forefront of her recent work in patristics. In her 1990 essay “Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology,” Harrison argues that one’s gender does not hinder one’s ability to pursue godlikeness: Human activity is accordingly understood primarily as moral activity, the exercise of virtues, which liken us to God, and vices, which do the opposite. Thus the things that Basil [of Caesarea] sees as important and definitive about the human condition, nature and moral character, are unaffected by the gender distinction, and the differences it involves are insignificant by comparison.26

This does not, of course, mean that gender is wholly unimportant. In fact, Harrison argues that “Christian spirituality opened to women a self-concept and a whole range of virtues that were otherwise largely closed to them in fourth-century Graeco-Roman culture. They were enabled to emerge from their narrow ‘feminine’ context of domestic service and child-rearing and pursue values that characterize the human as such.”27 In her 1998 essay “The Maleness of Christ” Harrison tackles one of the biggest questions facing the Orthodox feminist project: if we look to early Christianity to find a robust, woman-empowering theological anthropology, what do we do with those passages in Tertullian and other early Christian writers that clearly demean women? Harrison explains that such views are, in the end, simply unchristian: The occasional statements among early Christian writers such as Tertullian . . . that women are not created according to the divine image, which amounts to a denial of their full humanity, must be definitively rejected on soteriological grounds. The divine image is what grows into the likeness to God and participation in divine life that constitute salvation. Orthodox faith affirms that the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ and the grace of the Holy Spirit make this fully available to all human persons. Whether we receive it depends not on our gender but on how we use our free choice.28

In her 2010 book God’s Many-Splendored Image Harrison elaborates on the distinction between image and likeness of God: “The ‘image’ names the stable foundation in human nature that provides for the potential growth in likeness to God, communion with God, and collaboration in God’s creative and loving activities. The dynamic movement into greater and greater actualization of this potential is called the divine ‘likeness.’”29 Like Behr-Sigel before her, Harrison calls the acquisition of the divine likeness “dynamic,” and throughout the book shows how each and every aspect of human nature,

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from spiritual perception and care for social justice to embodied living and ecological preservation, contribute to the divine likeness in each person. Avoiding the pitfall of dualism, Harrison argues that the body “is made for virtuous deeds, and that virtues are forms of likeness to God. The body together with the soul and the mind, therefore, can make essential contributions to the human person’s divine likeness.”30 The body can also share in the godlikeness achieved by the virtuous soul: The human mind, bearing God’s image, mediates between God and the person’s own body. The body too is like a mirror, capable of receiving the divine light. . . . So if everything goes as God has planned, the body will share the divine image with its soul. Matter will then receive and share the beauty of God, more than it does now. To be sure, everything in the world manifests God’s presence and beauty because God is present in it as its creator. Yet the divine image possesses a greater share in God’s presence and in the divine light and beauty that God himself has imprinted into the human person. So we have the task of sharing this divine light first with our own bodies and then through our bodies with the world around us.31

In her explication of how divine light may shine through the virtuous soul to the virtuous body, and through the virtuous body upon the whole world, Harrison returns to the vision of Behr-Sigel, wherein the call of the contemporary nun—and, indeed, of all humans—is to shine with the light of Christ in the midst of the city so that all may be illumined. It is this unique combination of the doctrines of godlikeness and shining with divine light that finds such kinship with Longfellow’s depictions of his most successful heroines. FEMINISM EAST AND WEST In her essay that concludes the Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology, Valerie Karras contrasts the Eastern Orthodox view of gender and anthropology with Western feminist views: “For the Christian East sexual differentiation is not understood as being an attribute of God and, therefore, it is not understood as being part of God’s image. . . . In particular, Eastern Christianity does not understand the male human being as the ‘normative’ human.”32 “What I am articulating here,” she clarifies, “is a theological anthropology (theocentrism) in contrast to both patriarchal anthropological theology (anthropocentrism) and ecofeminist theology (cosmocentrism).” Instead of promoting an anthropology where nature or maleness is the fundamental orientation of a woman’s life, Karras instead argues that a woman’s spirit is “fundamentally oriented” toward the divine nature of the Trinity.

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Such an anthropology leads, Karras argues, to a conception of salvation as true union with God as “partakers of the divine nature.” . . . Salvation is not a juridical notion of justification (being made right with God), but an existential participation in the life of the Trinity, an experience which begins here and now and extends dynamically and eternally into the future. So human persons, while distinct from the transcendent divine nature, are called to be “gods” by union with the immanent divine nature.33

This is the heart of the Orthodox feminist vision: the acquisition of godlikeness by the fully human woman. The Orthodox feminists have, for the most part, stayed out of the literary critical conversation. The exception to this is Behr-Sigel’s brief mention of Alyosha Karamazov as a fictional example of the “new monastic” who plunges into the darkness of city life to shine God’s light. But even in this example, the literary character is still male. What are needed, if Orthodox feminism is to find fruitful parallels in the world of literature, are works that feature female characters who are robustly and fully human, who seek godlikeness as their end, and, after lives of love and ascesis, are transfigured in divine light. Thus, the question at core of this book is this: can a poetic world wherein women have agency to determine their own work, their own destinies— sexual, aesthetic, political—be harmonized with the universe posited by Christianity, where women are created by God for a specific end, and are held by both God and God’s Church to an ethical standard that sees deviation from that God-appointed end as morally blameworthy? This harmony is found—if it is found at all—in the vision of Christian humanism articulated in certain early Christian writers (the Church Fathers and Mothers), and present in the Middle Ages, especially in Dante, Longfellow’s strongest precursor.34 It is this Christian humanist vision, which posits the full humanity and potential divinity of women, which informs Longfellow’s most successful heroines, Evangeline and Vittoria Colonna chief among them.35 NOTES 1. St. John Chrysostom, “Homily of Praise on the holy martyrs Juventinus and Maximinus who were martyred under Julian the Apostate,” in The Cult of the Saints: Select Homilies and Letters, translated by Wendy Mayer and Bronwen Neil (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006), 92. 2. Charles Calhoun, for instance, credits Longfellow with the invention of the study of comparative literature in the US. See Charles Calhoun, Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 81–82.

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3. Quoted in Edward Wagenknecht, Longfellow: A Full-Length Portrait (New York: Longmans, Green, 1955), 290. 4. In a discussion of Milton’s interest in the early church, Channing has this to say: “The earliest Fathers, as we learn form their works, were not receptive of large communications of truth. Their writings abound in puerilities and marks of childish credulity, and betray that indistinctness of vision, which is experienced by men who issue from thick darkness into the light of day. In the ages of barbarism that followed the fall of the Roman empire, Christianity, though it answered wise purposes of Providence, was more and more disfigured and obscured. . . . How vain, then, was Milton’s search for ‘the mangled Osiris,’ for ‘the lovely form and immortal features of Truth,’ in the history of the church.” William Ellery Channing, The Works of William Ellery Channing (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1903), 66–67. 5. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Outre-Mer and Driftwood (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1866), 261. 6. Ludwig Lewisohn, The Story of American Literature (New York: Modern Library, 1939), 65. 7. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf writes that “women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.” Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, 1981), 43. Woolf goes on to list the heroines of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Racine. She does not mention Longfellow’s heroines, nor do Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their 1979 The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, nor does Norma Lorre Goodrich in her 1993 volume Heroines. In her discussion of pre-Christian warrior heroines, Goodrich makes the claim that “Christianity wiped out the ancient heroical model for women and demoted them to service, subserviency, and impurity.” Norma Lorre Goodrich, Heroines: Demigoddess, Prima Donna, Movie Star (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 194. 8. See Marion Shaw, Alfred Lord Tennyson (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988). 9. Calhoun, 188. 10. The only real villainess that Longfellow writes is Tituba in Giles Corey of Salem Farm, a malevolent witch who intentionally terrorizes the town of Salem. But even here, the true villain of the play ends up being ill-will and paranoia, which destroys many an innocent life and leaves Tituba unharmed. In addition to Tituba, there are female characters who make mistakes—sometimes drastic ones, like Pandora in The Masque of Pandora or the deeply deceived Helen of Tyre in The Divine Tragedy—but even these are left with a hope of possible redemption by the end of their poems. 11. Samuel Johnson, A Johnson Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1964), 163. 12. Quoted in Newton Arvin, Longfellow: His Life and Work (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), 322. 13. Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 211. 14. Ibid., 210. 15. Ibid., 211. 16. Hicks also accuses Longfellow of being “sentimental.” I have chosen not to address Longfellow’s relationship with sentimentality, in part due to the quality

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work that has already been done on Longfellow and sentimentality. See especially Eric Haralson, “Mars in Petticoats: Longfellow and Sentimental Masculinity,” in Nineteenth-Century Literature 51.3 (December 1996): 327–355, and Christoph Irmscher, “Longfellow’s Sentimentality,” in Soundings 93.3/4 (Fall/Winter 2010): 249–280, as well as chapters 2 and 3 of Reconsidering Longfellow, edited by Christoph Irmscher and Robert Arbour (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015). 17. Annamaria Formichella Elsden, Roman Fever: Domesticity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), x. 18. Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, “The Ordination of Women: A Point of Contention in Ecumenical Dialogue,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 48, No. 1 (2004), 51–52. 19. Ibid., 52. 20. Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, “Woman, Too, Is in the Likeness of God,” Mid-Stream 21, No. 3 (July 1982): 371. 21. Ibid., 370. 22. Ibid., 374. 23. Ibid., 374. 24. Behr-Sigel, Discerning the Signs of the Times: The Vision of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 47. 25. Ibid., 66–67. 26. Nonna Verna Harrison, “Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology,” Journal of Theological Studies 41.1 (October 1990): 450. 27. Ibid., 445. Contrast this statement of Harrison with the earlier words of Goodrich, who reads Christianity as primarily “demo[ting]” women to subservient roles. 28. Nonna Verna Harrison, “The Maleness of Christ,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 42.2 (1998): 116. 29. Nonna Verna Harrison, God’s Many-Splendored Image: Theological Anthropology for Christian Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2010), 7. 30. Ibid., 110–111. 31. Ibid., 115–116. 32. Valerie Karras, “Eschatology,” The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 252. 33. Ibid., 250. 34. In calling Longfellow a Christian humanist, I follow Dana Gioia, who describes Longfellow as “a liberal Christian humanist.” Dana Gioia, Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2004), 56. Gioia’s fellow Roman Catholic Gregory Wolfe sums up core Christian humanist tenets thus: “The heart of the humanist belief [is] in the importance of literature and rhetoric as a mediating force, capable of taking political and theological concepts and incarnating them in concrete language, drama, metaphor. Only with a mind trained by the study of rhetoric and style could one find the living tissue of spirit within the hard shell of the letter. For Erasmus, Thomas More, and the other humanists of that [Renaissance] era, literature and figurative language were the key to preventing people from falling

Introduction

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into abstraction, moralism, and incessant warfare. Pagan literature, the humanists held, could be read with profit by Christians because it is possible to absorb and be enriched by the artistry without embracing false religious beliefs.” Gregory Wolfe, “The Erasmus Option,” in Image: Art, Faith, Mystery, Issue 94, https:​//​imagejournal​ .org​/article​/erasmusoption​/. We find similar statements about literature and art as they related to politics and to the pagan past in the lectures and letters of Longfellow. 35. Though this book has strong affinities with both movements, I do not attempt in it to give a purely feminist read of Longfellow nor do I read his poems according to a strict “literature and theology” model. Though critics like Marion Shaw and theologians like Hans Urs von Balthasar have, at times, guided my research methods, my desire is less to fit into a school of interpretation or critique than to read a good poet well. If we read Longfellow well, I believe we will be taken with his heroines, will wrestle with their defects, will exult in their victories and their virtues. The confluence of interest in Longfellow’s female characters and Longfellow’s Christianity is suggested by Dana Gioia in the mid-nineties, when he wrote that the critic who wanted to engage with Longfellow would need to wrestle with “Christianity’s place in art,” and “the representation of females, blacks, and Native Americans by white, male authors.” Gioia, 55.

Chapter One

The Early Heroines Preciosa, The Teacher, The Quadroon Girl

Before he ever wrote about heroines, Longfellow’s perspective on women was shaped by several key women in his life. His mother, Zilpah Longfellow, was his guide to literary taste and perspective as well as the religious bedrock of his Unitarian family. Longfellow’s letters with his mother while he attended Bowdoin College in the 1820s show that he sought his mother’s approval both for his religious witness and his reading habits in romantic poetry. Edward Cifelli has recently shown how Longfellow fell under the influence of two other women soon after graduation: Florencia Gonzalez and Guilia Persiani. These were women of his own generation that he met during his post-graduate travels in Europe. Gonzalez was his de-facto Spanish tutor and possible romantic interest during his time in Madrid in 1827.1 From Spain he moved on to Italy, where he fell in love with both Rome and the Italian widow Guilia Persiani, who was only a few years older than he.2 But by 1829, Longfellow would move back to New England to take a teaching position at Bowdoin, and both European women became romantic memories of another world. This world of a romantic Europe did remain powerful in his imagination, however, and and when Longfellow began publishing original work in 1835, he began by writing a travel journal of his trip through Europe, titled Outre-Mer. Here and there the beautiful girls of Europe appear in this book, but never as main characters. And Longfellow was not destined to choose a European woman for a spouse. Instead, Longfellow had married a fellow New England aristocrat, Mary Storer Potter, in 1831. The two had met soon after Henry’s return from Europe, and according to Cifelli, Longfellow had no trouble falling immediately in love with her, notwithstanding his recent affections in Europe.3 Sadly, Henry and Mary’s relationship would not prove 15

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a long one. Soon after the publication of Outre-Mer, the couple took a trip to Europe together. Mary was in the early stages of pregnancy, and she suffered a miscarriage while they were in the Netherlands. As the year 1835 drew to a close, Mary became severely ill and died. A devastated Henry grieved his way around Germany, taking solace in a new friendship—and flirtation— with fellow American traveller Frances Appleton, before finally returning to America. The decade between 1826 and 1836 had shaped Longfellow into the man who could finally write the poetry he became know for. A literary mother, early affections for Spanish and Italian ladies, a brief, doomed marriage, and yet another close friendship with a single American lady: all of these informed his first major heroines. PRECIOSA It would not be until his first major work of dramatic poetry in 1842 that Longfellow crafted a character who could be called a heroine. He had, it is true, painted gentle pictures of girls he met in his European travels in OutreMer, and he wrote of the doomed daughter of the ship-captain in his early ballad “The Wreck of the Hesperus.” But in The Spanish Student, Longfellow presents, to the best of his developing ability, a heroic woman—the Romani dancer Preciosa4—who prompts in all around her questions about the nature of women and the relationship of women to virtue. In fact, if there is a drawback to the play and the heroine, it could be that we spend more time as an audience observing men talk about Preciosa and her virtue than we do actually seeing Preciosa speak and act. The play begins in Madrid with a conversation between the Count of Lara, a seedy Spanish nobleman, and the pliant Don Carlos. They are discussing Lara’s recent trip to the theater, when the Count praises the dancing of a certain Preciosa: Don Carlos Of course, the Preciosa danced to-night? Lara And never better. Every footstep fell As lightly as a sunbeam on the water. I think the girl extremely beautiful. Don Carlos Almost beyond the privilege of woman!

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I saw her in the Prado yesterday. Her step was royal,—queen-like,—and her face As beautiful as a saint’s in Paradise.5 Don Carlos expresses what will be a typical way of praising a woman in Longfellow’s poetry: comparing her to a saint, especially in the features of her face. But she is also, to Don Carlos, “queen-like” and “her step was royal.” There is irony here, for Preciosa is no more than a commoner. Worse, her whole Romani community is treated with suspicion, and she herself ends up in danger of being condemned as a criminal. As much as Lara finds Preciosa beautiful, he will not agree with Don Carlos’s comparison of the girl to a saint: Lara May not a saint fall from her Paradise, And be no more a saint? Don Carlos Why do you ask? Lara Because I have heard it said this angel fell, And though she is a virgin outwardly, Within she is a sinner; like those panels Of doors and altar-pieces the old monks Painted in convents, with the Virgin Mary On the outside, and on the inside Venus!6 Lara, the ethical skeptic of the play, sees Preciosa’s virtue as a show, a Christian front to hide the wanton pagan within. He soon expands his slander of Preciosa to all women in the city: There’s not a virtuous woman in Madrid, In this whole city! And would you persuade me That a mere dancing-girl, who shows herself, Nightly, half naked, on the stage, for money, And with voluptuous motions fires the blood Of inconsiderate youth, is to be held A model for her virtue?7 But this is exactly what Longfellow, as the play will go on to show, would persuade us of: Preciosa is both a “dancing-girl” and “a model for her virtue.”

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The initial argument for the coexistence of both qualities in the same person comes from Don Carlos: The only virtue that a Gypsy prizes Is chastity. That is her only virtue. Dearer than life she holds it. I remember A Gypsy woman, a vile, shameless bawd, Whose craft was to betray the young and fair; And yet this woman was above all bribes. And when a noble lord, touched by her beauty, The wild and wizard beauty of her race, Offered her gold to be what she made others, She turned upon him, with a look of scorn, And smote him in the face! . . . I believe That woman, in her deepest degradation, Holds something sacred, something undefiled, Some pledge and keepsake of her higher nature, And, like the diamond in the dark, retains Some quenchless gleam of the celestial light!8 Not only is Preciosa chaste, but chastity is, according to Don Carlos, her highest and only virtue. She may betray others, but she will never become unchaste. In his final lines Don Carlos goes a step further, claiming that Preciosa, in remaining chaste, “retains / Some quenchless gleam of the celestial light!” This “celestial light,” which seems here largely metaphorical, will keep showing up in Longfellow’s most exalted statements about his heroines, and will become, especially in Evangeline and John Endicott, a theological underpinning of Longfellow’s Christian humanist vision. When we finally meet Preciosa, we find that Don Carlos has been correct. She is indeed chaste, and she is indeed a masterful dancer. She is also, as Lara suspects, in love with Victorian, the titular Spanish student, who shares with Don Carlos the tendency to describe her beauty in terms of saintliness: There’s nothing fair or beautiful, but takes Something from thee, that makes it beautiful . . . I see thy face in everything I see! The paintings in the chapel wear thy looks The canticles are changed to sarabands And with the learned doctors of the schools I see thee dance cachucas.9

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Here Preciosa appears to Victorian in religious icons, hymns, and hierarchy. But her presence creates a tension; is the dancing of a beautiful girl compatible with the life of study—especially devout, Christian study? Or, more simply, can the Spanish student chastely love the Romani dancer? This question was not just resigned to the characters in the play. When Longfellow was in the early stages of writing the play, his friend Sam Ward sent him a letter describing a famous dancer, Fanny Elssler, whom he had seen perform in New York: “She is a charming dancer, the ideal of a fascinating mistress. . . . Such a woman is dangerous to her sex and to humanity. . . . These danseuses personify the creatures of our dreams—appearing angels to the sentimental and Sultanas to the sensual beholder.”10 Ward intimates that those who would find the Fanny Elsslers and Preciosas of the world “angels” are letting sentiment get in the way of clearer sight. And so it appeared to many who encountered Longfellow’s play. In an early review of the play, Longfellow’s chum Felton writes that “Several old women have laid it under ban and forbidden their daughters to read it. This only makes the daughters more earnest to get hold of it.”11 Longfellow attempts to demonstrate the real possibility of a virtuous, even Christian dancer by staging a test for Preciosa in Act II. The Pope, we learn, has sent a Cardinal to Madrid to witness the local dances in order to determine whether they should be banned. When Preciosa appears before the Cardinal to dance, he is surprised at her appearance: O, what a fair and ministering angel Was lost to heaven when this sweet woman fell . . . Her acts are modest, and her words discreet! I did not look for this. Come hither child!12 Preciosa has already been described as a queen and a saint, and now she is an angel. We also are treated to a list of supposed feminine virtues with “sweet,” “modest,” and “discreet.” Still, there is the matter of her dancing, which, the Cardinal suggests, has rendered her a fallen angel. When Preciosa begins to dance, the Cardinal and his attending Archbishop “look on with gravity and an occasional frown.”13 But then, “as the dance continues, [both] become more and more pleased and excited; and at length rise from their seats, throw their caps in the air, and applaud vehemently as the scene closes.”14 Preciosa has, with her “modest” appearance and her spirited dancing, won the day. Charles Calhoun has called this scene “a triumph of art over dogma,”15 but given the earlier anxiety in the play over whether a dancer could be virtuous according to traditional Christian morality, it would be more accurate to say that this is a scene that reveals the possible harmony between art and dogma.

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If Preciosa’s victory before the Cardinal feels a little too neat and easy, we find in the next scene that it is premature. The Count of Lara sneaks into Preciosa’s chambers, and as she lectures him for his impropriety, Victorian enters, misinterprets the scene, and spurns her. While Preciosa has previously shone in her dancing, she now shines in her words to Lara: Preciosa I am strangely moved To see one of your noble rank thus low and humbled; For your sake I will put aside all anger, All unkind feeling, all dislike, and speak In gentleness, as most becomes a woman, And as my heart now prompts me. I no more Will hate you, for all hate is painful to me. But if without offending modesty And that reserve which is a woman’s glory, I may speak freely, I will teach my heart To love you. Lara O sweet angel! Preciosa Ay, in truth, Far better than you love yourself or me. Lara Give me some sign of this,—the slightest token. Let me but kiss your hand! Preciosa Nay, come no nearer. The words I utter are its sign and token. Misunderstand me not! Be not deceived! The love wherewith I love you is not such As you would offer me. For you come here To take from me the only thing I have, My honor. You are wealthy, you have friends And kindred, and a thousand pleasant hopes That fill your heart with happiness; but I As poor, and friendless, having but one treasure, And would you take that from me, and for what?

