European journal of American studies

5-1 | 2010 Spring 2010

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/7742 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.7742 ISSN: 1991-9336

Publisher European Association for American Studies

Electronic reference European journal of American studies, 5-1 | 2010, “Spring 2010” [Online], Online since 24 January 2010, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/7742; DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.4000/ejas.7742

This text was automatically generated on 8 July 2021.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Comparing Exceptionalism in France and the USA A Transatlantic Approach to the Death Penalty Abolition Debate (1972-1977) Elsa Devienne

Were It a New-Made World: Hawthorne, Melville and the Unmasking of America Michael Broek

“Though Hermes never taught thee”: The Anti-Patriarchal Tendency of Charles Brockden Brown’s Mercurial Outcast Carwin, the Biloquist Evert Jan van Leeuwen

Militia or Regular Army? The Debate on the Character of the American Army during the Revolution Tal Tovy

Negotiating Transcendentalism, Escaping « Paradise » : Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Ramón Espejo Romero

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Comparing Exceptionalism in France and the USA A Transatlantic Approach to the Death Penalty Abolition Debate (1972-1977)

Elsa Devienne

I. Introduction

1 “Sustained, systematic, organized, and relentless.” As Denis Lacorne has recently pointed out, European media have unremittingly led the denunciation campaign of the death penalty in the United States throughout the 1990s and 2000s. France, in particular, has criticized the use of capital punishment in the American legal system resulting, ironically, in some American death-row inmates’ life stories finding their ways into French newspapers more easily than into their American equivalents.1 Numerous legal scholars and scientists have tried to theorize and decipher this “widening divide” between Europe and the “American exception.”2 However, the notion of exceptionalism does not take into account the recent transatlantic history of the abolition debate and effaces the period during which the purported exceptionalism was not American but French.3 Although an “exception” repeatedly decried by its European neighbors for most of the 1970s, France has now removed capital punishment not only from its laws but also from its national “imaginary.”4 Historical scholarship on the history of the death penalty in France tends to reflect this obliviousness by emphasizing the inevitability of the 1981 abolition.5 Similarly, collective memory tends to be excessively short regarding the guillotine: not so long ago, while the electric chair was collecting dust, the guillotine was still executing the condemned.

2 In this article, I intend to look closely at the short period in the 1970s when American executions were halted while in France the executions continued in cases that were widely debated in public opinion.6 By examining this intriguing moment in the transatlantic history of capital punishment, this essay follows a recent trend in the history of the death penalty. By erasing the traditional boundaries between national histories, it seeks to detect the rise of an “international judicial and political discourse on the penalty of death and its abolition.”7 The article focuses on the reception of the two major decisions taken by the Supreme Court in the 1970s and their direct

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consequences, as they were reported in the main French newspapers and television news magazines.8 However, this essay is not solely about the French gaze on American practices. The journalists actively used American decisions to stoke the national debate by reading their meanings in light of the French context. While for a short period the United States occupied the position of exemplary “civilized” nation—thereby complicating the traditional scholarship on Franco-American relations largely preoccupied with anti-Americanism—this situation was soon reversed with the reinstatement of the death penalty in the US in 1976 and the Patrick Henry trial in 1977 that seemed to presage abolition in France. By tracing the progressive emergence of an official discourse on the death penalty as an aberration in French history, even before the actual law of 1981, the article demonstrates how French media gradually constructed the contemporary opposition between a death-penalty free France and a “barbaric” America.9 II. The 1972 Supreme Court Decisions and their Reception in France 3 On June 29 1972, in a group of cases collectively called Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court declared every existing death penalty law in the United States unconstitutional on the grounds that they violated the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause of the Eighth Amendment. This decision, which effectively put a moratorium on capital punishment, was “one of the biggest surprises in its history”10 and the result of a complex combination of factors. While Herbert Haines emphasizes the “‘inspirational’ effect” of Supreme Court decisions in other arenas like Civil Rights, most scholars cite the constitutional attack on capital punishment led by the lawyers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Legal Defence Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union since the beginning of the 1960s.11 That exact same day, a “few hours away” as Le Monde put it, French inmates Claude Buffet and Roger Bontems were condemned to death in one of the most controversial trials of the decade.12 In 1971 while serving their sentence in the Clairvaux prison, the two inmates had taken a prison guard and a nurse hostage, and eventually killed them both.13 As no execution had taken place in France since 1969, the sentence elicited a renewed interest in the abolition question. This historical coincidence, far from being ignored or dismissed as irrelevant to the national debate, forced French journalists in June 1972 to raise questions concerning the issue of the death penalty in a transatlantic, if not global, perspective.

4 Significantly, the French media reported these two news items simultaneously, subsequently transforming their reportage into an opportunity to discuss the abolition debate from an international point of view. Most newspapers not only noted the coincidence and emphasized the significance of the two decisions on their front pages, but also broadened the perspective and defined the controversy in global terms.14 In Le Figaro of June 30 1972, the coincidence was highlighted as follows: “At the same moment when the assizes court of Aube was condemning the two criminals to the death sentence, the Supreme Court decides that capital punishment cannot be applied.”15 According to La Croix, the French Catholic newspaper, “the coincidence cannot be missed” and the two events contributed “to put[ting] the death penalty on the agenda”, while for Le Monde they “relaunch[ed] the controversy.” 16 Both Le Monde and France Soir highlighted the symbolic value of the coincidence, and ran a special article on the international state of abolition. “The United States is joining the more than thirty countries in the world that have abolished the death penalty” announced Le Monde.17 However, the abolition was not the only issue framed in global terms: the

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factors explaining strong public support for the death penalty—as exemplified by the applause and cheers at Buffet-Bontems’ verdict—appeared to be the same in France and in the United States. Quoting the American pundit George Gallup’s analysis of the American situation, the magazine Le Point identified the growth in criminality as the main reason for the increasing support for capital punishment in France.18

5 According to some newspapers, the issue was not only international, it was also, on a more philosophical level, linked with a “civilizing process.”19 Le Figaro argued that the two events “relaunch[ed] this never-ending debate around this great and mysterious problem that has taken place in every civilized society.” Similarly, La Croix was concerned by this “old and serious debate that no civilized society can evade,” and elaborated the issue further: “Does the collectivity have the right to kill those who have transgressed the law?”20 The notion of “civilization” was invoked in the death penalty debate as early as the late eighteenth century. It was used to promote moving executions to the jail yard, away from the public eye, as well as other methods of punishment that officials and reformers considered more “humane.” Even proponents of the death penalty have invoked the discourse of “civilization” to argue for the compatibility of the ultimate punishment with the process of civilization. In contrast, used in connection with other concepts such as “humanization” and “progress,” it has also allowed death penalty detractors to imagine and promote a teleological process towards abolition.21 The term thus needs to be historicized to cover how it evolved according to geographical and historical contexts.

6 What defines “civilization” in these 1972 reports is the capacity for a society to at least broach the issue of the retention or abolition of the death penalty. All “civilized societies” are bound to confront this question. Nevertheless both Le Figaro and La Croix are both neutral on the issue of abolition (the French right, which Le Figaro represented, was divided on the topic, while the Catholic church had not yet taken a definite position).22 They therefore did not embrace the discourse, especially prevalent after World War II, that identifies a civilized process leading inexorably to the rejection of legalized state killing. More cautious in their use of the phrase “civilized society”, they simply acknowledged the shared conundrum present in American and French societies.23 This more philosophical outlook adopted by both newspapers contributed to the international discourse on the penal system.

7 While the French newspapers internationalized the issue, the immediate impact of the American abolition on the national debate in France was at the same time highlighted. During the 1970s, the French media played a central role in mobilising a major public debate on abolition. Partisans of abolition and their adversaries consistently discussed sensational cases through op-eds and opinion columns.24 In this heated context, it is no surprise that the journalists used the Supreme Court decision as fodder to ignite the French debate. According to Le Monde, the coincidence “rejuvenate[d] the debate on the retention or the abolition of the death penalty in France.” As the newspaper was largely in favor of abolition, the Supreme Court decision was exploited to strengthen the abolitionist side. The journalist argued that the question of abolition was posed in “identical terms in the United States” and that criminals “as revolting as Buffet and Bontems” like “Charles Manson and his accomplices” would serve their sentences in jail, just as the French criminals could in “the prison of Mende25.” In other words, the same questions, the same arguments, and the same debate in both countries, should have begotten the same resolution: abolition. Hinting at Georges Pompidou’s well-

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known repulsion for the death penalty, the journalist emphasized the coincidence by asserting that “what the Supreme Court has decided, Mr. Pompidou was ready to do just before the Clairvaux drama.”26 The newspaper was not only reporting information; it stressed the divergent path of the two countries, and the straight comparison tarnished France’s image. Similarly, L’Express had reservations concerning the “preventive value of the ultimate punishment” in the case of Buffet and Bontems, both re-offenders: “Its exemplarity seems rather illusory. This is also the opinion of the American Supreme Court that has just abolished the death penalty.”27 The journalist hinted at one of the most cherished arguments used by the partisans of capital punishment: its purported deterrence effect. The Buffet and Bontems affair seemed to belie the efficiency of such an effect: they both knew that they could be executed if they were caught but they had decided to take the risk regardless. If the threat of the guillotine did not deter inmates from repeating their crimes, the journalist from L’Express implied, then the punishment seemed devoid of most of its legitimacy. The American Supreme Court was merely acknowledging this state of affairs by abolishing the death penalty.

8 Becoming an integral part of the French debate, the American decision was even used by French journalists as a means to pressure the French president. Indeed, in Le Canard enchaîné, the American decision was one more argument for clemency—the exclusive domain of the president—being applied in the Buffet-Bontems case. The Canard addressed the article to President Pompidou: “You, the man of the last resort…What are you going to decide? Will you yield to the lynching mob or will you pardon the ‘Enraged of Clairvaux’? Destiny is making it simple for you. In the United States of America where justice has never been easy on its criminals … the death penalty has just been abolished forever. If I were you, Mr. President, … I would take advantage of this example to order the Senate to put the guillotine away.”28 In contrast to La Croix and Le Figaro, the Canard was implicitly taking up the discourse that identifies “civilization” with the rejection of capital punishment. By equating the behavior of the public in the Buffet-Bontems trial with the irrationality of a “lynching mob”, the newspaper’s intent was to induce shame among officials, thereby influencing their choice. This tactic was not only adopted by journalists but also by famous abolitionists like lawyer Albert Naud. On June 29, as quoted by France Soir, Naud shouted out: “Great victory for the society indeed. Sending Claude Buffet to the guillotine! A man good for psychiatry!” He then emphasized the symbolic damage the decision imposed on the reputation of “Voltaire and Hugo’s country.” But above all, he asserted that “the height of shame for our country is that the sentence was pronounced the same day that the Supreme Court abolished the death penalty in the United States.”29 Naud exploited the lasting rivalry between France and the United States as to which country could claim to be the beacon of the free world. France, he implied, was losing ground.30 III The US as Exemplary Nation 9 To stir up the feeling that France was taking the wrong path, French media represented the United States as an exemplary nation. Indeed, in the words of Le Canard it constituted “an example” that Pompidou should follow. This attitude strongly undermined the prevalent beliefs of the French public about the American penal system. Indeed, France—and for that matter European countries in general—have a long tradition of putting America “on trial” when it comes to its penal system.31 While the United State could pride themselves on having a far more gentle penal code than Europe in the nineteenth century, the situation was reversed in the twentieth. Starting

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in the 1920s with the Sacco and Vanzetti case, then followed by the Rosenbergs’ death sentence and the execution of Caryl Chessman, Europe harshly criticized American use of capital punishment.32 However, the decision of 1972 seemed to turn the tables all over again. The sudden admiration for the American penal system was not only observable in right-wing newspapers, but also in the leftist ones as exemplified by the relatively positive depiction in Le Canard. The article in Le Monde reporting on abolition similarly ended with praise for the Court’s ability to judge the issue not on criminological or penal grounds but as a philosophical question. “Do we still have to wait?” asked the journalist - “What gesture would indeed be less demagogic, more courageous, than the decision to put an end to what is not a sentence but a torture, not a penal sanction but a residue of barbarism?”33 In this instance, while the United States was on the side of rationalism and humanitarianism, France was implicitly associated with backwardness and cruelty.

10 As evidenced by many book titles (“The Anti-American Obsession”, “The American Enemy”), the abundant scholarly literature on Franco-American relationships largely focuses on the phenomenon of anti-Americanism.34 Nevertheless, this seemingly unexpected praise for American penal practices remains consistent with the paradoxical nature of French anti-Americanism. According to Denis Lacorne, the “discourses” that form anti-Americanism are characterized by “ambiguity and frequent contradictions.” “Subject to frequent swings,” they evolve depending on the immediate historical context.35 Negative opinions can also accommodate themselves with contemporaneous positive appreciations of the United States, as is patently clear in this case. While Le Canard exhorted Pompidou to imitate the American Supreme Court, it criticized in the same movement the American penal system by lampooning a justice so harsh towards its criminals “that there is the possibility sometimes of doing innocents in.”36 In addition, the general praise of the Court’s decision did not win over all the media. L’Humanité, the French Communist party newspaper, dedicated a very short article to abolition and—although there was an article on the Buffet-Bontems case on the same page—no comparison was drawn between the two countries. While the Communist party was strongly opposed to the death penalty in 1972, the article denied the exemplarity of the American decision and asserted that actions were already taken to cancel the decision—a claim which was later revealed to be correct.37 In the same manner, the 585 prisoners benefited only “in some way” from the decision, meaning, they were probably not going to be spared in the long run.38 Far more preoccupied with the denunciation of the Vietnam war, l’Humanité refused to abandon its anti- Americanist discourse. Even if the United States appeared to be heading down the right path, it could not stand as an example for France to follow. The exception that confirmed the rule, L’Humanité remained distinct from the rest of the French media.

11 The French reception of the 1972 Supreme Court decision evinced the rise of an international discourse on the death penalty’s abolition. By conjuring up the notion of “civilization” or commenting on the American decision’s exemplarity, the media refused to limit the debate to its national significance. Moreover, by not only reporting the news but also analyzing it as a portent of inevitable progress, a sign that the world was inexorably heading toward abolition, the journalists transformed the decision into a symbolic event that could have an impact on French politics. IV The Reinstatement of the Death Penalty in the US

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12 Surprisingly, the French media did not pay much attention to the American reinstatement of the death penalty. While the Supreme Court upheld the more rationalized sentencing procedure in a set of three 1976 decisions collectively known as Gregg v. Georgia, thereby reopening the door to the death chamber in America, Le Monde was the only newspaper to analyze—and strongly denounce—the decision.39 If the national newspapers had regarded the United States as an example in 1972, this step back comforted the traditional French criticism toward the American penal system. Considering the consequences of the decision, Le Monde argued that “one should keep in mind the imponderable nature of American psychology … it is … obvious that the great majority of Americans still believe in the deterring and expiatory virtues of capital punishment despite the unceasing abolitionist campaigns.”40 Americans appeared widely influenced by rising crime rates and thereby supported a reinstatement of a harsh and severe penal system. The overall absence of reaction in the press could also be explained by the general abolitionist stance advocated by most national mainstream newspapers. A piece of information going against what was believed to be a world-wide trend toward abolitionism did not serve the cause well. In contrast to the 1972 decision, which journalists exploited to undermine the pro-death penalty cause, the 1976 decision went almost unnoticed, as if irrelevant in a French context that saw the number of executions declining.41

13 Conversely, when Gary Gilmore—the first convict put to death in ten years in the United States—was executed in 1977 the French press showed a deep interest. Once again, a coincidence encouraged the journalists to adopt an international standpoint: three days after the Gilmore execution, the child-murderer Patrick Henry was condemned in France to life in prison, a momentous decision considering that public opinion was vehemently in favor of his execution.42 The two events therefore inverted the previous situation: while France was “de facto abolishing the death penalty” as pointed out by L’Express, the United States reverted to their former practice.43 The conditions were ripe for the setting up in the French media of a long-lasting opposition between a “barbaric” America and a reasoned France.

14 First, journalists once again exploited the Supreme Court’s decision to inform the French abolition debate. However, this time the American reinstatement of the death penalty was not only used by the abolitionist side but also served as a strong argument in favor of retention. An anti-abolitionist law professor, Jean-Claude Soyer, took advantage of the simultaneous events to draw subtle comparisons between the two penal systems in a Le Figaro op-ed. Probing one by one the traditional arguments in favor of abolition, he denied the allegation that the death penalty is a more terrible “torture” than life imprisonment. To support his claim, he reminded his readers that “currently, in the United States, some inmates are struggling to obtain their executions.” Although Soyer didn’t explicitly name Gilmore, it was obvious to most readers that he alluded to the recently executed American. Indeed, Gilmore had not only refused the appeals filed by his lawyers to prevent his execution but also his last months in jail were disrupted by two attempted suicides.44 Soyer then concluded his article: “We are right to believe in the efficiency of the death penalty, and therefore to retain its use as a weapon against crime …. Besides, French people are favoring it in a large majority (as do Californians, a people that it would be difficult to characterize as backward-looking).”45 Soyer was probably alluding to the November 1972 California referendum on “proposition 17” which intended to reinstate the death penalty, and

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which was accepted by a large margin. Building upon the reputation of California (and more generally, the United States) as a symbol of progress and innovation, Soyer hoped to avert the traditional abolitionist critique that equated the death penalty with barbaric societies. The allusion was discreet, but it demonstrated the argument’s latent presence in French media discourse.

15 L’Humanité was undoubtedly the newspaper that epitomized this opinion. Considered anachronistic in a civilized society, the death penalty was deemed a “medieval practice.” In order to impress the readers and link the execution to an unfair and barbaric tradition, the journalist described Gilmore’s last moments in terms of hunting: “Vile execution in the United States: Gary Gilmore was shot yesterday with a big game gun” yelled the headline. Although the method was chosen by Gilmore himself, the firing squad was represented as a shocking reversion to primitive times. Gilmore’s body “collapsed like big game in the jungle” related the journalist. Interestingly, while the United States appeared as a backward country locked in the past, L’Humanité condemned its pervasive mass media as “experts in the art of [public] manipulation” as well as the execution’s financial exploitation via filming, both symbolically corrupting the apparent characteristics of a modern and innovative nation. The ambiguous denunciation again addresses the paradoxical nature of anti-American discourses. For the journalist, there was no contradiction to ponder; the United States was a powerful country that lacked morality and judgment. Like Soyer, l’Humanité alluded to the commonalities of the French and American systems, and used the comparison to condemn both countries’ practices. Examining American police accusations against the excessive clemency displayed by judges, the journalist cried out: “Mr. Poniatowski hasn’t invented anything!” Michel Poniatowski, French minister of the interior and an avowed retentionist, had indeed recently taken a stand on the issue, advocating for the death penalty in the Henry case and supporting similar views held by the police officers union.46 The journalist also fustigated the “game of cat and mouse” present in the numerous deferments of Gilmore’s execution. He asserted that binding the inmates’ life to the stroke of a pen was very much like “the presidential power to pardon.”47 By hinting at the French system of pardon, the journalist effectively condemned the two systems in the same tirade.

16 While in 1972 the communist newspaper was alone in its sharp criticism of the American penal system, it did not stand out among the French media in 1977. Journalists largely denounced Gilmore’s execution and attached special attention to what seemed an outdated method of execution: the firing squad. Coined a “macabre soap opera” in the news, the Gilmore execution was scrutinized in its most graphic aspects, such as the fact that Gilmore had declined to wear the scarf over his eyes but was obliged to by the law.48 Although Le Monde didn’t indulge in the execution’s gruesome details, the newspaper compared the death penalty to a “barbaric lottery” and denounced Gilmore’s execution in 1977.49 These reports bear witness of the revival of a French discourse censuring “barbaric” America. The guillotine was not yet put away in a museum. Nevertheless, the French national press was already undertaking the task of building a strong discourse against the death penalty.

17 Indeed, in 1977—the last year that witnessed an execution in France—most of the media declared the impending abandonment of capital punishment.50 This was not a novelty: as early as 1972, several newspapers hinted at the coming disappearance of the infamous practice. Le Nouvel Observateur, sharply condemning the Buffet-Bontems death

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sentence, warned Pompidou that his failure to pardon the two criminals would “revive the death penalty he ha[d] de facto abolished since his arrival at the Elysée.”51 Similarly, L’Express pointed out the fact that, according to abolitionists, if Pompidou granted clemency it “would mean the death of the death penalty.”52 Already hinted at in 1972, abolition had become more of a priority by 1977. Indeed, in most newspaper accounts, Patrick Henry’s life imprisonment sentence amounted to an unofficial abolition. Echoing the words of one of Patrick Henry’s lawyers, Robert Bocquillon, who, quoted in L’Express, solemnly declared the “de facto abolition of the death penalty in France,” French media anticipated legal abolition.53 Most symbolic was the title of the article that Le Monde ran on the event: “The death of a penalty?” If killing a child was not a capital crime anymore, reasoned the journalist, then the penalty was in serious danger of disappearance. Le Monde was not the only newspaper to run wordplays for the occasion: “Dead, the death penalty?” wondered Le Nouvel Observateur. While the journalist answered “not yet”, he still emphasized the “great blow it just received.”54 This anticipation of the 1981 law, clearly present from 1972 onwards, might explain how a “broadly supported moral orthodoxy against the death penalty”, as David Garland put it, was so firmly established shortly after the actual abolition.55 As Evi Girling recently noted, few scholars have sought to understand the process through which the death penalty in Europe—and most spectacularly in France—“remains effectively beyond political will and imagination.”56 In France, part of the reason seems to lie in the forceful denunciation that most French media engaged in throughout the 1970s. V Conclusion 18 By gradually portraying France as a “de facto” death-penalty-free state, French media accustomed public opinion to the idea of an inevitable abolition. In the meantime, they developed a semi-official discourse that represented the guillotine as an aberration in French history. “Voltaire and Hugo’s country” could no longer be associated with this infamous punishment. The American counter-example, starting in 1977, only helped in this process. As the “privileged Other of France,”57 the country against which France had traditionally defined its identity, the United States allowed France to refine its distinctiveness around the death penalty issue. This resonates with David Garland’s suggestion that scholars should attend to the “cultural role” of legal practices. Practices of punishment, asserts Garland, shape social meanings and social worlds and, by marking a difference between self and other, take on a symbolical dimension.58 This remark is especially important within the framework of international rivalries as it demonstrates how foreign affairs can sometimes shape domestic policy. Legal scholar Richard Primus has shown how much American policy during the Cold War was influenced by the need to distinguish itself from the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.59 Similarly, the American reinstatement of the death penalty reinforced French abolitionism.

19 Starting in the mid-1970s, the death penalty therefore served as a cultural signifier for France to distinguish itself from the United States, thereby preserving and shaping its identity. While Evi Girling has dealt with this identity-building process in Europe, she has only concentrated on the 1990s and 2000s.60 Yet, to be accurate about the origins of the opposition between a death-penalty free Europe and a barbaric America, one should also take into account the 1970s. Although for a short period the United States embodied an example to follow, the reconstitution of a critical discourse toward the transatlantic neighbor was quickly undertaken following the Supreme Court’s 1976

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decision. In 1977, while Gilmore’s execution inaugurated a new divide between the United States and Europe, the Henry trial ushered in the pervasive discourse on the “death of the death penalty.” Anticipating the famous Mitterrand decision of 1981, French journalists played a major role in foreseeing and delineating the contours of a France free of its guillotine. In the meantime, they contributed to shaping an international discourse on penal practices and abolition that effaced geographical boundaries and encouraged a global appreciation of the significance of national decisions and events (particularly, of course, in America).

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Franklin E. Zimring, The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)

NOTES

1. Denis Lacorne. “The Barbaric Americans,” Wilson Quaterly 25 (Spring 2001): 52. 2. The phrase is from James Whitman. See James Q. Whitman, Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide between America and Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 3. See for instance in bibliography: Whitman (2003), Zimring (2003), Garland (2001) and Steiker (2002). For a critique of the notion of “exceptionalism” and a reflection on transnational history, see Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). 4. The death penalty was abolished in Italy in 1948, in Finland and Germany in 1949, in Austria in 1968, in the United Kingdom in 1969, in Sweden in 1972, and in Portugal in 1976. See: Council of Europe, ed., The Death Penalty. Beyond Abolition (Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 2004), 7. On European abolitionism and the cultural construction of Europe as a death penalty-free zone, see Evi Girling, “European Identity and the Mission Against the Death Penalty in the United States.” in Austin Sarat and Christian Boulanger, eds., The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment. Comparative Perspectives (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 112-128. 5. See Cécile Toqué Pichon, L’abolition de la peine de mort en France. La “loi Badinter”. (Paris: Panthéon, 2006); Julie Le Quang Sang, La loi et le bourreau: la peine de mort en débats: 1870-1985 (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2001); Sandrine Costa, La peine de mort: de Voltaire à Badinter (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 2001). 6. Between 1967 and 1976, there were no executions in the United States, while seven were performed in France. 7. Sarat & Boulanger, The Cultural Lives, 1. 8. The newspapers reviewed for this paper were: Le Monde, Le Figaro, Le Nouvel Observateur, L’Express, Le Point, La Croix, Le Canard Enchaîné, L’Humanité, France Soir, as well as the television news of channel 1 and 2. Clippings were also consulted from Minute, L’Aurore, Est Éclair, Le Petit Parisien, Libération-Champagne and Politique hebdo, available in Documentation Francaise, ed., L’abolition de la peine de mort (Paris: La Documentation Francaise, 1987). Most newspapers reviewed were either in favor of abolition or neutral. Some were adamantly retentionist (for instance Minute, politically

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on the far right) while others only showed support for the death penalty during the Buffet and Bontems case (the local press in particular). 9. Lacorne, “The Barbaric”, 51. 10. Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 231. The quotation is from the New Republic. 11. The gradual decline in executions and the rise of abolitionist voices within and without the United States also played a role in the decision. See Herbert H. Haines, Against Capital Punishment: The Anti-Death Penalty Movement in America, 1972-1994 (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 21. 12. Le Monde, July 1, 1972, 1. The French president, Georges Pompidou, had commuted all death sentences following his election in 1969. 13. Toqué Pichon, L’abolition, 62. 14. Le Monde ran on its front page two articles—one on the Supreme Court decision, the other on the combined analysis of the American situation and Buffet and Bontems’ death sentences—under the same overarching title: “A Few Hours Away,” Le Monde, July 1, 1972, 1. 15. Le Figaro, June 30, 1972, 1. 16. La Croix, July 1, 1972, 1; Le Monde, July 1, 1972, 1. 17. Le Monde, July 1, 1972, 12. 18. Le Point, December 4 1972, 64. The article was published shortly after the execution of Buffet and Bontems, which was performed on November 28 1972. 19. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994 [1939]) 20. La Croix, July 1, 1972, 1; Le Figaro, June 30, 1972, 1. 21. See Jurgen Martschukat, “Nineteenth-Century Executions as Performances of Law, Death, and Civilization,” in Sarat and Boulanger, The Cultural Lives, 49-91. 22. The common platform of the Left released in June 1972 condemned the death penalty. The Catholic church eventually denounced it in an article published on January 23 1977, in the Observatore Romano. (Julie Le Quang Sang, La loi et le bourreau: la peine de mort en débats (1870-1985) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2001), 119 and 128). 23. A recent example of this argument can be found in The Council of Europe, The Death Penalty: Beyond Abolition (Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 2004), 8, where the death penalty was declared “not to have a place in a civilized society.” 24. Toqué Pichon, L’abolition, 118-120. 25. Mende is a French commune in the department of Lozère. 26. Le Monde, July 1, 1972, 1. See also Le Figaro, November 29, 1972, 5. 27. L’Express, July 3-9, 1972, 38. 28. Le Canard enchaîné, June 5, 1972, 4. 29. France Soir, July 1, 1972, 3. 30. For a reflection on the “ethical war” between France and the United States, see Lacorne, “The Barbaric”, 53. 31. Moshik Temkin, The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 32. Banner, The Death Penalty, 242-243. For an account of international reactions to the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, see Temkin, The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair. 33. Le Monde, July 1, 1972, 1. 34. See in bibliography Portes (1990), Rupnik and Toinet (1986), Revel (2002), Mathé (2000), Roger (2005).

