משיח לא בא: דוד המלך בספרות האמריקאית של המאה התשע-עשרה

מחקר לשם מילוי חלקי של הדרישות לקבלת תואר "דוקטור לפילוסופיה"

מאת

דניאל שרייבר רובין

הוגש לסינאט אוניברסיטת בן גוריון בנגב

ו' ניסן ה'תשע"ח 22.3.18

באר שבע

משיח לא בא: דוד המלך בספרות האמריקאית של המאה התשע עשרה

מחקר לשם מילוי חלקי של הדרישות לקבלת תואר "דוקטור לפילוסופיה"

מאת

דניאל שרייבר רובין

הוגש לסינאט אוניברסיטת בן גוריון בנגב

אישור המנחה ______

אישור דיקן בית הספר ללימודי מחקר מתקדמים ע"ש קרייטמן ______

י"א תשרי ה'תשע"ט 20.9.18

באר שבע

העבודה נעשתה בהדרכת ד"ר יעל בן-צבי ופרופ' ברברה הוכמן

במחלקה לספרויות זרות ובלשנות

בפקולטה למדעי הרוח והחברה

הצהרת תלמיד המחקר עם הגשת עבודת הדוקטור לשיפוט

אני החתום מטה מצהיר/ה בזאת: )אנא סמן(:

_X_ חיברתי את חיבורי בעצמי, להוציא עזרת ההדרכה שקיבלתי מאת מנחה/ים.

_X_ החומר המדעי הנכלל בעבודה זו הינו פרי מחקרי מתקופת היותי תלמיד/ת מחקר.

___ בעבודה נכלל חומר מחקרי שהוא פרי שיתוף עם אחרים, למעט עזרה טכנית

הנהוגה בעבודה ניסיונית. לפי כך מצורפת בזאת הצהרה על תרומתי ותרומת שותפי למחקר, שאושרה על ידם ומוגשת בהסכמתם.

תאריך _20.9.18__ שם התלמיד/ה _דניאל שרייבר רובין_ חתימה ______

Not that Type: King David in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY”

by

Danielle Schreiber Rubin

Submitted to the Senate of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

March 22, 2018

Beer-Sheva

Not that Type: King David in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY”

by

Danielle Schreiber Rubin

Submitted to the Senate of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Approved by the advisor Approved by the Dean of the Kreitman School of Advanced Graduate Studies

March 22, 2018

Beer-Sheva

This work was carried out under the supervision of

Dr. Yael Ben-zvi and Prof. Barbara Hochman

In the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics

The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Research-Student's Affidavit when Submitting the Doctoral Thesis for Judgment

I, Danielle Schreiber Rubin, whose signature appears below, hereby declare that (Please mark the appropriate statements):

X I have written this Thesis by myself, except for the help and guidance offered by my Thesis Advisors.

X The scientific materials included in this Thesis are products of my own research, culled from the period during which I was a research student.

___ This Thesis incorporates research materials produced in cooperation with others, excluding the technical help commonly received during experimental work. Therefore, I am attaching another affidavit stating the contributions made by myself and the other participants in this research, which has been approved by them and submitted with their approval.

Date: September 20, 2018 Student's name: Danielle Schreiber Rubin Signature:______

Acknowledgments I am indebted to the devoted supervision and guidance of my two advisors, Dr. Yael Ben-zvi and Prof. Barbara Hochman. Each in her own way offered invaluable advice and support, helped me formulate and refine my arguments, suggested directions to pursue that I would never have thought of, and knew exactly when to push me and when to let go. I appreciate their ideas, comments and funding, and feel so blessed to have them as my mentors, who with their intelligence, care and devotion, taught me far more than I expected to learn in this dissertation. They are two amazing teachers and I am grateful for everything they have given me.

I also wish to thank my friends, colleagues and professors at Ben-Gurion University’s Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics, for their interest, kindness and friendship. I am proud to belong to such a vital and stimulating intellectual community.

Words cannot express how grateful I am to my mother- and father-in-law for their enthusiastic willingness to assist—especially with the children—and for their love and guidance. And to my parents, who believed in me when I could not, and were always available to give advice and encouragement. I am inspired by your enduring strength and goodness and strive to emulate your example.

Lastly, to my children—Yehuda, Ayala, Dvir and Noam—who braved through months of motherless days and nights, patiently and eagerly waiting for this project to take its final shape. I am so proud of you and thank God for bestowing on me this marvelous adventure of motherhood with you. And to Natan, my partner on this journey and on so many others. Without you I would surely be lost.

This dissertation is dedicated to my Baba, Gusti Gross Blumenthal, and to my Nonni and Saba, Renee and Elliot Schreiber, and to the loving memory of my Papa, Joe Gross—my amazing, caring and strong grandparents, who gave me the Tanakh and gave me stories. Thank you for these origins.

