HAROLD FREDERIC AS A PURVEYOR OF AMERICAN MYTH: AN APPROACH TO HIS NOVELS
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University Microfilms International 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 USA St. John's Road, Tyler's Green High Wycombe, Bucks, England HP10 8HR 77-11,446 WITT, Stanley Pryor, 1938- HAROLD FREDERIC AS A PURVEYOR OF AMERICAN MYTH: AN APPROACH TO HIS NOVELS. The University of Arizona, Ph.D., 1976 Literature, American
Xerox University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 HAROLD FREDERIC AS A PURVEYOR OF AMERICAN MYTH:
AN APPROACH TO HIS NOVELS
by
Stanley Pryor Witt
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
In the Graduate College
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
19 7 6 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA.
GRADUATE COLLEGE
I hereby recommend that this dissertation prepared under my
direction by Stanley Pry or Witt
entitled HAROLD FREDERIC A3 A PURVEYOR OP AMERICAN MYTH: AN APPROACH TO HIS NOVELS
be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the degree of Dootor of Philosophy
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As members of the Final Examination Committee, we certify
that we have read this dissertation and agree that it may be
presented for final defense.
' w/>- a ''•» /o/A # foe /Wvv IMshv-Au
Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent on the candidate's adequate performance and defense thereof at the final oral examination. STATEMENT BY AUTHOR
This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to bor rowers under rules of the Library.
Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author.
SIGNED: For China Sue
iii PREFACE
It has long been something of a tradition to discuss Harold
Frederic within the context of the "new realism" of the post-Civil War era or to see in his early novels an emerging social conscience becoming attuned to the social and political problems of the Gilded
Age. Equally popular has been the custom to describe the later
Frederic as an expatriate who, having become disgusted with American materialism, fled to Europe and there immersed himself in Old World romances, never again to visit the American scene in either his fiction or in real life.
While both approaches have been of value in the development of
Frederic criticism, they have nevertheless tended to limit one's under standing of the man and to confine one's appreciation of his works to only one or two novels, The Damnation of Theron Ware and, perhaps, The
Market-Place. It has been of late that critics have taken the lead of
Paul Haines and of Messrs. O'Donnell and Franchere and have begun to see Frederic in a larger context and as a man with a great diversity of interests and abilities. No longer is he viewed as an embittered
"country boy of genius" but is typically seen as a man with a large, generous personality and an enjoyable sense of humor. Nor do we any longer tend to see him as a writer who early in his career abandoned his natural ability to write realistic novels of his native land and adopted instead the highly artificial method of writing novels accord ing to the high-flown romanticism characteristic of the earlier part of
iv V
the century. On the contrary, critics are now discussing both the man
and his works in terms of a consistent pattern of development.
Indeed, had it not been for the numerous recent developments in
Frederic criticism, particularly with respect to the work of Briggs,
Blackall, Garner, and Woodward, any discussion of Frederic as a myth-
maker would have seemed untenable. However, it is now possible to
enlarge our understanding of Frederic by examining the mythical ele
ments which provide the structural basis for many of his novels and
which reflect a uniquely American brand of mythology and point of view.
By viewing the man from this angle, we shall be able to perceive his
close relationship to Hawthorne, Melville, James, and others who wrote
in the mainstream of American literature, and we shall also come to a
greater appreciation of both the continuity and universality of his
works.
I should like to extend a word of thanks to Professors Paul
Rosenblatt, Arthur Kay, John Hollowell, and Cecil Robinson, of The
University of Arizona. I am grateful to Professor Rosenblatt for his
thoughtful direction during the opening stages of this work and for his
patience during the time I was writing in absentia. My sincerest
appreciation is extended to Professor Kay for helpful insights regard
ing consistency of approach and point of view (particularly in the
later chapters) and for his honest encouragement that I strive for
excellence throughout. I wish to thank Professor Hollowell for his many valuable suggestions, not the least of which was that concerning my use of the term "myth." I owe a special debt of gratitude to Professor Cecil Robinson, who was instrumental in rescuing my doctoral program from the limbo of delay and postponement and who, both as a teacher of American literature and director of this study, has helped me more than I can possibly acknowledge here. Suffice it to say that to him I extend profoundest gratitude for his large, dynamic nature, his compassion, his enthusiasm, his intellectual leadership, and, not least of all, his generous sense of humor when the going became rough.
To all of the above-mentioned individuals I am further indebted for the usual assistance regarding matters of mechanics and style, organi zation and documentation, and the like. I am also grateful to the late
Mr. Robert Poland of The University of Arizona library staff and to
Nancy Kirkpatrick of the library staff at Yavapai Community College for their generous assistance in securing materials. I owe a further debt of gratitude to Professors Oliver F. Sigworth, Marie P. Hamilton, and
Patrick J. McCarthy who were instrumental in helping me obtain a grant which made possible my graduate studies in the first place. Finally, I should like to express appreciation to my wife whose support is beyond all measurement. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ABSTRACT viii
1. FREDERIC REVISITED: THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN DREAM 1
2. IN THE VALLEY: THE MYTH OF NEW WORLD SUPERIORITY ...... 28
3. SETH'S BROTHER'S WIFE: EMERGENCE OF A DIALECTIC 44
4. THE LAWTON GIRL: THE MYTH OF TRANSCENDENTAL EXPECTANCY ... 68
5. THE RETURN OF THE O'MAHONY: A NEW YORK YANKEE IN IRELAND . . 95
6. THERON WARE: THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL Ill
7. MARCH HARES: THE THRESHOLD OF REBIRTH 144
8. GLORIA MUNDI: THE RETURN OF THE DUKE 161
9. THE MARKET-PLACE: THE MYTH OF THE POWER HERO 181
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 205
vii ABSTRACT
Although Harold Frederic (1856-1898) began his career as an author by writing in the vein of American literary realism, his development as reflected both in his artistic as well as in his personal life shows him moving steadily away from a factual view of reality and in the direction of a mythical interpretation.
In his earlier novels Frederic's development toward a symbolic vision of life is suggested by his attempts to define and elucidate certain mythical assumptions which he found deeply ingrained in the fabric of the American character. In the Valley probes and analyzes the distinguishing features of the Yankee; Seth's Brother's Wife is an enlightening commentary on American notions of rural (versus urban) superiority.
To enrich his vision of the national ethos, Frederic also in his earlier novels laid the foundations for a dialectical scheme in which his masculine and feminine character types would function as repositories of cultural values, a scheme whose essential feature reflects the blonde-brunette dichotomy earlier exploited by Cooper,
Hawthorne, Melville, and others. The dialectical scheme, borrowing elements from mythological patterns, provided the structural framework for subsequent novels, thus helping Frederic to free himself from the bonds of literary realism. The Damnation of Theron Ware is the finest example of his newly-developed style.
viii ix
In his later novels Frederic's treatment of myth becomes pro gressively broader in scope and more universal in terms of cultural implications (although not necessarily better in terms of artistic achievement). In fact, three of his novels, The Damnation of Theron
Ware, March Hares, and Gloria Mundi, may be taken, sequentially, to represent an entire mythological round. As such, they reflect a thematic structure comparable in nature to the monomythic adventure of the universal cultural hero as described by Professor Joseph Campbell and other mythologists.
The Market-Place, Frederic's last novel, is an excellent example of creative mythology in which Frederic helped to establish an archetypal pattern for American literature, one which would engage the interests of numerous American authors to come.
Frederic's short career as a transmitter of American myth both anticipates the modernity of twentieth-century myth-makers and recalls significant cultural concerns of past major American writers. His achievement, although not major in scope, justifies his place in the mainstream of American fiction. CHAPTER 1
FREDERIC REVISITED: THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
While Frederic wrote during an age of realism and even though
his novels, particularly his earlier ones, suggest a certain commitment
to the principles of objective reporting and to an empirical interpre
tation of life, he was also acutely aware of the inadequacies and
limitations inherent in such an approach and so developed methods of expression which would satisfy his inner yearning for the symbolic and
the mythical. In this connection, his early novels show his preoccupa
tion with a national ethos and mythical assumptions deeply ingrained in
the American psyche, while his later novels show him driven to confront
issues of deeper and more universal significance, such as his attempt
to define and interpret the underlying relationship between historical
process and mythological tradition. His last novel, The Market-Place, is an excellent example of creative mythology in which Frederic served as pioneer in recording an important cultural experience elaborated upon by numerous later American authors. In all of his novels, how ever, whether written early or late in his career, myth and mythology serve as agents for ordering his themes and for structuring his plots— ultimately, for making meaningful and mirroring forth his vision of life.
In order to understand better the complexity of Frederic's role as a transmitter of "myth," some preliminary distinctions ought to be
1 2 made with respect to our use of the term. As we shall see, Frederic employed a variety of mythical structures. For example, one kind of myth which pervades his novels embodies a framework of ideas or assumptions peculiar, say, to American culture. There is, in this con nection, Frederic's treatment of national myths, such as the myth of
Yankee superiority which finds expression in The Return of The O'Mahony and in In the Valley. Next, there is Frederic's use of a dialectical myth (as embodied, say, in Seth's Brother's Wife) in which masculine and feminine character types function as the repository of cultural values. Finally, there is a third kind of myth which recalls or sug gests a legendary story or an archetypal adventure, such as is found in
The Damnation of Theron Ware and the novels which follow it. As we shall see, in the course of his writing career Frederic used the materials of the first two kinds of myth (i.e., that illumiriting national themes and that involving the structural dialectic) as the building blocks for the mythic framework of the third type (the arche typal adventure) where he achieved his greatest success as a writer.
I
In many respects the life of Harold Frederic anticipates important mythical patterns which are found throughout nearly all of his fictional writings and which furnish the basic structural elements for all of his novels after The Damnation of Theron Ware. Inextricably caught up in the mythology of the American dream, he later used it to lay the groundwork for the mythology of success which is played out in the lives of so many of his characters. Or, to cite another example, 3
closely tied up with his view of success is his mythology of woman
which likewise derives from his cultural inheritance and which also
finds frequent expression in his novels. To put it yet another way,
his novels often function as masks for the playing out of the various
mythical and dialectical dramas so much a part of his life and so char
acteristic of the American experience. Viewed in this light, a bio
graphical sketch will facilitate our appreciation of his role as a
purveyor of American myth.
Harold Frederic (1856-1898) grew up during a watershed period of American history. It was the period of the Civil War and its turbu lent aftermath, a period of vast and baffling paradoxes created amidst the revival of old dreams and the sufferings of new despairs. It was a time of new beginnings for at least half of the American citizenry who would again witness vast social and cultural changes. It was a time of expansion, a time which saw not only the acquisition of Alaska but also saw the country reach its continental boundaries. Each year more than one hundred thousand pioneers had begun to heed railroad handbills advertising cheap land and the Homestead Act and had begun to migrate west. There, from Kansas to California and against seemingly insur mountable odds, these determined settlers would cultivate over twenty million acres of wilderness territory. Back in the Eastern states, industrial production was already beginning to boom, the economy now converted from the production of war materiel to the building up of an expanding nation. Even in the Southern states the populace was beginning to emerge from the devastation wrought by both the War and Reconstruction, and it began to entertain the possibility of future
prosperity. With the discovery of each new natural resource and the
invention of each new technique of production, the growth of American
industry foreshadowed increased prosperity for the entire nation. It
was a time when business capital would double from one and a half
billion to three billion dollars."''
Heralded as a time of political reconciliation, the age seemed
to champion anew the ideals of liberty, fraternity, and equality. With reckless abandon the nation revived its confidence that America would soon fulfill the measure of her creation so exuberantly sung in native myth and legend, that she would truly become a land of opportunity, a land where the young, if only honest in heart and industrious in deed, could rise from poor boy to president or where the old or the downtrod den could redeem themselves from bankruptcy and rise to billionaire.
It was, in short, a time when according to the vision of men like Mark
Twain's Colonel Sellers, America was to become a kind of New World
Jerusalem, a Utopia of morality and money.
The dream, however, would inevitably bring disappointment. For one thing, the expansion would prove to be too great. Sudden cutbacks
1. The American Dream: Myth or Reality? (New York: The Cen-. ter for Humanities, 1972), pp. 18-20. Useful background studies pro viding social, political, and economic information include Thomas Beer1s,The Mauve Decade: American Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926); Ray Giner's Age of Excess: The U. S. from 1877 to 1914 (New York: Macmillan, 1965); Matthew Josephson1s,' The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861- 1901 (New York! Harcourt, Brace, 1934); The Gilded Age: A Reap- praisal, Ed. Howard W. Morgan (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1963); Larzer Ziff's The American 1890's: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (New York: The Viking Press, 1966). in production would bring about economic troubles. Labor disputes would dash the hopes for universal prosperity. Slums would begin to spread in the city. Political corruption among federal officials would undermine the public trust, as would the graft and bribery of numerous smaller officials, such as those of the Tweed Ring. By 1877, Southern whites would be able to "deal with Blacks in their own way ... a kind 2 of home rule that means segregation—and degradation." By the end of the century, the nation would once again be fragmented and polarized, with a wide gulf between the rich and the poor, between the employer and his employee, and between the blacks and the whites.
II
It was into this America—the America of the Gilded Age—that
Harold Frederic was born. The place was Utica, New York, the Octavius of his novels. Like the typical character from the Horatio Alger myth,
Frederic derived from several generations of poor but respectable people. His grandfather, Henry Fredericks (for so the name was then spelled), had been a cooper, while Frederic's father had been first a
"chair-finisher" and later a freight conductor. His mother, the chief parental influence in the youngster's life, had been the daughter of a 3 blacksmith.
2. The American Dream, p. 20.
3. Paul Haines, "Harold Frederic," Diss. New York University, 1945, pp. 7-8. To date, this is the most comprehensive biographical source available on Frederic. J
6
It was Mrs. Fredericks who inculcated in the growing boy the
values of rural America, values which are reflected in the upbringing
of the Seth Fairchilds and the Theron Wares. In religion she was a
fundamentalist. "Her lore and her perspectives were Biblical and 4 protestant and ... her judgments were always righteous." In
politics she was a confirmed egalitarian. So strong were her demo
cratic convictions that she garbed the young Frederic "in Kossuth hat
and Garibaldi jacket" to demonstrate her hatred of tyrants."* A prac
tical woman, full of vitality and fortitude, she became a seamstress
when her husband died in 1858—only eighteen months after the birth of
Harold—and carried on "a vest-making business so energetically that
she was able to employ several young women as assistants. . . ."^ She
and Jessica Lawton are alike in this respect. Indeed, it was the
spirit of industry that she wanted, above all, for young Harold to
cultivate, for she expected the "boy to be a credit to her," to make
something of himself as she had done.^ Accordingly, as is amply mani
fested in his novels, Frederic grew up preoccupied with the American
dream—with the Horatio Alger myth of success and progress. As Austin
Briggs, Jr. has perceptively noted, Frederic's heroes entertain
4. Haines, p. 10.
5. Haines, p. 10.
6. Haines, p. 9.
7. Haines, p. 12. 7 grandiose notions of progress:
From the first novel, with its reformers out to banish the political bosses of the Gilded Age, through The Damnation, with its hero dazzled by the brilliance of his own illumi nation, to the last novel, with its hero unable to see a limit to the expansion of his power, Frederic's fiction treats the bumptious hopes of characters filled with g enthusiasm for the possibilities of their own development.
Consistent with the rags-to-riches element implicit in the
American dream, the family tradition which Frederic inherited was quite thin; very little was there for him to be pretentious about. He could boast of no intellectual tradition, "such as Emerson ... had inherited; no sense of family guilt, like Hawthorne's; no overpowering religious heritage to brood over and rebel against in the manner of 9 Stephen Crane." It is true that Frederic's ancestors had played a small role in the American Revolution—a role dramatized in In the
Valley—and that Frederic could point out that there had always been
"social gradations ... below them."^ Thus, Frederic was not ashamed of his commonplace origins or his lack of cultural tradition. In fact, much in the manner of Mark Twain, he capitalized on his circumstances in order to create for himself an image that would place him squarely within the best of all American traditions:
'The country boy of genius' was a myth that Frederic himself helped to create by exaggerating the poverty of his
8. Austin Briggs, Jr., The Novels of Harold Frederic (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1969), p. 15.
9. Thomas F. O'Donnell and Hoyt C. Franchere, Harold Frederic (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1961), p. 20.
10. Haines, p. 7. 8
upbringing and his lack of formal education, and by claiming that he had been raised on a farm when in actuality he grew up in a city of 20,000. The view of himself that he often promoted was that of the self-made man who owed nothing to the past. The story of his rise in the world, even without his embellishments, 'would lend itself to any amount of gushing from the platforms of the "Self-Culture" organiza tions, 1 and Frederic |jved to tell the story with a gushing, boastful pride. ...
It is therefore scarcely coincidental that Seth Fairchild, Reuben Tracy
(the hero of The Lawton Girl), and Theron Ware think of themselves in terms that would describe a "country boy of genius," a self-made man bent on rising from rural obscurity to urban eminence and affluence.
Frederic's own rise in the world began on a somewhat precarious note. Between 1871 and 1873, for example, he worked as a helper in several photographer firms, from one of which he was summarily dis- 12 missed for daydreaming and negligence. It was probably not until
1873, when he turned seventeen, that Frederic caught the Horatio Alger enthusiasm and resolved "to make something of himself," as his mother had earlier admonished. Dropping the "ks" from his name "to make a 13 more comely spelling," he set out for Boston, which at that time was the New Jerusalem for prospective artists and writers. As O'Donnell and Franchere have pointed out, only thirteen years earlier William
Dean Howells, "another young man from a farther West than Frederic's, had established the pattern and had grown in a little more than a
11. Briggs, pp. 17-18.
12. For further details of Frederic's early life, see Haines, pp. 7-58 and O'Donnell and Franchere, pp. 17-33.
13. Haines, p. 16. 9 14 decade from country boy to editor of the mighty Atlantic Monthly."
But whereas Howells' pilgrimage was successful, Frederic's proved to be largely unsuccessful. The only job he could find, apparently, was as a retoucher for a photographer. His spare time was utilized, "not in seeking out America's intellectual and literary giants," but in playing pool at the local billiard "academy" and in touring the art galleries
"where he admired pictures and portraits that would never hang in
Mechanic's Hall back in Utica."'''"' Two years after he had left to make good in the big city, Frederic was back in Utica decked out in a long- 16 tailed frock coat, alluding to the magnificence of Boston and "view- 17 ing Utica affairs with a certain worldly serenity." Also, like 18 Theron Ware's, his hands were "white and meticulously cared for," suggesting, perhaps, that he no longer considered himself a member of the working class. For the time being, this phase of the American dream had gone awry for him.
Ill
Back home, however, and again under the influence of Mrs.
Fredericks, Harold found himself confronted with the pressures to suc ceed. And before long, he appears to have become genuinely interested
14. O'Donnell and Franchere, p. 34.
15. O'Donnell and Franchere, p. 34.
16. Haines, p. 26.
17. Haines, p. 27.
18. Haines, p. 27. 10
in becoming a success. The quickened sense of guilt—the stinging
realization of countless hours frittered away in Boston pool rooms and
art galleries—must have had a sobering effect upon the country lad who
had gone to the city to make the big time but who had in fact returned
home more like the prodigal son, with nothing to show for his experi
ence except a repertoire of wisecracks and a frock coat. Thus, once
again, Frederic "made the maternal assurance that he would amount to 19 something," a commitment which he had made a "part of his own fibre."
And to complement this long-standing and often-reiterated commitment,
he resolved to "live up to his frock coat" 20 —a symbol for him, 21 apparently, of "the culture, lore, and wisdom of the ages" which he
had somehow fancied that he had "acquired" during his two-year stay in
Boston.
Thus it was that Frederic began to settle down and to apply himself. Hard work, honesty, aggressiveness—these were his watch words—his guidelines which were championed by both Horatio Alger and
Mrs. Fredericks. Accordingly, his success was phenomenal. In 1875,
the year in which Frederic returned to Utica, he joined the staff of the Utica Morning Herald and became a proofreader. Later that year, he switched to the Utica Observer, and within five years he had become its managing editor. By then he was one of the city's most prominent
19. Haines, pp. 51-52.
20. Haines, p. 27.
21. Carey McWilliams, "Harold Frederic: 'A Country Boy of Genius,University of California Chronicle, 35 (January, 1933), 30. 11 citizens and had achieved all that Seth Fairchild had and more, and all that Theron Ware or Horace Boyce might have realistically hoped to achieve: "All social doors were open to /[FredericJ, and he shared the confidences of nationally influential men. He was particularly attracted to the Irish Catholic community and its good-natured men and beautiful women." 22
Quite a success story indeed, especially for a man just twenty- four years old! But Frederic, like the archetypal figure of the
American myth, was hardly content. His ambitions continued to soar and his achievements to multiply. In 1882, he came to feel that his talent 23 was being wasted on a provincial newspaper and so abruptly resigned from the Observer to assume the editorship of the powerful Albany 24 Evening Journal. But this latest position did not satisfy him either, for by 1884 he had become disillusioned with both journalism 25 and his position as journalist. The former he dismissed as a "vile and hollow fool-rink," while the latter he saw as a "fakir" 26—views which the Reverend Theron Ware comes to have with respect to congrega tion and clergy. What was probably more important, however, at least in terms of the mythology of success, was Frederic's contempt for the
22. Stanton Garner, Harold Frederic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 9.
23. Haines, p. 40.
24. O'Donnell and Franchere, p. 46.
25. For the particulars of Frederic's relationship with the Evening Journal, see O'Donnell and Franchere, pp. 46-49.
26. Garner, p. 10. 12 27 "slowness" of his ascent to worldly prominence. Thus, Frederic now
resigned from the Evening Journal. His El Dorado, he felt, lay else-
where, and like Theron Ware, he would set out for new horizons. 28
IV
When Frederic resigned from the Evening Journal because of his
scorn for journalism, he accepted, somewhat ironically, a position as
London correspondent for the New York Times. But as Stanton Garner
explains, Frederic "made it abundantly clear in letter after letter
from London that he regarded the Times post as no more than a temporary 29 haven which he intended to abandon after a year or two, ..." pre
sumably so that he could devote all of his time to the writing of
fiction. For he had set his heart upon becoming a literary giant and was convinced that he could "attain eminence and affluence by marching
to the Howells1 drum and conforming to the Horatio Alger Junior success 30 pattern." Frederic once wrote to his friend John Howe, "I shall come 31 back to America in 1887 with some money, with a reputation. ..."
Yet Frederic never quite realized his ambitious dreams. Working for
the Times, he got bogged down in the quagmire of "high living and low
27. Garner, p. 10.
28. In this connection, one is also reminded of Dreiser's hero, Frank Cowperwood, who also had made a success in the states before setting off to make a name for himself in London.
29. Garner, p. 10.
30. Garner, p. 27.
31. O'Donnell and Franchere, p. 59. 13 sales which frustrated permanently his hope of abandoning the 'fool- 32 rink1 of journalism for the life of the literary aristocrat." Thus, in one sense, journalism proved to be for Frederic, as it had for so many other American writers, the proverbial albatross, one that he could never get off his neck.
And yet the position seemed perfect at the time for an aspiring young man such as Frederic, a man who had brilliantly "survived the rough-and-tumble of American public life and was ready to challenge
Europe, to analyze and probe it, and add it to his growing store of 33 world knowledge." Like Ben Franklin's experience in Europe, surely
Frederic's life in London would help broaden his horizons and thereby make possible a career for him as a writer of fiction. He certainly could use the experience, because, as O'Donnell and Franchere's por trait of the newly-appointed correspondent reveals", Frederic was by no means a cosmopolite when he set sail for the Old World:
In some respects /Frederic7 was mature beyond his years; in others, he was a fledgling, raw and underdeveloped for the sophisticated society into which he was about to fly. Before boarding the ship in New York, he had gone to Times Editor Edward P. Mitchell not to discover what his duties in London would be but to learn what tips he was expected to pay aboard ship to table and room stewards. Having given him some inexpert advice, Mr. Mitchell waved farewell and watched the young man lumber awkwardly out the door in a ^ 'long green overcoat that made him look like a cucumber.'
32. Garner, p. 26.
33. Garner, p. 10.
34. O'Donnell and Franchere, p. 50. 14
Indeed there was still very much of the naive American in
Frederic when he embarked for England. According to Frank Harris, an
Englishman who witnessed Frederic's arrival, Frederic "was, of course,
American, patriotically, and flamboyantly so, and like a good American
he was ready to point out our faults, and failings, and contrast them 35 with the full-orbed perfection of the other hemisphere."
In spite of the hardship involved in adjusting to an entirely
different mode of existence and to an alien breed of people, Frederic
did not remain a fledgling for long. In 1884, the year in which he
alighted at England, he undertook a daring adventure, one that earned
him the respect and admiration of the British people. Well aware that
he was risking his life, but probably motivated more from Yankee
shrewdness at grabbing the big chance than from heroic instinct,
Frederic rushed to a cholera-stricken area in southern France, where he
spent five days gathering information that helped to check the rising
tide of hysteria that was engulfing England along with other European
countries. His courageous undertaking not only won him international
acclaim as a press agent but also no doubt figured significantly in his
getting elected to the Savage Club in London, where, in addition to
his well-known heroics, he was becoming known as a "brilliant, high- 36 spirited, hail-fellow-well-met sort of man. . . ."
35. Quoted by Ernest Earnest, Expatriates and Patriots: American Artists, Scholars, and Writers in Europe (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1968), p. 222.
36. O'Donnell and Franchere, p. 55. 15
Launched from the nest, Frederic winged his way into the
British political and social aviary, still fully confident that he would yet fulfill himself according to the terms implicit in the Ameri can mythology of success—and this, in spite of the fact that he was no longer living at home, but abroad. In less than a year after his adventure in France, he was elected a member of the National Liberal
Club. Here he made the acquaintance of numerous renowned statesmen, such as William E. Gladstone, David Lloyd George, and Charles Stewart
Parnell, with many of whom Frederic eventually became intimately asso ciated. In 1889, Frederic was involved over head and ears in the activities of the Ghouls Club. At the club's meetings in Signor Roma's restaurant, he "ordered the menu and dominated the conversation" in the presence of men like James M. Barrie, W. E. Henley, Joseph Pennell,
Conan Doyle, and Barnard Partridge, the cartoonist for Punch. Such artists and writers considered Frederic "the best of boon companions 37 and a storyteller of the rarest." By now Frederic had, in his own modest way, crashed the London social scene and had earned for himself the paradoxical epithet of the American Dr. Johnson. Besides his lively conversation, at parties Frederic often intoned such American 38 songs as "Clementine" or related the details of the British nobility, as Vestalia Skinner, the heroine of March Hares, so ably does.
37. Earnest, pp. 221-22.
38. Haines, pp. 179-180. V
But along with this cosmopolitan veneer of worldly wisdom which
Frederic had recently acquired, there came a corresponding decline in his expectations for becoming a great literary success. With the pas sage of time and the piling up of obstacle on obstacle, it became impossible for Frederic to become the free lance of his heart's desire.
For one thing, he had lost sight of his goals and had allowed his
increasingly extravagant mode of living to keep him fettered to the
Times post. To maintain his image as the American Johnson at the clubs, he had to spend a great deal for membership fees, food and drink, and fashionable attire. As international press agent, he no doubt felt obliged to pick up the tab when important dignitaries accompanied him to dinner or to the theater—expenses for which he apparently felt that the Times did not adequately reimburse him. And in 1890, Frederic found himself a mistress and hence became a bread- 39 winner for two households instead of one.
One would think that Frederic's spectacular handling of the cholera epidemic in France and his showy invasion of London circles would make him more valuable to the Times, but the Times never recipro cated by giving him an increase in salary: "He could turn only to his writing of fiction and non-fiction for the needed increment, and the volume of his publications after 1890 is weighty evidence that he felt 40 the pressure to produce." But the royalties he received on his books
39. O'Donnell and Franchere, pp. 67-69.
40. O'Donnell and Franchere, p. 69. 17 were insufficient to close the gulf between his income and his ever-
increasing expenditures.
Frederic was never able to liberate himself from the curse of
economic necessity. When he died, he left virtually penniless a widow and a mistress, both of whom had borne him several children. Though obviously aware of the appalling prospects with which his families would be faced at his death, he was utterly powerless to unweave the
life-pattern which he had woven during the last fourteen years of his 41 life, a "pattern as intricate and as complex as a map of London."
Nor did Frederic accept with quiet resignation what must have seemed imminent failure. His correspondence suggests that when he began to realize what was happening to him his life style became
increasingly more reckless and irresponsible. In the midst of August of 1898, he collapsed as the result of a stroke:
Impatient with illness, and more impatient still with doctors or with healers of any kind, Frederic refused to follow orders, to rest, or to diet. 'Doctor,' he said to one physi cian called in to attend him, 'I have an intellectual con tempt for milk.' He would have hhz cigars and pipe, his brandy, his rides in the country.
Two months later Frederic was dead. In a sense, he had followed through to its inevitable, destructive conclusion the impulse of his hero of March Hares.
Six decades after his death, Frederic's daughter wrote that
"unhappily, success came too easily and too early to Harold
41. O'Donnell and Franchere, p. 56.
42. O'Donnell and Franchere, p. 71. 18 43 Frederic," for his early success helped to bring to the surface his
deepest flaws. Stanton Garner has made some perceptive comments on
this aspect of Frederic's life:
In his rise from a modest background to international stature as a journalist, his life had approximated the American dream. Yet for all of his high principles and dedication to truth, his deepest impulses were undependable and self-defeating. ... As this self-knowledge grew, he sensed that the flaws of his protagonists were reflections of flaws within himself. He realized in the most personal way that the new world Adam was really post-lapsarian. ... As long as the innocence was imperfectly tested by experience, its surface might hold. But once it was pattered, the true nature of the democratic man was exposed.
In this sense, Frederic's life was never fulfilled. Ultimately
thwarted was his vision of the American dream; gone forever were his hopes of returning to his native land a literary aristocrat, to be received amidst all of the attendant pomp and circumstance his heart so passionately desired. In terms of his personal experience, the Horatio
Alger myth—the American dream itself--had proved unworkable, an elusive grail the pursuit of which had brought him dangerously close to spiritual bankruptcy and had possibly even made him an alcoholic. It seems perversely ironic that Harold Frederic, like Horatio Alger, died a poor man. In his penultimate novel, Frederic's hero makes an obser vation that might easily stand as Frederic's own final commentary on life: "A man is only a man after all. He did not make this world, and he cannot do with it what he likes. It is a bigger thing, when you come to think of it, than he is. At the end there is only a little
43. O'Donnell and Franchere, p. 56.
44. Garner, p. 32. hole in it for him to be buried in and forgotten. ..." Quite a
disparity there is, indeed, between these words and the great expecta
tions which Frederic had cherished years before. Like the author of
the proverb, Frederic had learned that "success at first doth many
times undo men at last."
VI
So far we have made little attempt to define the role of women
in Frederic's life, a role which, nevertheless, played an important
part in both his life and his fiction. He once began a novel by
declaring that "the meeting of the man and the woman—it is to this
that every story in the world goes back for its beginning" (Gloria
Mundi, p. 1). Frederic was not being facetious here. On the contrary,
he saw himself as proclaiming an infallible truth because the chief
events of so many of his novels are triggered by the acquaintances made 46 between his male and female protagonists. As we shall later see,
these encounters, affecting as they do the ultimate fate of Frederic's
characters as well as the development of the plots, supplied him with
his primary thematic materials and enabled him to construct a mythical
dialectic in which his feminine characters, who symbolize opposing
45. Harold Frederic, Gloria Mundi: A Novel (New York: Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1898), p. 570. Subsequent references to this edition will be parenthetically cited in the text.
46. Consider, for example, Daisy's acquaintance with Philip (In the Valley), Seth's with Isabel (Seth's Brother's Wife), Horace's with Kate (The Lawton Girl), Theron's with Celia (The Damnation of Theron Ware), Christian's with Frances (Gloria Mundi), and Thorpe's with Lady Cressage (The Market-Place). 20 cultural values, are brilliantly played off one against the other. For the sake of convenience and for want of better terms, we may simply refer to these contrasting feminine types as the artless maiden and, her counterpart, the gilded lady. Briefly, the former reflects the values of the working class and its emphasis on the simple, meagerly prosperous life, whereas the latter is usually a city-bred woman and represents the society of the idle rich and its emphasis on wealth, social status, culture, and sophisticated manners.
Frederic's own encounters with women—which must have been legion—not only helped to establish the pattern of his life style and to bring about the changes of fortune affecting his career but also contributed significantly to his evolving dialectic. There were, for example, at least two women who served unquestionably as models for his fictional versions of the artless maiden.
The first was Grace Williams, the prototype of the unsophisti cated woman of the American novels (as opposed to the English novels).^ She was a Utica Girl who had been reared in a solid tradi- 48 tion of "plain living and high thinking." Her maternal grandfather 49 was Beriah Green, the famous abolitionist. She and Harold had met early in life. In fact, they had grown up together and looked upon themselves as childhood sweethearts. There was a tacit understanding
47. The American novels are those whose settings and charac ters are chiefly American, while the later English novels deal pri marily with English settings and characters.
48. Haines, p. 73.
49. Earnest, p. 221; also see Haines, p. 73. among members of the community that the couple were ideal for each other and would eventually marry, presumably when Frederic decided to settle down. When Frederic returned from Boston, Grace idolized "the tall young man who, in little domestic parties, so gaily teased his half-sister, Helen, by singing, on the last chorus, in his rich bass voice, 'My bonnie, blear-eyed Scotch lassie,' who described so non chalantly his experiences in a larger city, who, already a journalist, was to become an author.
Frederic, of course, reciprocated, at least for the time being.
As the young bachelor described Grace in his first published story,
"The Blakelys of Poplar Place," she seemed to him "the prettiest, sweetest, modestest miss you ever see."^ Very well did she fit his conception of a companion suitable for an aspiring young man of the world. As everything seemed to indicate, they were to enjoy an endur ing, harmonious relationship. Unfortunately, however, such a notion proved to be ill-founded. By 1881, four years after the wedding, their marriage was in trouble; by 1890, for all practical purposes, it was dead, even though there never were divorce proceedings.