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35. Denis Lacorne, “Anti-Americanism and Americanophobia: A French Perspective,” lecture available on the Science Po website: http://www.ceri-sciencespo.com/archive/ mars05/artdl.pdf (accessed 6 January 2010). 36. Le Canard enchaîné, June 5, 1972, 4. 37. Banner, The Death Penalty, 268-271; L’Humanité, June 30, 1972, 1. 38. L’Humanité, June 30, 1972, 1; 585 American prisoners were on death row at the time of the decision. . Philippe Roger contends that anti-American discourse was adopted by the French Left shortly after World War II. The condemnation of the United States became a constant in communist discourse, as exemplified in this case. Philippe Roger, The American Enemy: a Story of French anti-Americanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 327. 39. Banner, The Death Penalty, 267-305; France Soir ran a short article on the decision as well, see France Soir, July 4, 1976, 3. 40. Le Monde, July 4, 1976, 2 41. No execution had taken place in 1974 and 1975 as Valery Giscard d’Estaing had commuted most death sentences to life imprisonment. See Julie Le Quang Sang, La loi et le bourreau, 258. 42. Toqué Pichon, L’abolition, 66. 43. L’Express, January 24-30, 1977, 56. 44. See Le Figaro, January 18, 1972, 11. 45. Le Figaro, January 18, 1977, 11. Soyer had already used the California situation to support the retentionist side shortly after the execution of Buffet and Bontems in an op-ed published by Le Figaro, November 29, 1972, 5. 46. Michel Poniatowski had made his opinion clear on the radio station RTL on February 19 1976. La Documentation Francaise, L’abolition de la peine de mort, 38. 47. L’Humanité, January 18, 1977, 10. 48. January 17, 1977, Channel 2, Journal télévisé, 20h. 49. Le Monde, July 4, 1976, 2; Le Monde, January 18, 1977, 13. 50. There were two executions in 1977. The last convict executed was Hamida Djandoubi on September 10 1977. 51. Emphasis in the original. Le Nouvel Observateur, November 20-26, 1972, 40. 52. L’Express, November 27-December 3, 1972, 75. 53. L’Express, January 24-30, 1977, 56. 54. Le Monde, January 23-24, 1977, 28; Le Nouvel Observateur, January 24, 1977, 22. L’Aurore and L’Est Éclair used the same device to convey the imminence of abolition: “Is it the abolition of the death penalty?” asked the journalist in Est Éclair while L’Aurore wondered if “the members of the Troyes Jury ha[d] condemned the Executioner.” L’Aurore, January 22-23, 1977, 16; L’Est Éclair, January 21, 1977, 1. 55. Franklin E. Zimring, “The Executioner’s Dissonant Song: On Capital Punishment and American Values,” in Austin Sarat, ed., The Killing State. Capital Punishment in Law, Politics, and Culture (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 139. 56. Girling, “European Identity,” 112. 57. Pierre Guerlain, Miroirs transatlantiques: La France et les Etats-Unis entre passions et indifférences (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), 7. 58. Austin Sarat, “The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment: Responsibility and Representation in Dead Man Walking and Last Dance,” in Sarat, The Killing State, 229. 59. Richard Primus, “A Brooding Omnipresence: Totalitarianism in Postwar Constitutional Thought,” Yale Law Journal 106 (1996): 423.

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60. Girling, “European Identity.”

ABSTRACTS

This article challenges the current scholarship on the history of the death penalty and its abolition by adopting a transatlantic framework and debunking the popular contemporary conception of the “Barbaric Americans” against the “civilised” anti-death penalty French. The article focuses on the short period in the 1970s during which American executions were halted by the Supreme Court, while France was still putting prisoners to death in cases that were widely debated in public opinion. By observing the French media’s reactions to the two major decisions taken by the Supreme Court in the 1970s and their direct consequences, this essay analyzes not only the French gaze on American practices but also how these American decisions were manipulated by the journalists to stoke the French debate about abolition.

AUTHOR

ELSA DEVIENNE Elsa Devienne, EHESS (Center of North-American Studies, CENA), Paris

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Were It a New-Made World: Hawthorne, Melville and the Unmasking of America

Michael Broek

The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. – President John F. Kennedy, in 1963, at Amherst College for the dedication of the Robert Frost Library In George W. Bush’s America, Emerson could not be elected dogcatcher. – Bloom, Best Poems of the English Language (504) Utilizing Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson’s definition of “nationalism,” this article concerns American nationalism and aesthetics and argues that Hawthorne and Melville were among the first American imaginative writers to challenge the myth of American Exceptionalism in terms of their aesthetic operations, insofar as Hawthorne’s sense of ambiguity and Melville’s sense of multiple perspectives challenges the validity of any single monological narrative of national identity. The article further places this argument within the context of modern and contemporary American literature, with particular references to Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy, whose most recent novel, The Road, was released on film in the Fall of 2009.

1 In America, nationalism and literature have always been inexorably connected, or as Sacvan Bercovitch writes, “[American] culture was committed from the start to what social scientists have termed the process of modernization” (American xii), “modernization” here closely allied with Ernest Gellner’s definition of “nationalism,” in which the pressures and requirements of industrialization force the political and cultural (or, in this case, literary) units to merge. Of course this is not to say that

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America has always been industrial and never agrarian, but rather that, from John Winthrop forward, America’s “founders” professed their faith in the essential homogeneity of American society and culture, a culture by means of which each citizen, properly exercising his or her particular talents, could enjoy the fruits of America’s divine ordination – whether those fruits were political, economic, or more likely both. As an allegedly classless society, America had to develop and adhere to a narrative of national identity, a mythology of American Exceptionalism, if it was going to cohere, and this narrative has been developed through the medium of a complex, imagined, “literary” narrative. Indeed, no American writer of imagined literature can escape nationalism’s pull, for even when the narrative of national identity seems remote, it exists in the background, arguing in favor of its symbols and tropes.

2 Bercovitch and others, such as A.N. Kaul, Irving Howe, and Richard Slotkin, have certainly commented at length upon American mythology – its religious, political and economic rhetoric and realities – and the relationship of these indices of culture to American literature.1 More recently, Susan Faludi, in The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, discusses the mythological underpinnings of America’s response to the events of September 11: “The anxieties [9/11] awakened reside deep in our cultural memory. And the myth we deployed to keep those anxieties buried is one we’ve been constructing for more than three hundred years” (13). What I wish to emphasize is the monological essence of this mythological narrative, its constitution as what Bakhtin calls an “authoritative discourse” which “permits no play with the context framing it” (343), for it is this non-contextuality against which I will argue Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne were rebelling, though not typically in overtly political terms but in terms of their aesthetic operations.

3 Aesthetically, what Hawthorne and Melville sought was to break open old myths and symbols, many of which had become grounded in the myth of American Exceptionalism, to discover what emerged into the light, what might be found behind the “veil” - the veil being a favorite trope of Hawthorne’s. As Melville’s Ishmael bobs up from the sea and Hawthorne’s Coverdale drops the mask of his self-delusion, as Bartleby’s narrator cries “Ah, humanity!” and Pearl quits her mother’s settlement, a new metaphor is revealed and an old narrative, grounded in myth and symbol is destroyed. It is this “breaking into blossom,” to borrow a line from the American poet James Wright, that challenges the monological myth of national identity, and this challenge emerges as a consequence of rejecting (always tentatively and incompletely) the truth of aloneness – the aloneness of solitude and death, but more importantly in terms of this argument, the aloneness of closed symbols and single-voiced narratives. Thus, an aesthetic operation emerges as an anti-nationalistic political argument, not because it is an aesthetics that concerns itself with America but because it largely does not. The “Un-masking” of this article’s title, then, refers to this process of revealing, as the consequence of an aesthetic process, of what lies behind and beyond the self-generated and willingly-imposed “mask” of American national identity.

4 This argument, then, will proceed in three parts. The first will seek to establish the terms of this narrative of American Exceptionalism; the second will suggest how Hawthorne and Melville resist this narrative; and the third will posit the ways in which a number of American authors have continued writing in the same aesthetic vein. Thus, this article will cover a great deal of literary territory and, as such, its outlines, while I hope not fragmentary, are certainly preliminary. This argument reaches beyond

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Hawthorne and Melville to encompass a number of modern and contemporary American authors, but it is my hope that what will be established here are at least the parameters of a worthwhile discussion, particularly as it may be an argument somewhat at odds with current scholarship on these canonical authors, much of which emphasizes the historical, biographical, psychological, and public aspects of these authors’ works, to the neglect of how their writing operates in aesthetic terms on the page. I. 5 Speaking of the poet Robert Frost, President John F. Kennedy says the poet “was supremely two things: an artist and an American.” Kennedy’s view of the artist as an independent agent is complex, so that he praises the poet as an artist whose “sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation.” This view is close to that of the Southern fiction writer Flannery O’Connor, who argues, “The person who aims after art in his work aims after truth in an imaginative sense, no more and no less” (Mystery 65).

6 And yet, in remarks that largely concern the moral necessity of lending service to “the Great Republic,” Kennedy cannot help buy ally Frost’s exceptionality with the exceptionality of the nation in which he lived. But if all nationalism is a form of mythology, as Gellner suggests, then can Kennedy at once claim that the artist eschews self-deception and embraces or at least embodies the mythology of nationalism? Gellner argues that necessary for the production of the “national” is the perpetuation of a context-free, unitary language, which is concomitant with the myth of “nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent though long-delayed political destiny” (48). How else to ensure that this new mobile and homogenized population remained relatively placid in the face of economic and political uncertainty? If, according to Gellner, nationalism is “the establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually substitutable atomized individuals” (57), then where does this leave American literary writers?

7 Perhaps they may form something like the “Anacharsis Clootz deputation,” recounted by Melville, that marched into the French Assembly in 1790 to air “the world’s grievances” (Moby-Dick 107). 2 And yet what commonly occurs is that such criticism of the institutions of power, democratic or otherwise, is itself absorbed into the mythology of nationalism or, as Kennedy notes, “In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.” Thus social criticism is embraced in America and transformed into a narrative of national identity; thus is Hester Prynne’s radicalism often interpreted, by critics such as Bercovitch, as an ultimately conservative capitulation to the sources of national myth; thus is Walt Whitman’s rejection of slavery and sexism neutralized.

8 O’Connor, as well, was encouraged to return the warm embrace offered by an America drunk on its Dream. Responding to a Life magazine editorial that exhorted modern writers to consider the joys of living in America, O’Connor replies rather sarcastically, “[T]here could be some ugly correlation between our unparalleled prosperity and the stridency of these demands for a literature that shows us the joy of life” (30).

9 Whitman is particularly illustrative of this point. Harold Bloom refers to Whitman, whom he considers the “Center of the American Canon,” as an “American religious prophet” and an “American Jesus” (Western Canon 249). Herein Bloom aligns Whitman with the myth of American Exceptionalism. For as the mythology of the “resurrected

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man” – of the underdog, of the heroic “common man” – is such a prevalent American type, then Whitman is that type. But Whitman requires no help from Bloom to claim his national roots, Whitman readily claiming them for himself.

10 This indeed is what separates Whitman from the other two writers whom Bloom also describes as members of the early American canon – Hawthorne and Melville. These two authors apprehended American democracy – American nationalism – in a different light. They had to, if they were to realize their aesthetic potential. Once the artist has to deal with the fact of the nation, then the artist must place himself against this fact. Joyce would not be Joyce without Ireland, Faulkner not Faulkner without the American South. Flannery O’Connor writes, “The first product of self-knowledge is humility, and this is not a virtue conspicuous in any national character” (Mystery 35). Arguably, Whitman claims for himself too much.

11 Naturally then, one understands O’Connor’s affinity for Hawthorne who “knew his own problems and perhaps anticipated ours when he said he did not write novels, he wrote romances” (Mystery 38). In other words, O’Connor argues that the writer’s allegiance (her allegiance, as well as Hawthorne’s) is to a spiritual truth over and above a physical one, to the mysteries of death and grace over and above the logic of symbolism and myth. Thus, in O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” the Grandmother is destroyed as she reaches out to touch the Misfit’s face, and in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Jaffrey Pyncheon sits immobile in the parlor as he quietly chokes on his own blood.

12 The truths that these writers serve are illustrated as a consequence of the individual’s struggle against whatever deadens the soul. This sense of one’s spiritual bondage as a larger issue than even the physical bondage of chattel slavery is prevalent in Hawthorne’s work, and it is the source of some criticism, since writers and thinkers surrounding Hawthorne (and more popular than himself) had made the abolition of Southern slavery such an issue in their work, an issue that he only obliquely addressed. Following Hawthorne’s lead, Melville also developed a style in Moby-Dick (famously dedicated to Hawthorne) that was far more concerned with the illumination of enduring human truths than with criticizing contemporary myths of social or national identity, though this interpretation of Melville’s work is controversial, and I will take it up more thoroughly in the next Section.

13 Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, notes that “American attitudes toward American ‘greatness,’” which includes its sense of its own “specialness” and “altruism,” have “remained constant” (7). Hawthorne and Melville, however, recognized the falseness of this narrative. Biographer Brenda Wineapple asserts that Hawthorne was always concerned with “national hypocrisy […] whether he writes about Puritans, Tories, rebels, or transcendentalists,” perceiving that “America is conceived in liberty and oppression” (350 emphasis added). His “Chiefly About War Matters,” published in the The Atlantic in 1862, offended the magazine’s readers, according to Wineapple, “not because it frequently seems pro-Southern but because it is so virulently and unequivocally antiwar – and this during a war fought for such a palpable moral good” (352). “Chiefly About War Matters” skewers the Northern narrative just as much as the Southern, and it even turns on itself, as Hawthorne, adopting the voice of a Northern editor sympathetic to Lincoln, inserts editorial footnotes critical of the author (who is himself).

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14 One hundred and fifty years after its founding in 1857, The Atlantic, where Hawthorne published numerous essays, published “The Future of the American Idea,” a compilation of responses by notable Americans to the question, “What is the American Idea?” The Pulitzer-Prize winning essayist George F. Will writes, “Talk about ‘the’ American idea is dangerous because it often is a precursor to, and an excuse for, the missionary impulse that sleeps lightly, when it sleeps at all, in many Americans” (“Future” 20). The author Joyce Carol Oates remarks simply, “How heartily sick the world has grown, in the first seven years of the 21st Century, of the American idea!” (“Future” 22). Similarly, Hawthorne’s narrators implicitly question the “American idea,” as in the story “The Gray Champion”: “Here […] were the veterans of King Philip’s war, who had burnt villages and slaughtered young and old, with pious fierceness, while the godly souls throughout the land were helping them with prayer” (237).3

15 Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities, highlights this connection between nationalism and language, and in particular the role of print capitalism, which he argues served to standardize languages and to fix power amongst those who knew the standard dialect: The coalition between Protestantism and print-capitalism, exploiting cheap popular editions, quickly created large new reading publics […] and simultaneously mobilized them for politico-religious purposes [while also producing] Europe’s first important non-dynastic, non-city states in the Dutch Republic and the Commonwealth of the Puritans (40).

16 Not incidentally, it was in the Dutch Republic where the Pilgrims found relative safety from persecution in England before embarking for America, and it was in the Commonwealth of the Puritans where the Geneva Bible, which included extensive notes on interpretation in the vernacular language, was developed and printed. The Geneva Bible finally entered America via William Bradford and the Plymouth Pilgrims.

17 While Anderson makes the point that a particular standardized print-language is not necessarily associated with a particular nation (English language Britain and English language America are the obvious examples here), the issue is that from the establishment of Plymouth Colony onwards, English – not courtly French or church Latin – was the language of power in America and everyone had access to it. Language had never been an issue in the American nationalist movements. […I]t was precisely the sharing with the metropole of a common language (and common religion and common culture) that had made the first national imaginings possible (Anderson 197).

18 That Benjamin Franklin was a printer is not incidental to the development of a particular American identity.

19 Gellner’s and Anderson’s account of the interrelationship between language, culture, industrialization and nationalism is relevant because it directs us to the point that concomitant with the development of a context-free language – that is, a language and an idiom that is technically standardized and universally understood, but more importantly that serves to mask difference and to manufacture a (false) sense of shared destiny – has been the development of an American national mythology, and it is this mythology against which Hawthorne and Melville were the first strong American

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imaginative writers to place themselves, “un-masking” as it were, the false front of American Exceptionalism.

20 Thus Mikhail Bakhtin, while not writing specifically about nationalism, suggests what may now seem obvious, that the artist’s resistance to a single, monologic narrative is, at least in the American context, inherently anti-nationalistic because, in what he identifies as “artistic prose,” the author places narratives against themselves such that this dialogization penetrates from within the very way in which the word conceives its object and its means for expressing itself, reformulating the semantics and syntactical structure of discourse (284).

21 In other words, the “artistic” author is never satisfied with the unified, homogeneous language handed to him or her by the nation, the single narrative of national identity that serves to mask the complexities and paradoxes of “real” life. Rather, the author finds the fissures within the narrative, extrudes multiple dialogues, often in conflict with each other, and repacks their meaning. If Bakhtin is correct, then, insofar as Hawthorne and Melville, as artists, had to resist the predominant idiom, they had to resist American mythology, since for them it constituted the idiom. Such resistance is the act of un-masking. II. 22 In his short story “Earth’s Holocaust,” Hawthorne describes an enormous bonfire into which all manners of narrative are thrown by those who would purify the world of its worn-out symbols: “badges of knighthood” (887); “perfumed letters” and “a college- graduate, his diploma” (893); “marriage-certificates” and “bales of paper-money” (897); “the weight of dead men’s thought” (898), all “the plague of letters” (901); “priestly garments” (902), and even the Bible, which survives, minus “the finger-marks of human perfection” (904). The only item spared the fire, because it is overlooked, says the narrator, is the human heart, which a jilted lover “would willingly have flung” into the fire, “but could find no means to wrench it out” (893). The heart, “wherein existed the original wrong” cannot be purified, and thus it is fated to repeat the narratives that the impulse to reform had just erased (906).

23 This “wrong,” however, is not simply “original sin,” but, as Hawthorne describes in “The New Adam and Eve,” it is our every attempt set down “false wisdom” and “specious theories,” (761) every attempt to erect a system of ideas, a single and singular narrative, in lieu of acts of human empathy.

24 There is a distinction that may be made between Hawthorne and Melville and other mid-Nineteenth Century writers, a distinction that arises out of aesthetics. What Bercovitch argues about American “classic” writers, namely that “the dream that inspired them to defy the false Americanism of their time compelled them to speak their defiance as keepers of the dream” (American 180), may be most usefully said about the Transcendentalists, and in particular Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, a point Bercovitch aptly makes (American Epilogue). But Bercovitch also includes in this vein Melville and Hawthorne, in the sense that their invocation of doom and ambiguity, because of its cosmic, millennial, universal flavor (in a sense, because of its monologism), partakes of the same figural tropes as the exceptionalism that it resists. But Bercovitch’s argument about these two writers depends on a very particular reading of their work. I believe that the aesthetic operations employed by Hawthorne and Melville, most specifically considering their manipulation of perspective and metaphor, places them in a new category – not seeking to champion the premises of

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American Exceptionalism, and not primarily critical or conservative, either (as Bercovitch argues). Rather, the aesthetic manipulation of perspective and metaphor employed by Hawthorne and Melville opens up the possibility of rendering an experience that is finally outside of nationalism and its mythologies.

25 Jonathan Arac makes a similar argument in his American Literary Narrative as he argues that Melville and Hawthorne “set their work apart from national narrative” in that they “seemed […] to transcend and, implicitly, to criticize the world of common life” (4). He draws a distinction between the publication of “national narratives,” which he most closely associates, in terms of imagined fiction, with James Fenimore Cooper; “local narratives,” which he associates with writers such as Washington Irving and the Southwestern Humorists; and the advent of “literary narratives,” such as those, Arac argues, developed by Hawthorne and Melville.

26 Arac makes a particular argument about Cooper that serves as an interesting point of difference in relation to Hawthorne and Melville: “Cooper’s fictions operate as strategies of containment, that is, as imaginary techniques for negotiating the complexities of the life that both he and his readers were living” (11 emphasis added). For example, in Last of the Mohicans, Hawk-eye repeatedly asserts his rugged masculinity in contrast to the effeminate flute-playing of the hapless Puritan minister, David Gamut. Hawk-eye categorically rejects Gamut’s view of the universe as “fore- ordered” and instead asserts that he is the master of his fate (108-109), even as he fulfills the role of knight protector, safekeeping the honor of two white women against the blood-thirsty Iroquois. This sense of the rugged “maverick” as the independent yet noble defender of all things virtuous is a predominant theme of American Exceptionalism.

27 As Arac argues of Mohicans, “National narrative did not permit an alternative history of America in which the most heroic of Indians and the most passionate of mulattoes founded a new line” (12). Evidently, while it is permissible to reject the rigid framework of Puritan belief, it is not possible to subsequently dwell outside of a mytho-symbolic system – this time in the form of the unchallenged assumptions of white, Christian, masculine dominance and chivalric attitudes. Similarly, Bumppo’s women must be virginal and white, which is why he must reject Judith’s overtures of marriage in The Deerslayer. Such narrow perceptions are never crossed by Bumppo, and in fact he consistently defends their validity. Contrast this figure, however, with the “heroes” (or, rather, anti-heroes) drawn by Hawthorne and Melville. Hawthorne’s narrator Miles Coverdale, for example, following his withdrawal from the supposed utopian community of Blithedale, laments, “[...E]verything I meet with, now-a-days, makes me wonder whether I am awake” (155). He no longer knows who he is and thus cannot trust his perceptions. In this sense, he has lost his faith in the clear light of America and, although he has not made any broad political statements, the fact that Coverdale has drawn into question the veracity of any single narrative forms, itself, a criticism of the myths of national exceptionalism.

28 But this is not to say that Bumppo’s pronouncements should be confused with Cooper’s aesthetic operations, a distinction that Arac may too quickly dismiss. Certainly, even when Bumppo criticizes American settlers, as for example when he notes the wasteful, short-sighted attitudes of the pigeon shooters in The Pioneers, he does not ever enter into a reflective dialogue with himself. Bumppo consistently epitomizes a single point of view, one that comes to represent the typical “common man”: strong-willed but

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charitable, moral but secular, independent but faithful, industrious but realistic, and in the case of Harvey Birch in Cooper’s The Spy, unrelentingly patriotic.

29 But this is primarily Bumppo’s narrative frame, not necessarily the argument suggested by Cooper, who in fact seems sympathetic to his protagonist’s position as a victim of the American frontier’s voracious appetite for land, resources, and control.4

30 As the “unitary language,” or monologism, posited by Gellner has as a part of its syntax the patterns of allegorical language and symbolism that constitute the nation’s sense of itself, then in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Coverdale’s act of narration has as its consequence the splitting of this language into numerous conflicted and conflicting perspectives. In other words, as Coverdale satirizes himself, recognizing his own acts of self-deception, then his jibs and jabs at “truth,” always contingent and always self- limiting, call into question all attempts to frame any single narrative.

31 It is obvious that the IDEA of “America” and its religious, political and economic rhetoric and realities serve as Hawthorne’s touchstones in Blithedale, but this is only ancillary to the full argument of the novel, which is rendered in aesthetic terms. Insofar as Coverdale recognizes his aloneness and yet struggles against this recognition, as he recognizes in himself the “Veiled Lady” and seeks, albeit haltingly, to “unveil” himself, then he strives toward his own un-masking, which is always politically agitating and anti-nationalistic because it only emerges as a consequence of the recognition of the inadequacy of the “unitary language” and the adoption instead of a polyphonic, heterogeneous language discourse, or more simply, the adoption of a new way of seeing. Ethan Brand, in Hawthorne’s short-story of the same name, throws himself into the fire because he discovers that his insistence upon a single question is entirely incompatible with the complexities of experience. For him, the havoc he has wreaked cannot be undone. Similarly, Coverdale becomes aware of what he has done and not done that has resulted in the destruction of his community and his friends and lovers. Anderson, in Imagined Communities, points out what may seem an obvious fact on its surface: “[…P]ersonhood, identity […] because it cannot be ‘remembered,’ must be narrated” (204). Coverdale takes that step, he narrates himself, and so perhaps discovers that he belongs to no community at all. In this way, through its aesthetic operations – in this case Hawthorne's manipulation of the novel's point of view – the novel challenges the myth of American Exceptionalism, and in this way Coverale’s “failure” may be conceived of as only a prelude to a struggle that could lead to his eventual success – the discovery of a new way of knowing outside of the national narrative.

32 Hawthorne’s much more canonical The Scarlet Letter, as well as Melville’s Moby-Dick have achieved their status, I would argue, because they avoid direct confrontation with the crucial political issues of the day, such as slavery, expansionism, and women’s rights. The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick are set, respectively, at the date of America’s earliest origins and as far away from American shores as possible. Hawthorne’s Blithedale, and Melville’s commercially successful (because exotic) but less canonical Typee and Omoo overtly criticize American Exceptionalism – its utopian movements and its missionary zeal – but these novels have largely survived because of their author’s strong aesthetic successes in their other works.5 In fact, in White-Jacket, Melville’s novel just prior to Moby-Dick, the author makes one last appeal to American Exceptionalism, an appeal that Bercovitch points to as evidence of the power of “America” as symbol and promise in Melville’s work. It is a jarring passage to which Bercovitch points

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because, while it is particularly jingoistic, it seems particularly out of place in a narrative that is highly critical of monological thinking.