תקציר

מבקרים רבים עומדים על מעמדו המרכזי של התנ"ך בספרות ובתרבות האמריקאית. החל מכתבי ראשית המאה השבע-עשרה ועד המאה התשע-עשרה הוזכר התנ"ך לעתים קרובות בספרות ובאמנות, ושימש מקור דתי וספרותי להבנת אירועים ותהליכים היסטוריים, והתנהגויות וערכים אנושיים. בספרות האמריקאית המוקדמת התנ"ך יוצג בעיקר באופן טיפולוגי במסגרת פרשנות מקראית שהתייחסה לאירועים ודמויות תנכיים כמקורות לאלה המופיעים בכתבי הנצרות. פרקטיקה זו אפשרה לראשוני הסופרים שכתבו באנגלית בצפון אמריקה להגדיר את תפקידו ההיסטורי של התנ"ך כסיפור על מקורות לאומיים, וכך לקשר את האומה האמריקאית המתהווה עם העבר התנ"כי והגאולה העתידית המובטחת. מחקרים בתחום זה טרם תיארו באופן מקיף את השינוי שחל בהתייחסויות לתנ"ך בספרות האמריקאית במאה התשע-עשרה בעקבות התרחקות היצירה הספרותית מהפרשנות הטיפולוגית. כדי לגשר על פער זה, עבודה זו בוחנת את האופנים השונים בהם סופרי המאה התשע-עשרה הציגו את סיפורי התנ"ך. היא מדגימה כיצד ייצוגים חדשים אלו ביקרו את הנרטיב הלאומי שנשען על השראה תנ"כית, ואת תפיסות התנ"ך כמקור בלתי מעורער של נרטיבים אלו. עבודה זו מתמקדת בייצוגים לא-טיפולוגיים של סיפורי דוד המלך ביצירות ספרותיות מהמאה התשע-עשרה, המשילים מהתנ"ך אחריות וסמכות כמקור לאומי וכבסיס לתודעה הסטורית לאומית, ומחדדים במקום זה את תפקידו וכוחו הספרותי. הגישה הטיפולוגית התפתחה כפרקטיקה פרשנית יהודית משיחית, ופרשנים נוצרים קדומים השתמשו בה ביחס להגשמתן העתידית של בשורות הברית החדשה. הם עיגנו את ההיסטוריה הנוצרית במסורת היהודית שקדמה לה כדי לאחד את התנ"ך העברי עם הברית החדשה. חוקרים רבים הראו כי הפרשנות הטיפולוגית, שהיתה פופולרית בכתבים הפוריטניים הראשונים, שימשה לא רק לפרשנות מקראית אלא גם כמסגרת פרשנות היסטורית. המתיישבים הראשונים בצפון אמריקה ביארו את כל האירועים, אישיים וקולקטיביים, כהשתקפויות של התבונה המקראית וכך חיזקו את תפיסתם העצמית כעמו הנבחר החדש של האל. לפיכך, הם ראו את הקולוניזציה כמאמץ רוחני במסגרתו כיבוש יבשת אמריקה ומימוש עבודת האל בעולם יסייעו ליצירת אומה קדושה. מערכת פרשנית זו עיצבה מוסדות חברתיים וקידמה השקפת עולם אקספציונליסטית אמריקאית )American Exceptionalism(, שהציגה את הקדמה הלאומית והמודרניזציה כהתגלמותה של תוכנית היסטורית אלוהית קדומה. אולם, יצירות ספרותיות שנכתבו לאורך המאה התשע-עשרה הטילו ספק באידיאל המסורתי של הברית המקודשת בין האל לעם האמריקאי. שינויים חברתיים שחלו בעקבות המהפכה, ומחלוקות בנושאי גזע, עבדות, זכויות אמריקאים ילידים ועוולות חברתיות שהגיעו לשיאן במלחמת האזרחים עוררו אי-ודאות לגבי הברית והביאו לעליית תפיסות היסטוריות חדשות. תנועות וזרמים דתיים שהונעו על ידי גישות רפורמיסטיות וליברליות דגלו בהיסטוריה פוסט-קלוויניסטית של קדמה חברתית שלא היתה מבוססת על הבטחה אלוהית, אלא הדגישה את האחריות האישית לגאולה. תפיסה חדשה זו של ההיסטוריה כתהליך חברתי ולא אלוהי עודדה אנשי רוח ויוצרים להפריד את הנראטיבים המקראיים מרעיונות של היסטוריה קבועה וידועה מראש. בהקשר זה, סופרים אמריקאים נטשו את הפרקטיקות הטיפולוגיות עליהן חונכו לטובת הסוגה החדשה של הרומן, שאפשרה להם להביע סמכות אישית, בדיונית ורגשית במקום תלות בתנ"ך כמקור בלעדי לידע והבנה. מחקר זה מתחקה אחר נוכחותו של התנ"ך וחשיבותו בספרות המאה התשע-עשרה על ידי התמקדות בעבודות שכתבו מחדש את סיפורי דוד המלך, דמות מרכזית בספרים שמואל א', שמואל ב' ומלכים א', ושהמסורת מייחסת לו גם את כתיבת ספר תהילים. דמותו של דוד משלבת תפקידים סותרים ושונים זה מזה – רועה צאן ולוחם, משורר ומאהב, מאמין באלוהים וחוטא מתייסר – ולכן היא משמשת מטונימיה לתפקיד התנ"ך בתרבות האמריקאית במאה התשע-עשרה, כאתר מקורי של יצירתיות ספרותית וכיסוד לאתוס הלאומי המעורער. סופרים נוצריים הדגישו את חשיבותו של דוד המלך כמבשר בן-דמותו )type( של ישו, הדומה למושיע הנוצרי ושונה ממנו בו-זמנית. כמו דמויות תנ"כיות רבות, דמותו של דוד בולטת במספר רב של טקסטים אמריקאיים המדגישים את תפקידו הדתי ואת כוחו הספרותי. באמריקה הקולוניאלית הוא מופיע בעיקר בדרשות ושירים, והפנָיות לספר תהילים שלו הן מן השורות המצוטטות ביותר בכתבים רבים; כמרים מזכירים שוב ושוב את סגולותיו של דוד בדרשותיהם ומעודדים את קהילותיהם לחקות את מעשיו. עם זאת, במאה התשע-עשרה דוד עובר מהפך ממודל דתי לדמות ספרותית. תכונותיו הסותרות של דוד משכו סופרים דתיים ופופולריים כאחד, שכתבו ביוגרפיות בדיוניות על חייו של דוד מחד, ועבודות פרוזה ושירה שרומזות לדמותו של דוד מאידך. סופרים מהמאה התשע-עשרה ששילבו בכתביהם נושאים מקראיים חיזקו את תפקיד התנ"ך כטקסט מקורי דתי תוך שעבודתם ערערה את מעמדו כמקור ספרותי ולאומי, ואת הרלוונטיות שלו ככזה. לפני המאה התשע-עשרה התנ"ך נתפס כנקודת מוצא לנראטיבים מגוונים של מקורות – ספרותיים, לאומיים ודתיים. פוליטיקאים, הוגים דתיים ומנהיגים מוקדמים השתמשו בתנ"ך כדי לזהות את אמריקה עם רעיון הקדמה, אותו הם ציירו כסדרה של צעדים היסטוריים שנקבעו מראש ונכתבו בתנ"ך. הנראטיבים הלאומיים האלו הציבו את המתיישבים החדשים באמריקה בתפקיד האומה הגואלת שנוסדה על ידי העם הנבחר המופקד על ייעוד אקספציונליסטי, והציגו את תולדות העולם כנגזרות מהחוויות האמריקאיות שהעניקו להן משמעות. אולם, במאה התשע-עשרה סופרים אמריקאים בחנו תיאוריות אלה, והציעו חלופות להם על ידי ניסויים שערכו בתצורות ונושאים ספרותיים. עבודותיהם פירקו הן את הקיבעון התרבותי של אמונה במקור חד-משמעי המגולם בטקסט יסוד אחד, והן את ההנחה כי מקורות הם בהכרח טקסטואליים. הטקסטים של המאה התשע-עשרה שעבודה זו חוקרת מקיימים דיאלוגים מורכבים עם אידיאולוגיית המקורות הפוריטנית-קולוניאלית. ייצוגים ספרותיים מקראיים רבים מן המאה התשע-עשרה מעידים על האופנים המגוונים בהם סופרים בחנו את תפקיד התנ"ך כמקור לאומי וספרותי תוך שביקרו את האמונה הרווחת לגבי קיומו של יסוד לאומי יחיד, ועוררו ספקות לגבי ערכם של נראטיבים מוחלטים. טקסטים אלה מעידים על מתח בין רעיון המקורות הטקסטואליים, לפיו טקסט אחד משמש בסיס לעיקרון אחר, לבין הדגשת מקוריותו של כל טקסט ספרותי שיצירתו מהווה אירוע חדש: ספרותי, היסטורי, או טמפורלי. דגשים אלה תואמים לוויכוח שהתרחש במקביל להם, ביחס למעמדה של אמריקה כאומה גואלת חדשה בהיסטוריה. ארבעת פרקי עבודה זו מנתחים יצירות נבחרות של סופרים מן המאה התשע-עשרה המתעמתים עם משמעות התנ"ך כנראטיב של מקורות. בעודם משמרים אמונה במעמדו המקודש והאלוהי של התנ"ך, סופרים ידועים כג'יימס פנימור קופר, נתניאל הות'ורן, הרמן