It seems clear that Harold and Mrs. Frederic were jointly responsible for the breakup of their marriage. Grace, for example, could never adjust, like Alice Ware, to her new role, that of a wife whose husband was rising rapidly to worldly eminence. "Equal to romp ing with the Baxters," she nevertheless felt uncomfortable around and
50. Haines, pp. 31-32.
51. Quoted by Haines, p. 31. 22
"self-conscious among gaily prattling strangers; a virtuous housewife, she did not cultivate elegance of person and had not the knack of 52 primping." On one occasion, acceding to Frederic's demand that she invest in a hat with some style to it, she spent thirty-five dollars for "an elephant-colored chip with a carise band, far too magnificent 53 for her other apparel or indeed for her personality." And when she asked her husband for his opinion, Frederic only sighed, "Still like
Grace.
However, just as his male protagonists are often culpable in their relationship with unsophisticated women, so Frederic must help shoulder the burden of responsibility for the failure of his marriage.
Assuming that Grace was ingenuous, provincial, unadaptable (as he seems to have thought), Frederic himself often displayed an alarming lack of poise and assurance, as, for example, has been suggested by his igno rance of etiquette aboard ship during his trip to England. Respecting his wife, he was often brazenly inconsiderate. In 1881, only four years after he was married and during a time when Grace, already frus trated and confused, must have been trying desperately to "refine" her self in accordance with his wishes, Frederic stupidly placed her "in an ambiguous position by his close friendship with a young woman, a friendship from which his wife was excluded, just as Alice Ware . . .
52. Haines, p. 72.
53. Haines, p. 72.
54. Haines, p. 72. 23 would be left out of the intimacy between Theron and Celia Madden""'"' and just as Annie Fairchild would be excluded from the intimacy between
Seth and Isabel. It is no wonder that Mrs. Frederic became "a cheer less woman," as Lillian Gilkes describes her,"^ one who, "as the years passed ... drew more and more away from active participation in her husband's affairs" and who "toward the last of her life /Tbecame7 almost a recluse.
VII
By 1890, Frederic had given up on Grace. Never, he believed, would she measure up to his expectations or be a credit to him by enhancing his social and economic opportunities. Like Annie Fairchild and Alice Ware, she was too "artless," too plain, too homey; she would be a permanent liability. He thus began to look about for someone with 58 a sweeter, more spirited and sparkling disposition. He also must have felt the need for someone who could share in his intellectual and emotional life, a need which is understandable enough. Hence Frederic acquired a mistress, a vivacious girl named Kate Lyon, who became the model for the unsophisticated woman of the English novels and thus
55. Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1966), p. 241.
56. Lillian Gilkes, Cora Crane: A Biography of Mrs. Stephen Crane (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1960), p. 72.
57. O'Donnell and Franchere, p. 65.
58. Gilkes, p. 72. 24
provided the principal characteristics of Frances Bailey and Vestalia
Skinner.
An Oswego Girl, Miss Lyon herself had been reared in a theo cratic tradition and in some respects always remained a devoted
Christian Scientist. It was partially at her insistence that Frederic, critically ill, dismissed his physicians and placed his life in the hands of a faith healer, an act which not only hastened Frederic's 59 death but which brought on herself a formal charge of manslaughter.
In other respects, however, she was quite liberal and seemed unfettered by fundamentalist dogma. Depending on the occasion, she could be a charming hostess,^ an exuberant lover, or a "gay gypsy" companion.^
Perhaps she is best characterized as an updated or modernized version of Grace Williams—being more emancipated and less provincial.
From the time that Frederic met Kate until his death, he lived alternately between the two households, spending the weekends with
Grace and the remainder of the time with Kate. As O'Donnell and
Franchere have concluded,
Just how Frederic managed to preserve the social amenities in both homes is hard to imagine. If Kate was happy, it must be said that Grace was cruelly unhappy. ... Frederic did not count the cost either to Grace and her children or to Kate and hers; nor, apparently, did he give much thought to the tragic circumstances into which he might—and by his early
59. For the grim details of Kate's meddling and of Frederic's negligence, see Haines, pp. 226-30.
60. O'Donnell and Franchere, p. 68.
61. Gilkes, p. 118. 25
death, did—plunge them all. Whether he^gver regretted his extravagant bargain he did not disclose.
VIII
There is almost no information available concerning Frederic's encounters with fashionable society belles, so that anything said about possible sources for his treatment of the gilded lady must be done with extreme caution. However, judging by the frequency with which they appear in his novels and considering his position as a reporter having a wide range of contacts, one is tempted to conclude that the gorgeous ladies were not just creatures of Frederic's fancy but were drawn, partially, at least, from living models. It is known, for instance, that Celia Madden derived, in part, from two Uticans,
Josephine McQuade and her sister, Catherine. The former had luxurious 63 red hair, while the latter had mastered Chopin on the piano. It is regrettable that not much else is known about Miss Madden's prototypes.
As suggested earlier, Frederic had probably been attracted to this type of woman for many years, especially those years when in
America he was rising to national eminence and when, at the same time, he was becoming disillusioned by Grace's want of refinement. And, as in his novels, it is likely that in real life the fashionable lady, with whom he no doubt chatted at fund-raising dinners and about whom he read in the gossip column, symbolized for him, as Grace most certainly
62. O'Donnell and Franchere, p. 68.
63. O'Donnell and Franchere, p. 43 64 did not, the "culture, lore, and wisdom of the ages." As with Theron
Ware and Horace Boyce, she must have become for him the highest symbol
of achievement within the context of the myth of the American dream.
However, as Frederic grew sadder and wiser as a result of his experi
ence, he must have become disillusioned with the gilded lady. Had he
gotten involved in an affair which had turned him sour? Or was his skepticism simply due to his observations as a reporter? In any case,
by 1892 he was writing a series of articles satirizing, as Earnest
aptly expresses it, "the prejudices of the British upper middle class:
their hypocritical prudishness, their social pretensions, their ignorance about art, their anti-Americanism, and their muddle- 65 headedness." Later, the articles were published in book form under the ludicrously unimaginative title Mrs. Albert Grundy. It is to
Frederic's credit that he remained, at least in his fiction, if not in real life, on the side of the artless maidens. Once, when a friend alluded to Frederic's domestic behavior, Frederic replied, "Enough of that. Whatever my life has been, my pen has always been on the side of 66 the angels." Those familiar with Frederic's life and works would probably agree with Frederic's assessment.
64. McWilliams, p. 30.
65. Earnest, p. 226.
66. O'Donnell and Franchere, p. 71. The myth of the American dream, then, was embodied to some extent in Frederic's life. Ultimately, however, it was frustrated, never fully realized within the pattern of his life. Sensing that his dreams might never be attained, indeed fearing that they might remain dreams, and only dreams, Frederic had early begun working the pattern into the fabric of his fiction. There, he hoped to obtain a more detached view of what had been happening to him. Perhaps he felt that if he probed deeply enough in his fiction he might win enough self- understanding to change the disastrous course his life seemed always
(and inevitably) to be taking. Alas, this Frederic was never able to achieve—neither the self-knowledge nor the ability for effective action. Perhaps it was for these reasons that Frederic's last novel,
The Market-Place, was to suggest an underlying disillusionment with the myth of the American dream. CHAPTER 2
IN THE VALLEY: THE MYTH OF NEW WORLD SUPERIORITY
The second novel that Frederic published, In the Valley was in several important ways his first; hence its treatment at this point in our discussion. For one thing, Frederic himself considered it his
"first." An historical novel dealing with the American Revolution, it was to be, in Frederic's own words, "the best thing of the kind ever done by an American.""'" These words Frederic spoke in the face of his own conviction that the writing of historical fiction was of all tasks
"the most difficult and exacting." 2 Quite a statement of faith indeed, especially for a fledgling author to make.
But In the Valley was in another sense Frederic's first novel.
It was conceived and much of it was written years before he undertook to write his second novel, Seth's Brother's Wife, which was published in 1887, three years before the publication of In the Valley. "Before
I left school, at the age of twelve," Frederic observed in his "Preface to a Uniform Edition," "I had composed some short but lurid intro ductions to a narrative which should have for its central feature the 3 battle of Oriskany," an event which in the novel leads up to the
1. Briggs, p. 51.
2. Harold Frederic, "Preface to a Uniform Edition," In the Sixties (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1897), p. viii.
3. Frederic, In the Sixties, p. vi.
28 29
climax. By 1885, he had composed a number of additional fragments, one
"that ran to more than twenty thousand words, and several others £that7 4 were half that length, but they were all failures." Realizing that he
was not yet mature enough to write historical novels, Frederic decided
to shelve the project for the time being and to begin writing something
less "difficult and exacting." The result of this newest endeavor was
Seth's Brother's Wife.^ Frederic then went back to work on In the
Valley and found that the novel "went smoothly and rapidly."^ The
novel came out in 1890.
I
More important for the purpose of this study, however, is a
third way in which the novel may be viewed as Frederic's first. For it represents his first book-length study of the national character. By recording national attitudes, habits, and other definitive character istics, Frederic contributed a small but no less significant part to the perpetuation of a national ethos which had begun to be discernible over a hundred years earlier in the writings of Franklin, Tyler, and others and which continued to appear in American literature throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Thus, preoccupied with issues and concerns which had engaged the imagination of such authors as Cooper, Hawthorne, Twain, and James, Frederic would from his
4. Frederic, In the Sixties, p. vii.
5. Frederic, In the Sixties, p. viii.
6. Briggs, p. 50. 30
very first novel be writing within the main currents of American
thought.
Here, also, in In the Valley, Frederic would begin to develop
the mythical dialectic which would provide the structural context not
only for defining the national ethos but also for embodying what would
come to be the central theme in the remainder of his American novels.
As identified by Carey McWilliams, this theme, to which we alluded in
the previous chapter, is "the chaos that results when an untrained,
uneducated, and unsophisticated person escapes from a provincial
society and suddenly finds himself heir to the culture, lore, and wis
dom of the ages."^ In the present novel, as well as in a goodly number
of novels by Henry James, the theme is played out in a contest between
representatives of Old and New World cultures, a contest which is
usually triggered when the innocent American receives the impact of
European tradition.
In earlier treatments of the theme as reflected in American
literature, such as may be found in Royal Tyler's play The Contrast
(1787) or Trumbull's poem M'Fingal (1782), the conflict, usually a
crude, often farcical affair, seemed scarcely to be taken seriously and, if it were, was nearly always resolved in favor of the pious
American or Yankee. The representative of the Old World, on the other hand, who was most often an Englishman, was universally dismissed as a
7. McWilliams, p. 30. 31 g "silly, foppish, infamous" fool. By the nineteenth century, however, and especially by the time Frederic was writing, the culture of the Old
World was not so easily dismissed but was a commodity Americans were increasingly coming to value. As Constance Rourke explains, "Culture was an obvious proof of leisure, of long establishment, of half a hundred desirable assurances that had been lacking in American life; it even seemed to resolve the vexing problem of manners. Culture was 9 sought abroad as a tangible emblem."
Hence, in place of contempt, Americans were now showing more respect for, and greater sensitivity to, the traditions of Europe than they had heretofore shown. There was also a greater sense of fairness in native attempts to define the distinguishing features of the respective hemispheres. For Irving and Cooper, for example, as for
Frederic, the age-old contrast between the New and Old World character no longer seemed to warrant such a black and white picture or such an absolute interpretation of good and evil. Rather, the issue now seemed to imply virtues and flaws on both sides of the Atlantic. The
American, it was now generally conceded, possessed a healthy moral and pragmatic vitality but was provincial and sorely lacking in matters of taste and learning. The Englishman, by contrast, displayed a more solid intellectual and artistic tradition but was often arrogant and
8. Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace,1931), p. 16.
9. Rourke, p. 236.
10. There were, of course, numerous works, such as Innocents Abroad, which continued in the older tradition of satire and farce. 32
tended toward moral decadence. Both the Englishman and the American,
it was commonly believed, were too sensitive toward criticism and were
given to exaggerating the faults of others."'"'''
Basically, this was the state of affairs when Frederic, who was
now living in London, sent In the Valley to the publishers. Twelve
years later, Frank Norris was to observe that of all of the American
expatriates living abroad, Harold Frederic "seems to have been the 12 sturdiest in clinging to American traditions. ..." As we shall
see, Norris's appraisal is a reasonably accurate reflection of
Frederic's attitude at this time with respect to the Englishman and his
Yankee counterpart, although Frederic was not, we must keep in mind,
blind to the failings of his countrymen.
II
In In the Valley, Frederic's attitude toward national character
types is clearly evident in his treatment of Daisy Mauverensen, the
heroine of the novel whose conversion to Old World culture nearly proves
her undoing. For she, more than any of the other characters in the
novel, epitomizes American freshness and innocence, as her given name
"Desideria" implies, which means "home love" and refers to the finest
11. For more details, see Washington Irving's "English Writers on America," in American Literature Survey, ed. Milton R. Stern and Seymour L. Gross (New York: The Viking Press, 1962), II, 32-40; and James Fenimore Cooper, "Gleanings in Europe: England," in American Literature Survey, ed. Milton R. Stern and Seymour L. Gross (New York: The Viking Press, 1962), pp. 76-85.
12. Frank Norris, The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, ed. Donald Pizer (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1964), p. 202. 33 13 lady in the Valley —traits which we shall encounter again in the
persons of Annie Fairchild and, to a lesser degree, Alice Ware. In
terms of Frederic's mythical dialectic, Daisy thus enacts the role of
the artless maiden of humble origins.
In the first section of the novel, Daisy is content with her
childhood sweetheart and a life of frontier simplicity. The orphan of
a Dutch wheelwright scalped in an Indian raid, she is taken at an early
age into the house of one Thomas Stewart, a renegade Irish aristocrat
who under self-imposed exile has forsaken the corrupt courtly life of
Europe for the "rude" but free and honest existence of the Mohawk
Valley frontiersman. In the same household is Douw Mauverensen, the narrator, whose widowed mother, already overburdened with a great number of offspring, had consented to let the boy become a part of the
Stewart "family."
The relationship which develops between boy and girl is one prolonged blissful pastoral delight, carried on in the best American tradition of young love in which Daisy manifests "her pretty love for all living things, her delight in innocent, simple amusements, her innate repugnance to coarse and cruel actions" (p. 63). Here, Daisy represents the kind of woman whom Cooper and Hawthorne loved so much to depict in their fair-haired beauties of innocence: the pious, guile less, morally elevating creature of the softer sex.
13. Harold Frederic, In the Valley (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890), p. 45. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited parenthetically in the text. 34
Unlike most of her literary ancestors, however, Daisy undergoes
a morally damaging transformation, possibly a warning from Frederic
that the national character was unable to accommodate the shock of cul
tural change—an observation which he might have derived from personal
experience. The change begins shortly after the arrival in America of one Lady Berenecia Cross, an addlebrained, pretentious, decadent
European dowager. Armed with fluffs of lace and ribbon, chests of
baubles and fashionable attire, along with jars of greasy make-up, she seizes upon the naive country lass and well-nigh recreates her into a monster of manners. With some apprehension, Douw Mauverensen, upon whom Daisy has previously had a refining influence, begins to observe shades of formalism and arrogance manifesting themselves in her demeanor. He notes also that she rises much later in the morning and spends more of her time making her toilet, abandoning the "simple braid as of old" and adopting instead a tiara set upon the crown of her head
(pp. 150-51). Even the husband of Lady Berenecia notices the change and questions whether or not it is an improvement: "To my mind the young woman is not improved by these furbelows and fal-lals my wife has put upon her. What wit or reason is there in a homely, sensible little maiden like this—a pretty flower growing, as God designed it to, in modest sweetness on its own soil—being garnished out in the stale foppery of the last London season?" (p. 95).
To be fair to Daisy, she herself is not entirely sure that she is taking the right course, because she vacillates between the glitter which Lady Berenecia and her circle, "with their polished ways, their 35
glistening surfaces, and their attractive, idlers' view of existence,
had thrown over her, and her own innate, womanly repugnance to the
shallowness and indulgence, not to say license, beneath it all"
(p. 151). Nevertheless, the temptation proves too great for her to
withstand, and Daisy thus falls victim to what Douw calls "the triumph
of art over unadorned nature" (p. 94). The "new" Daisy had in essence
done what Henry James and Mark Twain and others had cautioned Americans
living abroad against doing, for she had adopted all of the faults, but
none of the virtues, of European society.
Meanwhile, Daisy has become enamored of the swaggering Philip
Cross, a relative of Lady Berenecia's come to the Mohawk Valley to
establish a grand feudal estate and to find himself a wife to embellish it. Relative to the evolving mythical framework, Philip's function is
to intensify the confrontation between American and European values.
Daisy, of course, turns out to be the best prospect available and is easily flattered into accepting his proposal that she become his
titled lady and mistress of his mansion, Cairncross.
For a time the marriage seems workable but it inevitably begins to deteriorate. Flaunting himself about with the same air of hauteur and arrogance with which Fenimore Cooper had characterized the English- 14 man's bearing toward the American, Sir Philip insults his father-in- law, is openly contemptuous of Daisy's humble origins, and brazenly makes a mockery of local customs. Moreover, with the outbreak of hostilities between England and America in 1775, Sir Philip, siding
14. Cooper, p. 78. 36 with the Tory elements, plots a take-over of the Valley and a massacre of its democratic inhabitants. The combined effects of these activi ties, along with his recently acquired habits of drinking and carousing, bring Daisy to the verge of emotional collapse. It is then that she realizes the significance of her transformation—that it was her change into an imitator of manners which was responsible for the degradation and misery she and her loved ones had suffered. It is then that she also realizes the shoddiness underlying the value system which
Lady Berenecia and Sir Philip stand for and which she herself had so foolishly fawned over. Thus, according to her own analysis,
I was the silly girl to be thus befooled. My heart would have served me better if it had been all good. The longing for finery and luxury was my own. I yearned to be set above the rest. I dreamed to be called 'my lady,' too, in good time. I forgot that I came from the poor people, and that I belonged to them. So well and truly did I forget this that the fact struck me like a whip when—when it was brought to my notice (p. 286).
As an indication of the frequency with which Frederic would recur to this theme, it is interesting to note here that except for the differ ence in gender, these words might have easily been spoken by such later
Frederic heroes as Seth Fairchild, Horace Boyce, or Theron Ware,
American characters who also must suffer because of their gullibility regarding the "culture, lore, and wisdom of the ages."
As the novel turns out, Philip Cross is conveniently disposed of and Daisy repentantly returns to Douw, her first love. But she does so, as Stanton Garner has indicated, not as "an immaculate virgin but 37 15 £as7 the abused widow of /T)ouw'sJ enemy. . . Such a situation,
with its ironic implications, implications which are almost tragic in
nature, seems to reflect Frederic's contempt for Americans like Daisy
who, denying their native cultural traditions, become servile to the
traditions of the Old World.
Always a zealous American, Frederic had himself mistakenly
placed Henry James in the same category with Daisy. Once Frederic
remarked, after having crossed paths with James on several occasions
abroad, "James is an effeminate old donkey who lives with a herd of
other donkeys around him and insists on being treated as if he were the
Pope, £but/ he has licked the dust from the floor of every third rate 16 hostess in England. ..." This is a rather unfortunate observation
for Frederic to have made. Not only is it inaccurate but is lacking in
taste as well. Furthermore, Frederic's own writings complement James's
in more ways than Frederic apparently realized. Both authors, as we
have already noted, were deeply committed to defining generic and
national characteristics, and both were very much interested in estab
lishing a meaningful personal relationship with the culture of Europe.
More specifically, the story of Daisy Mauverensen parallels in
some important respects the story of Daisy Miller, which was published
eleven years before Frederic's novel and which might have influenced
it. In addition to the obvious similarity of their names, both
15. Garner, Frederic, p. 20.
16. Thomas Beer, Hanna, Crane, and the Mauve Decade (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1926), p. 321. 38
heroines are New World innocents reared in rural sections of New York who become bored by the paucity of American culture and who energeti
cally seek self-fulfillment in the glamour and excitement presumably extended them by representatives of the Old World. Both are cruelly exploited by their European beaux, Frederic's heroine somewhat more malevolently perhaps, and both suffer the scorn of their countrymen and the terrible ignominy of soiled reputations. And both incur the retri bution of their creators at story's end. Frederic's heroine survives her ordeal a ravaged and emaciated widow, whereas James's pays for her folly with her life. The principal difference between the stories, it seems, is that Frederic's novel takes place on native soil, whereas
Daisy Miller occurs on the Continent.
A more impressive series of correspondences may be found in The
Portrait of a Lady, which also came out several years before In the
Valley and of which Frederic was more than likely aware. Like Isabel
Archer, Daisy is an orphaned American with few social or economic pre tensions but with an errant curiosity about, and attraction for, the manners of Europe. Philip Cross is like Gilbert Osmond, whose coldness of nature contrasts sharply with the glowing warmth of the American girl's personality and whose approach to marriage is calculating, heartless, and essentially adulterous. Lady Berenecia Cross, though perhaps more nearly akin to the brassy and vulgar dowager Aunt Maud of
The Wings of the Dove, nevertheless suggests the worldly, cynical, and conniving Madame Merle in that both take on the American innocent as a prote'gee and arrange to marry her off for selfish reasons. And Douw 39
Hauverensen recalls Caspar Goodwood, the rejected American suitor who
remains steadfast in his pursuit of the heroine and who generously
offers her both love and advice when her marriage collapses. Douw is
also like Frederick Winterbourne from Daisy Miller, who feels a certain
"superior indignation at his own lovely fellow-country-woman's not 17 knowing the difference between a spurious gentleman and a real one."
It is important, too, to observe that within the context of the two novels both Frederic and James make a point of asserting the moral superiority of the American but concede her inability to cope with the experience of Old World or Europeanized antagonists. In like manner, both emphasize the necessity of accepting the responsibility for one's actions, although in this regard Frederic seems to be a little more lenient with his heroine, whereas Isabel must remain committed to a bad marriage to the very end.
Ill
Frederic also seems to have been, at this time at least, more vehemently nationalistic than James, perhaps more biased in the manner of Mark Twain, an attitude which he was to modify over the years. In any event, as a comparison of his respective treatments of Douw and Sir
Philip will show, his prejudices at this time were indeed strongly oriented in favor of the national character. The former, who inciden tally, characterizes himself, since he is the narrator of the novel, is a self-made man who bears some marked resemblances both to Harold
17. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Daisy Miller (New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1962), p. 166. 40
Frederic and to Benjamin Franklin, the arch-exponent of the mythos of
the American dream.
Like Frederic, for example, Douw derives from several genera
tions of humble but respectable Dutchmen. Like Franklin's, Douw's
father had been a worthy protestant clergyman. Douw himself manages to
become a prosperous merchant, living, like Franklin, "quietly, and
without ostentation, putting aside some money each quarter, and adven
turing /his_7 savings to considerable profit in the company's business
. . ." (p. 192). He is also self-congratulatory, and not at all
adverse to enumerating for the benefit of the reader his native virtues
of honesty, diligence, "truthfulness, dutifulness and sobriety (p. 163).
A professed Whig, he knows instinctively the symbolic relationship
between Yankee breeches and colonial democracy. During the harvest
season, he manifests his enthusiasms for the ideals of fraternity and
equality by helping his fellow farmers harvest the hay. And, true to
the spirit of Tom Paine, he sees the American Revolution essentially as
a contest "between the workers and the idlers" (p. 148).
By contrast, Sir Philip is characterized as a decadent aristo
crat, one of the "idlers" who, as Fenimore Cooper had himself earlier
complained, insisted on making class distinctions "to create an extreme
deference in all the subordinate classes for their superiors" (p. 77).
Politically, he is supposed to be a faithful Tory, an officer who
claims to be fighting only for the protection of his estate and in
defense of his king, but who, according to Douw's common American bias,
is motivated by ancestral blood-lust accumulated during centuries of 41 wanton butchery. At the prospect of engaging in battle, Philip con jures up, like one of Jack London's heroes reverting back to the beast,
The stolid purple visage of some ancestral Cross ... over his heavy beef and tubs of ale, at the stray thought of spearing a boar at bay, or roasting ducats out of a Jew. ... The varnish of civilization melted from his surface; one saw in him only the historic [,] fierce, blood-letting islander, true son of the men who for thirty years murdered one another by tens of.thousands all over England, nomi nally for a York or a Lancaster, but truly from the utter wantonness of the butcher's instinct, the while we Dutch were discovering oil-painting and perfecting the noble craft of printing with types (pp. 236-37).
This last pious sentiment may be more Douw's than Frederic's because, as we have said earlier, Frederic was not entirely oblivious of flaws within the national character. In the same words that
Constance Rourke used to characterize the Yankee, Douw's "noisy asser tion of . . . superiority suggested an underlying doubt that this 18 superiority existed," a belief which was implicit in Cooper's state ment that Americans, having their "spurs to earn, on all matters of glory and renown," were jealous and defensive "even to the reputations 19 of the cats and dogs." Nor does Frederic applaud Douw in other sig nificant respects, for the merchant, as representative of generic and national traits, is often portrayed as a commonplace, uninteresting, and unimaginative character who at times looks with unfounded suspicion upon graceful and elegant living and who frequently irritates the reader's sensibility by preaching trite platitudes and self-righteous sentiments. In this sense, Douw clearly tends toward mediocrity, a
18. Rourke, p. 29.
19. Cooper, "Gleanings", p. 79. 42 characteristic which Cooper himself had noticed and deplored in his study.. • 20
Nor does Frederic categorically condemn Sir Philip, the chief symbol of the English national character. Near the end of the novel,
Douw, whom sixty years and a wide range of experience have matured, and who in this particular instance seems to be speaking for Frederic, reassesses the character of his rival and finds it to be not all that bad. There were now two Philips,
One affable, honorable, generous, likeable, among his equals; the other cold, selfish, haughty, and harsh to his inferiors. It struck me now that ... I had been shown only the rude and hateful one because my station in life had not seemed to entitle me to consort with the other. ...
In his own country he would doubtless have made a tolerable husband, a fair landlord, a worthy gentleman in the eyes of the only class of people whose consideration he cared for. But over here, in the new land, all the conditions had been against him (p. 402).
Here Frederic seems to be pleading extenuating circumstances to account for Philip's reprehensible behavior, whereas in the passage cited earlier he had unequivocally declared the aristocrat to be a blood-thirsty scoundrel. The paradox may be explained by Frederic's ambivalence. For while Frederic would concede the Englishman's arrogance and deplore, as Washington Irving had written, its habit of thriving "on the common boon of civility," attributing to such "lowli ness of others their own elevation," and underrating "a society where 21 there are no artificial distinctions," Frederic nevertheless saw in
20. Cooper, "Gleanings", p. 81.
21. Irving, p. 34. 43 the European a person with a greater artistic and intellectual tradi tion, a tradition which was noticeably absent in America but which would soon have to be developed. CHAPTER 3
SETH'S BROTHER'S WIFE: EMERGENCE OF A DIALECTIC
In this, the "second" of Frederic's novels, the mythical dia lectic ("mythical" because significant elements in the dialectic are derived from national mythical patterns) which had begun to unfold in his previous novel here comes forth fully developed. As we shall see throughout the following chapters, the structural framework of
Frederic's future novels would, with some variations and inversions, be reworkings of this underlying scheme. We shall further observe that in the course of his career as a writer Frederic moved progressively away from a realistic and factual interpretation of life and came to lean more heavily on a symbolic and mythical interpretation. Thus, while in the course of his career he straddled simultaneously two dis parate traditions (the realistic and the romantic) he did so with an ever increasing reliance on the romantic and a corresponding decrease on the realistic. In this sense, Frederic's use of the dialectic ensured his freedom from both the technical and philosophical limita tions characteristic of pure literary realism. Hereafter, his novels would be, generally speaking, richer in content and thematic implica tion; they would also tend to reflect Frederic's growing sense of artistic awareness, an awareness which reaches its height with The
Damnation of Theron Ware.
44 45
The use of a dialectical pattern within a larger mythical framework was, of course, not new in American literature. Cooper and
Hawthorne, for example, had already employed similar patterns in their own writings, and Henry James and others were to develop their versions- later on. In fact there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that many of these writers, including Harold Frederic, borrowed freely from among themselves and from sources abroad. In one sense, such wide spread usage implies a certain artistic or aesthetic satisfaction to be derived from the myth-making process; in another, it suggests a certain fulfillment of universal impulses deeply embedded in the human psyche.
As John F. Priest has argued, "mythological thinking is striving for a total world view, for an interpretation or meaning of all that is sig nificant.""'' While Frederic's novel obviously stops short of presenting us with a world view, it nevertheless embodies significant aspects of human experience which have come to be identified as universally Ameri can.
I
At this point let us examine the dialectic in more detail. As we have noted in Chapter 1 of our study, the dialectic involves the use of masculine and feminine character types who represent opposing cul tural values and who are played off one against the other usually in the manner of a triangle. In this way Frederic argues the relative
1. John F. Priest, "Myth and Dream in Hebrew Scripture," Myths, Dreams, and Religion, ed. Joseph Campbell (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1970), p. 51. 46 merits of alternative life-styles generally in vogue during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In America these were the decades of the Gilded Age; in England they were the decadent years leading up to the fin de siecle. In any case, they were the years when, as we have earlier observed, materialistic values were notoriously undermining traditional ideals. The frenzied clambering after social position, the frantic pursuit of wealth (and in prodigious quantities), the quest for forbidden knowledge, the overindulgence in aestheticism—all these were becoming grails in Western civilization and were causing great concern among the best of our poets and novelists. For example, that Frederic himself felt gravely apprehensive about the New Morality in America is reflected in his correspondence during the time he was working on Seth.
A short time after Grover Cleveland, whom Frederic knew personally, had assumed the Presidency in 1885, Frederic had written him that,
The public tendency since the war, in business, in politics, in social life, has rotted and infected almost every condi tion of our existence. Moral sensibility has been blunted, the keen edge of honor turned, the standards of justice clogged, the ardor of patriotism chilled, the confiding ignorance of the half-educated tampered with, the ambitions of good men perverted. ...
In Frederic's novels, what we have earlier called the. "gilded lady" represents the materialism of these decades and inevitably comes to stand as a symbol for all the values embodied in the New Morality, while, her counterpart, on the other hand, the "artless maiden," reflects the values of a vanishing Puritan culture. The former lives her life in the drawing rooms and boudoirs of America, cultivating the
2. Quoted by O'Donnell and Franchere, pp. 78-79. 47 society of the idle rich, spending her time at tea parties, gossip sessions, and theater engagements. She it is who "creates the myth of 3 urban superiority" while indicting "the myth of agrarian life." An
exotic beauty, she is restless, proud, often passionate, and full of romantic illusions, lacking in moral depth and tending toward deca
dence. She is related to the "new woman" in literature and stands somewhere between Hawthorne's dark beauties and Fitzgerald's neurotic
blondes, being less inhibited and less concerned with social respon sibility than, say, Hester Prynne, but certainly more conscious of tra ditional restraints than Daisy Buchanan, the heroine of The Great
Gatsby. In the novel under discussion, Isabel Fairchild, the wife of
Seth's brother Albert, plays the role of the gilded lady. The fact that Frederic gave her the titular role, instead of her artless rival, may be construed as an indication of Frederic's interest in this type of woman.
True to the symbolism of her type, Isabel is an emancipated city-bred woman descended from six generations of wealthy Albany aristocrats and reared in the atmosphere of fashionable niceties. A petite beauty who belongs always in the security of the drawing room, she has, at her husband's insistence, decided to abandon the plush life in the city and move to the run-down Fairchild farm in order that her ambitious lawyer-husband can satisfy the Dearborn County residential requirements for obtaining a seat in Congress. But her acquiescence
3. Robert H. Woodward, "Illusion and Moral Ambivalence in Seth's Brother's Wife," American Literary Realism, 2 (1969), 280. 48
forebodes ill, because she nurses a very damaging and spurious notion
of what rural life is all about. Although she has visited the farm on
only one previous occasion, she delivers a lengthy exposition on the
crudity and poverty which she fancies to be the definitive features of
life outside the city. The speech, which is addressed to Seth who is
at this time extremely naive and impressionable, sets the stage upon
which Frederic's dialectic will be played out:
The very thought of /Tiarm life7 sets my teeth on edge. The dreadful people you have to know: men without an idea beyond crops and calves and the cheese-factory; women slaving their lives out doing bad cooking, mending for a houseful of men, devoting their scarce opportunities for intercourse with other women to the weakest and most wretched gossip; coarse servants who eat at the table with their employers and call them by their Christian names; boys whose only theory about education is thrashing the school teacher, if it is a man, or breaking her heart by their mean insolence if it is a woman; and girls brought up to be awkward gawks, without a chance in life, since the brighter and nicer they are the more they will suffer from marriage with men mentally beneath them—that is, if they don't,become sour old maids. I don't wonder you hate it all, Seth.
Present here is a whole cluster of stock assumptions about
rural life which had been current in Frederic's day and which had found
their way into popular fiction. As implied in Isabel's indictment,
everything from home cooking to rural education had been the subject of
severe criticism and had been cited as the motivating principle for the
mass exodus from the farm to the city of ambitious youngsters such as
Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Sherwood Anderson's George Willard. But
4. Harold Frederic, Seth's Brother's Wife: A Study of Life in the Greater New York (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1887), pp. 32- 33. Subsequent references to this edition will be made parenthetically in the text. 49
Frederic, as we shall see, was not so readily inclined at this time to
share in the myth of rural inferiority, for he had been to the big city
and had returned, as many others would do, disillusioned with what he
had experienced.
Meanwhile, once on the farm, Isabel's plans to convert it into
"a centre of fashion and social display" (p. 95) collapse, and she
t becomes restless and bored. Impossibly romantic and full of the illu
sions of old romances with their dashing knights and maidens in dis
tress (for so she fancies herself to be), she strikes up a correspon
dence with Seth (who is now in the city) and plays upon his naive
sympathies by pleading her isolation and her husband's cruel neglect.