33 However, Arac makes an interesting observation, which is that while Hawthorne and Melville seek for themselves an “imaginary” space outside of politics, they nevertheless generate their most notable works during a period immediately prior to the Civil War, amid great public consternation and argument over the fate of the Republic. It could be argued that, while their novels do not directly confront, as does for example Stowe's Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the issue of slavery and national unity, they nevertheless are inspired by the conflict of perceptions raging around them at the time of their writing. Indeed, by the time of Moby-Dick, almost all traces of an appeal to American Exceptionalism have vanished in Melville, “America” as symbol, instead, sinking literally and figuratively to the bottom of the Pacific.

34 Melville, of course, explores the collusion of theocracy, autocracy and the consequences of despotism in Moby-Dick, and Ishmael seems to conclude that neither acquiescence – as embodied by Starbuck – nor outright rebellion against the world– as attempted by Ahab – will ultimately yield any positive result. And in Pierre, as biographer Andrew Delbanco argues, “Melville curses sentimental culture for refusing to recognize that its standards and practices are arbitrary and its collective memory as entranced by myth as that of distant savages” (205 emphasis added). Indeed, Delbanco finds ample political subterfuge in Moby-Dick, but these references are indirect and even arguable, such as Delbanco’s effort to draw a parallel between Captain Ahab and the Southern orator and pro-slavery political figure John C. Calhoun, but such is the state of criticism that emphasizes history and culture rather than aesthetics.6

35 However, Bercovitch portrays Melville himself as a purveyor of myth in that he “could not envision a different set of ideals – an antinomian self-sufficiency, a non-American course of progress – beyond that which his culture imposed” (Jeremiad 193). He finds that Ahab’s monomania and destruction implicitly “argue the need for the containment of individualism” (Jeremiad 192). In other words, Moby-Dick remains complicit with the myth of American Exceptionalism because it offers no viable alternative. But while this may be true of Pierre, which implodes upon on its own satire, it is not, I believe, true of Moby-Dick.

36 Rather, Ishmael – an outcast and a survivor – lives out of sight of the “American wood” of the ship’s construction (MD 426) which, like the Birnam wood of the witches’ prophecy, is but a false front, concealing truth, in this case the truth as it is symbolized by Pip, who is screwed to the Pequod’s bowels. The singularly un-Christian and hence putatively un-American Ishmael – Abraham’s dismissed son – survives Ahab’s madness, and thus his survival suggests that some “post-American” world is possible.

37 The characters imagined by Hawthorne and Melville come to terms with their aloneness – whether this aloneness takes the form of a physical separation or isolation, or a spiritual and psychological one – while rejecting themselves as exceptional. Hester finally lives her life outside of the symbol system that has condemned her, transforming her “A” into “Able,” but Dimmesdale, who as a Puritan minister is a representative of all that is exceptional, is dead. He cannot transcend the monologism that is his inheritance. Ahab’s isolation and his allegiance to his single-minded perception nearly doom Ishmael.

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38 Where Hawthorne and Melville do criticize specific cultural practices, such as flogging (in White-Jacket), or specific human weaknesses, such as greed and selfishness (as in The Blithedale Romance), they always temper their observations with a simultaneous argument, rendered in aesthetic terms, that any sort of monologism, even of the sort that promises charity and loving-kindness, is ultimately anathema to human growth and development. “There are no new truths,” laments Zenobia (Blithedale 206). Thus, the ultimate target of their cultural criticism is the single-voice narrative, a national narrative that, in America at least, speaks to every facet of the individual’s life.

39 It is true that Melville does sing America’s praises in nearly millennial terms in White- Jacket: “And we Americans are the peculiar chosen people – the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world” (151). However, he also blasts the single- minded pomposity of the ship’s captain, the injustice of flogging, and the absurdity of praying aboard a warship: [A] man-of-war is but this old-fashioned world of ours afloat, full of all manner of characters – full of strange contradictions; and though boasting some fine fellows here and there, yet, upon the whole, charged to the combings of her hatchways with the spirit of Belial and all unrighteousness (390 emphasis added).

40 These themes, however, do not fully reflect the novel’s concerns, though Bercovitch highlights the passage about the “chosen people” in his argument relating Melville to his thesis in The American Jeremiad. Rather, what emerges from the conclusion of White- Jacket is the narrator’s abandonment of the aptly named United States, and although the abandonment is accidental, resulting from his fall from the yard-arm, it results in his metaphoric rebirth: A bloody film was before my eyes, through which ghost-like, passed and repassed my father, mother, and sisters. [...] For one instant an agonizing revulsion came over me as I found myself utterly sinking. [...] I was conscious of a feeling like being pinioned in a feather-bed, and, moving my hands, felt my jacket puffed out above my tight girdle with water. [...] I whipped out my knife [...] and ripped my jacket straight up and down, as if I were ripping open myself. With a violent struggle I then burst out of it, and was free (394-95).

41 Thus, Melville turns aside from the polemical language he had earlier employed in favor of a moment of transformation and the adoption of a new perspective, a perspective that would be further problematized in Moby-Dick.

42 In the short story “Wakefield,” Hawthorne writes: “Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another, and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever” (298). Yet it is only through the experience of this loss of one’s “place,” both Hawthorne and Melville suggest, that one may hope to find oneself, even if, as for Ahab, that experience results in madness and death. III. 43 In The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, written at the end of Melville’s novel-writing career, the merchant, faced with the challenge of the “unfortunate man,” opines excitedly: Ah, wine is good, and confidence is good; but can wine or confidence percolate down through all the stony strata of hard considerations, and drop warmly and ruddily into the cold cave of truth? Truth will not be comforted. Led by dear charity,

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lured by sweet hope, fond fancy essays this feat; but in vain; mere dreams and ideals, they explode in your hand, leaving naught but the scorching behind! (73)

44 Herein, Melville summarizes the themes both he and Hawthorne had been addressing for a decade, from about 1850-1860, across all their major novels. The merchant’s wine is not enough to forestall the “scorching” of truth; and confidence, or faith in systems and symbols, cannot assuage its difficulties. For Melville, as for Hawthorne, this truth was nothing less than the fact that “the natural heart” had been “authoritatively admonished” (Confidence Man 73).

45 I would finally like to suggest that the merchant’s outburst in The Confidence Man reflects an attitude that is prevalent and powerful across much of modern American literature. It may be illuminating to apply the mode of aesthetic consideration of literary texts that I have outlined to a wide range of works, a few having direct connections to Hawthorne and Melville, but most having none, allied only in the sense of their discoveries and their manner of aesthetic operations.

46 Ernest Hemingway, writing in A Moveable Feast about his creative process, says, “I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them” (13). I find this a rather astonishing statement, considering that Hemingway, as an ambulance driver, had just witnessed the horrors of trench warfare and yet was turning to Impressionist painting to find something missing in the act of simple observation, but there must have been something in Cézanne’s work that hinted at more than simple “representation.”

47 It is no mistake that “Modern” American writers find their permissions and inspiration in the “Romantic” authors of 100 years previous, or in “Impressionist” artists of roughly the same period. O’Connor cites Hawthorne. Faulkner cites Melville. Wallace Stevens, in his essay “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting,” writes, “Poetry and painting alike create through composition” (163), which he argues is an effort of mind, a “labor of calculation,” and produces “deliciae of the spirit as distinguished from delectationes of the senses” (166). Or, as O’Connor writes more simply, “ ‘You can’t say Cézanne painted apples on a tablecloth and have said what Cézanne painted’ ” (qtd. in Mystery 75).

48 And Impressionism (and perhaps all modern art) is akin to the Romance, which, according to Hawthorne, “while it sins unpardonably, so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart – has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances [...] of the writer’s own choosing or creation” (House Preface 1); or as Melville writes in Mardi, “Some revelations show best in twilight” (716). O’Connor writes, “The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality” (Mystery 157). This may have been the revelation that Hemingway was searching for in Cézanne, that is “the truth of the human heart,” which Henry arguably experiences at the conclusion of A Farewell To Arms.

7 49 Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, for example, explores the same sense of violence and powerlessness found in Moby-Dick and The House of the Seven Gables. Sheriff Bell, facing a malevolence that he cannot subdue, quits his position and confesses his cowardice to his father, while the ultra-violent Chigurh professes a kind of absolute faith in destiny and in himself as a tool of fate. Bell says at the novel’s end,

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I’m bein asked to stand for something that I don’t have the same belief in as I once did. Asked to believe in something I might not hold with the way I once did. […] I’ve been forced to look at it again and I’ve been forced to look at myself. For better or worse I do not know (296).

50 In the same way that Hepzibah is forced to consider her withered reflection, Sheriff Bell has lost his faith in himself and his society. Chigurh, conversely, experiences no crisis of faith because, as he explains to the woman he is about to murder, “A person’s path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly” (259). His belief is Calvinistic, and it enables him to disassociate himself from the consequences of his actions upon others. He cannot swerve from his fate or, as he explains, permit others (notably his victims) to swerve from theirs.

51 In this sense, Chigurh is an Ahab. The lines on Ahab’s chart are etched on his forehead, his soul is “laid with iron rails” (Melville MD 143), just as Chigurh explains, “All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased” (259). Chigurh’s world is amoral because there are no choices to be made and hence no guilt or remorse, though also no possibility of joy.

52 Ahab, however, never ceases to recognize the paradoxical relationship between joy and grief, as he attests when he looks in Starbuck’s eyes, while Chigurh’s psychic wounding yields a different result, more akin to the attitude of The Misfit in O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” whose murder spree is also ruthless, unyielding, and seemingly motivated by a similar philosophy of fate. The Misfit’s creed, “No pleasure but meanness,” (152) is founded upon his recognition of an amoral world, a recognition prompted by the circumstances of his fate (the mystery of his incarceration and his father’s death) and his inability to “touch” anything divine. In fact, it is the Grandmother’s attempt to literally touch The Misfit that directly results in her murder. This is the moment, as O’Connor describes it, that the Grandmother “realizes, even in her limited way, that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots deep in the mystery” (Mystery 112).

53 But while The Misfit recognizes that “goodness” is at least possible, ironically remarking that the Grandmother could have been good “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” (153), Chigurh only believes in the “coin toss”– life and death as matters of simple chance.

54 Sheriff Bell, then, is similar to the Grandmother in that he too undergoes a transformation as he faces the ruthlessness of Chigurh. His encounter with what he suggests is “the devil” challenges what he had believed about himself and his community, and at the novel’s conclusion he attempts to “save” the “Mexican,” whom he believes has been wrongly prosecuted. The Mexican’s response, however, like The Misfit’s, is ruthless.

55 This sense of one’s perceptions as always contingent and liable to cancellation or revision by a stronger “Other” is at the heart of the conflicts illuminated by Hawthorne and Melville. As Coverdale cannot “see” the Veiled Lady, as Bartleby goes blind, as Hepzibah squints and as the “A” is a symbol that resists transformation, as The Misfit cannot read the papers that explain why he is imprisoned and as Bell confesses that the narrative of his “heroic” actions in Vietnam is false, what is revealed is the “truth” that no story, symbol system, or faith is ever entire or sufficient.

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56 President Kennedy, like all proponents of American nationalism, may wish to claim the artist as a citizen of the Great Republic, but these citizens, at least in the case of Hawthorne and Melville, are more likely to echo the views of Hester Prynne: For years past she had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions; and whatever priests or legislators had cherished; criticizing all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church. The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free (The Scarlet Letter 128).

57 Sheriff Bell is as much a victim as Hester of “the blackest shade of Puritanism” (Hawthorne Scarlet Letter 147) inasmuch as he withers under the unrelenting gaze of perceptions that he does not understand. It may even be worse for Bell, who suffers as a consequence of his shame and guilt but is afforded no means of expatiation.

58 The similar titles of No Country For Old Men and “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” both of which suggest the emptiness of men’s lives, speak to the similar concerns of the two pieces – the possibility of goodness in a violent world, the collision of fate and choice, the accounting of one’s soul. Their responses to these concerns are also similar, and these works succeed aesthetically because they allow for what O’Connor refers to as the “literal” (Mystery 113) resolution of each character’s struggle, by which she means that the writer has remained faithful to a deeper truth and avoided sentimentality.

59 In McCarthy’s The Road, however, the resolution does not arise naturally from the circumstances of the novel. This is illustrated, for example, by each novel’s different handling of the metaphor of “the fire.” No Country ends with Bell’s dream of his father carrying the fire out into the wilderness and away from Bell: Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. [...A]nd I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. An then I woke up (309).

60 But whereas Bell experiences a disconnection from the father and from the past, in The Road, the son explicitly receives “the fire” from the father and is reborn into innocence.

61 In a sense, the boy in The Road is a Billy Budd, painfully one-sided and almost impossibly innocent, for whom “to deal in double meanings and insinuations of any sort [is] quite foreign to his nature” (Melville, “Billy” 454). Billy Budd is as simple as the prelapsarian Adam, the narrator warns (457), just as the “son” of McCarthy’s novel appears destined to become the progenitor of a new, more spiritual, more loving race of human beings. Melville’s narrator, however, specifically warns against viewing the boyish Budd as “a conventional hero,” noting his stutter, which is particularly evident during moments of high emotion (458), whereas the boy of McCarthy’s novel is only pure love, cleaving to his father, then cleaving to his “second” mother, who, it seems, keeps her faith in God and thus does not despair. Budd may similarly cleave to his adopted father, Captain Vere, but the narrator’s point of view – his insinuations and satire – seems to purposefully problematize any single reading of Budd’s death, whereas the points of view presented in The Road are consistently simplified, described in terms of us and them, good and bad, black and white.

62 In this sense, The Road may be said to belong to that aesthetic tradition that flows out of Cooper and Stowe and their Puritan antecedents, such as Cotton Mather and John Winthrop, an aesthetic that fully confirms the myth of American Exceptionalism in terms of its monological, single-voiced perspective. Even the final chapter of The Road,

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which exhorts the great “mystery” of the universe (241), could be said to confirm the myth, just as Bercovitch has argued that Whitman and the Transcendentalists reconfirmed the myth, in terms of their co-mingling of the universal and the divine with the American. By contrast, Melville’s narrator in White-Jacket, as opposed to McCarthy’s narrator in The Road, intones: “There are no mysteries out of ourselves” (398). Melville clearly locates the locus of conflict within the self, not in a relationship to a Transcendental “Other.” In this way, Melville contradicts the Transcendentalists and those contemporary American authors searching for some answer to madness outside of the limits of human knowing.

63 Ishmael muses, “ ‘It maketh a marvelous difference, whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides […]’ ” (Moby-Dick 25). Insofar as the frost is on both sides for Hawthorne, Melville, and those American writers after them who share the same aesthetic sense, then there is no single, clear point of view. This is the mind that views the smoky painting hanging in the Spouter Inn from numerous points of view, drawing metaphors from each. It is the mind that turns to Cézanne’s “impressions” in the effort to write what is true. Paradoxically, then, because the aesthetic sensibility that animates these novels operates outside of the myth of American Exceptionalism, in effect “un-masking” the single-voiced narrative and its claims of authority, these works actually emerge as strong opponents of the nationalist impulse, even as they often seem to be saying nothing specific about America itself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 1991.

Arac, Jonathan. The Emergence of American Literary Narrative: 1820-1860. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005.

Bakhtin, M.M. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981. 259-422.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1978.

---. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.

Bloom, Harold. The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost. New York: Harper, 2004.

---. The Western Cannon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Riverhead, 1994.

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Deerslayer, or The First War-Path. New York: Modern Library, 2002.

---. The Last of the Mohicans. New York: Modern Library, 2001.

---. The Pioneers. New York: Penguin, 1988.

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Davie, Donald. “The Legacy of Fenimore Cooper.” Two Ways Out of Whitman. Manchester, England: Carcanet, 2000. 14-26.

Dekker, George. James Fenimore Cooper: The American Scott. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967.

Delbanco, Andrew. Melville: His World and Work. New York: Vintage, 2005.

Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America. New York: Holt, 2007.

“The Future of the American Idea.” The Atlantic. Nov. 2007: 13-62.

Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP: 1983.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. New York: Penguin, 1986.

---. “Chiefly About War Matters.” The Atlantic Monthly. 10.57 (July 1862): 43-61. 3 March 09.

---. “Earth’s Holocaust.” Tales and Sketches. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce. New York: Library of America, 1982. 887-906.

---. “The New Adam and Eve.” Tales and Sketches. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce. New York: Library of America, 1982. 746-63.

---. “The Gray Champion.” Tales and Sketches. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce. New York: Library of America, 1982. 236-243.

---. The House of the Seven Gables. Ed. Michael Davitt Bell. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.

---. Preface. The House of the Seven Gables. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 1-3.

---. “Wakefield.” Tales and Sketches. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce. New York: Library of America, 1982. 290-98.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribners, 1964.

Howe, Irving. Politics and the Novel. New York: Horizon, 1957.

Kaul, A.N. The American Vision: Actual and Ideal Society in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1963.

Kennedy, John F. “Remarks at Amherst College.” Historical Resources. 26 Oct. 1963. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. 1 Jan. 2008.

Reference+Desk/Speeches/JFK/003POF03Amherst10261963.htm>

Levine, Robert. “Sympathy and Reform in The Blithedale Romance.” The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. Richard Millington. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 207-29.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Knopf, 2006.

---. No Country For Old Men. New York: Knopf, 2005.

Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.” Melville’s Short Novels. Ed. Dan McCall. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 2002. 3-34.

---. “Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative.” Tales, Poems, and Other Writings. Ed. John Bryant. New York: Modern Library, 2002. 449-521

---. The Confidence Man: His Masquerade. Ed. Hershel Parker and Mark Niemeyer. Norton Critical Edition. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2006.

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---. Moby-Dick. Eds. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford. Norton Critical Edition. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2002.

---. Pierre, or The Ambiguities. Ed. Hershel Parker. The Kraken Edition. New York: Harper, 1995.

---. Typee, Omoo, Mardi. New York: Library of America, 1982.

---. White-Jacket or the World in a Man-Of-War. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2000.

O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, 1970.

---. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Collected Works. New York: Library of America, 1988. 137-53.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1973.

Wineapple, Brenda. Hawthorne: A Life. New York: Knopf, 2003.

NOTES

1. See A.N. Kaul, The American Vision, Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel and Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence. 2. All quotes from Melville are drawn from texts that utilize the authoritative Northwestern-Newberry Edition of the Northwestern University Press of the works of Herman Melville. 3. All quotes from Hawthorne (except “Chiefly About War Matters”) are drawn from texts that utilize the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne of the Ohio State University Press. 4. Donald Davie and George Dekker have both written perceptive accounts of Cooper's work that emphasize the aesthetic success of the author's novels, despite their obvious drawbacks. 5. Many critics have written about The Blithedale Romance and its relationship to American Exceptionalism, but not in terms of its aesthetic operations, as I am arguing. See Kaul, for example, or more recently, Robert Levine, “Sympathy and Reform in The Blithedale Romance”. 6. See Chapter 6 in Andrew Delbanco's Melville: His World and Work (149-75). 7. McCarthy's novel was transformed into an Oscar winning film of the same title in 2007 (Dirs. Ethan and Joel Coen).

ABSTRACTS

Utilizing Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson’s definition of “nationalism,” this article concerns American nationalism and aesthetics and argues that Hawthorne and Melville were

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among the first American imaginative writers to challenge the myth of American Exceptionalism in terms of their aesthetic operations, insofar as Hawthorne’s sense of ambiguity and Melville’s sense of multiple perspectives challenges the validity of any single monological narrative of national identity. The article further places this argument within the context of modern and contemporary American literature, with particular references to Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy, whose most recent novel, The Road, was released on film in the Fall of 2009.

INDEX

Keywords: aesthetics, Nationalism, American Exceptionalism, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Gellner, Flannery O', Connor, Cormac McCarthy.

AUTHOR

MICHAEL BROEK University of Essex (UK)- Brookdale Community College (NJ, USA)

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“Though Hermes never taught thee”: The Anti-Patriarchal Tendency of Charles Brockden Brown’s Mercurial Outcast Carwin, the Biloquist1

Evert Jan van Leeuwen

1 In writing about early American gothic fiction, Cathy N. Davidson has explained that “the struggling individual has, in the Gothic world, a remarkable potential for good but an equally powerful motivation (and opportunity) for corruption” (Davidson 215). Over the past decades, the reputation of Carwin’s narrative function in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) and the subsequent “Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist” (1803) and often discussed as a figure with a supporting role only, one of mystery, trickery or evil. Norman S. Grabo, for example, has interpreted Carwin as “a most shabby villain” and “the agent of stupid mischief rather than the engineer of evil” (Grabo 10). David Punter describes Carwin as “a rationalist friend of the family who claims to have been trying to teach Wieland a lesson in religious credulity” (Punter 167). Bill Christopherson finds Carwin to be “more red herring than protagonist” (Christopherson 34). Peter Kafer argues that “Carwin is just a mischievous wanderer with a special talent for projecting voices.” He concludes: “while Carwin may be some sort of villain, there is nothing heroic about him” (Kafer 129). In Carwin’s case, then, the interpretive stress has often lain on his potential to do evil. In light of Davidson’s argument about the inherent ambiguity of early American gothic, it is also possible to read Carwin as an outsider figure, unknown to the protagonists in the Wieland, and consequently mysterious, but with “a remarkable potential for good.” Ref?

2 If Carwin is freed from his conceptual straightjacket as gothic villain and is placed in the context of alternative cultural schemata such as Hermetic philosophy, and utopian idealism, he becomes a figure of potential heroic dissidence, a radical individualist who rejects not only the materialist tendency of his age but also the patriarchal foundations

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on which the social structure of the eighteenth-century American colonies was founded. The entrance of Carwin and his preternatural powers into the world of Mettingen sets up a contrast with the supposedly enlightened, Cicero-loving, Theodore Wieland. Carwin’s presence reveals that behind Theodore’s mask of enlightenment rationalism hides a staunch patriarch whose authority is founded on, and supported by, an age-old androcentric perspective on the nature of familial society and the power structures that operate it. Carwin’s presence in the novel highlights that the supposedly rational and free figures of this seemingly idyllic Pennsylvania community are more concerned with material possessions than philosophical ideals. This theme is further highlighted by Brown’s playfully subversive use of the concepts of possession and primogeniture: in the course of the novel, Theodore Wieland, under pressure from Carwin’s machinations, turns from a rational individual in possession of his father’s family estate to one possessed by the Father and obsessed by the possible loss of his material possessions, as well as his family, in the bodies of his wife and children. 1.Charles Brockden Brown and the Cultural Schema of Utopianism 3 In his 1815 biography of Brown, William Dunlap commented that the writer had had a “love for Utopian systems” (Dunlap 169). As a young intellectual in the early American republic Brown not only read the radical and often visionary philosophy of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, but also channelled his interest in utopianism into his writing . For example, inAlcuin (1798), aphilosophical dialogue about gender inequality, one of the speakers tells of a world he has visited in which men and women live on equal footing; where gender no longer functions as a power tool (see Fleischmann and/or Van Leeuwen for a detailed discussion of this text). Even though the speaker in Brown’s Alcuin professes to have actually visited this place, the dialogic nature of the text suggests that this genderless world is the product of a visionary imagination.

4 Brown’s early writings show a serious interest in the visionary imagination. Emory Elliot points out that in one of his earliest published pieces, “The Rhapsodist” (1789), Brown constructed the literary persona of “a hermit-explorer who has spent many months in the wilderness, meditating on human nature” (Elliott 220). Brown’s friend Elihu Hubbard Smith lends credence to the idea that the rhapsodist was not just a fiction, but also a persona for Brown himself as a thinker. Smith describes Brown at one point as living in “‘a world of [his] own creation’” (quoted in Watts 47). Like Brown’s rhapsodist persona, Carwin reveals in his “Memoirs” that he suffered from an “unconquerable…curiosity” which led him to the acquirement of the preternatural power of throwing his voice (Brown 228). And like Brown’s own rhapsodist persona, Carwin confesses that his thought was marked by a semi-utopian bent: “my fancy teemed with visions of the future, and my attention fastened upon everything mysterious or unknown” (Brown 227).

5 Importantly, in Wieland, Carwin’s type of idealism is contrasted strongly to the utopianism of his mentor Ludloe, a practical radical reformer who seeks literally to change the entire structure of civilization. Francis Bacon’s utopian text New Atlantis (1626) may well have influenced Brown in the creation of the figure of the radical Ludloe, who has a scheme of creating a secret island utopia from which the world will be invisibly guided towards a better state. This concept is very similar to Bacon’s idea of an island of scientific utopians who venture out into the world to secretly and invisibly influence and ensure its progress. Ludloe’s possession of secret maps locating

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an island in the Pacific suggests that he is actually already a part of, or he may be looking for, the mythical island of Bensalem that Bacon described in New Atlantis. Significantly, in the “Memoirs,” Carwin is attracted to but also continually resistant to Ludloe’s schemes. He eventually breaks with Ludloe and by the time he enters the Pennsylvania community of Mettingen he is hunted by his former mentor.

6 A story fragment unpublished in Brown’s lifetime, but printed in Dunlap’s biography, can shed more light on the nature of Brown’s interests in visionary utopias, as well as on the construction of his mercurial figure Carwin. The fragment titled “Signor Adini” shows once again Brown’s interest in solitary figures with mystical ideals and Hermetic leanings that enter seemingly idyllic societies to illuminate how they are in fact far from ideal. Adini is a mysterious old man who arrives in America in 1785 with a ten- year old girl, “a bewitching child” for whom “he displayed the most passionate fondness” (Dunlap 144). Like the wandering alchemists and Hermetic philosophers of yore, Adini is socially unclassifiable. He professes to come from Italy and while “his garb and aspect were that of a foreigner”, his speech was characterized by “the accents of an Englishman” (Dunlap 141). Rumours of aristocratic descent surround Adini, but his aspect is one of “intelligent solemnity”; the narrator speculates that he “could be a voluntary exile from a land in which his religious or political opinions might render his continuance dangerous” (Dunlap 142),in an echo of persecuted alchemists of old. Like the alchemists, Adini never participates in the budding marketplace but somehow he is never short of cash: “he had no visitants…appeared to have no pecuniary dealings with others, but was exact and liberal in his payments” (Dunlap 143). Like the alchemists of old, who were thought to possess the elixir vitae, Adini is never ill, and “though with some marks of age upon him, he enjoyed perfect health”, even though “his clothing was slight and varied not with the variations of temperance or seasons” and he was frugal to the extent that “he was unacquainted with a bed” and slept on “a mat or hair sopha” (Dunlap 144). For Adini, as for the legendary alchemists, “dry or wet, turbulent or calm, serene or gloomy, hot or cold, were differences with which his sensations appeared to have no concern” (Dunlap 167). While reserved in character, Adini “displayed in dubitable proofs of extensive knowledge and energies of mind” (Dunlap 149). While refusing to speak “of every topic that might lead to the mention of his own adventures,” and angry at any mention of this topic by others, Adini would talk of how “the purposes of daily life, philosophy and reason, demand a reformation,” of how “the whole mass, indeed, wants a thorough shifting.” All the characteristics leave the narrator to conjecture that “if he possessed supernatural power, he would doubtless exercise it, to the production of natural or universal happiness” (Dunlap 151-2). Adini thus echoes the legends of alchemists and hermetic philosophers who lived quiet, frugal and meditative lives working their powers for the common good (see Marshall).