מלוויל וקונסטנס פנימור וולסון, כמו גם סופרים ידועים פחות כשרה יואינג הול וג'וזף הולט אינגרהאם, כתבו יצירות בדיון שהשתמשו בתנ"ך תוך בדיקת מעמדו כמקור להיסטוריה לאומית וספרותית. חתרנות זו בוטאה בצורות שונות, החל מיצירת תוספות לנראטיבים מקראיים בעזרת תצורות חדשות, דרך ייצוג נראטיבים מקראיים בהקשר של ריבוי מקורות סותרים שערערו על סמכות של התנ"ך, בידודם של נראטיבים בדיוניים מטקסטים קודמים וממאגרי הידע המיושנים שליוו אותם, וכלה בהדגשת השלכותיה השליליות של דבקות עיקשת בשמירת האמונה ביצירת אומה מאוחדת שצמחה ממקור תנ"כי בלתי מעורער. יצירותיהם של סופרים אלה נבדלות זו מזו ברמיזותיהן לד ו ד התנ"כי ובייצוגיו, אך כולן מדגישות את חשיבות החיפוש אחר חלופות לפרשנויות טיפולוגיות לאירועים בהווה, וכתוצאה מכך גם בעבר ובעתיד. הפרק הראשון מתמקד ביצירותיהם של חמישה סופרים לא-קאנוניים ששאבו השראה מהתנ"ך מחד ומהרומן מאידך. טקסטים אלה שייכים לסוגה הספרותית של סיפורת תנ"כית, שנכתבה על ידי סופרים רבים )גברים, נשים, כמרים ומנהיגים דתיים, מחנכים, כמו גם כותבים לא מקצועיים(, שעיבודיהם לסיפורי דוד המלך שאלו היבטים של הרומן תוך שהביעו אמביוולנטיות לגבי מעמד התנ"ך כמקור קדוש ומושלם. בפרק זה אני מנתחת סיפורים על דוד המלך שכתבו שרה יואינג הול )1830-1761(, מרי אן )בראון( הוקר )1838-1796(, סמואל גלאודט )1851-1787(, הוראס הוקר )1864-1793(, ג'וזף הולט אינגרהאם )1860-1809( וצ'רלס ביצ'ר )1900-1815(. מחברים אלה ראו בתנ"ך מקור ספרותי ואידיאולוגי חיוני, בעוד עבודותיהם מייצגות אותו בו-זמנית כטקסט לקוי הזקוק לתוספת. לכן, בעוד שהם ניסו להפוך את התנ"ך לנגיש יותר עבור קוראיהם, ערערו סופרים אלה את מעמדו המקודש. גישות מתקדמות המערערות את ההשראה התנ"כית לנרטיב המקורות הלאומי, ובמיוחד לגבי האמונה שהמציאות במאה התשע-עשרה נוצרה בעבר תנ"כי ועתידה להגיע לשיאה בעתיד צפוי מראש, באות לידי ביטוי במעבר הספרותי מן הדוקטרינה הטיפולוגית הנוקשה אל אופיו האמביוולנטי וההתפתחותי של הרומן. פרק זה משלב שאלות על מקורות לאומיים עם החיפוש אחר צורות ספרותיות הולמות ורלוונטיות, ומדגיש את כוחה של הספרות לפצות על חסרים בחשיבה ההיסטורית הדתית. העיבודים הבדיוניים של סופרים אלו לסיפורי התנ"ך מפנה את תשומת הלב לאופי המבני והחליפי של מקורות וצורות כאחד, המערער את הסמכות והאותנטיות של התנ"ך שהם עצמם ביקשו לקיים. תת-סוגה זו של סיפורת תנ"כית, העמוסה בתיאורים מעורבים של שפה ודימויים דתיים וחילוניים, משמשת כתוספת המערערת על ייחודו של המקור, גם כשהיא תורמת לשינוי תרבותי שמדגיש את הפופולריות של סיפורי התנ"ך ונושאיהם. כמו הכותבים הלא-קאנוניים, גם כותבים קאנוניים חשבו מחדש על תפקיד התנ"ך ביחס לאומה ולספרותה, אך טקסטים קאנוניים מתייחסים לנראטיבים של דוד ולתנ"ך בשיטות חמקמקות ועקיפות יותר. בניגוד לסיפורת התנ"כית שתוארה בפרק הראשון, הרומן כצורה ספרותית מובחרת אפשר חשיבה מחודשת על תפקוד התנ"ך כמקור ספרותי וחברתי. העלילות המורכבות והמרובות של הרומן, הדגשותיו את הניגודים והיחסים בין ייצוג ומציאות, ביקורתו על עמדות חברתיות, והתמקדותו בפרט, פעולותיו, התפתחותו ואופיו אפשרו לסופרים לבחון באור חדש את סיפורי התנ"ך. הפרק השני, שלישי ורביעי מתבוננים ביצירות אחרון המוהיקנים )1826( של ג'יימס פנימור קופר, אות השני )1850( של נתניאל הות'ורן, והנובלה בילי באד, מלח של הרמן מלוויל )1888-1(, המשלבות את התנ"ך בהיסטוריות האמריקאיות הבדיוניות שלהן כדי לבקר תפיסות היסטוריות אקספציונליסטיות. סיפורי דוד המלך מחדדים את העמדות ההיסטוריות של רומנים אלו, המדגישים את תפיסתם הרוויזיוניסטית לגבי התנ"ך כמקור להיסטוריה וזהות לאומית. בדומה לסופרים של סיפורת תנ"כית, גם סופרים אלה דוחים את הטיפולוגיה בדרכים שונות. הפרק השני בוחן כיצד קופר מסלף את הפרשנות הטיפולוגית לתנ"ך ולהיסטוריה באפיון פארודי בדמותו של דייויד גאמוט, המתואר לצד נרטיב של מקורות ילידי אמריקאי המיוחס לטבע ולשממה. אחרון המוהיקנים מציג את הנרטיבים המתחרים הללו ומכחיש את שניהם, כשהוא מציע את הרומן ההיסטורי של קופר כנרטיב של התחלות, הרלוונטי יותר עבור האומה האמריקנית שלאחר המהפכה. הפרק השלישי עוסק בסיפורו של הות'ורן ובדרך בה הוא מתנגד למבנים הגנאלוגיים המייצרים את החשיבה הטיפולוגית. בתיאור שטיח הקיר בחדרו של ארתור דימסדייל, שמתייחס לפרשת דוד ובת שבע, הוא מעלה רמז נסתר לסיפור המקראי של יהודה ותמר. הדגש של אות השני על ההווה כפרק זמן היוצר אפקט מתנגד לידע המוגבל והגנאולוגי המיוחס לתנ"ך באמצעות מסגרות טיפולוגיות. לבסוף, הפרק הרביעי מתאר איך מלוויל מחליף את הקריאות הטיפולוגיות בקריאתו האלגורית של בילי באד כדמות של דוד, הנוקטת באלימות הכרחית כדי לקיים סדר אזרחי. בילי באד, מלח מגיב למטרה הפרדוקסלית של מלחמת האזרחים לשמירת האחדות, על ידי ביטול האפשרות של יצירת אחדות כזו, הבנה המחוזקת על ידי שיטת הפרשנות האלגורית המתנגדת לאחדות ולכידות. שיטות שונות אלו של דחיית הטיפולוגיה מציינות כל אחת מהן היבט שהן מזהות כמרכזיות למסגרת הפרשנית הטיפולוגית: קופר מזהה את חוסר ההתאמה של התנ"ך עם מרחב היסטורי מסוים; הות'ורן מבטל את המבנים הזמניים של טיפולוגיה; ומלוויל, יחד עם סיפורה של קונסטנס פנימור וולסון, "המלך דוד" )1878(, שנידון בפרק סיכום העבודה, מתנגדים להיבטים הפרשניים והחברתיים של הטיפולוגיה. כל אחד מהם מפריך באופן עצמאי את ההשלכות של היצמדות לנרטיב תנ"כי מקורי, ומבקר ניסיונות של בני-זמנם ליצור זהות לאומית קוהרנטית והיסטוריה באמצעות מקור כזה. הטקסטים המנותחים בעבודת הדוקטורט הזו – שנכתבו על ידי אינגרהם וכותבי הסיפורת התנ"כית, קופר, הות'ורן, מלוויל ו-וולסון – מקדמים הגדרה של מקורות כהבניות על ידי הדגשת קריאות אלטרנטיביות ולא-טיפולוגיות של התנ"ך, הדורשות חשיבה מחודשת על תהליכים היסטוריים. בהתנגדותם למוסכמויות הנוגעות לתפקידיו הלאומיים והספרותיים של התנ"ך, סופרים אלו דוחים תפיסה של התנ"ך כמקור בלתי מעורער של האומה וספרותה, ונצמדים לתפקידו היחיד והדתי של התנ"ך במאה התשע-עשרה בארצות הברית. באמצעות תהליכים של התווספות, מיתולוגיזציה, מחיקה ואלגוריה סופרים אלו מבקרים תפיסות היסטוריות וספרותיות טיפולוגיות המנסות למזג מקורות לאומיים וספרותיים. על ידי ביטול תפיסות לאומיות של התנ"ך, מחברים אלה מייצרים בחינה מחודשת של משמעות התנ"ך בתרבות הספרותית של המאה התשע-עשרה, ממחישים את חוסר יכולתו לבסס נרטיב של מקורות לאומי מתמיד ומקיף, ובמקום זאת מדגישים את חשיבותו הספרותי כמשמעותי להבנת האופן שבו מקורות וטקסטים פועלים בחברה ובתרבות.