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To flatter your own vanity, and make me What you most despise. Oh, sir, such love, That seeks to harm me, cannot be true love. Indeed it cannot. But my love for you Is of a different kind, but seeks your good. It is a holier feeling. It rebukes Your earthly passion, your unchaste desires, And bids you look into your heart, and see How you do wrong that better nature in you And grieve your soul with sin.16 The Cardinal who was delighted at her dancing could not have but been pleased at this, her sermon. Preciosa confirms Don Carlos’s earlier description of her as one who, having little, guards her chastity above all. Preciosa also exposes Lara’s hypocrisy in using words of love to turn her into an object of hate through satisfying his unchaste desires. Further, she affirms the earlier comparisons of herself as a saint by explaining that in calling him to turn from passion and “unchaste desires” she is loving him the best she can. Though this speech is a personal triumph of both rhetoric and moral fortitude on Preciosa’s part, it is disastrous circumstantially, for Victorian overhears only enough to persuade him she has been unfaithful, and Lara leaves intent on revenge. This revenge takes the form of hiring musicians to cause a racket at Preciosa’s next public dance, which ruins her dance and sends her into despair. Lara, convinced she is despondent enough to accept his entreaties, attempts to sing outside her window, unaware that another suitor, the Romani mountebank Bartolome, is also waiting to woo her. Bartolome duels and kills Lara. Preciosa’s shiftless father then forces her to leave Madrid and urges her to marry Bartolome. In the climactic scene of the play, Preciosa rejects Bartolome and laments her lack of agency: ‘Twas my father’s promise, Not mine. I never gave my heart to thee, Nor promised thee my hand! . . . Nay, listen to me, I will speak frankly. I have never loved thee; I cannot love thee. This is not my fault. It is my destiny. Thou art a man Restless and violent. What wouldst thou with me, A feeble girl, who have not long to live, Whose heart is broken? Seek another wife, Better than I, and fairer; and let not

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Thy rash and headlong moods estrange her from thee. Thou art unhappy in this hopeless passion. I never sought thy love, never did aught To make thee love me. Yet I pity thee, And most of all I pity thy wild heart, That hurries thee to crimes and deeds of blood. Beware, beware of that.17 If, according to Preciosa, Lara’s besetting sin is his unchaste desires that would make his conquests hateful to him, Bartolome’s sin is wildness and violence. To both men, she insists that they turn aside from their respective “passion” and seek a better life. To both she attempts to perform the office not of a lover but of a chaste, moral guide. Both hate her for it. Bartolome leaves, plotting revenge, and Victorian enters, having come to his senses. The two lovers are reunited and engaged, and it is conveniently revealed that Preciosa is not Romani after all, but a Spanish nobleman’s daughter, who was stolen as an infant. In the epilogue, as the protagonists make their way to meet Preciosa’s father, Bartolome shoots at them from afar, and is killed by the returning volley. Critics have shown the many debts, in plot and in characterization, which Longfellow’s Spanish Student owes to Spanish drama and Shakespeare. The Romani girl as romantic protagonist is a common trope in Spanish drama, especially, as Newton Arvin has shown, in Cervantes’s “La Gitanilla.”18 But Longfellow is not as interested in Preciosa as Romani, or even a romantic protagonist, as he is in her as both an accomplished artist and a Christian moral example, two qualities that he insists are compatible. Preciosa’s truest victory in the play is her winning over the Cardinal with her dance, and her truest defeat is not Victorian’s spurning of her, but her inability to finish her dance due to Lara’s machinations. It is this interruption of her work as an artist that finally causes Preciosa to fall into sickness and despair. Even when Victorian had rejected her, she still had her individual work of dance, not to mention her virtue. What are the virtues of this first heroine of Longfellow? As we have seen, she is described as beautiful, royal, chaste, fair, modest, and sweet. She has been compared to a queen, a saint, and an angel. She has a “higher nature” and retains “celestial light.”19 She is contrasted with Lara, whose “better nature” has been “wrong[ed]” by his sins.20 Additionally, she is a skilled artisan who keeps alive a local custom in the face of political and ecclesiastical mistrust and potential censorship. Though all of the main, male characters at some point or another doubt her virtue, Longfellow never allows the audience to do so. We are led to believe, even before we meet her, that she is above reproach, and we root for her to be vindicated, as she eventually is, in the

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eyes of her lover, her culture, and her religion. Cifelli sees in this portrayal an ultimate rethinking of the Fanny Elssler model of woman: “The sexy virtuoso dancer was romantically transformed into an innocently virtuous woman.”21 And though Cifelli does not mention them, it is likely Longfellow wrote his remembered affections for Gonzalez and Persiani into the romance between Victorian and Preciosa. One of the more frustrating aspects of The Spanish Student is the inability of the men around Preciosa to see her well. Lara thinks she is little more than a harlot and can be bought for the right price; her Romani father thinks she is deceptive and is hiding money from him; Bartolome assumes she will find him dashing and marry him. Even Victorian, who can, perhaps, be forgiven for misunderstanding Lara’s presence in Preciosa’s bedroom, seems unable to see Preciosa as anything more than a domestic and affectionate being. When Preciosa worries that she “cannot walk together in this world”22 with Victorian, she being uneducated and he being devoted to intellectual pursuits, Victorian answers: What I most prize in woman Is her affections, not her intellect! The intellect is finite; but the affections Are infinite, and cannot be exhausted. Compare me with the great men of the earth; What am I? Why, a pygmy among giants! But if thou lovest,—mark me! I say lovest,— The greatest of thy sex excels thee not! The world of affections is thy world, Not that of man’s ambition. In that stillness Which most becomes a woman, calm, and holy, Thou sittest by the fireside of the heart, Feeding its flames. The element of fire Is pure. It cannot change nor hide its nature, But burns as brightly in a Gypsy camp As in a palace hall.23 Here Victorian’s distinction between the world of intellect and ambition as the sphere of man and the world of affection and “the fireside of the heart” as the sphere of woman does not do justice to the actual virtues of his beloved. Yes, Preciosa loves constantly, but joined to this love is an astonishing perspicacity that is a feat of both her intellect and her heart. She sees into the motivations and intentions of her suitors, and reveals their true natures to themselves. Further, while the word “fireside” is used figuratively, it suggests the Victorian concept of the domestic sphere as the proper place for

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woman. But Preciosa seems most at home on the stage, and is only driven to convalesce beside the fireside when she has been unjustly unstaged by Lara. Given the plot of the play, then, Victorian unduly limits Preciosa in prizing her affections alone. It is her chastity, her perspicacity, and her artistry that render her heroic. POEMS ON SLAVERY The summer after he completed The Spanish Student, Longfellow went to Germany to restore his health. On the voyage home, in October 1842, he wrote a series of poems on slavery, which were published upon his return. While most of the poems deal with male characters, two of them are about women. The first of these is called “The Good Part: Which Shall Not Be Taken Away,” and tells the story of a schoolteacher in West Virginia: She dwells by Great Kenhawa’s side, In valleys green and cool; And all her hope and all her pride Are in the village school. Her soul, like the transparent air That robes the hills above, Though not of earth, encircles there All things with arms of love. And thus she walks among her girls With praise and mild rebukes; Subduing e’en rude village churls By her angelic looks.24

Like Preciosa before her, this teacher has a soul that is “not of earth,” and subdues “rude village churls,” words not unfitting for Bartolome and Lara. The Teacher’s outward appearance is “angelic,” another word used to describe Preciosa. But this woman is a teacher, not a dancer, and in stanzas four and five we see the content of her teaching: She reads to them at eventide Of One who came to save; To cast the captive’s chains aside And liberate the slave. And oft the blessed time foretells When all men shall be free;

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And musical, as silver bells, Their falling chains shall be.25

If we interpret this poem as being set in 1842, then the liberation of slave has not just religious connotations (which it surely does, given the “One who came to save” phrase), but also strong abolitionist resonances. In the next stanza we see that The Teacher lives a life in harmony with her religious teachings: And following her beloved Lord, In decent poverty, She makes her life one sweet record And deed of charity.26

If the poem concluded here, it would be a rather unremarkable poem about an optimistic abolitionist. But in the final stanzas, the poet reveals a surprising backstory. For she was rich, and gave up all To break the iron bands Of those who waited in her hall, And labored in her lands. Long since beyond the Southern Sea Their outbound sails have sped, While she, in meek humility, Now earns her daily bread.27

This teacher was a slaveholder, who gave up her wealth (which was acquired through slave labor) and set her slaves free. The fact that she now must “earn her daily bread” implies a change in her class, from aristocratic to working-class. Though Longfellow could not have known it at the time of writing, the heroine of this poem could be read as a microcosm of her community, for she runs a school in West Virginia, which would separate from the rest of slave-holding Virginia in 1861 to rejoin the union. Though she only enjoys a mere nine stanzas of lyric poetry, Longfellow’s teacher-heroine proves to be a woman who truly has practiced what she preaches. And the poet who wrote her was the same. In Longfellow’s antebellum budget sheets, one can see where, each month, he used a portion of his income to free slaves.28 In The Spanish Student Longfellow describes his heroine as having a saintly face, and he does so again in the final stanza of “The Good Part”: It is their prayers, which never cease, That clothe her with such grace;

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Their blessing is the light of peace That shines upon her face.29

Though the word saint is not used, The Teacher’s face appears here as luminous, clothed in “grace” and a “light of peace.” And this light is given to her on account of the prayers of the slaves she freed, who continually intercede on her behalf. Here there is almost a mutual saintliness in both the former slaves and the former master. The former slaves unceasingly intercede on behalf of the their former master, and she, who has imitated Christ in setting the captives free, appears saintly due to their intercessions. One other heroic woman from Poems on Slavery is worth mentioning. In the poem “The Quadroon Girl,” a slave is sold by her master (who is, the poet implies, also her father) to a slave trader “to be his slave and paramour.”30 The poem is tragic; it focuses on the weakness of the master in the face of the slaver’s “glittering gold.”31 In Longfellow’s description of the girl herself, however, we find again the saintly, shining face: Before them, with her face upraised, In timid attitude, Like one half curious, half amazed, A Quadroon maiden stood. Her eyes were large, and full of light, Her arms and neck were bare; No garment she wore save a kirtle bright, And her own long, raven hair. And on her lips there played a smile As holy, meek, and faint, As lights in some cathedral aisle The features of a saint.32

The “saint” language of The Spanish Student is now wed to the “light” imagery of “The Good Part,” and both descriptions are focused on the girl’s facial features. But unlike both Preciosa and the slaveholder-turned-teacher, this girl is given no agency, and can only grow “pale as death”—a loss of light—as the slaver leads her to “a strange and distant land.”33 The very fact that the girl has some of the qualities found in an early Longfellow heroine make the poem all the more tragic. Slavery here robs the woman of the chance and the power to be heroic. The very fact that The Teacher has the freedom to be heroic reveals that she enjoys a social privilege that the girl lacks. This grim insinuation, added to Longfellow’s more explicit denunciations of slavery throughout the collection, rendered Poems on Slavery too controversial to sell in the American South. Even a New England magazine like Graham’s,

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which had serially published The Spanish Student just months before, refused to review it, due to its incendiary topic.34 If we care to sum up the qualities of Longfellow’s early heroines, especially in relation to the focal points of Orthodox feminism, we could point to several emerging trends. First, in both Orthodox feminism and Longfellow’s early poems, the heroic woman is likened to a saint. Second, there is an important focus on the imagery of luminosity, especially as a descriptor of the heroine’s physical features. But in Longfellow’s early poems, both the language of saint-likeness and of luminosity remain highly figurative. Preciosa and The Teacher are like saints, but they are not literal saints. And the luminosity of the smile of The Quadroon Girl simply shares certain qualities with the smiles of saints as they would be depicted in cathedral icons. Longfellow has not yet begun to articulate a clear ontology or soteriology that would undergird these comparisons. But in his next poem, Evangeline, the theological details of divinity and illumination will begin to emerge. NOTES 1. Edward Cifelli, Longfellow in Love: Passion and Tragedy in the Life of the Poet (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018), 24–25. 2. Ibid., 32–33. 3. Ibid., 45. 4. There is considerable debate about the proper term to use for Preciosa’s ethnic community. Longfellow uses the term “gypsy,” which is now avoided due to its use as an ethnic slur. In English-speaking countries, the terms “Romani” and “Roma” are currently used for the people group, and I have decided to use the former to refer to Preciosa and her community in general. 5. Longfellow, The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Household Edition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1907), 30. 6. Ibid., 30–31. 7. Ibid., 31. 8. Ibid., 31–32. 9. Ibid., 33. 10. Quoted in Lawrance Thompson, Young Longfellow (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 317. 11. Ibid., 326. 12. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 43. 13. Ibid., 43. 14. Ibid., 43. 15. Calhoun, 179. 16. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 48. 17. Ibid., 61. 18. Arvin, 82–83.

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19. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 31 20. Ibid., 48 21. Cifelli, 156. 22. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 34. 23. Ibid., 34. 24. Ibid., 26. 25. Ibid., 26. 26. Ibid., 26. 27. Ibid., 26. 28. Christoph Irmscher documents this element of Longfellow’s life beautifully, including reproductions of Longfellow’s account books. See Christoph Irmscher, Public Poet, Private Man (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), 115–117. 29. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 26. 30. Ibid., 28. 31. Ibid., 28. 32. Ibid., 28. 33. Ibid., 28 34. For more on the censorship of Poems on Slavery, see Wagenkencht, 80.

Chapter Two

Evangeline The First Masterpiece

Though Preciosa, Longfellow’s most well-defined heroine of the early 1840s, is the central character of The Spanish Student, the play gives almost equal time to the student himself, Victorian. It is, after all, a romantic comedy, and has a hero—however short-sighted and misguided—as well as a heroine. But in the mid-1840s, Longfellow attempted a new kind of poetic endeavor, a long narrative poem that dispenses with a hero altogether, and focuses only on the heroine. The creation of this new heroine coincided with the final great romantic consummation of Longfellow’s life: his courtship of and marriage to Frances Appleton. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Longfellow had met Appleton in that great year of darkness, 1836, in which Longfellow mourned the death of his first child and his first wife, Mary. Frances had been the one bright spot in his devastated wanderings, but when the two returned to America, Frances drifted away from her friendship with Henry. This led to several years of bewildered resentment on the poet’s part, as he felt he had been abandoned unjustly. The Spanish Student, along with several distinctly melancholy works like Voices of the Night and Hyperion, were written during this time. But in early 1843, just after the publication of Poems on Slavery, everything changed. Frances unexpectedly reconnected with Henry (who had begrudgingly come to terms with her disinterest), and the two were quickly engaged and married.1 Henry went from a resigned bachelor to part of a new aristocratic power-couple, and his poetic prowess waxed admirably. His personal romantic tensions now gloriously resolved, Longfellow turned to what would be his greatest work—and his greatest heroine—yet: Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie. This narrative poem is based on the historical story of the exile of the Acadians—a group of French Catholic colonists— from Nova Scotia. The plot of Longfellow’s tragic romance is based on a story he heard from the Reverend H. L. Conolly: 29

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It was the story of a young Acadian maiden who at the dispersion of her people by the English troops had been separated from her betrothed lover; they sought each other for years in their exile; and at last they met in a hospital where the lover lay dying. Mr. Longfellow was touched by the story, especially by the constancy of the heroine. . . . Out of this grew Evangeline.2

Longfellow worked on the poem for two years, from 1845 to early 1847, and the poem was published on November 1, 1847. Evangeline is broken up into two parts of five cantos each. The introductory stanzas of Evangeline describe a pastoral scene of “the forest primeval” beneath which the “hearts” and “home[s] of Acadian farmers”3 used to dwell. In the final stanza of the introduction, the narrator introduces his main theme: Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient, Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of a woman’s devotion, List to the mournful tradition, still sung by the pines of the forest; List to a tale of love in Acadie, home of the happy.4 Readers of The Spanish Student and Poems on Slavery are already on familiar footing: we will once again focus on a devout woman. But here the words affection and beauty, so prominent in The Spanish Student, are joined by hope, endurance, patience, and—perhaps most important of all—strength. These will be the defining characteristics of Evangeline the heroine. EVANGELINE PART 1: THE HEROINE IN EDEN Part 1, canto 1 begins in “the little village of Grand-Pré” where “simple Acadian famers” “dwelt together in love.”5 We meet the priest of the village, Father Felician, and two families. First are the Bellefontaines: Benedict, “the wealthiest farmer of Grand-Pré,” and his daughter Evangeline, “the pride of the village.”6 Second is the Lajeunesse family: Basil, a blacksmith, and his son Gabriel, the only young man of the village who Evangeline “welcome[s]” as a suitor.7 From the outset of canto 1, the Acadians are portrayed as devout Catholics who participate in the religious life of the village. As she walks home from church on “Sunday morn,” Evangeline carries “her chaplet of beads and her missal.”8 She is dressed in a “kirtle of blue,” a color that associates her with Mary.9 Her body also reveals her devotion:

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But a celestial brightness—a more ethereal beauty— Shone on her face and encircled her form, when, after confession Homeward serenely she walked with God’s benediction upon her. When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.10 At first we see that Evangeline carries beads and a missal, indicators of her involvement in personal prayer and communal worship, respectively. Then, we see that her “face” and “form” are indicators of her devotion, particularly her participation in the sacrament of confession. This Sunday morning scene is the first time in the poem that we are introduced to “celestial brightness,” or “celestial light,” a concept we first met in The Spanish Student, and one which will appear several times throughout the poem, most prominently in part 2, canto 5. Jacques Chevalier has argued that there is a parallel in these lines between Evangeline’s celestial brightness and the promise in Revelation 22:16 that the “righteous [shall] shine forth as the sun.” Chevalier is quick to point out, however, that in the first canto of Evangeline, Longfellow describes not an eschatological scene of final perfection, but a sort of Eden that is about to endure a fall.11 Is the celestial light in this passage something that comes from without and rests upon Evangeline, as the prayers of the former slaves clothed The Teacher in light in “The Good Part,” or is it a light that emanates from within Evangeline herself?12 The preposition “on” is ambiguous; it will not be until part 2 of Evangeline that Longfellow will clarify how exactly celestial light is related to Evangeline’s body and soul. Whatever the case, it is important to establish that the part 1, canto 1 experience of celestial light encircling the face and form is directly related to the participation in the sacrament under the authority of the church.13 In other words, Evangeline is revealed here as orthoprax, and she is rewarded, exceptionally, with illumination by celestial light. Later in part 1, canto 1 we find a humorous instance of the spiritual practices of Evangeline’s village: Many a youth, as he knelt in church and opened his missal Fixed his eyes upon [Evangeline] as the saint of his deepest devotion; Happy was he who might touch her hand or the hem of her garment.14 The youths of the village gaze upon Evangeline, instead of the saints, with “deepest devotion.”15 Evangeline has already been seen wearing the Marian color of blue, and she is now treated like Mary by her peers. Further, in the third line, she is treated like Jesus, for the admiring youths “touch . . . the hem of her garment,” just as the faithful woman is healed by touching Christ’s garment in chapter 5 of the Gospel of Mark. Similarly, in The Spanish Student

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Victorian complains to Preciosa that at Mass all the saints begin to look like her. More distantly still, we might hear an echo of Dante’s young pilgrim pining for Beatrice with a love that leads at last to Paradise. And Evangeline has a particular young pilgrim in mind for a mate: the youth Gabriel, whose father Basil is best friends with Evangeline’s father, Benedict. In canto 3 we find more luminous imagery as Evangeline prepares for bed: Carefully then were covered the embers that glowed on the hearthstone, And on the oaken stairs resounded the tread of the farmer. Soon with soundless step the foot of Evangeline followed. Up the staircase moved a luminous space in the darkness, Lighted less by the lamp than the shining face of the maiden.16 Though the light imagery in canto 1 was ambiguous—does it rest upon Evangeline, or shine from her?—the imagery here is clearer: the maiden herself outshines even the lamp. Despite these luminous and romantic scenes, all is not well in Grande-Pré. We learn in canto 2 from Basil Lajeunesse that “the English ships at their anchors” have appeared in the bay, and “many surmises of Evil alarm the heart of the people.”17 While Benedict and Basil debate the likelihood of English aggression, the notary public René Leblanc enters, and reminds them that whatever may happen, “man is unjust, but God is just, and finally justice / Triumphs.”18 But Leblanc is not there to argue politics; rather, he is there to notarize the betrothal of Evangeline and Gabriel. The canto ends with this legal affirmation of their romance. In the next canto, Basil’s deepest fear is realized when the English gather all the men of the village into the church and tell them that their “lands and dwellings and cattle” are now “forfeit . . . to the [British] crown”; moreover, the whole Acadian community will be “transported to other lands.”19 Meanwhile, Evangeline waits for the men, and tries to console herself with the notary’s words the night before: Thus did Evangeline wait at her Father’s door, as the sunset Threw the long shadows of trees o’er the broad ambrosial meadows. Ah! On her spirit within a deeper shadow had fallen, And from the fields of her soul a fragrance celestial ascended,— Charity, meekness, love, and hope, and forgiveness, and patience! Then, all forgetful of self, she wandered into the village, Cheering with looks and words the mournful hearts of the women. . . . In the dead of night, she heard the disconsolate rain fall Loud on the withered leaves of the sycamore tree by the window.

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Keenly the lightning flashed; and the voice of the echoing thunder Told her that God was in heaven, and governed the world he created! Then she remembered the tales she had heard of the justice of Heaven; Soothed was her troubled soul, and she peacefully slumbered till morning.20 In the first stanza, Evangeline—despite her fear—draws on her inner virtues, some of which we have met before in Preciosa, The Teacher, and The Quadroon Girl: “Charity, meekness, love, and hope and forgiveness and patience.” Longfellow calls this list of virtues a “celestial fragrance.” The celestial qualities, then, are not limited to light-imagery, but also extend to the sense of smell.21 Evangeline then ministers to the women of the village, over whom the “shadow of fear” has fallen. But in the second stanza, Evangeline is again worried. However, she receives, in the dead of night, a consolation from nature itself, which reinforces the theological teaching presented to her the night before by the notary—namely, that the justice of Heaven will triumph. Evangeline’s “troubled soul” is “soothed” and she “slumbers peacefully” at remembering this teaching. This spirit in Evangeline matches that of her earlier serenity while walking home from confession. This is hardly the only time in the poem that Evangeline is consoled or otherwise taught divine truths through nature. In canto 1, Evangeline and Gabriel together admire Basil at his forge, and see a spiritual teaching in the sparks that flow from of his forge: Oft on autumnal eves, when without in the gathering darkness Bursting with light seemed the smithy, through every cranny and crevice, Warm by the forge within they watched the laboring bellows, And as its panting ceased, and the sparks expired in the ashes, Merrily laughed, and said they were nuns going into the chapel.22 This description of the sparks is an allusion to the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, which says that “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God . . . they shall shine, and run to and fro like sparks among the stubble.”23 Implied here is an association of the devout nun, “going into the chapel,” with the shining promised in Wisdom of Solomon. From the outset of the poem, then, it is nuns who we might most expect to shine with the light of heaven. In the final canto of part 1, the Acadians are haphazardly crowded onto boats and deported. Evangeline and Gabriel are separated in the commotion, and, as Basil and Gabriel sail away, Evangeline, Benedict, and Fr. Felician watch their city burn. Benedict, overcome with grief, dies on the beach. This final scene of destruction can be read, Jacques Chevalier argues, as a fall from paradise. Evangeline, he explains, “gravitates round the story of

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paradise lost, toward tragic memories of the Fall and the mortal redemption through self denial.”24 Chevalier reads Evangeline’s own spiritual journey in part 1 as “torn between the erotic and the ascetic.”25 He sees in Evangeline a “two-sided inclination to betray (reveal and misrepresent) her Edenic ancestry; to recognize her fallen condition while also disavowing her own sinful nature.”26 If Evangeline is an Eve figure and Grand-Pré is Eden, then it would make sense to see Evangeline as responsible for the Fall of GrandPré, but clearly she is not. Rather, as Charles Calhoun points out, it is “the misdeeds of men”—in particular, the injustice of Imperial English men—that cause the fall of the Acadians, and that, in part 2, Evangeline will attempt to overcome.27 EVANGELINE PART 2: THE HEROINE IN EXILE As part 2 opens, we find Evangeline still beside Father Felician, wandering among the exiled Acadians of America, searching for Gabriel. Evangeline’s fellow exiles, however, suggest that she should forget Gabriel and marry someone else: Then would they say, “Dear child! Why dream and wait for him longer? Are there not other youths as fair as Gabriel? Others Who have hearts as tender and true, and spirits as loyal? Here is Baptiste Leblanc, the notary’s son, who has loved thee Many a tedious year; come, give him thy hand and be happy! Thou art too fair to braid St. Catherine’s tresses.” Then would Evangeline answer, serenely but sadly, “I cannot! Whither my heart has gone, there follows my hand, and not elsewhere. For when the heart goes on before, like a lamp, and illumines the pathway Many things are made clear, that else lay hidden in darkness.”28

As far as they go, Evangeline’s words are not religious or theological, but are instead a sort of erotic doctrine, which expand upon her earlier assurance to Gabriel on the shore in 1.5: “if we love one another / Nothing, in truth, can harm us, whatever mischances may happen!”29 In 2.1 Evangeline seems to still be operating on this principle, believing that if she follows her heart after Gabriel, the great mischance that has befallen their love will indeed prove to be temporary, and they will remain unharmed. Further, Evangeline uses a metaphor of light, hearkening back to the earlier images of both natural and celestial light in part 1. The within/without dialectic which first appeared in

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the ambiguity of the phrase “shone on her face” in part 1, canto 1 is more pronounced in this image, for the heart, which is within the human, “goes on before” and “illumines the pathway,” acting as if it were something external to the human. Evangeline’s response prompts Father Felician to launch into a discourse wherein he interprets Evangeline’s erotic doctrine as a theological truth about human perfection: Thereupon the priest, her friend and father-confessor, Said with a smile, “O daughter! thy God thus speaketh within thee. Talk not of wasted affection, affection never was wasted; If it enrich not the heart of another, its waters, returning Back to their springs, like the rain, shall fill them full of refreshment; That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain. Patience, accomplish thy labor, accomplish thy work of affection! Sorrow and silence are strong, and patient endurance is godlike. Therefore accomplish thy labor of love, till the heart is made godlike, Purified, strengthened, perfected, and rendered more worthy of heaven!”30 Not since the speeches of Don Carlos and Victorian in The Spanish Student has Longfellow treated us to such an involved theological ethics of womanhood. Felician begins with the claim that God is “speaking within” Evangeline. According to the priest, affection is like the waters of a fountain: if they do not “enrich another,” such waters will return to their source and “refresh” it. Affection is never wasted, for it will either enrich another or the heart that sent it forth. “The work of affection,” Felician explains, should now be Evangeline’s primary “labor.” This labor will entail three activities: “sorrow and silence . . . and patient endurance.” Sorrow and silence will “strengthen” Evangeline, and “patient endurance” will render her “godlike.” Finally, Felician adds three more qualities that will follow from Evangeline’s “work of affection”: purification, perfection, and worthiness of heaven. To summarize: in part 2, canto 1 Felician teaches that unrequited affection returns to and enriches the heart through a process in which the heart becomes godlike, strong, purified, perfected, and worthy of heaven through sorrow, silence, and patient endurance. Though each of the five promised qualities (godlikeness, strength, purification, perfection, and worthiness of heaven) are desirable, it is godlikeness that seems the most exalted and surprising of the promised benefits of the work of affection. In part 1, Evangeline is likened to Old Testament saints; but now godlikeness, not just saintliness—a primary virtue of Preciosa—is promised her, if only she can “accomplish [her] work of affection.” Ever the devout Catholic, Evangeline submits to and obeys her priest:

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Cheered by the good man’s words, Evangeline labored and waited. Still in her heart she heard the funeral dirge of the ocean, But with its sound there was mingled a voice that whispered, “Despair not!” Thus did that poor soul wander in want and cheerless discomfort Bleeding, barefooted, over the shards and thorns of existence.31 After this more sober set up for part 2 of his poem, Longfellow invokes the muse: “Let me essay, O Muse, to follow the wanderer’s footsteps.”32 We are now in a full-fledged epic, with not just the romantic future, but the potential godlikeness of the heroine at stake. In Evangeline 2.2, as the heroine and priest travel down the Mississippi, Gabriel’s boat passes close by them, unseen. Evangeline is asleep at the time, but she wakes with a premonition that Gabriel is close. This Mississippi scene is filled with luminous and paradisiacal images: Swinging from its great arms, the trumpet flower and the grapevine Hung their ladder of ropes aloft like the ladder of Jacob, On whose pendulous stairs the angels ascending, descending, Were the swift humming-birds, that flitted from blossom to blossom. Such was the vision Evangeline saw as she slumbered beneath it. Filled was her heart with love, and the dawn of an opening heaven Lighted her soul in sleep with the glory of regions celestial.33 For the first time in part 2, Evangeline is illumined by celestial light; Longfellow specifies that it is “her soul,” in particular, that is “lighted.” This illumination takes place exactly when Gabriel is sailing past her. When she awakes from sleep, she tells Father Felician of her premonition. And Felician comments on her perspicacity: “Daughter, thy words are not idle, nor are they to me without meaning. Feeling is deep and still; and the word that floats on the surface Is as the tossing buoy, that betrays where the anchor is hidden. Therefore trust to thy heart, and to what the world calls illusions.”34 In the following cantos, Evangeline has many opportunities to heed Felician’s advice. In the next canto, Evangeline and Felician arrive among the exiled Acadians of Louisiana. But as epic luck would have it, though Basil is there, Gabriel himself has just left. Overcome with longing, Evangeline prays in Basil’s garden:

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Nearer and round about her, the manifold flowers of the garden Poured out their souls in odours, that were their prayers and confessions Unto the night, as it went its way, like a silent Carthusian. Fuller of fragrance than they, and as heaved with shadows and night dews, Hung the heart of the maiden. The calm and magical moonlight Seemed to inundate her soul with indefinable longings, As, through the garden gate, and beneath the shade of the oak trees, Passed she along the path to the edge of the measureless prairie. Silent it lay, with a silvery haze upon it, and fireflies Gleamed and floated away in mingled and infinite numbers. Over her head, the stars, the thoughts of God in the heavens, Shone on the eyes of man, who had ceased to marvel and worship, Save when a blazing comet was seen on the walls of that temple As if a hand had appeared and written upon them, “Upharsin.”35 Here Evangeline experiences nature as a host of spiritual signs: the flowers pour out odors like confessions—and not unlike her own soul in part 1 when it exuded “celestial fragrance”—the night is like a confessor, the prairie is “measureless,” the fireflies are “infinite,” and the stars are “the thoughts of God.” As in part 1, divine sensations abound. Evangeline then cries out to Gabriel, and is answered by nature itself: And the soul of the maiden, between the stars and the fireflies, Wandered alone, and she cried, “O Gabriel, O my beloved! Art thou so near unto me, and yet I cannot behold thee? Art thou so near unto me, and yet thy voice does not reach me? Ah! How often thy feet have trod this path to the prairie! Ah! How often thine eyes have looked on the woodlands around me! Ah! How often beneath this oak, returning from labor, Thou hast lain down to rest, and to dream of me in thy slumbers! When shall these eyes behold, these arms be folded about thee?” Loud and sudden and near the notes of a whippoorwill sounded Like a flute in the woods; and anon, through the neighboring thickets, Farther and farther away it floated and dropped into silence. “Patience!” whispered the oaks from oracular caverns of darkness: And from the moonlit meadow, a sigh responded, “To-morrow!”36 Though she expresses great disconsolation, Evangeline’s soul is described as being “between the stars and the fireflies.” Stars and fireflies are the two dominant light-filled objects in this canto and, in the case of stars, in the entire poem. Evangeline’s soul is midway between the earthly light of the firefly and the celestial light of the stars.37 Further, the landscape, which in part 1

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consoled her and reminded her of God’s justice, here preaches “patience” to her, reinforcing Father Felician’s sermon. The next day, Evangeline continues her quest with Basil, instead of Felician, as her guide. She soon meets two very different spiritual guides, a Shawnee woman and a Jesuit priest. The Shawnee woman tells Evangeline a legend of lost love. As she listens to the woman’s tale, Evangeline feels that “the region around her / seemed like enchanted ground and her swarthy guest the enchantress.”38 Next, she encounters a Jesuit priest, who also tries to comfort her: “Patience!” the priest would say; “have faith, and thy prayer will be answered! Look at this delicate plant that lifts its head from the meadow, See how its leaves all point to the north, as true as the magnet; This is the compass-flower, that the finger of God has suspended Here on its fragile stock, to direct the traveller’s journey Over the sea-like, pathless, limitless waste of the desert. Such in the soul of man is faith. The blossoms of passion, Gay and luxuriant flowers, are brighter and fuller of fragrance, But they beguile us, and lead us astray, and their odor is deadly. Only this humble plant can guide us here, and hereafter Crown us with asphodel flowers, that are wet with the dews of nepenthe.”39 As in Felician’s earlier teaching, Evangeline is again exhorted to have patience. But added to this exhortation is an ethical teaching: Evangeline must reject the allure of passion and cling to faith, which alone “can guide us.” The priest here sounds rather like Preciosa in her sermons to Lara and Bartolome, for in both of them, she diagnoses passion as that which they must give up in order to be cleansed of sin and return to their better nature. In the Jesuit priest’s speech about the compass flower, we see that nature can communicate ethical lessons. This clarifies what exactly Evangeline’s ascesis entails: true ascetic activity does not reject nature, does not close its eyes to flowers, trees, or prairies, for through these can come sensations and communications that lead the pilgrim aright. True ascetic activity entails the rejection of “the blossoms of passion,” which “beguile us, and lead us astray.” For all this good advice, however, Gabriel is not found, and Evangeline continues her search for many years. In the final canto of the poem, Evangeline settles in Philadelphia, and there finds a new sort of insight into her journey: So, when the fruitless search, the disappointed endeavor, Ended, to recommence no more on earth, uncomplaining,

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Thither, as leaves to the light, were turned her thoughts and her footsteps. As from the mountain’s top the rainy mists of the morning Roll away, and afar we behold the landscape below us, Sun illumined, with shining rivers and cities and hamlets, So fell the mists from her mind, and she saw the world far below her, Dark no longer, but illumined with love; and the pathway Which she had climbed so far, lying smooth in the distance.40 This vision can be read as the fulfillment of the erotic doctrine that Evangeline articulated in 2.1, wherein she explains that if “the heart goes before, like a lamp and illumines the pathway,” then “many things are made clear that else lie hidden in darkness.” Evangeline has become like a leaf that turns toward this light. Evangeline’s vision continues, ending with a practical conclusion about how to spend the rest of her life: Gabriel was not forgotten. Within her heart was his image, Clothed in the beauty of love and youth, as last she beheld him, Only more beautiful made by his death-like silence and absence. Into her thoughts of him time entered not, for it was not. Over him years had no power; he was not changed, but transfigured; He had become to her heart as one who is dead, and not absent; Patience and abnegation of self, and devotion to others, This is the lesson a life of trial and sorrow had taught her. So was her love diffused, but, like to some odorous spices, Suffered no waste nor loss, though filling the air with aroma. Other hope had she none, nor wish in this life but to follow Meekly, with reverent steps, the sacred feet of her Savior. Thus many years she lived as a Sister of Mercy.41 Evangeline discerns that her affection for Gabriel is not gone, but it did not, after all, enrich the heart of another. If Father Felician is to be believed, Evangeline’s affection should have returned back to her own heart, resulting, ultimately, in the attainment of godlikeness. Has such a result taken place? Evangeline has indeed endured and learned from “patience . . . and sorrow” and now desires to “follow . . . her Savior,” through becoming a nun in Philadelphia. And Evangeline has learned “Patience,” a quality of godlikeness according to Father Felician. Additionally, her love is “diffused” in a way that recalls Felician’s fountain metaphor. Those expecting a more dramatic evidence of Evangeline’s godliness need only wait one more stanza:

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Thither, by night and by day, came the Sister of Mercy. The dying Looked up into her face, and thought indeed, to behold there Gleams of celestial light encircle her forehead with splendor, Such as the artist paints o’er the brows of saints and apostles, Or such as hangs by night o’er a city seen at a distance. Unto their eyes it seemed the lamps of the city celestial, Into whose shining gates erelong their spirits would enter.42 As she ministers to the sick during a plague, Evangeline experiences bodily illumination by celestial light. This illumination is more detailed than any before it in the poem. Longfellow provides us with two images to help us understand this transfiguration: the halo of the painted saint, and the glow of a far-off city. Both images are of heavenly, not earthly light, for the city is not Philadelphia, but the “city celestial.” In the final canto of the poem, then, Longfellow provides us with a dramatic physical indication of the godlikeness that Evangeline has attained by learning patience through her work of affection: she shines with celestial light. Though the poem could have ended here, it does not, for among the sick she finds, at last, the one she has sought for so long: On the pallet before her was stretched the form of an old man. Long and thin, and gray were the locks that shaded his temples; But, as he lay there in the morning light, his face for a moment Seemed to assume once more the form of its earlier manhood; So are wont to be changed the faces of those who are dying.43 Gabriel strives to say Evangeline’s name, but he sinks into darkness. Evangeline cradles and kisses him as he dies, whispering, “Father, I thank you.”44 Longfellow’s epilogue then returns to the “forest primeval,” describing the lovers as “at rest,” having “ceased from their labors” and “completed their journey.”45 The pointedly theological climax of Evangeline did not come out of nowhere. As discussed in the introduction, Longfellow had spent time with the Church Fathers, most importantly Origen of Alexandria, Cyprian of Carthage, and John Chrysostom, quoted earlier. In my previous book, Glimpses of Her Father’s Glory, I spend a good deal of time discussing Longfellow’s reading and writing on the Church Fathers, and Evangeline is a prime site of this influence.46 In this final scene of illumination especially, Longfellow reveals his kinship with his favorite Father, St. John Chrysostom. Let us return again to Chrysostom’s panegyric on the martyrs Juventinus and Maximinus:

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Blessed Babylas, along with three children, recently drew us together here. Today it is a matched pair of soldier saints that has stationed Christ’s army in battle array. . . . Of such a nature is the Church’s treasure, containing young and old pearls. But the beauty of all of them is one and the same. Their bloom doesn’t fade, it doesn’t flow away with time. By nature this brilliance doesn’t succumb to age’s rust. For whereas physical riches fade and pass away with the passage of time—indeed, clothes wear out and houses collapse and jewelry rusts, and with time the entire essence of these riches we see and touch perishes and vanishes—in the case of the spiritual treasures it is not like this. Rather, the martyrs always and perpetually remain brilliant in equal vigor and youth, brightly reflecting the glory of their innate brilliance.47

Chrysostom poetically describes the luminous appearance of the martyrs and the beauty of their example. According to Chrysostom, the luminosity of the martyrs is “innate.” Longfellow echoes this sense of the innateness of divine light in his final description of the illumined Evangeline in part 2, canto 5, where she approaches her final meeting with Gabriel with “light in her looks.” Whereas she was illumined by light earlier in the poems, she now shines with that same light. This light is both truly hers, and truly God’s, for she has become like God, and bears the characteristics of his divinity. In Evangeline 2.5, then, Longfellow presents us with a portrait of Evangeline’s transfiguration in divine light that shares much in common with the writings of Chrysostom and the Christian scriptures. Evangeline has become a heroine transfigured—like Christ, like Moses, like Elijah, like Juventinus and Maximinus. Evangeline has been led to this experience by a process of deification—of becoming godlike through love and ascetic activity. She rejects the sinful passions and follows the guidance of the divine sensations communicated by nature, by celestial light, and by the sanctifying work of caring for the sick in Philadelphia. EVANGELINE AS HEROINE There are such riches in the pages of Evangeline that it is difficult to sum up all that the poem is about. Simply stated, Evangeline seems to be initially a romantic protagonist who, in looking for her lost love, is caught up into a greater narrative about human sanctification. Thus her heroism is both erotic (she overcomes all in search of her lost love), and theological (she seeks and attains the godlikeness to which her religion calls her). Evangeline is the fulfillment of the erotic, ethical, and theological qualities that Longfellow uses to describe Preciosa in The Spanish Student. But whereas Preciosa’s main plot involves proving the licitness and beauty of her art and the innocence

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of her character, Evangeline’s plot involves the transformation of that erotic affection that Victorian praises too highly into a prime human motivator in the search for the divine. Victorian and others limit the life of erotic affection to the woman’s sphere of action; Father Felician and Evangeline expand the life of erotic affection into a theological quest for godlikeness that all humans can and should participate in. The genius and heroism of Evangeline lies in the fact that she does participate in God, does unite the erotic and the divine within herself, an act that Jacques Chevalier, in his explication of part 1, seems pessimistic about. Jenny Franchot and Andrew C. Higgins have contributed two of the most important pieces of criticism on Evangeline in recent years. Franchot takes as her entry point Evangeline’s Catholicism, and the complexities involved in her story being conceived and written by the Protestant Longfellow. Evangeline, she writes, is “a compelling poetic heroine for readers of the domestic novel,” being, as she is, a “Catholic maiden expelled by the inhuman English troops from the sacramental order of her Acadian village.”48 By the end of the poem, she argues, Evangeline becomes “a nun who loves,” reminding us of the joys of domesticity by being, ultimately, denied them.49 She is allowed by the poet neither her home, nor her potential husband, even as she makes it her quest to find the latter. “Catholicism,” Franchot argues, “in the figure of Evangeline’s priestly companion, has officially sanctioned her romantic quest.”50 Evangeline, then, is sister to Preciosa, in that an important part of her accomplishment is the receiving of official church sanction for her endeavors. But Franchot is pessimistic about whether we should read Evangeline’s quest as at all successful: Her ardor gradually transformed into a sacrificial labor, Evangeline’s joint pursuit of God and Gabriel finally subordinates the thematics of exile to the baffling circularity of the Protestant romance that recounts it. The lovers’ failed pursuit of one another eventually emphasizes the elusive proximity and distance of the Deity. “Art thou so near unto me, and yet thy voice does not reach me?” soliloquizes Evangeline from the bayou, her own unconsummated marriage invested with the vanishing communion between God and his New England Unitarian worshippers. Catholic imagery, representing what has been simultaneously lost and repudiated, powerfully informs this liberal Protestant poetics of foreclosed union.51

Franchot is certainly right that the second part of the poem is mostly taken up with foreclosed union, but our investigation of the final scenes of the poem suggest that Evangeline does achieve a union with God, and thus the promised “godlikeness,” and this is experienced as shining with celestial light just prior to her brief reunion with Gabriel.

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Andrew C. Higgins has recently shed interesting historical light on the positive portrayal of the Roman Catholicism of Evangeline’s heroine. Higgins focuses on how Longfellow’s characterization of Evangeline’s Catholicism acted as a counter-balance to the anti-Catholic nationalism of nineteenth-century America.52 He explores in particular the history of antiCatholicism in nineteenth-century Philadelphia, Evangeline’s final home: As important a response to anti-Catholicism as Longfellow’s decision to make Evangeline a nun is his decision to end the story in Philadelphia, a city that had become the main flashpoint of anti-Catholicism in the United States. In May and July of 1844, the city was twice wracked with riots between Irish Catholics and nativists. The ostensible cause of the riots was a conflict over whether or not to allow the Catholic Bible into public schools. But the spark occurred when nativists organized a march in a heavily Irish-Catholic ward. After a nativist was killed in the ensuing confrontation, nativists used the death as a rallying cry, and three days of rioting followed. Two months later, three more days of rioting occurred after nativists paraded the dead man’s widow and children through the streets. By casting Evangeline as a Sister of Mercy, an Irish-Catholic order founded in 1831 (long after the chronological setting of Evangeline), Longfellow ties his story directly to the Irish-Catholic community that suffered at the hands of the nativists.53

In light of such violence, Higgins sees Longfellow’s Evangeline as recasting Catholics, and nuns in particular, in a heroic light. Higgins attributes Longfellow’s project here as stemming not from a particular partisan endorsement of the Catholic creed, but instead as part of Longfellow’s Unitarian outlook. Unitarians, Higgins explains, viewed “America as a Christian multi-culture, where the nation is a synthesis of religious and ethnic groups united by a universal love of and devotion to God.”54 In fact, Higgins scolds previous critics for ignoring Longfellow’s Unitarianism: “Longfellow’s faith has often confused readers, especially Christian readers, who tend to overlook the implications of Longfellow’s very sincere Unitarianism.”55 Higgins highlights one Unitarian doctrine in particular that pervades Longfellow’s poem: The vision of Evangeline, then, is not so much an unrealized or aestheticized Catholicism, but rather a Unitarian attempt to evangelize Catholicism itself, to convert it to Unitarian principles and thus tame it to republican politics. . . . Evangeline may be the most famous Catholic character in nineteenth-century American literature, and she would become the patron saint of Acadian nationalism. But in her heart of hearts, she is a Harvard Unitarian.56

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Far from limiting the heroism of Evangeline, Franchot and Higgins shed much-needed light on the theological and historical context of the poem. They open up new aspects of Evangeline’s heroism, a heroism which is an advocacy for the oppressed minorities to which she belongs. Beyond her belonging to religious and ethnic minorities, Evangeline is, of course, a woman. In his 2003 biography of Longfellow, Charles Calhoun has made much of Longfellow’s choice of a heroine, given America’s troubled and male-dominated past: Evangeline is not so much a person as an idea in motion: not simply the conventional idea of feminine constancy but the larger idea—which manages to be both personal and political—that it is only a woman who can set things to order again, who can mend that which has been ripped apart, who can heal the wounds men have inflicted. When Evangeline, now a nursing sister, finally meets the dying Gabriel in the Philadelphia charity hospital, their reunion stands for the bringing together again of all the scattered Acadians—indeed, of all exiled peoples—in an imagined world where the Christian charity of women has redeemed the misdeeds of men.57

Coupled with the readings of Franchot and Higgins, Calhoun takes us beyond simplistic readings, like those of Roy Harvey Pearce, who read Longfellow’s poems as uncomplicated celebrations of conventional domesticity.58 Further, Christoph Irmscher writes that Evangeline had a powerful effect on those in American society who felt displaced. “No wonder,” he concludes, “that a picture of Longfellow’s Evangeline graced many a college dormitory room.”59 In his interaction with Evangeline, Calhoun introduces a very useful term—agency—into the conversation about Evangeline and Longfellow’s heroines in general: [Longfellow] has turned the received notion of gender on its head: in a world that validates male achievement, male heroism, male ingenuity, his Evangeline is a person of considerable agency, a woman who survives by her wits over a sprawling, untamed American wilderness that had crippled or destroyed many of the men who had ventured there. The great American theme of conquest, of marching to destiny’s drumbeat ever westward, is subtly undermined by this persistent little Acadian farm girl, who takes on the vast continent and survives, only to return east to her greater destiny.60

It has already been argued that this greater destiny is the achievement of godlikeness. Essential to Calhoun’s praise of the poem is that this destiny is self-determined by Evangeline as agent. In The Spanish Student, what Lara and her father would take away from Preciosa is precisely her agency, her ability to choose her artistic and moral pursuits.

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If the heroism of Preciosa resides, in part, in her freely chosen demonstration of the harmony between art and dogma, then recent criticism has shown that the heroism of Evangeline resides in freely demonstrating the harmony between the erotic life and the ascetic life. Chevalier describes this attempted harmony as a Christian Romanticism, “the ability to feast on fasting.”61 Franchot describes the harmony as exemplified in “the nun who loves.”62 I add that this attempt—and, I argue, success—at harmonizing the erotic and the ascetic makes the most sense when it is seen in light of Evangeline’s ultimate quest to attain godlikeness, as explained by Father Felician in part 2, canto 1, and as evidenced by her final shining with celestial light. Throughout the rest of this book, Evangeline will not be far from us. She is arguably the most ambitious and the most successfully rendered of Longfellow’s heroines. This success is due, in part, to the suitability of the poet to the form and the subject chosen. With the possible exceptions of Melville’s Clarel, or Longfellow’s own Courtship of Miles Standish, Evangeline is the finest long narrative poem of the American nineteenth century. NOTES 1. For a dramatic account of this surprise courtship and marriage, see Cifelli, 179–188. 2. Samuel Longfellow, The Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), 70–71. 3. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Evangeline,” in Complete Poetical Works, ll. 1–9. 4. Ibid., ll. 16–19. 5. Ibid., ll. 20–58. 6. Ibid., ll. 59–61. 7. Ibid., ll. 114–21. 8. Ibid., ll. 71–74. 9. Ibid., 1. 75. 10. Ibid., ll. 78–81. 11. Jacques Chevalier, Semiotics, Romanticism, and the Scriptures (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990), 184–86. 12. We will see this ambiguity and interplay between within/without language throughout the narrative, not only in relation to light, but also in relation to love. 13. Andrew C. Higgins has pointed out that though Longfellow is careful to keep the Catholic traditions and hierarchical structure intact from the priest downward, there is a curious lack of mention of any bishop. To what authority, we might ask, does Father Felician answer? Though Felician is clearly a Roman Catholic priest, the upper echelons of ecclesiastical authority are effectively absent from the poem. See Andrew

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C. Higgins, “Evangeline’s Mission: Anti-Catholicism, Nativism, and Unitarianism in Longfellow’s Evangeline,” Religion and the Arts 13.4 (2009): 547. 14. Longfellow, “Evangeline,” ll. 105–7. 15. In contrast to my reading of this passage as humorous, Chevalier sees ethical danger: “The scene under discussion shows no evidence of . . . virtuous conduct.” Chevalier, 235. 16. Longfellow, “Evangeline,” ll. 358–61. 17. Ibid., ll. 237–42. 18. Ibid., ll. 300–301. 19. Ibid., ll. 437–39. 20. Ibid., ll. 496–503, 518–23. 21. For more on sensory language in Evangeline, see Lauren Simek, “The Sounds of Narrative in Longfellow’s Evangeline,” in Reconsidering Longfellow. 22. Longfellow, “Evangeline,” ll. 129–33. 23. Wisdom of Solomon 3:1, 7 (KJV). 24. Chevalier, 1–2. 25. Ibid., 91. 26. Ibid., 91. 27. Calhoun, 88. 28. Longfellow, “Evangeline,” ll. 708–17. 29. Ibid., ll. 559–60. 30. Ibid., ll. 719–27. 31. Ibid., ll. 728–32. 32. Ibid., l. 733. 33. Ibid., ll. 820–26. 34. Ibid., ll. 851–54. 35. Ibid., ll. 1031–44. 36. Ibid., ll. 1145–58. 37. It is probably safest to read the stars as symbols of celestial light, not as literal celestial lights. For “celestial light” in Evangeline seems to be reserved for the light of heaven itself, or of those into whom it has been infused by grace, such as Evangeline after confession, or Moses coming down from Mount Sinai. 38. Ibid., ll. 1151–52. 39. Ibid., ll. 1216–26. 40. Ibid., ll. 1267–75. 41. Ibid., ll. 1276–88. 42. Ibid., ll. 1313–19. 43. Ibid., ll. 1349–353. 44. Ibid., l. 1380. 45. Ibid., ll. 1381–89. 46. For a detailed exploration of Longfellow’s interactions with the Church Fathers, see Timothy E. G. Bartel, Glimpses of Her Father’s Glory: Deification and Divine Light in Longfellow’s Evangeline (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2019), especially chapter 4: “The Christian Fathers in Longfellow.” 47. Chrysostom, “Juventinus and Maximinus,” 92.

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48. Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 206. 49. Ibid., 211. 50. Ibid., 208. 51. Ibid., 209. 52. Higgins, “Evangeline’s Mission,” 549. 53. Ibid., 561. 54. Ibid., 549. 55. Ibid., 563. 56. Ibid., 566. 57. Calhoun, 187–88. 58. Roy Harvey Pearce, 211. 59. Irmscher, Longfellow Redux (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 70. 60. Calhoun, 188. 61. Chevalier, 115. 62. Franchot, 211.