7 Adini refuses to speak to the rational merchant Mr. Ellen about the latter’s adventures in the East, but shows his anti-capitalist leanings when he remarks polemically that it is curious how “Columbus…a desperate pursuer of wealth is adored as the benefactor of mankind” (Dunlap 153).Unsurprisingly, as a successful businessman, Mr. Ellen does not understand Adini’s diagnosis of the ills of his times, and decides that it is Adini who is mad. Ironically, Ellen tries to find out what ails Adini so he can find a cure, even though the reader is cajoled by Adini’s perspective. When Ellen’s son finds a map of New Holland Adini tells him: “to thee it is a realm of barren and inhospitable turbulence, populous only in the mute and scaly kind. To the better informed it is a world of intellectual beings, whose majesty is faintly reflected on the diminutive stage, and by

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the pigmy actors of Europe” (Dunlap 163). Adini finally reveals his reason for coming to America. He confesses to have “visited utopia” and to be in search for a successor. He claims to see in Mr. Ellen’s adopted son a “destined heir of greatness,” after which Ellen professes him truly mad (Dunlap 164). Although Brown never worked the story of Adini into a closed narrative, the figure of the outcast, with his utopian mindset and apparently mysterious alchemical powers clearly foreshadows to a large extent the figure of Carwin in Wieland and the “Memoirs.”

8 Brown’s imagination may also have been fuelled by legends of Johannes Kelpius’ “renowned group of ‘Saxon’ radical pietists,” who settled in Pennsylvania in the seventeenth century and dabbled in the mystical doctrines of Jacob Boehme, Jewish Cabbala and Rosicrucian philosophy. Kafer’s research suggests that Brown’s great- grandparents “almost certainly came into contact with the Hermits of the Wissahickon” (Kafer 114-115). In the context of the legends surrounding the hermetic order of Kelpius, Carwin’s flight from home into the wilderness and his subsequent development of preternatural powers becomes much less a product of Brown’s gothic imagination and more the product of a writer attuned to the historical legends of his native region. Kelpius and his group were religious millenarians, who settled in Pennsylvania with the conviction that it was there that the second-coming would take place and where a Christian Utopia on earth could be established. Carwin’s curiosity for secret knowledge, his interest in the future and attraction to utopian schemes seem like the products of Brown’s own visionary mind as well as the stories circulating in Brown’s culture about Pennsylvania’s immediate history. 2. Carwin: Gothic Trickster or Hermetic Philosopher? 9 Carwin’s power of biloquism, being able to throw his voice, is not attributed directly to the legendary alchemists and Hermetic philosophers of old. Yet Brown includes enough allusions to the cultural schema of alchemy in his texts to link in Carwin. Carwin’s acquisition of the power of biloquism is in many ways analogous to the way in which the Hermetic mystics would develop their alchemical art of transmutation. The Hermeticist’s method is one of isolation and endless repetition of privately conducted experiments in which the inextricability of mind and matter is a crucial element (see Marshall). Kelpius, for instance, maintained a private cave outside the communities common buildings, in which to meditate (see Sachse). Carwin also seeks out a sequestered natural space in which he “proceeded to experiment,” “repeated the effort, but failed,” exerts himself “with indefatigable zeal to regain what had once, though for so short a space, been in [his] power” and by such trial and error “gradually…subjected these finer and more subtle motions to the command of [his] will” (Brown 232).

10 Most alchemists, whether misguided materialists or venerable Hermetic philosohers, became outsiders due to the very foundation of their undertakings. Consequently, many faced stigmatization or at worst persecution from the authorities (see Marshall). Brown also links Carwin’s transgression of the established boundaries of human knowledge to the transgression of social boundaries. Carwin’s acquisition of preternatural powers lead directly to social marginalization. Instead of being cast out, however, Carwin uses his powers to try to better his own social standing by undermining his father’s patriarchal authority. Carwin intends to mimic the voice of his dead mother to order his father, who is “a confident believer in supernatural tokens,” to send him away from his paternal home to live with his aunt. However, “a

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thousand superstitious tales were current in the family” and Carwin is himself affected by his family’s credulity when at the moment he intends to dupe his father, the barn is hit by a lightning blot and burns down (Brown 234). Because Carwin remains intent on running away if his father does not allow him to leave willingly, his father lets him go.

11 At his aunt’s house, Carwin exchanges “detested labour” for “luxurious idleness” and spends “three tranquil years” in the city undertaking intellectual pursuits, as “each day added to [his] happiness, by adding to his knowledge.” While Carwin confesses that his aim in cultivating his intellect “was not the happiness of others,” he also states that he was “not destitute of pure intentions...delighted not in evil” and was “incapable of knowingly contributing to another’s misery” (Brown 238). In contrast to the legends of the Bavarian Illuminati and other secret societies that in Brown’s day were believed to work towards the secret subversion of the socio-political status quo, Carwin’s plans are highly individualistic at first, aimed at personal illumination and entertainment and apolitical at the outset. Carwin’s initiation into the secret world of the rationalist radical Ludloe, therefore, should not be read as a sign of initiation into an Illuminati style secret society, but as the consequence of his own curiosity for knowledge and intellectual interests.

12 Another significant textual detail in the “Memoirs” that links Carwin to the myth of Hermetic utopianism rather than Illuminati conspiracy, is his carefully delineated residence in Spain. Carwin is initially sent to Spain by Ludloe to be educated for some mysterious purpose. It is during his sojourn in Spain, however, that Carwin decides to break with the rationalist (Brown 252). This break seems to be brought about by the knowledge Carwin acquires from his learning. Peter Marshall explains that in the middle-ages Spain functioned as the gateway for Arabic alchemy into Europe. It is in this country that the Arabic alchemical texts were first translated into Latin. Toledo became “the fountain head” of the ensuing alchemical translation activities (Marshall 259). The medieval capital of Castile is also the residence of the mythical Emerald Tablet, the foundation text for Hermetic philosophy, which came to Europe form the east during the time of the crusades. According to Marshall this ancient alchemical text is “the most profound single work of spiritual alchemy to emerge from the whole hermetic tradition.” It carries the descriptive English title “The words of the Secret Things of Hermes Trismegistus,” and, according to Marshall, “it became the bible of the medieval alchemists in Europe” (Marshall 250). Significantly, Toledo is the setting of the final and most mysterious of Carwin’s adventures in his “Memoirs.” Even if Pleyel’s story in Wieland suggests that Carwin is learning from Catholic scholars, and his links with Ludloe seem to suggest his initiation into a secret organisation, Carwin never actually joins any order, nor does he enter into a Jesuit training school, as Jane Tompkins has suggested (Tompkins52). In his “Memoirs” Carwin states clearly that when he entered Spain he found a solitary cell in a convent in Castile where he studied “the treasures of Arabian literature” (Brown 254). Marshall explains that “European alchemy in the Middle-Ages was…entirely founded on the Islamic legacy which in turn was mainly based on ancient Egyptian sacred science”, much of which, in turn, could be found at Toledo in Spain (Marshall 258). Carwin’s tale of a sojourn in the heart of Spain, his self-induced confinement to a solitary cell and his reading of Arabic text, is hardly the stuff of Jesuit scholasticism or Illuminati political theory. It dovetails closely, however, with the legends of the alchemists and hermetic philosophers who sought individual illumination throughthe writings of Hermes Trismegistus, the mythical father of hermetic alchemy, whose principal text resides at Toledo along with so many

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other Arabic alchemical texts. The legendary alchemist Nicolas Flamel, for instance, travelled from France to Spain in order to learn more about the Hermetic art, only to become a philanthropist of sorts after discovering the philosopher’s stone with the help of his wife Perenelle (see Marshall 312-316). On his European journey, then, Carwin is treading in the footsteps left by legendary alchemists such as Flamel and foreshadows the journey of later literary alchemists such as Godwin’s St Leon (1799), whose name echoes another Spanish town associated with the cultural schema of alchemy.

13 In Wieland, Henry Pleyel describes Carwin as fully immersed in the customs and habit of the Spanish population. Just as i the mysterious stranger Adini evokes surprise by his perfect command of English, Pleyel is surprised to find that Carwin, in appearance and habit a Spaniard, spoke perfect English. Marshall observes that the Rosicrucian philosophers always “live[d] according to the manners of the countries in which they lived, only making themselves known by their seal and sign ‘R.C.’” (Marshall 362). This mythical order of seventeenth-century Hermetic philosophers could not only blend seamlessly into whichever culture they resided; they also professed to have magical powers by which they could move invisibly and swiftly over the world. Carwin’s curiosity to develop apparently supernatural powers, his action of entering into a Castillian convent and shutting himself up to read Arabian texts, his ability to fully disguise himself as a native wherever he goes and his command of languages all link his identity to that of the legendary hermetic philosophers, alchemists and Rosicrucians of old.

14 The final scene of the “Memoirs,” at Toledo, dramatises the rift between the more rational and political utopian Ludloe and the more visionary hermetic Carwin. The reader finds out that, against the wishes of Ludloe, Carwin has been meeting a lady in the cathedral, with whom he has exchanged mysterious emblems. It is significant that his mysterious dealings are with a woman and not another male schemer. Ludloe’s furious reaction to this event suggests that Carwin was acting contrary to the way in which he had planned his pupil’s education. During their final confrontation over this incident, Ludloe asks Carwin to “recall all the incidents of that drama, and labour to conceive the means by which my sagacity had been able to reach events that took place so far off, and under so deep a covering” (Brown 287). Ludloe, who early in the “Memoirs,” denies the supernatural, disclaiming immortality, alludes here, seemingly, to the presence of a great network of secret brothers that survey Carwin’s every move. His accusation that Carwin may be in league with an evil spirit can in this context be read as his turn from rational utopianism to the mystical Hermetic philosophy practiced by alchemists and Rosicrucians. On Bacon’s pacific island with its proto- freemasonry scientific utopia, the inhabitants (some of whom wear white turbans with a small red cross) make buildings of blue stone and call themselves the Society of Solomon’s House, linking them to Freemasonry (Bacon 251-258). Solomon’s temple features heavily in Masonic lore as well, and the presence of such details as blue houses and secret pacific islands in the “Memoirs” gives the impression that Ludloe’s schemes are linked to this type of secret fraternity, while Carwin’s obvious opposition to Ludloe’s schemes and his refusal to reveal his own acquired secret powers suggest that he is an individualistic visionary, even if he is not a proper alchemist or mystical Rosicrucian philosopher, like William Godwin’s St Leon (1799) or George Lippard’s Hermetic revolutionary Paul Ardenheim (1848)

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3. Carwin’s Anarchic Voice in Wieland

15 After fleeing from Ludloe’s angry grasp at the end of the “Memoirs”, and entering the scene of Mettingen in Wieland, one of Carwin’s first utterances to Clara’s maid is: “thou knowest as well as I, though Hermes never taught thee, that though every dairy be a house, every house be not a dairy” (Brown 47). While the nonsensical wisdom of Carwin’s address undermines the importance of its utterance, the reader is presented with yet another key element of the cultural schema of alchemy significant in the construction of the figure of Carwin. One identity of Hermes is that of trickster God in classical mythology, but this Hermes is not a teacher. The other Hermes, however, the mythical father of alchemy, became the most important teacher of alchemical wisdom in the West. This tablet supposedly is to be found where Carwin resided: Toledo. Carwin’s reference to Hermes as his teacher, and his residence at the very centre where eastern alchemy was translated into Latin for the European philosophers, implies Hermes Trismegistus, not just Hermes the trickster figure or messenger. Significantly, his entrance into the world of the novel Wieland brings about the dissolution of a seemingly utopian domestic community. Carwin unmasks this community revealing the old-world bulwarks of patriarchy: primogeniture, intellectual male superiority and a domestic ideology that ensures women’s inferior status.

16 According to Hermetic philosophy, individuals are microcosms of the earth, which is in turn a microcosm of the cosmos. The idea that all is one, and one is all, is one of the central Hermetic maxims of alchemy. Carwin’s lack of identity gives him the protean quality to fuse with others and change them from within, to change their world view. The figure of Carwin, in possession of esoteric knowledge with which he can alter the status quo, reveals one of the major faultlines hidden by Clara Wieland’s idyllic representation of utopian community at the eve of the American Revolution: its harmonious appearance is reliant on old-world patriarchal institutions that privilege androcentric culture above a utopian egalitarianism. Carwin is unclassifiable from the point of view of the two families at Mettingen, the Wielands and the Pleyels, whose rural community represents a microcosm of American society, which is still founded for its integrity on the acknowledgement of European, and in Wieland’s case, even noble ancestry (Brown 6). At Mettingen, “the law of male primogeniture” (Brown 34), the institution of marriage, the rights to property, “mercantile servitude,” all have come to overshadow the family’s history in religious radicalism (Brown 7). Francis D. Cogliano explains that in the decades leading up to the revolution “the family was the essential economic unit, as well as social unit” and even functioned “as a political institution,” therefore a microcosm of the state (Cogliano 11, 21). Carwin’s preternatural powers unmask the apparent idyllic community on the banks of the Schuylkill River as a community founded on repressed animosities not only between various faction within American socio-political life, but also within the family unit, in which the law of the father prevailed. Paradoxically, Cogliano explains, while revolutionary rhetoric foregrounded the concepts of liberty and equality, most Americans also “accepted that they lived in a society which was unequal and hierarchical,” (Cogliano 15) on both the macro and microcosmic level. Shirley Samuels argues that Wieland “emphasizes the violence within the family while ascribing that violence to the intrusion of a violent force, but that very force seems immanent rather than intrusive and the efforts to name it as ‘alien’ only emphasize its immanence” (Samuels 49).

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17 Carwin is of course not an alien. He is an American, but also a drifter who returns home after a sojourn abroad. What he has learnt while abroad has made him unrecognisable, however. On his return to Pennsylvania, Carwin has fully developed the special power of biloquism, which he had used initially to free himself from the authority of his father and his family. Now that he returns, more in control of his powers, and wiser, he functions more as an emblem for the (potentially destructive) domestic forces at play on the eve of the revolutionary struggle. Carwin’s biloquial powers can be said to embody the potentially dangerous revolutionary mentality that Benjamin Rush identified in his essay on the “Influence of the American Revolution” (1789). Rush wrote that “the minds of the citizens of the United States were wholly unprepared for their new situation. The excess of the passion for liberty,” according to Rush brought on “a species of insanity” called “Anarchia” (Rush 333). Carwin’s voice is clearly anarchic as he has the power to mimic and throw any voice in any direction he wishes, causing chaos and confusion wherever he goes and whenever he wishes. As such, he can be considered a solitary version of institutions such as The Sons of Liberty, who “operated as a semi-secret political organisation” fighting what they believed was the tyranny of British rule, and inspiring “more general” radical opposition “throughout the colonies” (Cogliano 35).

18 Importantly, while the confessional narrative strategy of the later memoirs would give Carwin his own voice, in Wieland, Carwin is represented to the reader through the androcentric lens of Clara Wieland’s first-person narrative. Carwin’s fluid identity and ability to speak both literally and ideologically from all positions are represented by Clara as a threat to the integrity of the social structure of Mettingen, but they simultaneously reveal that an alternative mode of existence is possible. Even if Carwin’s machinations, from the viewpoint of Clara, bring about the fall of the house of Wieland, this fall, in the larger scheme of things, is the first step in a longer process towards a more egalitarian future beyond the Jeffersonian and Federalist partisanship that marked the 1790s, allowing the integrity of the individual subject to be constituted not by ideologically prescribed social roles, buttressed by an ideology of gender polarization, but by a more inclusive sense of self that allows for multiple possibilities of individual identity.

19 In Hermetic philosophy, concretised in alchemical experiments, the utopian ideal, the perfect matter, the philosopher’s stone, is created by fusing opposite forces and transmuting them into something that is more than the sum of its parts. These forces are always gendered male and female, and it is only through the dissolution of these opposites that perfection can be achieved. Structurally, Carwin’s presence at Mettingen brings about several male/female confrontations in the novel that work to destroy patriarchal dominance. The first confrontation is significantly between Carwin himself and the narrator of the novel, Clara Wieland. In this confrontation, the seemingly independent Clara is unmasked as viewing Carwin through an androcentric lens, which supports specifically her brother Theodore’s authority and generally the socio-political status quo at Mettingen. Her reaction to Carwin’s presence and words, however, imbibe Clara with visions of an alternative mode of life, revealing the artificiality of this ideological position . The second confrontation is between Clara and her lover Pleyel. Pleyel’s suspicion of Clara’s infidelity triggers in him a hysterical reaction as he defends what he believes is his natural right: to Clara’s unquestionable devotion and his possession of her property. The final confrontation is between Clara and her brother

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Theodore, husband to Pleyel’s sister Catherine and the patriarch of the family and landlord of his estate. Wieland reacts with equal hysterics to Carwin’s machinations as he calls on the ultimate source of patriarchal authority, an omnipotent deity, to buttress the authority that his identity as heir and patriarch had given him, but which Carwin’s presence undermines: “God is the object of my supreme passion…I have thirsted for the knowledge of his will.. I have burnt in ardour to approve my faith and my obedience” (Brown 151). His apparently benevolent function as enlightened landlord and head of his family is reversed when under Carwin’s machinations Theodore becomes the tyrannical Lord of the land, destroying all who fail to comply with his creed.

20 Wieland opens with Clara’s account of her family history. Clara recounts how her father came to America as a disciple of the Albigensians and tried to convert the natives; how he became increasingly insular in his faith and eventually self-combusted in his temple; how his children, having inherited his estate, were given a classical education by their uncle – they worship a bust of Cicero – and managed to construct a “normal” enlightened life for themselves, turning their father’s temple into a house of culture and idealising the domestic family unit in a rural setting as the pinnacle of civilization. From their fanatical origin, this family, as Nancy Ruttenburg explains, has become “a family of complacent rationalists” (Ruttenburg 185). Significantly, Clara reveals that she views her past through an androcentric lens by writing that “we females were busy at the needle, while my brother and Pleyel were bandying quotations and syllogisms” (Brown 28). Clara’s uncritical account of traditional gender roles underscores Lori Merish’s argument that “in the binary logic of eighteenth-century Anglo-American gender formulations, women were private and consuming, not public and political, creatures” (Merish 30). Indeed, Clara views her world often from secluded private positions.

21 Looking through the window at Carwin’s physical appearance and dress, as he lingers on the edge of their family estate, Clara writes, There was nothing remarkable in these appearances; they were frequently to be met with on the road or in the harvest-field. I cannot tell why I gazed upon them, on this occasion, with more than ordinary attention, unless it were, that such figures were seldom seen by me except on the road or field. This lawn was only traversed by men whose views were directed to the pleasures of the walk, or the grandeur of the scenery. (Brown 46-7)

22 In keeping with her comment on the gender division of leisurely pursuits, Clara identifies identity with socio-political standing. Because the landscape of Mettingen that surrounds her own house is a lawn, a landscape garden, any citizen who traverses it should naturally be a gentleman of leisure. Clara confesses here that she failed to recognize Carwin as such a gentleman. His very physical presence clashes with her expectations. Carwin, however, ignores the social customs of the day and boldly proceeds not merely to enter their genteel domain of Mettingen, but walks straight up to the house Clara occupies and which is separated from the patriarchal mansion in which Theodore and his family reside.

23 The striking description of Carwin’s entrance into Clara’s world is worth quoting in full: On a sunny afternoon, I was standing in the door of my house, when I marked a person passing close to the edge of the bank that was in front. His pace was a careless and lingering one, and had none of that gracefulness and ease which distinguish a person with certain advantages of education from a clown. His gait

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was rustic and awkward. His form was ungainly and disproportioned. Shoulders broad and square, breast sunken, his head drooping, his body of uniform breadth, supported by long and lank legs, were the ingredients of his frame. His garb was not ill adapted to such a figure. A slouched hat, tarnished by the weather, a coat of thick gray cloth, cut and wrought, as it seemed, by a country tailor, blue worsted stockings, and shoes fastened by thongs, and deeply discoloured by dust, which brush had never disturbed, constituted his dress. (Brown 46)

24 This portrait of Carwin is complemented by Clara’s later words: And yet his forehead, so far as shaggy locks would allow it to be seen, his eyes lustrously black, and possessing, in the midst of haggardness, a radiance inexpressibly serene and potent, and something in the rest of his features, which it would be in vain to describe, but which served to betoken a mind of the highest order, were essential ingredients in the portrait. (Brown 49).

25 Like Adini, Carwin is portrayed as an oxymoronic figure incorporating the seemingly irreconcilable characteristics of noble sage and wandering beggar. His very oxymoronic physical appearance undermines the ideologies that prescribe social identities in the word of the novel. Ruttenburg adds extra weight to the reading of Carwin as an intermediate, dissident androgynous being when she argues that “all binary signifying systems, such as those that deduce essence from appearance, are undermined” when Carwin enters Clara’s world (Ruttenburg 185). Immediately after Carwin’s introduction, and Clara’s moment of mutual recognition with the hermetic stranger, her seemingly enlightened and stable world starts to disintegrate from within.

26 On hearing Carwin pronounce his Hermetic riddle to her maid, Clara immediately becomes infatuated with his voice, by the “degree in which force and sweetness were blended in them” (Brown 48). Her “heart overflowed with sympathy and [her] eyes with unbidden tears” (Brown 48). As her mind builds a picture around this voice she finds out that “this person was, in all visible respects, the reverse of this phantom.” The coarse and grotesquely proportioned Carwin pierces through the expectations raised by his own voice. The shock of misrecognition that leaves Clara in a state of bewildering awe about Carwin’s identity is the first obvious crack in the patriarchal ideology that underscores the social surface of Mettingen, which is shown to be upheld through a continual performance of expected role patterns. When Clara sees him she confesses that “with a confused sense of impropriety…his face was as glowingly suffused as my own” (Brown 49). Not bent on performing an orthodox masculine role in either public or private domains, not a gentleman but neither an ordinary field hand, Carwin’s dissident androgynous presence turns him into an empty signifier allowing both men and women to project their identity onto his fluid identity.

27 Carwin is attractive to Clara because he embodies an alternative identity to that of the other men in her life, her supposed lover Pleyel and her brother Theodore, or even her own sense of self as an independent woman. In the course of the narrative, Carwin’s becomes a dissident figure because his unmanly posture, yet wiser-than-thou attitude undermines Theodore’s and Pleyel’s traditional masculinity, underscored by patriarchal ideology. Significantly, it is exactly the oxymoronic nature of Carwin’s identity, as a vagabond with great, almost mesmeric, intellectual presence and a “magical and thrilling” voice which allows Clara, standing on the threshold of her own house, to alter her ideological perspective for a moment (Brown 64). Just looking at this deformed vagabond and hearing him speak gives her ideas about the possible reformation of the established socio-economic structure. She reflects on “the alliance

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which commonly subsists between ignorance and the practice of agriculture” and she “indulged [her]self in airy speculations as to the influence of progressive knowledge in dissolving this alliance and embodying the dreams of the poets.” She “asked” herself “why the plough and the hoe might not become the trade of every human being, and how this trade might be made conductive to, or at least, consistent with acquisition of wisdom and eloquence” (Brown 47). While Clara’s tone of lament for the loss of the rural estate of Mettingen throughout her confession seems to underscore her androcentric worldview, she here, for a moment ruminates on a utopian ideal of shared labour which would leave all the necessary time to cultivate the intellect. The poets are likely to be the kind of utopians Brown was interested in at the time, or figures such as Brown’s Adini. The momentary nature of this vision of social utopia, however, shows how much Clara has made the gender role allotted to her by the patriarchal society of Mettingen part of her individual identity. She writes, “weary of these reflections, I returned to the kitchen to perform some household office” (Brown 47). Under pressure to conform, Clara reverts to the performance of domestic duties to take her mind off Carwin and the visions his presence induce.

28 Merish explains that “the new bourgeois ideal [of womanhood] stressed woman’s moral value, her spiritual depth rather than polite surface, and typically extolled ‘the passive virtues’ of modesty, humility, and discretion coupled with the more practical skills of frugality and industriousness” (Merish 61). Clara reverts to this prescribed role to deny Carwin, whose power has already effected a momentary change in the way she views herself and her position within society. What is revealed in the moment that Clara identifies with Carwin’s identity, however, is that as a woman she is restricted in her sense of self because she is reliant on her brother’s authority as landlord and family patriarch. While she seems independent at first, she occupies her own house only at the discretion of Theodore who owns the property and who occupies the paternal mansion. Clara’s description of Pleyel’s sister, the almost literally invisible Catherine, highlights how much her pseudo-independent lifestyle has not altered her tendency to view women’s social position through an androcentric lens. In fact, her transparent portrait of Catherine makes visible the androcentric point of view adopted by all members of the Wieland community. She describes Pleyel’s sister as “clay, moulded by the circumstances in which she happened to be placed” (Brown 71). Catherine indeed only materialises in the novel as Pleyel’s sister and later as Theodore’s wife, the mother of his children and the victim of his paranoid delusions. In these socially prescribed female roles, Clara illustrates to what extent she has adopted as natural the ideology of gender polarization that through the institutions of marriage, property and primogeniture structure Mettingen. That Theodore marries Catherine and Clara is supposed to marry Pleyel underscores the force of the ideology of gender polarization and the illusion of male/female complementarity. . This interfamilial exchange of wives between Theodore and Pleyel is the perfect homosocial move to ensure both their family lineage and fortune. 4. Carwin as Anti-Patriarchal Dissident in Wieland

29 While Carwin pierces through Clara’s androcentric worldview momentarily at the outset of the story, without challenging its dominant position, his antics threaten both Pleyel and Theodore’s sense of self as naturally privileged men. In contrast to Clara’s portrait of them as rational and scientifically oriented individuals, both men react hysterically to Carwin’s presence and his use of biloquism. Somewhere between the

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fictional timeframe of the “Memoirs” and Wieland, Pleyel had met Carwin in Spain. The rationalist Pleyel is blind to the esoteric nature of Carwin’s studies. The American is visiting Spain to see the ruins of the Roman Empire, a neo-classical pilgrimage of homage to masculine valour and patriarchal power that contrasts directly to Carwin’s hermit existence and individual studies of Arabian texts in a cloister cell. Unsurprisingly, Pleyel recounts, “on topics of religion and of his own history, previous to his transformation into a Spaniard, [Carwin] was invariably silent” (Brown 63). From Pleyel’s point of view this seems indeed curious, but with the knowledge gained from Carwin’s “Memoirs,” it is clear that his professed study of the Catholic faith was a cover-up, and that he is an American who has been able to don the mask of Irishman, Spaniard, and Briton, and has thus become invisible to his own people. Pleyel’s “suspicion that his belief was counterfeited for some political purpose” fits exactly what will be revealed in the course of the novel as his hysterical masculinity, while it also unmasks him as a federalist in the grip of conspiracy fears that challenge his sense of innate superiority (Brown 63).

