Death in American Letters

Death in American Letters by Christopher Peter Trigg A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Christopher Peter Trigg 2010 Death in American Letters Christopher Peter Trigg Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto 2010 Abstract This dissertation examines American attitudes towards death from the colonial era to the end of the nineteenth century. I begin with a close analysis of the thanatology of the Congregational church in New England, before demonstrating the lasting influence of Puritan thought on three later writers: Jonathan Edwards, Henry David Thoreau and Stephen Crane. In contrast to purely cultural studies of mortality in America (including those by Phillipe Ariès, David Stannard and Michael Steiner), my investigation discusses the philosophical difficulties that obstruct any attempt to speak about death. Building on Jacques Derrida’s work in Aporias (1993), I identify three logical impasses that interrupt Puritan writing on mortality: the indeterminacy, singularity and finality of death. While Edwards, Thoreau and Crane write in different circumstances and diverse genres, I argue that they are sensitive to these same three aporias when they discuss death. In this regard, they resist a broader post-Puritan tendency (in both scientific and sentimental texts) to minimize the uncertainties surrounding human mortality and approach death as a universal (rather than radically singular) phenomenon. While my study situates each of its authors in the cultural and intellectual contexts in which they worked, it also challenges the notion that it is possible to write a history of death. Speaking ii strictly, mankind’s relationship to death can never change. It is always, in fact, a non-relation. The very idea of death destabilizes our most fundamental historical and literary assumptions. Accordingly, my second chapter uses a deconstruction of Edwards’ theory of revivalism to argue that the New-England awakenings of the eighteenth century expressed the converts’ desire to renounce responsibility for their souls, rather than accept it. In my third chapter, I argue that those writings in which Thoreau registers what might seem to be a nihilistic fascination with dead and decaying bodies in fact express a sentimental desire for a peaceful death. Chapter four reads Stephen Crane’s poetry, fiction and journalism in the context of his Calvinist heritage, breaking down the distinction between his textual play with the concept of death and the Puritans’ “serious” attempts to come to terms with mortality. iii Acknowledgments First thanks must go to my committee: my supervisor, Paul Downes, for his perceptive comments and generous support; Michael Cobb, for offering me such valuable advice; and Neal Dolan, for his untiring enthusiasm for the project. Many friends in the Department of English have widened my intellectual horizons with their conversation: David Galbraith, Ira Wells, Andrew DuBois, Christopher Hicklin, Ross Hawkins, Julian Patrick and Joel Goldbach. Special thanks must go to Nick Mount, Gillian Northgrave and Will Robins for offering wise words of encouragement when they were most needed. I’d also like to thank my instructors and fellow students in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge University for setting me on the path that led to this dissertation: Oliver Padel, Rosalind Love, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Ross Smyth and Lindsay MacDonald. Generous funding from the Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship program, the University of Toronto and the Scace Graduate Fellowship and Department of English at the University of Toronto has made this project possible. Lastly, many thanks are due to Kate Wakely-Mulroney for her unstinting love, patience and support. iv Dedicated, with much love and gratitude, to my parents. v Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: The Puritan Thanatology .................................................................................. 32 Chapter Two: Mortality and Revivalism .................................................................................. 76 Chapter Three: Thoreau’s Visions of Death ......................................................................... 128 Chapter Four: The Game of Death ........................................................................................ 190 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 251 Works Consulted ...................................................................................................................... 256 vi Introduction How would we write a history of death in America? Which sources would we employ, which testimonies would we reproduce? Is there a standard narrative, an accepted history that we may rewrite or re-inscribe? Any American history of mortality is likely to begin in colonial New England, with the Puritans’ powerful sense of the imminence of death. 1 While Puritan ministers spoke of God’s special covenant with the colony, prophesying that, one day, he would establish his earthly kingdom there, they warned that the fate of the individual Christian was far from certain. 2 Since death might steal him away at any moment, he must strive always to be reconciled to God, always to live in a state of grace. Calvinism may have preached that grace was a gift bestowed by God and that individual salvation and damnation were predestined, but it also warned that each human being was to be held accountable for the manner in which they 1 In Albion’s Seed , his study of the cultural origins of four areas of seventeenth-century British settlement in America (Massachusetts, Virginia, the Delaware Valley and the Appalachian Backcountry), David Hackett Fischer observes that despite the relatively high life expectancies of New Englanders, the Massachusetts Puritans’ “thinking about death … had an exceptional intensity even by the macabre standards of their age” (111). 2 This disjuncture stands at the centre of modern scholarship on the American Puritans. Perry Miller argued that New England ministers developed a complex federal theology, in which the individual’s relationship to God was enfolded within three contractual agreements: “the covenant of grace” (which stipulated that God would grant salvation to those who possessed true faith in him [ The Seventeenth Century 375-77]), “the covenant of the church” (in which believers were required to demonstrate their election through participation in their local congregational church, an institution that was supposedly comprised only of visible saints and was thus “an autonomous unit,” independent from the power of “bishops and archbishops, synods and assemblies” [435]), and the “social contract” (which upheld that God specially favoured the colonies as a nation, because of the number of pious individuals and holy congregations within them [410-3]). This covenantal view of the world, Miller maintained, was part of the Puritans’ attempt “to mark off an area of human behavior from the general realm of nature, and within it to substitute for the rule of necessity and rule of freedom” (398). “They were striving[,]” he continues, to push as far into the background as possible the order of things that is fulfilled by unconscious and aimless motions, that is determined by inertia and inexorable law, and in its place to set up an order founded in voluntary choice” (398). This, it seems to me, is a long way of saying that the federal theology, on the most basic level, was a response to the Calvinist’s heightened anxiety concerning death. Miller’s next sentence, indeed, appears to confirm this interpretation. The Puritans sought, he claims, “to extricate man from the relentless primordial mechanism, from the chains of instinct and fear, to set him upon his own feet, to endow him with a knowledge of utility and purpose, with the faculties to implement his knowledge, so that he might rationally choose and not be driven from pillar to post by fate or circumstance” (398-9). Although covenantal theory could not guarantee that the individual would be saved (since he could not be absolutely certain that he stood within them), they offered him a degree of agency in determining his destiny. 1 2 had lived their lives. In particular, they would be judged according to their use of the most precious resource available to them: time. To waste the brief life available to them in pursuit of pleasure and pastime was to reckon the value of redemption cheap. The Puritans’ literary and theological discourse never strayed far from this subject, 3 and pastors counselled their parishioners that their private devotions should follow this lead. “We are none of us very far from a Night , when we shall Sleep in the dust [,]” wrote Cotton Mather, “We Shall not Sleep in our Sin , if we are duly Sensible, how sure, and how near, this Night is to us” ( A Midnight Cry 56). In the midst of every activity, in every place they visited, reformed Christians were to keep death constantly in mind. “When we go out of our Houses,” Mather continued, “Let us think, I shall shortly be carried unto my Long Home . When we sit at our Tables, Let us think, I shall shortly be my self a morsel for the Worms

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