Chapter Three

The Middle Heroines Elsie, Nokomis, Minnehaha, Priscilla

The 1850s were a period of great literary flourishing in New England in general and also in Longfellow’s own career. As children were born to him and Frances, Henry’s literary output kept pace: three of Longfellow’s major poetical works were completed in this decade, The Golden Legend (1851), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858). Though none of these works are as focused on their heroines as fixedly as Evangeline is, each contain heroines that develop and complicate the place of the heroine in Longfellow’s work. They also provide us with Longfellow’s first major Puritan hero in Priscilla, who reveals Longfellow as a poet as alive to Protestant theological tradition as he is to Catholic theological tradition in his rendering of Evangeline. ELSIE: THE GOLDEN LEGEND The Golden Legend is a dramatic retelling of a narrative that Longfellow encountered in Hartmann von Aue’s medieval story Der Arme Heinrich. Longfellow’s play begins with Satan in disguise, who pays a visit to a German prince, Henry, who is dying of a mysterious sickness. The Prince bemoans: Ourselves we cannot re-create; Nor set ourselves to the same key Of the remembered harmony!1 Satan, however, convinces him that this is not entirely true, for he prompts the Prince to read from a volume that describes a cure:

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“Not to be cured, yet not incurable! The only remedy that remains Is the blood that flows from a maiden’s veins, Who of her own free will shall die And give her life as the price of yours.”2 This is a twist on the old story of Iphigenia; in that tale, a virgin must be sacrificed, be she willing or no. But here is a more curious set up: the virgin must choose to sacrifice herself “of her own free will.” We have already seen three characters—Preciosa, The Quadroon Girl, and Evangeline—who have had hardships and danger forced upon them. The proposed maiden in this first scene must face a more extreme trial than any of Longfellow’s heroines before her, but she must choose it herself; it cannot be forced upon her. Fortuitously, the ailing Henry, who is troubled at Satan’s advice, retires to the countryside to stay with a peasant family. This family has a teenage daughter, Elsie, who from the first takes pity on the Prince: Elsie Here are flowers for you, But they are not all for you. Some of them are for the Virgin And for Saint Cecilia. Prince Henry As thou standest there, Thou seemest to me like the angel That brought immortal roses To Saint Cecilia’s bridal chamber.3 We are now used to such an exchange, where an older man in authority praises a younger woman by calling her an angel and associating her with a saint. But further on in the scene, the Prince associates Elsie with “the Sultan’s daughter,” who, in a story Elsie tells him, falls in love with a gardener, who is Christ, and “follow[s] him to his Father’s garden.”4 This ostensibly sweet story is, of course, about the death of the Sultan’s daughter. The reader is alarmed, but not entirely surprised, when Elsie explains that she would “very gladly” have followed Christ to heaven if he offered. Inevitably, Elsie is told of the desperate remedy that could cure the Prince. She explains to her father and mother, Gottlieb and Ursula, that she would like to be the maiden to die for him:

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Elsie I am disturbed and much distressed, In thinking our dear Prince must die; I cannot close my eyes, nor rest. Gottlieb What wouldst thou? In the Power Divine His healing lies, not in our own; It is in the hand of God alone. Elsie Nay, he has put it into mine, And into my heart! Gottlieb Thy words are wild!   Ursula What dost thou mean? my child! my child! Elsie That for our dear Prince Henry’s sake I will myself the offering make, And give my life to purchase his. Ursula Are thou still dreaming, or awake? Thou speakest carelessly of death, And yet thou knowest not what it is.5 At this point it is not difficult to agree with Ursula; Elsie is young, given to flower-gathering and storytelling. She is devout, to be sure, keeping some of her flowers for the saint, and, in the previous scene, praying sincerely that she may follow where thou leadest, Let me, bleeding as thou bleedest, Die, if dying I may give Life to one who asks to live, And more nearly, Dying thus, resemble thee.6

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Elsie, then, is sincere in her desire, and motivated by her desire to resemble God. But does she understand what death is? In response to her mother, Elsie presents a soliloquy on death. Elsie’s speech is, perhaps, the most powerful of all the speeches in the play: Elsie ‘Tis the cessation of our breath. Silent and motionless we lie; And no one knoweth more than this. I saw our little Gertrude die; She left off breathing, and no more I smoothed the pillow beneath her head. She was more beautiful than before. Like violets faded were her eyes; By this we know that she was dead. Through the open window looked the skies Into the chamber where she lay And the wind was like a sound of wings, As if the angels came to bear her away. Ah! When I saw and felt these things I found it difficult to stay; I longed to die, as she had died. And go forth with her, side by side. The Saints are dead, the Martyrs dead. And Mary, and our Lord; and I Would follow in humility The way by them illumined. Ursula My child! my child! thou must not die! Elsie Why should I live? Do I not know The life of woman is full of woe? Toiling on and on and on, With breaking heart and tearful eyes. And silent lips, and in the soul The secret longings that arise, Which this world never satisfies! Some more, some less, but of the whole Not one quite happy, no, not one!

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Ursula It is the malediction of Eve! Elsie In place of it, let me receive The benediction of Mary.7 In her insistence that choosing death is something she does freely and knowingly, Elsie strongly identifies herself with Christ, the saints, and Mary, a figure with whom Evangeline, too, is associated. Elsie argues that she is no more ignorant of death than anyone else. She has seen a person die, her religious heroes and heroines are all dead, and, if it comes to comparing life and death, she understands from her experience of the world that “the life of woman is full of woe.” Just as Evangeline sees her path illumined in Evangeline 2.5, so Elsie sees the path to death illumined by the saints, the martyrs, Mary, and Christ himself, who she wishes to resemble. In the final exchange with her parents in this scene, Elsie stresses the Christlikeness of her choice: Christ died for me, and shall not I Be willing for my Prince to die? You both are silent; you cannot speak. This said I at our Savior’s feast After confession, to the priest, And even he made no reply.8 Still, Elsie decides that she wants to consult the priest before she goes with the Prince to Salerno, where the sacrifice must be carried out. But Elsie never receives the priest’s blessing, as far as we can tell. Instead, in the next scene the parish priest, who is tired of waiting for the overdue Prince to come and make his confession, leaves to go minister to “the sick and the disconsolate.”9 Lucifer, disguised as a priest, enters and hears the Prince’s confession instead. Henry is wracked with doubt about whether he should let Elsie die for him: But this deed, is it good, or evil? Have I thine absolution free To do it, and without restriction?10 Lucifer absolves and encourages him: Accept the comfort and the calm She offers, as a gift divine;

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Let her fall down and anoint thy feet With the ointment costly and most sweet Of her young blood, and thou shalt live.11 Here we have a mockery of the priestly sanction given to Preciosa and Evangeline in their endeavors. Elsie is not even allowed a direct audience with a priest, but is blessed in her choice by the devil through the mediation of the weak and deceived Prince. Though much of the rest of the play is a diverting journey to Salerno, which includes a mystery and comic scenes with monks and scholastics, the disastrous deception of the Prince in this early scene hangs over all. Perhaps someone with the perspicacity of Preciosa could have seen through the devil’s disguise, but not the Prince. He is more dull of sight than Victorian. Lucifer follows the prince and maiden, and as they draw close to Salerno, he worries that Elsie’s pure and selfless motivations mean that her soul will never be his: But my guests approach! There is in the air A fragrance, like that of the Beautiful Garden Of Paradise, in days that were! An odour of innocence and of prayer, And of love, and faith that never fails. Such as the fresh young heart exhales Before it begins to wither and harden! I cannot breathe in such an atmosphere! My soul is filled with a nameless fear That, after all my trouble and pain, After all my restless endeavor, The youngest, fairest soul of the twain, The most ethereal, most divine, Will escape from my hands for ever and ever. But the other is already mine!12 Elsie, like Evangeline before her, exudes a fragrance of great beauty that is hateful to those who are evil. Innocence, prayer, love, and faith are her virtues, and though she goes to her death, her soul is safe from Lucifer. The speaker contrasts her with “the other,” Prince Henry, who breathes “weakness, selfishness, and the base / And pusillanimous fear of death.”13 Lucifer even goes as far as calling Henry one of his ministers, “Who wander the great earth to and fro / And on my errands come and go.”14

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Arriving at Salerno, the Prince and Elsie find a friar who is willing to kill Elsie for the Prince. Unsurprisingly, this friar is also Lucifer in disguise. When the false friar questions Elsie’s choice, Elsie insists, I come not here To argue but to die. Your business is not To question, but to kill me. I am ready.15 Elsie’s final words to the Prince and his attendants are beautiful and tragic, all the more tragic for the earnestness with which they are spoken, in light of the great deception that has been accomplished: Weep not, my friends, rather rejoice with me. I shall not feel the pain, but shall be gone. And you will have another friend in heaven. Then start not at the creaking of the door Through which I pass. I see what lies beyond it. And you, O Prince! Bear back my benison Unto my father’s house, and all within it. This morning in the church I prayed for them After confession, after absolution, When my whole soul was white, I prayed for them. God will take care of them, they need me not. And in your life let my remembrance linger, As something not to trouble and disturb it, But to complete it, adding life to life.16 Elsie is led away and the door shut behind her, and Prince Henry at last comes to his senses: Oh, what a vile and abject thing am I That purchase length of days at such a cost! Not by her death alone, but by the death Of all that’s good and true and noble in me! All manhood, innocence, and self-respect, All love, and faith, and hope, and heart are dead! All my divine nobility of nature By this one act is forfeited forever.17 As in the sermons of Preciosa, it is the appeal to the nature of the errant man that is the most powerful. Cecil Williams has described Elsie as “the stronger character showing [the Prince] the spiritual light.”18 In this final scene, this

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light becomes specified into distinct and desirable virtues. Prince Henry’s realization is that it is precisely those virtues of Elsie—innocence, faith, hope, love, and heart—that he, too, wants. They are not just feminine virtues, but human virtues, virtues that the Prince associates with “manhood.” The scene closes on Prince Henry and his attendants bursting through the door to save Elsie. The conclusion of the matter is told in retrospect, by a forester who stops at Ursula’s door and relates how Elsie was saved, the Prince healed “by the touch of St. Matthew’s sacred bones,” and the Prince and Maiden married.19 This ending is rather like that of The Spanish Student, where fortunes are heaped, out of nowhere it seems, upon the romantic protagonists, and all is made well. Still, Longfellow has dramatized two agonizing choices quite well: Elsie’s choice to freely give her life for the prince in imitation of Christ, and the Prince’s choice to accept his own mortality rather than let Lucifer kill Elsie. If Elsie comes out of the play looking much more spotless than the Prince, she also appears almost alien in her purity: can she really give herself so freely for another with full understanding of the cost? It is tempting to think her naïve, perhaps even manipulated by the dogma of her church into a self-sacrifice she is too young to understand. On the other hand, it might be tempting to see a disturbing morbidity in her, an unhealthy longing for death and misunderstanding of the value of life. In his interaction with The Golden Legend, Newton Arvin worries about this second possibility. “Elsie,” he explains, “seems to offer herself as a sacrifice not only out of a saintly willingness to die for Henry’s sake, but of a somewhat questionable aversion from life.”20 He continues, “It is very curious to come upon this suicidal theme in Longfellow’s work.”21 Still, Arvin points out that in The Spanish Student, Victorian and Preciosa also long to leave the world. If there is an explanation for the strange desire for death in The Spanish Student and The Golden Legend, it resides in Longfellow’s attempt to characterize the sincere Roman Catholic belief that the ideal life is the life of the saints in heaven, who have followed Christ to glory. If Elsie, then, is to be read as heroic, it must be in her achieving a harmony between a free, mature agency and that zealous imitation of Christ’s self-sacrifice modeled by the saints and the martyrs of Christian tradition. NOKOMIS AND MINNEHAHA: THE SONG OF HIAWATHA Longfellow’s first three major heroines, Preciosa, Evangeline, and Elsie, are all Christians of European descent, and the conflict in each of their stories is closely connected to the struggle to live a Christian life as a mature and

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free woman. With each, Longfellow tested more and more the limits of his Protestant American readers’ tastes for the European, the Roman Catholic, and the melodramatic. It was time for a change. That change came in the form of The Song of Hiawatha, published in 1855, which trades a medieval European setting for a pre-Columbian American setting. And while neither of the two main female protagonists, Nokomis and Minnehaha, play as central a role in Hiawatha as the earlier heroines did in their poems, both indicate an enduring imaginative freshness in Longfellow for creating memorable heroines. Nokomis is the grandmother of the hero Hiawatha. In book 3 of the poem, we learn that she is “Daughter of the moon,” who fell “from the full moon” to earth, where she bore a daughter, Wenonah.22 But Wenonah is assaulted, impregnated, and abandoned by the West Wind, and dies of her grief after giving birth to a son, Hiawatha. Nokomis becomes not only Hiawatha’s mother-figure, but also his mentor: Many things Nokomis taught him Of the stars that shone in heaven; Showed him Ishkoodah, the comet, Ishkoodah, with firey tresses; Showed the Death Dance of the spirits, Warriors with their plumes and war-clubs, Flaring far away to northward In the frosty nights of Winter; Showed the broad, white road in heaven Pathway of the ghosts, the shadows, Running straight across the heavens, Crowded with the ghosts, the shadows.23 Nokomis initiates Hiawatha into the mysteries of his people, instructs him in the lore of stars, Death, ghosts, and battle. When Hiawatha is grown and has proved himself in battle, Nokomis challenges him to rid his land of an evil sorcerer, Pearl-Feather: And Nokomis, the old woman, Pointing with her finger westward, Spake these words to Hiawatha: “Yonder dwells the great Pearl-Feather, Megissogwon, the Magician, Manito of Wealth and Wampum, Guarded by his fiery serpents, Guarded by the black pitch-water . . . He it was who slew my father,

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By his wicked wiles and cunning, When he from the moon descended, When he came on earth to seek me He, the mightiest of Magicians, Sends the fever from the marshes . . . Slay this merciless magician, Save the people from the fever That he breathes across the fen-lands, And avenge my father’s murder!”24 After raising him in the lore and values of his people, Nokomis sends Hiawatha on a mission to both avenge his great-grandfather and to rid his land of the source of disease. When Hiawatha is successful in his battle against Pearl-Feather, Nokomis tells him: “Wed a maiden of your people” who will be “Like a fire upon the hearthstone.”25 Hiawatha already has his sights set on Minnehaha, a Dacotah maiden. He assures Nokomis that Minnehaha, though not an Iroquois like them, is Handsomest of all the women. I will bring her to your wigwam, She shall run upon your errands, Be your starlight, moonlight, firelight, Be the sunlight of my people.26 Though she is compared to the sunlight—and light-connections are always fortuitous for a Longfellovian character—Minnehaha’s future activities as described by Hiawatha sound rather more restricted than those of previous heroines. Nokomis relents, and Hiawatha travels to ask Minnehaha’s father for her hand. The wise arrow-maker, her father, leaves the final decision up to his daughter: “Yes, if Minnehaha wishes; / Let your heart speak, Minnehaha!”27 Though she goes to Hiawatha “Neither willing nor reluctant,” Longfellow has told us a few lines before that Minnehaha had been dreaming of Hiawatha for many days before he came for her.28 When they arrive home, nature itself sings to the couple, giving them gender-specific advice. To Hiawatha, the sun says, “Rule by love, O Hiawatha!”29 And to Minnehaha, the moon says, Day is restless, night is quiet, Man imperious, woman feeble; Half is mine, although I follow; Rule by patience, Laughing Water!30

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The moon—here female herself—describes woman as the one who follows, but who owns “half.” Woman is characterized by feebleness, which can be overcome with patience; man, by implication, can overcome his imperiousness with love. While Nokomis’s contribution to the plot of the poem is primarily that of a wise mentor to the hero, Minnehaha works alongside Hiawatha to help her people flourish. This is best seen when harvest comes, and Hiawatha enlists Minnehaha’s aid to bless the cornfields: Once, when all the maize was planted, Hiawatha, wise and thoughtful, Spake and said to Minnehaha, To his wife, the Laughing Water: “You shall bless to-night the cornfields, Draw a magic circle round them, To protect them from destruction, Blast of mildew, blight of insect, Wagemin, the thief of cornfields, Paimosaid, who steals the maize-ear! “In the night, when all is silence, In the night, when all is darkness, When the Spirit of Sleep, Nepahwin, Shuts the doors of all the wigwams, So that not an ear can hear you, So that not an eye can see you, Rise up from your bed in silence, Lay aside your garments wholly, Walk around the fields you planted, Round the borders of the cornfields, Covered by your tresses only, Robed with darkness as a garment. “Thus the fields shall be more fruitful, And the passing of your footsteps.”31 Minnehaha obediently performs the ritual: From her bed rose Laughing Water, Laid aside her garments wholly, And with darkness clothed and guarded, Unashamed and unafrighted, Walked securely round the cornfields, Drew the sacred, magic circle

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Of her footprints round the cornfields. No one but the Midnight only Saw her beauty in the darkness, No one but the Wawonaissa Heard the panting of her bosom; Guskewau, the darkness, wrapped her Closely in his sacred mantle, So that none might see her beauty, So that none might boast, “I saw her!”32 If this scene has some of the same cultic qualities as Nokomis’s earlier astronomy lesson, it also strives to retain a Victorian propriety. Though Minnehaha is naked, performing pagan magic, nature itself makes sure she stays decent while doing it. In 1955, Edward Wagenknecht called this scene “daring,”33 and more recently, Charles Calhoun described its “sweetness of touch, amid its strangeness, which is not ethnologically truthful so much as Longfellovian.”34 Despite the scene’s ethnological inaccuracy, Calhoun argues that “Longfellow seems to have instinctively grasped what later anthropologists would record—the prevalence across culture of female fertility rites.”35 Perhaps we might also discern in the scene a balance of forces characteristic of Longfellow’s depiction of heroines. Minnehaha is, after all, “unashamed” of her nakedness, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. And the darkness that “wrapped her / closely in his sacred mantle” is not just protecting her from those who would spy, but also from the more malevolent forces in Hiawatha’s world, like Mudjekeewis, who, as we learned earlier in the poem, threaten mortal women with sexual violence. If there is a troubling aspect to the portrayal of Minnehaha it is in the cultural expectations of a woman, and the clear subservient position that she has in Longfellow’s version of Hiawatha’s indigenous culture.36 Elsie and Evangeline get to choose their quests freely; Minnehaha simply obeys her husband. It is true that Evangeline, at the beginning of her poem, serves dinner to her father and his guests, but she is never described as the one who “runs along” on her elder’s errands, as Minnehaha is. Additionally, whereas Victorian dismisses intellect as unimportant for a woman and favors instead woman’s affection, Minnehaha is told by the the moon that “woman [is] feeble.” Interestingly, the remedy for feebleness is patience, one of the virtues that Father Felician recommends to Evangeline. Felician, however, never calls Evangeline, let alone her whole sex, feeble. The notes of hope for the portrayal of heroic women in Hiawatha are the wise mentor Nokomis and a female character briefly mentioned in a tale told at Hiawatha and Minnehaha’s wedding feast. This character is Owenee, who

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alone is perceptive enough to see that Osseo, an old wrinkled man in her village, is actually the Son of the Evening Star: Only Owenee, the youngest, She the willful and the wayward, She the silent, dreamy maiden, Was the fairest of the sisters.37 Owenee marries Osseo, and is derided by her family and community, but she stays strong and insists: “I am happy with Osseo.”38 As often happens in stories of this kind, Owenee’s family and friends are cursed for their derision of the Son of the Evening Star and are turned into birds. Osseo sheds his wrinkled form, and reveals himself to be a strong, young warrior. After some further complications, the beautiful Owenee and Osseo live happily with their new bird pets. In her “willful and . . . wayward” nature, Owenee has more in common with Nokomis than Minnehaha, but the fact that the story of the willful and perspicacious Owenee is told at Minnehaha’s wedding feast seems to give us hope that she will strive to be like Owenee: clear-sighted and strong in will, as well as patient. PRISCILLA: THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH In 1858, thirty years into his career as a writer, Longfellow wrote his first major Anglo-American heroine. This heroine is “The Puritan maiden Priscilla,” a historical woman who lived in Plymouth Colony and was an ancestor of the Longfellow family.39 Priscilla shares her poem, The Courtship of Miles Standish, with two other memorable Longfellow protagonists: the shy writer John Alden and the boisterous captain of Plymouth, Miles Standish. The plot of the poem is a familiar one: the proud and self-satisfied Miles Standish, who is “a maker of war, not a maker of phrases,” enlists the help of his friend, the bookish John Alden, to go to “the angel whose name is Priscilla” and “Say that a blunt old Captain . . . offers his hand and his heart.”40 Readers of comedies will know what comes next: Alden is also in love with Priscilla, and romantic misunderstandings and blunders ensue. Though Standish uses the epithet “angel” in describing Priscilla, this poem is unique in Longfellow’s early and middle work in its avoidance of comparing its Christian heroine to Mary or the saints. This is, no doubt, due to its Puritan setting, where such Catholic language would seem out of place. Instead, Priscilla is most often compared to Old Testament characters, including the woman of Proverbs 31 and Rebecca, the wife of Isaac.41 In a non-Biblical allusion, Alden twice compares Priscilla to a certain Bertha, “the

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queen of Helvetia,” who capably used her spinning wheel even while she travelled “on her palfrey.”42 When we first meet Priscilla, she is described by Alden as “modest and simple and sweet.”43 Sitting at her spinning wheel, Priscilla is Singing the hundredth Psalm, the grand old Puritan anthem, Music that Luther sang to the sacred words of the Psalmist, Full of the breath of the Lord, consoling and comforting many. Then, as he opened the door, he beheld the form of the maiden Seated beside her wheel, and the carded wool like a snow-drift Piled at her knee, her white hands feeding the ravenous spindle, While with her foot on the treadle she guided the wheel in its motion. Open wide on her lap lay the well-worn psalm-book of Ainsworth, Printed in Amsterdam, the words and the music together, Rough-hewn, angular notes, like stones in the wall of a churchyard, Darkened and overhung by the running vine of the verses. Such was the book from whose pages she sang the old Puritan anthem, She, the Puritan girl, in the solitude of the forest, Making the humble house and the modest apparel of home-spun Beautiful with her beauty, and rich with the wealth of her being!44 Priscilla is portrayed as a model of colonial Protestant domesticity: her beauty makes her house and her creations beautiful; her being imbues all with richness. But she is also engaged in Bible-reading and Psalm singing, adding an almost exaggerated robustness to her activity: can a woman read the scriptures, while singing well, while creating beautiful garments, while lending ontological content to all that surrounds her? Priscilla can. This domestic genius is not, however, pleased to hear John Alden’s suit on behalf of his friend: Mute with amazement and sorrow, Priscilla the Puritan maiden Looked into Alden’s face, her eyes dilated with wonder, Feeling his words like a blow, that stunned her and rendered her speechless; Till at length she exclaimed, interrupting the ominous silence: “If the great Captain of Plymouth is so very eager to wed me, Why does he not come himself, and take the trouble to woo me? If I am not worth the wooing, I surely am not worth the winning! . . . That is the way with you men; you don’t understand us, you cannot. When you have made up your minds, after thinking of this one and that one, Choosing, selecting, rejecting, comparing one with another, Then you make known your desire, with abrupt and sudden avowal,

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And are offended and hurt, and indignant perhaps, that a woman Does not respond at once to a love that she never suspected, Does not attain at a bound the height to which you have been climbing. This is not right nor just: for surely a woman’s affection Is not a thing to be asked for, and had for only the asking. When one is truly in love, one not only says it, but shows it.”45 Priscilla proves, in her first scene, that she is the true master of rhetoric in Plymouth, and has more well-formed theories about gender than all of the other characters combined. To Priscilla, men do not and cannot understand women; men mistakenly assume that when they have chosen a woman by reason, that woman must “bound” to their level of affection. Even Victorian is not as clueless as John Alden and Miles Standish. As Alden, more and more flustered by Priscilla’s wit and good sense, presses his friend’s case, Priscilla “archly . . . smiled, and with eyes overrunning with laughter, / Said in a tremulous voice, ‘Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?’”46 Once again, a heroine’s perspicacity wins the day, and Alden, realizing his own affections have been found out, runs from Priscilla’s house. Still trying to be a good friend, Alden decides to go back to England rather than stand in the way of Standish’s pursuit of Priscilla. But the damage is already done, and Standish, after hearing how the conversation with Priscilla ended, spurns Alden as a friend and marches off to fight the local indigenous peoples, who have conveniently risen up against the colonists. The rest of the poem is taken up with the campaigns of Standish against the Indians, and, more interestingly, the growing, flirtatious friendship between John and Priscilla. In these scenes of friendship, Longfellow further explores Puritan—or, more accurately, Priscillan—theories of love and gender. After Alden decides not to go back to England on the Mayflower, Priscilla finds him and apologizes for “speaking so frankly, for saying / What I ought not to have said, yet now I can never unsay it.”47 Despite this apology, not twenty lines later, Priscilla interrupts Alden’s denial that her frankness made him angry: “No!” interrupted the maiden, with answer prompt and decisive; “No; you were angry with me, for speaking so frankly and freely. It was wrong, I acknowledge; for it is the fate of a woman Long to be patient and silent, to wait like a ghost that is speechless, Till some questioning voice dissolves the spell of its silence. Hence is the inner life of so many suffering women Sunless and silent and deep, like subterranean rivers Running through caverns of darkness, unheard, unseen, and unfruitful, Chafing their channels of stone, with endless and profitless murmurs.”48