30 Like the mysterious Adini, Carwin “studiously avoided all mention of his past or present situation…even the place of his abode in the city,” once he is again in Pleyel’s company (Brown 66). Like Adini, he is a stranger with “intellectual endowments” which are “indisputably great,” a behaviour modelled on “uncommon standard” and in possession of “a mind alive to every generous and heroic feeling” (Brown 65) In trying to place Carwin within the ideological parameters that give individuals a recognisable identity in her world, Clara confesses that, to all of the inhabitants of Mettingen, Carwin “afforded no ground on which to build even a plausible conjecture” about his identity, leaving them immediately worried whether, “his powers had been exerted to evil or to good” (Brown 66). This last phrase shows how much both she and her family are formed by world view that defines the world according to binary oppositions. They cannot accept an open verdict on his social identity and past but need to position him either on the right side or the wrong side of the laws that validate their lifestyle and social relations.

31 Unsurprisingly, Carwin is hounded by the authorities. Ludloe, Carwin’s one-time mentor in the “Memoirs,” but now his foe, has chased his former ward across the Atlantic and traced him to Philadelphia, where he brands him The most incomprehensible and formidable among men; as engaged in schemes, reasonably suspected to be, in the highest degree, criminal, but such as no human intelligence is able to unravel: that his ends are pursued by means which leave it in doubt whether he be not in league with some infernal spirit: that his crimes have hitherto been perpetrated with the aid of some unknown but desperate accomplices: that he wages perpetual war against the happiness of mankind, and sets his engines of destruction at work against every object that presents itself. (Brown 121)

32 Once Carwin returns to America from a mysterious sojourn in Europe, he is pictured as a superhuman villain intent on attacking all that mankind holds dear. In Wieland the mercurial stranger with secret magical powers stands on the wrong side of the law – from the law’s perspective that is. In a world ruled by rationalist creeds, any individual pertaining to know more than the law allows becomes a threat to its integrity and must be repressed. Carwin occupies this abjected position.

33 Carwin’s appearance turns the rationalist and classical scholar Pleyel into a patriarchal tyrant. Pleyel, Fritz Fleischmann rightly points out, is “a patriarch of the first order”

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and “is neither nice nor reasonable” (Fleischmann 46). Cunning as a seducer, he attempts to move into the socio-political vacuum he perceives has opened up in the Wieland family due to Theodore’s hesitancy to take up his prescribed role as patriarch. Fleischmann also argues that “Pleyel’s attitudes toward women accord with his monarchist and feudal inclinations” (Fleischmann 47). Pleyel, described by Clara as “the champion of intellectual liberty,” who “rejected all guidance but that of his reason,” is also clearly a representation of the dominant ideology in which men like Pleyel pull the strings (Brown 23). Pleyel, hysterically trying to ensure the stability of Mettingen for his own benefit, establishes himself in Clara’s formerly independent household as her guardian. He had already urged Theodore, “by the law of primogeniture,” to claim his ancestral patrimony in Germany, to ensure the stability of the Wieland family, a stability he needs to be able to marry Clara (Brown 34). When Theodore is unwilling to perform what Pleyel believes is his prerogative as the head of the household and when Carwin’s machinations, moreover, show a fissure appearing in the patriarchal foundations of the house, Pleyel aggressively defends his supposed right to be the possessor of Clara.

34 Carwin’s machinations are a trick aimed at Pleyel’s character, as much as they are aimed at Theodore’s religious credulity. It is Pleyel who Carwin knows best and who immediately condemns Clara, and not Carwin, for her supposed liaisons with the mysterious stranger. While Clara’s confessional narrative and tone of lament foreground the disastrous effects of Carwin’s dissident androgynous presence and anarchic voice, the actions she recounts show up the posturing of the dominant males at Mettingen who hysterically defend their masculine privilege against Carwin’s dissident intrusion.

35 Clara’s androcentric viewpoint is also underscored by her lament that her “golden vision” of Pleyel’s silent devotion to her “melted into air” (Brown 74). By now hysterical, Pleyel becomes the stalker of Clara and Carwin. Thinking that he has unmasked their illicit liaison, Pleyel unsurprisingly condemns Clara to “a ruin so complete – so unheard of…” that even he cannot express its exact nature (Brown 95). For Pleyel, Clara’s integrity as a woman is defined by her chastity and her adherence to Theodore’s patriarchal will and her reliance on Pleyel’s protection. As Samuels explains, in Wieland, the family is initially presented as a retreat, or “sweet and tranquil asylum”…from the intrusions of the outside world, but the distinction between home and world, radically personified by the figure of the intruding Carwin, gets blurred as the destruction seen to lurk without is discovered within…for the family to keep its identity as an ‘asylum,’ the outside world must be posited as a threat. (Samuels 56)

36 Clara’s association with Carwin, who clearly stands outside of Pleyel’s patriarchal powers, reveals the independence of which she is capable, marking her , to Pleyel, as “the most specious, and most profligate of women” (Brown 96). Carwin uses his powers to play at once the role of adversary and saviour, allowing Clara to find her own independent desire, loose from the shackles of social custom which would have seen her safely married off to Pleyel. That she marries Pleyel at the end of the novel, just as St Leon vindicates his son’s adoption of an aristocratic masculinity, says more about her continuing reliance on an androcentric worldview and patriarchal ideology for individual integrity than about the evil nature of Carwin.

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37 Carwin reveals himself to Clara in her room and Clara now is sure he holds “supernatural power.” Carwin explains, in a solemn and earnest voice, which grows more passionate as he continues, that Clara’s belief that she is in his power and on the brink of ruin are “groundless fears.” Carwin expresses his idea that a sexual union between them “would sanctify my deed” and would not be the “injury” that Clara believes it would be because of her interpellation into the dominant ideology that bars women an independent sexuality. This suggests that his intention was to free Clara from perceiving herself through an androcentric lens by appealing to her inner most desires. Carwin tells Clara, however, that if “this chimera” – the significance of chastity to a woman’s identity – is “still worshipped” by her (meaning that she still submits to Theodore and Pleyel’s masculine will to power), he would “do nothing to pollute it” as he “cannot lift a finger to hurt” her. He says, “the power that protects you would crumble my sinews, and reduce me to a heap of ashes in a moment.” This power is the coercive nature of an ideology of gender polarization that causes hysterical men like Theodore and Pleyel to aggressively protect Clara from dissident figures such as Carwin. Carwin’s point seems to be that Clara needs to start to think independently, to take off her androcentric glasses and look at the world as an independent individual, with her own desires (Brown 83-86).

38 Carwin’s oxymoronic identity, which gives him a dissident presence within the patriarchal community of Mettingen, triggers in Theodore (as it had done with Pleyel) a hysterical response, which takes shape as an antinomian religious fanaticism greater in its delusion than his father’s Albigensian faith. Clara’s confession reveals that Theodore initially had republican inclinations. Clara explains that, in reaction to Pleyel’s urge that he should claim his patrimony, Theodore had wondered: “was it laudable to grasp at wealth and power even when they were within our reach,” and wonders: “were not these two great sources of depravity?” Theodore initially refuses to play the masculine role allotted to him by the dominant ideology and by his family tradition. His father, whose unorthodox religious creed made him refuse any authoritative posture, functioned as a model for Theodore’s own unorthodox behaviour at the outset of the novel. Clara explains that Theodore believed “power and riches were chiefly to be dreaded on account of their tendency to deprave the possessor. He held them in abhorrence, not only of instruments of misery to others, but to him on whom they were conferred. Besides, riches were comparative, and was he not rich already?” (Brown 35).

39 Viewed through Clara’s androcentric narrative perspective, Theodore is presented to the reader as reluctant to don the mask of either commercial businessman or feudal aristocrat. It is the pressure that the more dominant Pleyel exerts on Wieland to conform to the expectations laid on him by an increasingly liberal-capitalist society that leads Theodore to increasingly rely on that other source of tyrannical masculine authority: an omnipotent deity. As Watts argues, “if crumbling patriarchal domination created a vacuum in Wieland, the force of religious fanaticism filled it with unfortunate effect” (Watts 83). Clearly, Carwin’s dissident presence and his anarchic voice trigger in Theodore not a move towards the very ideal social vision he seems, like Clara, to harbour, but a hysterical turn to religious fanaticism as a means to empower himself, as well as a means to try to repress Carwin’s dissident androgynous presence and more powerful yet anarchic voice.

40 Theodore’s brutal massacre of his whole family is clearly representative of the aggression and masculine will to power that lay hidden underneath the idealistic veil of

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liberal capitalist ideology with its bifurcated ideal identities of Franklinesque men and Republican mothers. The evil that Carwin’s machinations bring about, as Clara by the end of her tale has to confess, “owed their existence to the errors of the sufferers” (Brown 223). The novel’s plot, like the plot of St Leon, is not driven by Carwin’s apparent supernatural powers as such, but by the hysterical reactions of the figures who are confronted with the androgynous presence and anarchic voice of the mercurial figure. Theodore Wieland’s massacre of his family, as narrated by Clara, becomes a travesty of the type of authoritative manhood that the early American social structure vindicated because of its grounding in patriarchal ideology and reliance on an androcentric worldview. His obsession with extreme authoritarianism and his Manichean outlook on good and evil leads him towards a grotesque gnosis that turns him into the ultimate despotic Lord of the Land.

41 Even though the novel ends with the complete demise of the estate of Mettingen that Theodore had “ruled,” Brown’s novel is not so “shocking and uncharacteristically negative” as Jane Tompkins has argued (Tompkins 44). Brown introduced into the world of the Wielands and Pleyels his mercurial figure Carwin, who refuses to perform the prescribed roles available to men and women, and who willing adopts male and female voices and social positions, so as to unveil the artificiality of the hegemonic patriarchal order. Christopherson argues that “by the end of the novel America has been abandoned” (Christopherson 8). He is only partly right. In Wieland, the protagonists who survive Theodore Wieland’s killing spree, indeed abandon America. Clara recovers from the illness brought on by her brother’s insane killing spree, and subsequently marries Pleyel and retreats to France. This ending, articulated the reconstitution of her androcentric point of view and the couple’s reliance on the traditional old-world patriarchal structure that Carwin’s presence had caused to crumble. Their return is a return to the past, geographically as well as ideologically.

42 Even though Clara’s voice is dominant in the novel, her story contains an alternative point of view through the continuing story of Carwin. He is the only one who remains in Pennsylvania after the fall of the house of Wieland. Curiously, Clara does not ruminate on any further mischief he might cause but conjectures that he is “probably engaged in the harmless pursuit of agriculture” (Brown 219). While the novel ends with the narrator’s celebration of a patriarchal marriage and a lament for a lost idyll, Carwin’s fate expresses a potential celebration of eternal fluidity and continuous change. Carwin’s interference in the new-world microcosm has in fact made possible an alternative vision. Wieland contains a utopian vision of the future since Carwin has managed to purify Pennsylvania from the old-world ideologies that still structured the society that inhabited the region, and in doing so has re-established the utopian potential of the geographical space. Leiden University, the Netherlands Bacon, Francis. Essays and New Atlantis. New York: Walter J. Black, 1942. Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1994. Christopherson, Bill. The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown’s American Gothic. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1993. Cogliano, Francis D. Revolutionary America, 1753-1815. London: Routledge, 2000. Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

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Dunlap, William. The Life of Charles Brockden Brown. 2 vols. Philadelphia: James P. Parke, 1815. Elliott, Emory. Revolutionary Writers. New York: Oxford UP, 1982. Fleischmann, Fritz. A Right View of the Subject: Feminism in the Works of Charles Brockden Brown and John Neal. Erlangen: Palm and Enke, 1983. Grabo, Norman S. The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1981), 10. Kafer, Peter. Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 2004. Marshall, Peter. The Philosopher’s Stone: A Quest for the Secrets of Alchemy. London: Macmillan, 2002. Merish, Lori. Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth- Century American Literature. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror. 2nd ed. Vol 1: The Gothic Tradition. London: Longman, 1996. Rush, Benjamin. “On the Different Species of Mania,” The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush. Ed. Dagobert D. Runes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1947. 212-219. Ruttenberg, Nancy. Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Sachse, The German Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania, 1694-1708. Philadelphia, 1985. Samuels, Shirley. Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Watts, Steven. The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Gothic, Alchemy, Hermetic Philosophy, Visionary Utopianism, Patriarchal Ideology Charles Brockden Brown, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Francis Bacon, Benjamin Rush

NOTES

1. This article is a revised and updated version of part two of chapter four of my unpublished PhD dissertation: “Anarchic Alchemists: Dissident Androgyny in Anglo-American Gothic Fiction from Godwin to Melville”. The dissertation was successfully defended at Leiden University, the Netherlands on the 7th of September 2006 (my PhD supervisor was prof.dr. Theo D’Haen, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium; the external examiner was prof.dr. Paul Giles, Oxford University, UK).

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ABSTRACTS

This article traces the allusions to the utopian cultural schemas of alchemy and hermetic philosophy in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and “Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist” in order to show that the mysterious anti-hero Carwin does not have to be cast in the role of gothic villain but instead can play the part of marginalised utopian idealist, whose dissident presence in the novel reveals that the seemingly enlightened community of Mettingen is in fact reliant on old- world patriarchal ideology to ensure its stability.

INDEX

Keywords: Gothic, Alchemy, Hermetic Philosophy, Visionary Utopianism, Patriarchal Ideology, Charles Brockden Brown, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Francis Bacon, Benjamin Rush

AUTHOR

EVERT JAN VAN LEEUWEN Leiden University, the Netherlands

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Militia or Regular Army? The Debate on the Character of the American Army during the Revolution

Tal Tovy

1. Introduction

1 During the period from the end of the war with Britain until the confirmation of the Constitution (1783-1787), a fierce political struggle took place in the United States regarding the nature of the government in the new political entity that had just been formed. Besides the discussion about the political, economic, juridical and social powers of the government, there was also a discussion on the questions regarding the position, nature and perception of the army.1 When the Americans began dealing with the nature of the army in the post-revolutionary period, they already had a military past that was rife with wars, beginning with the early British colonies in North America and their battles with native American-Indians. At the end of the 17th century the American colonies took part in European power struggles, mainly those between Britain and France.2

2 While many argued for continuing the system of militias, which meant continuing the responsibility of the states, there were those who argued that a central government also needed to have a military force that would be based on a regular army, a navy, a system of forts, arsenals, a military industry and a military academy for professional officers.3 The most outstanding and important study on the debate concerning the post-war character of the army is that of Richard Kohn,4 who deals with the disagreements between the federalists and the anti-federalists. But the book positions this debate within the general discussions about the power and authority of the central government in relation to geo-strategic threats against the new republic. There is hardly any discussion of the assumption that those who wanted a regular army had argued for this because of their military experience in the revolution. The new military mechanism needed to be adapted to American liberalism, giving serious consideration to the traditional fears of a permanent standing army as a body that might injure the rights of the individual and society.

3 This article presents an additional point rarely covered in detail elsewhere: The decision to set up a regular army based on the eighteenth century European model

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(prior to the French Revolution) also came from the experience of military operations in the revolution, especially in the southern colonies.

4 In the historiography about the American Revolution there is a fascinating debate about the place occupied by the militia in winning the war.5 Therefore, an additional contribution of this article is the attempt to correlate the historiographical debate (on the degree of military efficiency of the militia and its contribution to winning the war) with the perception of George Washington regarding the military system that was necessary for the United States during the course of the war. One should ask the question: If the militia system was successful in the opinion of those who claim it had led to victory in the revolution, why was there a desire to set up a regular army both during the war and after it in a society that was apprehensive of this kind of army? Also, why was it necessary to make such a far-reaching reform in the structure of the militia?

5 The article will deal mainly with George Washington, who was the central figure in the attempt to set up a regular army during the revolution. The answers to the questions raised above will be based on an analysis of the extensive correspondence that Washington conducted with various personalities during the war, with an emphasis on the period in which the fighting took place in the south, as seen through the instructions and contacts that Washington had with the commander of the American forces in the southern arena, General Nathanael Green.6 From the analysis of these letters it will be possible to determine how Washington perceived the place and function of the militia during the American Revolution and how this perspective influenced his desire to set up a regular army. II The Debate on the Army 6 Those in support of the establishment of a regular army in times of peace declared their position in a series of manifestos published in the New York press between September 1787 and August 1788. In The Federalist, No. 8, there is an insistent call for the establishment of a regular army. For Alexander Hamilton, its author, the presence of regular armies in Europe averted the possibility of surprise conquest, rapid destruction, and swift defeat. Although the colonialists valued their liberty, the absence of a regular army would lead to liberty being exchanged for violent destruction of life and property.7

7 These principles can also be found in the document that George Washington had written in May 1783 at the request of Hamilton for the Congress. This was “Sentiments on a Peace Establishment,” and it contained the recommendations of Washington for the future structure of an American military force. Washington argued that the colonies should maintain a standing army as the first line of defense in case of surprise attack by the European powers. He also asserted that far-reaching reforms should be made in the militia, and that in case of emergency it would be placed under the command of the regular army.8 The plans and proposals of Washington for the militia can be found in The Federalist, No. 29, also written by Hamilton.9

8 Washington’s document may be defined as one of the most important founding documents of the American army. Although it was not accepted in full until the reforms of Secretary of War Elihu Root in 1903, many of its requirements, especially the far- reaching reform in the structure and operation of the militia, were introduced.10

9 The logic behind the federalists’ wish for a regular army in peacetime is clear, in spite of the fact that the opposition to a regular army was one of the main reasons for

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protest by the colonialists in the days preceding the revolution. The reasons for the apprehensiveness about a regular army can be found in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the colonies, especially in the radical political ideology of the English Whig party that developed after the military dictatorship of Cromwell.11

10 The issue becomes sharper in view of the fact that the colonialists admired the Roman Republic, including its military system.12 This system is based on the citizen who is recruited during wartime and returns to his ordinary civilian life at the end of his period of service. Numerous comparisons were made in the colonies with the history of the Roman Republic. For example, George Mason, one of the important revolutionaries in Virginia, argued even before the outbreak of war with Britain that the colonialists should continue to adhere to the republican tradition of choosing militia commanders. Mason’s argument was that as long as the Romans preserved the republican nature of the army they succeeded in conquering an empire and in maintaining their political and social freedom. When this system was abandoned the Roman Republic fell.13

11 The comparisons with the Roman Republic continued during the period of the revolution as well, when the senior commanders compared themselves to the esteemed figures of that republic. Nathanael Greene was Scipio Africanus, the destroyer of Carthage; Washington resembled the young Cato, the tribune who struggled against the dictatorship of Julius Caesar. After the revolution it was said about Washington that he gave up all his authority and military power exactly as Cincinnatus had done.14 The colonialists regarded America as a renewed realization of the Roman Republic and warned against political, social and economic trends that would lead to its fall.

12 A paradox can therefore be found between the fears of a regular army and the desire to establish one in peacetime, something that is illustrated further in the letters of George Washington written during the years of the revolution. Washington often speaks in the revolutionary language of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense or the Declaration of Independence, such as: “We fight for Life, Liberty, Property”.15 Yet in military matters there is a kind of reverence for the model that Washington saw as ideal – the regular British army.16 This paradox is resolved by the fact that the desire of Washington for a regular army and his lack of trust in the militia system are due to his military experience during the period of the revolution.

13 Two military models are at the heart of the debate. The first involved the militia as the institution that represents the power of the citizen and his liberty. The second was the standing army that represented the absolute power of the state over its citizens, to the point of tyranny.17 But the course of the revolution itself added another dimension to the debate. This is the practical military dimension that emerged from the conduct of the revolution and the assertion of Washington and some of his generals that the only way to overcome the British army was by establishing a similar military system – a regular army. III. British Strategy during the War 14 The military history of the American Revolution can be divided roughly, both chronologically and regionally, into two main stages. The first period began with the aborted American attack on British strongholds in Canada at the end of 1775, and ended in October 1777 with the surrender of the British general Burgoyne at Saratoga. 18 After this the war moved to the southern colonies until the capitulation of the British forces in Yorktown in October 1781.

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15 The British regarded the American Revolution in the wider context of its colonial wars during the eighteenth century.19 The political and military confrontation was perceived as the revolt of British citizens against the Empire. Moreover, Britain identified the American Revolution as a danger to its standing as a superpower, especially vis-à-vis France, Holland and Spain. In practical terms, the British plan of war was to take control over the Hudson River and thus to detach the New England colonies from the rest, and only later on to move southwards, and with the help of those settlers who had remained loyal to the Crown (the ‘Loyalists’) to conquer the southern colonies. But the defeat at Saratoga and the entry of France into the war at the beginning of 1778 led Britain to change its strategy, depending increasingly on Crown supporters in the colonies.20

16 Washington understood, especially after the fall of New York (August 1776), that his small army was not capable of defending all the cities in America, but his strategic conclusion was that as long as a regular American army existed the revolution would also continue to exist.21 Already at this stage of the war it could be seen that Washington refused to regard the militia as a military force that could win the war, despite the fact that a myth began to be formulated in the colonies that the irregular forces – the militia – could face the British army. This perception developed after the battle of Breed’s Hill (June 17, 1775), better known (mistakenly) as Bunker Hill. Many Americans regarded this as a moral victory that strengthened the lessons learnt at Lexington and Concord, which meant that the soldiers of the militia who were motivated by revolutionary ideology could withstand a professional, well-trained, and well-equipped army.22 In contrast Washington claimed, even after the battle, that an army composed mainly of soldiers serving only temporarily could not win the war. He also claimed that the militia were merely an auxiliary force for a military system that must be based on a professional army of soldiers disciplined and trained, which would be committed to serve throughout the war.23

17 After the failure of the expedition to conquer Canada, Washington wrote to Congress that it was not possible to depend on the militia or on any irregular military force that did not function in the long term, and that it was necessary to build a standing army to achieve the aims of the revolution. He added that the militia could not protect the colonies for long, and therefore the establishment of a regular army was an immediate need.24 Washington also asserted in another letter that it was not possible to conduct a war or plan future operations because of the instability of the militia.25

18 Throughout the course of the war one can find letters to various people in which Washington argues that it was necessary to set up a standing army.26 Thus it may be seen that since the very beginning of the revolution Washington did not consider the militia to be a dependable military force. Several years before Washington had himself been appointed as the militia officer of Virginia, but for him this appointment had merely been a jumping board for a permanent position in the British army. For the British officer corps the militia was no more than an auxiliary force, mainly for security assignments, and not a military force for attack operations.27 During the course of the revolution Washington sent the militia to carry out defensive tasks, mainly at places of lesser strategic importance or along the frontier facing the Indians (a lesser enemy than the British army.

19 As long as Washington did not have a regular kind of army, he avoided a decisive battle confrontation against the professional British forces. Washington therefore adopted a

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strategy of attrition and went into battle only when he knew that the chances of victory were clearly in his favor.28 Washington also understood that the British army was dependent upon its navy for supplies and for transport from one place to another, and therefore, in order to neutralize this tactic, Washington tried to lure the British into conducting battles far inland.29 The attrition strategy of Washington had two other purposes. The first was an attempt to gain time in order to enlarge his forces, equip it, and more importantly to train it. The second was to induce the involvement of the European powers, especially France, and perhaps also Spain and Holland, in support of the colonies.

20 The defeat at Saratoga transferred the strategic focus of Britain to the colonies south of the Potomac River. The British Minister of the Colonies, Lord Germain, estimated that there were more loyalists in the south than in the north and therefore a smaller British force would be required. The intention of Germain was to ‘Americanize’ the war, in so doing to cause civil war among the American settlers: loyalists against patriots. After control was restored in the south, the British army could return and carry out military operations in the northern colonies. The change in British strategy was also due to the participation of France, Holland, and Spain in the war, which constituted an immediate and more serious threat to the British Empire.30

21 At the end of 1778 the settled area of Georgia was conquered and this colony came back under British control. The American-French attempts to regain it ended in painful defeat. The British then went on to conquer South Carolina with the general aim of gradually advancing northwards, establishing an operational base in the mouth of Chesapeake Bay (Maryland), and reconquering the northern colonies. In May 1780 Charleston (South Carolina) was taken, and Washington tried to send his army, which was encamped around the city of New York, southwards in an attempt to strengthen the militia forces. But the situation of the Americans became worse after the defeat of General Gates at the battle of Camden in August 1780. In fact, after this battle, there was no organized American army in the south, and even the militias had ceased to function. It should be noted that during this period there were various guerrilla groups operating in the south, but British control over the settled areas of the colonies denied the guerrilla fighters freedom of movement and support. However, the British failure to control the border areas of the southern colonies allowed the guerrilla groups to re- organize and return to operational activities.