מילות מפתח: תנ"ך; המאה התשע עשרה; ספרות אמריקאית; טיפולוגיה; דוד המלך; מקורות )נרטיבים של(; תודעה היסטורית; רֹומָ ן; אּומָ ה; קופר, ג'יימס פנימור; הות'ורן, נת'ניאל; מלוויל, הרמן; וולסון, קונסטנס פנימור; הול, שרה יואינג; הוקר, מרי אן )בראון(; גלאודט, תומאס; הוקר, הוראס; אינגרהם, ג'וזף הולט; ביצ'ר, צ'רלס

Table of Contents

Abstract 1

Introduction The Hebrew Bible, Typology and Originary Narratives in American Literature 7

Chapter 1 Between Divine Inspiration and Human Authorship: The King David of Nineteenth-Century Biblical Fiction 28

Chapter 2 Competing with Nature: Vanishing Biblical Origins in The Last of the Mohicans 68

Chapter 3 The Figure in the Tapestry: The Non-Derivative Scarlet Letter and the Affective Potentiality of the Present 93

Chapter 4 Violent Forms and Allegorical Origins in Billy Budd, Sailor 116

Conclusion “Reading an Unseen Book:” “King David” and the Failure of Typology in Nineteenth-Century American Literature 139

Works Cited 153

1

Abstract

From writings by the early seventeenth-century colonists through eighteenth and even nineteenth-century texts, the Hebrew Bible is ubiquitous. It was not only read, but also taught, quoted, printed and represented in literature and other art forms, serving as a religious and literary source for understanding events and historical processes, as well as human nature, virtues and values. The Hebrew Bible is frequently represented in early American literature through typology, a form of biblical interpretation which understood Hebrew Bible events and characters as prefiguring those of the New Testament. This practice enabled early American writers to understand the Hebrew Bible’s historical function as a narrative of national origins linking the budding American nation with the biblical past and with biblically-foreshadowed future salvation. However, scholars have yet to provide a comprehensive account of the Hebrew Bible’s changing uses in nineteenth-century American literature and the shift away from typological interpretations. In order to amend this critical neglect, this dissertation links these two developments, examining the conflicting methods nineteenth-century writers employed to represent Hebrew Bible stories. It demonstrates how such representations reveal a breach in this national narrative of Biblical inspiration, specifically in perceptions of the Bible as presumably undisputed national origin. I argue that a new conception of national narratives and national origins is reflected in the non-typological representations of the biblical King David stories that nineteenth-century writers chose to recreate. Early Christian exegetes appropriated the typological interpretative system, which originated as a messianic Jewish exegetical practice, to include the future fulfillment of New Testament predictions. They aimed to unite and reconcile the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, and to ground Christian history in an earlier text and culture. As critics have shown, typological exegesis was a popular tool in early American Puritan writings, functioning not only as a biblical exegetical mode, but also as historical framework. Early colonists understood every event—individual and collective—as reflecting some scriptural prefiguration, which bolstered their self-perception as God’s new chosen people. They accordingly deemed their colonizing mission as a spiritual endeavor destined to conquer the American continent and do God’s work on earth by creating a holy nation. This interpretive system shaped social institutions while simultaneously promoting an exceptionalist view of American history, in which national progress and modernization was perceived to manifest a divinely-designated historical plan. 2

The nineteenth century saw the break with, challenge to, and even denial of this traditional acceptance of the perennial contract and covenant between God and the American people. Rapid changes in post-revolutionary society and emerging debates about race, slavery, native rights and social injustices that culminated in the Civil War raised uncertainty regarding the covenant and its durability; this uncertainty had a significant impact on understandings of historical processes. New religious creeds and reformed and liberal religious denominations advocated a post-Calvinist history of social progress that presupposed no divine promise, but emphasized individual responsibility for redemption and progress. This new perception of history as a social rather than divine process is reflected in the detachment of Biblical narratives from ideas of predestined history as US writers abandoned typological forms in favor of the novel, which expressed individual authority, fictionality and affect. In order to study the Hebrew Bible’s presence and significance in nineteenth-century literature, this research focuses on literary reconstructions of the biblical accounts of King David, a central character chronicled in the Hebrew Bible's books of Samuel I, Samuel II, and Kings I; David is also traditionally seen as the author of the Psalms. David’s character as a convergence of various conflicting roles is metonymic of the role I argue the Hebrew Bible played in nineteenth-century American culture: an originary site of both literary creativity and national founding. Christian writers have emphasized King David’s significance as a Hebrew Bible precursor and type of Jesus Christ, similar to but somewhat lacking by comparison to the Christian savior. Like many biblical characters, David figures prominently in numerous American texts that emphasize his religious role and literary allure. In colonial America, he appears predominantly in sermons and poems, and references to his Psalms are among the most frequently quoted lines in diverse writings; ministers repeatedly reference David’s virtues, encouraging their congregations to emulate his deeds. However, in the nineteenth century David is transformed from religious role model to literary figure. David's contradictory character traits—shepherd and warrior, poet and lover, devout man of God and penitent sinner—attracted numerous religious and popular writers who produced fictional biographies of David's life, on the one hand, and works of prose and poetry that interweaved sparse allusions to David, on the other. This combination of qualities makes him an especially resonant figure for considering national origins, an analysis that has surprisingly evaded scholarship. 3