Predictably enough, before long he is back at the farm where she has him reading her love stories, one of which, interestingly enough, is
"Jeff Brigg's Love Story," one of Brete Harte's "improbable romance£sJ set in the Sierras, as far from reality as Seth's love story is candidly close.
For the next few months the romance develops apace so that it is not long until Isabel's designs seem virtually assured. One evening, while Seth is vacationing on the farm and Albert is supposed to be away at the city, the two lovers are seated in the living room flirting with forbidden conversation. At a critical moment, with
Isabel and her brother-in-law on the brink of adultery, Albert unex pectedly walks in and puts an end to the affair in an extremely unpleasant scene which follows. Later that evening, Albert is murdered
5. Woodward, Illusion, p. 281. 50 by a steward greedy for the money which Albert has earmarked for brib ing a local political boss.
Isabel's response to the events summarized in the foregoing reveals a great deal about her character and reinforces John Fair- child's belief that the city woman is a hopeless romantic, a slave of a self-devouring obsession. Having witnessed the quarrel between Seth and Albert, she gloats over the part in which Seth had vaguely implied a threat to her husband. Seth is, after all, she has come to believe, the knight who will rescue her from her confinement and take her away back to the city where she belongs. So the next morning, when she is notified of her husband's death, she concludes that Seth must be the culprit, and she exults in the notion that he would murder his own brother out of love for her. Fratricide, especially when motivated by incestuous desires, is for her, apparently, the highest expression of the chivalric instinct. When the innocent Seth turns up at her house, she begins sobbing and fawning over the hand which she believes has murdered her husband, kissing it and affectionately pressing it to her breast. Even Seth, dense as he sometimes is and still uninformed of his brother's death, apprehends the theatrics of the urbanite: "Come, come!" he admonishes. "You are acting like a tragedy-queen on the stage" (p. 288).
Viewed in the light of subsequent events, Isabel's conduct here seems perversely ironic. After her romance with Seth has fizzled out and he has returned to his former sweetheart, Isabel, now consumed by jealousy, tries to drive a wedge between the reunited couple by proclaiming to Annie what she had earlier sworn to Seth never to dis
close—and what she now knows to be a veritable falsehood—namely, that
Seth has murdered his brother in order to wed that brother's wife.
Here, she has attempted to shift the whole burden of guilt from her
shoulders, where it rightly belongs, to the shoulders of her immature
victim.
The crowning irony is yet to come, however. At the end of the
novel, Isabel, whose last gesture at the farm has been to argue her
devotion as a wife, has now married her husband's political rival and
is currently fluttering among Washington elites, fastidiously inquiring
of Dearborn County delegates whether the Seth Fairchilds have named
their new baby daughter "Isabel." On learning of Isabel's curiosity
and having long ago discerned Seth's ambivalent feelings toward the
gilded lady, Annie Fairchild makes an astute observation, one with which Frederic himself might have concurred, that the Isabels of this world will always be attractive to men who can never marry them. For men like Seth, they seem to possess a charming but dangerous charisma, one that represents a threat both to weak-headed romantics and to the stability of traditional moral values.
II
Within the context of the mythical dialectic, opposite Isabel the gilded lady stands her counterpart, Annie Fairchild. Throughout
Frederic's American novels, her type generally derives from rural origins. She also has fewer pretensions than her gilded counterpart and is more practical in outlook and more cognizant of ethical values. She is a descendant of the fair-haired embodiments of purity in Cooper
and Hawthorne, but compared to her literary ancestors, she is more
aggressive, more emancipated, more worldly, and decidedly less
inhibited. In the twentieth century, she becomes the pathetic, often
exploited brunette, as exemplified in Dreiser's titular heroine in
Jenny Gerhardt and Roberta Alden in An American Tragedy. In Frederic, her representatives include, in addition to Annie Warren (Fairchild),
Jessica Lawton and Alice Ware. Two of Frederic's English heroines,
Vestalia Skinner and Frances Bailey, also share some of her character istics.
Annie's situation is similar to Daisy Mauverensen's before the latter had aspired to become a lady. An orphan, Annie is living with an invalid grandmother and is partially supporting the household by teaching at the grammar school. Unlike Daisy, however, she remains simple, honest, patient, chaste, and self-reliant—all of the virtues which Frederic believed to be firmly rooted in rural America. But whereas Daisy had succumbed to Lady Berenecia's pressure to become a socialite, Annie adamantly rejects Isabel's similar designs "to bring her out," to make her "air ... so distingue, and her tastes so fas tidious" (p. 95). Nor does Annie wax contemptuous of her country neighbors but, on the contrary, defends them with calm diplomacy. When
Seth, after hearing Isabel's preachments concerning rural inferiority, has himself labeled his country kin "a mean, narrow-contracted lot,"
Annie replies, "after all, Seth, they are well-meaning people, and some of them are smart, too, in their way" (p. 45). Contrasted to Isabel, Annie is blessed with rural wisdom which
is entirely foreign to her city counterpart. Shortly before Seth
leaves for the city to make the big time as press magnate, he and the
two women go on a fishing excursion, presumably to celebrate his
departure to fame and fortune. In the course of events, Seth falls
into the stream, knocking himself unconscious and getting caught in a
log-jam. Isabel herself falls into a panic, weeping and wringing her
hands, completely helpless, while Annie deftly fishes the drowning knight to safety. Just as Douw had represented an American belief in
the essential superiority of the Yankee over the Englishman, so Annie
Fairchild fits the American folkloric notion that the rural lass is shrewder and more adaptable than her helpless city sister who, wasting
her time cultivating her literary interests, fails to learn how to sur
vive in the real world.
However, it is in contrast to Seth that Annie's true nature is
best defined. Unlike her weak-willed beau, she easily fends off a would-be seducer, Milton Squires, the Fairchild servant who turns out
to be Albert's murderer. Already having saved Seth from a violent physical death, she must now rescue him from his involvement with
Isabel and, consequently, from utter moral collapse. Her coup de grace occurs on the night of Seth's quarrel with his brother-in-law. In the grips of an enormous temptation, Seth leaves the house and beneath the cool brilliance of moon and stars, wanders about the countryside, aim less and befuddled, first blaming himself for the mess he is in, then
Isabel, then Albert. At this point he crosses paths with Annie, who is returning home from a husking bee to which, unbeknownst to himself, he had been invited but to which Isabel had presumptively sent his
"regrets." After several minutes of incoherent talk about his need for a "balance-wheel," he suddenly blurts out, "I want to pledge myself to you, to swear that you are to be my wife" (p. 252).
Austin Briggs has written that it is to "Annie's credit ... £ that she declines the proposal," at least temporarily, since Seth needs to regain some equilibrium on his own and since there are indeed a great many details which will have to be explained. However, it comes as no surprise to her when Seth confesses his argument with
Albert. On the contrary, she had been anticipating such a confronta tion, discerning as she had the growing flirtation between Seth and her rival. She had also, in her superior rural wisdom, surmised what her urban sister could not, that the illicit affair contained the seeds of its own destruction and that her errant knight would return to his first love. John Fairchild, Seth's older brother who functions as a rural philosopher in this novel, once remarked to Isabel, "there never was a time, and I fear there never will be one, when I would not call
/Annie Seth's7 superior" (p. 354). Frederic himself seems to have agreed with John's evaluation.
Given Frederic's treatment of the simple yet morally elevating woman, it ought to be mentioned here that Sarah Pierrepont, the child hood sweetheart and later the wife of Jonathan Edwards, bears some striking resemblances to Annie Fairchild and the later heroine, Alice
6. Briggs, p. 44. 55
Ware. Sarah Pierrepont, it will be recalled, had, like Annie and
Alice, been idealized and placed on a pedestal by her naive young hus
band. She was also the source of a good deal of inspiration, encourag ing Jonathan, as Annie and Alice do their men, in plain living and high thinking. Sarah shared with her husband, stoically and without undue criticism, the disappointments of the last years at Northampton, just as Alice shared in Theron's dark years at Octavius. And she accepted gracefully, as Alice accepts Theron's new career at Seattle, Edwards' appointment as a humble missionary after the move to stockbridge which, like Seattle, was itself a small outpost.^
Ill
As a third component in the mythical framework, caught between these contrasting feminine characters is the man whom we might dub the questing knight and who sees in one of the foregoing feminine symbols the embodiment of his deepest aspirations. For him, she represents a kind of grail figure and his possession of her, a symbol signifying the realization of all his dreams. As we shall see, it is his relationship to these opposing types that defines Frederic's position with respect to alternative life styles and opposing cultural values. Remotely sug gestive of Hawthorne's Dimmesdale, the questing knight will later appear as Clyde Griffiths (An American Tragedy), Jay Gatsby, and Martin
7. The life of Sarah Pierrepont and Edwards I have summarized from Robert E. Spiller et al., Literary History of the United States; History, 3rd ed. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1963), p. 73. 56
Eden. In Frederic his type is represented by such weak-willed romantic heroes as Seth Fairchild, Horace Boyce, and Theron Ware.
When one speaks of weak-willed men with romantic tendencies, one is reminded of Byron's Don Juan who, like Seth, is more passive than active in his relations with women, more the victim than the aggressor. To use Frederic's description of Seth, both are portrayed as having "simple, straightforward, one-stringed natures" (pp. 369-70), and both, as Austin Briggs writes of Seth, turn out to be heroes g "almost by default." Relative to autobiography, one is also reminded of young Harold and Master George Noel Gordon. Just as Don Juan served as Byron's surrogate by reliving in fiction many of the author's former experiences, so Seth undoubtedly served.as Frederic's mask in much the same way. There is a further similarity in that both authors employ the device of the symbolic quest, which is one of the fundamental pre requisites for the mythological adventure we shall be discussing in later chapters. There is, however, an important difference in the way these authors portray their fictional selves. Whereas Don Juan is a farcical imitation of his creator, Seth must, in the words of Garner, bear the burden of "Frederic's deep-rooted sense of insufficiency and 9 guilt." It is thus Seth's conscience which distinguishes him from
8. Briggs, p. 33.
9. Garner, Frederic, p. 15. Byron's "good-for-nothing ... mischief-making monkey" and which
characterizes all of Frederic's American heroes.
At the beginning of the novel, Seth is described as an even-
tempered, "quiet, harmless sort of youngster, who worked pretty
steadily on the farm" (p. 19) and who was generally satisfied with his
humble calling as farm hand. With the arrival of Isabel, however, Seth
undergoes a radical transformation, not unlike Daisy Mauverensen's.
Similarly, Isabel's arrival recalls the advent of Lady Berenecia in the
Mohawk Valley. Like Lady Berenecia, Isabel is contemptuous of rustic
life. Seth, of course, inexperienced and gullible as he is and feeling
acutely his New World uneasiness at lacking a strong cultural tradi
tion, adopts her views without the slightest hesitation. No sooner has
she arrived on the farm sporting a Parisian hat (with pretty ribbons)
and a dainty parasol than he sees in her "the very embodiment of the
luxury, beauty, refinement of city life" (p. 30). Later, in a cozy
scene in which Seth and Isabel are swapping compliments, he confides to
her that she is the highest ideal of womanhood (p. 171). She has thus
become for him a veritable symbol of urban supremacy, a summation of
"the culture, lore, and wisdom of the ages."
In accordance with his newly-acquired "ideals" and though more country bumpkin than city slicker—his manner of walking suggests that he is well-acquainted with the plow (p. 19)—he begins dubbing his
peers "country louts" (p. 45) and begins speaking derisively of Annie,
10. Byron, Don Juan, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1958), p. 15 (I, XXV, 1-2). the rural lass whom he has intended to marry but whom he now dismisses as a specimen of rural mediocrity. Rather than waste his time on the farm, he will now go to the city where he can mingle with people of wisdom and refinement and where the countrified Annie would feel out of place. Of course, Annie is "a dear, good girl," he confides to Isabel.
"Nobody knows that better than I do. But you must admit she _is_—what shall I say?—rural. Now that I have got my foot on the ladder, there is no telling how far I may not climb. It would be simply suicide to marry a wife whom I perhaps would have to carry up with me, a dead weight" (pp. 170-71).
Like most of his other grail chasers, Frederic's hero here shows himself to be a genuine prig. His spiel, saturated with absurdly ironic implications, could not be further from the truth, for not only, as Seth himself later admits, does Annie prove to be more knowledge able—ultimately more sophisticated—than he, but she also, as we have seen, turns out to be his "balance-wheel," a good angel to a perverse little boy, "a strong, sweet, wise nature" upon whom a silly visionary can lean and from whom he can draw the inspiration necessary to become a success (p. 252).
In the meantime, Seth has set off for Tecumseh, the big city, with much the same attitude with which Frederic must have set off for
Boston, determined to repeat the Horatio Alger success story and thus validate Isabel's faith in his ability. Now his "dreams were really to come true; he was actually going to the city, to wear decent clothes ia frock coat perhaps, as Frederic had in Boston?J, ... to attain that one aim and vision of his life, a place on a great paper!"
(p. 73). Then, conjuring up in his mind visions of urban grandeur, he is fascinated by what must be Tecumseh's "gilded temptations, its wild revels of sumptuous gayety, its dazzling luxuriance of life, as shepherd boys on the plain of Dura might have dreamed of the mysteries and marvels of Babylon" (p. 266). According to the ironic title of the chapter, Seth is now "On the Threshold of the World" Cp. 105).
His preconceptions of what life would be like in the big city turn out to be laughably erroneous, however. In this regard, Seth's experience serves as a means of exposing the falsehood underlying the myth of big city grandeur which Isabel and her kind symbolized. His conception of the glitter of city debauchery, for example, proves to be a disappointing illusion. On his first night out on the town, he is taken to the popular "Bismark's," a German tavern which "is totally bereft of even the glitter of 'the really gorgeous saloon from a
Chicago standpoint1 that so bewitched Theodore Dreiser. ... Although
Bismark's has music—piano, harp, and flute—and gaming—dominoes—it lacks not only swings with velvet ropes but, apparently, accommodations of any sort for ladies of any sort."^ But Seth—and this is the measure of his naivete^--thinks it all "really swell," as Dreiser might have put it, and, joining in with the loud laughter and coarse conversa tion, he indulges in a cigar, which makes his mouth taste bitter, and four bottles of beer which drug him to sleep.
11. Briggs, p. 35. Seth's experiences as a newspaperman in the big city prove as unrewarding as his attempts to socialize. Working with his colleagues on the Tecumseh Chronicle, he is "nervous lest he should not speak with sufficient correctness, and should shock their fastidious ears with idioms insensibly acquired in the back-country" (p. 110). When he is asked to contribute articles to the society columns or write reviews of dramatic productions, he reflects that "society was Syriac to him, and he had never seen a play acted, beyond an occasional presentation of
'Uncle Tom's Cabin' or 'The Octoroon" by strolling tenth-rate mummers in the tiny hall at Thessaly" Cp. 127). As proofreader, he has missed such blunders as "our martyr President Sinclair" and two lines of market prices cast upside down. He has also overlooked "mayonnaise" for "Moyen Age," and Mr. McCullough for Mrs. McCullough.
Eventually Seth grows familiar with the routine of newspaper work, but by then he is bored with it all and so becomes somewhat apathetic. After a dull day at the office, he retreats to Bismark's, where he spends the greater part of the evening drinking beer and play ing dominoes—diversions which are equivalent to Frederic's drinking beer and playing pool in Boston. Austin Briggs is partly correct when he writes that Frederic, instead of following the traditional Horatio
Alger success story, reverses the pattern "and relates the story of the good country boy who goes to ruin in the city, turns from Horatio Alger 12 to Prodigal Son." However, by novel's end Seth has made something which does approximate a success.
12. Briggs, p. 35. 61
In any case, after thirteen months on the Chronicle, Seth is summoned back to the farm to attend his dying father. His return, of course, enables him to resume his flirtation with Isabel. It also pro vides him, just as it did young Frederic on his return from Boston, with the opportunity to play the part of the accomplished gentleman of manners. Frederic himself used the occasion of Seth's return to under line the negative influence which urban life has had on Seth's trans formation. Generally speaking, the picture Frederic paints for us is a revolting one, although Seth has managed a few superficial improve ments, such as his improved ability "to wear good clothes now without awkwardness" or his knowledge of "how to joke without leading the laughter himself" (p. 152). As an indication of his regression, during an evening with Annie and Isabel, he grossly exaggerates the importance of his position on the Chronicle and speaks derisively about some of his journalist colleagues. His bluff, however, is successful, at least for the time being. Both women follow his discourse with extreme deference—Annie, because of her "timorous, nervous" feeling "about the impression she was making on him" and Isabel, who is less sincere than
Seth, because of her so-called "real respect and deference to what he had to say" (p. 152). Both women having been hoodwinked, "they were more than ever proud of their relative, who had so rapidly conquered a high and commanding position for himself in that mystic, awesome sphere of journalism" (p. 153). As for Seth, he "expanded and basked in this admiration" (p. 153). 62
During the ensuing weeks, owing to a number of changes in both staff and policy at the Chronicle, as well as a renewed determination on his own part to make good, Seth manages to secure a responsible editorial post. But with his regeneration as a journalist, there comes a corresponding decline in his private life, until, on the verge of committing incestuous adultery with his sister-in-law, he is miracu lously saved by the moral beneficence of Annie Fairchild and by his own belated puritanic instincts. This decline in morals which accompanies
Seth's rise in the world seems to be a negation of the principle implicit in the Horatio Alger myth that virtue is a prerequisite for material prosperity. Most of Frederic's heroes seem to share in this inverted ideal, and most of them pay dearly for their beliefs. Even in
Seth's case, lasting prosperity does not come to him until after he has returned to Annie and apparently purged himself of his wayward fanta sies. Frederic ordains a similar course of penance for the Reverend
Theron Ware.
IV
To summarize, then, the mythical dialectic which Frederic has created in his American novels, the grail woman is characteristically the gilded lady, while the knight who goes in quest of her might be said to be a masculine version of the artless maiden gone awry. At first relatively naive and unsophisticated, of humble or reduced cir cumstances, and having in some way committed himself and his loyalty to his feminine parallel (as Seth had early in life committed himself to
Annie), he suddenly finds himself lured by the glitter and pomp of the dazzling society belle. Enamored of his own self-importance and
dazzled by his prospects of securing the grail, he casts aside his
rustic garb, shuns his guileless maid, dons his armor of snobbery, sham
sentiment, and intellectual arrogance, then blithely goes a-grailing.
But all too often, the grail woman turns out to be an urban siren and
the knight who goes in quest of her, a pretentious fool. If he comes
to realize this, as Seth Fairchild seems to do, he will revise his
system of values. If not, as perhaps might be the case with Theron
Ware, his failure of vision foreshadows new follies. In either case,
after near emotional collapse and imminent social scandal, he returns
humiliated and shame-faced—at least for the time being—to the woman he has so rudely forsaken.
As Frederic uses it, the dialectic is remarkably flexible and allows for numerous variations and combinations both of character types and of attributes of individual characters. Henry James also realized the importance of flexibility in his dialectical scheme, as did
Fenimore Cooper, but possibly to a lesser extent. As an example of how
Frederic would vary his dialectical pattern, take the matter of the symbolism of hair color, which in some respects he borrowed from
Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville before him. As Frederic I. Carpenter has pointed out in a splendid analysis of Hawthorne and Melville, there has always been a sharp disagreement on the relative virtues of fair- haired and dark-haired women, but as types the blonde and the brunette have symbolized definite traits for only about the last one hundred and thirty years:
In the mid-nineteenth century golden hair became an attribute of the pure and innocent maiden; while dark hair suggested the woman of passion and experience. In English literature, particularly in the writings of the Victorians, this associa tion was common; but the two greatest American novelists of the period £Rawthornj2and MelvilleJ developed it into a theme of major importance.
Carpenter goes on to discuss how both Hawthorne and Melville must have inwardly believed that spiritual growth or genuine purity could be attained only through experience and passion—involvement, in other words, in the things of this world—but how neither writer could ultimately deny the Puritan ideal of purity unsoiled by human passion.
Thus, Carpenter concludes, while Pierre and Coverdale, for example, are secretly attracted to the dark woman of worldly passion, they neverthe less renounce her in favor of the blonde lady of purity and innocence.
The blondes might have less fun, but they are inevitably "safer" for the man of Puritan background.
The influence which this blonde-brunette antithesis has had on
American literature has indeed been very significant. Carpenter him self suggests that "much of the literature of modern America owes the violence of its revolt to the failure of /American writers^ to free 14 themselves from the old ideal of purity." Frederic, for one—whether he consciously participated in this revolt is questionable—most cer tainly borrowed from earlier writers his dichotomous feminine character
13. F. I. Carpenter, "Puritans Preferred Blondes: The Heroines of Melville and Hawthorne," New England Quarterly, 9 (1936), 253.
14. Carpenter, p. 271. 65
types which provide, as we have seen, the structural basis for his
dialectic. He also seems to have borrowed the idea of having his women
symbolize such opposing themes as the head versus the heart, innocence
versus experience, appearance versus reality, reason versus emotion, , 15 and so on.
More important, however, is the artistic ambivalence which
results when he attempts to resolve the dialectic, an ambivalence which,
like that of his predecessors in American literature, arises from his
inherent refusal to renounce the myth of moral purity and accept the
dark wisdom of. worldly experience. We have noted that Frederic con
sistently resolves the dialectic in favor of the older, more tradi
tional ways of life as represented by the figure of the unsophisticated
woman to whom in the American novels the quest-figure returns. But
there are further ambiguities which complicate the matter and which
make it virtually impossible to resolve the dialectic in absolute
terms. For one thing, Frederic does not always adhere to the tradi
tional dichotomy of the blonde innocent set against the dark-haired
romantic. Some of his fair-haired women, for example, as Briggs has 16 perceived, are not technically pure. Jessica Lawton, the heroine of
The Lawton Girl, is a case in point. On the other hand, some of
Frederic's worldly women are both blonde beauties and technically
15. For a discussion of these themes in Hawthorne and Melville, see Edward G. Lueders, "The Melville-Hawthorne Relationship in Pierre and The Blithedale Romance," Western Humanities Review, 4 (1950), 329-334.
16. Briggs, p. 30. 66 chaste, as exemplified in the person of Isabel Fairchild. Then there is Kate Minster, also from The Lawton Girl, who shares the personality traits of both types and who in one place is described as having "flow ing, soft-brown ringlets""'"'' while in another we are told of her "raven diadem of curls" (p. 243).
In his rollicking Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H.
Lawrence makes a big thing out of the light-dark opposition of feminine character types and goes on to construct a theory in which he attempts to explain the whole of American artistic activity in terms of dichotomy, duality, and ambivalence. For Lawrence, however, the ques tion is not so much one of purity versus experience as it is one of the 18 mental consciousness versus the vital or blood consciousness.
Examined in the light of Laurentian criticism, Isabel Fairchild and her type (say, Hester Prynne or Zenobia) would tend to reflect the primeval passional impulse, while Annie Fairchild and her type (say, Priscilla in The Blithedale Romance) would represent the intellect or the "hate- 19 ful white light of understanding." Unlike Frederic and his prede cessors whose admiration of the wayward beauty remains largely con cealed, Lawrence openly prefers her frank sexuality while vehemently condemning the sexlessness and "spiruality" of the pure heroine whom he
17. Harold Frederic, The Lawton Girl (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890), p. 19. Subsequent references to this edition will be made parenthetically in the text.
18. For a fuller explanation of these concepts, see D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: The Viking Press, 1961), pp. 84-89.
19. Lawrence, p. 96. likes to describe as a soul-sucker who had allowed her mind-
consciousness to destroy her passionate vitality.
Whether or not Frederic would have agreed with Lawrence's
explanation of American ambivalence is, of course, a moot question.
What does seem certain, however, is that Frederic must have shared,
with Hawthorne and Melville, in the confusion of values and must have
experienced a simultaneous enchantment and disenchantment with both the
New Morality and traditional values. But his ambivalence, again like
Hawthorne's and Melville's, does not reflect an irresolvable contest
involving opposing tendencies of equal weight. As the pattern of his novels indicates, Frederic again and again repudiates the gilded lady
and returns to the artless maid, a return which, if not always possible
in real life, was at least possible in his imagination. For the cruel
facts of his own experience had suggested to Frederic the impossibility of attaining spiritual growth through worldly involvement. As is
evident in the symbolism which is played out by Isabel Fairchild and which will later be played out by Celia Madden, worldly involvement too often degenerates into overindulgence. Hence, there is the necessity,
Frederic felt, for the restraining influence provided by the virtuous maiden. And while her type in Frederic is less artless and more worldly than such literary ancestors as Priscilla, the heroine of The
Blithedale Romance, or Hilda of The Marble Faun, she was the most genuine version of her kind that the Gilded Age had to offer. CHAPTER 4
THE LAWTON GIRL; THE MYTH OF TRANSCENDENTAL EXPECTANCY
Frederic noted in the "Preface to a Uniform Edition" that The
Lav/ton Girl (1890) "suggested itself at the outset as a kind of sequel to Seth's Brother's Wife.""*" But it is only "a kind of sequel" since, as numerous critics have noted, the plots of the two novels are not really related, and the principal characters of The Lawton Girl are only mentioned in Seth.
Apropos of the Frederic dialectic, the novel represents a further development, particularly with respect to the male protagonist.
Stanton Garner has shown how in Frederic's working notes for the novel he had planned to have "a single protagonist, but, warned by Seth's unreliability and not yet aware of the confusion of attitudes which
Seth had embodied, he divided the original protagonist into two." 2 As a result, there are two quest-figures whom Frederic sends in search of the same lady—Reuben Tracy, who displays Seth's finest traits; and
Horace Boyce, who represents Seth at his worst and who represents
Frederic's first attempt to deal sympathetically with a type which would soon become popular in American fiction, the financier or entre preneur.
1. Frederic, In the Sixties, p. vii.
2. Garner, Frederic, p. 17.
68 As characters, both Horace and Reuben seem incomplete and lop
sided, tending as they do to reflect absolute values. As such, they
play out the drama for the gilded lady in a manner reminiscent of the
Good and Bad angel of a medieval morality play vying for the soul of
Everyman. Indeed, Jessica herself perceives something of this dichot
omy, for she labels Reuben her good "genius" and Horace, her evil
"genius" (p. 19). In this regard, character functions as almost pure
symbol.
More important here, however, is Frederic's concern with cer
tain aspects of American democracy. Although deeply committed to
American democracy, Frederic nevertheless recognized that serious
problems lay at its basis. In this sense, The Lawton Girl attempts to
isolate what were for Frederic the basic conflicting elements within
our democratic framework. The theme, of course, is a recurrent one in
Frederic and appears in the majority of his novels in one degree or
another, but nowhere, except perhaps in The Market-Place, does it
receive the attention that it does in The Lawton Girl.
Specifically, the theme attempts to define a workable relation
ship between the individual and society. For Frederic, as for other nineteenth-century thinkers, this was a two-part issue dealing with the
conflict between personal conscience and public responsibility.
Debated here, on the one hand, is the question of whether a democratic society is justified in suppressing the so-called extraordinary but
defiant individual who believes that his brand of morality is
"superior" to that embodied in the public conscience. On the other hand, the second half of the issue poses the question of whether or not
the individual is himself justified in demanding that democracy sacri fice the principles of the majority in order to satisfy the demands of
private morality. As a related issue, there is raised further the question of a possible compromise between these polar positions, a com promise which would enable society to minister equally, if not fully, to the needs of both the masses and the few superlative individuals.
As we shall see, though fraught with characteristic ambivalence,
Frederic's basic attitude can be discerned.
With varying degrees of optimism and pessimism and from differ ent points of view, such questions also carry the burden of theme in many of the sea tales of Cooper and Melville, where, likewise, the answers are not so easily forthcoming. One of the finest discussions of the whole complex issue is Harry Slochower's "Moby Dick: The Myth 3 of Democratic Expectancy," an examination of which will help to bring the problem into sharper focus and will help to establish a firmer con text for our discussion of Frederic.
According to Slochower, the American myth of "Democratic
Expectancy" derives from two traditional views of man, the transcen dental and the pragmatic, views which are deeply rooted in the American cultural and intellectual past. The former view argues for the unre stricted freedom of the individual on the grounds that man, by nature, possesses a virtuous and aspiring mind and that he is capable of
3. Harry Slochower, "Moby Dick: The Myth of Democratic Expec tancy ," Amerixan_Quarterl^, 2 (1950), 259-69. 71
unlimited intellectual and spiritual development. Setting at nought
man's capacity for evil, such a view insists that man's full develop
ment can be realized only in a community where self-expression and
self-assertion are virtually unimpeded. America, of course, was pre
sumably such a community, "a land offering a surfeit of opportunities,
'a golden land, . . .'" "a new, open, expanding world in which 'the
sky is the limit,' and where one can hit it rich, where anybody, 4 regardless of his origins, can go 'from rags to riches'." America was
thus the Utopia, the great melting pot of the world where the oppor
tunities for the black man, the yellow man, and the white man were
equal and unlimited.
The pragmatic view, on the other hand, supports the notions of
brotherhood, fraternity, and equality, as they might properly exist in
any well-governed democratic society. Recognizing that some men are more ambitious, more intelligent, and more selfish than others and that such men might therefore exploit their fellowmen, such a view contends
that unrestrained freedom would prove unjust to the common man and that it might possibly lead to tyranny. The welfare of society is thus, according to the pragmatic mind, the definitive principle in relation to which man determines his actions. Private need must define itself in terms of social expedience and utility, for as soon as man's actions begin to function outside the framework of society, they become destructive and, therefore, illegitimate. The individual is not to characterize his affiliation with society by pursuing the policy of the
4. Slochower, pp. 259-60. 72 survival of the fittest or some other manifestation of the law of the jungle, but by his willingness to play the good neighbor—to assist his downtrodden brother and to submit whole-heartedly to the traditionally constituted civil authority. A truly pragmatic society cannot there fore tolerate the aspiring man with his willful self-reliance and his exaggerated notions of personal superiority, for such traits might destroy the very fabric on which the "democratic" community rests.
Indeed, as Slochower notes, this is precisely what happens to the unfortunate microcosmic democracy aboard the Pequod. In his unswerving determination to avenge a personal wrong, Ahab willfully perverts the collective need and thus destroys the entire democratic community.
I
With Frederic, as with Melville, we are at the crossroads where the transcendental world and the pragmatic world collide. In The
Lawton Girl, the conflict between these divergent philosophical views is reflected in the lives of the four protagonists (there are two feminine figures in addition to the masculine characters we have already mentioned). By examining the interrelationships among these, we shall begin to get an idea of Frederic's own views of democratic expectancy.
Horace Boyce, who is by far the more engaging of the two male protagonists,"* is the chief exponent of the myth of transcendental
5. In fact, the title The Lawton Girl is something of a mis nomer, since it is Horace and not the Lawton girl herself who dominates the action. It is also from Horace's point of view that we follow most of the action of the narrative. According to Briggs, Frederic's expectancy as Slochower has described it. In terms of the Frederic dialectic, Horace is a variation in "the line of development from Seth" to Theron Ware to Joel Thorpe and thus helps to bridge the gap between g the early hero and the later anti-hero. Compared to Seth, he is no longer a passive, innocent bumkin fired to ambition by the wiles of a city siren. Rather, from the outset he is an aggressive, arrogant, determined grail-seeker. In this respect, he is, more significantly, akin to the rebel-hero Philip Cross and anticipates the full-blown hero-villain who dominates The Market-Place and who later captivated the imagination of writers like Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and
Frank Norris. As we shall see, the transcendentalism of Horace Boyce and his fictional descendants represents a perversion of the concept of the heroic individual as formulated by the great transcendentalists
Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, who fulminated against materialism and human exploitation.
At the time the novel begins, Horace, who has just turned twenty-eight, already has an inflated transcendental concept of himself and his prospects. Having cashed in his $20,000 inheritance and jilted
Jessica Lawton, the poor working-class girl whom he has seduced and gotten with child, he has taken himself off to Europe. There, as we learn, he has spent four years studying law and "listening to lectures at Heidelberg, ... to the orchestra swaying in unison under the baton working title was "Reuben Tracy's Partner" (p. 75) and was therefore more appropriate than the one eventually used. All references to The Lawton Girl in this chapter are referred parenthetically to the page number in the text.
6. Briggs, p. 86. of Strauss at Vienna, and to a good many other things in Pesth and
Paris and Brussels and London" (p. 28). Newly converted to European culture, he has learned "to see America in perspective" (p. 29) and
"with a new eye" (p. 112). With his transcendentalist vision which distinguishes him from his crude neighbors, what he sees on his return home is "the prevalence of tobacco juice" (p. 112), the wretchedness of rural hotel service, the vulgarity of the American turkey shoot, the ugliness of small town architecture, and the provinciality of American manners in general. Boyce's contempt for Thessaly after his tour of
Europe indeed reminds one of Frederic's dissatisfaction with Utica after his sojourn in Boston. One can easily imagine Boyce, a dilet tante like the arrogant young Frederic, garbed in a frock-coat and puffing on a cigar, deriding his native Thessaly as he sipped from a glass of French wine.
Despite, however, his pronouncements on American values, Horace is himself very American—and a very gilded one at that. In order to realize his own mythology of success, his plan is to rehabilitate the family reputation which his father, General Sylvanus Boyce, a Civil War veteran and now a fallen Thessaly merchant, has vulgarized by his boozing and keeping of low companions. To accomplish this Horace decides that he must win in marriage the hand of Kate Minster, the beautiful heiress of a deceased Thessaly iron magnate. His next move is to gain access to the Minster home by allowing himself to be appointed the Minster lawyer by a couple of unscrupulous manipulators who intend to plunder the family estate for themselves. We should mention here, however, that in accepting the appointment, Horace, who has begun to suspect their designs, does make a feeble effort to pacify his conscience by mentioning to them that he is not "bound to do any thing of a shady character" (p. 232). For the time being, it seems, he is willing to be fooled on that score.