22 In the autumn of 1780, Washington received another blow. Benedict Arnold, one of the most gifted generals of the revolution, deserted to the British side. Arnold was the commander of the system of fortifications at West Point, and the fear was that his desertion would lead to the fall of the Hudson River into British hands.31 It also constituted a moral and psychological blow to American recruitment, since the desertion of such an esteemed commander indicated a lack of confidence in the ability of the American army to win the war. These crises led Washington to focus once again upon the situation in the north. He therefore issued a series of severe orders to transfer reinforcements to the fortification system at West Point and also to increase the state of alert in Maryland and Virginia.32 From the series of letters that Washington sent to his generals it appears that he intended to rely only on his regular forces and that he did not count on the militia to provide the defense along the Hudson River. Although Britain did not take advantage of the opportunity to control the Hudson River, the very presence of a large and well-trained British army supported by the navy

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in New York (the southern egress of the Hudson River), can explain the fears and the measures taken by Washington.33 IV. Military Developments in Europe (1648-1763) 23 In order to understand Washington’s military approach it is necessary to deal firstly with two subjects. The first is the change that occurred in European armies in the years following the Thirty Years War, in particular the development of standing armies in France and Prussia in the years extending from the end of the Thirty Years War (1648) up to the Seven Years War.34 The second subject is the type of military thinking at the end of the eighteenth century prior to the French Revolution. These two processes intersected in a series of wars conducted in Europe, beginning with the wars of Louis XIV and reaching its peak in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), continuing through the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and ending in the Seven Years War (1756-1763). The last two wars were marked by the remarkable victories of Frederick the Great against the armies of France, Austria and Russia, and the Prussian Emperor was considered as the most important military authority in the Western world at that time.35 The development of the Prussian army under the command of Frederick the Great is therefore crucial. Moreover, from the end of the seventeenth century the American colonies were involved in European conflicts, mainly between Britain and France.36 Thus, the colonial settlers found themselves fighting side by side with British regular forces, winning appointments as officers, and being exposed to the fighting methods of a regular army. One of these officers was George Washington. This could explain the actions of Washington during the American Revolution and his desire to establish standing army acting in accordance with contemporary principles of military thinking, especially those of the Prussian army.37

24 During the course of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) various European countries, including France, Holland and Sweden, began developing professional standing armies. These armies were trained, equipped, and mobilized with the assistance of an efficient taxation system, and were controlled by a centralized bureaucracy.38 The Thirty Years War proved that one could not depend on unreliable mercenary armies. Regular soldiers loyal to the crown could crush any internal opposition to central government, lay down the law, and assist in the collection of taxes. The relatively long period of peace after 1648, together with improvements in tax collection systems, contributed to the increasing size of armies. These trends created military forces that, in the French and later the Prussian case, became effective instruments in the hands of those monarchs aspiring to absolutism and European hegemony.39

25 France came out of the Thirty Years War as the strongest military power, and Louis XIV took advantage of this to press for achieving political superiority on the European continent. 40 In order to conquer, fortify and hold the enormous territories extending from the Low Countries (Netherlands) to the west, the Pyrenees to the south, and the Rhine in the east, as well as to support dynastic claims (such as those in the Polish and Spanish wars of succession), Louis XIV needed a large land army, especially infantry, that was capable of protecting the border fortresses.41 We therefore find a gradual increase in the size of the French army over the period of five decades during which Louis XIV ruled, at the end of which the French army had about 390,000 soldiers.42

26 The other kingdoms of Europe did not have the material, human resources or aspirations of the France of Louis XIV, but they needed regular standing armies to withstand the French threat. By 1710 the Austrian army possessed 100,000 soldiers in a

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standing army, making it the main component in the military coalition against Louis XIV. The ability of the Austrians to cope with both French and Turkish aggression turned Austria into a central power in Europe.43 England, in spite of its apprehensions regarding a regular army, also increased its armed forces in this period, fighting with the Dutch army both in the War of the Augsburg League and in the War of the Spanish Succession.44 Savoy and other German states set up small standing armies that joined Austria in the wars against the French and the Turks. Similar trends also occurred in Sweden and Russia.45 But the most impressive development was that of the Principality of Brandenburg-Prussia.

27 The Prussian army also began to adopt the model of a professional army after the Thirty Years War since it had not succeeded in defending its territories. The most significant developments were made during the reign of the Prussian emperor Frederick William I (1713-1740), nicknamed “the soldier king” (Der Soldatenkönig). Under his rule Prussia developed the fourth largest army in Europe and the strongest one on the continent.46 This was achieved despite the limited material and human resources of Prussia in comparison with the other European powers.47 The Prussian army then achieved fame during the reign of Frederick II ‘the Great’ (1740-1786). The Prussian rulers managed to set up an efficient bureaucratic system and invested many resources despite demographical and economic limitations. Walter Dorn asserts that: “… it was not Prussia that made the army but the army that made modern Prussia”.48

28 The geo-strategic situation of Prussia was somewhat similar to that of the colonies in North America. Prussia was strategically weak because it did not have natural borders and because it was surrounded by European powers that were stronger and more aggressive. Prussia also consisted of a group of territories without territorial contiguity. The colonies in North America were surrounded by powerful enemies, with no natural borders either in the north or the south that could bar against European invasion, whether British, French or Spanish. Although there was physical contiguity of territory among the colonies, each of them conducted its affairs independently with hardly any coordination with neighboring colonies, and military cooperation against various strategic threats was rarely to be found.

29 Frederick the Great held full military and political powers in his hands and his army was based on an officer corps of Junker aristocrats. This was the poor but proud and tough landed aristocracy considered as the most superior and consolidated social class in Europe, devoting its life to the service of country and emperor, unlike the French officer corps that purchased rank with money, and many of whom were not qualified to be officers at all. Prussian soldiers were mostly native born recruits called up to join the army, often by compulsion, on a territorial basis. Every district was divided into cantons, each being obliged to provide a regiment.49 The stringent and rigorous training system gave the Prussian soldier an advantage in mobility and speed, something that was demonstrated in the wars conducted by Frederick the Great during the 1740s and 1750s.

30 The Prussian army under the command of Frederick the Great succeeded in winning two important wars in Europe: the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War.50 In both wars, the army confronted enemies that were stronger and bigger than itself.51 Should we wish to find the turning point in history at which the rise of the Prussian army parallels a decline of the French army, this could be the battle of Rossbach (November 5, 1757), when Frederick skillfully combined artillery and cavalry

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to defeat a French-Austrian force twice as large. Rossbach demonstrated the military philosophy of Frederick the Great.52 He understood that if a military commander wished to be victorious in war he must conduct offensive battles. Thus the army of the enemy became the main military target and not the supply lines or logistic stores.

31 There is no doubt that Washington did not want to build a centralized military system like Prussia, and certainly not a system based on forced recruiting and a cruel system of training and discipline that included physical punishment and executions for disciplinary faults (even though there is evidence that his army did impose such punishments). But he did aspire to build a national army acting in accordance with the principles of warfare that were designed by Frederick the Great. Washington saw the essential need to oblige the governors of the colonies to recruit soldiers and place them under the authority of the Continental Army under his direct command. During the American Revolution, especially in the southern colonies, Washington sought the decisive battle that would end the war. Already in September 1777 Washington wrote that: “One Bold Stroke will free the land from rapine, devastations and burnings”.53 V. The Influence of European Art and Science on Washington 32 In order to understand the military perceptions of Washington, it is also necessary to briefly discuss military thinking in the eighteenth century prior to the French Revolution. The theoretical and practical approach of Frederick the Great reflected the ideas of the Enlightenment in showing that the arts of war should be taught like all the other arts and that it demanded professional training and extensive knowledge in various fields. The conclusion of Frederick the Great, as expressed in his Principes Généraux de la Guerre, is that the arts of war can be based on a theoretical system of rules and principles derived from the lessons of history.

33 Military success, in the period from the end of the Thirty Years War to the outbreak of the French Revolution, was achieved through tactical means such as separating the enemy from his supply bases. Contemporary writers defined the importance of the link between the army in the battlefield and its bases of supply, something that military analyst Henry Lloyd referred to as the core principle.54

34 These lines of communication have important implications for the conduct of war. It is necessary to select the shortest and most convenient line in order not to be exposed to counterattack from the sides. If the line is too long the attacking army will be vulnerable to losing supplies and reinforcements from counter-attacks. Therefore the attacker must bring his supply bases forward and the defender must maneuver to threaten the lines of communication and force the attacker to retreat.

35 This tactical approach was used in the operations conducted by the British as well as by Washington’s Continental army.55 Although Washington was not a military analyst, there is no doubt that he knew the military thinking of his period.56 Washington’s desire for a standing army was shared by many of his staff officers.57 It is an interesting fact that the senior officers of Washington who supported the establishment of a regular army were those like Greene and Knox who had served earlier in the militias. On the other hand, Charles Lee and Horatio Gates, who had served in the past as officers in the British army, supported militia operations and were opposed to setting up a regular army. Some claim that their opposition to the strategic perceptions of Washington led in the end to their dismissal.58

36 Military thinking of the eighteenth century included an appreciation of the value of irregular warfare and its place within the framework of regular warfare.59 It should

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also not be forgotten that the British army accumulated much experience in war against this type of warfare during the colonial wars in North America, and that the first commanders that George III appointed for war in the colonies were the veterans of the French and Indian War.60 It may be that Washington was afraid that the British would succeed in eventually overcoming the irregular forces in the south. It should also be remembered that in spite of the fact the French army used such methods in the French and Indian War, the war was finally decided in a series of regular battles, with victory for the British. As Washington’s letters make clear, the way to obtain victory over the regular British forces (on land and on sea) would be with the help of a regular army trained and equipped for regular warfare.

37 Throughout the duration of the war Washington did not have sufficient soldiers or arms. This was the reason why the American army was not capable, during most of the war, to cope successfully with the British army in the orthodox warfare methods of the time. These two basic facts led to a strategic paradox on the American side. In order for the revolution to succeed and the colonies to achieve independence, it was necessary for Washington to defeat the British army. But the operational and logistic weakness of his own army led to an inability to initiate a wide-scale attack. The weakness of the American army was demonstrated clearly in the battle of New York in the summer of 1776. After this battle Washington refrained from direct confrontation with the British army on the battlefield. It may therefore be said that the failure in New York represented a watershed in Washington’s strategic thinking. VI. The Strategy of Washington 38 After the battle of New York, Washington had to deal with the fact that the war would not end quickly in one decisive military action, although he never gave up his aspiration for such a battle. Three options presented themselves. The first option was to lead the Continental army westward in order to avoid direct clashes and to use guerrilla tactics. The second option was to conduct a series of clashes and tactical retreats with the aim of causing losses to the British army without endangering his army in a regular battle. The third option was to stand with all his army face to face with the British army and to risk the outcome of a pitched battle.

39 Washington rejected the first option because it was based mainly on the fighting abilities of the militia forces, something he did not trust. The second option was perceived by Washington as avoiding the challenge posed by the British army and as a cowardly strategy that would eventually lead to the conquest of the central cities. The third option was the preferred one for Washington, but this required building up a regular army that was well equipped and trained according to the European theories of warfare. Therefore, until his army was ready for this enormous task, Washington designed a strategy composed of the first two options, which were now merely tactical means to achieve his strategic goal, the buying of time needed for building up a regular army. This was the strategy based on attrition, or the “Fabian strategy”.61

40 The forays against Trenton and Princeton at the end of 1776 were evidence of the new strategic line of action that Washington adopted, involving raids upon British strongholds followed by retreat. Washington also designed this Fabian strategy in an attempt to put political pressure upon Britain to abandon the war and the colonies.62 But Washington never gave up the third option, and we know this from the series of letters he wrote during the years 1779 and 1780. In these letters Washington claims that Britain would not give up its empire in North America until it suffered another

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decisive defeat as it had in Saratoga. However, in his view, this defeat would take place only if his forces, together with the French navy, could re-conquer New York. The decisive defeat eventually came at Yorktown, justifying Washington’s overall strategy (even if the location was somewhere else).63

41 For Washington, the most important principle of war was that of the massing or concentration of forces. Frederick the Great wrote: “There is an ancient rule of war that cannot be repeated often enough: hold your forces together, make no detachment, and when you want to fight the enemy, reassemble all your forces and seize every advantage to make sure of your success”.64 As long as the Continental army did not reach this goal Washington refrained from a regular form of battle with the British army. The entry of France would solve this problem. Washington’s traditional way of thinking is also evident in the winter encampment of the American army in Valley Forge. During this time French and Prussian officers arrived to train the army in European tactics. Military engineers also arrived who fortified key points on the Hudson River (including West Point), according to the method of the famous French engineer Vauban.65

42 After this period of training, Washington felt that his army was prepared for war, and in June 1778 the first regular battle between the Continental army and the British army took place at Monmouth Court House, ending in victory for the Americans.66 This battle had two implications. The first was that it was the last battle in the northern colonies. Washington managed to station a line of defense around New York, enclosing the British stronghold. The center of this line of defense was West Point. The commander of the British forces in the north, General Clinton, did not try to break through this line of defense, which led to the transfer of the British war effort to the south. The second implication was the strengthening of Washington’s perception that the Continental army was capable of confronting the regular British army.67 Therefore only a regular army trained according to the European model could win the war.

43 With the war’s center of gravity transferred to the south and the successes of the British, Washington’s descriptions about the disposition of the American military system became gloomier, especially after the defeat of Gates at Camden in 1780. The main criticism of Washington was the continued dependence on the militia system. Although the militia forces had defeated the British army at the battle of Saratoga, Washington claimed that the basic assumption of reliance on a militia force was erroneous. This was because “regular troops alone are equal to the exigencies of modern war …the Militia will never acquire the habits necessary to resist a regular force”.68 Washington argued that the militia should be under the command of officers of the Continental army in order to obtain maximum operational effectiveness.69 This point was emphasized in the ‘Sentiments’ document.

44 In a letter that he wrote after the defeat of Gates, Washington tried to persuade the recipient that his strategy of attrition was indeed working. He claimed that in spite of the victories of Britain in the south, it was having difficulty financing the war and there were signs of rebellion in Britain, especially by the Irish. Its international situation was also difficult following the entry of France, Spain and Holland into the war. The conversion of the American Revolution into a war in which the European powers were involved proved the success of the attrition strategy adopted by Washington.70 Britain was forced to withdraw troops for the defense of Britain against French invasion and also to protect its sugar plantations in the West Indies. In his view, Britain was close to

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the point at which she could no longer continue to fight in North America. But Washington continues to assert that the establishment of a large standing army based on general recruitment for three years was essential to win the war. The United States would never win its independence so long as it did not have a regular army.71

45 Washington wrote to Congress that even though the British had not taken advantage of their successes in the south to transfer the war back to the north, the defeat of Gates demonstrated the weakness of the regular army when it depended upon the militia forces. In his opinion, the militia could never confront a regular army, and in order to save the revolution it was necessary to recruit several thousand soldiers from the states of North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Delaware, and to set up an army that would also include cavalry and artillery units. The militia, within the framework of a regular army, would constitute an auxiliary force that would be engaged in patrolling, securing border crossings, and skirmishes.72 VII. The Conduct of the War in the South by Greene 46 On October 14, 1780 Washington appointed General Nathanael Greene as commander of the American forces in the south, and authorized him to determine the appropriate strategy for rehabilitating the army and carrying out military operations against the British.73 In Washington’s opinion, Greene was the man best suited to command the southern arena.74 His appointment stabilized the situation in the south and led eventually to the final surrender of the British at Yorktown. Greene’s non-conventional thinking is often praised, yet his thinking was not unlike that of Washington. Both generals conducted a strategy of attrition, but executed it in different tactical ways. Greene always acted under the command of Washington and never tried to undermine his authority as the Supreme Commander of the American forces. Greene was the commander of an arena, and in this capacity he had a fair amount of independence to decide on strategy.

47 The first task for Greene was to reconstruct the military system: the regular, militia and guerrilla forces in the southern colonies. Even before Greene had reached the south, patriot guerrilla units conducted an attack on a British-loyalist force at King Mountain (October 7, 1780).75 This may be considered as a turning point in the south since it led the British to set aside for the time being their planned advance northwards and to direct their resources against the patriot guerrilla forces in South Carolina.76

48 Greene claimed that the dismal situation of the regular army did not allow him to carry out offensive operations without causing further catastrophe.77 He therefore relinquished the regular method of warfare and engaged in irregular warfare. Washington and Greene present us with two methods for conducting war, one conventional (Washington) and the other unorthodox (Greene). Greene agreed with Washington’s strategy of attrition but carried it out in a different way, waging attrition and buying time for the rehabilitation of the regular army. The army was then reinforced by French forces preparing for the decisive battle of the revolution at Yorktown. Guerrilla warfare was the means and the establishment of a regular army was the end. It is also possible that the aim of the attrition strategy conducted by Greene was to damage the financial abilities of Britain to continue with the war, and thus to induce Britain to end the war through negotiations.

49 Greene’s unconventional approach also violated the principle of the concentration of forces. He split his small army into three groups. One of these was under the command of Daniel Morgan, whose task was to attack the British on the border between Georgia

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and South Carolina.78 The second group was commanded by Henry Lee, who set up a mobile task force that linked up with the guerrilla group of Frances Marion along the shoreline of South Carolina. The rest of the army under Greene’s command moved around in the internal areas of the southern colonies in a Fabian-like strategy.

50 This approach even led the British to disperse their forces in response, which weakened the British army and made it yet more vulnerable to guerrilla attacks. The commander of the British forces in the south, General Cornwallis, split his army in order to keep track of Greene and to try and eliminate Morgan’s army.79 In January 1781 Morgan’s units encountered the British units at Cowpens on the border between the two Carolinas. Morgan’s army was composed of regular soldiers and militiamen, but he did not depend on the militiamen at all and estimated that they would flee from the battlefield when the cavalry of Cornwallis arrived. Morgan told the militiamen to fire only three rounds of ammunition and then to retreat. In fact, at the very beginning of the British attack the militia units retreated.80 It may therefore be said that Morgan’s victory in this battle was in fact the first victory in the south in which a regular American army confronted British forces in conventional battlefield formation.81 What is more important is that the victory infused a new fighting spirit in the southern colonies and in the supporters of the revolution. Greene’s split-force strategy led to a situation in which the two armies that met at Cowpens each had an equal number of soldiers. When Greene arrived in the south, the ratio between the American and British forces had been 1:10 in favor of the British.

51 Greene’s approach, based on the assumption that a series of defeats would eventually lead to the total retreat of Britain from the colonies, combined a defensive strategy with tactical offensive operations. The unconventional thinking of Greene found expression in the splitting of his forces and the subordination of the guerrilla forces to his authority.82 Greene tempted the army of Cornwallis across the colonies of the south and distanced it from its operational bases (in the southern cities), lengthening its lines of communication and refraining from confronting the British in regular battle. Although this did not lead to a significant victory between February and August 1781, the attrition of the British caused them to abandon areas in Carolina and Georgia and to withdraw into the cities of Savannah (Georgia), Charleston (South Carolina), Wilmington (North Carolina) and Yorktown (Virginia).

52 The revolution ended with siege warfare according to the European model, involving the integration of the French expeditionary force and navy. The last act of the revolution, the conquest of the city of Yorktown, was a conventional one. Therefore, from the strategic viewpoint, there was no difference between the two generals. Greene was unconventional in his military thinking, but from his letters it appears that he believed only a standing army, based on the eighteenth century European model, could win the revolution. In a letter that he wrote to Washington, Greene says that the outcome of the battle at King Mountain proved that one could depend on the irregular units for local operations so that the British would be forced to direct military resources to the internal areas of the southern colonies, thereby preventing their advance northwards towards Virginia.83 Thus we find that there is a subordination of partisan warfare to his authority for the sake of coordinating overall operations. As soon as Greene arrived in the south, he wrote to Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter that he was aware of their important operations that denied the British any

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achievements after the defeat of Gates at Camden, but that their main task at present was to gather intelligence about the strength and intentions of the British.84

53 Greene’s perception that only a regular army could confront the British and win the war, in line with Washington’s thinking,, can be found in a series of letters that he wrote to various governors of the colonies. Greene wrote that although the fighting spirit of the militia was high, it should constitute an auxiliary force and that the main war effort should be carried out by the regular army.85 In a letter to the North Carolina Board of War, Greene writes that the war in the south would continue to be a partisan war “… until we have a more permanent force to appear before the enemy …”.86 Two conclusions may be deduced from this letter. The first is proof that Green used the irregular units to rehabilitate the army. The second, which is derived from the first, is once again the inability of the irregular units to win the war. Greene was fully aware of the fact that the governors of the colonies had reservations against any threat to their authority, especially their control over the militia forces.87

54 But in the letters to his colleagues in Washington’s headquarters one can find his real opinion about the militia. No control over the militia was possible because the commanders obeyed the authority of the governor and not the authority of the Continental Congress (in effect, that of Washington), and they could not be subordinated to any political or military authority higher than the level of the colony. Moreover, the officers were not suited to their positions of command and “… everybody is a General …” as Greene complained to Knox.88

55 So, in spite of the continued partisan activity in the south, Greene never expected that the war would be won by irregular units. In a letter that was sent to Greene after the victory at Cowpens, Washington claims that the victory of Morgan was achieved through his adherence to the traditional principles of warfare.89 In a letter to Congress, Washington announced that the victory of Morgan would enable Greene to continue his rehabilitation of the regular army.90

56 From the letters that Washington wrote to Greene after Cowpens, we find once again the desire of Washington to conduct a war based on the guiding principle of the concentration of forces. Washington instructs Greene to refrain from large operations against the British since his forces were still small and dependent on militia forces.91 Washington’s views of the militia were also shared by French officers.92 VIII. Conclusion 57 As this article has tried to show, based on the letters of Washington and Greene, neither of them relied on irregular forces as the main fighting force of the revolution and instead aspired, during the entire course of the war, to set up a permanent army. The strategy of these two men was that of a war of attrition. Washington sent the militias on hit-and-run operations and to collect intelligence, and at the same time to build a system of fortifications on the Hudson River based on European models introduced by Vauban, relying on European officers to train the regular army in European methods of warfare. His intentions were to induce the British to focus on militia operations and thus to buy extra time for the regular army to rehabilitate and train. Military literature prior to the French Revolution also did not provide an independent function for irregular units except within the framework of close cooperation with the regular armed forces, and this is exactly what Washington and Greene did. Thus the military thinking of these two generals was in accordance with the conventional European thinking of the eighteenth century.

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58 The greatness of Washington was in his creation of a strategy that suited the military realities he confronted, while the greatness of Greene was in finding a balance between conventional warfare (European) and unconventional warfare (American). From the strategic viewpoint, both generals shared the same perceptions, which were that only a regular army, organized and trained in the modern methods of warfare, was capable of winning the war. This strategic thinking greatly influenced those who, after the revolution, supported the establishment of a regular army in peacetime. The clearest expression of this thinking can be found in the ‘Sentiments’ document in which Washington asserted that it was necessary to set up a regular army, and that in times of emergency the militias must be subordinated to a central political authority.

59 Greene rehabilitated his army while continuing to conduct irregular warfare against the British in order to prevent them from establishing themselves in the south. If 1780 was the most difficult year of the revolution, and if we accept the claim that the activities of Greene saved the revolution in the south, and thus the revolution as a whole, it may be claimed that the appointment of Greene, and even more so, the liberty given to him to conduct the fighting with hardly any interference by Washington, were probably the most important and decisive decisions that Washington made during the war. Paradoxically, it was only after they had adopted the very institutions for which they went to war against the British Empire that the Americans were able to achieve victory in war to gain their independence.

NOTES

1. Garry Wills, A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 112-122. 2. See: Center of Military History, American Military History (Washington, D.C.: United States Army, 1989), 30-38; John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 234-240. The most comprehensive work on the colonial wars is that of Douglas E. Leach, Arms for Empire: A Military History of the British Colonies in North America (New York: Macmillan, 1973). See also Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America (New York: Free Press, 1984), 1-45; Robert Leckie, The Wars of America (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 3-80. 3. On a military academy for producing a professional officer corps, see: Azar Gat, A History of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 60-68. 4. Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783-1802 (New York: Free Press, 1975). 5. On this issue there are two central schools of thought. The first claims that irregular warfare was the key to American victory in the southern colonies, and therefore in the entire war. See for example: Robert C. Pugh, “The Revolutionary Militia in the Southern Campaign, 1780-1781”, in: The William and Mary Quarterly 14 (2) 1957, 157; Clyde R.

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Ferguson, “Functions of the Partisan-Militia in the South during the American Revolution: An Interpretation”, in: Robert W. Higgins (ed.), The Revolutionary War in the South: Power, Conflict, and Leadership (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979), 258; Robert Asprey, War in the Shadow: The Guerrilla in History (New York: W. Morrow, 1994), 63-70. In this connection one should note especially the study by Mark Kwasny, who argues against portraying Washington as a typical army officer of the late eighteenth century. For Kwasny, Washington conceived partisan warfare as the means to achieve victory. See: Mark V. Kwasny, Washington’s Partisan War, 1775-1783 (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1996), 223-224, 338. However, although Kwasny’s study is confined to the years 1775-1783, his focus is mainly on the course of the war that was conducted in the central colonies (New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut) and there is hardly any discussion about the irregular warfare and its integration with the regular war in the southern colonies. The second position holds that the militia did not constitute a decisive factor in the course of the war. Washington’s dependence upon the militia was because it was the only military system at his disposal, while he was trying to form a regular army. See: Russell F. Weigley, Towards an American Army: Military Thought from Washington to Marshall (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 1-9; Millett and Maslowski, For the Common Defense, 54-56; David H. Overy, “The Colonial Wars and the American Revolution”, in: John M. Carroll and Colin F. Baxter (eds.), The American Military Tradition: From Colonial Times to the Present (Wilmington: SR Books, 1993), 7; Lawrence D. Cress, Citizens in Arms: The Army and the Militia in American Society to the War of 1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 58-59; Walter Laqueur, Guerrilla: A Historical and Critical Study (London: Weidenfeld, 1977), 18. 6. Jonas Viles (ed.), George Washington: Letters and Addresses (New York: The Sun Dial Classics, 1909). Hereafter: GW-L&A; John C. Fitzpatrick (ed.), The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscripts Sources, 1745-1799 (39 vols.), (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1937). Hereafter: WofGW; Richard K. Showman (et. al.), The Papers of General Nathanael Greene (12 vols.), (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991-1997). Hereafter: PofNG. 7. The Federalist, No. 8 (Hamilton), in: Terence Ball (ed.), The Federalist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 30-35. See also: Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 84-88. 8. Washington to Hamilton (2/5/1783): Sentiments of Peace Establishment, WofGW (vol. 26), 374-375, 387-395. See also: Center of Military History, American Military History, 101-104; Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 41-42. 9. The Federalist, No. 29 (Hamilton), in: Ball (ed.), The Federalist, 132-136. 10. The reforms of Root are sometimes defined in the research literature as New Hamiltonianism, following the thought of Hamilton. See: Paul Y. Hammond, Organizing for Defense: The American Military Establishment in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 23-24. 11. On the reasons for the apprehensions in the colonies concerning a regular army, see: Kohn, Eagle and Sword, 3-6. 12. On the influence of the Roman Republic on the colonies in North America, see for example: Robert A. Ferguson, Reading the Early Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 172-197. 13. Robert A. Rutland (ed.), The Papers of George Mason (vol. 1), (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 230-231.