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Some of this sounds rather like Father Felician’s sermon in Evangeline, though it leaves out the doctrine of godlikeness. But The Courtship of Miles Standish is a comedy, where time and again the high-sounding theories of the protagonists are extraordinarily at odds with their behavior. Priscilla’s manner here belies her theories. No sooner does she apologize for frankness, than she “answer[s] prompt and decisive.” And though she urges that “it is the fate of a woman / Long to be patient and silent,” it is her speech—even her impatience—that move the romance forward. Strangely, it is John Alden who is the most patient and the most silent in the story; not even in this scene does he profess his love, so loyal is he to his friend Standish. At the end of the chapter, Longfellow compares Alden to “a pilgrim devout, who toward Jerusalem journeys,” leaving out any mention of the saints or relics of The Golden Legend.49 If John is the pilgrim, then Priscilla is Jerusalem. Just before Alden does declare his love, we are treated to the passage where Priscilla is described as the woman of Proverbs 31: Ever of her he thought, when he read in his Bible on Sunday Praise of the virtuous woman, as she is described in the Proverbs, How the heart of her husband doth safely trust in her always, How all the days of her life she will do him good, and not evil, How she seeketh the wool and the flax and worketh with gladness, How she layeth her hand to the spindle and holdeth the distaff, How she is not afraid of the snow for herself or her household, Knowing her household are clothed with the scarlet cloth of her weaving!50 This may be the least ironic of the allusions that the characters make about one another. Priscilla is indeed virtuous (though she has virtues other than she praises), and her work at the spinning wheel is indeed unparalleled in Plymouth. Further, “she is not afraid,” not only of the snow, but of most other things; the bravery of Priscilla in interpersonal dealings matches the bravery of Miles Standish in military dealings. Speaking of Miles Standish, after the Proverbs-minded Alden reaches Priscilla’s house and begins to talk with her, a messenger enters with the news that Standish has been killed in battle: John Alden, upstarting, as if the barb of the arrow Piercing the heart of his friend had struck his own, and had sundered Once and for ever the bonds that held him bound as a captive, Wild with excess of sensation, the awful delight of his freedom, Mingled with pain and regret, unconscious of what he was doing, Clasped, almost with a groan, the motionless form of Priscilla,

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Pressing her close to his heart, as for ever his own, and exclaiming: “Those whom the Lord hath united, let no man put them asunder!”51 This sudden exclamation is also a quotation from Scripture, and when Alden and Priscilla are married in the next chapter, the world to them seems “as the Garden of Eden, / Filled with the presence of God, whose voice was the sound of the ocean.”52 The sound of the ocean, which in Evangeline was a sound of mourning, is here a divine blessing of romantic fulfillment and union. Together with Minnehaha, Priscilla is the most conventional—by the standards of the day—of Longfellow’s heroines. She is “a pattern for housewifes,”53 as she calls herself, a latter-day Old Testament wife, a maker of garments, and a singer of songs. She is also perceptive, decisive, and, despite her apologizing for it, appropriately blunt. In her artistry and her perspicacity, as well as in the genre of her story, she is most like Preciosa. But she faces none of the ethnic, artistic, and ecclesiastical challenges of Preciosa. In fact, Priscilla’s heroism lies in her overcoming her romantic obstacles more than anything else: she is offered a husband that she would not care for, and she does not rest until she secures for herself a husband that she would care for. Priscilla retains, as Minnehaha does not, a robust agency to determine her own romantic fate. At one point Longfellow describes her as: Shrinking, fearing almost, lest, coming home from his battles, [Standish] should lay claim to her hand, as the prize and reward of his valor.54 Given the plot of the poem, this would be the height of villainy. Luckily, in the dénouement of the poem, Standish stumbles into the chapel just after Alden and Priscilla have said their vows, revealing himself as still alive, and newly repentant for his hurtful behavior to both of them. In the closing lines of the poem, Longfellow adds his romantic protagonists to “the endless succession of lovers.”55 And Longfellow has indeed shown that a conventional marriage and family life (at least in the Protestant American conception) can be one of the forms that heroic womanhood can take. Priscilla does not experience the obvious deification and divine illumination of Evangeline, but hers is not a story like Evangeline’s, in which monastic views, feats of ascesis, and celestial voices and visions are major features. Inasmuch as this is true, Priscilla’s world stands at a remove from the world (and the heroine within it) imagined by the Orthodox feminists. And yet Puritan New England is not an antithetical world to that of Evangeline—or Elsie, or Minnehaha, for that matter. Instead, the relative mundanity of Priscilla’s world enhances the ability of the author to provide

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naturalistic portraits and achieve comic effects. It is the height, perhaps, of Longfellow’s historical realism.56 Still, The Courtship of Miles Standish was to be Longfellow’s last major romantic narrative. He still had over twenty years of writing left to him, but after the 1850s, he turned to more various, mature forms and subjects; perhaps this was because he was no longer in the courtship stage of life, having been happily married for fifteen years by the time he wrote Miles Standish. This more mature perspective may account for the gentle hypocrisy of even his most likable character, Priscilla. The young lover, to Longfellow, now seemed more laughably unaware than ever of her true motivations and virtues. NOTES 1. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 536. 2. Ibid., 538. 3. Ibid., 545. 4. Ibid., 545–547. 5. Ibid., 550–551. 6. Ibid., 550. 7. Ibid., 551–552. 8. Ibid., 552. 9. Ibid., 553. 10. Ibid., 557. 11. Ibid., 556. 12. Ibid., 559. 13. Ibid., 601. 14. Ibid., 601. 15. Ibid., 601. 16. Ibid., 602. 17. Ibid., 602. 18. Cecil B. Williams, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston: Twayne, 1964), 179. 19. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 605. 20. Arvin, 93. 21. Ibid., 93. 22. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 147. 23. Ibid., 148. 24. Ibid., 162. 25. Ibid., 165. 26. Ibid., 165. 27. Ibid., 166. 28. Ibid., 166. 29. Ibid., 168. 30. Ibid., 168.

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31. Ibid., 175. 32. Ibid., 176. 33. Wagenknecht, 176. 34. Calhoun, 212. 35. Ibid., 212. 36. We must remember that the version of pre-Columbian culture that we find in Longfellow’s Hiawatha is filtered through Longfellow’s sensibilities, biases, and creative choices and should not be taken as representative of a direct indigenous perspective. Longfellow did extensively research Ojibwa culture and legend, primarily through consulting Henry and Jane Schoolcraft. Henry Schoolcraft was a white ethnographer who wrote extensively on the indigenous cultures of the northeast. Jane, however, was of Ojibwa descent, and it is to her prose and verse that one must look to find an authentic indigenous preservation and presentation of Ojibwa perspectives, concerns, and narratives. For more on Jane Schoolcraft and her writings, see The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnson Schoolcraft, edited by Robert Dale Parker (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 37. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 171. 38. Ibid., 172. 39. Ibid., 203. 40. Ibid., 204. 41. Ibid., 222, 226. 42. Ibid., 223. 43. Ibid., 206. 44. Ibid., 206. 45. Ibid., 207–209. 46. Ibid., 209. 47. Ibid., 217. 48. Ibid., 217. 49. Ibid., 219. 50. Ibid., 222. 51. Ibid., 223. 52. Ibid., 226. 53. Ibid., 223. 54. Ibid., 221. 55. Ibid., 226. 56. It should also be noted that Longfellow’s most successful novel, Kavanagh (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1849), was written in the intervening years between Evangeline and Miles Standish, and shares with the latter a gentle satire of New England provincial life. Like Longfellow’s earlier novel Hyperion (New York: Samuel Colman, 1839), however, Kavanagh focuses primarily on a male protagonist.

Chapter Four

Interlude The Perspicacity of Beatrice

Of all the heroines who were not his own creations, it was Dante Alighieri’s Beatrice that most fascinated Longfellow. In the early to mid-1860s, Longfellow would turn from composing original long narratives like Hiawatha and Miles Standish to the translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy as his main creative occupation. But Longfellow had been thinking about, translating, and teaching on Dante ever since the 1830s. In his first collection of poems, Voices of the Night (1839), Longfellow included three short translations from Dante’s Purgatory. Here we meet Beatrice through Longfellow’s eyes in a section of Purgatorio canto 30, that Longfellow titled “Beatrice”: in the bosom of a cloud of flowers Which from those hands angelic were thrown up, And down descended inside and without, With crown of olive o’er a snow white veil, Appeared a lady, under a green mantle, Vested in colors of the living flame.1

Just as this first glimpse of Beatrice in Purgatory has a powerful effect upon Dante, so Beatrice had a powerful effect upon Longfellow. The whiteness of Beatrice’s veil and the flame in which she is vested are two of the models for the light imagery in all of the descriptions of heroines we have so far seen. In this short chapter we will examine the place of Beatrice in Longfellow’s early unpublished lecture on Purgatory and in the sonnets he wrote to accompany his translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

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BEATRICE IN LONGFELLOW’S PURGATORY LECTURE Though the translation “Beatrice” was Longfellow’s first published interaction with Dante’s heroine, he had discoursed at length about Beatrice in a series of Bowdoin College lectures on Dante the year before. In these lectures, Longfellow provides commentary on Purgatorio, canto by canto. In his commentary on canto XXX, after quoting the lines above, Longfellow writes: This was Beatrice: and Dante, before he saw more clearly who it was, felt, by the mysterious influence of her presence, the wonderful power of ancient love: and turned to Virgil to say: “Less than a dram of blood remains in me, that does not tremble, I recognize the signs of the old flame.” But alas Virgil was no longer there—Virgil, his surest father, Virgil, to whom he had given himself for safety. Beatrice bid him weep not at his guide’s departure: at the wound of another sword he shall soon weep. And looking down upon him from her triumphal car, royal in act and with a lofty mien, she continued: “Look at me well! I am, I am indeed Beatrice! How didst thou deign to ascent the mount! Didst thou not know that here mankind are happy!” The poet cast his eyes downward but seeing himself in the clear water, started back, o’ercome with shame. Awful she seemed to him, as a mother to her child . . . Beatrice appeals to Dante himself for the justice of her reproof. He confesses his errors.2

Beatrice awakens memory in Dante by the “power of ancient love.” This love is ancient in two ways: first, it is ancient in Dante’s own biography, for Beatrice was the girl whom he loved in his youth, and though she married another and soon afterward died, he never forgot her. Second, the love is ancient cosmologically speaking, for it is also the love of God, a love that moves even Beatrice herself to act, a love that, Dante will write in Paradiso XXXIII, “moves the sun and the other stars.”3 Beatrice is described as powerful, royal, lofty, and “awful . . . as a mother to her child.” When Dante looks away from Beatrice to hide from her perspicacious eyes, he sees himself in the stream—Lethe—at his feet. In Purgatory one cannot hide from clear sight of oneself, for it is here, Beatrice warns, that “mankind are happy.” Happiness, then, requires clear sight, and it is not until Dante looks upon Beatrice—and Beatrice looks upon him—that he can see clearly. Once he does, he can freely, if painfully, “confess his errors.” In this early translation and lecture, Beatrice appears as a more fearsome and holy figure than any of Longfellow’s early and middle heroines. This is appropriate, for Beatrice is a saint who has descended from Paradise to Purgatory to help the pilgrim-poet in his journey to God. She enjoys the authority and correct sight of a glorified soul. Longfellow’s major early and

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middle heroines can each be read as participating, more or less, in this heavenly authority and perspicacity. Beatrice is what Preciosa, Evangeline, Elsie, and Priscilla can and will become if they continue on the road to godlikeness. BEATRICE IN LONGFELLOW’S SONNETS As was mentioned earlier, after Miles Standish, Longfellow tackled the greatest translation project of his life, Dante’s Divine Comedy. His translation was published in 1867, and in place of a critical introduction, Longfellow wrote six sonnets, two for each canticle of the poem. Beatrice plays a role in two of these sonnets. The first is sonnet IV, placed at the beginning of Purgatory. In it Longfellow returns us to the scene described in his 1838 lecture: Beatrice’s chastisement of Dante in Purgatory and Dante’s confession of his fault: With snow-white veil and garments as of flame, She stands before thee, who so long ago Filled thy young heart with passion and the woe From which thy song and all its splendors came; And while with stern rebuke she speaks thy name, The ice about thy heart melts as the snow On mountain heights, and in swift overflow Comes gushing from thy lips in sobs of shame. Thou makest full confession; and a gleam, As of the dawn on some dark forest cast, Seems on thy lifted forehead to increase; Lethe and Eunoë—the remembered dream And the forgotten sorrow—bring at last That perfect pardon which is perfect peace.4

In the first four lines we have an expansion of what Longfellow thirty years before called “the power of ancient love.” Here we get a two-line flashback: “She stands before thee, who so long ago / Filled thy young heart with passion.” As we have come to see, passion is not usually a good quality in Longfellow’s heroes. It is something they need to reject in order to follow their true nature. Here too is the “stern rebuke” of Beatrice, followed by a lovely alpine metaphor, inspired by Dante’s own imagery of the pilgrim weeping in Purgatorio XXX.5 The sestet of the sonnet adds new dimensions to the earlier lecture. Not only does Dante confess, but he is illumined by “a gleam / As of the dawn on some dark forest cast.” This image redeems the first line of the Divine Comedy, where Dante finds himself in a dark forest. This light falls on his forehead, and Dante is, for a moment, illumined with light about the face

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like Longfellow’s heroines of the 1840s and 1850s. Finally, we have a movement forward in narrative beyond canto XXX, with the mention of Lethe and Eunoe, which, when bathed in, “bring at last / That perfect pardon which is perfect peace.” The men who encountered Preciosa’s clear-sighted rebuke could not bring themselves to confess and change, and both died in their passions. Dante here manages to both confess and find pardon. Longfellow allows us a brief glimpse of Beatrice and the newly pardoned Dante in heaven in his fifth “Divina Commedia” sonnet, used to introduce Dante’s Paradise: I lift mine eyes, and all the windows blaze With forms of Saints and holy men who died, Here martyred and hereafter glorified; And the great Rose upon its leaves displays Christ’s Triumph, and the angelic roundelays, With splendor upon splendor multiplied; And Beatrice again at Dante’s side No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise.6

Beatrice and Dante are now beside one another in the “great rose” of heaven. They are surrounded by those they resemble: saints, holy men, and martyrs. And Beatrice’s relationship toward Dante has changed: “no more” does she rebuke, “but smiles her words of praise.” This final image is a bit of clever synesthesia, but it is appropriate to Dante’s Paradise, a realm where expressions of joy are filled with many-dimensioned meaning. It is also significant that Beatrice is “at Dante’s side.” Before, in Purgatory, she was above him, standing in judgement. But the eternal state is one of equality within God’s grand harmony, with the woman neither above the man nor below him. NOTES 1. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 836. 2. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Lectures on Dante,” MS Am 1340 (106–107), Houghton Library, Harvard University, 118–123. 3. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Volume III, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867), 223. 4. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 376. 5. This alpine metaphor of snow on a mountain paralleling the emotional state of the speaker also appears in Longfellow’s late sonnet “The Cross of Snow,” written in 1879, but not published until after the poet’s death. In the octave of the sonnet, Longfellow meditates on a painting of his departed wife, Frances (“Fanny”), and sees “a halo of pale light” surrounding her face. This halo is only figuratively celestial, for it

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is literally cast by the “night-lamp.” In the sestet, the poet speaks of a “cross of snow” formed in the “deep ravines” of a western mountain. “Such is the cross I wear upon my breast,” he concludes, “changeless since the day she died.” Life of Longfellow Volume 2, 425–426. While in Purgatorio the snow in Dante’s breast melts at the rebuke of Beatrice, in Longfellow’s “Cross of Snow” the poet remains unmelted, even as he beholds the illumined face of his beloved. Nicholas Basbanes says of this sonnet that “the parallels and similarities between Beatrice and Fanny [are] distinctive.” Nicholas Basbanes, Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020), 375. 6. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 376.

Chapter Five

The Later Heroines Edith, The Mother, Elizabeth

Once he was finished with Dante’s Divine Comedy in 1867, Longfellow was free to turn to other projects. But he was not the man that he had been ten years before. His wife, Frances, the heroine of his own life-story if there ever was one, had died in a fire in 1861; his country—and his son Charlie with it—had fought a devastating civil war, wherein Charlie had been seriously wounded. And Longfellow had now translated the greatest poem of the medieval world, a feat no American had yet accomplished. Longfellow’s work after the Civil War and the Divine Comedy reveal a writer more troubled at the state of the world, the church, and the human heart that he had been in his early career. But the late works also reveal a more patient writer, a man more sympathetic even to his villains and his fools. The heroines of these later years are, with the exception of Elizabeth, not young women in love, nor are their plots concerned with matters of romantic comedy. Instead, Longfellow picks women in various states of suffering, and paints their small victories in the midst of civil and religious strife. EDITH: JOHN ENDICOTT When Longfellow wrote The Golden Legend in 1851, he planned for it to be the middle entry in a trilogy of plays about church history, which he would title Christus. Once he was finished with his work on Dante, Longfellow was free to complete the third part of the trilogy which had been in development since the late 1850s. He decided to separate this third section into two plays, John Endicott and Giles Corey of Salem Farm. Together he titled these plays The New England Tragedies, and they were published in 1868. John Endicott is concerned with the persecution of the Quakers by the Puritans in colonial Boston. Confusingly (or perhaps slyly), the two main 75

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male characters in the play are both named John Endicott. The first John Endicott is the governor of Boston, who makes social war upon the Quakers. The second John Endicott is the governor’s son, who begins to have pity on and tries to save the Quakers. The heroine of the play is Edith Christison, a Quaker who bears the brunt of the elder Endicott’s persecution. Though Edith is relatively young, she bears no more the marks of naivety or uncertainty that sometimes hamper Preciosa, Evangeline, and Elsie, nor does she ever apologize for her frankness, as does Priscilla. Instead, Edith is steadfast and defiant from the start. We first meet Edith when she interrupts a sermon by the Puritan preacher Norton. In the stage directions, Longfellow describes her as “barefooted, and clad in sackcloth, with her hair hanging loose upon her shoulders.”1 This appearance is quite the contrast when compared to the prim appearance of Priscilla or Preciosa. Edith has eschewed the trappings of European womanhood. Upon entering Norton’s chapel, she cries “Peace!,” and the following exchange ensues: Norton Anathema maranatha! The Lord cometh! Edith Yea, verily He cometh, and shall judge The shepherds of Israel who do feed themselves, And leave their flocks to eat what they have trodden Beneath their feet. Norton Be silent, babbling woman! St. Paul commands all women to keep silence Within the churches. Edith Yet the women prayed And prophesied at Corinth in his day; And, among those on whom the fiery tongues Of Pentecost descended, some were women! Norton The Elders of the Churches, by our law, Alone have power to open the doors of speech And silence in the Assembly. I command you!

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Edith The law of God is greater than your laws! Ye build your church with blood, your town with crime; The heads thereof give judgment for reward; The priests thereof teach only for their hire; Your laws condemn the innocent to death; And against this I bear my testimony!2 To each of Norton’s rebukes, Edith has a ready answer. This is most striking in her reversal of Norton’s use of St. Paul. Norton is referring to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church, where Paul advises, “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law.”3 Edith brilliantly invokes two biblical and historical counter-instances: “the women prayed / and prophesied in Corinth in [Paul’s] day” and “among those on whom the fiery tongues / Of Pentecost descended, some were women!” These counter-instances not only outnumber the single quotation of Norton, they also claim much more than Norton denied. Above and beyond questioning the bare prohibition of women from speaking in church, Edith claims for women the roles of both prophet and apostle. She then steps into both offices to question the practices of the Puritan church, accusing Norton and his church of crime, money-grubbing, and, even, murder. Though the accusation of murder seems a very strong one, we see two scenes later that the accusation is justified. Having been “driven out with violence” from the church, Edith and the other Quakers, foremost among them Wharton, have taken refuge with the kindly Nicholas Upsall.4 As the Quakers discuss their plight, we learn that several of their own, including William Leddra, have recently been hanged by the Puritans for their defiant behavior. In the ensuing exchange between Edith and Wharton, Longfellow gives us insight into the theology and courage of the Quakers. Edith As persecuted, Yet not forsaken; as unknown, yet known; As dying, and behold we are alive; As sorrowful, and yet rejoicing always; As having nothing, yet possessing all! Wharton And Leddra, too, is dead. But from his prison, The day before his death, he sent these words Unto the little flock of Christ: “What ever

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May come upon the followers of the Light,— Distress, affliction, famine, nakedness, Or perils in the city or the sea, Or persecution, or even death itself,— I am persuaded that God’s armor of Light, As it is loved and lived in, will preserve you. Yea, death itself; through which you will find entrance Into the pleasant pastures of the fold, Where you shall feed forever as the herds That roam at large in the low valleys of Achor. And as the flowing of the ocean fills Each creek and branch thereof, and then retires, Leaving behind a sweet and wholesome savor; So doth the virtue and the life of God Flow evermore into the hearts of those Whom He hath made partakers of His nature; And, when it but withdraws itself a little, Leaves a sweet savor after it, that many Can say they are made clean by every word That He hath spoken to them in their silence.” Edith (rising and breaking into a kind of chant) Truly we do but grope here in the dark, Near the partition-wall of Life and Death, At every moment dreading or desiring To lay our hands upon the unseen door! Let us, then, labor for an inward stillness,— An inward stillness and an inward healing; That perfect silence where the lips and heart Are still, and we no longer entertain Our own imperfect thoughts and vain opinions, But God alone speaks in us, and we wait In singleness of heart, that we may know His will, and in the silence of our spirits, That we may do His will, and do that only!5 In Edith’s final “chant,” she returns to the issue of silence raised by Norton several scenes before, and again turns Norton’s idea on its head. She praises “that perfect silence where the lips and heart / are still.” This sounds superficially like an agreement with Norton that she should seek silence, especially in religious contexts. But she explodes Norton’s theory by continuing: “But God alone speaks in us, and we wait / In singleness of heart, that we may

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know / His will.” This is beyond the mere prohibition or allowance of speech. It is an ascetic doctrine of silence, wherein the lips, heart, and thoughts of the Christian become silent in order that God himself may speak through them. Here, then, Edith gives the ascetic foundations of her prophecy. A few scenes later, she will claim that the reason she entered Norton’s church in the first place is that “the Lord said with me, / ‘Thou must go and cry aloud against that Idol.’”6 Before John Endicott, Longfellow compared his heroines to saints, martyrs, and angels; now he begins to fashion an image of the heroine as prophetess. Though Edith’s speech here is important for understanding Longfellow’s developing sense of the prophetic heroine, it is also important to attend to Wharton’s quotation of Leddra as well. As we have seen, in The Spanish Student Longfellow began using light-about-the-face imagery to demonstrate the holiness of his heroines. Evangeline, as we examined at length, is often illumined with “celestial light,” which by the end has become something that shines out from within her. By the time we get to Beatrice in “Divina Commedia IV,” the heroine is clothed in “garments as of flame.” Now, in Leddra’s words, we are treated to a more fully developed theology of heavenly light, one that finds affinity with that of the Orthodox Feminists. The Quakers are called “followers of the light,” and no matter what harm comes to them, Leddra is “persuaded that God’s armor of light” will protect them. Is this all metaphorical? It would be tempting to think so, to think that “light” stands for providence, or some such abstraction. But the reader of Longfellow knows that light from heaven—celestial light, God’s light—often appears literally in the poet’s world. Further, Leddra explains the mechanism by which this might be possible: And as the flowing of the ocean fills Each creek and branch thereof . . . So doth the virtue and the life of God Flow evermore into the hearts of those Whom He hath made partakers of His nature7 The follower of God, then, is a “creek and branch” of the ocean that is God, and when she is made a “partaker of His nature,” “the virtue and the life of God” flows into her. This is a biblical concept and also a Dantean one. The phrase “partakers of His nature” is first found in the New Testament in the second epistle of St. Peter: According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue: Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that

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by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.8

According to St. Peter, it is the knowledge of God through which the Christian becomes a “partaker in the divine nature.” This idea of partaking in God’s nature, and thus receiving God’s attributes (described by Leddra as God’s “virtue and life”) was an important one for patristic and medieval theologians, with whom, as we have seen, Longfellow was familiar. A year before John Endicott was published, Longfellow had completed the notes for his translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. In his notes on Paradise I, Longfellow includes the following quotation from Dante’s Convivio: The human soul, ennobled by the highest power, that is by reason, partakes of the divine nature in the manner of an eternal Intelligence; because the soul is so ennobled by that sovereign power, and denuded of matter, that the divine light shines in it as in an angel; and therefore man has been called by the philosophers a divine animal.9

This quotation from Dante pulls together many of the threads of heroic qualities that have been scattered throughout Longfellow’s poems. In the first section of the sentence, Dante rewrites 2 Peter 1:3–4, explaining that by reason the human soul “partakes of the divine nature.” The effects of this partaking are explained in the second part of the sentence: the soul is ennobled, raised above matter, and “divine light shines in it, as in an angel.” This last section suggests that Longfellow’s many descriptions of angelic, illumined heroines are not the result of unthinking Victorian sentimentalism, but rather informed theological thought. Returning to John Endicott, then, we see in Leddra’s speech another recasting of 2 Peter 1:4 and Dante’s Convivio. Here the partaker in God’s nature receives his “virtue and life.” Given the strong light imagery of the lines above this passage, it is not overreaching to conclude that one of the virtues of God that the partaker receives is God’s light. Thus Longfellow provides for us, twenty-five years after he first began to use it, a theological rationale for his dominant heroic imagery. Just after this theologically rich and interpretively fruitful scene, the younger John Endicott enters Upsall’s house with armed men and the Quakers are taken to prison. As she passes Endicott Jr., Edith asks him, “Why dost thou persecute me, Saul of Tarsus?”10 This sets Endicott Jr. on a quest of soul-searching that will lead him to question not only his father’s policies, but the whole Puritan way of looking upon the Other. Endicott describes, in a soliloquy, Edith’s countenance:

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A sorrowful sweet face; a look that pierced me With meek reproach; a voice of resignation That had a life of suffering in its tone.”11 And suffer is what Edith will do, for when she appears before Endicott Sr. for sentencing and describes herself as a prophetess, he declares: It is sufficient. Edith Christison. The sentence of the court is that you be Scourged in three towns, with forty stripes save one, Then banished on the pain of death.12 Edith, in characteristic manner, responds, Is truly no more terrible to me Than had you blown a feather into the air And, as it fell upon me, you had said. “Take heed it hurt thee not!”13 Like Beatrice, like Elsie, and like the mature Evangeline, Edith looks upon suffering and death with courage. When Endicott Jr. visits her in prison and offers to help her escape, she replies: “Remembering who was scourged for me, I shirk not / Nor shudder at the forty stripes save one.”14 Amazed at her refusal, Endicott says a “divine ambassador” speaks in her, and that she has “the patience and faith of Saints!”15 If we take Endicott’s words to be accurate descriptions, then Edith has attained the silence that she hoped for earlier in the play, a silence of her own thoughts and desires that makes room for God to speak through her. To put it in the words of St. Peter, Dante, and William Leddra, she has begun to partake in the divine nature. She has begun to be godlike. Once Endicott Jr. has ceased tempting her to escape, Edith pronounces another prophecy, this time about Endicott himself: Put this temptation underneath thy feet. To him that overcometh shall be given The white stone with the new name written on it, That no man knows save him that doth receive it. And I will give thee a new name, and call thee Paul of Damascus and not Saul of Tarsus.16 Edith has now advanced beyond simply speaking truth to corrupted power. She has begun to participate in the divine activity of naming and renaming.