Nineteenth-century writers who incorporated biblical themes simultaneously sustained the Bible’s role as a religious originary narrative and questioned its status and relevance as a literary and national one. Before the nineteenth century, the Bible was perceived as encapsulating multiple origins—literary, national, and religious. Synthesizing religious and political originary narratives, early American politicians, religious thinkers, and other leaders used the Hebrew Bible to equate America with a sense of progress they understood as a series of preordained historical steps prophesied by the Hebrew Bible. These national narratives designated America as a redeemer nation founded by a chosen people entrusted with an exceptional destiny; world history was construed as relying on and revolving around the American experience. In the nineteenth-century, however, U.S. writers revised these theories of origins by experimenting with various literary forms and subjects, deconstructing not only the fixation on a univocal origin embodied in a single foundational text, but also presuppositions about the significance of origins. The nineteenth-century texts that Not That Type explores are in dialogue with the colonial Puritan conception of origins. Myriad biblical literary representations of the period reconsider the Hebrew Bible as a national and literary origin, questioning conventional faith in a single national foundation, and raising doubts regarding the value of originary narratives. These texts reflect a tension between the idea of authoritative textual origins, whereby one text serves as the foundation for another, and the idea of originality, which implies that any given literary text constitutes a new literary, historical, or temporal event. The tension between these two views of literary creation corresponds to a debate regarding the status of America as a new nation. The four chapters of this dissertation analyze select works by nineteenth-century writers who contest the Hebrew Bible’s previously assigned significance as a narrative of origins. Writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Constance Fenimore Woolson, along with lesser known writers, offer fictional representations that vary in the degree to which they refer to the Bible as the originary site of a national and literary history, while retaining a reverence for its divinely-inspired status. These subversions of Biblical authority take various forms, including the supplementation of the biblical narratives with new forms; the alignment of the biblical narratives within a multiplicity of conflicting origins which undermine the Hebrew Bible’s authority; the distancing of fictional narratives from past texts and what is framed as antiquated knowledge; and the critique of a stubborn belief in a unified 4 nation that emerged from an unquestioned Biblical predecessor. These authors differ in their allusions to and treatment of the biblical David, but share a common, tacit agenda of providing alternatives to typological interpretations of the present—and by implication, of the past and future too. The first chapter focuses on the works of five non-canonical writers whose fictions were inspired by the Hebrew Bible on the one hand, and by the novel form on the other. These texts comprise the genre of biblical fiction, which was written by numerous writers (men, women, ministers and religious leaders, educators, and laypersons) whose revisions of the Hebrew Bible’s David narratives borrowed aspects of the novel while displaying their deep ambivalence regarding the Bible as sacred, perfect origin. I analyze stories of King David written by Sarah Ewing Hall (1761-1830), Mary Ann (Brown) Hooker (1796-1838), Samuel Gallaudet (1787- 1851), Horace Hooker (1793-1864), Joseph Holt Ingraham (1809-1860) and Charles Beecher (1815-1900). These authors viewed the Hebrew Bible as an indispensable, sacred literary and ideological source; yet their works simultaneously represented it as a deficient text in need of supplementation. By attempting to make the Hebrew Bible more accessible for their readers, they tacitly undermined its sacred originating status. This literary shift from rigid typological doctrine to the ambivalently secular nature of the novel replicates reformed approaches to the biblically-inspired belief that the nineteenth-century present originated in a biblical past and would culminate in a foreordained future. This chapter suggests that many nineteenth-century writers integrated questions regarding the nation’s origins into their pursuit of adequate, relevant literary forms, while it similarly stresses literature’s power to compensate for a deficiency in religious historical thinking. These authors created fictional adaptations of Biblical stories in a way that calls attention to the constructedness and interchangeability of both origins and forms, undermining the authority and authenticity of the Hebrew Bible they sought to sustain. This sub-genre of Hebrew Biblical fiction, laden with blended depictions of both sacred and earthly language and imagery, acts as a supplement that undermines the original even as it contributes to a cultural transformation that popularizes the Hebrew Bible’s themes and narratives. Both canonical and non-canonical writers were preoccupied with rethinking the role of the Hebrew Bible in relation to the nation and its literature, but canonical texts reference the David narratives in particular in ways that are both more allusive and more oblique than Biblical 5 fiction. Unlike the fictions studied in Chapter 1, the novel as a distinct literary form enabled this nuanced reconsideration of the Hebrew Bible’s function as a literary and social origin, a status the novel earned thanks to (1) its multiple, complex plots, (2) its emphases on representation and reality, (3) its critique of social attitudes, and (4) its focus on individual action, development, and character. This dissertation suggests that James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), and Melville’s novella Billy Budd, Sailor (1890-1), interweave the Hebrew Bible into the fictional American histories they narrate in order to critique exceptionalist perceptions of these histories. These three novels all use the David chronicles to clarify their revisionary perceptions of the Hebrew Bible as an originator of national history and identity. Like the writers of biblical fiction, these writers reject typology in different ways. Cooper parodies biblical and historical typological interpretations in the character of David Gamut, who is juxtaposed with characters that emblematize a Native American originary narrative, associated with the wilderness. The Last of the Mohicans aligns competing narratives—one originating in the Hebrew Bible and the other in nature—and repudiates them both, offering Cooper’s historical novel as a more relevant narrative of beginnings for the post-revolutionary American nation. Next, I anchor my reading of the way Hawthorne opposes the genealogical constructions of typological thinking by analyzing a neglected description of a tapestry in Dimmesdale’s room. This tapestry references the affair of David and Bathsheba, while obliquely alluding as well to the similar biblical tale of Judah and Tamar—a tale with direct relevance to the plot and themes of Hawthorne’s novel. The Scarlet Letter’s emphasis on the present as a time that produces affect, significant interpersonal human experiences, defies the constrained and genealogical knowledge ascribed to the Hebrew Bible through typological frameworks. Lastly, I show that Melville subverts typological readings in his allegorical representation of Billy Budd as a David figure who resorts to necessary violence to uphold civil order. Billy Budd, Sailor responds to the Civil War’s paradoxical goal of preserving unity by disclaiming the possibility of creating such unity, an understanding reinforced by the allegorical method of interpretation which resists cohesion. Each author’s different method of rejecting typology indicates an aspect he finds central to the typological interpretative framework: Cooper identifies the Hebrew Bible’s incompatibility with a specific historical space; Hawthorne dismisses the temporal constructions of typology; and Melville, along with Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “King David” (1878) 6 discussed in my conclusion, resists the interpretative and social aspects of typology. Thus each one refutes the implications of adhering to an original biblical narrative, and critiques contemporaneous attempts at creating a coherent national identity and history through such an origin. The texts analyzed in this dissertation—by Ingraham and the writers of biblical fiction, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, and Woolson—all promote an understanding of origins as constructs, by emphasizing alternative, non-typological readings of the Hebrew Bible, which demand new considerations of historical processes. Dismissing conventional assumptions regarding the Hebrew Bible’s national and literary roles, these multiple rejections of the Bible as undisputed origin of the nation and its literature insist on the Bible’s solely religious function in nineteenth century United States. Through a process of supplementation, mythologizing, erasure, and allegory, these authors critique typological historical and literary perceptions that conflate national and literary origins. By denationalizing the Hebrew Bible, these writers evince nuanced reconsiderations of the Hebrew Bible’s significance in nineteenth-century literary culture, highlight its inability to construct an enduring and all-encompassing national narrative of origins, and underscore its broad literary import for comprehending how origins and texts function in society and culture.