Meanwhile, his position as legal adviser makes it possible for him to pay court to the dazzling, dark-eyed Kate. For him, the oppor tunity suddenly defines his view of transcendental expectancy; for him, it means everything:
Everything? The word seemed feeble. It meant one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen as his wife—a lady well-born, delicately nurtured, clever, and good; it meant vast wealth, untold wealth, with which to be not only the principal person age of these provincial parts, but a great figure in New York or Washington or Europe. He might be senator in Congress, minister to Paris, or even aspire to the towering, solitary eminence of the Presidency itself with the backing of these millions. It meant a yacht, the very dream of sea-going luxury and speed, in which to bask under Hawaiian skies . . . (pp. 130-31).
Passages like this are common in Frederic. They also occur with notable frequency in the novels of Dreiser, London, and Norris, who also saw the society woman as the epitome of transcendental bliss.
One has only to examine the attitude toward women of Clyde Griffiths,
Martin Eden, and Curtis Jadwin, just to name a few, to appreciate the prevalence of this viewpoint among American males near the turn of the century. For Horace, as for the other characters, it is not just the lady's beauty that attracts him. Nor is it just her wealth, or her social position, or any other single characteristic. Rather, it is a combination of these features, features which in his imagination are inextricably intertwined. Kate's beauty, for example, corresponds so closely to Horace's idea of great wealth that it is impossible for him to separate the two. Collectively, her characteristics embody the essential nature of Horace's mythology of success. Largely a projec tion of his own fantasies, Horace's conception of Kate is thus often expressed in images that might have been employed by a medieval romancer. Fancying her to be a princess incarcerated in an enchanted palace and himself a knight just transported within the battlements, he woos her in terms redolent of the days of old romance and chivalry, with all their fawning minstrels and exotic madonnas. At other times his romantic imagination, though less extravagant, nevertheless transcends the bounds of realistic expectation. Later, when he seems assured that he will marry into the Minster millions, he contents him self with the "idea of hyphenating the two names in the English fashion, Minster-Boyce" (p. 138). With respect to Kate, the symbolic meaning and the physical referent have become one.
There are other respects in which Horace's transcendent imagi nation does not jibe with the facts of reality. With his sand castle firmly planted in mid-air, as Thoreau might have urged, Horace begins to envision his bankrupt alcoholic father as a gentleman about town whose "social connections will help me a good deal" (p. 41). Of more consequence to his career, however, is his gross illusion about his commercial acumen, his ability as an entrepreneur. As the conspiracy to ruin the Minster estate thickens, Horace, now more involved than ever, resolves to march to his own drummer and manipulate the affair so as to accomplish the goals of his private project. "One needed to be smarter than one's neighbors in these later times," he remarks. "To eat others was the rule now, if one would save himself from being devoured" (p. 237). Later, when the General warns his son that
Wendover and Tenney, two of the area's shrewdest financial buccaneers, may be setting him up as a scapegoat, Horace boasts that "if it comes to 'dog eat dog,' they'll find my teeth are filed down to a point quite as sharp as theirs. . . .I'm going to play a card this afternoon that will take the wind out of both their sails. . (p. 339).
As it turns out, however, Horace's trump card proves to be another illusion, and it is Horace who is undone and is nearly sent to prison. In the end, Horace is left penniless and is spared further humiliation only by an act of mercy on the part of Kate, the heiress whom Horace in his arrogant superiority had come to view as "insolent, purse-proud, newly rich ... provincial, only a gilded variation upon the rustic character of the section" (p. 364).
Horace's character may thus be viewed as a manifestation of all of the negative aspects of transcendental philosophy. In his partici pation in the conspiracy, there is the theme of the individual's defiance of socially recognized authority; in his causing of the steel mills to be shut down with the resultant layoff which follows, there is the theme of the moral inter-debtedness of man perverted into the exploitation of one's fellowman; regarding the symbolism surrounding the beautiful and wealthy Kate Minster, there is the theme of the aspiring mind transposed into the slavish pursuit of a materialism whose ends are at once crass and ignoble; and in place of the tran
scendental ideal of the greatness of human destiny, there is the ugly
manifestation of a romanticism based on self-deceit and grandiose con
ceptions of self-importance. Concerning Horace's capacity for illu
sion, Austin Briggs has made a clever observation, one which bears
repeating: "'I call people rich,' said Ralph Touchett in The Portrait
of a Lady, 'when they are able to meet the requirements of their
imagination.' Poor Ralph did not know the reaches of the American
imagination in the Gilded Age as Frederic did. ... Horace's reach so
far exceeds his grasp that he comes up empty-handed. . . . Thus, in
Horace's world, although the transcendental vision is stressed, it is
stressed (according to Slochower's use of the term) in such a way that
its destructive tendencies are made to appear as its more significant
features. The microcosm of Thessaly in which Horace and Tenney enact
their harsh dramas of transcendental expectancy is consistently a lure and a snare for the unwary. In this sense, Frederic no doubt felt that
such a philosophy was untenable and would result in anarchy and chaos,
as Thessaly itself does when the mills are shut down, and largely as a result of Horace's machinations.
As James E. Miller, Jr. writes of the diabolical heroes in
Hawthorne and Melville, it is a personal triumph which these men are seeking, an elevation of the self, a prepossessing pride developing into arrogance, an arrogance leading to mental obsession and possible
7. Briggs, p. 75. 79 g insanity. They are the outcasts of society, the lawless men condemned
according to traditional codes of ethics. They are in various degrees akin to the Tamburlaines, the Faustuses, and the Satans of literature,
the rebels and exiles who threaten to destroy themselves because of the
very nature of their inverted idealism. In Horace's case, because of
the blind assertion of his self-importance, he comes to hold spiritual values in contempt, and, spurning the romantic sentiments of Jessica
Lawton—the factory girl whom he has made pregnant and then abandoned, leaving her to fend for herself—he throws away his chances for genuine feminine companionship and virtually cuts himself off from the possi bilities of human intercourse.
As far as Frederic seems to be concerned, Horace's type does not make for an attractive character because there are too many things which make him morally reprehensible. Ethel Minster, Kate's younger invalid sister who in some respects resembles Fenimore Cooper's feeble minded Hetty Hutter, senses his scoundrelism immediately. Later, even the General feels moved to offer a commentary upon his son's character:
"You are a damned scoundrel!" (p. 349) he blurts out after he has been shocked by the incident in which Horace has ignominiously seized a con fidential letter addressed to Kate.
Of all the characters, perhaps only Jessica herself really understands Horace and can thus offer him genuine forgiveness. It is to her credit that at the end of the novel she has purged herself of
8. James E. Miller, Jr., "Hawthorne and Melville: The Unpar donable Sin," PMLA, 70 (1955), 95. 80
any bitterness and attempts to effect some sort of reconciliation.
"You're the best of the lot, dear old Jess" (p. 414), the chastened and
repentant Horace now candidly admits.
II
Boyce's downfall is brought about primarily because Horace is
incapable of restraining or subduing an errant transcendental imagina
tion, or as Ralph Touchett might have said, because there is no way
that he can safely satisfy the requirements of that imagination. But
Horace is certainly not the only character in the novel who succumbs to
the wiles of a vagrant fancy. Nor is Reuben Tracy, Horace's paired opposite, an exception, for Reuben is in many ways as culpable as
Horace. And yet Reuben triumphs in the end, whereas Horace goes down
to ignoble defeat.
One may object to Frederic's duplicity in this respect, point
ing out that Tracy is not only a tiresome prig but a vulgar idealist
into the bargain. However, there are significant differences between
the two characters which Frederic wishes to emphasize in order to make clear his views on democratic expectancy. As the chief exponent of the pragmatic point of view, Reuben is Horace's "better half," so to speak, and exhibits a number of traits which Horace sorely lacks, such as honesty, industry, sober-thinking, chastity—all of the elements required in the Alger mythology of success. In Reuben Tracy's world, which is a world of utility, expediency, and practical results, the demonstration of brotherly or neighborly love not only helps to redeem the downtrodden Jessica from spiritual degradation and purchase the economic security of Thessaly's laboring class, but it also saves the
Minster fortune from falling into unworthy hands and secures for Reuben the beautiful heiress. As we have discussed earlier, during the Gilded
Age there was no better way to reward such qualities than by bestowing the gilded lady upon the possessor of them. In awarding Kate to
Reuben, Frederic was merely conforming to what his audience expected of him, just as Mark Twain was conforming to the public ideal when in The
Gilded Age he awarded the beautiful Ruth Bolton to Philip Sterling, a character who is remarkably similar to Reuben Tracy. Too, as we shall see, there is a priggish streak in Kate's nature which makes her ideally suited to be Reuben's wife.
In any event, Tracy must have occupied a prominent position in
Frederic's estimation, especially when one recalls that Frederic had been repulsed by Seth's vagaries which derived from an immature view of transcendentalism. As a conventional representation of the wholesome farm-bred country boy, Reuben also no doubt gratified Frederic's readers by providing an effective antidote against the vicious machina tions of the corrupt city sophisticate represented by Horace Boyce.
Viewed in this light, Reuben's defeat of Horace is simply another mani festation of the American folkloric myth which we discussed in Chapter
2 where Yankee superiority shrewdly triumphs over European decadence.
As spokesman for the pragmatic point of view and in contrast to
Horace Boyce, Tracy is firmly entrenched in the tradition of plain living and conservative thinking. Consistent with his egalitarian sentiments, "to 'be in society,' as the phrase went, had not seemed important to him" (p. 220); on the contrary, the "graces of life" are
"minor things" (p. 113). Given his social conscience and his concern for the collective body, there are larger matters to be "sick at heart over ... the greed for money, the drunkenness, the indifference to real education, the neglect of health, the immodesty and commonness of our young folks' thought and intercourse, the narrowness and mental squalor of the life people live all about me" (p. 113). Reuben also looks with suspicion upon hereditary riches, viewing them as a corrupt ing influence to be avoided like the Asiatic plague. Take, for example, the experience of young Stephen Minster, Kate's brother, whose early death provided a lesson to be remembered:
/Reuben? thought about this worthless, brief career, as his eyes rested on the bright, boyish face of the portrait ... and his serious mind filled itself with protests against the conditions which had made of this heir to millions a rake and a fool. ... There must be some blight, some mysterious curse upon hereditary riches here in America, thought Reuben. ... Therein lay a terrible menace to the Republic, he said to himself (pp. 264-65).
Concerning women, Tracy does not pretend to know very much. "Perhaps he was a trifle dull about such things" (p. 219). He has had only one experience with love when, as a youth, he had become infatuated with
Annie Fairchild, whom he describes as "the sweetest flower that all the farm-lands of Dearborn County had ever produced" (p. 276) and who
"enables you to understand all the exalted and sublime things that have ever been written about her sex" (p. 37). Rich and exotic women, on the other hand, are too flighty for Reuben. On one occasion he finds it necessary to caution Jessica Lawton about putting her faith in a promise made her by the privileged Kate: "'Put not your trust in princes,' serves as a warning about millionnaires as well as monarchs"
(pp. 213-14).
Thus, we have a picture of Reuben Tracy before he becomes
enamored of Kate, a picture of a man solidly committed to the pragmatic
ideals of fraternity, equality and fellowship. Notice now the trans
formation which follows, one so significant as to raise the question of
Frederic's ambivalence concerning pragmatic expectancy. First, Reuben's
interest very subtly shifts from his Thessaly Citizens Club with its
emphasis on community action projects to the Minster Iron Works and to
saving the Minster fortune. Although he continues to express demo
cratic sentiments, his real loyalties are now patrician in nature—he
discovers "Carlyle after everybody else had ceased reading him"
(p. 102). What Reuben has done—and possibly not even realized—is to
substitute the Old World myth of European paternity in place of the New
World equivalent of American fraternity.
There is, of course, a corresponding change in Reuben's view of
women and the values they symbolize. No longer does Kate seem so
frivolous or untrustworthy. On the contrary, she becomes almost in the
twinkling of an eye, "the most beautiful, the cleverest, the dearest,
the loveliest, the most to be adored and longed for, of all mortal women" (p. 274). Here Reuben sentimentalizes his damsel even more than
Horace had done. In addition to the delirium of building castles and
creating faraway fairylands, Reuben indulges in a kind of object wor ship, consecrating Kate's personal letters addressed to him and invest
ing her creamy white gown with "sanctified and symbolical" 84
significance: "this mystical robe ... he had enshrined in his heart with incense and candles and solemn veneration, as does the Latin
devotee with the jewelled dress of the Bambino. . ." (p. 382).
There is an additional element in Tracy's metamorphosis which merits our attention. During a visit to the family farm, Reuben now
begins to deride, in the way Seth had, his humble origins, spurning the
"drowsy, unfruitful life" (p. 422) of the country and reflecting dis dainfully on his brother Ezra, who had elected to remain behind.
According to the new Reuben Tracy, who will soon inherit the Minster millions, Ezra and his kind apparently preferred the "sterile and barren and uninviting" existence so characteristic of rural life
(p. 422). Tracy congratulates himself, on the other hand, for having escaped to the city, where he could satisfy his "yearning for culture or conquest or the mere sensation of living where it was really life"
(p. 422). Then, by way of contrast, Tracy's mind suddenly shifts to the Minster drawing room. There follows a passage which is quite revealing:
It seemed as if the whole vast swing of the mind's pendulum separated that luxurious abode of cultured wealth from this dingy and barren farmhouse room. And he, who had been born and reared in this latter, now found himself at a loss how to spend so much as a single evening in its environment, so com pletely had familiarity with the other remoulded and changed his habits, his point of view, his very character (pp. 422-23).
His very character indeed! In view of what we know concerning the Frederic dialectic, the kind of change we have been describing—a change which amounts to a hundred-and-eighty degree turn—always fore bodes disaster in the life of the character making it. Basically, it is a shift from a safe and responsible pragmatism to a reckless and irresponsible transcendentalism. It is the kind of shift which Seth
Fairchild and Horace Boyce had earlier made and which Theron Ware would soon make himself. It probably also reflects to some extent Frederic's experience shortly after his arrival in Boston, and later, possibly, in
London. In this sense Briggs seems correct in his assertion that "the
Frederic hero is the provincial, the Pretentious Young Man; but the
Pretentious Young man is not Frederic the novelist. Instead, this hero is the young Frederic as viewed by the elder Frederic." 9 Or, as Ralph
Robert Rogers expresses it, there "were two Harold Frederics, the innocent, uncultivated, romantic one and the experienced, sophisticated, realistic one. ..." It was "this conflict between his two inner hostile selves" that "provided the dramatic and intellectual texture for his novels.Thus it was that Frederic relived in his novels his dramatic conversion from one philosophical view to another. Only too well did he remember how he himself could no longer remain content with what he would have described as the humdrum world of pragmatic "medioc rity" and how he had set out with the dogged determination (monomania?) of the transcendentalist to master the "culture, lore, and wisdom of the ages," only to recoil in loathing and disgust at the chaos which such a quest had wrought on his life. And yet to the end of his life
9. Briggs, p. 13.
10. Ralph Robert Rogers, "Harold Frederic: His Development as a Comic Realist," Diss. Columbia University, 1961, p. 26. he would never quite cease, even in his novels, to be attracted by the
glitter of transcendental expectancy.
Ill
Just as the male protagonists fall easily (perhaps too easily)
into the category of paired opposites, so also the women represent
neatly contrasting pairs. On one level, Jessica Lawton roughly sug
gests the artless woman, while Kate Minster is more akin to her gilded
counterpart. On another level, both continue the philosophical debate
begun by Tracy and Boyce.
Paradoxically, Jessica is related both to the fallen woman and
to the conventional fair-haired heroine of Frederic's mythology. On
the one hand, she is like Dreiser's fallen woman, Jenny Gerhardt, having suffered a childhood that is "unhappy, wearied, and mutinous, with squalid misery at home, and no respite from it possible" (p. 19),
the kind of childhood which would naturally account for her demoraliza
tion. On the other hand, Jessica is not permanently coarsened by her experience but apparently regains her good-heartedness, her diligence, and her optimism. She never becomes cynical or despairing as does
Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles who, in most other significant respects, is like her. As Austin Briggs has pointed out, in terms of
Jessica's girlish buoyancy she is related to "women like Annie Fair- child and Alice Ware, who combine a strain of patient endurance with a yielding weakness for men who are boyish, weak, and hypocritical.""^
11. Briggs, p. 85. 87
Unlike these women, however, Jessica, in her role as fallen
woman, is not so much preoccupied with bringing home the wayward knight
as she is with living down the burden of social stigma attached to her.
"This is the point," Reuben informs Horace, by way of explaining why
Jessica has returned to Thessaly and to what seems a hopelessly dis
credited life. "She has made up her mind to come back here, earn her
own living decently, face the past out and live it down here among
those who know that past best" (p. 36). Thus, like Hester Prynne who,
as O'Donnell and Franchere note, had followed a plan of penance which 12 she had fixed for herself, Jessica sets about establishing a milli
ner's shop that will be adequate to support both her and her unstable
younger sister, Lucinda who, without the proper guidance, will more
than likely embark on a similarly destructive course.
In view of the foregoing, Jessica plays in reverse the mythical
pilgrimage of the typical Frederic protagonist. Her movement is from
the city back to the farm and from a rebellious transcendental indi
vidualism to a humble pragmatism. Disenchanted with the life offered her in the city, she desires to start "anew" and attempt a second
beginning by returning home. She has discovered just as Seth had that urban life, in spite of its glittering allurements, offers opportuni
ties for only a few, wretchedness for the many. For the majority, it is a place where the glowing expectancy of material prosperity dis solves into the dull reality of poor pay and where the expectancy of
12. O'Donnell and Franchere, p. 90. 88
spiritual fulfillment is invalidated by broken spirits and moral degra
dation.
Such were the depths to which Jessica had descended when, miraculously, none other than the pragmatic Annie Fairchild appeared on
the scene and rescued her fallen sister from the Tecumseh red-light
district and obtained for her a job in a milliner's shop where Jessica
learned the trade. It was also Annie who had urged Jessica to return to Thessaly and to whom Jessica now writes "daily ... short letters setting forth tersely the events and outcome of the day," letters which help "greatly to strengthen her" (p. 191).
Jessica's lot is not an easy one, of course. In fact there is something pathetic about it, just as there was about the burden which
Hardy's Tess had to shoulder. Day in and day out Jessica no doubt must brook the sneers of hardened factory girls and the advances of rakish men (although Frederic himself does not emphasize this). There are times when she longs to return to the city, "to get back again into the atmosphere where bright lights shone on beautiful dresses, and the hours went swiftly, gayly by with jest, and son, and the sparkle of the amber air-beads rising in the tall wine-glasses" (p. 192). Neverthe less, she perseveres and eventually her artistry in plying the needle pays off, for her business begins to prosper.
But Jessica is not content for long to live alone and in spiri tual isolation, earning her support and disciplining Lucinda's restless impulses. With Annie's encouragement, and consistent with her newly- developed sense of fraternity and moral interdebtedness, Jessica soon undertakes a humanitarian scheme to establish an "evening club for the working-girls of the town" (p. 194), a place where they can go to get off the streets and amuse themselves by reading or chatting or listen ing to Jessica's counsel. One is here reminded again of Hester Prynne who devoted the later years of her life to comforting and counseling fallen women.
Of all her generous impulses, however, it is her treatment of
Horace in the end that is most deserving. As we have already indi cated, Jessica does not repay Horace with hatred or contempt, but with compassion and understanding—ideals which bespeak the highest form of brotherhood. As Austin Briggs, has written, "£Jessica7 realizes that she is not a ruined woman in the way that Horace is a ruined man, that in truth she is far more capable and strong than the man she has 13 hitherto sentimentalized as her wicked betrayer." Her only recrimi natory advice is offered when she presents Horace with their son:
"Take the boy, ... he is Horace, too. Don't let him lie—ever—to any girl" (p. 469).
IV
In contrast to Jessica Lawton stands Kate Minster, the lady of transcendent beauty. Throughout the novel both Horace and Reuben over- sentimentalize her, ascribing to her qualities which her character cannot reasonably sustain. She is, at various times, angel, princess,
Madonna, and saint, depending on the whims of her admirers. She is, of
13. Briggs, p. 86. course, none of these. Nor is she, as Horace eventually concludes, a
"gilded variation upon the rustic character of the section" (p. 364).
Her character is best described somewhere between these extremes. As
an exotic lady, she stands in the line of development between such
creatures of unbridled imagination as Isabel Fairchild and Celia
Madden.
For one thing, her weakness for romance marks her as one of
Frederic's transcendental heroines. She herself takes great pleasure
in having her suitors place her on a pedestal, a sentiment which may be
due to a latent narcissism. Much of her time with Horace is spent in
amiable raillery over chivalric codes and principles of courtly love.
Like Isabel's, Kate's romanticism brings her to the brink of disaster.
Although not morally stained as Isabel becomes, she places herself in a vulnerable financial position and, as a result, her fortune nearly vanishes.
Also consistent with her type is her tendency always to be suffering the extremes of restlessness and boredom. Frequently she complains about "how rich girls must feel when they commit themselves to entering a convent" (p. 155). Briggs believes that Kate must possess her father's tremendous energy, but, try as she might, she can 14 find no acceptable channels for it. As a means of pacifying herself, she has tried collecting flowers, coins, cameos, and the like, but in each case she has suddenly abandoned her project "with disgust and wrath" (p. 157). In like manner she has tried her hand at embroidery,
14. Briggs, p. 88. gardening, painting, and writing. She has also gone to a great deal of time and expense to collect materials for an extensive biography of
Lady Arabella Stuart, only to forsake that project as well. As
Frederic himself writes, there is "something alike grotesque and pathetic" in Kate's attempts to amuse herself (p. 157). For a time she does manage to show interest in Jessica's project to provide a rest home for the underprivileged working girls of Thessaly. At first she is carried away in her enthusiasm, making suggestions for the working plans and then offering to endow the entire project. It is not long, however, until Horace has prejudiced her against it and her interest in it has vanished.
Perhaps her most significant feature as a transcendental heroine is her utter failure to relate to the human community—her lack of the sense of interdependence so necessary in a truly democratic society. Even her interest in Jessica's project seems motivated more by a desire to organize and manipulate people than by a need to belong.
On the one hand, she is cut off from the lower classes by the barrier of her wealth. On the other hand, she finds it almost intolerable to associate with members of her own class, people who, in her own words, have the "advantages of amiable manners, cleanliness, sophisticated speech, and refined surroundings" (p. 159). It seems highly unlikely that Reuben Tracy will be able to fill the "vacuity of existence" that so oppresses her (p. 156).
There is one important trait, however, which distinguishes Kate from Frederic's other romantic women. In contrast to Isabel, Kate does not lack moral depth. Indeed, her main objection to Horace's character is that he is dishonest, that he pays ostensible homage to the prin ciples of service to others while secretly serving the cause of self- advancement—a pattern of behavior not uncommon among the ranks of apostate transcendentalists. In no uncertain terms does she inform
Horace's father that "your son is not a good man or an honest man, and
I wish never to see him again" (p. 345). Dishonesty, one suspects, is a trait which Kate—as well as Reuben, for that matter—would tend to associate with the Europeanized character. It is interesting to note here that the fiction of Henry James abounds with Europeanized charac ters who are both reprehensible and dishonest, among whom Gilbert
Osmond (The Portrait of a Lady) is perhaps the most striking example.
We might further observe that it is dishonesty which Lambert Strether finds most objectionable among his European acquaintances in The
Ambassadors and which constitutes the basis for Robert Acton's rejec tion of Eugenia Munster in The Europeans. And it is for the same reason that Natty Bumppo refuses to marry Judith Hutter, Cooper's dark transcendental beauty in The Peerslayer. In this respect, Kate is more 15 akin to the American innocent than she is to the exotic lady.
15. There is yet another feature of the Europeanized character to which Kate strongly objects. Referring to Horace's sojourn in Europe, the patriotic Kate reveals to a family friend that she dis approves of Americans who learn to imitate European manners and who then return hom "sneering at those who haven't been there" and wearing their "coats buttoned in such a way, and their gloves of just such a shade, ... and their hats laid sidewise in the rack so that you can observe that they have a London maker's brand inside" (pp. 65-66). The Lawton Girl thus dramatizes the essential conflict between the transcendental and the pragmatic worlds. As Frederic represents them, neither appears to be wholly acceptable either to the modern reader or to Frederic himself, for that matter. His pragmatic world, for example, is undesirable because of the leveling tendencies and pressures to conform which are manifested by the behavior of the towns people toward Jessica and by the determination of the factory workers to force a concession upon the Minster family by threatening bodily harm and the destruction of property. Here, the pragmatic ideal of utility and expedience in the name of communal welfare has degenerated into mob tyranny. The transcendental world, on the other hand, is deeply flawed by false romanticism, grandiosity, and self-delusion.
With Kate, such idealism leads to boredom and restlessness. With
Horace, it leads to downright scoundrelism: in his refusal to function according to acceptable social standards, he runs the risk not only of annihilating permanently his own chances for freedom but of introducing tyranny and anarchy among his fellowmen as well. With Tracy, where the transcendental ideal will lead is anybody's guess, because, as we have seen, on the one hand, his conversion is rewarded at the novel's end, whereas, on the other hand, such a conversion inevitably forebodes ill for Frederic's heroes. Perhaps in his ambivalence Frederic felt that the pragmatic ideal of utility and restraint ought to be vigorously applied to such characters as Horace Boyce, that the ideals of frater nity and equality should be practiced by penitents such as Jessica 94
Lawton, and that the transcendentalist reward should be bestowed upon the virtuous individualism of men like Reuben Tracy. CHAPTER 5
THE RETURN OF THE O'MAHONY: A NEW YORK YANKEE IN IRELAND
Throughout our discussions we have seen how the contrast of character types has been a central feature of the Frederic dialectic.
It is, of course, an obvious feature of The Lawton Girl as well, as is evident in the way in which Frederic sets one character against another or in how he splits the male protagonist in two, giving each of the component characters, Reuben and Horace, attributes which reflect opposing life styles. There is also a good deal to be said about paired chapters in The Lawton Girl. Briefly, the chapter entitled
"Thanksgiving at the Minsters" is balanced by the chapter "Thanksgiving at the Lawtons"; the chapter headed "The Daughter of the Millions" matches that entitled "The Lawton Girl's Work"; and so on."'" Nowhere in
Frederic, however, is the principle of dichotomy more apparent than in
The Return of The O'Mahony. Not only are the characters but the very structure itself is conceived in antithetical terms.
With respect to the principle of dichotomy, there is another angle which is relevant to Frederic and which ought to be pursued at
1. There is a similar dichotomous organization in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter with chapters cleverly set off one against another, as indicated, for example, in the juxtaposition of the chapter entitled "The Prison-Door" with the chapter entitled "The Market-Place"; compare, also, the paired chapters respectively titled "Hester and the Physician" and "The Pastor and His Parishioner." As both reader and admirer of Hawthorne, Frederic might have been influ enced by Hawthorne's art in this respect.
95 96
this point. This is best explained by referring to Philip Rahv's
theory of dichotomy as it applies to the whole of American literature.
After examining that, we can then discuss its specific application to
The Return of The O'Mahony.
According to Rahv's contention, the "creative mind in America is fragmented and one-sided"; there is "a dichotomy between experience and consciousness, a dissociation between energy and sensibility, between conduct and theories of conduct. ..."2 With regard to Ameri can fiction, Rahv goes on to explain, there are two basic types of authors, and, by extension, two fundamental kinds of characters. These he calls "Paleface" and "Redskin."
Paleface literature reflects the tastes and sensibilities of the drawing room. It is intellectual and "moral" in nature and appeals mainly to the genteel sensibility. It often embraces aesthetic ideals and appeals to the symbolic imagination. Its subject matter concerns itself with the highest cultural attainments and the refined nicities of life. It is especially cognizant of customs and manners—the things which make up a national tradition. Henry James is perhaps the best representative of the Paleface tradition in American literature.
By contrast, Redskin literature reflects an egalitarian point of view such as one might find on the frontier or in a large Midwestern city. It tends to be emotional and spontaneous in nature, and vibrant with crude vitality. It expresses a naturalistic point of view and
2. Philip Rahv, Image and Idea; Fourteen Essays on Literary Themes (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions Books, 1949), p. 1. 97
tends to be literal, rather than symbolic, in its perception of
reality. It is often self-congratulatory. Rahv cites Walt Whitman as
an example of the Redskin in American literature.
As examples in Frederic, Horace Boyce tends toward a life style
that is Paleface in nature, while Reuben Tracy, his counterpart, seems
inevitably drawn toward the Redskin point of view. Frederic has done
the same thing with Jessica and Kate, so that we have the former
embracing democratic ideals; the latter, patrician sensibilities. In
The Lawton Girl, it is also interesting to note, the total effect of
this hodgepodge of characters thrown into the same vat scarcely resulted
in a synthesis for Frederic. Rather, it remained a seething mixture of
unresolved elements. What Rahv says of our national literature might
easily have been said about The Lawton Girl as well:
The national literature suffers from the ills of a split per sonality. The typical American writer has so far shown him self incapable of escaping the blight of one-sidedness: of achieving that mature control which permits the balance of impuls| with sensitiveness, of natural power with philosophic depth.
Frederic, however, was not to give up. He was to make several more
attempts at achieving a synthesis. And while he was never quite suc
cessful in this respect, his attempts were fruitful in the sense that
they helped to enrich both the materials and structure of his evolving mythos.
In relation to The Return of The O'Mahony, the principle of
dichotomy has a significant (and thorough) application. Within the
3. Rahv, p. 3. narrative framework, serious and comic elements contrast sharply with
one another; sometimes they merge with the satiric and the farcical.
In terms of conventions, elements common to the realistic novel are
often set in glaring juxtaposition against a romantic background. With
reference to character, the pragmatist is pitted against the idealist,
the materialist against the spiritualist, the innovator against the
traditionalist, the democrat against the patrician, and the radiant maiden against the grey-haired nun. As a thematic concern, the total effect of the novel is one of heightened contrast between the myth of
the New World man with his financial wizardry and practical technology and the myth of the Old World man with his ancient traditions and
encumbered estates. In relation to the theory set forth by Rahv, the novel is a replay, somewhat exaggerated perhaps, of the contest between the Redskin and the Paleface, a contest which, as we have seen, has been going on in Frederic since he began the writing of In the Valley.
I
Although in The Return of The O'Mahony Frederic deviated tempo rarily from the dialectical pattern which he has been developing all along, he is clearly moving in the direction of a mythical treatment of literature and away from a realistic or naturalistic vision of life.
The relationship of this novel to Mark Twain's improbable romance, A
Connecticut Yankee, which was published less than three years before
Frederic's novel came out in 1892, is of course an obvious one but one which involves more than merely superficial correspondences. Both authors, for example, view Europe through the eyes of a Redskin, although Twain's biases are more direct and more obviously American, and his frontier humor is more coarse and exaggerated. Similarly,
Twain exhibits less patience than Frederic when exposing medieval customs and superstitions or when satirizing social injustice. But the organizing principle of Twain's book is, like Frederic's, based on "a contrast," a contrast, as Twain himself had written of A Connecticut
Yankee, of the past and the present in which "the bringing them into 4 this immediate juxtaposition emphasizes the salients of both."
Frederic, of course, was concerned with nineteenth-century
Ireland and the Irish question rather than with sixth-century England and the Round Table, but the vestigial customs and outmoded traditions contributing to the demoralization of the populace are in many respects quite similar. Another difference may be found in the fact that
Twain's knowledge of the Arthurian world was necessarily literary in nature, whereas Frederic was able to visit Ireland and gain firsthand a knowledge of her people and problems.Twain's work, however, is much richer in thematic development, whereas the content of Frederic's runs somewhat thin in places. In this connection, O'Donnell and
Franchere have pointed out that Frederic wrote the novel during a time of relaxation and apparently did not become too emotionally wrought up
4. Quoted by Henry Seidel Canby, Turn West, Turn East; Mark Twain and Henry James (New York: Biblo and Tanner, 1965), p. 167.
5. According to O'Donnell and Franchere, Frederic had made the acquaintance of numerous prominent Irish Members of Parliament and had traveled throughout County Cork visiting the O'Mahony castles, meeting the people and coming to know their problems (pp. 97-98). over the Irish question, whereas Twain, it is clear, stewed over the
English question for a number of years. Paul Haines has written of
Frederic's novel, however, that although it is a happy kind of romance, it nevertheless represents a thoughtful political thesis'' and should not therefore be easily dismissed.
Like Twain's, Frederic's romance begins on American soil and then shifts to Europe. Zeke Tisdale is Frederic's hero, a soldier of fortune and opportunist now fighting in the last stages of the Civil
War. Though commander of Company F and well-known for his "cold- g blooded intrepidity in battle," he seizes a passing whim to desert and suddenly absconds with stolen credentials which he hopes will secure him the lost heirship to a large estate in Ireland. Once there, he makes the acquaintance of Jerry Wiggins, a local cab driver, retains him as his valet and rechristens him with the imaginary ancestral appellation of Diarmid MacEgan, then proceeds to the O'Mahony castle where he promptly installs himself as lord of the manor.
From the very beginning, the new O'Mahony shows himself to be thoroughly American and a thoroughly Redskin one, steeped in all the democratic prejudices (and all its limitations). On the very day of his arrival he confesses to Jerry, to whom he now privately refers as his "chief cook and bottle washer" (p. 61), that he cannot reckon in
6. O'Donnell and Franchere, pp. 97-98.
7. Haines, p. 315.
8. Harold Frederic, The Return of The O'Mahony: A Novel (New York: Robert Bonner's Sons, Publisher, 1892), p. 8. Subsequent refer ences to this edition will be made parenthetically in the text. 101
Irish currency because, for one thing, he has never even heard of it.