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In the perspicacity of Edith we see that there is hope for Endicott Jr., as there was not for the Count of Lara or Bartolome. After she is whipped and barely survives, Edith is pursued into the wilderness by Endicott Jr, who tracks her back into town, and ends the play watching over her recovery in the house of Upsall. Meanwhile, the anti-Puritan monarchy in England sends word that the persecution of Quakers in Boston is to cease. Endicott Sr. meets his end having renounced his son and abused his community. He dies of a heart attack at his desk. This conclusion leaves Edith wholly vindicated, both in her work of preaching and prophesying, and in her robust Quaker theological stances—which, as we have seen, owe quite a bit to a medieval Dantean ontology, and, further back, to the Church Fathers upon whom Dante drew. THE MOTHER: JUDAS MACCABEUS With John Endicott a new quality, bare defiance, is added to the Longfellovian heroine. Longfellow continued to explore this quality in his next play, Judas Maccabeus (1872), which dramatizes the struggle between the pagan Seleucid governor Antiochus and the Jewish rebel Judas Maccabees during the Maccabean revolt in Palestine. Though most of the play focuses on Judas himself, the entire second act is taken up with the story of Antiochus’s execution of an entire family of defiant Jews. As the act opens, The Mother (she is never given a proper name), waits outside the dungeon where her seven sons are imprisoned as they are each offered the chance to betray their people and pledge allegiance to the pagan government: The Mother Be strong, my heart! Break not till they are dead. All, all my Seven Sons; then burst asunder, And let this tortured and tormented soul Leap and rush out like water through the shards Of earthen vessels broken at a well. O my dear children, mine in life and death, I know not how ye came into my womb; I neither gave you breath, nor gave you life, And neither was it I that formed the members Of every one of you. But the Creator, Who made the world, and made the heavens above us, Who formed the generation of mankind, And found out the beginning of all things, He gave you breath and life, and will again

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Of his own mercy, as ye now regard Not your own selves, but his eternal law. I do not murmur, nay, I thank thee, God, That I and mine have not been deemed unworthy To suffer for thy sake, and for thy law, And for the many sins of Israel. Hark! I can hear within the sound of scourges! I feel them more than ye do, O my sons! But cannot come to you. I, who was wont To wake at night at the least cry ye made, To whom ye ran at every slightest hurt,— I cannot take you now into my lap And soothe your pain, but God will take you all And give you rest.17 In the first section of the soliloquy, The Mother gives an unexpected account of motherhood. Instead of lamenting her sons’ impending death because they are her offspring, she instead denies that she is their life-giver; it is “the Creator” who “gave [them] life and breath.” God, then, is the ideal and ultimate mother, of whom The Mother is an image or imitation. In the second half of the soliloquy The Mother thanks God for deeming her family worthy to “suffer for thy sake, and for thy law, / and for the many sins of Israel.” Not only is her family, in The Mother’s view, suffering for God, they are also atoning, in their suffering, for the sins of God’s people. Because this is a pre-Christian setting, there is no mention of Christ, but in that her family suffers for the sins of the Jews, they participate in a messianic act of atonement. One by one she hears her sons die, until just two are left: The Mother O hasten; Why dost thou pause? Thou who hast slain already So many Hebrew women, and hast hung Their murdered infants round their necks, slay me, For I too am a woman, and these boys Are mine. Make haste to slay us all, And hang my lifeless babes about my neck. Sixth Voice (within) Think not, Antiochus, that takest in hand To strive against the God of Israel, Shall overtake thee and thy bloody house.

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The Mother          One more, One more, my Sirion, and then all is ended. Having put all to bed, then in my turn I will lie down and sleep as sound as they. My Sirion, my youngest, best beloved! And those bright golden locks, that I so oft Are foul with blood and dust, like a lamb’s fleece, Slain in the shambles.—Not a sound I hear. This silence is more terrible to me Than any sound, than any cry of pain, That might escape the lips of one who dies. Doth his heart fail him? Doth he fall away In the last hour from God? O Sirion, Sirion, Art thou afraid? I do not hear thy voice. Die as thy brothers died. Thou must not live!18 Here again there is a strange re-assessment of motherhood, wherein the good Jewish mother, in time of persecution, sees it as fitting for her children to die, and to be hung around her neck. This gruesome end is the proof that a woman has truly defied pagan rule. In the next scene, The Mother discovers that Sirion, the seventh son, has indeed not been killed. Instead, Antiochus attempts to use The Mother to persuade Sirion to recant his Jewish faith: Antiochus O woman, I have spared him for thy sake, For he is fair to look upon and comely; And I have sworn to him by all the gods That I would crown his life with joy and honor, Heap treasures on him, luxuries, delights, Make him my friend and keeper of my secrets, If he would turn from your Mosaic Law And be as we are; but he will not listen. The Mother My noble Sirion! Antiochus Therefore I beseech thee, Who art his mother, thou wouldst speak with him,

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And wouldst persuade him. I am sick of blood. The Mother Yea, I will speak with him and will persuade him. O Sirion, my son! have pity on me, On me that bare thee, and that gave thee suck, And fed and nourished thee, and brought thee up With the dear trouble of a mother’s care Unto this age. Look on the heavens above thee, And on the earth and all that is therein; Consider that God made them out of things That were not; and that likewise in this manner Mankind was made. Then fear not this tormentor; But, being worthy of thy brethren, take Thy death as they did, that I may receive thee Again in mercy with them. Antiochus I am mocked, Yea, I am laughed to scorn.19 The Mother’s final defiance is a mocking of Antiochus through bolstering Sirion’s faith and resolve to die for that faith. Not unlike Nokomis, or even The Teacher in “The Good Part,” she asks her son to ponder God’s works and ways, and the joy that awaits him when he receives the eternal reward of his righteous defiance. Antiochus, in a rage, condemns them to be tortured to death. The last we see of The Mother, she proclaims: I am Death, Nay, am the Mother of Death, seeing these sons All lying lifeless.—Kiss me, Sirion.20 These are some of the darkest scenes Longfellow ever wrote, matching and even surpassing the violence of The New England Tragedies. The Mother is something of a holy Lady Macbeth—if such a thing can be imagined— grimly glorying in her children’s death because it means the atonement and defense of her nation and her faith. More broadly, coming so soon after John Endicott, Judas Maccabeus tempts us to read it as a mirror of the oppression and defiance of the American past, with Antiochus as an ancient analogue of the Puritan tyrants. Longfellow in the late 1860s and early 1870s reveals himself to be a poet profoundly troubled by sectarian violence and those that suffer it—especially

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women. These women become heroic inasmuch as they defy the violent and endure tortures and death. The Longfellow of 1851 could not let his heroine Elsie be physically harmed, let alone killed. The Longfellow of twenty years later writes his best lines for heroines who are about to be beaten and killed. If this is a morbidity, it is an accusatory morbidity, and the accusation is laid at the feet of the American people and the American churches throughout history. As John Endicott Jr. laments to Edith: Alas! the coat that was without a seam Is rent asunder by contending sects; Each bears away a portion of the garment, Blindly believing that he has the whole.21 Longfellow had envisioned, early in his career, that the final plays in his Christus would celebrate love through the Christians of the recent centuries. What he expected less, perhaps, was that in the end the plays would celebrate small acts of love and tolerance surrounded by a sea of intolerance, hate, and death. “ELIZABETH” Cecil Williams has spoken of the relationship between John Endicott Jr. and Edith Christison as a “love affair,” but the play is in no way a romance.22 At the most there is an implication that if Edith recovers from her whipping, romance may blossom between them. But the plot of John Endicott, like the plot of Judas Maccabeus, does not revolve around the courtship of the main characters, nor are the acts of heroism performed by the heroines acts of winning an appropriate mate or rejecting an inappropriate one. Both Edith and The Mother face the larger and more final task of demonstrating a harmony between their religious faith and the abuses that await them at the hands of their intolerant political superiors. In his later years, the closest Longfellow came to a romance like Miles Standish or The Spanish Student is a verse tale called “Elizabeth.” This poem is found in the third volume of Longfellow’s long, serial work Tales of a Wayside Inn, published in 1873. In Tales of a Wayside Inn, Longfellow plays the part of an American Chaucer, gathering a group of storytellers from all walks of life, and having them tell tales to each other by the fireside at an inn. The tale “Elizabeth” is told by a character called The Theologian, who is prompted to tell a story of pure and upright love as a response to a mildly scandalous tale told by The Student. “Elizabeth” marks Longfellow’s return to dactylic hexameter, the meter he used in both Evangeline and Miles

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Standish, and the tale feels like a snippet from one of those longer poems, though written by an older and more ruminative poet. The poem opens on a winter night, during a conversation between Elizabeth, the owner of a New England boarding-house, and her servant Hanna, who complains about the frequent abundance of houseguests: Thereupon answered Hannah the housemaid, the thrifty, the frugal: “Yea, they come and they tarry, as if thy house were a tavern; Open to all are its doors, and they come and go like the pigeons In and out of the holes of the pigeon-house over the hayloft, Cooing and smoothing their feathers and basking themselves in the sunshine.” But in meekness of spirit, and calmly, Elizabeth answered: “All I have is the Lord’s, not mine to give or withhold it; I but distribute his gifts to the poor, and to those of his people Who in journeyings often surrender their lives to his service. His, not mine, are the gifts, and only so far can I make them Mine, as in giving I add my heart to whatever is given. Therefore my excellent father first built this house in the clearing; Though he came not himself, I came; for the Lord was my guidance, Leading me here for this service. We must not grudge, then, to others Ever the cup of cold water, or crumbs that fall from our table.”23 Just as the seven sons do not truly belong to The Mother, but to God, so Elizabeth’s goods are not truly hers, but God’s, and thus it is her joy to distribute them to all in need. Elizabeth echoes her sister-heroine Evangeline when she says: “only so far can I make them / Mine, as in giving I add my heart to whatever is given.” This is a strange reversal of the theory of John Locke, wherein it is the labor of one’s body upon an object that makes it one’s own.24 For Elizabeth the only ownership comes in giving away, and adding one’s heart to the gift. As the conversation continues, we learn that Elizabeth has been thinking about a man whom she once heard preach in England: “a young man, a stranger, John Estaugh, Moved by the Spirit, rose, as if he were John the Apostle, Speaking such words of power that they bowed our hearts, as a strong wind Bends the grass of the fields, or grain that is ripe for the sickle. Thoughts of him to-day have been oft borne inward upon me, Wherefore I do not know; but strong is the feeling within me That once more I shall see a face I have never forgotten.”25

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As if thought had the power to draw its object to itself, Elizabeth’s other servant, the harried Joseph, presently returns, bringing with him none other than John Estaugh, lately come to America to preach. This coincidence may lead us to call Elizabeth’s previous mention of Estaugh not perspicacity but rather presentiment. Longfellow offers that it was “as if an unseen power had announced and preceded his presence.”26 As we continue to read, however, we see that this will not be a breezy tale of an easy romance. As they sit conversing by the fire, both Elizabeth and John share the tales of what brought them to the New World: Then Elizabeth told her story again to John Estaugh, Going far back to the past, to the early days of her childhood; How she had waited and watched, in all her doubts and besetments Comforted with the extendings and holy, sweet inflowings Of the spirit of love, till the voice imperative sounded, And she obeyed the voice, and cast in her lot with her people Here in the desert land, and God would provide for the issue.27 This is a heroine who, like Edith, looks for and experiences “sweet inflowings of the spirit of love,” and when that spirit calls her, she leaves the Old World behind. Elizabeth describes herself as Abraham, or perhaps Israel, called out from among her people to go into the desert to do the Lord’s work. John Estaugh too is traveling, borne by the Lord’s calling. He explains, “Surely the hand of the Lord conducted me here to thy threshold. For as I journeyed along, and pondered alone and in silence On his ways, that are past finding out, I saw in the snow-mist, Seemingly weary with travel, a wayfarer, who by the wayside Paused and waited. Forthwith I remembered Queen Candace’s eunuch, How on the way that goes down from Jerusalem unto Gaza, Reading Esaias the Prophet, he journeyed, and spake unto Philip, Praying him to come up and sit in his chariot with him. So I greeted the man, and he mounted the sledge beside me, And as we talked on the way he told me of thee and thy homestead, How, being led by the light of the Spirit, that never deceiveth, Full of zeal for the work of the Lord, thou hadst come to this country. And I remembered thy name, and thy father and mother in England, And on my journey have stopped to see thee, Elizabeth Haddon. Wishing to strengthen thy hand in the labors of love thou art doing.”28 In his metaphor, John is a character in the New Testament Book of Acts, the eunuch servant of the Queen of Ethiopia, and Joseph is the Apostle Philip. This

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is, no doubt, supposed to be a little humorous, given Joseph’s comedic role in the story. But comedy is replaced by earnestness in Estaugh’s final lines, where he wishes to join in Elizabeth’s “labors of love.” Though the phrase is a common one, one cannot help but think of Father Felician, who describes Evangeline’s quest for Gabriel and for godlikeness as a “labor of love.” In this scene Longfellow gives us a glimpse of how Elizabeth has set up her household: all sat down to their supper; For underneath that roof was no distinction of persons, But one family only, one heart, one hearth and one household.29 Though she has servants, Elizabeth does not treat them as lower than she; instead, Joseph and Hannah seem like Elizabeth’s siblings, whose faults she forgives, and to whose better natures she appeals. It would be a happy thing if John Estaugh could stay with this strange, egalitarian family, but he must be about the Lord’s work, and he leaves in the morning, promising to return in May. This he does, and Elizabeth sees that she must act decisively if she is to win him over. As they ride to meeting, Elizabeth asks John to “Tarry a while behind, for I have something to tell thee.”30 She then confesses: Elizabeth said, though still with a certain reluctance, As if impelled to reveal a secret she fain would have guarded: “I will no longer conceal what is laid upon me to tell thee; I have received from the Lord a charge to love thee, John Estaugh.” And John Estaugh made answer, surprised by the words she had spoken, “Pleasant to me are thy converse, thy ways, thy meekness of spirit; Pleasant thy frankness of speech, and thy soul’s immaculate whiteness, Love without dissimulation, a holy and inward adorning. But I have yet no light to lead me, no voice to direct me. When the Lord’s work is done, and the toil and the labor completed He hath appointed to me, I will gather into the stillness Of my own heart awhile, and listen and wait for his guidance.” Then Elizabeth said, not troubled nor wounded in spirit, “So is it best, John Estaugh. We will not speak of it further. It hath been laid upon me to tell thee this, for to-morrow Thou art going away, across the sea, and I know not When I shall see thee more; but if the Lord hath decreed it, Thou wilt return again to seek me here and to find me.” And they rode onward in silence, and entered the town with the others.31

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This is a rare moment in a Longfellow poem, where a woman declares her love for a man, and he does not reciprocate. Elizabeth is bolder here than Priscilla, whose closest declaration of love to John Alden is: “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?” What Priscilla implies with a question, Elizabeth says outright: “I have received from the Lord a charge to love thee, John Estaugh.” The Christian formality of the statement may leave some passion to be desired, but this is The Theologian’s tale, and is characterized by a traditional Christian formality, as well as an atypical boldness and frankness in its heroine. Refreshingly, this frankness is no longer apologized for, as it was in Miles Standish. Though Estaugh has high praise for Elizabeth—her “meekness of spirit,” her “frankness of speech,” her “soul’s immaculate whiteness”—he cannot reciprocate her romantic choice until he too hears God’s charge to love her. This second deferral of romance leads Longfellow into one of his most famous quatrains: Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.32 It is almost as if Longfellow wrote the whole poem—at 231 lines, certainly not a short poem—to get to this maxim. Longfellow knew such truths well. He had already buried two wives and a child, and had nearly lost his son in the Civil War, before he wrote “Elizabeth.” Longfellow had seen his prime pass. He was now 66, and in 9 years, he would be dead. There is both a triumph, then, and a melancholy in Elizabeth’s heroic frankness. It is all, the poet suggests, that we have in this life: a brief moment beside the beloved to express our love. Elizabeth is a heroine because she is ready to speak when she needs to speak; her frankness is her virtue. Luckily, her soul also possesses an “immaculate whiteness” according to John Estaugh, and accordingly he cannot stay away from her for long. Elizabeth waits for him “patient and unrepining . . . / Mindful not of herself, but bearing the burden of others.”33 Elizabeth’s words—we might even call them a proposal—remain with John like a “fragrance . . . / Mary’s ointment of spikenard, that filled all the house with its odour.”34 Once again we have sweet fragrance associated with the holy heroine, and once again she is compared to a saint, this time Mary Magdalene, who in the gospels anoints Christ’s feet with oil. Finally, “John Estaugh came back o’er the sea for the gift that was offered / Better than houses and lands, the gift of a woman’s affection.”35 Longfellow too has seen Elizabeth’s frankness as a type of

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proposal, and reaches back to the words of Evangeline and, even, The Spanish Student in his praise of “a woman’s affection.” Elizabeth is Longfellow’s last heroine save one, and in her there is a re-thinking and reorganizing of many of the motifs found in his early and middle romances. Though it will never stand among his major poems, it is a relatively uncluttered late romance, shot through with the Protestant simplicity of his Puritan-focused poems, which allows Longfellow’s enduring themes to sneak through: the peace of the good woman’s home, the strength of a woman’s frankness, and the joy of final reunion. NOTES 1. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 613. 2. Ibid., 613. 3. I Corinthians 14:34 (KJV). 4. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 614. 5. Ibid., 617–618. 6. Ibid., 631. 7. Ibid., 618. 8. 2 Peter 1:3–4 (KJV). 9. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 611. 10. Ibid., 618. 11. Ibid., 619. 12. Ibid., 631–632. 13. Ibid., 632. 14. Ibid., 636. 15. Ibid., 636. 16. Ibid., 637. 17. Ibid., 694. 18. Ibid., 695–696. 19. Ibid., 696–697. 20. Ibid., 698. 21. Ibid., 636. 22. Williams, 179. 23. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 346. 24. For Locke’s theory of property, see John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 18. 25. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 346. 26. Ibid., 346. 27. Ibid., 347. 28. Ibid., 347. 29. Ibid., 347. 30. Ibid., 349.

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31. Ibid., 349. 32. Ibid., 349. 33. Ibid., 349. 34. Ibid., 350. 35. Ibid., 350.

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Chapter Six

The Last Heroine Vittoria Colonna

Though Longfellow was long fascinated by Beatrice, another Florentine woman captured his imagination in the last decade of his life. From 1872 to 1882, the year of his death, Longfellow wrote off and on about Vittoria Colonna, a poet of the Italian Renaissance and a close friend of Michael Angelo.1 Interpreters such as Robert Gale have seen Longfellow’s Vittoria as acting in the same role of “womanly guide” to Michael Angelo as Beatrice did to Dante.2 Though this would become an important quality of Longfellow’s Colonna, she enters into Longfellow’s work not primarily as a muse to Michael Angelo, but as an artist in her own right. Colonna first appears in The Poetry and Poets of Europe, an anthology that Longfellow edited in 1844. He included in this collection two sonnets by Colonna, and in his introductory note to her poems, Longfellow writes: This celebrated lady, the most distinguished among the poetesses of Italy, was the daughter of Fabrizio Colonna, grand constable of the kingdom of Naples, and of Anna di Montefeltro, daughter of the duke of Urbino. She was born in Mariano, a fief of her family, about the year 1490. At the age of four years, she was betrothed to Ferdinando Francesco Davalos, marquis of Pescara, a child of about the same age. At a very early period of her life, her rare beauty, her extraordinary mental endowments, and the accomplishments which a most careful education had bestowed upon her, rendered her the object of universal admiration. Even sovereign princes sought her hand in marriage; but she remained faithful to the object of her parents’ choice, and the youthful pair were married at the age of seventeen. The marriage proved eminently happy; the noble and gallant character of the marquis, the beauty, grace, and virtue of Vittoria, the advantages of fortune, and a perfect unanimity of feeling, were inexhaustible sources of felicity.3

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Longfellow goes on to describe the death of the marquis, Vittoria’s husband, who fought valiantly at the battle of Ravenna and the battle of Pavia, but died of wounds received in the latter. Longfellow continues: Vittoria found consolation for her bereavement in those pursuits which had been the ornaments of her prosperity, and in celebrating the virtues and immortalizing the memory of her husband in poetry. She withdrew from the world to the tranquil retirement of the island of Ischia, and firmly refused all the offers of marriage which her beauty, her genius, her virtues, and her fame induced several persons of princely rank to make. The indulgence of her sorrows in solitude soon gave her mind a strongly religious turn; and though she did not cease to exercise her poetical talents, they were henceforth employed chiefly on sacred themes. Among her friends she numbered many of the most distinguished of her contemporaries. . . . The great genius, Michael Angelo, was one of her most devoted friends and admirers, and to her many of his sonnets are addressed. In 1541, desirous of finding a more complete seclusion, she retired to a monastery in Orvieto, and thence to that of Santa Catarina in Viterbo. She returned, however, once more to Rome, where she died, toward the end of February, 1547. Her poems, which passed through four editions during her lifetime, place her in the first rank of the followers of Petrarch. Her sonnets show, besides the finished elegance of the language, a vigour and vivacity of thought, a tenderness of feeling, and a brilliancy of imagination, which justify the admiration felt for her by the most illustrious of among her contemporaries.4

The sonnets that follow this introduction were not translated by Longfellow. Still, Vittoria had captured Longfellow’s imagination as early as 1844. She is to him beautiful, gracious, and virtuous; she possesses “genius,” “extraordinary mental endowments,” and “brilliancy of thought,” but also does not lack “tenderness of feeling.” And though Michael Angelo factors into her story, it is Vittoria’s own journey of lost love and poetic endeavor that fascinate Longfellow most. Perhaps he saw in her story a mirror of his own: the poet who overcomes grief and heartbreak to achieve a masterpiece of song. Vittoria next appears in Longfellow’s translations of the sonnets of Michael Angelo, published in 1878, in the lyric poem “Vittoria Colonna,” published the same year, and finally in the posthumously published Michael Angelo: A Fragment, a verse play that Longfellow worked on over the last decade of his life, but never thought fit to publish.