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14. Mortimer N.S. Sellers, American Republicanism: Roman Ideology in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 72-73. 15. Washington, General Orders (3/1/1776), WofGW (vol. 4), 297. See also the discussion in: Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War (New York: Norton, 1981), 255-264. 16. Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (New York: Faber, 2004), 79-80. 17. Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, 23-33; James K. Martin and Mark E. Lender, A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763-1789, (Arlington Heights: Harlan Davidson, 1982), 1-28. 18. For a review of the course of the war until 1779, see: Leckie, The Wars of America, 131-179; Center of Military History, American Military History, 50-83. 19. On the colonial wars as seen from the perspective of the British empire see: Dorothy Marshall, Eighteenth Century England (London: Longmans, 1989), 260-267; Bruce P. Lenman, "Colonial Wars and Imperial Instability”, in: P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, (Vol. 2): The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 151-167; Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America's Place in the World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 66-87. 20. Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775-1783 (London: Longmans, 1964), 404-407; James K. Martin and John M. Dederer, "The War of the Revolution", in: John E. Jessup and Louise B. Katz (eds.), Encyclopedia of the American Military (vol. 1), (New York: Scribner's, 1994), 548-549. 21. Ira D. Gruber, "America's First Battle Long Island, 27 August 1776", in: Charles E. Heller and William A. Stofft (eds.), America's First Battles, 1776-1965 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986), 32. 22. Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 191; Don Higginbotham, George Washington and the American Military Tradition (Athens: University of Geogia Press, 1985), 9-12; Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington, 76. 23. See also: Robert K. Wright, "'Nor Is Their Standing Army to be Despised': The Emergence of the Continental Army as a Military Institution", in: Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (eds.), Arms and Independence: The Military Character of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1984), 73. 24. Washington to the President of Congress (20/12/1776), WofGW (vol. 6), 402-403. 25. Washington to the President of Congress (26/3/1777), WofGW (vol. 7), 319; Washington to Richard Lee (1/6/1777), WofGW (vol. 8), 160-161. 26. Washington to the President of Congress (9/2/1776), GW-L&A, 82-85; Washington to the President of Congress (2/9/1776), GW-L&A, 103. 27. Thomas A Lewis, For King and Country: George Washington, the Early Years (New York: J. Wily, 1995), 36. 28. On the attrition strategy of Washington, see: Weigley, The American Way of War, 3-17. 29. On the logistical and operational difficulties of the British, see: Center of Military History, American Military History, 58-60. 30. For the strategic consequences and the widening of the war after Saratoga see: Robert A. Doughty and Ira D. Gruber, Warfare in the Western World (vol. 1): Military Operations from 1600 to 1871, (Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company, 1996), 154-157. 31. On the fortification and defense of West Point, see: John H. Bradley, West Point and the Hudson Highlands in the American Revolution (West Point: United States Military Academy, 1976), 18-22. 32. Washington to Greene. 7/9/1780, WofGW (vol. 20), 10; Washington to Heath, 8/9/1780, Ibid., 13; Washington to Comte de Rochambeau, 8/9/1780, Ibid., 16;

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Washington to Greene, 25/9/1780, WofGW (vol. 20), 85; Washington to Wade, 25/9/1780, Ibid; Washington to Gray, 25/9/1780, Ibid, 86; Washington to Low, 25/9/1780, Ibid., 87. 33. Center of Military History, American Military History, 72-74. 34. The most comprehensive book about European armies and warfare during the eighteenth century up until the French Revolution is Robert S. Quimby, The Background of Napoleonic Warfare (New York: AMS Press, 1957). Additional surveys can be found in: David Chandler, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Marlborough (London: Bastford, 1976); Gunther E. Rothenberg, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 11-30; Hew Strachan, European Armies and the Conduct of War (Boston: Allan & Unwin, 1985), 8-37; Geoffrey Parker, "Dynastic War", in: Geoffrey Parker (ed.), The Cambridge History of Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 148-166. On the place of the American Revolution within the general context of eighteenth century military history, see: Larry H. Addington, The Patterns of War since the Eighteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 1-17. 35. Jeremy Black, European Warfare, 1660-1815 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 149-153. For a general review of the period from a military perspective, see: John A. Lynn, "States in Conflict", in: Geoffrey Parker (ed.), The Cambridge History of Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 167-188. 36. War of the League of Augsburg – King William's War (1689-1697); War of the Spanish Succession – Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713); War of the Austrian Succession – King George's War (1739-1748); The Seven Years War – The French and Indian War (1754-1763). 37. Christopher Duffy, The Army of Frederick the Great (New York: Hippocrene, 1974), 210-211; Dave R. Palmer, The Way of the Fox: American Strategy in the War for America 1775-1783 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1975), 10-24. 38. Christopher Duffy, The Military Experience in the Age of Reason (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 151-156; M. S. Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime, 1618-1789 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), 24-32. 39. John Merriman, A History of Modern Europe, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 280-282. 40. The literature on the wars of Louis XIV is extensive. One of the most comprehensive books is John A. Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667-1714 (London: Longman, 1999). 41. David J. Sturdy, Louis XIV (New York: St. Martin's press, 1998), 126-128. 42. For the increase of the French army during the regime of Louis XIV see: Doughty and Gruber, Warfare in the Western World (vol. 1): Military Operations from 1600 to 1871, 32. 43. Derek McKay and H. M. Scott, The Rise of the Great Powers, 1648-1815 (London: Longman, 1983), 67-77. 44. On the British army in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries see: Black, European Warfare, 1660-1815, 106-113; David Chandler (ed.) The Oxford History of the British Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), chapters 4-6; Davis French, The British Way in Warfare (London: Unwin Hyman , 1990), 32-61. 45. On the increasing size of European armies from the end of the seventeenth century until the French Revolution, see the table in John Childs, Armies and Warfare in Europe, 1648-1789 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982), 42. 46. Anthony F. Upton, Europe 1600-1789 (London: Arnold, 2001), 254-257. 47. In regard to territory, Prussia was the tenth largest state in Europe, and with regard to population it was only in thirteenth place. On the Prussian army during the reign of Friedrich Wilhelm I, see: E. N. Williams, The Ancien Régime in Europe: Government and Society in the Major States, 1648-1789 (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 310-314.

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48. Walter L. Dorn, Competition for Empire, 1740-1763 (New York: Harper, 1963), 90. 49. On the system of cantons, see: Otto Büsch, Military System and Social Life in Old Regime Prussia, 1713-1807 (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1997), 2-8. On the incorporation of the Junker class in the Prussian army, see: Ibid., 50-64. 50. On these two wars, see: McKay and Scott, The Rise of the Great Powers, 1648-1815, 162-177, 192-197; Upton, Europe 1600-1789, 270-286. 51. For a review of the Prussian army in these two wars, see for example: Duffy, The Army of Frederick the Great, 157-199. On the wars and the influence of Prussian victories on the European political system, see: Williams, The Ancien Régime in Europe, 345-349. On other European armies, see: Dorn, Competition for Empire, 1740-1763, 80-84. 52. At the same time, it should be remembered that Frederick adopted a defensive strategy after these battles because of the heavy losses sustained by his army. See The Instructions of Frederick the Great for His Generals (1747); Black, European Warfare, 1660-1815, 132-136. 53. Washington: General Orders (September 5, 1777), WofGW (vol. 9), 181. 54. On military thinking of that period, see: R. R. Palmer, "Frederick the Great, Guibert, Bulow: From Dynastic to National War", in: Peter Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Modern Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 91-119; Gat, A History of Military Thought, 27-80; Peter Wilson, "Warfare in the Old Regime 1648-1789", in: Jeremy Black (ed.), European Warfare 1453-1815 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 69-95; Armstrong Starkey, War in the Age of Enlightenment,1700-1789 (Westport: Praeger, 2003), 33-63. 55. Palmer, The Way of the Fox, 10-11. 56. Wright, "'Nor Is Their Standing Army to be Despised': The Emergence of the Continental Army as a Military Institution", 67-68. See also the article by Spaulding who examines the books on military subjects that Washington possessed before the revolution. Most of these books were British manuals that described how to build up and train a regular army and also books about military philosophy. Although Spaulding shows reservations by saying that even though they were found in his possession there is no proof that he actually read them, his conclusions are that the activities of Washington at the beginning of the revolution (1776-1777) and the reorganization he conducted in the army testify to the influence of these books on his military activities. Oliver L. Spaulding, “The Military Studies of George Washington”, American Historical Review, 29 (4) (1924), 675-680; Don Higginbotham, George Washington and the American Military Tradition, 14-15. 57. Robert C. Pugh, "The Revolutionary Militia in the Southern Campaign, 1780-1781", in: The William and Mary Quarterly 14 (2) 1957, 157-158; Palmer, The Way of the Fox, 8-9. 58. Ellis, His Excellency George Washington, 80-81. 59. Discussion about the place of irregular warfare can be found in Maurice de Saxe, My Reveries upon the Art of War (1732), In: Thomas R. Phillips (ed.), Roots of Strategy, 262-264. The book was written in 1732 but was published only in 1756. For a review of guerrilla warfare in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries see: Asprey, War in the Shadow, 51-55. 60. On this, see: Peter E. Russell, "Redcoats in the Wilderness: British Officers and Irregular Warfare in Europe and America, 1740 to 1760", in: The William and Mary Quarterly 35 (4) (1978), 629-652; Jeremy Black, War and the World: Military Power and the Fate of Continents, 1450-2000, (Yale: Yale University Press, 1998), 121-125; Armstrong Starkey, "European-Native American Warfare in North America, 1513-1815", in: Jeremy

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Black (ed.), War in the Early Modern World, (Boulder: Westview, 1999), 244-250; William R. Nester, The Great Frontier War: Britain, France, and the Imperial Struggle for North America, 1607-1755 (Westport: Praeger, 2004), 112-128. 61. This was the strategy used by the Roman consul Fabius Maximus after the Roman defeat at Cannae. Fabius led his legions across Italy and refrained from conducting a regular battle with the Carthaginian forces under the command of Hannibal. See: Martin and Lender, A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763-1789, 79-80. 62. Weigley, The American Way of War, 5. 63. Washington to D'Estaing, 4/10 and 7/10/ 1779, WofGW (vol. 16), 408-414, 428-429. Until the middle of the summer of 1781, Washington continued to hold to his view that New York was the key to victory in the war. See: Ellis, His Excellency George Washington, 133. 64. The Instruction of Frederick the Great for His Generals (1747), Roots of Strategy, 343-344. 65. Center of Military History, American Military History, 79-81; Martin and Lender, A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763-1789, 114-115. 66. On this battle, see: Center of Military History, American Military History, 82-82; Conway, The War of American Independence, 104-105. 67. Ellis, His Excellency George Washington, 120. 68. Washington to the President of Congress (15/9/1780), WofGW (vol. 20), 49-50. 69. Washington to Governor Livingston, (18/6/1780), WofGW (vol.19), 28. 70. Washington to Cadwalader, 5/10/1780, WofGW (vol. 20), 122. 71. Washington to the President of the Congress, 20/8/1780, WofGW (vol. 19), 402-413; Washington to Mathews, 4/10/1780, Ibid, 113. 72. Washington to the President of the Congress, 15/9/1780, WofGW (vol. 20), 49-50. 73. Washington to Greene, 22/10/1780, WofGW (vol. 20), 238. 74. Washington to Fitzhugh, in: W. B. Allen (ed.), George Washington: A collection (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988), 176-177. 75. Guerrilla warfare began in the south at the outbreak of the revolution and reached its peak after the fall of Charleston on 12 May 1780. Among the unit commanders one should mention especially Francis Marion (Swamp Fox), Andrew Pickens, and Thomas Sumter. The guerrilla commanders were veterans of the French and Indian War during which they learnt Native-American warfare methods. See: Henry Lumpkin, From Savannah to Yorktown: The American Revolution in the South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1981), 80-90; Ira D. Gruber, "The Anglo-American Military Tradition and the War for American Independence", in: Kenneth J. Hagan and William R. Roberts (eds.), Against All Enemies: Interpretations of American Military History from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 22-23; Asprey, War in the Shadows, 55-61. For a discussion on the interrelations and mutual influence between the Indian fighter and the warfare method of the settlers, see: John K. Mahon, "Anglo-American Methods of Indian Warfare, 1676-1794", The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 45 (2) (1958), 254-275. 76. For a general survey of the course of the war in the south, see: Stephen Conway, The War of American Independence, 1775-1783, (London: E. Arnold, 1995), 103-129; Jeremy Black, War for America: The Fight for Independence 1775-1783 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), 170-233. 77. Greene to Washington, 31/10/1780, PofNG (vol. 6), 447-449. 78. Greene to Morgan, 16/12/1780, PofNG (vol. 6), 589-590.

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79. Frederick the Great noted in his book that if a commander was forced to act defensively, he should sometimes split his forces, but if he intends to act offensively he must never split them. See: The Instruction of Frederick the Great for His Generals (1747), Roots of Strategy, 344-345. 80. Don Higginbotham, Daniel Morgan: Revolutionary Rifleman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 137. 81. Higginbotham, Daniel Morgan, 136-142. 82. Martin and Dederer, "The War of the Revolution", 586-587. 83. Greene to Washington, 31/10/1780, PofNG (vol. 6), 447-449. On the battle at King Mountain and its importance, see: Doughty, Warfare in the Western World (vol. 1), 161-162. 84. Greene to Marion, 4/12/1780, PofNG, (vol. 6), 519-520; Greene to Sumter, 12/12/1780, ibid., 563-564. 85. Greene to Lee (Governor of Maryland), 10/11/1780, PofNG, (vol. 6), 473; Greene to Rodney (Governor of Delaware), 10/11/1780, ibid., 475; Greene to Jefferson (Governor of Virginia), 20/11/1780, ibid., 491-492; Greene to Nash (Governor of North Carolina), 6/12/1780. ibid., 533. 86. Greene to North Carolina Board of War, 7/12/1780, PofNG vol. 6), 549. 87. Mark A. Clodfelter, "Between Virtue and Necessity: Nathanael Greene and the Conduct of Civil-Military Relations in the South, 1780-1782", Military Affairs 52 (4) (1988), 169-174. 88. Greene to Knox, 7/12/1780, PofNG (vol. 6), 547; Greene to Peabody, 8/12/1780, ibid, 555. 89. Washington to Greene, 2/2/1781, WofGW (vol. 21), 171. 90. Washington to President of Congress, WofGW (vol. 21), 238. 91. Washington to Greene, 27/2/1781, 304; 21/3/1781, 345; 18/4/1781, 471, WofGW (vol. 21).. 92. Washington to Comte de Rochambeau, 27/2/1781, WofGW, (vol. 21), 312; Lafayette to the Comte d'Estaing, 30/7/1778, in: Stanley J. Idzerda (ed.), Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution (vol. 2), (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 122, 124-125

AUTHOR

TAL TOVY Tal Tovy, Assistant Professor of History, Bar Ilan university, Israel

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Negotiating Transcendentalism, Escaping « Paradise » : Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

Ramón Espejo Romero

1 The purpose of this paper is to explore the way in which Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) reflects a dialogue between the novelist and Transcendentalism. Such a dialogue would moreover shape the rest of his career as a writer. Being a fiction writer, Melville uses several of his characters to offer his conclusions, and specifically the traits of their different personalities and their respective outcomes in the novel. These characters are Ismael, Ahab, and Bulkington. Captain Ahab is a living embodiment of the terrible consequences of Transcendentalism when and if taken too literally. Its undeniable allurements are embodied in the elusive yet mystifying Bulkington. However, Melville’s (ambivalent) stand about the Concord movement is best gleaned from a character who stands at the center of his reflection on Transcendentalism. Let us call him Ishmael. Like the eyes of the whale, which can simultaneously receive two different (even conflicting) views of the same reality, or the leviathan’s whiteness, an apparently colorless crucible of all colors and meanings, Ishmael will expose a highly idiosyncratic form of Transcendentalism. It is unorthodox, contradictory, and far from the dogma that Transcendentalist writing appeared to construct (or some insisted it did). But in being unfaithful to “mainstream” Transcendentalism (meaning what is often thought of as defining Transcendentalism), Ishmael is closer to its genuine spirit than any other character in the novel.

2 Difficult as it is to say what Moby-Dick is exactly about, my starting point is that it is very much about Transcendentalism. I might be taking things too far, but it seems obvious that Milton R. Stern was wrong when he affirmed decades ago that [t]hematically, Melville was out of keeping with much of the mainstream of thought in his own times, which popularly and philosophically for the most part emphasized an untrammelled individualism, free from the restrictions of the past (4).

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3 It seems clear that Melville was perfectly aware of major intellectual trends in his age, although critics have been divided as to how he specifically interacted with Transcendentalism. Howard P. Vincent says that “Moby-Dick is a satire of New England Transcendentalism” and also “a criticism of American social and ethical thought, a condemnation of brutalizing materialism, and an affirmation of the dignity and nobility of Man” (8). However, how can Melville satirize a movement which contained a profound criticism of American social and ethical thought, condemnation of materialism, and vindication of the dignity and nobility of Man, when these are things which, in Vincent’s opinion, Melville is also commending in the novel? This is just an example of how unfocused critical assessment of Melville and Transcendentalism has often been.

4 Special attention should be paid to the work already done on the Melville-Emerson connection. Among Melville’s reading, which Milton M. Sealts extensively documented in the 1960s, Emerson’s essays figured prominently (see also McLoughlin 171-173). The novelist attended one of Emerson’s lectures in 1849, and then wrote an often-quoted letter to Evert Duyckinck sharing his impressions: I was very agreeably disappointed in Mr. Emerson. I had heard of him as full of Transcendentalism, myths and oracular gibberish . . . To my surprise, I found him quite intelligible, tho’ to say truth, they told me that night he was unusually plain . . . I could readily see in Emerson, notwithstanding his merit, a gaping flaw. It was the insinuation that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions. These men are all cracked right across the brow. (qtd. Freeman 58)

5 This letter establishes a pattern of simultaneous embrace and rejection of Transcendentalist ideas. It also noted the gap between “the Transcendentalist ideal and the real” (Williams 12), which Melville would explore more fully in the novel with which he astonished American readers two years later. The remark that Melville, while admiring Emerson, did not see himself as at all oscillating in his “rainbow” (Bryant 69) is well known too, as is the scribbling on the margins of a copy of Emerson owned by Melville, specifically next to a passage on the essential goodness of men: “God help the poor fellow who squares his life according to this” (Stern 12).

6 The different stand Emerson and Melville take towards the existence of evil (whose reality the latter was fully and painfully aware of) has too often been used as evidence of Melville’s anti-Emersonianism. But Melville may have disagreed with Emerson on that or other issues, while not necessarily rejecting all of his thought. As a matter of fact, he was not the only one to respond critically to Emerson; even some of his declared followers, like Thoreau, did. For John B. Williams, Emerson was not surrounded by “little Emersons” but rather by “an odd collocation of resolutely-defined figures who shaped their careers as much in reaction to Emerson as in emulation of him” (34). That is the reason moreover why we still consider the age of Transcendentalism one of the most fruitful in American intellectual history. Similarly, it is important to bear in mind that Transcendentalism was profoundly contradictory and thus impossible to contain within the narrow bounds of a simple definition; as a matter of fact, Vincent finds it difficult to characterize beyond saying that it was “a protest against usage, and a search for principles” (154). A movement that regarded individidualism as the supreme value and rejected rationality should not be expected to have, in spite of that, a homogeneous outlook. Not even individual members of Transcendentalism felt constrained to hold on to ideas they had entertained in the

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past. Emerson wanted to know, somewhat proudly, why one had to “drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself: what then?” (“Self-Reliance” 136).

7 One of the first critics to investigate the Transcendentalist element in Melville was Perry Miller, who, in a lecture read at Williams College at the Moby-Dick’s centennial celebration in 1951, and later re-written as the article “Melville and Transcendentalism,” pointed out a connection between Melville and the Transcendentalists while also admitting that Melville never fully embraced Transcendentalism. While Nina Baym considered Emerson as the most important influence over Melville (Williams 6), both Charles Feidelson in Symbolism and American Literature, and Harry Levin in The Power of Blackness, argued that Melville contributed some skepticism to Emerson’s self-assurance (Williams 7). Other critics have addressed Melville’s connection with Transcendentalism. McLoughlin, for instance, analyzes the different “gams” in the novel as comments upon the Transcendentalist subtext. That between the Pequod and the Albatross “suggests both the difficulty of communication between the self and the outer world and the essential enigma of nature”, and that with the Town-Ho is an endorsement of self-reliance, since it “portrays Moby Dick as an agent of God’s justice in destroying the mate Radney and ending his tyranny over Steelkilt, a rebellious, self-reliant seaman” (85). From a different perspective, Steven Gould Axelrod has suggested the convenience of pairing Melville and Emerson in the teaching of American literature as both of them are more interested in the process of thinking than in whatever results might come from it (68).

8 Only two full-length books have so far taken up this subject, and both are relatively recent: John B. Williams’ White Fire: The Influence of Emerson on Melville (1991), and Michael McLoughlin’s Dead Letters to the New World. Melville, Emerson, and American Transcendentalism (2003). Williams surveys Melville’s fiction up to and including Moby- Dick, but has a limited scope; his aim is mostly to demonstrate that Melville’s view of Transcendentalism in general and Emerson in particular was not only based on a reading of the latter’s works, but also on the newspaper discussion of Emerson’s lectures and essays. Whether to praise or satirize it, Transcendentalism was often discussed in the circles Melville frequented and in the magazines and newspapers he used to read, as well as in his conversations with Hawthorne. McLoughlin’s focus is broader. His book revisits the novels already analyzed by Williams but continues the exploration throughout the fiction that followed Moby-Dick, which acts to him as a hinge between the initial phase in Melville’s career, in which he heartily followed Transcendentalism, and the post-Moby-Dick one, in which he grew more and more critical of that movement, as revealed by his indictment of self-reliance and the disastrous consequences it entails for characters such as Ahab, Bartleby, or Pierre. McLoughlin also provides the only existing annotated bibliography on the Melville- Emerson connection (171-174). His main conclusion is that any accurate consideration of the Transcendentalism in Melville’s art must ultimately account for the dynamic nature of literary influence, which moves through time in patterns of attraction and repulsion, ranging in emphasis between the poles of original interpretation and critical reaction. (9)

9 He thus discourages any “pro-Emerson” or “anti-Emerson” approach to Melville’s fiction.

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10 The successive moves within Melville’s literary career can be seen as a dialogue between the writer and Transcendentalism. It is well known that he at first enjoyed popular success with novels such as Typee or Omoo, sea narratives that amused, and sometimes shocked, American readers, but which definitely established his reputation as a writer. The following novels, still pre-Moby-Dick ones, slightly departed from the “adventure” pattern, and met with more moderate success. Melville discovered that the further he strayed from established literary conventions and patterns, the less successful his writing was, and concluded perhaps that following one’s path rarely meets with the applause that Emerson’s lectures never failed to draw. In all probability, these notions were prominent in Melville’s mind as he was conceiving and executing the one that would be hailed (posthumously) as the peak of 19th-century American fiction and a masterpiece of world literature. But Moby-Dick is Melville’s attempt at testing the validity and scope of Transcendentalist ideas, not only as an abstract or intellectual problem but as a necessary step in figuring out his future career. No matter how inspiring (or otherwise) the topic was for his readers, Melville’s exploration of the concept of self-reliance and how self-reliant one could afford to be was enormously relevant for himself at that juncture. Was he to play it safe so as to insure recognition (and sales), or was he to take to more daring and uncertain paths, even if that alienated a substantial part of his readership? Moby-Dick was both the vehicle and reflection of such debate.

11 What will happen if one models oneself entirely on Transcendentalist principles? What consequences will result from being oneself at all times? Who defines that “self” and how can the degree of faithfulness or unfaithfulness to it be measured? Is it a moral obligation to truly be who one is? Captain Ahab, who clearly concluded with Emerson that “if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil” (“Self-Reliance” 134), is one of Melville’s tools for answering the questions above. F. H. Jacobi, the German philosopher, had already been quoted by Emerson in “The Transcendentalist” as saying that he was that atheist, that godless person who . . . would lie as the dying Desdemona lied . . . would assassinate like Timoleon . . . would commit sacrilege with David . . . For, I have assurance in myself, that, in pardoning these faults according to the letter, man exerts the sovereign right which the majesty of his being confers on him. (100)

12 There is not a great distance between such words and Ahab’s: I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here . . . while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights . . . Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee. (616)

13 The Gothic undertones of all such passages in Moby-Dick should not obscure the fact that Ahab is not paying homage to the Devil of Christian mythology but rather claiming the status of a God himself. His, in Captain Peleg’s words, “ungodly, god-like” character (176) is the result of an excessively blind application of Transcendentalist injunctions to respect natural inclinations and be consistent with one’s inner urges. But that always poses a danger for other people. Ahab becoming a God also to his crew has the tragic results that readers of Moby-Dick are perfectly familiar with. These results indict Ahab’s peculiar assimilation of Transcendentalism. Such a radical respect for one’s own self may only be valid if it is not permitted to invade other spaces beyond the self. But how

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easy is that to accomplish? Is it possible to be a God only to oneself? Melville tries to answer these questions through another character in the novel: Bulkington.

14 In his “Introduction” to Moby-Dick, Harold Beaver regards Bulkington as “a thumbnail sketch of the Emersonian hero” and as a “virtuous and self-reliant transcendentalist, dedicated to the solitary search for truth”; Beaver then refers to Ahab as “Emerson’s transcendental philosopher turned satanic” (32). Bulkington makes a brief appearance in chapter 3, “The Spouter-Inn,” where he is already referred to as someone who “held somewhat aloof,” a fact which his being so tall underscores; he is then described as a formidably strong man, very popular with his comrades and yet gloomier than them (107-108). Chapter 23, “The Lee Shore,” tells us that, in spite of having just disembarked from another vessel, Bulkington enlists right away on the Pequod, the sea acting as a magnet to him. According to Walcutt, throughout Moby-Dick there is “a symbolic opposition of land and sea, according to which the land stands for safety, security, conformity, orthodoxy, and so on, while the sea stands for the hidden, the secret, the half-known world where the other side of reality is shown and where alone one may find the full truth” (qtd. Barrio Marco 124).Bulkington is then attracted to a sea which is in the novel the Transcendentalist haven in which, paradoxically, all of the crew, including Bulkington, will perish. All but one, that is. The island of Nantucket, with its sand plains and so deep into the sea that clams are said to adhere to the furniture, serves as the reader’s rite of passage into the world of the Pequod. It is presented as the capital of the oceans, its inhabitants dominating the watery world. Thus, it stands as a metaphor of the isolated, self-reliant, independent man, who is a lord to that portion of the globe, the sea, where freedom and individuality are only possible, and where communion with Nature is absolute, even while one sleeps: “[A]t nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales” (159). His sleep is accompanied by the sea and its creatures, whether the more benign walrus or the dangerous whale.

15 Bulkington’s communion with Nature is as full as the Nantucketers’, and, unlike Ahab, he does not see brutality and destruction in it. But Bulkington’s reading of Transcendentalism, even if superficially more peaceful and harmless, is equally devastating for himself: his Transcendentalist quest for completion and knowledge, and his challenge of assumed ideas, those “wildest winds of heaven [religion] and earth [social norms and custom]” (203) which threaten to dash him against a deceptively safe coast, destroy him. Nevertheless, through this character, Melville concludes that it is possible to undertake a harmless (except for oneself) Transcendentalist quest for free thought. Where Ahab was a God, Bulkington is only a “demigod” (203), however. But Melville is far from proposing Bulkington as a valid Transcendentalist model. As a matter of fact, like Ahab, he is also indicted, though more sympathetically, as the solemn yet skeptical question “Know ye, now, Bulkington?” (203) reveals. Where has that knowledge taken you? Has it given you anything worth having? Was it all really worth it? These are probably questions that the novelist had in mind. Bulkington’s death may be glorious and heroic but it is death all the same, and it is hard to conceive of a philosophy of life that only offers death as the result of its application.