Keywords: Hebrew Bible; nineteenth century; American literature; typology; King David; origins (narratives of); historical consciousness; novel; nation; Cooper, James Fenimore; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Melville, Herman; Woolson, Constance Fenimore; Hall, Sarah Ewing; Hooker, Mary Ann (Brown); Gallaudet, Thomas; Hooker, Horace; Ingraham, Joseph Holt; Beecher, Charles

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Introduction The Hebrew Bible, Typology, and Originary Narratives in American Literature When I began working on my dissertation in September 2012, Sarah Rivett proposed a premise that is still very much alive and of concern to critics and laypeople alike. “As the question of the United States’ future has come to the fore of public debates,” Rivett began, writing in Early American Literature, “a reconsideration of its origins seems not only appropriate to the times we are living in but perhaps also essential for Americanists” (391). Rivett’s call to reconsider the nation’s origins appeared after a lapse in the critical attempt to gain a clearer understanding of the country’s future; the repeatedly returned to the nation’s origins—historical, religious and literary—in order to analyze and comment on current events and future policies. This critical trend has been around since early American colonists, writers, and leaders sought to document the history and idea of “America” by looking both forward and backwards. John Winthrop’s published journal, The History of New England from 1630 to 1649 (published 1790) and Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) are but two examples of numerous early American works that record the history of the colonies, bracketed within a history reaching back to, and grounded in, the biblical narrative.1 Historians, ministers and others continue to resort to this strategy well into the nineteenth century. This dissertation focuses on the nineteenth century as an era in which religious thinkers and other commentators begin to question the Bible’s status as the conventionally accepted origin of the nation’s history by producing works of literature that represent, allude to, and revise Hebrew Biblical narratives in a manner that reflects their growing concerns, unease, or disagreement with the meanings of this origin. By so doing, they question the significance and authority of origins as a defining concept of national narratives. The Hebrew Bible, a collection of books which depicts the formation of origins, functions at once as a religious, cultural, and social origin for groups that identify themselves in these narratives. The first of these books, the Pentateuch (Torah) commences with the creation of the world by distinguishing the creator from his creation, continuing with the formation of the

1 See, for example, Abram C. Van Engen’s essay on Winthrop’s use of the Geneva Bible in writing American history, and Lindsay DiCuirci for an account of nineteenth century historians’ reconciliation with Puritan history.

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Hebrews, and culminating with the establishment of the Mosaic law and traditions. Subsequent Christian traditions sought to elevate the New Testament’s originary status by rereading the Hebrew Bible as a text whose meaning and truth depended on its reincarnation and fulfillment in the New Testament.2 Throughout this dissertation, I will refer to the canonical group of Jewish texts (the Tanakh) as the Hebrew Bible or Scripture, except when I intend to clarify a distinction in the Christian tradition between the New and Old Testament. Christian Exegetes interpreted the Hebrew Bible as a work-in-progress that remained meaningless when read in isolation from the New Testament. Thus incorporated into Christianity, the Hebrew Bible’s influence on Western culture has corresponded and at times superseded that of the New Testament. Furthermore, when the early Puritan settlers colonized North America, they used the Hebrew Bible as a defining force for their emerging society. It would be an understatement to call the Hebrew Bible a significant book in American culture—it was the text that most shaped early American society, its religious beliefs, civil institutions, and social norms.3 Consider, for example, John Winthrop’s “City Upon a Hill” sermon on board the Arabella, where he cites from both Testaments to substantiate his message of communal obedience to God while employing unmistakably Hebraic tone and imagery that continue to resonate in American literature and culture until this very day: the recurring image of the ancient Israelites “pass[ing] over the sea to possess” North American lands and build there an unprecedented Christian government.4 The Hebrew Bible with its themes, structure, imagery and tones, flourished in early American Literature and contributed to a Hebraic culture that rapidly spread across the continent.5 It also helped engender the American exceptionalist consciousness through which early Americans perceived of themselves as partaking in the construction of a unique nation,

2 For a clear and solid review of the unification of the Hebrew Bible with the Christian texts in Christian tradition, see Lieu’s essay in Mitchell and Young’s The Cambridge History of Christianity.

3 See for example Reynolds, Faith in Fiction, and Gutjahr, American Bible, for an analysis of biblical reading practices and reception in the US.

4 Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” 217.

5 Among the literary devices influenced by the Hebrew Bible, the Jeremiad, the sermonic text, and psalmody are prominent examples that had cultural and political influence. See works by Sacvan Bercovitch, Robert Alter, Martin Kevorkian, and Dawn Coleman as studies that examine biblical influences on literary and cultural forms.

9 successors to the ancient Israelites, entrusted with the task of spreading God’s word throughout the nations. My research explores representations of the Hebrew Bible in nineteenth-century American literature, and analyzes the function of such usage, focusing on the departure of a newly conceived body of texts from the typological logic that dominated comparable representations during the colonial period and in the early republic. This research is indebted to and contextualized within post-secular theory in American literary studies, which repositions religious trends alongside secular ones. This school of thought validates the cross-fertilization of literary and historical contexts over time and enables this study to find common ground among seemingly contrasting literary and generic representations of the Hebrew Bible. I focus on non- typological representations of the biblical figure of King David, whose image was widely reproduced in fiction but has barely been studied. I analyze representations of King David not only in canonical works by James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville but also in fictional biblical biographies by a plethora of less canonical writers. Not That Type proposes that all these portrayals of King David evince altered understandings of the relations between past and future events and changing perspectives on the meaning and role of the Hebrew Bible as an origin of American history, literature, and national identity.

A Religious Errand into the Wilderness: From Puritanism to Post-Secularism I begin this introduction by briefly contextualizing the methodology of this dissertation in post-secular theory and practice. As Americanist scholars have recently documented, while cultural critics and researchers of American studies have never abandoned the study of religion in American culture, history and society, scholars of American literary studies struggle with varying and conflicting attitudes towards the subject. The scholarly discomfort can be linked to the field’s origins: Perry Miller was one of the first scholars, in the 1940s and 50s, to identify Puritanism as a coherent body of thought essential to the formation of the American exceptionalism.6 Sacvan Bercovitch continued this process in the 1970s and 1980s—most notably in The Puritan Origins of the American Self—by bridging the seventeenth and nineteenth

6 Though it should be noted that Miller is not explaining a theory of religion, but rather an account of American culture; see especially Murison and Stein, as well as Deborah Madsen’s American Exceptionalism.

10 centuries as part of a continuous construction of a unique vision of history in which believers understood their lives as recapitulating fulfillments of Christ’s life within a typological scriptural historical consciousness. The Puritan ideology that generated American exceptionalism is rooted in strategies for the simultaneous interpretation of texts and historical developments. Rivett argues, following Bercovitch, that seductive rhetorical forms of national exceptionalism are “sustained by typology, allegory and a commitment to biblical inerrancy and scriptural precedent” (399). She identifies key concepts from Bercovitch’s reading of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) as constitutive features of American identity and culture. Most relevant to my study is her attention to the way rhetoric is presented as reality in American through the “revelatory force of reading the world in types.” Rivett describes this Puritan reading method as antithetical to scholarly practices today: while academics “are trained to perceive literary form and style as a departure from a pure, mimetic relationship to history, the Puritans used style and form to create a hermeneutic of reading that read history out of allegory” (400). Rivett thus attempts to define the academic discomfort with Puritan reading strategies, and academic discomfort with the American religious literary culture engendered by these strategies. Given the post-structural and post-multi-cultural nature of literary studies towards the close of the twentieth century, Americanists strove to dismantle the cohesive theory of origins outlined by Miller and Bercovich and the exceptionalist history it entails. Ironically, during these years, a heightened version of this narrative of origins appeared within the non-academic and popular culture—a purportedly secular, modern society. This trend rekindled American studies scholars’ interest in religion and attempted to explain how “Puritanism belongs to a historical trajectory that is commensurate and contemporaneous with, rather than antithetical and prior to, the Enlightenment” (397).7 Theorists used to regard the secular as the natural process which overtakes religion in a “rationalized” age—what Charles Taylor famously describes as the “subtraction narrative of secularism.”8 These secularist notions implied that as society progressed, religion would slowly disappear from the world. But post-secular scholars are establishing narratives of American religious and literary history by looking back critically at the concept of origins, refusing to take theories of modernity as an inevitable outcome, in essence