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COLONNA AS BELOVED: MICHAEL ANGELO’S SONNETS In his 1878 poetry collection Keramos and Other Poems, Longfellow included a group of translations called “Seven Sonnets and a Canzone,” from the Italian of Michael Angelo, the Renaissance artist. We first meet Vittoria Colonna in the sonnet titled “The Artist”: Nothing the greatest artist can conceive That every marble block doth not confine Within itself; and only its design The hand that follows intellect can achieve. The ill I flee, the good that I believe, In thee, fair lady, lofty and divine, Thus hidden lie; and so that death be mine, Art of desired success doth me bereave. Love is not guilty, then, nor thy fair face, Nor fortune, cruelty, nor great disdain, Of my disgrace, nor chance nor destiny, If in thy heart both death and love find place At the same time, and if my humble brain, Burning, can nothing draw but death from thee.5

Michael Angelo’s famous idea that sculptures hide within blocks of marble, waiting to be released by the artist, is expressed in the first four densely-phrased lines. This idea is then used to describe a “fair lady, lofty and divine,” in whom both love and death are hidden. But though the speaker may, by following intellect, find the design of the form within the marble, he can only “draw death from” her. Though the poem is dense and allusive, critics agree that the lady is Vittoria Colonna. Luckily, the speaker does not blame the lady for his inability to draw good from her: “Love is not guilty, then, not thy fair face.” It is the fault of the speaker and his art that he fails to succeed with her as he does with a piece of marble. The next sonnet featuring Colonna is more hopeful and clear: V. To Vittoria Colonna Lady, how can it chance—yet this we see In long experience—that will longer last A living image carved from quarries vast Than its own maker, who dies presently? Cause yieldeth to effect if this so be, And even Nature is by Art surpassed; This know I, who to Art have given the past,

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But see that Time is breaking faith with me. Perhaps on both of us long life can I Either in color or in stone bestow, By now portraying each in look and mien; So that a thousand years after we die, How fair thou wast, and I how full of woe, And wherefore I so loved thee, may be seen.6

Michael Angelo here anticipates Shakespeare’s early sonnets, dwelling on the long life of art in comparison with the artist who makes it. He seeks to bestow, then, “long life” upon himself and Vittoria by “portraying each in look and mien” “either in color or in stone.” In the last few lines, however, the poet differentiates Vittoria from himself. She is “fair,” and he is “full of woe.” Still, he loves her, and he will preserve that love—and thus, by implication, that woe—for “a thousand years.” The fact that we are still reading his sonnet over 500 years later shows that his prediction may just come true. The final sonnet to deal with Vittoria seems to be addressed to her after she has died: VI. To Vittoria Colonna When the prime mover of my many sighs Heaven took through death from out her earthly place, Nature, that never made so fair a face, Remained ashamed, and tears were in all eyes. O fate, unheeding my impassioned cries! O hopes fallacious! O thou spirit of grace, Where art thou now? Earth holds in its embrace Thy lovely limbs, thy holy thoughts the skies. Vainly did cruel death attempt to stay The rumor of thy virtuous renown, That Lethe’s waters could not wash away! A thousand leaves, since he hath stricken thee down, Speak of thee, nor to thee could Heaven convey, Except through death, a refuge and a crown.7

Now heaven and God play a more vital role in the poet’s imagination. Colonna is “the prime mover” of the poet’s sighs. In this way she imitates God, who is the prime mover of the cosmos, according to Dante. We get another Dantean image in the sestet of the poem, where “cruel death attempt[s] to stay / The rumor of thy virtuous renown.” But even Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, through which Dante passes in Purgatory, cannot remove the memory of Vittoria’s virtues. Instead Heaven has given her “a refuge and a crown.” This is the most hopeful ending of the three poems, but it leaves the poet, perhaps,

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in the greatest despair. The woman that he was prevented from winning on earth has now been more permanently separated from him by her death and ascent to heaven. But there is hope in the Dante-haunted nature of these sonnets. We had earlier taken issue with reading Longfellow’s Vittoria primarily as a “womanly guide” to Michael Angelo, but such a read is certainly warranted in this sonnet. Perhaps, Michael Angelo implies, the poet will follow his unattained beloved to heaven, and find at last, as Longfellow has written of Dante, “perfect peace.”8 COLONNA TRANSFIGURED: “VITTORIA COLONNA” Longfellow ties Colonna’s life to his own memories of Italy in his late lyric poem “Vittoria Colonna,” published alongside “Seven Sonnets and a Canzone” in Keramos and Other Poems. The poem begins with an epitaph, which summarizes in brief the biography Longfellow wrote in 1845: “VITTORIA COLONNA, on the death of her husband, the Marchese di Pescara, retired to her castle at Ischia (Inarimé), and there wrote the Ode upon his death, which gained her the title of Divine.”9 The poem begins: Once more, once more, Inarimé, I see thy purple hills!—once more I hear the billows of the bay Wash the white pebbles on thy shore. High o’er the sea-surge and the sands, Like a great galleon wrecked and cast Ashore by storms, thy castle stands, A mouldering landmark of the Past.10

Longfellow had visited Inarime in the mid 1830s, on his first trip to Europe, and in these first stanzas he recalls his experience there. This is a common feature of Longfellow’s poetry throughout his career: the remembrance of a famous locale, followed by a celebration of the famous people who once lived there. This celebration begins in the third stanza: Upon its terrace-walk I see A phantom gliding to and fro; It is Colonna,—it is she Who lived and loved so long ago. Pescara’s beautiful young wife, The type of perfect womanhood, Whose life was love, the life of life, That time and change and death withstood.11

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Vittoria, who was to the younger Longfellow a genius, and to Michael Angelo the “prime mover of his sighs,” is now exalted to “the type of perfect womanhood.” In the last two lines above, her love is pitted against the enemies of “time and change and death.” Longfellow continues: For death, that breaks the marriage band In others, only closer pressed The wedding-ring upon her hand And closer locked and barred her breast. She knew the life-long martyrdom, The weariness, the endless pain Of waiting for some one to come Who nevermore would come again.12

Death cannot destroy Colonna’s love, but makes it dearer, closer. She becomes a martyr, a sort of more hopeless Evangeline, for her beloved is surely dead, whereas Gabriel is simply wandering out of reach. The next stanzas describe the occasion of her poetry: The shadows of the chestnut trees, The odor of the orange blooms, The song of birds, and, more than these, The silence of deserted rooms; The respiration of the sea, The soft caresses of the air, All things in nature seemed to be But ministers of her despair; Till the o’erburdened heart, so long Imprisoned in itself, found vent And voice in one impassioned song Of inconsolable lament.13

Nature as a whole crowds around her, causing the poet despair, but out of this she “found vent / and voice.” Though Vittoria had surely written poems before her husband died and she retired to Inarime, Longfellow saves his description of her “impassioned song” until after these tragic things have befallen her. She is for him primarily a poet who writes in the wake of tragedy. No doubt this is how Longfellow himself felt after the death of Frances. Then as the sun, though hidden from sight, Transmutes to gold the leaden mist, Her life was interfused with light, From realms that, though unseen, exist. Inarimé! Inarimé!

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Thy castle on the crags above In dust shall crumble and decay, But not the memory of her love.14

The penultimate stanza above is reminiscent of two other major passages we have looked at so far. The first passage is Evangeline 2.5, where the heroine’s face shines with a light which seems to originate from heaven itself. This is a different kind of light than sunlight or even starlight—it is the same uncreated, divine light of which Dante and the Orthodox Feminists speak. The second passage is from John Endicott where “God’s armor of light” is given to those who become “partakers in his nature” and thus receive “the virtue and the life of God.”15 These activities seem to be at work in Vittoria, and Longfellow gives us the new concept of “interfus[ion]” to describe the activity of divine light within the heroine. COLONNA DRAMATIZED: MICHAEL ANGELO: A FRAGMENT The final work in which Longfellow’s poet-heroine appears is Michael Angelo, a play which was found among Longfellow’s papers when he died, and was first printed serially in The Atlantic Monthly in 1883. Though the great Florentine artist of the title is the main character, Vittoria plays a major role. Rather than a complete, unified play, Michael Angelo is a collection of striking scenes featuring the old artist as he finishes his final projects, and as political, romantic, and religious intrigue go on around him. Vittoria Colonna appears in the first scene, well before we get a glimpse of the titular character, even. We find Vittoria conversing with Julia Gonzaga, a young friend and a fellow widow. Vittoria warns Julia against her close relationship with a Cardinal, Ippolito, to whom Julia has given her portrait. Julia tries to explain that she must be allowed her little dreams and pleasures, but Vittoria responds: Vittoria Are there no brighter dreams, No higher aspirations, than the wish To please and to be pleased?

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Julia For you there are; I am no saint; I feel the world we live in Comes before that which is to be here after, And must be dealt with first.16 Many times throughout the play, Julia will compare herself to Vittoria, describing her friend as a saint and herself as a common hedonist. But as the conversation progresses, Julia finds that Vittoria herself is not immune from dreaming of a man: Julia Ah, your tame lion Is Michael Angelo. Vittoria You speak a name That always thrills me with a noble sound, As of a trumpet! Michael Angelo! A lion all men fear and none can tame; A man that all men honor, and the model That all should follow; one who works and prays, For work is prayer, and consecrates his life To the sublime ideal of his art, Till art and life are one; a man who holds Such place in all men’s thoughts, that when they speak Of great things done, or to be done, his name Is ever on their lips.17 Julia continues to tease, but Vittoria concludes that though Michael Angelo is worthy of admiration and may admire her, his true gaze and true affection is for his art, and that he would notice her more only if she were “made of marble.”18 This is almost an inversion of Michael Angelo’s first sonnet to Vittoria, wherein his motivation to sculpt is to preserve the beauty that he sees in her. The next scene is a monologue by Michael Angelo about his painting of the Last Judgment. And we find that Vittoria may not be as invisible to the artist as she believes: What is it guides my hand, what thoughts possess me, That I have drawn her face among the angels, Where she will be hereafter? O sweet dreams,

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That through the vacant chambers of my heart Walk in the silence, as familiar phantoms Frequent an ancient house, what will ye with me? ‘T is said that Emperors write their names in green When under age, but when of age in purple. So Love, the greatest Emperor of them all, Writes his in green at first, but afterwards In the imperial purple of our blood. First love or last love,—which of these two passions Is more omnipotent? Which is more fair, The star of morning or the evening star? The sunrise or the sunset of the heart? . . . To me, the artisan, to whom all women Have been as if they were not, or at most A sudden rush of pigeons in the air, A flutter of wings, a sound, and then a silence? I am too old for love; I am too old To flatter and delude myself with visions Of never-ending friendship with fair women.19

Michael Angelo acknowledges that Vittoria is his guide, who he paints as an angel in his work. But Vittoria Colonna has been right about him: the artist knows he is too old for love, and to think he could win Vittoria’s hand would be illusion. In his meditations, Michael Angelo asks a question that may be rare in literature—the comparison of the first love of youth to the last love of old age. But in calling one the “star of morning” and one the “evening star,” the artist suggests that there is no real difference in the end; the difference is one of appearance and not of essence. Longfellow himself, who had many dear friendships with ladies in his later years, may here be attempting to reconcile his current loves with his first loves—Mary and Frances, his two wives who died. More distantly, we might be tempted to compare Vittoria, the last major heroine, with the first major heroine, Precisoa: how different are these heroines from one another? In the next scene, Michael Angelo leans in a doorway observing Colonna, and expresses: How like a Saint or Goddess she appears; Diana or Madonna, which I know not! In attitude and aspect formed to be At once the artist’s worship and despair!20

Here again there is a question as to Vittoria’s identity in relation to Michael Angelo: is she a saint or a goddess? Will she be an object of worship or an object of despair? We have already seen that she can be both to Michael

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Angelo. He paints her like an angel but rejects her as a distraction. Luckily, as the scene progresses, Michael Angelo is able to shake his angst over Vittoria and talk with her about their shared pursuit, art: Vittoria His Holiness Has granted me permission, long desired, To build a convent in this neighborhood, Where the old tower is standing, from whose top Nero looked down upon the burning city. Michel Angelo It is an inspiration! Vittoria I am doubtful How I shall build; how large to make the convent, And which way fronting. Michel Angelo Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, Are merely shadows cast by outward things On stone or canvas, having in themselves No separate existence. Architecture, Existing in itself, and not in seeming A something it is not, surpasses them As substance shadow . . . If God should give me power in my old age To build for Him a temple half as grand As those were in their glory, I should count My age more excellent than youth itself, And all that I have hitherto accomplished As only vanity. Vittoria I understand you. Art is the gift of God, and must be used Unto His glory. That in art is highest Which aims at this. When St. Hilarion blessed

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The horses of Italicus, they won The race at Gaza, for his benediction O’erpowered all magic; and the people shouted That Christ had conquered Marnas. So that art Which bears the consecration and the seal Of holiness upon it will prevail Over all others. Those few words of yours Inspire me with new confidence to build. What think you? The old walls might serve, perhaps, Some purpose still. The tower can hold the bells.21 Michael Angelo worried, in the last scene, about his friendships with women, but here we have a talk between friends that is beautiful and mutually beneficial. Michael Angelo discourses on the supremacy of architecture over other arts, and Vittoria crowns his praise with a short discourse on the proper aim of art: the glory of God. Their conversation draws them together, and by the end, Vittoria has been inspired and guided in her own pursuit by Michael Angelo’s words. Instead of drawing Vittoria away from art to focus on himself, he draws her to art through his guiding words. If Vittoria can act as a “womanly guide” to Michael Angelo, he can act as a reciprocal “manly guide” to her. The next major statement about Vittoria comes not from a man but from her friend Julia. In a humorous and gentle scene, Julia asks the spiritual advice of Giovanna Valdesso, a friend of Vittoria: I listen, But only as to music without meaning. It moves me for the moment, and I think How beautiful it is to be a saint, As dear Vittoria is; but I am weak And wayward, and I soon fall back again To my old ways, so very easily. There are too many week-days for one Sunday.22 Like Michael Angelo, Julia also sees Vittoria as a saint, someone she would like to imitate, but feels she cannot. She goes on to insist that Valdesso teach her to “harmonize the discord of [her] life.”23 Julia is not unlike Prince Henry in The Golden Legend, who laments the loss of “the remembered harmony” which cannot be re-set within the soul. Vittoria is another Elsie—an older, wiser Elsie—more acquainted with grief and life and art, a guide and example not just for the greatest artist of the Renaissance, but for every woman who wishes to heed the Godward call.

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Though the play itself is not as interested in plot as it is in portrait, there does seem to be some plot movement in the next scene, which is, incidentally, about a portrait: Vittoria Then chide me now, For I confess to something still more strange. Old as I am, I have at last consented To the entreaties and the supplications Of Michael Angelo— Julia To marry him? Vittoria I pray you, do not jest with me! You know, Or you should know, that never such a thought Entered my breast. I am already married. The Marquis of Pescara is my husband, And death has not divorced us. Julia Pardon me. Have I offended you? Vittoria No, but have hurt me. Unto my buried lord I give myself, Unto my friend the shadow of myself, My portrait. It is not from vanity, But for the love I bear him.24 In this exchange, we have the most explicit statement yet of Vittoria’s attitude toward Michael Angelo. He cannot be her husband because “The Marquis of Pescara is [her] husband.” Death, she says, “has not divorced us.” Thus she can give to Michael Angelo only “the shadow of” herself. Vittoria does not see herself as free from her marriage vows, even though her husband is dead. It is unclear whether this indicates a particular view of the ethics of marriage, or whether it is merely a way of expressing that she still loves her husband dearly. Either way, Vittoria feels that the best she can do for Michael Angelo is to let him draw her. This concession allows Michael Angelo to join his two

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loves—Vittoria and his art—in one. Just as he encouraged her in her architectural endeavors earlier, she encourages his drawing, and through his drawing his safely distanced love of her. The spirit of teasing vulnerability is continued when Michael Angelo enters to draw Vittoria: Michel Angelo Ah, my gracious lady, You know I have not words to speak your praise. I think of you in silence. You conceal Your manifold perfections from all eyes, And make yourself more saint-like day by day. And day by day men worship you the more. But now your hour of martyrdom has come. You know why I am here. Vittoria Ah yes, I know it, And meet my fate with fortitude. You find me Surrounded by the labors of your hands: The Woman of Samaria at the Well, The Mater Dolorosa, and the Christ Upon the Cross, beneath which you have written Those memorable words of Alighieri, “Men have forgotten how much blood it costs.” Michel Angelo And now I come to add one labor more, If you will call that labor which is pleasure, And only pleasure.25 Vittoria’s saint-likeness here is neither largely figurative, like Preciosa’s may be, nor is it static; she is described as daily progressing in saint-likeness. This description becomes an analogy for Vittoria as art-subject, with her sitting for Michael Angelo as an act of martyrdom. Though the word harmony is not used here, one might read this exchange as implying a familiar question: how can our heroine, Vittoria, harmonize her role as an artistic subject with her role as a Christian pursuing holiness? Longfellow may have felt like a secondary Michael Angelo, painting a portrait in words of a woman whose portrait is being drawn in ink.

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As if in answer to the question of whether she will prefer the life of art to the life of holiness, we find in Michael Angelo’s next monologue that Vittoria has secluded herself in a convent: Among the nuns In Santa Catarina’s convent hidden, Herself in soul a nun! And now she chides me For my too frequent letters, that disturb Her meditations, and that hinder me And keep me from my work; now graciously She thanks me for the crucifix I sent her, And says that she will keep it: with one hand Inflicts a wound, and with the other heals it. [Reading. “Profoundly I believed that God would grant you A supernatural faith to paint this Christ; I wished for that which I now see fulfilled So marvellously, exceeding all my wishes. Nor more could be desired, or even so much. And greatly I rejoice that you have made The angel on the right so beautiful; For the Archangel Michael will place you, You, Michael Angelo, on that new day Upon the Lord’s right hand! And waiting that, How can I better serve you than to pray To this sweet Christ for you, and to beseech you To hold me altogether yours in all things.”26 Vittoria has not given up her role as an encourager of Michael Angelo’s art, but she has removed herself as the subject of that art and praises his religious subjects. But we find that Michael Angelo has not ceased from using Colonna as a subject, for he says of his latest composition: I strive in vain to draw here on the margin The face of Beatrice. It is not hers, But the Colonna’s. Each hath his ideal, The image of some woman excellent, That is his guide. No Grecian art, nor Roman, Hath yet revealed such loveliness as hers.27

As in his historical sonnets, Michael Angelo is here dedicated to Vittoria as his “ideal” and his “guide.” Like Beatrice, Vittoria is the one with clear moral

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sight, and who encourages the quest for purer sight in her male devotee. But Vittoria too has her ideal and guide, as we find out in her next monologue. This ideal is not Michael Angelo, but Francesco, her departed husband: O gentle spirit, unto the third circle Of heaven among the blessed souls ascended, Who, living in the faith and dying for it, Have gone to their reward, I do not sigh For thee as being dead, but for myself That I am still alive. Turn those dear eyes, Once so benignant to me, upon mine, That open to their tears such uncontrolled And such continual issue. Still awhile Have patience; I will come to thee at last. A few more goings in and out these doors, A few more chimings of these convent bells, A few more prayers, a few more sighs and tears, And the long agony of this life will end, And I shall be with thee.28

There is, then, a chain of guidance in this play. At the top is Francesco, already in glory, who the poet Vittoria loves and wishes to follow. In the middle is Vittoria herself, a guiding ideal in the eyes of Julia and Michael Angelo. Third, there is Michael Angelo himself, who follows Vittoria, who follows Francesco. All the rest of Italy seems to be at yet a lower rung, scampering around Michael Angelo, idealizing his work. Yet there is also a reciprocity, artistically speaking, between Michael Angelo and Vittoria Colonna. He guides and encourages her artistic pursuits, and she his. But when it comes to the pursuit of holiness, she is clearly beyond him. This is seen most vividly in Vittoria’s death, which ends the second act of the three-act play. Julia is with Vittoria as she fades from life. Vittoria’s last words are of her husband, and of her faithfulness to his heavenly guidance: Vittoria Call my confessor!— Not disobedient to the heavenly vision! Pescara! my Pescara!29 Julia calls for Michael Angelo, and when he enters, he describes Vittoria’s dead face in language reminiscent of Evangeline:

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Michael Angelo How wonderful! The light upon her face Shines from the windows of another world. Saints only have such faces. Holy Angels! Bear her like sainted Catherine to her rest!30 Yet again—and for the last time in Longfellow’s works—a heroine’s face shines with the light of heaven. She has so approached godlikeness that she has taken on the divine attribute of celestial light. And she is compared to Saint Catherine, a woman renowned for her learning and intellectual skill. COLONNA’S HEROISM Vittoria Colonna is a unique and crowning achievement of Longfellow’s last years. She is a poet and would-be architect in addition to the qualities she shares with Longfellow’s other heroines: perspicacity, saintliness, and great affection. Her heroism lies not only in her poetic accomplishments (which are mentioned less in Michael Angelo than they are in “Vittoria Colonna”), but in her service as an aesthetic and religious guide to those around her, as well as her faithful commitment to her own guide, Francesco the Duke of Pescara. It is telling that Longfellow began and ended his career with poetic narratives featuring female artists. The life of art was a continual concern for him, and two of his finest heroines participate in that life and benefit from the depth of Longfellow’s vision and concern for such a life. Newton Arvin has described Longfellow’s Vittoria Colonna as: “beautiful, learned, philosophical, lofty minded, devoted to her husband’s memory, and profoundly, though perhaps heretically, religious.”31 Arvin picks up on the note of religious controversy in Colonna’s story, as she lived and took theological sides in an age when the Reformation was taking Europe by storm. Of course, religious boldness in the face of a powerful establishment had by this time become a hallmark of the Longfellovian heroine, most explicitly in John Endicott and Judas Maccabeus. But in fact all of the qualities Arvin mentions are arguably those which Longfellow most wanted to find not just in women, but in himself. Colonna’s most important act of guidance, then, may be her guidance of the poet who wrote of her, a poet who had matured far beyond the youthful desire to write a heroine who could be his ideal mate, and now writes heroines who could be his ideal self.32 At times we get the sense in Preciosa, in Elsie, in Evangeline, even, that these are heroines who Longfellow wishes all women could emulate and all men—including himself—could marry. But starting with Edith, and finding greatest fruition

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in Colonna, we find heroines who are admirable in their humanity, not just their femininity. This is, of course, what we would expect to find in the fully realized poetry of one who agreed with Elisabeth Behr-Sigel that “woman, too, is in the Image of God,” and with Sr. Nonna Harrison that women can put aside restrictive, culturally-defined roles and “pursue values that characterize the human as such.”33 NOTES 1. Longfellow preferred separating the artist’s name into two separate words. 2. Robert L. Gale, A Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003), 159. 3. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Poets and Poetry of Europe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887) 556–557. 4. Ibid., 557. 5. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 836–837. 6. Ibid., 838. 7. Ibid., 839. 8. Ibid., 376. 9. Ibid., 437. 10. Ibid., 437–438. 11. Ibid., 438. 12. Ibid., 438. 13. Ibid., 438. 14. Ibid., 438. 15. Ibid., 617–618. 16. Ibid., 710. 17. Ibid., 711. 18. Ibid., 711. 19. Ibid., 713–714. 20. Ibid., 714. 21. Ibid., 715–716. 22. Ibid., 723–724. 23. Ibid., 724. 24. Ibid., 727–728. 25. Ibid., 729–730. 26. Ibid., 733. 27. Ibid., 734. 28. Ibid., 735. 29. Ibid., 752. 30. Ibid., 753. 31. Arvin, 280.

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32. When critics discuss Michael Angelo, it has become conventional for them to speak mainly of Longfellow’s identification with Michael Angelo in his final years, and this is certainly an important consideration in our approach to this late play. But to exclusively focus on Longfellow seeing himself in Michael Angelo ignores the equally important identification that can be made between Longfellow and Colonna. 33. Harrison, “Male and Female,” 445.

Chapter Seven

Domestic, Defiant, or Divine?