During a tour of his estate, to which he familiarly refers as his
"ranch," he shows his contempt for the ideal of European paternity by insisting that his underlings address him as an equal. As he had earlier spoken to Jerry, "Don't call me 'yer honor,' or any o1 that sort o' palaver. ... I ain't used to bossin' niggers around, or playin' off that I'm better'n other folks" (p. 55). Later when the
O'Mahony bard is introduced to him as the chronicler of family history, he indifferently refers to him as his "song-and-dance man" (p. 61).
Having apparently been reared in a strong Protestant tradition, he shows a similar indifference to his first "Christian obligation," which is to set the example by attending mass. After his first session he is altogether bewildered, rather than impressed, by "the jumble of candles, bells and embroidered gowns; ... boys in frocks swinging little kettles of smoke by long chains; ... books printed on one side in
English and on the other in an unknown tongue" (p. 57). Finally, when he learns that young Kate O'Mahony, a seven year old to whom he has taken a strong liking, will be expected to enter a convent, he observes in the presence of the venerable Mother Superior that the youngster would probably "rather be whoopin' round barefoot with a nanny-goat, say, an' . . . climbin' trees ... than go into partnership with grandma, here, in the nun business" (p. 79).
As might be expected, Zeke's vigorous Yankeeism ruffles the feathers of the O'Mahony bard, Cormac O'Daly, who stands in the novel as the bastion of tradition and who thus becomes The O'Mahony's chief 102 antagonist. Having witnessed much of the foregoing, he immediately senses in the American a spirit both alien and unsympathetic to ancient and honored customs and is puzzled when he tries to account for it genealogically. As far back as O'Daly can remember, the present
O'Mahony resembles none of the previous barons in any significant way and differs from them in most important respects, but particularly in the fact that he is "possessed of qualities which commind him to the vulgar multichude" (p. 97). Finally, the bard concludes, the American must be an "reversion of toypes" (p. 92), clearly not in the main
O'Mahony line. On the contrary, he must have stemmed from the off shoot line of that ancient Philistine Teige, who was also,
A turbulent and timpistuous man. ... 'Tis well known that he viewed holy things with contimpt. 'Twas he that wint on to the very althar at Rosscarbery ... and cudgeled wan of the daycons out of the place for the rayson that he stammered in his spache. 'Twas he that hung his bard, my ancestor of that period, up by the heels on a willow-tree (p. 93).
While Cormac O'Daly is holding "fast be our ancient thradi- tions" (p. 74), The O'Mahony has in the meantime inspected his ances tral abode and has found most of the buildings in utter ruins. Only one part of the castle proper is suitable for living quarters, while the convent, which houses the Ladies of the Hostage's Tears, the only family order of nuns in Ireland (Cormac proudly observes), is irrepa rably dilapidated. In fact, the only genuine attraction of which the manor can boast is the great diversity of ruins, some of which date back a thousand years. There are Irish ruins, Norman ruins, Eliza bethan ruins, Victorian ruins—ruins which will delight tastes of every kind. When The O'Mahony inquires into the financial affairs, he is 103 dismayed to learn that the estate is deeply in debt and is overburdened by principal and interest payments of loans dating back for decades.
To his further chagrin, he is told that the interest alone on the borrowed money more than consumes the annual income by some 630 pounds.
The money, it seems, has been used to finance the drunken sprees and carousing adventures of O'Mahony barons for as long as O'Daly can him self remember: "The last two O'Mahonys ... did nothing but dhrink at the pig-market at Dunmanway once a week, and dhrink at Mike Leary's shebeen over Ballydivlin the remainding days of the week, and dhrink here at home on Sundays" (pp. 74-75). As an additional means of securing boozing money, the barons have for centuries forced their daughters to take vows to enter the convent and have thereby obviated the necessity of providing money for dowries.
Revolted by what he has learned, and now ashamed to accept rents from his impoverished tenants, The O'Mahony vows to enact sweep ing reforms, economic and otherwise. Beginning with himself, he swears that "There's going to be one O'Mahony that dies sober, or I'll know the reason why!" (p. 83). He further resolves to attend mass once a week instead of every morning. As for Muirisc (the name of the estate and the lands attached to it), he reduces the rents and then sets about putting the peasantry to work by reopening the copper mines, expanding the fishing industry, and founding a lobster canning enterprise.
Within a short period of time, Muirisc is on a solid economic footing. Zeke has been the first O'Mahony on record who has managed to pay expenses and make investments at the same time. As an example of 104 his industry and talent, the output of the copper mines alone increases from approximately 8,000 to 20,000 pounds annually. Thus, this
"strange Americanized chieftain" (p. 116) suddenly finds himself a great popular favorite among the Irish peasantry. Everybody, in fact, seems happy except Cormac O'Daly and the nuns of the Hostage's Tears, who continue to demur, pleading the cause of tradition and respect for the hereditary bard: "What's money, and what's popularity, . . ."
O'Daly asks, "if ye've no ancesthral proide, no love and reverence for ancient family thraditions, no devout desoire to walk in the paths your forefathers trod?" (p. 97).
Meanwhile, The O'Mahony, having solved the economic crisis, has set about to correct the political situation of Muirisc and, by exten sion, of all Ireland. Here, however, solutions are not so readily forthcoming. Acting on the encouragement of his faithful retainer
Jerry Wiggins, The O'Mahony becomes a member of the Fenians and par ticipates in a raid on a British outpost. One of the Irish Fenians betrays the rebellion, however, and the raid proves abortive. At mid point in the novel The O'Mahony is forced to flee Ireland and go into exile. The outcome of the venture might stand as Frederic's commentary on the efficacy of individual or minority efforts, whether of Fenians or otherwise, to impose a political solution from without, for as
Frederic sees it, the problem is an internal one. Take the matter of the Irishman who betrayed the cause. As the British officer remarked,
"There's always an Irishman who sells the secret to the government" 105
(p. 142). Disloyal and disorganized, the Irish can at best cause the
British only "a certain amount of bother" (p. 143).
II
With The O'Mahony conveniently out of the way, Cormac O'Daly gradually takes the estate over. As we learn, The O'Mahony had hurriedly appointed him as co-trustee, along with Jerry Wiggins, to manage the property for the benefit of the little girl Kate, who is his declared heir. O'Daly, though, has designs for self-aggrandizement.
His first move is to marry Kate's mo':her and provide himself with an heir. Then, as ward of the young Kate, he announces his plans to put her away in the convent, a move which will make his own son eligible to become the next O'Mahony. Meanwhile, he arrogates airs to himself by elevating his title from the menial epithet of steward to the more impressive name of "The O'Daly." This is a maneuver which the peas antry find especially presumptuous, since it has for years been rumored that 0'Daly's relatives had served as bards for the disreputable
McCarthys and even for the hated Carews.
Under the new regime, both the economic and spiritual well- being of the community deteriorates. For the next twelve years, O'Daly busies himself in reversing all of the innovations introduced by his predecessor and manages to re-implement all of the customs of the dark ages from which it has just emerged. With the area facing an unusually poor potato crop, this officious rascal increases the rents, reduces the fishing excursions, closes down the lobster cannery, restores the charge on the cutting of turf, and levies taxes on carigeens and on the 106
gathering of kelp. In addition, he sets about evicting tenants during
the dead of winter for nonpayment (a precedent, apparently, in the history of Muirisc), and meanwhile manages to embezzle from the estate funds in excess of 17,000 pounds. As Jerry Wiggins later remarks, for generations it has been commonly known that the O'Daly ancestors were
"thieves of the earth" (p. 197). Perhaps the most pernicious of
O'Daly's transgressions is his determination to revive the dying con vent of the Hostage's Tears and impress into its service all of the
O'Daly young women, whose superior, it is planned, will be none other than Kate O'Mahony herself. For Frederic, this gesture, obviously a misuse of Church authority, was a crude manifestation of the exploita tion of women. In this sense, 0'Daly's action symbolized one of the more reprehensible features of the European system of paternity.
Of the possible defects which Frederic sees in the Ireland of the past, the behavior of the usurper O'Daly is an excellent example.
Fanatically contemptuous of efficiency and modernity—of anything which smacks of change of any kind and in any degree—O'Daly remains a virtual slave of the past, of "thradition" as he calls it, in and for itself. Although he pretends to believe in the sincerity of his com mitment to ancient ideals, he is himself extremely lax in the practice of them and shows by his behavior that he possesses merely the husks of virtue. In reality he knows nothing of "trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie" which so genuinely characterized Chaucer's knight. A per- petuator of ignorance and superstition, 0'Daly's type must have been what the British officer had in mind when he commented, somewhat 107 obscurely, "Service in India helps one to understand all the inferior races" (p. 283).
In the meantime, the real heir, Bernard O'Mahony, arrives in
Ireland.from America and meets and falls in love with the beautiful
Kate, who, now twenty, is under heavy pressure to enter the convent.
With characteristic Yankee ingenuity (in this respect he is fully the equal of Zeke Tisdale), Bernard lays the groundwork for thwarting the tyranny of O'Daly and for putting the convent out of commission. The complications which follow, at once humorous and ironic, reveal an almost Tom Sawyerish delight on the part of Frederic. Also in this section, Frederic's interest in the gothic novel is particularly apparent. Here are all the trappings from lost medieval manuscripts and subterranean vaults to creaking hinges and imprisoned hostages.
By novel's end, however, everything seems to have been resolved. The O'Mahony, now returned from exile on the Continent, retires O'Daly to a farm and abolishes the position of ancestral bard.
The convent will be allowed to lapse and Jerry Wiggins will be restored to his former position of eminence as valet and companion. Bernard and
Kate are to marry and live in the castle as joint occupants and masters with The O'Mahony, who is to retain his title until he dies.
Although brief and inconclusive, the picture which Frederic presents of Ireland and the Irish is not very optimistic despite the happy ending of the novel. As Kate herself observes while standing atop Mt. Gabriel surveying the surrounding countryside, Ireland seems to have lost its vitality, and though still beautiful, it is "beautiful 108
with the beauty of death" (p. 228). As narrator, Frederic attempts to
explain why this might be so. Through all of the long generations of
persecution and suffering, "the Irish peasant has been schooled ...
to face the necessity of exile, to view the breaking of households, the separation of kinsmen, and the recurring miseries attendant upon an endless exodus across the seas, with the philosophy of the inevitable"
(p. 151). Frederic seems to share the belief of William Butler Yeats that Ireland's problems are at least partially due to the fact that she expects, if not encourages, all of her strength, vitality, and talent to go into foreign lands as exiles or abroad as immigrants.
Ill
Regarding Frederic's attitude, however, a closer parallel may be found here at home in the person of Mark Twain, whom we mentioned earlier in this chapter and whose Connecticut Yankee resembles The
Return of The O'Mahony. A closer look at both works now will bear this out.
In addition to the similarities mentioned earlier, there is a somewhat superficial one between Kate O'Mahony and Twain's Lady
Corisande (or Sandy), both of whom are distressed damsels. Then there is the 01Daly-Merlin parallel, both of whom represent the forces of ignorance and superstition and who can exchange guises and masks as the occasion warrants. At the end of Frederic's novel, for example, O'Daly is the same sycophant and fabricator of O'Mahony grandeur that he had been at the beginning. 109
The most striking parallel, of course, exists between The
O'Mahony (alias Zeke Tisdale) from New York and The Boss (alias Hank
Morgan) from Connecticut. Both have come from nondescript backgrounds; neither, apparently, has an authentic claim to lineage or social stand ing, which they later achieve. For good reason they are both profes sionally associated with weapons of persuasion and destruction—Twain's
Boss, in a Colt firearms factory and Frederic's baron, in the American
Civil War and later, in a Turkish uprising. Both have a firm belief in
the efficacy of business and scientific methods to replace outmoded institutions.
The parallel is even more striking when we consider their achievements. Both initiate a "new deal" so to speak, a term which
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is said to have borrowed from 9 Twain's work. (Roosevelt, it is interesting, was, according to some, also a harbinger of miracles.) In both cases, the purpose of the New
Deal stems from the hope that through the dignity of sobriety, work, and self-sufficiency the downtrodden Old World peasantry would be able to develop a healthy self-respect and a sound commitment to national progress. Both protagonists also desire to curb the influence of the
Church which they consider unhealthy. It is significant, too, that each becomes something of a folk hero, a champion of the people, for both Frederic and Twain liked to see themselves in this role. To use
Canby's description of Twain's hero, Frederic's protagonist, as well as
9. Edmund Reiss, "Afterword," A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (New York: New American Library, 1963), p. 321. 110
Twain's, is really a "boy in spirit, though a giant in achievement, a
cock-sure adolescent, let loose in what he regarded as a cockeyed world.And yet, in spite of all the good they do, there is some
thing lacking. Neither hero, as Edmund Reiss writes of The Boss,
brings any lasting improvement, material or cultural."'""'' Canby believes
that it is a moral conscience, one combined with self-knowledge, which
The Boss lacks; his efforts certainly do not effectively change popular 12 morality. Nor do The O'Mahony's.
In the final analysis, both characters represent a type which has come to be something of an "eidolon," a term which Whitman used to 13 describe "an imaginative type which men could imitate." Metaphori cally, the descendants of these men, according to Canby, are the Ameri can G. I.'s, those men whose technical dexterity caused so much wonder
throughout Europe during World War II and yet who still lacked some- 14 thing morally. With both The Boss and The O'Mahony, as with the
G.I., it all goes back to that Yankee sense of superiority which as
Canby says is "neither arrogant, nor predatory, but sprung from /their7 technical efficiency, and based on extreme self-confidence with not much self-knowledge.""'"^
10. Canby, p. 164.
11. Reiss, pp. 323-24.
12. Canby, pp. 168-69.
13. Canby, p. 169.
14. Canby, pp. 169-70.
15. Canby, p. 171. CHAPTER 6
THERON WARE: THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
The last of the American novels, The Damnation of Theron Ware
represents the culmination of the thesis section of the Frederic dia
lectic and embodies the motif of the knight who is demoralized in his quest for the forbidden lady. Again, there is the usual tripartite
division of characters, with one important variation. This is the addition of Sister Soulsby, who functions as an adjunct to the artless
Alice Ware and who bridges the gap between the fair-haired American lady and her more efficient and self-reliant version in the later
English novels. Celia Madden, who develops from the exotic Kate
Minster of The Lawton Girl, becomes more complex in terms of cultural values. Even Theron Ware, the knight, represents something of a development. He becomes a human being in his own right and does not suffer from the split personality syndrome reflected in the Reuben-
Horace dichotomy.
Of all Frederic's novels, Theron Ware most forcefully illus trates McWilliams1 definition of the principal theme in Frederic as the
"chaos that results when an untrained, uneducated, and unsophisticated person escapes from a provincial society and suddenly finds himself an heir to the culture, lore, and wisdom of the ages.""*" This theme—
Theron's disastrous confrontation with culture—while again embodied in
1. McWilliams, p. 30.
Ill 112
Frederic's cultural triangle involving the gilded lady and the artless maiden, is amplified and enriched by the addition of two cultural representatives, Father Forbes and Dr. Ledsmar, additions which make the cultural shock almost too much for the gullible Theron.
Beginning with Theron Ware, however, Frederic began to move in a new direction, away from particularized experience and in the direc tion of the more universal. Not only is the theme greatly enriched as a result, but it also reflects greater maturity of vision. Heretofore,
Frederic had focused mainly upon nationally biased themes and charac ters and had showed them off by placing them in strong juxtaposition to
Old World types. But with Theron Ware he began to generalize the mythic components of his national culture in order to construct a more universalized mythology. This is not to say that his hero is no longer recognizably American, for Theron Ware is certainly that. Rather, it means that Frederic mythicized—or better yet, universalized—the experience of his hero. Just as Hamlet is both English and something more, so Theron Ware transcends national limitations and suggests some thing of an archetypal figure.
In his monumental studies in psychology and mythology, Joseph
Campbell set forth a universal formula for the mythological adventure of the typical cultural hero. This adventure, Campbell demonstrated, has had worldwide distribution and is therefore common to all known cultures, whether past or present, Oriental or Occidental, and is equally applicable, whether to Buddha or Jesus, the Frog-King or 113 2 Apollo. Because the mythological experience (according to the belief 3 of C. G. Jung and others) expresses the deepest spiritual aspirations
of a culture and because the mythological pattern which Campbell
describes suggests some meaningful implications relevant to the
Frederic dialectic, Campbell's thesis deserves to be examined here.
Although many variations exist, the basic archetypal experi
ence, which Campbell calls the world "monomyth" (a term which he bor
rowed from Joyce's Finnegan's Wake), develops according to the following
motifs. The cultural hero, dissatisfied with his present life, is
separated from mundane reality and is initiated into a transcendent
world. There, he experiences a series of crises, spiritual and other
wise, in which he undergoes the traditional dark night of the soul or
something equivalent, such as Dante's "dark wood, midway in the journey 4 of our life" or the Judeo-Christian forty days in the wilderness.
Then follows a rebirth, a process which, like the dark night of the soul, may assume a multitude of forms, from a union with a goddess to
an atonement with the Father. Reborn thus to a state of expanded
2. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1970).For an excellent discussion of the common origins of such myths, see also Joseph Carripibell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (New York: The Viking Press, 1959), pp. 30-49; for an explanation of Occidental versions, see Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (New York: The Viking Press, 1964).
3. C. G. Jung and C. Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythol ogy: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, trans. by R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 79.
4. Campbell, Hero, p. 21. consciousness and to a life of creative fulfillment—a condition of blessedness which approximates the Hindu Nirvana or the Greek apothe osis—the hero returns to ordinary reality in order to share with com mon humanity the blessings derived from his transformation.^ So runs the monomyth.
A comparison of Frederic's dialectical scheme with Campbell's monomyth of the universal hero will reveal some meaningful parallels and ironic inversions. Of particular significance here is Frederic's vision of the process and efficacy of rebirth. Theron Ware alone, of course, does not satisfy all of the conditions necessary to complete a mythological adventure, nor can it, likewise, bear the dread weight of a universal monomyth. In this sense, our comparison will be more rewarding if we do not confine our vision to Theron Ware but extend it beyond to include the two novels which follow it, March Hares and
Gloria Mundi. As we shall see, each of the three novels fulfills, successively, the important phases of the adventure so that the three some may be taken collectively to represent a kind of mythological trilogy—a sequence in which the experience of Frederic's hero-avatar combination of Ware-Mosscrop-Tower approximates the archetypal cycle of separation from society and return to it.
I
At the beginning of The Damnation of Theron Ware, Frederic's protagonist is much like the typical grail-hero whom Campbell describes
5. Summarized from Campbell, Hero, pp. 3-46, 245-46. 115 £ in his Occidental Mythology. Young, naive, and ambitious, Theron has
just been assigned a new pastorate at Octavius, a small provincial town
in upstate New York. Like Perceval, whom Campbell describes as a
"forthright, simple, uncorrupted, noble son of nature, without guile, strong in the purity of the yearning of his heart,"'' Theron is warm, g "generous, unselfish." Indeed, just as the grail figure is generally held in esteem by his society, the members of Theron's former pastorate had valued this unassviming farm-bred man for his "innocent candor and guileless mind, for his good heart, his pious zeal, his modesty about gifts notably above the average" (p. 19). As a Methodist minister,
Theron had also been taught, as Perceval had, the difference between
"God and Satan ... 'dark and light'," even though "in his own deeds light and dark were mixed." 9 Neither angel nor saint, he is a living, questing man with a genuine desire to succeed in this life and also with a yearning to strive for something beyond. Although Theron has just suffered a mild setback in not having been awarded the Tecumseh pastorate, his career seems promising enough, and like Emerson and
Perceval, he holds "that all things work together for good" (p. 12).
Withal, Theron seems the picture of young Galahad garbed in the armor of expectation.
6. Campbell, Occidental Mythology, pp. 509-09.
7. Campbell, Occidental Mythology, p. 508.
8. Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1960), p. 99. Subsequent references to this edition will be made parenthetically in the text.
9. Campbell, Occidental Mythology, p. 508. 116
Consistent with the pattern of the mythological round, the world which the hero inhabits is symbolically represented as a fallen world or one on the verge of spiritual destitution. In Theron's world the post-lapsarian element is reflected in the degenerate Methodism of
Octavius. No sooner has the idealistic young minister and his new bride arrived in Octavius than there are ominous suggestions of bigotry and hypocrisy. One morning he is visited by his trustees and is ordered to remove from his sermons both scholarly and compassionate elements and to proclaim instead "straight-out, flat-footed hell,—the burnin' lake o' fire an' brimstone" (p. 29). On another occasion his trustees order his Sunday milk delivery stopped. Again, Theron's wife
Alice is rudely informed that she must buy her potatoes from a member of the congregation, even though they are more expensive than, and inferior in quality to, the potatoes she has been used to buying at the market. But, predictably enough, nowhere is Theron's frustration more keenly felt than in the restraints placed upon his preaching. Forced to preach dull and stupid sermons prescribed by trustees who are hostile even among themselves, Theron comes home "feeling like a wet rag" (p. 124) depressed because his special gift of oratory is being wasted. Complacency and bad preaching, he concludes, are what the
Octavians demand of their minister.
With a situation as deplorable as this, there is little doubt but that the Octavius congregation helps to lay the groundwork for the next phase of the mythological cycle, the call to adventure in which the hero abandons his world in disgust in order to search out something better. By stifling the creative spirit and freshness of vision which
Theron might have brought with him, the congregation forces him to seek new and "forbidden" outlets to satisfy his demand for self-expression.
Historically, Theron Ware suffers what many another protagonist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had to endure, from George
Willard in Winesburg, Ohio to Carol Kennicott in Main Street—the blighting effects of the small town mentality. For Octavius is just another manifestation of the provincialism, narrowness, and hypocrisy which E. W. Howe found in his country town and which Edgar Lee Masters saw in his Spoon River. In their own way, the denizens of these modern communities had gone just as surely to seed as the children of Israel had prior to Moses' ascension of Mt. Sinai.
There is, of course, an ironic contrast between the Reverend
Mr. Ware come to reform Octavius and the patriarch Moses who led Israel out of the maws of Egyptian bondage. As Van Wyck Brooks has implied, there is a fundamental difference between the "fighting pioneer" of heroic times and the "new" class of ministers who lack the patriarchal stamp.Yet, as Campbell points out, the archetypal adventure is not restricted to the supermen of history but applies across the board to
Everyman: "The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero's pas sage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale. ... The individual has only
10. Van Wyck Brooks, The Confident Years: 1885-1915 (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1952), p. 149. 118 to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls.
For Theron, the transcendental experience which frees him from his restrictive barriers is heralded, as it often is in the archetypal adventure, by a chance meeting with an exotic beauty who comes from an alien but alluring world. It is Celia Madden who reveals this fasci nating world and who introduces him to its other exponents, Father
Forbes and Dr. Ledsmar. In making their acquaintance, Theron finds himself suddenly amidst the cosmopolitan tradition of the world of art, religion, and science. Such a world, with its glittering fascinations, lures Theron, as it does Yeats's human child, away from the world of dull but safe realities and into one which is beautiful but unfath omable and dangerous. Yet for Theron, as for the cultural hero, the call to adventure symbolizes the dawn of some prodigious illumination and bespeaks not only a new life style but a whole new orientation—a novel way of perceiving reality itself. With some cultural heroes, the summons proves ultimately beneficial, as in the case of Buddha who returns with transcendent knowledge; with others, the call leads to catastrophe, as is the case with Tennyson's knights who abandon their responsibility to watch over the kingdom while they go a-grailing; with still others, such as Theron Ware, the summons proves ultimately ambig- 12 uous, since its long-term effects are unreported by the novel's end.
11. Campbell, Hero, p. 121.
12. The great majority of critics seems to agree that Theron's rebirth at the end of the novel is spurious or, at best, only tempo rary. One of the most convincing of recent accounts is Allen 119
II
Once across the threshold of ordinary existence and into the realm of quickened reality, the hero is subjected to a series of temp tations and ordeals which will presumably function as a means of cleansing and purifying the senses and of annihilating the destructive elements of the ego such as self-love and pride. In this connection,
Campbell recounts the story of Prince Five-Weapons, one of the many incarnations of the Buddha figure who during his time of ordeal was buffeted by the terrible ogre Sticky-Hair, the Lord of the Five Senses who would attempt to destroy the young prince by making him a slave to the flesh. After a lengthy battle, Prince Five-Weapons finally abandons his personal weaponry and is able to slay the ogre with his newly-acquired sixth sense which is symbolized by transcendent knowl edge. In abandoning his own ineffective weapons symbolic of the senses, the victorious prince leaves his ego stuck to the fur of Sticky-
Hair and emerges completely liberated from the senses and reborn to a 13 life of the spirit.
Theron's experience, on the other hand, once he has crossed the threshold from provincialism and Methodism into the world of cosmo politan sophistication, seems to work in reverse. Rather than get beyond restrictive barriers, he becomes more enslaved. Of the "trio of
F. Stein's "Evasions of an American Adam: Structure and Theme in The Damnation of Theron Ware," American Literary Realism, 5 (1972), 23-36. However, Frederic's novels, both earlier and later ones, are full of miracles. Daisy Mauverensen's repentance is only one example.
13. Campbell, Hero, pp. 85-89. 120 14 seducers" he encounters, Celia Madden is, as Arthur Hobson Quinn
recognized years ago, by far the most formidable and damaging agent in
Theron's degeneration."'""' A feminine embodiment of Sticky-Hair, she is
the alluring, emancipated, narcissistic, pagan daughter of Jeremiah
Madden, a Connemara peasant who has realized his own mythology of suc
cess and has become the town's most wealthy citizen. She it is who
introduces Ware to the aestheticism of the 1890's and the culture, as
John Henry Raleigh brilliantly summarizes it, of "the Pre-Raphaelites
and the Yellow Book ... redolent of secular incense, private altars,
diabolical poetry devoted to God, ... drunkards in penitential sack
cloth, erotic celibates writing obscure verse about the Trinity. 16 . . ." A high priestess of beauty and a forerunner of Sinclair
Lewis's exotic Sharon Falconner, herself a worshiper of decadent beauty
in Elmer Gantry,^ Celia claims to be a descendant of the Greeks and 18 vows to Hellenize Theron. When he seems puzzled about what she means
by being a "Greek," she replies that it means "absolute freedom from
14. Everett Carter, Introduction to The Damnation of Theron Ware (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. xxi.
15. Arthur Hobson Quinn, American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936), p. 451.
16. John Henry Raleigh, Introduction to The Damnation of Theron Ware (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1960), pp. xiii-xiv.
17. For some interesting parallels, see Charles V. Genthe, "The Damnation of Theron Ware and Elmer Gantry," Research Studies, 32 (1964), 334-43.
18. It would seem more fitting for Celia to show a preference for Hellenistic art which was sensuous and decadent rather than for Hellenic art which was more restrained and idealistic. 121
moral bugbears ... the recognition that beauty is the only thing in
life worth while" (p. 205).
Accordingly, late one evening Celia invites the Reverend Mr.
Ware into the privacy of her luxurious boudoir, an experience which has
the effect of further liberating him from moral responsibility and of
insuring his enslavement to the senses. As a means of heightening
one's response to the visual sense, Celia has decorated her boudoir in
blues and yellows, colors designed to set off her gorgeous red hair,
and has furnished the room with lavish tapestries and voluptuous nude
statuary. Her ostensible purpose in bringing this modern Prince Five-
Weapons to her apartment is to soothe his nerves which have been made
raw during a recent Methodist conference. To effect this she proposes
to play on the piano some pieces by Chopin, "the Greekiest of the
Greeks" (p. 197), whose melodies make "real music for bruised nerves"
(p. 191)—apparently by producing profuse aural sensations in the
listener. Lighting a perfumed cigarette and offering one to the
entranced Theron (a gesture which elicits a pleasing olfactory
response), Celia plays a number of pieces, including the "Sixteenth
Mazurka," which evokes "visions full of barbaric color and romantic
forms" (p. 203), followed by the "Second Sonata," that "weird mediaeval
processional, with its wild, clashing chords held down in the bondage 19 of an orderly sadness" (p. 200). Seated on the plush pillows and
19. The power of Celia's music over Theron reminds one of the power which music exerts in some of the odes of John Dryden, most notably in "A Song for St. Cecilias's Day" and in "Alexander's Feast." Both of these celebrate the musical ability of St. Cecilia (notice, too, the similarity between "Cecilia" and "Celia") to "raise and quell" 122
cushions which magnify his sense of touch, Theron becomes so intoxi
cated that in the absence of his puritanic sense of decorum he finds himself indulging in a cigarette and a glass of wine to satisfy the craving of his sense of taste. The whole experience in Celia's boudoir adds up to a complex synaesthetic indulgence on the part of Ware and his mythological seductress.
Having been befriended by Celia, Theron immediately plans to emulate her and become a Greek himself—a process which he describes as illumination but which really contributes to his damnation. Apparently totally unware of the true symbolic nature of Celia, he spends a good deal of his time fantasizing about her and women in general, and inevitably his thoughts draw him to make comparisons between his plain, fair-haired wife Alice and the dark and exotic Celia. Alice, he now discovers to his priggish chagrin, is no longer the "bright and keen witted" (p. 147) girl he had married but has grown dull and uninter esting, lacking in personal taste and participating in the so-called vulgar love feasts sponsored by the church. Scorning his wife's attempts to become reborn on her own, Theron thinks of Celia who belongs (in his mind) to a different class of women altogether—the class that knows how to engage the imaginations of "brilliant" men and be for them an enriching and humanizing force. Celia, Theron fancies, the passions, which is precisely the effect Celia's music has on Theron. One suspects that Frederic, when he composed this scene, was almost certainly aware of Dryden's odes, if he did not in fact have them specifically in mind. For a somewhat different interpretation of the effect of Chopin's music on Theron, see A. Carl Bredahl, Jr., "The Artist in T.he Damnation of Theron Ware," Studies in the Novel, 4 (1972), 436 ff. 123
was indeed such a woman, as was Sister Soulsby, the money-raiser for
the church: "... what a mighty part the comradeship of talented,
sweet-natured and beautiful women must play in the development of
genius, the achievement of lofty aims, out in the great world of great
men" (p. 188). As for Alice, Theron fatuously concludes, "She had had her chance to maintain a hold upon his interest and imagination, and had let it slip" (p. 295).
Theron's new attitude here is, with respect to Alice as well as his former association with the Methodists of Octavius, consistent with
the general mythological experience which accompanies the crossing of the threshold. It is the kind of experience which prevents the hero from ever resuming his former life on the same footing. It has the ultimate effect of making "what formerly was meaningful become strangely empty of value." 20 As Frederic portrays it, however,
Theron's crossing of the threshold is fraught with ironic reversals.
Whereas Prince Five-Weapons surrendered his ego up to Sticky-Hair, now ever to be self-denying and always to remain free of self-conscious love and carnal indulgence, Theron's experience entices him to become ever the more a slave of self-love, ever the more an apostle of self- indulgence. Whereas Buddha spent years wandering in the habit of a monk and meditating and increasing his knowledge preparatory to receiv ing the light of cosmic wisdom, Theron spends one short evening in the boudoir of a village aesthete and believes he has experienced the sweetness of Nirvana. In order to realize the full force of the irony
20. Campbell, Hero, p. 55. 124 in Theron's rebirth and grand illumination, one has only to make a mental juxtaposition of Jonah deep in the belly of the whale, or Christ in the Garden of Gesthemene, or Buddha under the Bo Tree, or Moses atop the dreaded slopes of Sinai—with the Reverend Mr. Theron Ware in
Celia's boudoir!
The use of ironic reversal is, of course, often a central feature of the mythological round. For example, the father of the young Buddha had attempted to forestall the prince's renunciation of the world by keeping from him the sad knowledge of humanity associated with sickness and death and by providing him with wine and women, only to have such efforts hasten the son's renunciation. In the same way,
Theron's narrow background and religious fundamentalism ill-prepare 21 him, as Charles Child Walcutt has noted, to cope with the very forces which he has been accustomed to condemning in the pulpit but which he inevitably falls prey to.
Ill
According to the canons of the mythological adventure, once the hero has survived the initiatory experience on the other side of the threshold, there occurs a series of signs of increasing magnitude and attraction which the quest-figure, unable to resist, follows unre servedly. The milieu in which he moves is often an ambiguous one, "a
21. Charles Child Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism; A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), p. 51. 125 22 landscape of symbolic figures (anyone of which may swallow him)" and
each of which represents a further succession of trials. In this
regard Theron makes the acquaintance of Father Forbes, the second agent
in his damnation, or, as Theron might have expressed it, his illumina
tion.
Forbes is a Catholic priest who, as a descendant of Montaigne and Sir Thomas Browne, can at one moment function as "the devout
guardian 'of a medieval superstition and fanaticism,' administering the
last sacrament to a dying Irishman, and at the next moment /[explain/
the pagan origins of that sacrament in the language of 'higher criti- 23 cism'." Forbes's ambivalence is puzzling to Theron who, as a literalist, erroneously interprets the priest's talk of "this Christ- myth of ours" (p. 73) as evidence of the clergyman's disaffection with the church. Theron similarly mistakes as skepticism Forbes's discourse on the Biblical Abraham, whom, as the priest informs Theron, modern research has proved never to have existed. Much impressed with this kind of talk, Theron finds himself remarking that "the America of the future will £hot7 trouble itself about any kind of a church. The march of science must very soon produce a universal skepticism" (p. 244).
Theron comes to view his introduction to Father Forbes as a crucial step in his progress toward illumination. For him the priest is an incarnation of scholarship and is surrounded everywhere by scholarly symbols. He inhabits a world entirely foreign to Theron, a
22. Campbell, Hero, p. 101.
23. 0'Donne11 and Franchere, p. 114. 126
world which Theron feels must be dominated by "culture and grace ...
lofty thoughts and the inspiring communion of real knowledge, where
creeds were not of importance and where men asked one another, not 'Is
your soul saved?' but 'Is your mind well furnished'?" (p. 135). In
reality, however, the priest complicates Theron's spiritual maze and
expands the labyrinth through which his soul must wend its way out of
the darkness and toward the light. Mythologically, the role which
Forbes plays is similar to that played by the host of the castle in Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight.