16 Everything so far would seem to confirm the view that Melville is indicting Emersonian self-reliance, and all of Transcendentalism by the same token, as essentially selfish, pointless, bleak, and often harming to others. The path towards freedom and a complete acceptance of individuality may be worth following, but the destination one

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intends to approach is hardly the haven one probably had in mind. In other words, the dream is more than likely to result in a nightmare. Such a contradictory situation is best gleaned when Ahab confesses to feeling “damned in the midst of Paradise,” as “[g]ifted with the high perception,” he nows lacks “the low, enjoying power” (266). We would all feel “damned” in the midst of such “Paradise” as his personal reading of Transcendentalism has created and where, despite the enlarged vision resulting in that “high perception,” everything beyond the self has vanished, one has completely embraced what one is, intuitions reign undisturbed by logic, and no enjoyment is possible as sensory gratification has been ruled out. But if the ultimate aim of Transcendentalist voyages was such a joyless enlightenment, they are probably, in Melville’s opinion, not worth taking. However, Melville’s dialogue with Transcendentalism does not conclude with that utterance. Such a statement is only the starting point for another journey, one in which Melville will attempt to find some other way to pursue Transcendentalism, one definitely not leading to such “paradise” as Ahab has created. In chapter 94, “A Squeeze of the Hand,” Ishmael already warns us that the greatest happiness may not reside in having the greatest thoughts or ideals but in enjoying the simplest of pleasures. Such thought was triggered by his pleasant squeezing of the whale’s sperm, an activity that would be meaningless for Ahab (or probably Bulkington), bent as he is upon “loftier” pursuits and “deeper wonders” (176). But, after all, to enjoy the world one must first experience it through the senses, a possibility that Ahab seems to have denied himself: when he tells the carpenter what his ideal man would be like, he insists that he would have “no heart at all, brass forehead, and about a quarter of an acre of fine brains” and is devoid of eyes, having only “a sky-light on top of his head to illuminate inwards” (582). And how is such an ideal man to enjoy what surrounds him if he cannot even see it? Yet, it is Ishmael’s, who can enjoy the squeeze of his colleague’s hands or the contemplation of a tranquil sea, that Melville posits as a more fruitful reading of Transcendentalism, a less literal one to be sure, but one which allows our narrator to survive the tragedy of a ship sunk by a more literal exegesis.

17 It is probably useful to insist that Ahab resembles much more than Ishmael the “hero” that Emerson seemed to have in mind in his essays. In “Self-Reliance,” which, as McLoughlin has noted, Melville read months before writing Moby-Dick (79), Emerson welcomed the “self-helping” man resulting from the application of his ideas in the following terms: “Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire” (146). Ahab certainly fits that description better than Ishmael does. It is him whom all tongues do greet, as his mostly unquestioned leadership shows. Ishmael is unable to explain the captain’s allure: “How it was that they [the Pequod’s crew] so aboundingly responded to the old man’s ire – by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs . . . would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go” (286). Emerson would explain that “evil magic” as the attainment of complete self-reliance, and would have applauded gestures such as Ahab’s casting of his pipe into the sea or the destruction of the quadrant as they imply a total commitment to his true nature (by refusing to contain his wrath through the pipe or to follow a reasonable course through the quadrant). Both are also gestures allowing instinctive behaviour to take over, as insisted upon by the Transcendentalists. Ahab has moreover unusual mental strength and a wealth of experience. His long-time seclusion in the remotest seas has led to independent thought and complete self-reliance. Part of his

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knowledge has come from Nature, as he is said to have received “all nature’s sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and confiding breast” (170), such “voluntary” revelations evincing a deeply Thoreauvian communion with it. As a good Transcendentalist, Ahab has received everything that Nature has volunteered and is also familiar with the Transcendentalist injunction to wait for revelations from Nature and not actively seek them. His lethal distrust of the white whale seems to place him far from the more sympathetic attitude of Thoreau, however. He has written the whale into an allegorical enemy and it is to be sure an unexpected reading of Nature (from one who is so close to Transcendentalism in most other aspects). On the other hand, in constructing Nature as text, Ahab is being faithful to Transcendentalist positions, the same from which Thoreau could write that “[e]very morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself”; he went on to textualize “the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest down” as “itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air” and “a standing advertisement . . . of the everlasting vigour and fertility of the world” (62).

18 The character in Moby-Dick, however, who most resembles Thoreau, or, as McWilliams would put it, “the self-created character of Henry David Thoreau” (12), is obviously Ishmael, representing as he does “el hombre insatisfecho de sí y del mundo, que busca y deambula de un lugar a otro, exiliado voluntario en pos de respuestas incontestables y de paraísos perdidos” (Barrio Marco 121). Both the character/narrator of Moby-Dick and the celebrated author of Walden adopt “similar personae” (Van Nostrand 114-5): dissatisfied with their lives so far, for reasons neither of them leaves very clear, both moved to new surroundings, and in both cases such a move involves water. Both were probably desirous of a peep at the everlasting, the unfathomable and the ungraspable sublime, a confirmation that life was more than they knew it to be. Resulting from the lack of a satisfactory life and consequent psychological imbalance, both Ishmael and Thoreau often change the moods in which they come before us: now they are joyful, now moody, now melancholy, now ironic or gloomy. Both are solitary beings, which often leads them to engage in silly dialogues with themselves, dozens of examples of which can be found in Walden and Moby-Dick. Sometimes, though, both Thoreau and Ishmael reach out to other beings, a lumberman in Thoreau’s case, Queequeg in Ishmael’s, and readers in both. Since the famous opening of Moby-Dick and its narrator urging the reader to call him Ishmael, he will address his readers almost as often as Thoreau addresses his: Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience. (5)

19 It seems clear that Thoreau’s project is not to retreat from society for good, and he has not forsaken human connection. Unlike Ahab’s, Ishmael’s thoughtfulness is not an obstacle for him initiating fruitful bonds with people like Queequeg either, or patting his readers’ back heartily every now and then.

20 Nevertheless, and in spite of the similarities above, Ishmael and the Thoreau of Walden also differ from each other in important respects. Ishmael, for one, does not heed the

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Transcendentalist insistence on laying aside books and traditions, stemming from Emerson’s conviction that “[t]he centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul . . . and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming” (“Self-Reliance” 141). Whether in the etymologies and extracts at the beginning of the novel or the intertextual games throughout it, Ishmael makes clear that he is heavily indebted to those who dealt with his subject before him. The result is a novel where one easily gets lost in the “unshored, harborless immensities” (227) of so much erudition and learning, the traditional boundaries between different discursive practices (of law, linguistics, or science, to name only a few) being constantly blurred. Ishmael certainly does not feel that the past is an “impertinence” or detects a conspiracy in the intellectual wealth accumulated over the centuries, and such position would constitute a first aspect of his (and Melville’s) argument with Transcendentalism: rather than denounce the castrating potential of authoritative voices, Ishmael concludes that it is possible to empower oneself through them. The specific strategy by which he retains control of the narrative consists in handling such voices of authority ironically, and thus creating a distance or space where they can be contested. Use the past, and do not let it use you, seems to be Ishmael’s response to Emerson’s assertions, while probably agreeing with the need to “[i]nsist on yourself; never imitate” (148), also set forth in “Self-Reliance.” Ishmael’s project is innovative, and yet respectful with his literary heritage. He leaves from Nantucket, the starting point for New England’s whaling industry, and a reasonable kind of departure for one who attaches such an importance to one’s roots. But then Nantucket is just the threshold of a journey that, as intended, takes him to confines (geographical, mental, experiential, sentimental, emotional, literary) he had never visited and for which books had not completely prepared him.

21 Alluding to Emerson, Melville said in 1849 that he loved “all men who dive” (McSweeney 10; author’s emphasis). Ishmael is also made to believe in the Transcendentalist (and neoplatonic) contention that reality is only partly (if it is that at all) what our senses are capable of perceiving, and declares that “some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher” (540; my emphasis). The verb lurk apparently implies that the meaning which is to be extracted from everyday occurrences is not easily or immediately available but can only be got after considerable exertion. This is the idea that underlies Emerson’s contention that “the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind” (“Nature” 16) or Thoreau’s minute scrutiny of his Walden surroundings, ones where he declared he was to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life” (63), since “we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us” (67). Thoreau would also subscribe to Ishmael’s positing of man’s soul as an endless landscape to seek out and discover, though one usually neglected and “parched” by the paradoxically “dead drought of the earthly life” (602). Ordinary life is often empty and deadening, suffocating, but every now and then men may walk those landscapes of the soul and feel “the cool dew of the life immortal on them” (Melville 602). This is akin to the Thoreauvian emphasis on spiritual concerns being the immortal part of man: “In accumulating property for ourselves and our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal” (69).

22 Both Thoreau and Ishmael use the material world as windows into their own selves, even if Melville’s character is more aware than Thoreau of the limitations of such a

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method. Ahab also tries to use Nature for the same purposes, but he is unable to let meaning flow smoothly and imposes on it only one possible text. He does not really listen to Nature, or at least to everything that Nature has to say. But how is he to know himself (or anyone else) in Nature, or let it disclose who he truly is, when, like a ventriloquist, he has silenced its voice and allows it just to repeat the same (violent) sentence over and over again? And it is a sentence that Nature has uttered (after all, it can indeed be brutal and violent, and Ahab has lost a leg to Moby-Dick). Sadly for him, it is not the only sentence that Nature can utter. Others may be comforting, soothing, invigorating, or inspiring. Towards the end of chapter 68, after noting how the whale preserves its warmth even in very cold climates, Ishmael declares: “Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own” (414). Readers are asked to preserve their individualities even if surrounded by unpropitious conditions. In other words, external pressure to change what we are or be what we are not should be resisted at all times.That was a “text” suggested by the peculiar anatomy of the whale, which makes it possible for the animal to keep warm regardless of conditions outside. While Ahab can only impose meaning, Ishmael reveals greater capacity to really listen to, closely observe and make sense of Nature in a more balanced way. He reminds us of the passage where Thoreau tells his readers that “[w]e should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it” (213), and reads the way in which the grass never fails to benefit from a gentle rain, no matter how dry it was yesterday, as an invitation to enjoy and live in the present. Not all readings of Nature are cheerful, however. Much as Thoreau realizes how often men hazard their chances of present enjoyment because of the past getting in their way, Ishmael realizes towards the end of the paragraph quoted above how difficult it will be for man to follow such advice and truly be himself: “[H]ow easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things!” (414).

23 From the very outset of the novel, Ishmael displays a rare thirst for knowledge, which may well remind us of Ahab’s, whose declared foe, the white whale, contains all meanings within its whiteness. It is moreover a symbol of Ahab’s quest for total knowledge, one eagerly engaged in, as “unless you own the whale you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth” (445), but one that can only result in utter frustration and the seeker eventually sucked down by such whirlwind as his eagerness has provoked. Who can know all? But for Ahab, only when Truth is whole, only when it is spelt with a capital letter, is it worth seeking. Ishmael seems at times fairly close to Ahab’s obsession, refusing to leave anything out, however trifling, and calling for Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. (567)

24 But, unlike Ahab, Ishmael is often happy to accommodate to the reality of imperfect knowledge. Many chapters end with an exhausted Ishmael, more than ready to settle for half, and who asks readers to complete whatever task he began: “If then, Sir William

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Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can” (455). Sometimes he has to conclude that in his investigations of the whale, “[d]issect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not and never will” (487). But Ishmael is not gloomy at such moments; on the contrary, he is happy to be at least engaged in a process which is giving him so much. In Thoreau, such failed quests often ended in bitter disappointment, as is the case with the ending of the section “Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors”: “There too, as everywhere, I sometimes expected the Visitor who never comes . . . I often performed this duty of hospitality, waited long enough to milk a whole herd of cows, but did not see the man approaching from the town” (183). His quest for that symbolic “visitor” has only resulted in sadness and frustration. But not only Ishmael has to settle for half; more orthodoxly ambitious (epistemologically speaking) Transcendentalists like Ahab or Thoreau have to. But they are pained to have to do so (Ahab simply refuses), while Ishmael is not. It is not healthy to expect too much knowledge from the world of nature, Ishmael seems to contend throughout the novel, and such a notion would be a second aspect of his (and again Melville’s) argument with Transcendentalism.

25 Every true Transcendentalist needed to feel moments of communion with the Oversoul, that mystic force that bound all living things together by means of invisible ties, which, for brief spells, were somewhat made visible. Upon spying an albatross, Ishmael is awed and confused: Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through me then. (289)

26 Right away, Ishmael leaves it clear that he had never read Coleridge’s poem. It is, quite simply, the coming before a strange, alien nature (having lost the memory “of traditions and of towns”), which shows him things that, because of their profusion (the whiteness of the albatross suggests the simultaneous presence of all colors and meanings), he cannot successfully translate into words. It is impossible not to feel that this is akin to what Ahab feels before the white whale, though he responds differently. In chapter 35 of the novel, significantly entitled “The Mast-Head,” we are offered a new glimpse of the Oversoul or “soul pervading mankind and nature” (257), which implies a loss of personal identity and the crossing of temporal and geographical barriers. It is now represented by that “mystic ocean” to which the narrator abandons himself, going through the kind of experience which, in Emerson’s view, caused man to become “a transparent eye-ball” and to be nothing yet to see all (“Nature” 6). Seductive as such disembodiment undoubtedly is, Ishmael has, however, one final remark to make: “But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch: slip your hold at all: and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever” (257). Were Transcendentalists listening? Just in case, he stresses that the message is mainly intended for them: “Heed it well, ye Pantheists!” (257).

27 The whole sequence above seems a rebuke of the Transcendentalists and their excessive idealism: too much abandonment and communion with Nature may result in

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drowning (both literally and symbolically, just as Ahab drowned, or lost his balance, long before he actually drowns at the end of the novel). Shortly before, the narrator had ironically deplored the disastrous consequences, for business, of enlisting “sunken- eyed young Platonists” for whaling ships, boys or men who, perhaps influenced by Transcendentalism, were too introspective and removed from the materiality of the whaling business: [Y]e shipowners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unreasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head . . . your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow your ten waked round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. (256)

28 As Michael Paul Rogin convincingly argues, Ishmael may, at the mast-head, see “all”, but fails to see whales, which is why he was up there (110). In Bryan Wolf’s opinion, his is in that instance “an extreme version of Emersonian innocence, a state of mind that expands consciousness only by diminishing the material world and the dangers it contains” (147). Nonetheless, it is a mistake, in my opinion, to conclude that Melville rejects the communing experience in itself. Vincent quotes Melville’s sarcastic assessment of such an idealistic communion with the Oversoul by referring to a similar insistence on the part of Goethe: “Here is a fellow with a raging toothache. ‘My dear boy,’ Goethe says to him, ‘you are sorely afflicted with that tooth; but you must live in the all, and then you will be happy!’” (qtd. Vincent 152). However, immediately afterwards, Melville claims that such a feeling of communion may be temporarily valid and rewarding. Similarly, in the episode above, Melville sees jeopardy only when such communion threatens to remove all connection with the real and obscures the risks often inherent in Nature. This could also be regarded as a third aspect of Melville’s argument with Transcendentalism. Abstractions are necessary and useful, and so it is to feel disembodied from time to time, and alive to other lives and Life as a whole. But it would be a mistake to let such feelings separate us from reality. Once we let go of the real, a potentially nurturing experience is rendered useless, dangerous even. In chapter 96, “The Try-Works,” Ishmael has an epiphany of sorts and realizes how crazy it is to create ghosts, to yield to irrational hallucinations, though Stern probably makes too much of the character’s warning “look not too long in the face of the fire, o man!” and uses it as proof that Melville is farther from Transcendentalism (247) than he actually was. But it is true that such a passage alerts us to the danger of abandoning reason, which is always inherent in Transcendentalist reveries.

29 A fourth aspect of Transcendentalism alarms Melville: excessive self-absorption, which may throw us into an irreversible state, particularly if we lack the necessary mental equipment. This is eloquently illustrated by means of Pip, who, in chapter 93, “The Castaway,” loses his sanity after having been left alone at sea for a good many hours, enduring “[t]he intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity” (525). Richard S. Moore considers that chapter as Melville’s response to Thoreau’s project of isolation (56). But, in my opinion, what happens to Pip is a result of his own mental weakness. Unlike Thoreau, he is just a boy and has not chosen isolation; therefore, he lacks the mental strength needed to face the moment when his “ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably” (525). Moreover, also unlike Thoreau, he does not possess an intellectual or philosophical background allowing him to read the experience profitably and to make sense of that “horizon,” his horizon of

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consciousness, which kept enlarging without him knowing how to accommodate to its changing shape. Thus, it expands “miserably,” i.e. with disastrous results, bringing him misery and not Transcendentalist joy. But it cannot follow from it that all projects of self-retreat (by adult, willing, intellectually prepared individuals) are going to have the same results. Rather than condemning Transcendentalism, Melville is again interrogating it: What happens if a weak mind tries to swallow larger truths than he can possibly digest, such as those “strange shapes of the unwarped primal world” (525), or the mass of timeless impulses, instincts, intuitions and human universals which Pip had never encountered before? Madness is the obvious answer. Afterwards, “Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs” (525) and begins to see that God of Nature that was manifest in every one of its creatures: “He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad” (525). Pip discovered indeed the divine principle in himself and Nature, but, sadly enough, it just led to ostracism and incomprehension. Then, it is affirmed that “man’s insanity is heaven’s sense” (525-6), that is, that Transcendentalist revelations may drive us crazy, though only, I would like to add, if we lack the tools, the age, the strength, or the will, to come to terms with them.

30 Transcendentalism is systematically read in the novel as a cutting edge, a sort of thin line separating self-fulfilment from madness, joy from sorrow, meaning from meaninglessness. Pip’s episode is only one more example of the danger inherent in a philosophy that seems to be able to give one moments of extreme existential joy, but also the utter hopelessness with which it curses Ahab or Pip. Similarly, in chapter 96, Ishmael was on the brink of becoming another Ahab, bringing disaster upon his fellow sailors, when he was about to lose control of the ship and his own mind by the same token. In the Epilogue of the novel, Ishmael is also “drawn towards the closing vortex” of the maelstrom about to sink the Pequod, “[t]ill gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst” and he was “liberated” (687). Ishmael got dangerously close to the point in which the two other Transcendentalist “heroes” of Moby-Dick (Ahab and Bulkington) and the martyrs of an unimaginative reading of Transcendentalism (the rest of the crew) tragically ended their journeys. But he is saved by the upward thrust of a more idiosyncratic Transcendentalism, one that does not make him unhappy. Unlike Ahab, he is not “damned in the midst of Paradise”; rather like the whales in the “Grand Armada,” he affirms of himself that “while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy” (498). But, in order to reach such a Transcendentalist haven and benefit from it in terms of his personal and experiential growth and of his ability to delve into reality in search of its “marrow,” he had to undertake an arduous, but finally successful negotiation.

31 Resulting from such a negotiation is a prominent use of humour, which was rare in Transcendentalism, but which, as Edward H. Rosenberry in Melville and the Comic Spirit has argued, is a very important part of the novel’s epistemology. When referring to the most trivial of thoughts, Ishmael can say, tongue-in-cheek, “I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all this beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic application” (557), thus poking fun at Transcendentalism itself. However, McLoughlin is, I think, wrong in regarding Ishmael as “the new post-Transcendentalist man, whose ultimate ironic detachment will become a commonplace pose for the new ‘hero’ of the

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‘realistic’ novel” (69). The irony of the novel does not come from Ishmael’s self- conscious ironic detachment but rather from the author’s ironic rendering of Ishmael’s over-serious approach to his task as a narrator. He is often laughable because of his (initial) ill-digested Transcendentalism, as displayed in those passages in which Ishmael earnestly tries not to leave out even the most trivial aspect of the whale’s anatomy, thus coming dangerously close to the sucking vortex of literal Transcendentalism and total knowledge. But it will be precisely as he becomes capable of reading Transcendentalism more creatively that the irony will be left behind. Ishmael’s idiosyncratic Transcendentalism also allows him to engage in an emotionally and intellectually fruitful relationship with Queequeg that a more literal approach to Transcendentalism seems to preclude, as Ahab’s and Bulkington’s conspicuous loneliness heralds. For a spell, Ahab finds his own Queequeg in Pip, but their liaison is doomed from the start by the kind of Transcendentalist journey in which Ahab has embarked. It is also true that shortly before the final chase begins, Ahab tells Starbuck: “[S]tand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God” (652), thereby implying that human contact is likely to give us more than any Transcendental quest, and thus confirming the validity of Ishmael’s agenda. But Ahab is too far into his mad quest to be able to harp on such a fleeting perception for long.

32 Ishmael is the only Transcendentalist hero in Moby-Dick who is finally able to transform ideals into a source of happiness and growth, and, by that token, make them worthwhile. Ishmael wants to know and, above all, he wants to know himself; but he does not think that the attainment of such knowledge justifies the use of whatever means. He also finds out that it is man’s lot to resign himself to live with whatever knowledge he can reach, and should not aspire to know everything. Beyond that, he is able to see that human relationships are also meaningful, that knowledge by itself and without a further goal makes very little sense, that isolation and communion with Nature may be only valid for a while (and as long as one is fully prepared to cope with them). In other words, he does not incorporate Transcendentalism uncritically but after having negotiated his own Transcendentalist agenda, absorbing such aspects as could serve him and discarding the most irrational, selfish and radical ones. Melville seems to be thus attacking the Ahab-like stereotyped view of Transcendentalism, the surface reading of what was a very sophisticated philosophy but probably also easy to reduce to a few over-simplified notions. Ishmael’s survival is an urge to be faithful to the spirit of Transcendentalism, not to its letter, and thus build our own philosophy of life (inspired rather than dictated by Transcendentalism). Aware as I am of the number of interpretations for Ishmael’s survival that already exist, I would like to propose one more: his final triumph, aside from giving him the chance to transform the story into his story, validates his personal version of Transcendentalism, and indicts alternative ones (Ahab’s or Bulkington’s). Thus, at the Epilogue, we become, with Ishmael, “pragmatic idealists left revolving on the edges of Ishmael’s maelstrom, staring into the vacant suction of Ahab’s political and philosophical idealism” (Bryant 71). This is an Ishmael-like novel, a compromise novel, with the action and adventures of a thrilling sea narrative and yet with the philosophical inquiry Melville was engaged in at the time. Such a combination will moreover characterize Melville’s future career. He indeed wrote works which “se fueron haciendo cada vez más profundos, más psicológicos, más metafísicos y enrevesados, en definitiva más transcendentes y complejos” (Barrio Marco 121), but never failing to give his readers amusing stories.

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Unfortunately, Ishmael’s pragmatic idealism served him better than his creator’s would serve him, judging by the sad story of Melville’s post-Moby-Dick life and literature.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Axelrod, Steven Gould. “Teaching Moby-Dick to Non-English Majors.” Approaches to Teaching Melville’s Moby-Dick. New York: MLA, 1985. 66-74.

Barrio Marco, José Manuel. “La novela norteamericana desde sus orígenes hasta la Guerra Civil”. Historia crítica de la novela norteamericana. Ed. José Antonio Gurpegui Palacios. Salamanca: Almar, 2001. 65-127.

Beaver, Harold. “Introduction [to Moby-Dick].” Moby-Dick. By Herman Melville. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. 20-42.

Bryant, John. “Moby-Dick as Revolution.” The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Ed. Robert S. Levine. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 65-90.

Cowan. S. A. “In Praise of Self-Reliance: The Role of Bulkington in Moby-Dick.” American Literature 38 (Jan 1967): 547-56.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Richard Poirier. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. 5-36.

---. “Self-Reliance.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Richard Poirier. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. 131-51.

---. “The Transcendentalist.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Richard Poirier. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. 97-110.

Freeman, John. Herman Melville. New York: Haskell, 1974.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America. London: Oxford UP, 1980.

McLoughlin, Michael. Dead Letters to the New World. Melville, Emerson, and American Transcendentalism. New York: Routledge, 2003.

McSweeney, Kerry. Moby-Dick. Ishmael’s Mighty Book. Boston: Twayne, 1986.

McWilliams, John P. Jr. Hawthorne, Melville, and the American Character. A Looking-Glass Business. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. 1851. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.

Miller, Perry. “Melville and Transcendentalism.” Moby-Dick. Centennial Essays. Eds. Tyrus Hillway and Luther S. Manfield. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1965 (1953).

Moore, Richard S. That Cunning Alphabet. Melville’s Aesthetics of Nature. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982.

Rogin, Michael Paul. Subversive Genealogy. The Politics and Art of Herman Melville. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985.

Rosenberry, Edward H. Melville and the Comic Spirit. New York: Octagon, 1979.

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Sealts, Milton M, Jr. Melville’s Reading: A Checklist of Books Owned and Borrowed. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1966.

Shanley, J. Lyndon. The Making of Walden with the Text of the First Version. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1957.

Stern, Milton R. The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1968.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. 1854. Ware: Wordsworth, 1995.

Van Nostrand, A. D. Everyman His Own Poet. Romantic Gospels in American Literature. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.

Vincent, Howard P. The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949.

Williams, John B. White Fire: The Influence of Emerson on Melville. Long Beach: California State UP, 1991.

Wolf, Bryan. “When Is a Painting Most like a Whale?: Ishmael, Moby-Dick and the Sublime.” New Essays on Moby-Dick. Ed. Richard H. Brodhead. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 141-79.

ABSTRACTS

By reviewing the critical literature on Melville and Transcendentalism and then undertaking a close reading of Moby-Dick (1851), this paper argues that the novel reflects, among other things, an ongoing debate between the novelist and Transcendentalist philosophy. While in later works, Melville seems to express a more robust condemnation of the Concord movement and its dangerous idealism, Moby-Dick occupies less firmly-defined territory. The Transcendentalist urge of an Ahab to be himself is a counterpoint to Ishmael’s more idiosyncratic deployment of self-reliance, communion with the oversoul, and various other concepts easy to trace back to Emerson or Thoreau. The conclusion seems to be that a negotiation is necessary if Transcendentalism is to be heeded at all, precisely the kind of negotiation Ishmael undertakes throughout the novel, one which spares him from the maelstrom created by a more radical approach to self-acceptance and self- fashioning.

INDEX

Keywords: Henry David Thoreau, literary influence, Melville, Moby-Dick, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Transcendentalism

AUTHOR

RAMÓN ESPEJO ROMERO University of Seville,Spain

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