Equipped with an overview of Longfellow’s major heroines, we are ready to return to the charge laid at Longfellow’s feet that he is a poet of domesticity, especially as regards his major heroines like Evangeline. Roy Harvey Pearce tells us that Evangeline’s piety is “domestic,” and he contrasts Longfellow’s home-and-hearth focus with Poe’s willingness to “search life to its depth.” Looking back over the six major heroines, it would be tempting to distinguish two types: the domestic heroines—those whose plots are largely romantic in nature and conclude with the heroine becoming a wife, and the non-domestic heroine—those whose plots focus on social persecution, and do not end in a wedding. But such a distinction is too simple, and does not take into account the many non-domestic qualities and victories of the seemingly domestic heroines. Priscilla Mullins, from The Courtship of Miles Standish, is, perhaps, the best example of the complications of reading Longfellow’s romantic heroines as primarily domestic. Most scenes involving Priscilla take place in her home, at her spinning wheel. This is seemingly the heart of the domestic sphere, where the would-be wife practices a trade which will help sustain and protect her future household. But Longfellow goes out of his way to remind us that Priscilla is a sojourner in a foreign land. According to the second definition of “domestic” as laid out in the introduction, Priscilla is in a non-domestic sphere as a pilgrim in the new world. Her parents are both dead, and she is in charge of not only her household, but her whole family line, which consists of herself and any descendants she might have. Further, she does not conform to the domestic ideal of quietness and submission to the man in her romantic dealings. She prompts John Alden to “speak for himself,” and does not hesitate to reject the advances of Miles Standish, a man with considerably more political power than both herself and John. Still, Priscilla does not reject the role of wife, nor the domestic responsibility and sphere that go along with it; she wants to be married, and she wants John Alden to be her husband. Thus, Priscilla conforms to some aspects of the nineteenth-century 111

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domestic ideal—wifehood and homemaking—while rejecting and undermining others—quiet submissiveness, remaining in her father’s home/country. If we turn to Preciosa and Elsie, the other heroines whose plots conclude in marriage, the conventions of domesticity are even more upended. Preciosa’s acts of heroism, indeed her primary individual work, is outside the sphere of the family home, for she is a dancer on the public stage. Her first victory in the play is dancing before the religious authorities and winning their favor. Preciosa also has considerable power over her avaricious father, who is her monetary dependent. And though it is revealed by the end that Preciosa’s real father is a rich Spaniard, there is no indication that this— nor her marriage—will inhibit her individual, extra-domestic work. In The Golden Legend, Elsie’s marriage, while not unexpected, is nevertheless an afterthought of the play. Elsie never expresses a desire to marry, but instead leaves both the domestic sphere of her father’s house and the domestic sphere of her native country to sacrifice herself for her Prince Henry. She even, in the end, removes herself from her Prince’s authority, defying his entreaties to let him die. Evangeline and Vittoria Colonna are stranger cases yet. Both have an earthly beloved, the fiancé Gabriel and the husband Francesco, respectively. But both beloveds are at an almost permanent remove from the heroines. Gabriel is lost somewhere in North America, and it becomes increasingly clear to Evangeline that her life will not likely include a reuniting with Gabriel that ends in marriage and domestic life. This inability to live in the domestic sphere as a wife is even more clear to Vittoria Colonna. Thus, both Evangeline and Vittoria Colonna live as nuns, denying the romantic advances of would-be husbands, and expanding their activities to include the loving service of all around them. Evangeline ministers to the sick in Philadelphia, and Vittoria mentors Julia and collaborates with Michael Angelo. Freed from the lure of domestic peace, both heroines extend their spheres of influence to their cities, even their countries. In Evangeline’s case, neither the city she serves, Philadelphia, nor the country she resides in, the United States, is domestic to her, for she is a French woman born in Nova Scotia, unjustly exiled. Placed beside Pearce’s claim that her poem is about “the rewards of domestic piety,” the actual Evangeline of Longfellow’s poem seems odd. Shouldn’t she be rewarded with the domestic bliss she allegedly seeks? Shouldn’t she, upon seeing that she likely won’t be rewarded with this bliss, settle for the domestic sphere of the new Acadian settlement in Louisiana? Barring this, shouldn’t she at least avoid becoming a nun and thus denying herself any possibility of future wife- or mother-hood? No, Evangeline is not a poem about the rewards of domestic piety, but rather a poem about something simpler and more difficult: the life of piety. Father Felician’s whole sermon at

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the beginning of part 2 is predicated on the idea that whether or not Gabriel is found, Evangeline’s quest can lead her to godlikeness. The erotic piety of staying true to one’s beloved is caught up into the larger religious piety of seeking the godlike life. Pearce would flip this relationship, reading religious piety as an aspect of a larger devotion to the domestic sphere that wife-hood entails. Neither the poem Evangeline nor Longfellow’s characterization of heroines as a whole support this reductionist reading. Curiously, a poet who better fits Pearce’s focus on domestic piety in the creation of female characters is Edgar Allan Poe, the poet Pearce offers as a preferable alternative to Longfellow. As Karen Weekes writes, Poe’s “‘ideal’ is a woman who can be subsumed into another’s ego and who has no need to tell her own tale; she is killed off so quickly that her silence is inscribed quite irrevocably.”1 This can be seen, Weekes argues, in “Annabel Lee,” which features a female character at least as famous as Evangeline. Lee “exemplifies several traits of Poe’s feminine ideal, especially that of being wholly subsumed by the male.”2 Further, she is quite young, a trait, Weekes says, of most of Poe’s poems about women: “a young ‘maiden’ would be more easily dominated . . . and the narrator appreciates the fact that Annabel Lee ‘lived with no other thought / That to love and to be loved by me.’”3 Though Weekes does not mention it, there is also a supernatural element to “Annabel Lee” that further distinguishes it from Evangeline. Whereas Evangeline’s “work of affection” can lead her to a godlike state where she is “worthy of heaven,” the love between Poe’s narrator and Annabel Lee is envied by the angels: The angels, not half so happy in Heaven, Went envying her and me— Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know, In this kingdom by the sea) That the wind came out of the cloud by night, Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.4

Here the hosts of heaven actively inhibit the relationship of the lovers, because they are not as happy as the lovers. For Poe, then, human love between a man and a woman who has “no other thought” than to love that man is the highest happiness in the universe, happier even than the angels in heaven. Where Longfellow describes a harmony between the work of affection on earth and the quest for godlikeness, Poe sees a deep disharmony between human love and heavenly life. Far from joining the saints and angels in heaven, the soul of Annabel Lee seems to linger in its sepulcher, forever the partner of the bereaved speaker. Though Poe’s speaker claims that the demons cannot “dissever” his soul from hers, the closest that Longfellow ever gets

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to describing two souls so joined is in his translation of Dante’s hell, where Paolo and Francesca are forever joined in the torment of the circle of Lust. In comparison with “Annabel Lee,” a poem written less than two years after the publication of Evangeline, Longfellow’s characterization of Evangeline appears much less interested in the celebration of pure domestic devotion, and much more interested in describing the rewards and struggles of the non-domestic life of exile, adventure, and social service. There is a disturbing limit to both thought and agency in Poe’s female protagonist, and, as Charles Calhoun has pointed out, a refreshing strength and agency in Longfellow’s Evangeline. But aside from the particular characterizations of female romantic protagonists in Longfellow and Poe, Pearce points to a deeper worry about Longfellow’s female romantic protagonists in general: that the domestic sphere is a place of ease and complacency, and that the poet who sets poems in the domestic sphere reveals his own intellectual and spiritual complacency. But both Poe and Longfellow, who did not agree on much, at the very least are akin in portraying the domestic happiness of lovers as hard-won and easily lost. Priscilla must step outside of Puritan ideals in order to secure for herself the proper husband; she risks, with her frankness, incurring the displeasure not only of Miles Standish, but also of John Alden. Were he a lesser man, he might see Priscilla’s lack of quiet submission as a taint on her character. Evangeline’s whole adult life is one of hoping for the possibility of romantic re-union with Gabriel (and the attendant life of domesticity) while living with the present fact of dis-unity caused by a political oppression that destroyed the domestic sphere of her childhood. Preciosa must brave the threat of sexual assault and the foolishness of her beloved before she is married, and Elsie must travel past death and the devil in order to find wife-hood on the other side. In Longfellow, the domestic state of wife-hood is a state that is barely, perilously won and dearly, lightly held, for disease or oppression can easily steal it away. Domesticity, then, when it is praised in Longfellow, is praised as a rare, precarious state, neither commonly found nor easily attained. The poet knew this to be true by experience: he had lost two wives, the first to medical complications following the miscarriage of their first child, and the second to an accidental fire that killed his wife and disfigured Longfellow himself. Poe, too, lost his wife, and it is revealing of each man’s character that the lives and deaths of their female protagonists are so different. For Longfellow, a woman’s life is a balance of individual desires and pursuits (sometimes romantic, sometimes not) with the quest for likeness to God, and her death is an entrance into the celestial light of heaven. For Poe, a woman’s life is a single-minded romantic devotion to a man, and her death is an eternal haunting of that man, while heaven looks on in envy. It is for the discerning

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to decide which poet treats his readers and his characters with more honor, more dignity, and more hope. The worry that Longfellow would limit women to the domestic sphere of the house-wife is further eased if we turn from those heroines whose story ends in marriage to those heroines who remain unmarried, and whose individual work centers around social defiance. Like the state of domestic happiness, this state of defiance is costly. The Teacher in “The Good Part” must effectively remove herself from the upper class, predicated as it is on slave labor, and assume the working-class profession of teacher in order to be faithful to her work of political and spiritual emancipation. In John Endicott, Edith Christison knowingly chooses the punishment of being whipped in order to protest the sectarian injustices of colonial Boston. And The Mother in Judas Maccabeus, in order to remain faithful to her God and to defy tyranny, chooses death for herself and her sons. No armchair activists can be found among Longfellow’s heroines. What, according to Longfellow, must be defied? Sectarian oppression is a prominent object of defiance, especially in Evangeline and the later plays. As Andrew Higgins has argued, this is illustrative of Longfellow’s desire for America to be a Christian multi-culture, where sects that once persecuted one another can live in peace.5 In Longfellow’s 1846 journal, as he is working on Evangeline, he laments about a certain church architect he has spoken with: “There is the meanness and narrowness of the matter, that his soul does not embrace all sects of the Christians.”6 A year later Evangeline would appear, the climax of which portrays a Philadelphia where Roman Catholics and Quakers—Longfellow’s favorite persecuted sects—freely worship side by side. Political oppression is also defied. This is especially the case when imperial powers like England and Seleucia oppress small communities like Nova Scotia or Judea, or upper-class slave owners oppress the lower classes of black slaves and workers. “The Quadroon Girl,” as we have seen, is an especially bitter poem that reveals human trafficking as violence against women’s agency, family bonds, and the whole world of human fellowship. The way that the Longfellovian heroine defies political oppression and violence is with words and with such actions as will best allow her words to reach the ears of the oppressors. Edith refuses to leave Boston not so much because she wants to live there, but because she wants to preach and protest there. The Jewish Mother addresses her defiance to the pagan tyrant himself, and urges her sons to do the same. Further, both defiant heroines pray, invoking divine aid for themselves and their families to make their defiance. One way that the Longfellovian heroine does not defy oppression is through physical violence. There are no warrior women in Longfellow, no Amazons or Joan of Arcs. But there are also few men who are warriors, and

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he who lives by the sword is never a Longfellovian hero. Miles Standish is most unlikable when he is waging his war against the indigenous peoples, and “The Saga of King Olaf,” which tells the tale of the evangelization of Norway by the sword, reveals Longfellow’s great distaste for violence. In fact, Longfellow tended toward pacifism, as can be seen in “The Arsenal at Springfield” and “The Occultation of Orion.” It is telling that in this latter poem the constellation of war is eclipsed by the moon, which is described as beautiful as some fair saint, Serenely moving on her way In hours of trial and dismay As if she heard the voice of God. Unharmed with naked feet she trod Upon the hot and burning stars, As on the glowing coals and bars, That were to prove her strength, and try Her holiness and purity.7

At the approach of the nun-like moon, Orion drops his “mighty club,” and an angel announces, “Forevermore, forevermore, / The reign of violence is o’er.”8 This poem, written in the mid-1840s, just before Evangeline, presents two qualities of Longfellow’s view of war: that it is fundamentally a pagan activity that should be subdued by Christian piety, and that Christian piety transforms the human urge for war into the human struggle for holiness. Ascesis—the endurance of “trial and dismay” for the sake of spiritual purification that so many of Longfellow’s heroines choose—is for Longfellow the true battleground on which the human should fight. Often this means suffering social stigma, exile, even torture and death (or simply the life of a toiling artist), but the victory is godlikeness and shining with the light of God. DIVINITY Though she may live either, neither the life of domesticity nor the life of defiance are the ultimate end for the Longfellovian heroine, but the life lived in imitation of God. For Poe’s Annabel Lee, life ends with death and a lingering in the grave. But for Longfellow, the soul is immortal, and “the grave is not its goal.”9 The departed soul of a beloved woman has better work to do than haunt her despondent lover. It has heaven itself to explore. Beatrice—the ideological and poetic opposite of Annabel Lee—is Longfellow’s model in this. Beatrice is perspicacious, frank, and luminous with divine light due to her partaking in divine nature. At their best, Longfellow’s heroines share

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these qualities. It has been the argument of this book that this was no accident on Longfellow’s part, no mere unthinking absorption of nineteenth-century hyperbole about women being “saints” and “angels.” Instead, these characterizations were historically and theologically informed decisions which make Longfellow unique among his poetical peers, whose “angelic” female characters are too often robbed of the agency and the afterlife that Longfellow gives to his characters. Biographically speaking, Longfellow was not outspoken about his view on women, nor was he as clearly interested in early feminist thought as some of his contemporaries, like Margaret Fuller and Tennyson. Still, Longfellow read and enjoyed the women writers of his day who defied social norms in their lives and in their writing. Longfellow’s journal shows that he was enjoying the writings of George Sand as he revised Evangeline, and in an entry for February 10, 1848, he writes: “We are reading a very interesting novel, Jane Eyre. Who wrote it? Nobody knows.”10 In the same month, he gives more reserved praise to Tennyson’s The Princess: Fields came out in the afternoon, and brought me an English copy of Tennyson’s new poem, The Princess. F[rances] read it in the evening. Strange enough! a university of women! A gentle satire, in the easiest and most flowing blank verse, with two delicious unrhymed songs, and many exquisite passages. I went to bed after it, with delightful music ringing in my ears; yet half disappointed in the poem, though not knowing why. There is a discordant note somewhere.11

It is characteristic of Longfellow to comment on the aesthetic qualities of a poem and keep his own counsel about the ideology. Whatever the cause of his disappointment, Longfellow remained uninterested throughout the course of his career in writing directly about such women’s rights issues as women’s higher education and suffrage. But his heroines—especially Priscilla, Edith, and Vittoria—are women of biblical and literary erudition, as was his own mother, Zilpah. Thus Longfellow is best grouped among those who would object to the subjugation of women because it inhibits women’s ability to become virtuous, to pursue their spiritual formation uninhibited by societal and political shackles. ORTHODOX FEMINISM: THE GODLIKENESS OF WOMEN As we first explored in the introduction, the parallels between Longfellow’s heroines and Orthodox Feminism are striking. In that they are eloquent and clear proponents of the full humanity and potential godlikeness of women,

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the Orthodox Feminists share with Longfellow a basic anthropology and soteriology. Evangeline, to take a robust example, is a woman whose ancestors reflected “an image of heaven”; when she finds herself in a world of exile she chooses the pursuit of godlikeness as her life’s mission. Alternately living like a Desert Mother in the waste places of America and a “nun in the city” in Philadelphia, she rejects sinful passion and acquires the virtues of silence, patient endurance, and, most of all, love. As an indication and pinnacle of her attainment of godlikeness, she physically shines with divine light, and shares this light with those around her. This rejection of inappropriate passion and patient endurance to maintain right affection is shared by most of Longfellow’s major heroines: Preciosa, Elsie, Edith, and Vittoria Colonna especially. The culminating spiritual experience of illumination by divine light is shared most explicitly by Vittoria, but is present, to some degree or another in Preciosa, The Teacher, The Quadroon Girl, Elsie, Priscilla, Edith, and Elizabeth. Sheila Briggs has written that “Feminist theology, just as feminist theory in general, starts with women’s bodies as the primary site for contesting hegemonic and hierarchical constructions of culture and society.”12 Particularly exciting, then, is this last point, the connection between Longfellow’s heroines and Orthodox Feminism’s views of the body, divine light, and the calling of the Christian woman. In both Longfellow and Orthodox Feminism we find not only a theological vision of woman as potentially godlike, but also the acquisition of godlikeness as manifesting itself in bodily illumination by divine light. This is not a mere illumination of the mind by intellectual light, but an illumination of both mind and body with celestial light. Though in Evangeline 2.1, Father Felician tells the heroine that her “heart [can be] made godlike,” we see in 2.5 that the light of godlikeness has been shared not only with her heart, but with her body, and, through her body, with those that surround her. Vittoria, too, shines with the light of heaven from her face in the moment after death. Further, in both Longfellow and Orthodox Feminism, communion with others is central to the acquisition of godlikeness. This is in part because God, according to Orthodoxy, is not some unknowable, alien monad in an inaccessible heaven, but is that perfect, loving, self-giving relationship of persons at the center of reality. To step beyond oneself in loving self-surrender, then, is to become like God. And this, in Longfellow’s poems, is what we see the heroine do. Vittoria Colonna acts as a mentor to younger women and an active member of the artistic community in Renaissance Italy; she finally finds her place in the community of a monastery at the end of her days. Evangeline becomes a nun in the city—a city that, according to Higgins, would have been hostile to her gender and her religion. There she becomes more fully oriented

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toward God than ever before, for “other hope had she none” than to follow “her Savior.” This wholehearted theological orientation returns Evangeline to that state that Longfellow describes in the poem’s introduction. Her life reflects “an image of heaven,” for, through orienting herself toward God and participating in him, she becomes a microcosm of all redeemed humanity, and she shines on and offers godlikeness to every individual in the community around her. If Orthodox Feminism offers a theological vision in line with Longfellow’s own, what does Longfellow’s poetry offer, in turn, to Orthodox Feminism? On the levels of theology and anthropology alone, it offers a highly sympathetic set of literary texts. It is surely not the only set of texts that offers such sympathies, but it is, significantly, an American body of work, deeply rooted in Western history and Western experience that nonetheless bears sympathies with Eastern Christian thought. When Orthodox theologians, feminist or otherwise, have turned to literary texts to explore themes and characters with reference to Orthodox theology, they invariably have turned to Eastern literature—most often Dostoyevsky.13 To the Orthodox scholar, the literature of America can appear all awash in Protestant Calvinism, bouncing back and forth between conservative Puritanism and reactive, progressive secularism. The vision of the Fathers still present in the literature of the Christian East seems wholly absent from the American bookshelf. But as we have seen in the course of this book, Longfellow’s poems are texts central to the development of nineteenth-century American poetry that offer, ultimately, a patristic vision of human spiritual destiny. For readers and scholars interested in the intersection of theology, feminism, and literature, Longfellow is a surprising and welcome starting point. NOTES 1. Karen Weekes, “Poe’s Feminine Ideal,” in Cambridge Companion to Poe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 150. 2. Ibid., 151. 3. Ibid., 152. 4. Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven and Other Favorite Poems (New York: Dover, 1991), 41. 5. See Higgins, “Evangeline’s Mission.” 6. Life of Longfellow, Vol. 2: 64. 7. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, 77–78. 8. Ibid., 78. 9. Ibid., 4. 10. Life of Longfellow, Vol. 2: 107. 11. Ibid., 106.

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12. Sheila Briggs, “What is Feminist Theology?” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012): 81. 13. See, for instance, Maria Skobtsova, The Crucible of Doubts: Komyakov, Dostoevsky, Solov’ev, in Search of Synthesis, translated by Fr. S. Janos (Mohrsvilla, PA: frsj, 2016).

Bibliography

Arvin, Newton. Longfellow: His Life and Work. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962. Bartel, Timothy E. G. Glimpses of Her Father’s Glory: Deification and Divine Light in Longfellow’s Evangeline. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2019. Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth. “Woman, Too, Is in the Likeness of God.” Mid-Stream 21, No. 3 (July 1982): 369–375. Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth. Discerning the Signs of the Times: The Vision of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001. Behr-Sigel, Elisabeth. “The Ordination of Women: A Point of Contention in Ecumenical Dialogue.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 48, No. 1 (2004). Briggs, Sheila. “What is Feminist Theology?” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Calhoun, Charles. Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004. Channing, William Ellery. The Works of William Ellery Channing. Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1903. Chevalier, Jacques. Semiotics, Romanticism, and the Scriptures. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990. Chrysostom, St. John. The Cult of the Saints: Select Homilies and Letters. Translated by Wendy Mayer and Bronwen Neil. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006. Cifelli, Edward. Longfellow in Love: Passion and Tragedy in the Life of the Poet. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018. Elsden, Annamaria Formichella. Roman Fever: Domesticity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. Franchot, Jenny. Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Gale, Robert L. A Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003. Gilbert, Susan and Sandra Gilbert. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

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Index

Appleton, Frances, 16, 29, 49, 72n5, 75, 98, 101, 114, 117 Arvin, Newton, 3, 22, 56, 108 Behr-Sigel, Elizabeth, 6–10, 109 Briggs, Sheila, 118 Calhoun, Charles C., 3, 4, 19, 34, 44, 60, 114 Celestial Light, 2, 46n37, 72n5, 108; Beatrice, 71–72, 72n5; Edith Christison, 79, 80; Vittoria Colonna, 99, 108; Evangeline, 33, 39, 41, 42, Church Fathers, 1, 7, 10, 11n4, 40, 46n46, 82, 119 Chrysostom, John, 1–2, 40–41 Cifelli, Edward, 3, 15, 23 Colonna, Vittoria (Historical figure), 2, 93–94, 97 Dante Alighieri, 2, 3, 10, 82, 96–97, 99, 114; Beatrice, 32, 69–72, 74n5 75, 79, 80, 81, 93, 106, 116; poems, Convivio, 80; Commedia, 2, 69–72, 75, 114 Deification, 7, 41, 65, 79–80; see also Godlikeness

Divine Light, 9–10, 116, 118; see also Celestial Light Domesticity, 5–6, 8, 111–112, 114, 116; of Evangeline, 42, 44; of Preciosa, 23; of Priscilla, 62 Elsden, Annamaria Formicella, 5 Elssler, Fanny, 19–23 Feminism, 6, 9, 10, 117; Orthodox Theology, 6–10; literary theory, 10, 13n35 Franchot, Jenny, 42, 44, 45 Fuller, Margaret, 117 Gioia, Dana, 3, 12n34, 13n35 Godlikeness, 2, 6, 64, 113, 116; in Orthodox Feminism, 6, 8–9, 117–119; of Beatrice, 71; of Edith Christison, 81; of Vittoria Colonna, 108; of Elizabeth, 89; of Evangeline, 35, 36, 39, 41–42, 44, 45, 113 Harrison, Nonna Verna, 8–9, 109 Hartmann von Aue, 49 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 4 Hicks, Granville, 5, 11n16. Higgins, Andrew C., 42, 43–44, 45n13, 115, 118 125

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Index

Irmscher, Chistoph, 3, 28n28, 44 Jane Eyre, 117 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth; marriages of, 15–16, 29, 66, 90, 114; poems of, Voices of the Night, 2, 29, 69; The Spanish Student, 16–24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 35, 41, 44, 56, 79, 86, 90; Poems on Slavery, 2, 24–27, 29, 30; “The Good Part,” 24–26, 31, 85, 115; “The Quadroon Girl,” 26–27, 33, 50, 115, 118; Evangeline, 2, 4, 5, 10, 18, 27, 29–45, 49, 50, 53, 54, 56, 60, 64, 65, 67n56, 71, 76, 79, 81, 86, 87, 89, 90, 98, 99, 107, 111–114, 115, 116, 117, 118–19; The Golden Legend, 49–56, 64, 75, 103, 112; The Song of Hiawatha, 2, 49, 56–61, 67n36, 69; The Courtship of Miles Standish, 2, 45, 49, 61–66, 86, 90, 111, 114, 116; “Paul Revere’s Ride,” 2; “Divina Commedia” Sonnets, 71–72, 79; John Endicott, 18, 75–82, 85, 86, 99, 108, 115; Judas Maccabeus, 82–85, 86, 108, 115; Tales of a Wayside Inn, 86; “Elizabeth,” 75, 86–91, 118; “The Cross of Snow,” 72n5; Keramos and Other Poems, 95, 97; “Vittoria Colonna,” 96, 97–99; Michael Angelo, A Fragment, 94, 99–108, 110n32, 112; prose works

of, Outre-Mer, 1, 15, 16; Hyperion, 29, 67n56; Kavanagh, 67n56; translations by, The Poetry and Poets of Europe, 93–94; “Seven Sonnets and a Canzone,” 95–97; Divine Comedy, 2, 69, 71–72, 75, 80; views on women of, 117; writing career of, 2–3, 49 Longfellow, Zilpah, 15, 117 Orthodox Feminism, 6–10, 27, 117–119, 79, 99; origin of term, 7 Patmore, Coventry, 5 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 5, 44, 111, 112–113, 114 Perspicacity, 24, 36, 54, 63, 65, 70–71, 81, 88, 108 Poe, Edgar Allan, 4, 5, 111, 114; women, 113–114; “Annabel Lee,” 113, 114, 116 Potter, Mary Storer, 15–16, 29, 101 Puritanism, 49, 61–62, 66, 76, 77, 80, 82, 85, 91, 114 Sand, George, 117 Shaw, Marion, 4, 13n35 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 4, 117; The Princess, 117 Weekes, Karen, 113 Williams, Cecil, 55, 86

About the Author

Timothy E. G. Bartel is Professor of Great Texts and Writing at Saint Constantine College. His first book on Longfellow is Glimpses of Her Father’s Glory: Deification and Divine Light in Longfellow’s Evangeline, and his essays and poems have appeared in Christianity and Literature, First Things, and The Hopkins Review.

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