Theron has in the meantime been furnishing his mind from a dif
ferent source, Ernest Renan's autobiography, Recollections of my Youth,
which symbolizes another of the evil influences to which the mytho
logical hero is subjected. Largely unread except for ecclesiastical
literature, Theron is captivated by the account of a
deeply devout young man, trained from his earliest boyhood for the sacred office, and desiring passionately nothing but to be worthy of it, /whq7 came to a point where, at infinite cost of pain to himself and of anguish to those dearest to him, he had to declare that he could no longer believe at all in revealed religion (pp. 128-29).
In reading this "gentle, tender, lovable book" (p. 134), Theron remains wholly oblivious to the dangerous parallels to his own course of action. What impresses him most is not that it recounts how a man lost his faith but that it "put its foot firmly upon everything which could not be proved in human reason to be true" (p. 134) and gives credence to the existence of a variety of forms of religious worship. The young minister also takes a great deal of satisfaction in the notion that
Father Forbes must know Renan's autobiography by heart. Thus, while 127
the book may not be evil in itself, for Theron it proves to be a
destructive talisman which casts a wicked spell.
The last member of the triumvirate who subjects Theron's soul
to the buffetings of the underworld is Dr. Ledsmar, who is himself
closely allied to Father Forbes in his progressive views of science and
religion. Both Forbes and Ledsmar are, in fact, manifestations of the
same dark force. In relation to the archetypal hero, Ledsmar functions
as "devil's advocate," a term which he uses to describe himself (p. 79).
From another point of view, Ledsmar corresponds to the Lord of the
Underworld, the protector and guardian of dark and forbidden knowledge
which in medieval romances we find hoarded up in the dreaded dens of
dragons. During a visit to the doctor's laboratory, Theron is
impressed with the abundance of flowers on the premises and remarks
that his host must have an affection for flowers. As it turns out,
however, Dr. Ledsmar, far from being interested in such harmless pur
suits, is in reality conducting experiments which the conservative ele
ments in the nineteenth century considered strictly taboo. For
example, in one experiment he is testing the validity of Darwin's
theory of hermaphroditism in plants. In another, which he conducts
dispassionately on his Chinese servant, Ledsmar is concerned with
determining the capacity of the human body to assimilate opium. When
Theron inquires if the doctor has never written a book, the latter replies, revealingly, that he has published one on serpent worship, a fact which further suggests his mythical relation to the dark forces of
temptation. 128
It is a wretched commentary on Ware's illumination that he is at all impressed with Ledsmar's morbid scientism, especially when one considers that so many of Theron's romantic forebears had been revolted by all the Frankensteinian monsters they were encountering in fiction and in the world of fact. One suspects that he had not carefully studied Poe who, himself a sympathizer with the mythical vision, had written of Ledsmar's brand of science, thou "Vulture, whose wings are 24 dull realities" ; or Wordsworth, who had likewise condemned "our med dling intellect /which7 misshapes the beauteous forms of things—/We 25 murder to dissect." Instead, if Theron hadn't been so terribly ignorant, one might have suspected him of being a disciple of Samuel
Butler, that nineteenth-century prodigy who attempted to reduce the study of mythology to a cold science as Ledsmar himself does and who learned to disown his cultural inheritance as Theron will learn to do.
In some respects, however, Ledsmar is more akin to Hawthorne's intellectual antagonists such as Roger Chillingworth, Ethan Brand, and
Rappaccini than he is to Samuel Butler. This is a similarity which grows the more one considers Ledsmar's scientific experiments in con nection with what Hawthorne defined as "the unpardonable sin." In an excellent analysis entitled "Hawthorne and Melville: The Unpardonable
Sin," to which we referred in our discussion of The Lawton Girl, James
24. Edgar Allen Poe, "Sonnet—To Science," American Literature Survey, ed. Milton R. Stern and Seymour L. Gross (New York: The Viking Press, 1962), II, 127, 1.4.
25. William Wordsworth, "The Tables Turned," The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 377, 11. 26-28. 129
E. Miller, Jr. describes the process involved in the commission of such a sin to be a combination of arrogance, diabolism, and intellectual
obsession, all of which traits Ledsmar seems to possess. Heartless as
he is, as proud, and as impersonal, he will destroy his "Chinaman" just as surely as Rappaccini destroyed his own daughter. This he will do in
the same fashion, by administering poison—and for the same reason, in
the name of science. Similarly, Ledsmar will help to destroy the
Adamic Theron by poisoning his mind with cynicism and atheism. Leds- mar's true mythical ancestry seems to derive from the serpent who wrought the fall of man, Satan himself.
IV
Meanwhile, three months have passed since Celia has vowed to
Hellenize Theron, to transform him into a worshiper of beauty and to free his mind from all moral "bugbears." During this time she has bought him a piano and has allowed him to kiss her during a stroll in the woods, gestures which, as it turns out, Theron mistakenly construes as evidence for her genuine romantic devotion to him and which he sees as evidence for his own illumination. There is no doubt in his mind that he has experienced a kind of rebirth:
...a poet ...had been born. Yes; the former country lout, the narrow zealot, the untutored slave groping about in the dark after silly superstitions ... was dead. There was an end of him, and good riddance. In his place there had been born a Poet,—he spelled the word out now unabashed,—a child of light, a lover of beauty and sweet sounds, a recog nizable brother to Renan and Chopin. . . (p. 210).
In the mythological cycle, if the hero attempts to resume his regular routine, as Theron does at home and in the ministry, it will 130
seem exceedingly dull and unrewarding. Accordingly, dazzled by his
progress, Theron now begins a critical reexamination of his relation
ship to those about him. Alice, the "beautiful and all-beneficent"
"miracle" of former times (p. 17), now appears a burden—a homely,
rustic "blockhead" (p. 293), almost repulsive in her crude lack of
refinement. As for his parishioners, he holds them in the utmost con
tempt, those "ignorant and spiteful narrow-minded people, ... jealous
nonentities" (pp. 148-49) "who groaned and bellowed" with a "barbarous
license" (p. 232).
Ironically suggesting a resemblance to Buddha, Theron begins to
contemplate the abandonment of both wife and ministry and begins enter
taining the idea of eloping with Celia and her millions. His fantasies,
much like Horace's, cannot separate the idea of exotic women and
luxurious yachts. They define pretty well Theron's position along the scale of enlightened knowledge: "He could see £Celia7 reclining in a
low easy-chair upon the polished deck. ... Ah, how the tender visions crowded upon him! Eternal summer basked round this enchanted yacht of his fancy,—summer sought now in Scottish firths or Norwegian fiords, now in quaint old Southern harbors ..." (p. 310). Clearly, Frederic identifies Theron's ogres here as the visible manifestations of his own stupidity and grandiosity. Ultimately they are the flaws which point to his own inhumanity. They are the measure of his failure—his total inability to grasp the meaning of his life. Rather than an expansion of consciousness, Theron has, in reality, experienced a contraction. 131
A slave now of self-delusion, Theron persuades himself that
Celia's money will protect him no matter what happens, and throwing all
caution to the winds, he foolishly follows her to New York. There,
expecting to consummate the love affair, Theron undergoes one of the most humbling (and humiliating) experiences recorded in American literature. Instead of expanding his horizons and growing into an enlightened intellectual, Celia predictably argues that Theron has degenerated. Formerly the "innocent, simple, genuine young character, full of mother's milk" and smelling "of early spring in the country"
(p. 326), Theron is now an egotistical pretender to culture and a nasty little boy giggling over prurient gossip (p. 327). Like the donkey in the fable, he has been trying to play the lap dog. As Celia concludes,
"And it wasn't even an honest, straightforward donkey at that!" (p.
327).
Speaking of Theron's transformation, Larzer Ziff writes: "In place of the honest Christian lad we do not have a refined, wise, and articulate adult; we have instead a pitiful creature who has betrayed the conditions of his breeding ... in exchange for a grab bag of third-hand tastes, ill-digested ideas, and smirking cynical opinions. 26 . . ." Like Thomas Wolfe's hero, he can never go home again. To put it simply, Theron is a man without a cultural tradition. Dissatisfied with his native tradition, he is nevertheless ill-equipped to aspire to another. Caught in a cultural limbo, Theron is like Jay Gatsby who
26. Larzer Ziff, The American 1890's: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (New York: The Viking Press, 1966), p. 214. 132 learns, according to Fitzgerald's classic statement, that the rich are different from everyone else and that this difference is not so much a matter of money, as Hemingway had jested, as a matter of life style.
Relating the ordeals of the archetypal hero to struggles characteristic of normal human intercourse, Joseph Campbell makes a comment which seems appropriate to Theron's situation: ". . . every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of igno- 27 ranee; regrets are illuminations come too late."
V
A popular motif in the mythological odyssey is the intermittent appearance of a protectoreas who functions as guide and mentor for the adventurer during his time of hardship. Metaphorically, she furnishes the hero "with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to 28 pass." She will often intervene in severe crises and at the dramatic eleventh hour to pluck the hapless mortal from the jaws of annihilation.
She is a kind of cosmic mother and represents the "benign, protecting 29 power of destiny." In the fairy tale the role is played by the fairy godmother. In the Christian tradition her part is assumed by a sur rogate of the Virgin Mary, such as Beatrice who escorts Dante through
Paradise. In classical mythology both goddesses and mortals function
27. Campbell, Hero, p. 121.
28. Campbell, Hero, p. 69.
29. Campbell, Hero, p. 71. 133
as guardians, as for example, Athena who oversees Odysseus' long
journey home or Ariadne, whose thread enables Theseus to find his way
out of the labyrinth of the dread minotaur. In Frederic's novel the
hero comes under the protection of Sister Soulsby.
The appearance of Sister Soulsby as deus ex machina is a sig
nificant deviation from the conventional dialectical pattern which
Frederic has employed in previous novels. Rather than have Alice Ware,
the somewhat ineffectual artless maid, rescue the wayward Theron,
Frederic delegates this responsibility to the more enterprising Meth
odist fund-raiser Sister Soulsby, whom Theron envisions as an American
Amazon (p. 338). A former professional clairvoyant and medium,
vaudevillian and charlatan, Sister Soulsby wields a brand of frontier
morality which seems better suited to handle the threat of evil than
the conventional Puritan New England morality of Alice Ware. As
Frederic saw it, the growth of the "new morality" had rendered anach ronistic the morality of Annie Fairchild and Alice Ware. What with the
incursions of Darwinian scientists such as Dr. Ledsmar, the cynical incursions of "higher critics" symbolized by Father Forbes, and the spread of- hedonism advocated by Celia Madden, Frederic was well aware that the artless maiden, if she were to survive, would have to borrow some of "the wisdom of the serpent" from her older and wiser, albeit more vulgar, sisters such as Soulsby.
As protectoress and fairy godmother, Sister Soulsby is thus something of an updated revision of the artless maid and is the polar opposite to Theron's adversaries Father Forbes and Celia Madden. More 134
Redskin than Paleface, to recall Philip Rahv's distinction, Sister
Soulsby possesses an abundance of common horse sense along with a
goodly amount of brassy insolence, ingredients which are characteristic
of her mythological type and which the delicate and sheltered Alice
lacks. Thus, Soulsby is able, during the first Quarterly Conference,
to raise sufficient money to eliminate the Church debt and thereby
restore the fallen Theron to the good graces of the Presiding Elder and
even to secure her protege an increase in salary. It is also Sister
Soulsby who, sensing Theron's lack of "sabe," counsels him against
bogus idealism and warns him of the terrible fate which befalls "the
unfrocked priest" (p. 175). And later, after Theron has been rejected
by Celia and has gone on a drunken orgy that has resulted in his emo
tional collapse, it is Sister Soulsby again who nurses him back to
health and who obtains for him a position as salesman in Seattle where
the ruined Reverend Mr. Ware can begin anew.
It is interesting to note that as moral mentor Sister Soulsby
reflects the didacticism underlying the fairy tale and also substan
tiates Frederic's own contention that the best literature should pro- 30 duce a moral impression. A pragmatist, Soulsby claims that her
religion preaches only one doctrine, namely, "that as long as human life
lasts, good, bad, and indifferent are all braided up together in every
man's nature" and that "the sheep and the goats are to be separated on
Judgment Day, but not a minute sooner" (pp. 340-41). Less of an
30. Robert H. Woodward, "A Selection of Harold Frederic's Early Literary Criticism, 1877-1881," American Literary Realism, 5 (1972), 6. 135
abstract moralist and more of a homespun philosopher, Sister Soulsby is
a feminine literary descendant of Reuben Tracy who through his Yankee
shrewdness rescues the Minster girl from the machinations of evil. In
a similar fashion she has usurped the role of the artless maiden. By
combining characteristics from both of her prototypes, Sister Soulsby
represents an effective antidote to the destructive impulses of Forbes,
Ledsmar, and Madden.
VI
The ultimate blessing which the archetypal hero can receive
after he has survived the ordeal is to be married to "the Queen Goddess 31 of the World" —a condition which is not always fulfilled in mytho
logical stories. Typically, the Queen Goddess manifests a dual nature
and is the incarnation of all opposites, the paragon of beauty and the repository of all vice, terrible yet benign, both madonna and seduc
tress, destroyer and preserver, the embodiment of both womb and tomb.
She is the "Cosmic Power, the totality of the universe, the harmoniza
tion of all the pairs of opposites, combining wonderfully the terror of 32 absolute destruction with an impersonal yet motherly reassurance."
In some mythologies the dual nature of the goddess is embodied in separate beings, as is suggested in the division of Artemis and
Aphrodite in Greek mythology or in the Una-Duessa dichotomy in the first book of Spenser's Faerie Queen. As we have seen, Frederic
31. Campbell, Hero, p. 109.
32. Campbell, Hero, p. 115. 136
employs a similar antithesis throughout most of his American novels,
one which in the novel presently under discussion is symbolized by the
Alice Ware-Celia Madden contrast.
As a symbol of heavenly virtue, Alice belongs to a pre-
lapsarian world and is, as Everett Carter once wrote, the embodiment of 33 "golden purity of a golden state of unfallen nature." A "beautiful
and all-beneficent" "miracle," she has early in her relationship with
Theron assumed her rightful place on a "glorified pinnacle" (Ware, p.
17) far removed from the cynical reality of nineteenth-century human
ity. There she remains, throughout the novel, in all her splendid
innocence, perfectly aloof from the bewildering forces which unhinge
her husband.
The analogy, however, between Alice Ware and the celestial
goddess from mythology ought not to be pushed very far. In the first
place, her symbolic role as a blessing to crown the achievements of the
hero remains in the end unrealized, even though she and Theron are
reunited and sent west to enjoy a new life in a new land. Within the
context of the novel, their reunion seems more suited to facilitate
penance than to celebrate apotheosis. Too, Alice's type in Frederic's novels inevitably seems less interesting than, and not as fully
developed as, her counterpart. Alice resembles Grace Frederic in this respect, who for a time enriched and humanized her husband's life (and
even fascinated him for a time), only to become an anachronism.
33. Carter, Introduction, p. xxii. 137
Clearly, the object of Theron's quest is not the fair-haired
Alice but her polar opposite, Celia Madden. Celia, whose name is an
anagram of "Alice," reflects the malignant side of Alice's nature and
thus stands as "the desired but forbidden mother ... whose presence 34 is a lure to dangerous desire." In Frederic, Gelia is the latest
manifestation of the dark woman of romantic imagination and damning
beauty—a seductress of the male psyche and destroyer of his soul. She
is, as critics have variously labeled her, a composite of a motley
group of character types, including a "sophisticated Eve" who tempts " 35 "an American Adam"; a Helen of Troy who plays "cultural perspective" 36 to Frederic's Faust, "albeit a rather sorry" Faust; a Madonna, pagan 37 priestess, Saint, evangelist, seductress, "troubled human being"; an 38 emancipated woman ; a kind of "atavistic idealization of the old 39 Kelt" (Father Forbes's view, p. 285); and so on, ad infinitum.
34. Campbell, Hero, p. 111. For a Freudian interpretation of the Oedipal triangle involving Theron, Celia, and Alice, see John W. Crowley, "The Nude and the Madonna in The Damnation of Theron Ware," American Literature, 45 (1973), 379-89.
35. Earnest, p. 227.
36. Raleigh, p. viii.
37. Elmer F. Suderman, "The Damnation of Theron Ware as a Criticism of American Religious Thought," Huntington Library Quarterly, 33 (November, 1969), 66.
38. W. Gordon Milne, "Frederic's 'Free' Woman," American Literary Realism, 6 (1973), 257.
39. Briggs has added to the list of interpretations, claiming that Celia accurately reflects the typical Bohemian of the 1890's (p. 124). 138
Within the context of mythology, an impressive parallel may be seen between Celia Madden and the terrible goddess Diana, both of whom stand in the long run for forbidden and frustrated desires. Actaeon, who had been out hunting one morning, left his companions to explore the surrounding groves and suddenly burst in upon the shaded bower of
Diana. The goddess, completely nude in her bathing pool, became immediately angered and doused water in the face of the youth who stood there agape, marveling at the sight of the naked beauty. Immediately,
Acteon became transformed, growing a long neck and sprouting antlers, whereupon he bounded into the forest where he was nearly torn to pieces by his own hounds that had picked up his scent and had followed in wild 40 pursuit. Theron himself, already once favored with an intimate glance at Celia disporting herself in her boudoir, doggedly pursues her to a New York hotel where, unannounced, he insinuates himself into her presence and is thus made to suffer the despair of the damned, torn by the hounds of his own agonizing conscience. Just as Actaeon was saved at the last moment by his alert companions, so Theron is rescued none too soon by a kindred fundamentalist, Sister Soulsby.
The attempt to master the goddess-destroyer is for the arche typal hero the supreme test of his mythological adventure. Successful mastery validates his triumph and he becomes for her "the king, the 41 incarnate god, of her created world." Mastery of her thus symbolizes mastery of the universe. However, only men of superior talent and
40. Campbell, Hero, pp. 111-12.
41. Campbell, Hero, p. 116. 139
vision "can support the full realization of the sublimity of this god- 42 dess" and can achieve full mastery of the mother-destroyer element of
her personality. For lesser men, or men not fully prepared to behold
her cosmic significance, the attempt to master her is perilous indeed.
Such is the lesson learned by Acteaon and Theron Ware.
As a variation on the Eve-temptress theme, Celia also suggests
a strong relation to Lamia, the serpent-woman of ancient legend whose
illusive beauty and artistic imagination fascinated John Keats. Keats'
Lycius also suggests Theron Ware, since both tend to be philosophic but
gullible young men who lose control of their passions when confronted with the enticements of the seductress. The parallels extend even fur
ther to include the sophist Apollonius who, like Dr. Ledsmar, is himself
versed in the history of serpent worship and who likewise manifests an
instinctive hatred toward the woman. Furthermore, both Ledsmar and
Apollonius, in vying against the temptress for the soul of the arche
typal hero, expose the coldness and depravity of their philosophy. But whereas Keats allows his feminine embodiment of beauty to be destroyed, in Frederic it is the youthful innocent who tampers with that beauty who is destroyed. The difference in treatment possibly lies in Keats' romantic sense of despair as opposed to Frederic's didactic and latent
Puritan streak. Whereas the former could identify with Poe in taking a kind of morbid pleasure in dwelling on the death of a beautiful crea ture, Frederic was usually governed by a contempt for sentimentality and by an inborn suspicion of that which smacked of the aesthetic.
42. Campbell, Hero, p. 115. 140
Whether Eve, Madonna, or serpent-woman, Celia is most certainly
(as Raleigh suggests) a "cultural perspective" toward which Theron aspires. Of the cultural forces responsible for Theron"s degradation, she is by far the'most destructive, more so than Kate had been to
Horace, and more so, even, than Isabel had been to Seth. With Celia, however, the symbolism is, as we have seen, extended to include a mythological perspective. In this sense, Celia Madden represents an important step in the development of a tradition which, as we have seen in our discussion of Seth's Brother's Wife, began back in the 1840's with the Leatherstocking tales of Cooper and which was perpetuated throughout the works of Hawthorne and Melville. As his literary criti cism shows, Frederic himself claimed to be a literary descendant of 43 Hawthorne and so felt at home with this tradition and obviously bor rowed heavily from it. Consistent with the nineteenth-century treat ment of the dark-haired woman, Celia takes her place alongside Cooper's
Judith Hutter, Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, and Melville's Isabel. As a woman of passion and forbidding experience, alluring and inscrutable, she captivated Frederic's fancy just as her type had captivated
Frederic's predecessors'. Like them, Frederic repudiated her, as the experience of his novels attests. For him, as for the earlier writers, the artistic and moral ambivalence inherent in the blonde-brunette dichotomy had to be resolved in favor of the purity and innocence symbolized by the Annie Fairchilds and the Alice Wares, for such char acteristics were infallibly the saving graces.
43. Woodward, "Selection," p. 4. 141
VII
Generally speaking, the last three elements in the monomythic
adventure follow the pattern of atonement (usually with some sort of a father figure), apotheosis, and return home with the life-giving elixir. In Theron Ware, these phases of the myth are at best only hinted at, certainly not realized to any extent (as the title of the novel would suggest). Full realization, if it is ever achieved in
Frederic, is reserved for the next two novels. However, a few remarks respecting the last stages of the adventure ought to be in order here.
From what is reported about Theron's two-day drunken binge in 44 New York and his attempted suicide, it is apparent in the light of mythology that he undergoes the suffering of divine retribution which prepares him for eventual atonement with the Father and initiates the process of rebirth. As the hapless Theron confesses to the Soulsbys,
"I was a fool whom God had taken hold of, to break his heart first, and then to craze his brain, and then to fling him on a dunghill to die like a dog. ... There can't be any hell worse than that I've gone through" (p. 339). Theron has, after all, been a disobedient son who, like Jonah, fled his responsibility rather than preach the gospel of repentance. Another parallel exists in young Phaethon who, also acting as agent for the Father (Apollo), drove the sun-chariot across the sky in a reckless manner and likewise incurred the Father's displeasure.
44. For evidence that Frederic had planned to have the novel end in Theron's suicide (thus negating the whole concept of spiritual rebirth), see Richard VanDerBeets, "The Ending of The Damnation of Theron Ware," American Literature, 36 (1964), 358-59. 142
The obvious moral is that disobedience and waywardness result in personal chaos and suffering, but, as we have indicated, the ordeal is necessary in order that the soul of the hero be scourged and purged of its flaws.
Following the experience during which the justice and wrath of the Father have been meted out, there are signs of the Father's mercy and grace. With Theron it is the recovery of lost health, a reunion with his wife, and a new position in the West where he can begin anew.
However, as for an apotheosis—the attainment of divine illumination and transcendent manhood, and the triumphant return to the world to share the blessings with common humanity—there isn't one. Instead, there is only the irony suggested by the title of the novel when it was first published in England, that of Illumination. For there is no real illumination, of course, only the illusion of one. It is significant that our last glimpse of Theron shows him fantasizing about addressing vast throngs of wildly applauding people and about creating a meteoric career for himself in politics. He no doubt fancies himself some sort of a world-savior dispensing the life-giving elixir; John Henry Raleigh is probably correct in saying that Theron "will in all likelihood make 45 an ass out of himself all over again. ..."
45. Raleigh, p. x. Critics generally seem to accept Raleigh's statement. However, it should be pointed out that the West has been traditionally (and almost mythologically) the American second chance, where the past is sloughed off and forgotten. Theron Ware's notion that he might succeed in politics might not be entirely without merit. He does, after all, excel in oratory—a gift which has helped many to succeed in the American frontier. 143
Just as the process of Theron's rebirth is ultimately frus
trated, so the mythological circle is not quite completed, but becomes inverted, turning inward upon itself. We have already seen in Chapter
1 how Frederic had become disillusioned with the shabby values of the
Gilded Age—the age of Theron Ware. And yet we know that at bottom he was optimistic and had great faith in his native land. As a result, we find Frederic thus writing on two levels in his fiction at this point in his career, an embivalence which has been largely misunderstood. It seems clear that the symbolic adventure became for him a means of expressing his idealism—of expressing how things ought to be, whereas the harsh, ironical treatment imposed upon the mythological framework satisfied his need to describe things as they actually were. As we shall see, the dialogue which Frederic has here established between appearance (myth) and reality (historical fact), between idealism and skepticism, is one which will preoccupy him for some time to come. CHAPTER 7
MARCH HARES; THE THRESHOLD OF REBIRTH
Theron Ware represents the culmination of the American half of
the Frederic dialectic—the quest figure vainly seeking the forbidden
woman. Except for his final novel, The Market-Place, Frederic will
henceforth be concerned with the English half—the disillusioned pro
tagonist's attempt to recapture the norm of simplicity as symbolized by
the virtuous woman. For in the English novels it: is she, rather than
the gilded woman, who is now object of the quest. A European version
of the artless woman of the American novels, she is more sophisticated,
more self-reliant, and less a flatterer of the masculine ego than her
American prototype, but like her American parallel, she derives from
unimpressive origins and deviates less from Victorian norms than does
her gilded rival. Although she may proclaim herself to be a dedicated
feminist, easily enough does she relinquish her independence.
In contrast to the American knight, the English knight is the
experienced man of the world who has already achieved the wealth, knowledge, and sophistication towards which the American hero aspires.
And yet, characteristically, he has already become disillusioned with
the corrupt values and way of life of his own class and apparently
desires to seek a state of existence which is more simple and less
intellectual than the one to which he has been accustomed. Unlike the
1. For a similar view, see Austin Briggs, p. 155.
144 145 protagonists of the American novels, those of the English novels are able to win their grails and thereby manage to achieve a measure of success.
March Hares, which is the first of the English novels, clearly points to Frederic's movement away from a realistic and factual treat ment of literary themes and in the direction of a more symbolic and mythical interpretation. The novel also marks Frederic's return to the theme of honest cultural simplicity and suggests a waning interest in the glittering vulgarities of sophisticated society. Even the struc ture of the novel reflects a kind of simplicity, the simplicity of the fairy tale. While numerous commentators have noted the fairy-tale quality of March Hares, they largely either ignore this aspect or are highly critical of it, in both cases failing to discover for it a plausible function. Van Wyck Brooks gave currency to such an interpre tation when he wrote that the later novels had lost their "semblance of 2 actuality." O'Donnell and Franchere, picking up on Brooks's lead, describe March Hares as a "light romance," "written mainly as an exer- 3 cise for the left hand," while Stanton Garner sees the novel as "the story of such protective self-deception, of failure and emptiness eluded by an escape into an artificial fairyland, embraced and sub- 4 stituted for distasteful truth."
2. Brooks, p. 258.
3. O'Donnell and Franchere, p. 118.
4. Garner, Frederic, p. 38. 146
It is true that as a literary work the novel falls considerably
short of the excellence of, say, its predecessor Theron Ware or of
Frederic's final novel, The Market-Place. However, relative to
Frederic's development as a purveyor of myth, the significance of the
novel hinges on the very element which critics most decry—the fairy
tale. Setting aside for the time being matters of aesthetic sensi
bility, we shall be able to see how Frederic might have intended to use
the fairy-tale element to carry the burden of meaning for the novel and
how he might have thought to use it to enrich and impart significance
to his dialectical framework."* Although not fully realized, Frederic's
use of the fairy-tale element provided a means of continuing the
dialogue of the monomythic adventure of the archetypal hero, a cycle
which, as we have seen, Frederic began with The Damnation of Theron
Hare. In this sense, March Hares is the second novel of Frederic's
mythological "trilogy."
I
Continuing our comparison of Frederic's dialectic of the quest-
figure with Campbell's monomyth of the universal cultural hero, some
further similarities may be noted with respect to David Mosscrop, the
hero of March Hares. Like the archetype of mythology, he has dis
tinguished himself within his society, and, as we have noted, he has
5. Frederic had begun to utilize elements from the fairy tale much earlier, especially in The Return of The O'Mahony. In Theron Ware, further features may be noted, as for example, the use of a fairy god mother in the person of Sister Soulsby, the troll in Dr. Ledsmar, and so on. 147
far outdistanced his American predecessor, the Reverend Mr. Ware. As
his name suggests and as Frederic himself had been, Mosscrop is a
hoarder of antiquarian knowledge, a "sort of intellectual haggis"
"cradled on a blackboard."^ Accordingly, he has been awarded the
coveted chair, Professor of Culdees, a position for which he draws a
full salary by lecturing only three weeks out of the year. It seems
ironic, however, that he knows almost nothing about the Culdees, a
group of ancient Scotch-Irish monks who, after years of extreme asceti- 7 8 cism, had become notoriously lax in the practice of their profession.
Mosscrop is, nevertheless, accomplished in other areas. In
addition to his cerebral talents, he is a connoisseur in the delicacies of wining and dining, taking great pride in his ability to give, in the way that Chaucer's monk must have done, "very minute instructions about having a grouse split and grilled" (p. 83). Thus, economically inde pendent, young, and handsome, this bachelor is coveted by gilded dames and his company sought at festive extravaganzas. The life style which
Mosscrop pursues is remarkably similar to that of the young Buddha or of St. Francis before their miraculous conversions.
6. Harold Frederic, March Hares (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896), p. 57. Subsequent references to this edition will be made parenthetically in the text.
7. Ludwig Bieler, "Culdees," The Encyclopedia Americana: International Edition (New York: Americana Corporation, 1976), VIII, 313.
8. "Culdees," The Columbia Encyclopedia, ed. William Bridg water and Seymour Kurtz (3rd ed.; New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 521. 148
And yet Frederic's hero, for all his distinction, is terribly ignorant, not only of Culdean lore, but of what is much more signifi cant, knowledge of himself. Verily dissatisfied with both life and himself, he is ready to fall from his own Garden of Eden. Like the archetypal figure of the monomyth, he will have to die to the world of reality, annihilate the self during the long dark night of the soul in order that he can prepare himself for rebirth and can emerge trium phantly into the brilliant light of a new day. According to the arche typal pattern, his summons to adventure will transfer "his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown," a region potentially "of both treasure and danger." 9
This experience comes for Mosscrop during the wee morning hours of his thirtieth birthday, after a long night of heavy drinking. As he muses on his birthday and what it might mean for him, it suddenly dawns on him that he had fulfilled none of the expectations of his youth, that, on the contrary, he had merely succeeded in satiating himself with sensual pleasures and in squandering his youthful vitality at unholy parlors and dives. Condemning himself as a boozer, loafer, wastrel, imposter, scoundrel, and fool, he is nauseated by a sense of personal waste. His life has led to a dead end. Just before dawn, he has built up such an intense feeling of loathing and self-hate that he stands at the edge of Westminster bridge, contemplating, as Theron Ware
9. Campbell, Hero, p. 58. 149
had, suicide as a means of solving his problems: "He stared down at
the slow-moving flood, and asked himself angrily why a man of thirty
who had learned nothing worth learning, achieved nothing worth the
doing'; who didn't even know enough to keep sober over-night, should not
be thrown like garbage into the river" (p. 2). Like St. John of the
Gross or any number of other archetypal figures—perhaps even as
Frederic himself might have done—Mosscrop teeters on the threshold of
despair, dwelling on self-annihilation as he is forced to confront the
stark realities of his own dreadful existence.
In the language of mythology, Mosscrop's experience here paral
lels the crossing of the threshold which is usually symbolized by the retreat back into the womb in order to prepare oneself for the rebirth
to follow. It is a time of critical self-examination leading to self- annihilation—the ultimate act of humility, of getting entirely beyond
the self. "The disappearance corresponds to the passing of a worshiper into a temple—where he is to be quickened by the recollection of who and what he is. . . This is the great transformation, the great illumination which, in Theron Ware, as we have seen, corresponds to the hero's passage into Gelia's boudoir, but which in March Hares, is given more serious treatment with Mosscrop's retreat into himself. This is the moment of illumination, the moment when Mosscrop realizes, as
James's hero had, that the beast resides not in an external jungle but within the labrinth of one's soul. It is at this point that Mosscrop, the cultural protagonist, has reached what Campbell calls the "nadir of
10. Campbell, Hero, p. 91. 150
the mythological round" and has undergone the "supreme ordeal""^ of spiritual purgation. Now clay for the Potter's hand, he is made ready to receive redemption.
II
In Mosscrop's case, and in contrast to Theron's, his salvation and ultimate triumph are facilitated by his meeting with Vestalia 12 Skinner, a lively, yellow-haired virgin of the lower middle class whom he has seen working as a clerk in the British Museum. Unlike
Celia Madden who tends to reflect the negative features of the life principle, Vestalia symbolizes the positive side of the destroyer- preserver principle and hence stands for life and rebirth. Consistent with the language of mythology, Vestalia suggests the "Queen Goddess of the World," and mastery of her translates symbolically into "the hero's 13 total mastery of life." As queen goddess whose potentiality, accord ing to the canons of mythology, lies incarnate within every woman, she holds forth for Mosscrop the visible means of achieving his destiny.
The embodiment of virtue—her very name suggests the purity and reverence meekly proffered in the presence of the holy Vestal Virgin—
Vestalia symbolizes, like her mythological counterparts about whom
Campbell writes so well, the ultimate boon. Perhaps a reflection of
11. Campbell, Hero, p. 246.
12. In like manner, Frederic received a new lease on life after his acquaintance with Kate Lyon who is probably the prototype for Vestalia. For details, see O'Donnell and Franchere, pp. 67-68.
13. Campbell, Hero, p. 120. 151 some esoteric interest on the part of Frederic in medieval Mariolatry,
Vestalia corresponds pretty well to Campbell's description of the goddess as
the paragon of all paragons of beauty, the reply to all desire, the bliss-bestowing goal of every hero's earthly and unearthly quest. She is mother, sister, mistress, bride. ... For she is the incarnation of the promise of perfection; the soul's assurance that, at the conclusion of its exile in a world of organized inadequacies, the bliss that once was known will be known again.