7 Rivett, 397.

8 A Secular Age, 314.

11 dissecting exceptionalist notions at the outset. Tracy Fessenden’s Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Culture (2007), for example, interprets reductive understandings of secularism as the absence of faith, demonstrating how the fiction of secularity established by Protestant hegemony aligns secularism as contemporaneous with—rather than antithetical to—Protestantism. Fessenden’s and other post-secular theorists have crucially facilitated my understanding of the Hebrew Bible as operating in different directions at the same time, as a literary-cultural product shedding its secular national function while still retaining its religious significance. By reconsidering both religious and secular understandings of origins and history, and by focusing on examples of secular texts in dialogue with the Hebrew Bible, my research reinstates aspects of the secular alongside those of religious thought rather than segregating them. Scholars repeatedly point to early American writers’ attempts at installing the Hebrew Bible as the original literary and theological foundation of the American nation. Such attempts to unify the American people by creating a national history linked to the Biblical text begin to disintegrate in the nineteenth century. Current academic consensus regarding the artificiality of the nation, devoid of a single national narrative and identity, impels scholars to revisit early writers who sought to identify the origins of American history in the Hebrew Bible in order to instill a common, unified American character. By highlighting nineteenth-century departures from this dominant line of thought—evident in biblical exegesis and corresponding to new literary genres and paradigms—I hope that Not That Type will answer Stein and Murison’s recent call for new methodologies for the study of religion.9 I suggest that this reevaluation of literary typology, amidst these revised considerations of religion and religious texts, on the one hand, and recent explorations of temporality and historical processes, on the other, will contribute to a richer understanding of the Hebrew Bible’s function in American literature—beginning in the nineteenth century, and most certainly affecting trends and transformations occurring in our present day.

9 Stein and Murison’s 2010 introduction to an Early American Literature issue they co-edited is dedicated to unfolding the complexities of the intersection between “religion” and “method.”

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“Make David Thy Pattern”: Of Messiahs and Muses As a case study of nineteenth-century references to the Bible, this research focuses on literary interpretations of biblical accounts of King David, a central character chronicled in the Hebrew Bible's books of Samuel I, Samuel II, and Kings I, and traditionally ascribed the authorship of the Psalms as well. Christian writers have emphasized King David’s significance as what eighteenth-century Calvinist Minister Samuel Mather deemed "the Type and Progenitor of the Messiah” whose “Kingdom [was] a Type of the Kingdom of Christ" (Mather 39). Within the typological framework of types and anti-types (discussed below), David stands out as a Hebrew Bible precursor of Jesus Christ whose attributes are similar to but somewhat lacking by comparison to the Christian savior. First, according to traditional genealogical thought, Jesus descended from the house of David and his tribe of Judah; both David and Jesus were born in Bethlehem and destined to royalty. Second, biblical prophecies and Jewish interpretations name an heir to the Davidic lineage as the future messiah (mashiach) who will rule the Jewish people and bring about a Messianic age. Similarly, the Christian translation of “Messiah” is Christ (of Greek origin), intimating the fulfillment of the biblical prophecies in the character of Jesus, in his life, death, and resurrection. But while David and Jesus share leadership qualities and destinies, Christian tradition highlights two major differences between them: unlike David, Jesus never sinned, and David died an earthly, natural death that differentiated him as mortal from the son of God.10 Like many biblical characters, David figures prominently in various American texts that emphasize both his religious role and literary allure. The centrality of the David story in early American literature is evident in such texts as the preface to the Bay Psalm Book (1640), which established David as a Christ-type by asserting that "if the singing of David’s psalms be a moral duty and therefore perpetual; then we under the New Testament are bound to sing them as well as they under the old" (29, emphases in text). Raymond-Jean Frontain asserts in his The King David Myth in Western Literature that “[a]fter Christ,” David is “the most important figure in the literature of colonial Puritan America, appearing in a countless number of sermons, poems, and

10 For more on David’s role in Christian tradition, see Porter’s Dictionary of Biblical Criticism and Interpretation and Alter’s The Story of David.

13 devotions” (5). Marie L. Ahearn shows that Puritan sermons encouraged the colonial soldier through David’s military “example,” quoting from David’s scriptural training of the men of Judah in combat as well as his elegies. Ahearn draws from many sermons across the colonies, such as this excerpt from a sermon by the Rev. John Richardson of Newberry, Massachusetts: “Be much and as often as you can upon these Exercises; Use makes perfectness or Expertness: Thou canst not be too exact in this Art military, make David thy pattern” (quoted in Ahearn, 109). Interestingly, David’s military role is detached from his political one, which figured prominently in seventeenth-century English writings, with John Dryden’s 1681 political satire Absalom and Achitophel igniting heated public debates about the monarchy.11 This difference in emphases might be read as a budding colonial resistance foreshadowing the eighteenth-century anti-monarchist revolutionary movement. In America, David becomes a literary figure (rather than a role model) only in the early nineteenth century. In this period David's contradictory character traits—shepherd and warrior, poet and lover, devout man of God and penitent sinner—attracted numerous religious and popular writers who produced both fictional biographies of David's life, and prose or poetry that allude only briefly to the Biblical narratives of David. Frontain concludes that it is “the extraordinary depth and suggestiveness of the David figure which allows him to mean such different things to so many different readers. … [H]e is the symbol of the complexity and ambiguity of human experience itself” (5). This complexity had been captured in earlier English literary texts such as Andrew Marvell’s analogy between David’s “sword and harpe” and Cromwell.12 The idea of a political or military leader engaged in music and poetry fascinated writers and artists both of the English Renaissance and Modern periods. Consequently, nineteenth-century American writers adapted these Modern English trends and also turned to David’s character for his traditional role as author of the psalms as well as his association with music (such as his playing the harp and the scriptural passages referring to music that accompanied religious worship and temple services). David thus functions as figure of political and literary origins—a model of leadership as well as a muse.

11 See Frontain and Wojcik, as well as Robert Kilgore’s essay. Kilgore argues that Milton attempted to mitigate David’s military and royal example which the Stuart regime idealized and emulated.

12 See the Introduction to Frontain and Wojcik’s study.

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David’s character as a convergence of various and conflicting roles is metonymic of the role I argue the Hebrew Bible played in American culture: an originary site of both literary creativity and national founding. As I proceed to explain, the typological method of biblical interpretation and its subsequent expression in works of early American literature highlight the interdependence between the literary and national functions of the Hebrew Bible. Only in the nineteenth century do writers begin to rethink the relation between both functions, challenging the typological practice that had consolidated an understanding of the two concepts as inherently and naturally interconnected.

