Vouchsafed by the Holy Ghost

Chapter 3 argues that the now-canonical reading of Kate Chopin’s small masterpiece, The Awakening, which takes Edna Pontellier’s sexual wanderlust as symptomatic of a racist, primitivistic projection (per Toni Morrison’s general formulation), utterly neglects the founding plot and concerted characterizations. In The Awakening, Edna, a married Kentucky Presbyterian, is set adrift among Creole Catholics who embody a sexual sacramentality that attracts her but that she can’t, herself, achieve, beyond eventual submission to adultery with a local lothario. When the story begins, Edna is chafing in her marriage to a self-involved financier and, despite her Calvinist upbringing and persisting individualist sensibility, becomes increasingly involved, Theron-style, with a Creole trio: Madame Ratignolle, the mother-woman who is sensual in aspect and touch; Robert Lebrun, a serial acolyte of older women who refuses to deliver on his sexual promise despite beguiling her on the refulgent isle of La Chenière Caminada; and Mademoiselle Reisz, a spinster artiste, whose way with Frédéric Chopin’s nocturnes is her way with Edna, soul and (implicitly) body. Thus The Awakening is American’s first major portrayal of the Protestant-adrift-among-Catholics, and it is only as such that it becomes our proto-feminist exploration of a wife’s quest for sexual and aesthetic autonomy. Whereas Frederic’s Theron Ware is one of talkiest books ever, The Awakening delineates temptations to Catholicism that are more show then tell, capturing the fault lines of full social incorporation in Edna’s fatal sea-swim, which can be understood both as a capitulation, in resurgent Protestant self-immolation, and as a visionary sacrifice.

Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction

This book considers modern American fiction in its own Italianate coloration: the interplay of sex (the red of passion), violence (the black of violence), and sanctity (the gold of redemption). Its purpose is to involve readers in the mythopoetics of American narrative, long-lived and well overdue, in which Marian Catholicism is seen as integral to apprehending the nexus among eros, grace, and sacrifice in U.S. self-making—especially for Protestants! It starts with Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the primary instigator, as well as with Frederic’s ingenious retelling, The Damnation of Theron Ware, a second persisting prism. Sustained revisionist accounts of five major novels and several stories follow, including Chopin’s The Awakening, James’ The Wings of the Dove, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Each novel is recalled as a melodrama of beset sexuality and revealed as a martyr tale of forbidden love—successive, self-aware courtings of devotional Catholicism that the critical and teaching establishment has found too mysterious and dangerous to recognize, never mind sanction. In counterpoint, the book illuminates each tale in its own terms, which are often surprising yet almost always common-sensical; it identifies the special senses—beauty, courage, and wisdom—that emerge, often in the face of social terror and moral darkness, under Marian-Catholic pedagogy; and it yields an overview of the mainline of the modern American novel in which sexual transgression (including betrayal) and graced redemption (the sanctification of passion, mediated confession, martyring sacrifice) go hand in hand, syncretically.

Of Lascivious Mysticism and Other Hibernian Matters

Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware recasts The Scarlet Letter as a Methodist minister’s romance with Catholics and fin-de-siècle intellectual Catholicism. The Reverend Theron Ware is a liberal progressive Dimmesdale update, happily married at the novel’s outset, who is assigned to a fundamentalist, anti-Catholic congregation yet comes increasingly under the spell of a trio of erudite, somewhat unorthodox Catholic leaders—one of whom, Celia Madden, the Hester Prynne update, is a single woman, seemingly independent yet Church-integrated, whose mastery of the organ and articulation of Continental aesthetics are all too provocative to be ignored. The resultant interplay between Theron’s late-century Protestant dissipation and the edgy Catholicism of Celia and her erudite comrades (one priest, one scientist) is lit in knowing commentary—religious anthropology cum wicked irony—that hangs in the air long after Theron’s hurtful sexploration comes to its merciful—mercy-filled, Angel-conducted—end. In The Damnation of Theron Ware, the Catholic-inspired, Catholic-tutored mythopoetics of Protestant self-consciousness take a mighty leap forward, in seeming lock-step with Henry Adams and in anticipation of such contemporary thinkers as Richard Rodriguez, Camille Paglia, and James T. Fisher. Religious wanderlust is seen to drive forbidden love at least as much as the original way around. And the narrative staging of Protestant wonderment and wanderlust, dramatized in terms of the Protestant-side tangle between its persisting Calvinism and emergent liberal pragmatism, takes a nasty 180-degree turn against itself, courtesy of its Catholic protagonists—though, really, of its Protestant author.

Acquisitive Liaisons

Sarah Anne Kuczynski, “Acquisitive Liaisons: Collecting and Alternative Valuing in Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware” (pp. 82–109) This essay reads Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) as an attempt to reimagine human relationships amid the unsettling of traditional, effortful methods for establishing personal value amid the socioeconomic stratification of Gilded Age America. Foregrounding the novel’s imbrication within late-nineteenth-century America’s “collecting mania,” this study contends that the relationship that forms between the Octavius elite and the title character closely resembles that between collector and recent acquisition. The idea that Theron is treated as an object by Celia and her friends might appear to lend support to the prevailing reading of the novel as a tale about a naive young minister who is used and abused by the worldly figures he idolizes. However, I offer a contrarian challenge to this dominant interpretation by demonstrating that Theron, in fact, consistently pursues objecthood and the fate of acquisition over the course of the novel—not in a masochistic sense but because, as this essay argues, within the Gilded Age social world of The Damnation of Theron Ware, the life of a prized possession has the potential to be a fulfilling one. Theron may talk of his grand plans for renovating his character but in reality he seizes every opportunity to retreat to a space where passivity is encouraged, where personal value is assigned rather than earned or enacted.

Humble Humbugs and Good Frauds: Harold Frederic, Christian Science, and the Anglo-American Professions

L. Ashley Squires, “Humble Humbugs and Good Frauds: Harold Frederic, Christian Science, and the Anglo-American Professions” (pp. 353–378) In October 1898, American novelist Harold Frederic died of complications following a stroke while in the care of a Christian Scientist named Athalie Goodman Mills, summoned to his bedside by the author’s mistress, Kate Lyon. His death was later the subject of a coroner’s inquest and unsuccessful manslaughter charge, making the author’s death central to an already raging debate about the efforts of an ascendant medical profession to criminalize the activities of healers they saw as illegitimate. This essay reads the public controversy as represented in newspapers and medical journals alongside Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), arguing that both texts demonstrate a widening epistemic gap between an ascendant class of experts and the broader public they served. In each, the concept of placebo emerges as a useful organizing metaphor for this tension. In the wake of cases like Frederic’s, many physicians began advocating for a broader use of “suggestive therapeutics” in response to the challenge that Christian Science presented, raising discomfiting epistemic and ethical questions because its use presumes a dissonance between what the doctor knows and what the patient believes. The ministers in The Damnation of Theron Ware likewise confront the problem of administering a kind of theological placebo, a primitive faith demanded by their congregants that the ministers themselves have come to doubt. Placebo therefore describes a way in which experts could assert their relevance and social necessity in the face of populist energies, exemplified in Christian Science, that challenged their rise to dominance.