Just as there was a Beatrice for Dante, a Medea for Jason, a Eurydice for Orpheus, so also is there a Vestalia for David Mosscrop.^"^ Linked symbolically to the past by the long lists of genealogies which she compiles in the British Museum, Vestalia is herself a modern avatar of the cosmic females of remote antiquity.
True to her image in the world of mythology, Vestalia in real life strikes one as an English variation of the typical nineteenth- century blonde American heroine whom, as we discussed in Chapter 3,
Frederic probably derived from Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville. Her zestful acceptance of life unencumbered by dangerous illusions, her desire to be genuinely independent and practical, and her inclination to be happy despite adversity and to be satisfied with the minimal necessities of life are qualities which are symbolically consistent
14. Campbell, Hero, pp. 110-11.
15. Vestalia's role seems more significant than W. Gordon Milne's view of her as a "sweet young thing." See "Frederic's 'Free' Woman," American Literary Realism, 6 (1973), 259. 152
with her bright yellow hair,"^ sparkling blue eyes, and blue silk
attire. Her innocent simplicity is further substantiated by her quaint
attempts to order dinner at a restaurant and by her studied remark to
Mosscrop, on finding herself alone with him in his apartment, that
"I've never even been alone in a room with a man before in my life"
(p. 29). It is likewise significant that during a tour of the British
Museum she expresses her preference for the idealism of Hellenic,
rather than the decadence of Hellenistic, art and subconsciously iden
tifies herself with the Winged Goddess of Victory, while Mosscrop, also
significantly, in his as yet unredeemed state, ostensibly expresses his
liking for a statue of Nero.
Mosscrop's encounter with Vestalia appears to be the work of
Providence, for as he stands on the brink of destruction, she passes by
him on the bridge, giving him a nod of recognition and a smile. The
immediate effect of this providential meeting is that Vestalia's
presence diverts Mosscrop's cynical obsession away from himself and
rechannels it into something creative and rewarding. The opportunity
for fulfillment becomes apparent when Mosscrop discovers that Vestalia
is destitute. "Shod like a beggar" (p. 14), ejected from her apart
ment, and without sufficient money to buy a crust of bread, she has
nevertheless resolved that, rather than perish, she will obey the
16. The twentieth-century view of the blonde as the sexless, calculating, unresponsive, nervous type was just beginning to achieve literary currency at the time March Hares was published in 1896 and is articulated in the novel both by Adele Skinner (Vestalia's cousin) and the Earl of Drumpipes. Vestalia, of course, belongs to the older tra dition in which blondeness and purity were linked together. 153
instinct to survive and will become a harlot.^ "What else can I do?"
she petitions the chagrined Mosscrop. "Nothing but throw myself into
the river. And that I won't do" (p. 42).
The effect of this declaration upon Mosscrop is phenomenal,
forcing him as it does to reflect back in shame upon his suicidal
behavior and see it for what it is. More important, however, is the
opportunity this affords him to participate in the supreme act of love
which is charity and through which the typical mythological hero
achieves his redemption. This consists of getting beyond the self—
beyond the states of self-consciousness (self-watching), self-love,
self-pity, self-hate, and the like. It involves essentially the act of
annihilating the self-centered ego and an emphatic identification with,
and a positive commitment to, external or cosmic forces.
Mosscrop therefore resolves to become Vestalia's knight—her
protector, guide, and, of course, her lover (Platonic and otherwise).
He further determines to accomplish what he had before only been con
templating, namely, to turn over a new leaf, to "forswear sack, and
live cleanly" (p. 5). In order to achieve these ends, he pursues
throughout much of the novel his elusive Vestalia who has suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. Although the end result is different, her flight and his frantic pursuit are in many respects a reenactment of
17. According to Campbell, the universal feminine principle may appear under numerous guises, among which, interestingly enough, is that of the harlot. For numerous accounts of women in myth and legend who are required by the Cosmic Mother to prostitute themselves, see Sir James Frazer, The New Golden Bough: A New Abridgement of the Classical Work, ed. Dr. Theodor H. Gaster (New York: Criterion Books, 1959), pp. 298-303. 154
the Apollo-Daphne ordeal of flight and pursuit. A closer parallel,
perhaps, may be found in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in which the 18 hero must descend to the underworld to rescue his beloved, just as
Mosscrop must sink to the depths of despair before he can be reunited
with his Vestalia.
Little does Mosscrop realize, until near the end of the novel,
that in proffering friendship to his beloved Vestalia—in providing her
with lodging and sustenance, replenishing her wardrobe and showering
her with unreserved compassion and affection unfeigned—he is making a
reality of, or validating, his own redemption. For in the picture
language of mythology, one cannot be separated from the other, neither
the hero from the goddess, nor vice versa. "She is the 'other portion'
of the hero himself. ... If his stature is that of world monarch she
is the world, and if he is a warrior she is fame. She is the image of
his destiny which he is to release from the prison of enveloping cir- 19 cumstances." Or, to put it another way, what the seeker actually obtains from his relationship with her is not so much herself as her
"grace," which is "the power of £her7 sustaining substance." 20 In this sense, Vestalia may be said to satisfy Mosscrop's need for permanence and stability. Nor, when he fancifully decrees that the day of their meeting is to be consecrated as her birthday, does he realize that he
18. Recounted in Edith Hamilton, Mythology (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1942), pp. 138-42.
19. Campbell, Hero, p. 342.
20. Campbell, Hero, p. 181. 155
is essentially announcing his rebirth. Vestalia, on the other hand, recognizes something of this because she later insists that "we'll decree that it's your birthday, too, so that we can celebrate them together" (p. 17).
Ill
As for Mosscrop, the tangible manifestations of his rebirth
(other than what has been mentioned) are difficult to translate into terms of concrete reality and thus strike one as being more symbolic than factual. As Jung concedes with respect to the interpretation of archetypal patterns, "even the best attempts at explanation are only more or less successful translations into another metaphorical lan- 21 guage." Frederic himself seems to have been troubled to find an objective correlative suitable for representing real life or actual modes of behavior. Stanton Garner must have had this in mind when he wrote that March Hares as a "novel is unfulfilled, ending in irresolu tion. The basic failure of David's life, his wasted brilliance and the meaningless squirrel-cage of his profession, is in the end unchanged." 22
Garner's point is well taken, since the matter of Mosscrop's profession ought, it seems, to be resolved one way or the other.
Apropos of the denouement, however, Vestalia turns out to be a princess of sorts in disguise; she and Mosscrop are united in wedlock; and,
21. Jung, p. 79.
22. Garner, Frederic, p. 39. 156
presumably (although as readers we may have our doubts), they will live
happily ever after. And yet the very fairy-tale quality of the ending
is an inherent feature of the mythological process and therefore defies
any finalized concrete interpretation. One of the problems here is
that the fairy tale deals with what Campbell calls the nebulous area of
mesocosm, "a mediating, middle cosmos through which the microcosm of 23 the individual is brought into relation to the macrocosm of the all."
There are, nevertheless, a number of fairly specific observa
tions upon which we may rely in order to understand the nature and quality of David's rebirth, a rebirth which, even if it were entirely symbolic and could not be given any kind of a literal interpretation, would be much more convincing than the rather flimsy illumination reflected in the behavior of Theron Ware. In some respects, Mosscrop's transformation is reminiscent of the apotheosis experienced by the archetypal hero in classical legend. One of the characteristic symptoms of rebirth in the Christian tradition is a revulsion from the physical world and the moral stain associated with carnal indulgence, a symptom which Mosscrop seems to sharu with numerous figures from St.
Augustine to Yeats's old man sailing to Byzantium.
Perhaps the most obvious indication of rebirth lies in Moss- crop's perceptions of himself. As he declares to his friend the Earl of Drumpipes, his meeting with Vestalia "alters my whole conception of myself. It gives me entirely new ideas of what I ought to do. So long as I led this solitary life here there was nothing for me but to drink.
23. Campbell, Primitive Mythology, p. 150. 157
But it's different now" (p. 116). The word "solitary" here is particu
larly important in understanding the nature of Mosscrop's expanded and
amplified consciousness. For his determination to renounce the soli
tary life in favor of the communal commitment of marriage is an
essential step in his need to get beyond the self and the sin of self-
conscious brooding (which was responsible, after all, for his wanting
to commit suicide in the first place). Effecting this facilitates his
rebirth and enables him to be quickened with creative energy or "new
ideas," as he calls them. His experience is one shared by numerous
other cultural archetypes, with Buddha and Jesus perhaps being the most
striking examples. It is also a condition which, according to E. M. 24 Forster, helps to distinguish the "round" from the "flat" character
and which Henry James found to be of special value in the lives of his
characters. One has the feeling that Mosscrop's transformation, what
ever it might involve, is permanent and that he will not revert to the
same folly in the way that Theron Ware will probably do.
It seems clear that Mosscrop's sharpened perspectives do not
specifically apply to his intellectual knowledge. In fact, as an
"intellectual haggis," he has pampered and developed his cerebral
nature at the expense of what D. H. Lawrence would have called his
instinctual nature or his "blood-consciousness." At any rate, con
comitant with his new powers of illumination is his desire to reexam
ine his views of femininity and to redefine and articulate his feminine
24. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, Inc., 1954), pp. 67-78. ideal. Whereas before he had entertained only vaguely cynical notions
of womanhood, Mosscrop now seeks for his ideal "a spirit brave and yet
tender, a mind broad and capable yet without arrogance, a temperament
attuning itself to each passing mood, sunny, shadowed, merry, pensive,
adventurous, timid—all as full of sweet little turns and twists and
unexpected things in general as an April day" (pp. 55-56).
In like manner, whereas before Mosscrop had apparently been
indifferent to the members of the British (and American) upper class,
he now feels acutely aware of their shortcomings and foibles. In a
delightful scene with the Earl of Drumpipes, Mosscrop skillfully
exposes the good Earl and his ilk by ironically protesting his utter
inability to impersonate an aristocrat. As he playfully informs the
Earl, "I shall have to sit and look entirely devoid of mental sensa tions of any sort for hours at a time. I know nothing of football and cricket, and have not the name of a single jockey on my tongue. ... I shall suffer continually from the knowledge that I am being regarded as a vicious fool, a rake, a gambler, and libertine. . ." (pp. 203-204).
Or again, he shrewdly perceives in Adele Skinner, Vestalia's American cousin come to England to purchase for herself both castle and countess-ship, a unique combination of "physical beauty and Standard
Oil" (p. 196).
IV
These observations, and similar ones which suggest a heightened awareness on the part of Mosscrop, ought to suffice in order to estab lish a relationship between Frederic's hero and the traditional 159
mythological protagonist striving in the direction of apotheosis. To
complete the cycle of the monomyth there remain but the hero's return
to and reintegration with society, or a descent, as Plato might have
said, back into the cave of ignorant humanity to share his wisdom with
his fellow man. According to the tenets of mythology, the return thus 25 assures a continuous flow of cosmic vitality into the world.
This return, however, the protagonist may be reluctant to effect, if, like Plato's philosopher-king or like Buddha, the ecstacy of his experience has eclipsed his interest in the problems of this world. Indeed, Mosscrop exhibits such a reluctance, if not an outright aversion, to reenter the kingdom of humanity. As he declares to a friend, "We ^Hosscrop and Vestalia7 have deliberately repudiated what are described as the realities of life. We discard them, cut them dead, decline to have anything whatever to do with them. We declare that it is a fairyland we are living in, and that we refuse to come out of it to the end of our days" (p. 257).
But descend the hero must, even though Frederic will not allow the protagonist to do that here at the end of March Hares. Once again, the mythological round is frustrated, even though it does show some development since The Damnation of Theron Ware. As we shall see, the return is a task which Frederic has reserved for his next protagonist,
Christian Tower. For the present, Frederic will settle in favor of a happy ending for his audience and will, in the spirit of comedy, have his hero transcend, rather than confront, ultimate human tragedy. As
25. Campbell, Hero, pp. 36-37. 160
Campbell explains, "the happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man." 26 Mosscrop will thus be allowed to bask in the light of his radiant goddess, just as Frederic himself absorbed the inspiring and joyous warmth shed on him by the liberated Kate Lyon, upon whom Vestalia was modeled.
26. Campbell, Hero, p. 28. CHAPTER 8
GLORIA MUNDI: THE RETURN OF THE DUKE
The second of the so-called English novels, Gloria Mundi (1898)
is the final novel in the mythological sequence which, beginning with
The Damnation of Theron Ware, develops the basic motifs of the univer
sal cultural odyssey. Here, in addition to concluding his version of
the mythological round, Frederic made use of the novel in order to
objectify a concern over which he had been brooding, intermittently,
since before the publication of In the Valley: namely, his disillu sionment with popular views of historical progress as seen against a
background of social, political, and economic forces operating within the framework of Western democracy. In this regard Gloria Mundi under lines Frederic's continued interest in British social and economic affairs. In a sense the novel is Frederic's commentary on the English and English affairs in the same way that The Return of The O'Mahony reflects his view of the Irish and the Irish question. Not only are significant parallels to be found in the plot structures of the two novels but the protagonists (who are themselves "lost" heirs) address themselves to similar problems relating to the possibilities for social and economic reform.
As his working notes for Gloria Mundi indicate, Frederic was specifically interested in airing his views on such related subjects as
"Big Estates, Business, Man at 40, Religion and Education, Art, The Sex
161 162
Passion, Woman, England, The Army Set, and Children.""'' These were, of course, concerns which had commanded the attention of many of
Frederic's contemporaries, such as Bernard Shaw in England and John
Dewey in America. And they were soon to engage the interests of men like T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence. As we shall see,
Frederic's treatment of such themes in Gloria Mundi not only enriches the mythological framework but provides as well a kind of digest or synthesis for his ideas regarding history and mythology.
As in the case of March Hares, Frederic employs the device of the fairy tale, except that here he uses the rags-to-riches plot, whereas in the earlier work he had chosen its sister variation, the
Cinderella story. The device as used in Gloria Mundi has likewise received a good deal of criticism. Van Wyck Brooks described the novel as one of the innumerable "'lost heir' stories that were dear to so may of /Frederic's7 countrymen," a reworking of Little Lord Faunt- 2 leroy. A more recent critic, Jean F. Blackall, has reasoned that the fairy-tale element undermines the basically serious intent of the novel, since there is an essential disparity between theme (which represents a pessimistic commentary on the nature of man) and form (the 3 fairy-tale aspect, which presupposes a happy ending).
1. 0'Donne11 and Franchere, p. 120.
2. Brooks, p. 258.
3. Jean F. Blackall, "Frederic's Gloria Mundi as a Novel of Education," Markham Review, 3 (May, 1972), 46. 163
Blackall's contention seems valid because the novel does tend to violate one's expectations respecting the conventional fairy-tale ending. On the other hand, if we view the fairy-tale framework from another angle, the disparity actually proves to be quite effective in that it underscores an assumption which is central to Frederic's mythical dialectic: that there is a jarring discrepancy between appearance (the fairy tale) and reality (the historical process), between idealism and pragmatism, between what one might expect from life and what one actually experiences. According to Austin Briggs, who seems to understand Frederic's use of the fairy tale in this regard, Frederic desired to emphasize that "life is not really what it is in the story books," that no matter how great the fortune a man might inherit he always remains dreadfully subject to human limita- tion. Thus, whether used intentionally or not, the device truly func tions in Frederic's favor, enabling him to play off one against the other—and for maximum effect—the historical process and the mytho logical round.
I
As the conclusion to Frederic's version of the archetypal adventure, Gloria Mundi begins approximately where March Hares does, with the meeting of the man and woman, but proceeds, as the earlier novel did not, through to a conclusion of the monomythic journey. By way of reviewing the mythological framework within which Frederic was
4. Briggs, p. 163. 164 writing, let us recall briefly the pattern which Joseph Campbell has described in The Hero with a Thousand Faces and elsewhere. Once the archetypal hero has received the divine call, he undergoes the trauma of the soul and the ordeal of self-annihilation, thus preparing the way for his rebirth. Having been charged with creative energy and now in possession of the life-giving elixir, his final obligation is that of returning to mortality in order to bring about the restoration of a fallen world.For instance, Prometheus plundered the heavens to bring back the much-needed fire; Jason braved the perils of the dreaded dragon's den to wrest forth the Golden Fleece; and Moses trod the sacred slopes of Mt. Sinai to deliver the Ten Commandments to his fellow Israelites. In Gloria Mundi, the hero sacrifices personal aspirations in order to teach a practical humanism to a barbaric people.
In Frederic's novel the role of world-savior falls to his pro tagonist whose name is, significantly, Christian Tower. He is David
Mosscrop's youthful successor and resembles him both in physical appearance and in intellectual predisposition (Christian is himself a tutor of languages). By the time the novel has begun, Christian has already been reclaimed from poverty and obscurity and given the promise of great wealth and power. The lost heir to the Dukedom of Glaston bury, the blood of ancestral kings flowing through his veins, he is to prepare himself for the task of redeeming the now degenerate descen dants of an ancient and once noble ancestry, the Torrs (alias Tower).
5. Campbell, Hero, pp. 35-37. 165
Like the Telemachus in Tennyson's poem, Christian will soon
discover that the task of making mild a savage and vulgar people is a
prodigious one indeed. Torr decadence, for example, pervades the very
walls of the ancestral castle. The principal symbol of hereditary
waste and decay, the castle reflects the character of the family in
much the same way that the manse in The.House of the Seven Gables
reflects the character of the Pyncheon family: £ "Was Caermere dark
because of the mood of the Torrs, its makers and masters, had from the
dawn of things been saturnine? Or did the Torrs owe their historic
gloom and dourness of temperament to the influence of this somber
cradle of their race?" (p. 47). Like the Morlocks in H. G. Wells' Time
Machine, the Torrs have an aversion to light and venture out only to go
on a hunt or to prowl the London promenades after dark or perhaps to attend a funeral. Keeping close to their castle just as Wells' repul sive animals inhabited their subterranean caves, the Torrs keep the windows of Caermere shuttered and will light a candle only for such matters as discerning a spade from a heart or deciphering the label on a bottle. Although the ancestral libraries are stacked with books, family members care nothing for reading, preferring instead to lie coiled by the hearth, gorging themselves like snakes and drinking them selves into a stupor, or listening to the drone of the bard until they fall asleep. The last survivors of the oldest Celtic family (its ancestry dates from before the Saxon invasion), the present Torrs have
6. Blackall (p. 42) observes that there is a similar moral decadence between the old duke in Gloria Mundi and in the portrait of Judge Pyncheon in Hawthorne's novel. 166
"titles and miles of mortgaged estates," but "they possess no money to
speak of and still less brains" (p. 37).
The chief occupant of Caermere and the most prominent symbol of
Torr degeneracy (and who, as we shall discuss later, plays a role in
Christian's mythological adventure) is the Duke of Glastonbury,
Christian's paternal grandfather from whom the young savior will shortly inherit his monumental responsibility. Like Shelley's portrait of King George III, Glastonbury is old, senile, nearly blind, despised, and dying, his body deformed and emaciated, his mind coarsened and
brutalized. Much like his mastiffs among which he takes his meals and sleeps, he has never, according to his brother, possessed the slight est degree of moral elevation: "He remembers his dogs more distinctly than he does his children. In the Almanach de Gotha he is classed among princes, but what he dwells upon most fondly among his public duties is the kicking of tenant-farmers in the stomach when they try to save their crops from being ruined by the hunt" (p. 157).
II
Into this fallen world strides Frederic's young lord, not yet completely reborn to transcendence but nevertheless armed in the characteristic fashion with an unquenchable love for the woman whom he envisions as his grail-goddess (just as fourteen years earlier the young Frederic himself must have strode into England armed with theories and schemes with which to fulfill his ambitions). Christian's beloved is one Frances Bailey whom he has met on his maiden journey to
England and whom he will make his duchess by novel's end. As we shall 167
see, she is the kind of woman who, in the language of myth, is supposed
to symbolize the ultimate boon, representing all that can ever be known, while Christian, as archetypal hero, represents the blessed
individual who comes to know. 7
No sooner has Christian landed in England, however, than he
discovers to his chagrin that his beloved has mysteriously disappeared.
Just as Vestalia had taken flight from Mosscrop, Frances's absence is necessary in order that the conditions of the mythological cycle might
be fulfilled. Christian must first undergo a period of spiritual
turmoil and experience a kind of dark night of the soul which will pre pare him for the process of rebirth to follow. This experiential sequence thus validates his worthiness to lay claim to his beloved.
With Christian, the process of rebirth is played out against a cycle of friendships with various English women, each of whom acts as spokesman for a particular life style or socioeconomic vision which
Christian must evaluate, and then reject or incorporate into his g philosophy. His experience here is comparable to Theron Ware's encounters with Madden, Ledsmar, Soulsby, and Forbes in that it fur nishes him the necessary sounding boards for defining and crystallizing his ideas of himself as a world-savior and bearer of the elixir. In addition to representing the process of rebirth, the experience func tions on a practical level as a kind of apprenticeship during which he
7. Campbell, Hero, p. 116.
8. For a discerning analysis of Frederic's view of the role of the woman in society, see Blackall, pp. 43-44. 168
must learn to choose wisely from among a number of options and then
translate his choice into terms of concrete reality.
The first of these encounters is Lady Edith Cressage,
Christian's widowed cousin who had been urged by ambitious parents to
contract a degrading marriage to the heir presumptive of Caermere, only
to have him brutalize her and then commit suicide before he could
inherit the dukedom and she could become the duchess. Formerly the
"most beautiful girl, and the most envied bride, in London" (p. 83),
she now bitterly resents her reduced circumstances and attempts to
enlist Christian's support by appealing to his sense of chivalry while
assuming for herself the stance of damsel in distress.
The world of Edith Cressage is the world of the decaying
aristocracy, one with neither vitality nor elegance, a world where
titled position and appearance are everything and where honesty and
simplicity are nothing. Nor are her own sensibilities too far removed
from those of her husband, whom in her acid bitterness she describes as
a "blubbering ignorant boy, who never got beyond ... standards of
taste of the servants' hall" (p. 457). What seems to crystallize
Christian's view of her occurs at the funeral of the old duke when
Christian, observing her in widow's garb, suddenly recalls that she had significantly neglected to wear it on the day of his arrival at
Caermere. For Christian, such behavior displays a sense of "remiss ness, of contumacy as against the great family which had endowed her with one of its names" (p. 545). Like that of the lost lady in Willa 169
Cather's novel, Lady Cressage's world exhibits a terrible lack of moral
and aesthetic decorum.
Meanwhile, Christian has encountered a second life style with which he must come to terms. Very shortly after his arrival in
England he is abruptly informed that his inheritance hinges on his
total commitment to prepare himself for administering a feudalistic scheme devised and financed by the elder Torrs, a wealthy side branch of the family consisting of Lord Julius Torr; his son, Emanuel; and
Emanuel's wife, Kathleen. Here, Christian learns the wherefore of his resurrection from obscurity on the Continent. The father and son, made wealthy by a vast inheritance from Emanuel's Jewish mother (whose ancestry boasts of Spinoza) and having resolved on the redemption of the family, have thus sought out the heir apparent (Christian) and have frustrated the hopes of an heir presumptive. Together, Lord Julius and his son, who seem to fancy themselves a sort of godhead, intend to sponsor and direct Christian's apprenticeship, promising to commit into his hands the entire "System" at a later date.
As explained to Christian, the redemptive scheme would place him in a position to control absolutely, almost, the quality of the material, moral, and spiritual well-being of approximately twenty thousand people contained in an area of about eighty thousand acres.
"It is," he is assured, "a little nation—a small kingdom—of which you will be the head" (p. 210). As both the father and son envision it, their scheme, which is a thinly disguised version of the feudal caste system combined with corporate profit sharing, will not only effect the 170 redemption of the Torr ancestry but will also prove the elixir for .all of the ills of modern civilization, whether political, social, eco nomic, or moral in nature.
Just as he had become disenchanted with the image of the aristocracy exhibited by Edith Cressage, so Christian also comes to view with suspicion the panacea dreamed up by Lord Julius and his son.
In the first place, the "System" is obsolete by six hundred years; in the second, it is too severe in its limitations placed upon the opportunity for individual growth and development, and too puritanical in its interpretation of leisure activity. And yet the fledgling duke realizes that he must submit to the "System" or he will likely wind up a titled pauper like his grandfather, and his mission will then have gone for naught.
Discouraged and confused, he turns to Kathleen Torr, a woman of generous spirit and remarkable charisma, who spends much of her time training the women within the "System." But she offers Christian very little consolation, indeed. On the contrary, he is perplexed to find her lecturing him on the virtues of medieval feminine ideas and upon the desirability of his choosing as duchess a woman who has cultivated the traditional wifely virtues of submission, obedience, and child- rearing. In concluding her discourse, she cautions him against his affection for Frances Bailey who, she implies, would be too liberal to fit comfortably into the "System" and who ought anyway to remain among her lower class associates. 171
Now wearied and disillusioned more than ever with philanthropic
schemes and theories, but not yet arrived at the nadir of the mytho
logical round, Christian sets off to London and remains there for the
social season. But his spirits sink even further, however, as he
becomes annoyed by all the dances, receptions, and social calls. He
likewise learns to look contemptuously on all of the "eminent artists,
eminent scientists, eminent writers, eminent soldiers and sailors"
(p. 280) to whom he is introduced while, at the same time during his nocturnal strolls about town, consciously developing a healthy sympathy for his "dishonored sisters" (p. 306) of the red-light district. Thus it goes until one evening at the theater it suddenly occurs to him, as it must have occurred to young Buddha, St. Francis,
David Mosscrop, and other archetypal figures who reach the nadir of life, that he is of all men the most miserable, that this gilded and ornate career which awaited him was all a sham and had "embalmed and wrapped (him] in mummy-cloths" (p. 449). Having finally reached the threshold of rebirth, he resolves to forswear both the life of the idle rich (to which Lady Cressage is aspiring) and any involvement in philanthropic schemes (which defines the aspirations of Lord Julius).
Ill
Significantly at this point, Christian determines to seek out
Frances Bailey, his long lost lady love, vaguely entertaining the notion that he might be able to persuade her to marry him and sail away to the Continent, there to lead a life of indolent pleasure careless of any ancestral obligations. In this way Christian's behavior also 172
resembles the pipe dreams of Theron Ware and Horace Boyce who had both
dreamed of sailing away with their beloved goddesses to golden isles of
bliss. But Christian's amorous designs are likewise frustrated,
temporarily at least, since Miss Bailey gives him a sharp rebuke and
lectures him on deserters and backsliders. The upshot of her influ
ence is that Christian is motivated in the direction of moral reform,
and, like the knight of the medieval romance, he finds himself under
taking the task which she has appointed him. Thus begins the process
of inner maturing, and with it comes a rebirth to the principle of
moral responsibility.
In their conversations, Miss Bailey continually emphasizes
Christian's need for an adviser, pointing out his introspective self-
consciousness (self-watching), his melancholy and fickleness—flaws
which are common among archetypal heroes. Although she ostensibly
scorns to think of herself as his mentor, or worse yet, as his duchess
(she vehemently proclaims herself a free woman), he nevertheless con
tinues to get "molded and kneaded" (p. 416) by her touch and frequently
catches himself quoting her arguments verbatim in his discussions with others. And she it is who helps on a practical level to direct his
thinking away from Julius's brand of medievalism with its "perpetual
enslavement of women" (p. 405) and its exaltation of the few at the
expense of the many.
It is important to point out here that Frederic is not content
to have Miss Bailey merely symbolize the principal motivating impulse in Christian's rebirth or, even if we accept Christian's appraisal, the 173
source of "calm, sweet wisdom" (p. 421). Instead, in a heavy-handed sort of way, Frederic must make of her a "new woman," thus super
imposing upon her mythological function a role derived from contem
porary society. This poses some interesting problems. A member of the new professional class after the manner of Jessica Lawton, Frank (nick name for Frances) is self-reliant, liberal, haughty, and intellectual.
She is, like David Mosscrop, a kind of intellectual "haggis"—or so considers herself to be—and spends much of her leisure time reading such titles as Economics of Socialism, Capitalistic Production, and
Towards Democracy. It is she, as we have seen, who articulates the chief objections to the neo-medievalist scheme of Lord Julius and who would be the kind to organize marches protesting the injustices of her downtrodden and exploited sisters of the London promenade. As she informs Christian, in response to his proposal of marriage,
I am also my own master, and I am a free woman. My life is exclusively my own personal property, to live as I choose to live it. I value my liberty quite as highly as if I were a man. It does not suit me to merge any part of it in some thing else. There could be many other reasons given, no doubt, but they would be merely individual variations of this one chief reason that I am a free woman, and intend to remain a free woman (p. 431).
As the foregoing indicates, Frank's character unquestionably reflects attitudes and traits which anticipate those reflected in the feminist movement of the twentieth century. For this reason Blackall is certainly right in his contention that Frank's personality is 9 unsuitable, aesthetically, for the traditional role of princess or, by
9. Blackall, Education, p. 76. extension, for the role of "Queen Goddess of the World." However,
Frederic might well have meant Frank as an ironic commentary on the
"new woman" and planned deliberately for a transversal of roles per
haps in the manner of George Bernard Shaw. The novel does contain,
after all, a goodly amount of ironic humor, much of which has gone
unnoticed by Frederic's critics. The title of the novel is a case in point. After having been introduced to the squalor and brutality which characterize the main branch of the Torr family, we would be sorely mistaken to describe that world literally in terms of "gloria mundi."
Nor, as we have seen, can the term be taken to refer to the feudal enterprise of the elder Torrs. Once we can understand the ironic implications suggested by this as well as by other aspects of the novel, it is entirely possible that Frederic might have intentionally miscast Frank to make her type seem comically inappropriate and to suggest that modern society, out of touch with history and mythology, no longer can produce women capable of playing roles with such weighty mythological significance. Seen from this angle, Frederic's device actually functions quite effectively.
IV
As for Christian, there remains but one matter to fulfill the conditions of his rebirth and thus make possible his successful
"reentry" into the world. This is atonement ("at-one-menf)"^ with the mysterious and unknown father figure. This is one of the most
10. Campbell, Hero, p. 130. 175 universal features of mythological iconography and occurs in even the most simple of folk tales.''""'' However, in Frederic's two previous novels, it is interesting that neither Theron Ware nor David Mosscrop was fully able to satisfy this condition and that both were conse quently prevented from completing the mythological cycle and the process of rebirth and return.
The ritual of atonement may be accomplished in one of two ways, either through a reconciliation with the Father or the annihilation of
Him. Concerning the latter, which is the particular form Christian will observe, Campbell has written, "the work of the hero is to slay the tenacious aspect of the father (dragon, tester, ogre king) and 12 release from its ban the vital energies that will feed the universe."
In Christian's case, the atonement will be realized with his paternal grandfather, the old duke, who, according to the canons of mythology, reflects the negative features of the hero's own person ality. Throughout the novel Christian has, like Telemachus, been searching for a father. His natural father, who had been exiled from
England after a terrible but unnamed scandal, had become a modern
Odysseus, a traveling professional warrior-soldier, and had met an early death in Spain when Christian was but a youngster. As a surro gate for Christian's natural father and as an important exponent in the mythological drama, the old duke appears humorously undignified, quite the opposite of his grandson. Having suffered a stroke of paralysis,
11. Campbell, Hero, p. 346.
12. Campbell, Hero, p. 352. 176 he has been reduced to a condition of lethargy, peevishness, and senility—traits which suggest the ogre aspect of the absolute Father.
"A duke nearly eighty years," but "an ass still longer than that"
(pp. 133-34), he spends most of his brief interview with his successor condemning a tenant farmer who had erected a barbed wire fence to protect his crop from the ravages of the hunt.
V
With the passing of his grandfather and the assumed consum mation of marriage with the grail woman at the end, Christian plays out his role as savior of the dukedom and thus symbolically returns with the life-giving elixir. Like Plato's philosophers who had attained knowledge of the absolute, Christian returns only with reluctance. One difficulty which Frederic experienced here was that of finding a con vincing objective correlative for translating Christian's newly acquired inner vision into practical terms. As we have seen, this was a problem which Frederic had experienced in the writing of March Hares.
As Campbell has explained, the task of translating the celestial into the mundane may be well-nigh impossible:
How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the milleniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task. How render back into the light- world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? How represent on a two-dimensional surface a three-dimensional form, or-^n a three-dimensional image a multi-dimensional meaning?
13. Campbell, Hero, p. 218. The magnitude of this difficulty is evidenced by numerous failures of
mythological heroes. There is, for example, the pathetic failure of
Rip Van Winkle who, baffled and unable to make meaningful his twenty-
year sojourn in the world of dreams, returned to the world of everyday
reality with nothing to show for his experience but his whiskers. As
we saw in our discussion of March Hares, David Mosscrop refused even to
make an attempt to return to a world which he considered fraught with
meaningless banalities, much less try to translate into a meaningful
language his vision of transcendental bliss. And Christian is himself
severely tempted on not one but several occasions to withdraw into his
private world and commit the whole of his dukedom to the devil.
But translate Frederic must, writing as he was during an age of
scientific realism and sharing with his contemporaries an insistence on
concrete fact and literal reporting. The opportunity for Christian to
display his own talents as a leader occurs shortly after his grand father 1s death when Lord Julius and Emanuel (who has broken down under severe mental strain) release him from his commitment to administer the
"System." Free now to initiate his own programs, Christian exhibits a philosophy that suggests a compromise between the conservative outlook of Lord Julius and the liberalism of Frances Bailey. It might best be described as a pragmatic humanism which represents, not a blind belief in abstract and untried Utopian philosophies, but a serene commitment to historical realism.
To put it another way, Christian's philosophy reflects an attempt to square his social and economic ideas with his knowledge of 178 historical probabilities and not with irrational visionary or emo tional sentiments. On the one hand, his philosophy would reject as false the optimism of Hegel and others such as Marx who subscribe to the doctrine of historical progress which moves in a linear direction from primitive beginnings to ultimate perfection. Acutely aware of human limitations, Christian informs Miss Bailey, "we learn only one thing from all the numberless millions who have gone before us—that man is less important than he thinks he is. . . . I am not going to believe that I ought to revolutionize human society before I die"
(p. 571). He likewise rejects, on the other hand, the pessimism of others, such as that of T. S. Eliot who tended to see the movement of history as a steady process of degeneration. As Christian now informs
Miss Bailey, although he may not revolutionize society, it will be possible for him to leave "things a trifle better than I found them"
Cp. 571). Clearly Christian does thus allow for modest historical progress.
Of special relevance to this theme is Plinlimmon's philosoph ical pamphlet in Herman Melville's Pierre. Since it deals with the contrast between personal ideals and practical behavior, it is germane to the contrast between the transcendentalism of Lord Julius and the pragmatism of Christian Tower. The symbols indicated in the title of the pamphlet, "Chronometricals and Horologicals," suggest contrasting 14 modes of measuring time, the celestial way and the earthly way. The
14. For an enlightening discussion of this theme in Melville's Pierre, see Lueders, pp. 333-334. 179
controversy between Pierre and Plinlimmon (between chronometer and
horologe), between Lord Julius and Christian Tower, can be extended to
include optimism versus pessimism, idealism versus realism. Both Lord
Julius and his son Emanuel pay homage to the laws of the chronometer
but live in the world of the horologe. As a result of this discrep
ancy, their schemes go unrealized and Emanuel himself is undone, all of
which suggests the inevitable futility of chronometrical assertion.
Christian, on the other hand, comes to terms with the world, and his
reconciliation provides a measure of personal satisfaction and admin
istrative success. His pragmatism seems to be Frederic's answer to the
chronometrical behavior of both Pierre and Melville. Frederic seems,
inevitably, to prefer the pragmatism of Sancho Panza to the foolish
idealism of Don Quixote.
The life style which Christian develops as the Duke of Glaston
bury, consistent with his views of historical progress and "horological
time," suggests the classical ideals of moderation, balance, restraint,
and common sense. For example, while he disclaims for himself any
pretense or ostentation with respect to his life as an aristocrat, he
will allow others whatever frills and ornamentation they are accustomed
to. While ancestral achievements generally do not impress him, he
does begin to manifest in his demeanor a "new patriarchal spirit"
(p. 498) and exhibits a good healthy family loyalty by having his
father's body brought home for burial in the Torr cemetery. By way of
changing ancient customs, he puts the traditional hangers-on and loafers
to work doing useful tasks, and for the more undesirable members he 180
secures positions abroad. Yet he revives the flagging custom of the
hunt, replenishing both the kennels and the stables. Concerning the
revival of the latter custom, he is truly reconciled and "at one" with
the wishes of the grandfather.
There is yet another aspect of Christian's development which
has mythological implications. In committing himself to administering
the affairs of his dukedom, he tends to lose his attachement to his
personal hopes and ambitions, and with them will eventually go, if he
continues to develop according to the mythological pattern, many of his
idiosyncrasies and limitations. In this sense the opposite of Theron
Ware, Christian is becoming a mere instrument for the great impersonal
life force which perpetuates the Torr ancestry and which sweeps aside all obstacles to its expression. Like his father and grandfather
before him, the one an unknown who played out his role as soldier of fortune abroad and the other a mysterious recluse who ruled his dukedom from an inner chamber in the upper regions of the castle, Christian is himself slowly, inevitably becoming an anonymity. When this has been achieved, the mythological round which Frederic began with The Damna tion of Theron Ware will have been completed. In the meantime,
Frederic will concern himself with another myth, one which has par ticular relevance to his native land. CHAPTER 9
THE MARKET-PLACE: THE MYTH OF THE POWER HERO
Published posthumously in 1899, The Market-Place is easily
Frederic's second best novel and stands just behind The Damnation of
Theron Ware; Blackall sees it as Frederic's second "major" novel."'" In its own day The Market-Place was well-received and even occupied a spot on the best seller lists. 2 Its popularity may be accounted for by the fact that it was considered, as a contemporary London critic observed in 1899, "an immoral book—immoral because a bare-faced scoundrel holds 3 the reader's admiration." The scoundrel is Joel Thorpe, the central character in this, Frederic's last novel.
The advent of Thorpe marks Frederic's return to the American half of the dialectic, which concludes his treatment of the mythical pattern of the quest-hero pursuing the figure of the gilded goddess.
Within the scope of the dialectical scheme, Thorpe's personality is a synthesis of the prominent features of Frederic's earlier American heroes and is the latest manifestation in a long line of development which began with Seth Fairchild and continued through Theron Ware. In a sense, Frederic's reversion to this type brings the pattern of his
1. Blackall, Education, p. 41.
2. Briggs, p. 179.
3. J. E. Hodder Williams, London Bookman, quoted by Briggs, p. 175.
181 182
novels full circle and represents a fitting conclusion to the dialectic
involving the conflict of cultural values.
In a broader context, however, Thorpe's character anticipates a
type which was soon to emerge in American fiction and which would
shortly be accepted as a valid expression of a particular facet of the
national character. The type which Thorpe suggests is that which in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was known, variously,
as the robber baron, the entrepreneur, the tycoon, the buccaneer, all
of whom were specifically American versions of the amoral superman 4 figure from legend and mythology. As we have seen, Frederic had
already tried to capture the type in the person of Horace Boyce in The
Lawton Girl, but his attempt went largely unrealized. In the present
novel, however, he was able to create an arch anti-hero whose type
would engage the imaginations of such notable and diverse American
writers as Jack London, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Heming- 5 way, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. In this respect, in
his final novel Frederic thus helped (perhaps unconsciously) to define
and interpret an evolving mythical iconography which has had no small
impact upon American literature.
4. In American fiction the type was preceded by the Satanic heroes of Melville (such as Ahab and Claggart) and Cooper (such as Red Rover and Raoul Yvard).
5. The following characters from fiction seem to fit the s superman type: Wolf Larsen, The Sea Wolf (1904); Curtis Jadwin, The Pit (1903); Frank Cowperwood, The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (1947); Harry Morgan, To Have and Have Not (1937); Jay Gatsby, The Great Gatsby (1925); Thomas Sutpen, Absalom, Absalom! (1936). 183
I
Before we examine Frederic's contribution to the mythological adventure of the power hero, one or two words regarding Frederic's choice of narrative framework will be helpful. In casting the business tycoon in a role which, we have said, resembles that of the mytho logical hero, Frederic drew from the.conventions of two disparate traditions, just as he had done in several of his earlier novels and most recently in Gloria Mundi. It appears that he did so here for the same purpose, for reinforcing one of his favorite themes: namely, the essential difference between mythological tradition (which in Frederic stands for appearance) and the historical process (which represents reality).
In The Market-Place, however, the mythological adventure is played out, not within the confines of the fairy tale as it had been in the two previous novels, but rather within the more literal and realistic framework of the naturalistic novel. Thus, in order to achieve the proper effects, Frederic had to invert the conventions of mythology, including the traditional values of the quest-figure, in order to give an accurate representation of the realities or facts of the Gilded Age. Having derived from the protagonists of the American novels, Thorpe is therefore the opposite of the selfless, unselfcon- scious archetypal hero of myth toward whom David Mosscrop and Christian
Tower were tending. On the contrary, he is uncouth and pretentious, bamboozled by many illusions, and possesses none of the urbanity or sophistication of either David Mosscrop or Christian Tower. In further j I I
; 184
I contrast to them, Thorpe has adopted a mystique of success founded upon
great wealth and aristocratic women. Thus, his monetary triumph in the
novel may best be described as a total inversion of the mythological
conventions of rebirth and apotheosis. Instead of showing us the
return of a resurrected young god come to rescue the world, Frederic
presents us with the dubious victory of a super mercenary bent on
crushing under heel all who get in his way.
Seen from this angle, the universal mythological round which
Campbell describes as culminating in moral and spiritual apotheosis is
ultimately frustrated in Frederic, never quite realized within the
scope of the dialectic. This does not mean, of course, that Frederic's
modification of the archetypal adventure ought to be decried, for there
are some significant advantages to be had. For instance, Frederic's
modification nicely accommodates his changing interests, and it also
provides a workable objective correlative with which to give expression
to important aspects of the national character. As we have said, the
mythological iconography reflected in The Market-Place parallels in
most important particulars the general pattern one encounters in later
novels dealing with the superman myth. Significantly, such parallels
tend to refute the thesis of Brooks and others who describe the later 0 Frederic as alienated from, and out of touch with, American culture.
6. In his study of Frederic as a native historian and local colorist, Robert H. Woodward concludes that although Frederic spent much of his time in England, his literary foundation remained in America. See "Harold Frederic and New York Folklore," New York Folklore Quarterly, 16 (Summer, 1960), 83-89. 185
On the contrary, such parallels suggest a solid relationship between
the Frederic dialectic and a peculiarly American brand of mythology.
II
As contained in The Market-Place, the evolving iconography of
the adventure of the power hero embraces a number of phases through which the hero must pass in order to fulfill the conditions of the mythological cycle.^ These phases, which in some respects resemble the
adventure of the universal hero of the monomyth, may be described as follows. There is, first, his derivation from humble or obscure origins. Next follows a great awakening, which is manifested by an insatiable desire to rise in the world and to make a name for himself.
Repudiating his home life and the values it symbolizes, he makes a com plete break with the past and sets out on his own. There then follows a period of apprenticeship of sorts, a time of trial and error during which he formulates a new code of behavior for the attainment of his goals, a code which is generally akin to the law of the jungle. Soon there is the rapid attainment of success, a brand which is a seemingly ruthless and absolute mastery of his environment, but which largely proves to be elusive. There is, finally, his downfall.
7. Useful discussions relative to this theme include Benjamin de Gasseres' The Superman in America (Seattle: University of Washing ton Chapbooks, 1929); Michael Millgate's, American Social Fiction: James to Cozzens (London: Oliver & Boyd, 1964), pp. 73-76; Friedrich W. Nietzsche's, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1954); Carl Van Doren's, Contemporary American Novel ists: 1900-1920 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), pp. 78-81; and Charles Child Walcutt's American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), pp. 92-113 and 199-206. 186
This is, of course, only a rough format for the playing out of
the superman adventure and does not take into account important
variations and exceptions. As set forth here, the formula is meant to
serve only as a general pattern since the supermen of fiction all stand
at different points along the scale. Too, the individual phases do not
always follow one another in the order in which they have here been
listed.
By examining the pattern in greater detail, however, we shall
be able to understand more clearly just how close to the main stream of
American fiction The Market-Place is, and, more importantly, just how
inextricably caught up in the American dream Frederic was. For while
the settings and characters of the novel are English, Thorpe himself,
as several Frederic scholars have acknowledged, bears unmistakably the
stamp of an American living abroad and does so, not only in terms of Q values and attitudes, but even down to his very appearance. (In fact,
he is often thought to be an American by the more sophisticated members
of British society. As Lord Plowden remarks, "I've always the greatest
difficulty to remember that you are an Englishman—a Londoner born.
. . . You don't talk in the least like one. On shipboard I made sure
8. See, for example, Jean Frantz Blackall, "Perspectives on Harold Frederic's Market-Place," PMLA, 86 (1971), 389; Briggs, p. 97; Clayton L. Eichelberger, "Philanthropy in Frederic's The Market-Place," American Quarterly, 20 (1968), 112; Edmund Wilson, The Devils and Canon Barham: Ten Essays on Poets, Novelists and Monsters (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1973), p. 70. 187
you were an American—a very characteristic one, I thought—of some 9 curious Western variety, you know.")
True to the general iconography of the superman adventure, the
hero of The Market-Place derives from modest circumstances. The son of
a London bookseller, Thorpe makes a big thing of his having attended
St. Paul's, "One of the great public schools of England" (p. 76), and
of his father's excellent reputation among probably nondescript writers
and patrons of literature. In reality, however, Thorpe possesses all
of the cultural assumptions and the aesthetic sensibility of the lowest
classes of English society. For he is ignorant, full of illusions
about what he might do in the world were he not economically handi
capped, and he is resentful toward those who are wealthy. At St.
Paul's he had naively envisioned himself as on a "footing of perfect
equality ... with the sons of aristocratic families or of great City
potentates" (p. 76) and had frequently daydreamed of the time when he
would set up his own dynasty.
As we might infer from our knowledge of Thorpe's background and, as we have already to some extent implied, the archetype of the
superman betrays an alarming lack of sophistication, of good breeding,
and savoir-faire. Uncouth and barbaric, and bewildered by the more subtle social distinctions, Thorpe feigns equality with elite groups
but underneath labors with the burden of a deep-rooted sense of
inferiority. Thus, when in the next phase of the mythological cycle
9. Harold Frederic, The Market-Place (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, Publishers, 1899), p. 9. Subsequent references to this edition will be given parenthetically in the text. 188
Thorpe is introduced to the world of wealth and fame, the experience
proves painful and humiliating, having the effect of some deep emo
tional shock. The jolt occurs during a leisure weekend at the estate of Lord Plowden when the latter unintentionally offends his guest by questioning Thorpe's right to be concerned about the affairs of the
beautiful Lady Cressage, the same, incidentally, who appeared in Gloria
Mundi and whom Thorpe now wishes to marry.
By comparing his own detestable circumstances to the coveted
luxury and refinement of others, Thorpe, as do most of the other super men in fiction, invariably finds himself cheated by life and begins entertaining feelings of hostility and contempt for the privileged orders. For example, the moment Lord Plowden has affronted Thorpe's sensibility, the latter glares at the offender, acidly reflecting "'Why should this fop of a lordling put on this air of contemptuous incre dulity?" (pp. 250-51). Nevertheless, the experience produces a great awakening of the power hero's inner being. Thorpe now begins to sense the shabbiness of his background, the lack of culture in his family tradition. His vast energies begin to stir, creating an inordinate ambition to rise in the world, to gain power and recognition, perhaps even, to exact revenge, as "unnamed forces dragged him forward to hurt and humiliate his former friend" (p. 252). It is interesting to note here that Thorpe's ambitions are remarkably similar to those of other supermen who followed him into the realm of fiction. Both he and
Curtis Jadwin of Norris' The Pit vow to corner the stock market (Thorpe in rubber, Jadwin in wheat); Cowperwood's plans, equally vast in scope, 189
include the building of a gigantic system of street railways; Thomas
Sutpen will create a huge plantation; Harrington will erect a gigantic
meat-packing plant; Eden will become a famous writer; and Willie
Stark will become governor of Louisiana.) Forswearing his former life,
even to the abandonment of family and friends, the superman is thus
ready to embark on a new life. In this connection, there is the vivid
picture of Joel Thorpe waiting at the station prior to departing to
Hadlow House, his beard freshly removed and his crude leather dungarees
exchanged for new attire, conscious that his old manners and habits
were being replaced, with the conviction firmly rooted in his mind
that he "needed only money to be recognized by everybody as a gentle
man" (p. 76).
In his initial efforts to achieve his goals, Thorpe as a pro
totype of later power heroes displays a fair degree of special talent which Walcutt characterizes as "selfish, individual, cunning, amoral" and attempts to achieve "happiness through the fullest indulgence of his will to power.However, as he quickly learns, his efforts at first produce only the merest semblance of success, or none at all, and he often discovers himself involved over head and ears in situa tions that might well prove detrimental to his grand designs. By the time The Market-Place begins, for example, Thorpe has already blundered into numerous worthless ventures, always seeking, like Twain's colorful
Colonel Sellers in The Gilded Age, the main chance but everywhere miss ing "by just a hair's breadth the golden consummation" (p. 20). The
10. Walcutt, p. 93. 190 last of these ventures, a scheme to sell a phantom rubber plantation to two separate parties simultaneously, later implicates him in a plot that terminates in the death of one of his victims. On other occa sions, he himself is victimized. As he complains, "someone had always played him false. There was never a friendship for him which could withstand the temptation of profitable treason" (p. 20).
The function of adversity in the early part of Thorpe's career has apparently been to force him to establish a moral code which will facilitate the realization of his superman objectives. Heretofore
Thorpe's actions have, from what can be inferred, represented a hodge podge of morality consisting of Judeo-Christian principles and sham sentiment, sprinkled liberally with elements of outright chicanery.
Before long, however, he has begun to see life in a different, more consistent way, tending to interpret it as a constant struggle for survival, a struggle grim and fierce in which the strong survive and the weak perish. One finds him declaiming against the inadequacy of humane codes and preaching the necessity of being ruthless in order to succeed. As Thorpe explains,
Everything in the City is cruel. ... All speculative business is cruel. ... Money like that belongs to those who are in possession of it, only so long as they are strong enough to hold on to it. When someone stronger still comes along, he takes it away from them. They don't complain; they don't cry and say it's cruel. They know it's the rule of the game. They accept it—and begin at once looking out for a new set of fools and weaklings to recoup themselves on (pp. 204-05).
As Walcutt writes of the struggle which characterizes the actions of some of Jack London's heroes, the struggle in Joel Thorpe is "dominated 191 by will. It is will in the sense of impulse, life-urge, ecstasy of 11 power, rather than ethical choice."
However extreme such conclusions might seem, Thorpe evidently feels compelled to adopt a code of his own, not a code, however, merely for the purpose of surviving as is often the case in the fiction of
Jack London, but one which will assure him a full measure of success— although Thorpe does not, and apparently cannot, distinguish between success and survival. Roughly, the code he develops is one of moral agnosticism. Illusive then, according to this view, is the notion that wrongs will be righted or compensated for by a benevolent Providence.
Instead, in order to succeed, the superman learns that he must be predatory, adamant against all desires but his own. He knows that if some people are going to dwell in comfortable country estates (as he later does himself), then others must live in hovels, and that in order for some to have economic power (as might be attained, for example, by cornering the market in rubber consoles), other people (such as the
Jewish Kaffirs) must be made bankrupt. Thorpe's code probably finds its best expression in the philosophy of Thrasymachus, the ancient
Greek who proclaimed the supremacy of "the will of the strongest and shrewdest for their own advantage" and who taught that the wisest man is "the perfectly unjust'1 man who ignores the law so that he may 12 satisfy his own desires.
11. Walcutt, p. 105.
12. Edward McNall Burns, Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture, 2 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973), I, 134. 192
Once the hero has managed to redefine his code of conduct— which Thorpe is able to do with stunning rapidity—it is possible for him to assert his great natural abilities swiftly and effectively.
Along with numerous other supermen from the fiction which followed The
Market-Place, Thorpe is able to manipulate the unsuspecting, to form
Machiavellian combinations, and to crush under heel those who would interfere with his schemes. It is with apparent ease that Thorpe, with his great cunning and vast capacity for mischief, crushes the
Jewish Kaffirs in a Hitleresque coup, squeezing "them to our hearts' content" (p. 37). And although it is not directly presented in the novel, the use of brute physical force is a likely feature of Thorpe's code, though obviously not to the extent that it is an essential ingredient in the code, say, of Jack London's brawling Wolf Larsen.
Nevertheless, throughout his career in Brazil and elsewhere (about which we are regrettably given only very sketchy information), Thorpe has undoubtedly relied on physical coercion to achieve his ends, on one occasion of which he is nearly lynched in Arizona as a horse thief.
Ill
One of the most significant features of the superman's mythol ogy of success is his relationship to women—significant because in the dialectic of the American dream the woman has always represented definitive cultural values, just as she has within the context of the
Frederic dialectic. Here again the character of Joel Thorpe has helped to establish a familiar pattern in American literature. As an arche typal figure, he entertains a longing for a feminine ideal the actual 193
realization of which satisfies totally, for the time being at least, 13 his mistique of success. Or to put it another way, the winning of
her hand in marriage both defines and validates the nature of his
achievement. Thus, for Thorpe, who sees Lady Cressage as some
unapproachable "queen in a pageant" (p. 78), her acceptance of his marriage proposal validates his ambition to acquire a large country estate and set up as a country gentleman. As he seems to understand it, it would be impossible for him to have one condition without satisfying the other, and vice versa. So inextricable are his views of women and ideal beauty (whether physical, intellectual, or aesthetic in nature) that he cannot separate them in his imagination.
Thorpe's idealization of feminine beauty is also bound up in some way with an image of masculinity which he has of himself. This would be apart from his biological needs, upon which, incidentally, 14 Frederic does not elaborate. Possessing an abundance of crude vitality, Thorpe sets the pattern for later supermen figures by inspir ing in Edith Cressage the urge to be overpowered and subdued. As
Austin Briggs has noted, marital bliss for her comes "through £th§7 15 terror" of her-association with her "big, bold, strong
13. Within the context of the American dream, the same sym bolic meaning is often attached to women even where the myth of the superman does not apply. Consider, for example, Philip Sterling's attachment to Ruth Bolton in Mark Twain's, The Gilded Age or Clyde Griffiths' love of Sondra Finchley in Dreiser's An American Tragedy.
14. An interesting contrast is Theodore Dreiser's lengthy treatment of Cowperwood's numerous amorous adventures and the resultant emphasis on biological drives.
15. Briggs, p. 194. 194
pirate" (p. 374). Accordingly, the wooing and love sessions of this masculine bearer of primeval virtu often smack of vigorous commercial 16 ventures or bargaining sessions. Thorpe's early courtship of Lady
Cressage is a particularly crude and awkward affair, conducted much like a stockbroker trying to negotiate a deal at the exchange.
IV
One can easily concede, however, that at the moment of his triumph Joel Thorpe does seem truly invincible and thus compares favorably to most of the later fictional power heroes. Viewed in this light it does not seem unusual for him to command a measure of respect from his commercial colleagues (and victims), or even admiration on the part of his creator. For, arch-swindler though he surely be, the very excellence and purity of his ruthlessness and barbaric cunning inevitably arouse Frederic's secret admiration, as may be inferred from the imagery used to characterize him. There was in Thorpe's face, for instance,
a stormy glow of the man's native, coarse, imperious virility. ... The large features were somehow grown larger still; they dominated the countenance as rough bold headlands dominate a shore. It was the visage of a conqueror—of a man gathering within himself, to expend upon his fellow, the appetites, energies, and insensibilities, audacities of a beast of prey (p. 386).
Dreiser and London, we might observe here, also manifest an unmistak able ambivalence toward their heroes, an ambivalence which may in part be due to autobiographical considerations, as is almost certainly the
16. Blackall, "Perspectives," p. 392. i
| 195
case with Frederic's attitude toward the Horatio Alger element in 17 Thorpe's career.
In spite of all his good fortune in attaining worldly grandeur,
however, Thorpe, even at the very height of his career, is never fully
a success, never satisfied or happy. For one thing, now that he no
longer must expend all of his energies acquiring a fortune, he soon
finds himself unutterably bored, unable to get genuinely involved in
the endless rounds of parties and social engagements, tending instead,
after the manner of Thorpe, to be "eating too much, and sitting about,
and getting fat and stupid" (p. 349). For another thing, Joel Thorpe
never quite fits in with nor is wholly accepted by the society to which
he has aspired. Although he now possesses all of the externals neces
sary to make him a gentleman (he has even upgraded his name to Mr.
Stormont Thorpe), he still retains his frank brutality of manner and
rudeness of speech and is "not wholly nice in his cups" (p. 259). In
polite circles he is extremely vulnerable, easily exposed to be the cad
that he so often is (p. 132), and always burdened by the suspicion that
he will remain a Philistine and a parvenu. His feelings of inferiority
even carry over to his relationship with his wife, whom he secretly
considers to be superior "intellectually no less than socially,
£because7 she possessed a title and he remained an undistinguished
plebian" (p. 329). In the judgment of Celia Madden, who appears much
matured in The Market-Place, Thorpe is "the kind of piratical buccaneer
17. For a discussion of the possible autobiographical influ ence, see Blackall, "Perspectives," p. 401; and Wilson, The Devils, pp. 73-74. 196
who oughtn't to be shaved and polished and taught drawing room tricks"
(p. 183). Thorpe is thus ultimately frustrated amid the assured plenty
of his material circumstances.
There remains at least one other important factor- which con
tributes to the disappointment or frustration of Thorpe and which seems
to blight the success of other supermen as well. This is the element
of guilt or moral stain which hangs like a cloud over Thorpe's day of
triumph, because, try as he might, he cannot wholly rid himself of the
moral influence of his upbringing. For him, the antidote for uneasy
thoughts or bad dreams brought on by a feeling of guilt is character
istically a hurried involvement in philanthropic schemes. Hence, as a
futile attempt to allay his tortured conscience, there is his grandiose
project to rehabilitate all of the downtrodden and to rebuild the city
slums. But such schemes hardly prove effective, of course, since the
superman generally, in spite of his good intentions, winds up manipu
lating even his philanthropic enterprise so as to satisfy his gargan
tuan appetite for power politics or economic gain. It is more than
likely that Thorpe will be forever atoning for his sins while ever
committing new ones. Thus, while ever "an irritant in the social 18 body," he is forever pleading the public cause.
And yet, as Walcutt has observed of Dreiser's Frank Cowperwood,
Thorpe leaves no lasting impression on the society he has
18. Walcutt quotes this as Jack London's description of the superman (p. 199). 197 19 manipulated. Just as Cowperwood's building of "street railway sys-
tems will not provide alms for oblivion," 20 so Thorpe's accomplish
ments, for all of his bragging and boasting, remain in the end a
phantom rubber company the creation of which has brought heartache and
destruction to colleagues and enemies alike. Nor has Thorpe improved
at all personally or culturally. Nor has there been any personal
accomplishments to speak of—neither socially nor morally. To the end
Thorpe retains his brassy frontier vulgarity, "his mocking rudeness of
speech," and his "cold insolence" (p. 277). At social gatherings, the
keen awareness "that everybody was afraid of him,—that everybody would
kneel to him, and meekly take insult and ignominy from him ...
hardened like a crust upon his mind" (p. 277).
V
As it has evolved in American fiction, the concluding phase of
the mythological cycle is, as we have earlier indicated, the superman's
downfall, often dramatic and terrible, ending in his destruction. The
Market-Place, however, does not conform to this particular convention
but allows the hero-villain to begin anew. At the novel's end, Thorpe is as energetic and as full of illusions as ever, and is planning a project more vast in scope and grander and in conception than anything he had previously dreamed possible. He will "stand London on its head"
Cp. 399) by harnessing for himself every conceivable source of
19. Walcutt, p. 213.
20. Walcutt, p. 213. 198 political power with which to reform the entire British economic sys tem. In contrast to later supermen, such as Martin Eden, Thorpe's ego is anything but deflated. His vision, totally unrealistic and chime rical, recalls Colonel Sellers' colossal land farce and his ambitions to become "the Grand Llama of the United States," the designation of president appearing "too limited and cramped in the constitutional 21 restrictions." The irresponsibility inherent in such grandiose con ceptions indeed point to the principal flaw in the character of the superman, a flaw which may best be described as a failure of con sciousness, ultimately a failure of moral vision.
Yet, granted that Thorpe is morally derelict, as most supermen seem inevitably to be, it is doubtful that Frederic would wholly con demn him for the gross misery and suffering which accompany his schemes and for which history and traditional morality tend to hold him respon sible. As many another creator of fictional supermen, Frederic with holds moral commentary, preferring instead to depict his hero as being swept along by forces more powerful than can be explained in terms of mere frustration, mere envy, or mere worldly ambition. At times such forces seem to be identified with Thorpe's demonic monomania which drives him on to revenge, while at other times they seem to inform his obsession to master and dominate Lady Cressage. Lady Cressage seems to understand something of this when she remarks to Celia Madden that
Thorpe must always "have in view something that he is determined to
21. Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (New York: Trident Press, 1964), pp. 271-72. 199 master. Without that, he is not contented. ... He has a passion for battle in his blood" (p. 401).
As another possible indication of extenuation, Joel Thorpe both as superman and as an exponent of the myth of transcendental expectancy has grown up under the influence of assumptions which have long been deeply rooted in the American imagination but which, as we have seen in our discussion of The Lawton Girl, are unrealizable because they are self-contradictory. Frederic himself, of course, grew up under the influence of the American dream and, like his hero, was taught the virtues of self-expression and individual freedom. And he also dis covered, to his chagrin, that self-fulfillment often conflicts with the needs of the masses and the ideals of democracy and brotherhood.
This brings us to the crux of the matter. As we have suggested in our discussion of The Lawton Girl, the power hero is thus faced with a morally difficult, if not morally impossible, choice. Like Martin
Eden, he can submit to the judgments of a society whose leaders are ostensibly dedicated to the principle of public welfare, and pine away, hoping for the rewards due him but which he will probably never receive; or, like Joel Thorpe, he can reject the conventional social standards and expectations and bully his way into prominence, grinding under his iron hoofs the ignorant, the weak, the helpless—ultimately humanity itself. As the superman must envision it, no compromise seems possible, even though he may argue, as we have seen, that human progress may result from the corrupt self-assertion of the superior individual.
In this sense we might conclude that Frederic must have viewed the 200 drama of the power hero as possessing certain aesthetic attractions but being played out in a way which was morally untenable. We might also conclude that Frederic's attitude tended to be defeatist, or perhaps even cynical, since it reflects a certain disillusionment both with the power hero and with the American dream. This is the darker side of
Frederic which we have encountered before.
VI
A necessary requirement of the mythological adventure is that it transcend the restrictions which any given age or society might impose upon it. In other words, it must have both contemporary and historical relevance. Otherwise it would not survive as myth but would quickly be consigned to oblivion. Viewed in this light, Frederic's story of the power hero seems to satisfy this condition and to suggest a relevance to the society of the 1970's. Watergate, for instance, as many of its political, economic, and social aspects suggest, no doubt represents a vast complex of resource materials for future stories recounting the deeds and misdeeds of hero-villains. The same will undoubtedly be the case with the Howard Hughes Story, if and when all of the truth becomes known. And there are other examples too numerous to mention here. The fact is that the portraits of the kind of people
Thorpe represents still hang in the collective imagination of America.
In our time, the superman may have altered the style of his mask, as he has always done from the Satans to the Faustuses to the Ahabs. But he is still very much among us today and is indubitably caught up in the same conflict. 201
Concerning Frederic's treatment of the myth of the power hero
or, for that matter, his working out of the monomythic round or his
development of the dialectic, my point is simply this. By ignoring the
many experiences and rich insights contained within the framework of
his fiction, as the last few generations of critics have done, we are making an omission which does an injustice both to Frederic as purveyor of myth and to ourselves who, whether we like it or not, are reenacting
the myths which he has described. For the struggles of Frederic's heroes are in reality our own struggles. Their delights in illusions and chimeras are our delights. Their attempts to wend their way
through the labyrinth of ignorance toward the light of self-knowledge are our attempts; their failures to do so are our failures. Frederic's cynicism and despair—these belong to us as well. The many masks which his heroes put on are simply the reflections of the thousands of faces which we ourselves wear. Refusing thus to confront ourselves and the aspirations and conflicts which form the basis of our humanity, we are in essence denying ourselves the opportunity of participating imagina tively in an aspect of the American experience which can only con tribute to further self-definition and self-understanding. It is an opportunity which we cannot easily afford to forgo.
Having availed ourselves of this opportunity, however, we can not fail to observe the underlying seriousness of Frederic's vision of life. For all of his supposed lighthearted use of the paraphernalia of the fairy tale and his seemingly tongue-in-cheek presentation of the dexterous farm lad and the clever Yankee, we must remember that 202
Frederic's treatment of myth and the mythological round ends not with illumination, self-mastery, or apotheosis, but in gross self-deception, exploitation, and grandiosity. Beginning with the exuberant optimism implied in the denouements of In the Valley and Seth's Brother's Wife,
Frederic's vision of the American dream became progressively darker, as is suggested in the pragmatic but somewhat grim resignation of Gloria
Mundi and the chaotic futility of The Market-Place.
Frederic's career as a writer lasted approximately eleven years, a span which is, regrettably, too brief; but during this time a pattern had indeed begun to emerge. Clearly, Frederic was abandoning his faith in the effectiveness of honest men such as Douw Mauverensen and Reuben Tracy and was beginning to hint at the terrible superiority of scoundrels and blackguards such as Dr. Ledsmar and Joel Thorpe. Had
Frederic written in this vein another ten years, his kinship to the later Twain would be more generally recognized than it is now; so, too, would Frederic's kinship to the darker sides of Hawthorne and Melville.
And although Frederic's achievements are admittedly slighter than the contributions of these literary superstars, his works nevertheless represent a respectable body of fiction and thus ought to assure him a secure place in the mainstream of American literature.
With respect to the darker or more cynical side of Frederic, a word ought to be said in behalf of his modernity—a characteristic which is most clearly implied in his abandonment of literary realism in favor of the mythological tradition. The twentieth century has wit nessed a rebirth of the mythological imagination, possibly, as Meyer 203
Reinhold has contended, to protest "the growing dominance of technol ogy and the development of a mechanical world" and because classical
themes involving "horror and suffering" "have a striking relevance for 22 contemporary audiences." Frederic both anticipates and shares in this rebirth to some extent. Recurring to patterns drawn from mytho logical antiquity, Frederic, like many contemporary authors, was able to magnify his vision of the spiritual grossness and materialistic ugliness of his generation. As T. S. Eliot has written of contemporary treatments of myth, Frederic's use of myth helps to give "shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is 23 contemporary history. ..." In this sense, Frederic's two finest novels, The Damnation of Theron Ware and The Market-Place are truly modern in spirit. Theron's odyssey, for example, is almost as meaning less and futile as some twentieth-century archetypal pilgrimages, such as Leopold Bloom's, or better yet, Jack Kerouac's. Dispossessed, tradition-less, rudderless, Theron's odyssey suggests the imagery of catastrophe—perhaps that of emotional and spiritual shipwreck, ulti mately the horror and panic of a lost lifeboat tossing on the vast seas. In the lost lifeboat, Theron has no place; at best, he can only row with the other lost souls, ever pursuing illusion after illusion, one chimerical horizon ever vanishing beyond the next. The gilded
22. Meyer Reinhold, Past and Present; The Continuity of Classical Myths (Toronto: Hakkert, 1972), pp. 399-400.
23. Quoted by Reinhold, p. 400. 204
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