Typological Interpretations of the Hebrew Bible in Early American Literature Historians and literary scholars traditionally analyze the Hebrew Bible’s role in early American writings through the typological method of biblical interpretation, an exegetical system whereby biblical textuality functions as the pattern of history. The practice of reading scripture typologically dates back to the early days of the Christian church. Thomas M. Davis explains how the origin of the type derives from "Hebrew Scripture and the Messianic traditions of prophecy," encapsulated in the belief that "a new Messiah would come” to usher in “a new Exodus, a new Jerusalem, a new and eternal covenant, and the final deliverance of God's people from their enemies" (13). Early Christian ministers relied on this Jewish interpretive system, anticipating a future fulfillment and reconstruction of a past historical event, focusing most importantly on the coming of a future Messiah who would be "greater than David" (13). To attain unity and reconciliation between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, these Christian exegetes read Hebrew Bible events as prefiguring those of the Christian one, as Augustine famously stated: "In the Old Testament the New is concealed and in the New the Old is revealed".13 This view, upheld by Origen and early Church fathers as well, advocates not only using the Old Testament as the foundation of the Christian religion but also understanding the Old Testament as “harmoniously foreshadowing the New” (Kaplan 23). The term type, or typos, derived from the Greek word τυπος, has many equivalents in the exegetical literature of the Church Fathers. References to "shadows," "similitudes," and "figures"

13 “Novum Testamentum in Vetere latet, Vetus in Novo patet” (Quaesiones in Hepatateuchum 2.73). This famous saying is traditionally traced to Augustine, see Harmless’ Augustine and the Catechumenate.

15 often refer to typological relations between a Biblical event or person and their earthly representation. However, these need to be carefully distinguished from "allegory," a biblical hermeneutic that, as theorists repeatedly stress, is a separate form of interpretation and which produces the opposite effect: while typology stresses similarities and fulfillment between two elements, allegory emphasizes incompatibility and inconsistency.14 One medieval theory of biblical interpretation, attributed to Origen, suggests that each scriptural passage has four levels of meaning: literal, allegorical (a term that signals the early conflation of allegory and typology), moral or tropological, and anagogical.15 This system, known as the quadriga, flourished during the Middle Ages, but was abandoned with the Lutheran reformation, which advocated a literal, historically verifiable approach to scripture. This, in turn, singled out and emphasized the validity of the typological approach, which, as Calvin proclaimed, is consistent with the "true" meaning of the biblical text and represents "true prophecy, albeit shadowy and somewhat obscure" (Puckett 114). The typological system of interpretation is sometimes symbolized as a mirror, a picture of a present situation which offers the viewer a representation of a future unfolding. In his foundational The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, Northrop Frye reads the Bible as a literary critic and examines the mutual relationship between literature and biblical scholarship. In his analysis of typology, he explains that the writers of the Christian Bible did more than simply “regard the Old Testament as a source of anticipations of the events in the life of Christ” (78). Typology’s more significant quality was not only temporal but also historical, as Frye explains: What Typology really is as a mode of thought, what it both assumes and leads to, is a theory of history, or more accurately of historical process: an assumption that there is some meaning and point to history, and that sooner or later some event or events will occur which will indicate what that meaning or point is, and so become an antitype of what has happened previously. (80-81) Typology thus works in both directions, connecting the past or present to the future by constituting certain events as anticipating others, and working from present events backwards to illuminate an inscrutable or unfulfilled event or text. Erich Auerbach similarly explains the

14 I elaborate further on distinctions between typology and allegory in chapter 4 of this dissertation.

15 The literal sense is based on the plain, grammatical meaning of the text; allegory is a symbolic meaning which carries historical expectations; tropological is the moral lesson that is very often the basis for sermons; and the anagogical is a mystical or metaphysical meaning that is traditionally believed to be unavailable to human understanding, and revealed only to one who is filled with Holy Spirit (Porter, Dictionary of Biblical Criticism 102).

16 typological relationship he terms “figural interpretations” as the substitution of a biblical event with an “earthly” one “in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first” (73). Translated into a social framework, this historical construction implies a theory of a predestined society “belong[ing] to something before [they] are anything,” having “entered a specific social contract before birth” (Frye 86-7). This definition stresses an inescapable and deterministic aspect of typological historical consciousness. Frye explains this teleology as one reason why the Calvinist tradition, with its emphasis on predestination, embraced this interpretative system. In early American Puritan writings, typological interpretive practices enabled the colonists to "[relate] their own destiny typologically to the Old Testament, [regarding it] as concrete, dramatic, universal history of providential significance" (Brumm 33). This relationship of promise and fulfillment conceives of both Biblical texts and historical context as whole, unified constructs. As Jane Tompkins writes, these Puritan narratives “aimed at demonstrating that human history is a continual reenactment of the sacred drama of redemption” (134). Drawing on Auerbach, Benedict Anderson similarly envisions the typological understanding of temporality as a “simultaneity” that is “wholly alien to our own. It views time as something close to … Messianic time, a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present” (24). These emphases on “Messianic time” and “redemption” through methods of “continual reenactment” and “simultaneity” designate typological history as a continuous process of fulfillment. To take one prominent example, Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 Narrative is conspicuously laden with the narrator’s typological interpretations of her captivity. Identifying the broad critical acceptance of Rowlandson’s typological structure, Michelle Burnham explains that it “facilitates the prediction of secular history by providing a model within which to interpret the significance of historical outcomes,” because if “Rowlandson’s trial mirrors that of the captive Israelites” then her own redemption is guaranteed (16). The burgeoning of typological literature in Puritan New England and its persistence in later years simultaneously shaped social institutions and an exceptionalist American view of history in which each earthly affair assumed a "double reference" as each occurrence—"whether death or Indian attack or thunderstorm"—was perceived as emblematic of God's "ultimate direction of events" (Conn 15). Dorothy Ross expands this Puritan historical vision in her discussion of nineteenth-century America's historical consciousness, clarifying that following the 17

Revolution, "Protestant Americans had available in the history of New England a Christian paradigm to which the establishment of the new nation could be assimilated" (912). As the millennium loomed, Ross argues, promising the "final salvation of mankind and the end of history," Americans believed that "the country's progress would be the unfolding of the millennial seed, rather than a process of historical change" (912). The nineteenth-century appearance of non-typological texts focusing on Biblical events and figures signals a break from, subversion of, and even denial of the traditional acceptance of the perennial covenant. Rapid changes in post-revolutionary society, and the new prominence of race, slavery, native rights, and social injustice raised suspicions regarding the covenant and its durability, impacting contemporary understandings of historical processes. Reformed and liberal religious denominations such as Unitarianism and its literary counterpart in Transcendentalism questioned predestination—the core of the covenant of grace— undermining faith in the coming fulfillment of such covenant. These theological and philosophical orientations advocated instead a post-Calvinist history of social progress based on no predestined promise, positioning individual action rather than providential salvation as the condition for redemption. These new interpretations of history as social rather than divine process helped to detach Biblical narratives from predestined history, leading to the abandonment of typological representations of historical development. While these new literary and cultural movements were undoubtedly informed by the Christian religious revivals of the early-to-mid-century (in the era between the Second and Third Great Awakenings), they complicated traditional interpretations of the covenant between God and humanity. Covenant—sometimes called federal—theology originated with the Protestant Reformation, and the colonists transplanted it in the New World, where it propagated a notion of American "Christianized society" that applied Old Testament promises to the Puritans. Roger Olson explains that “the extension of Israel under the second phases of the covenant of grace [is] known as the new covenant. The church is the 'new Israel' and the kingdom of God on earth is promised to it if it permeates all of human society and brings social structures into conformity with God's law” (Olson 503). The affinity between typology and covenant theology was not restricted to religious institutions and writings. Influenced by these ideas, the Puritans extended their theology to support the idea of an entire society in a sort of contract with God, through the 18 transition from the covenant of works to one of grace.16 However, in the nineteenth century, the appearance of new literary representations of the Hebrew Bible signals a break in the acceptance of this contract.

The Decline of Typology in Nineteenth Century Representations of the Hebrew Bible Nineteenth-century literature reveals a shift in historical representations of America's exceptional, "chosen" status. New approaches to the Hebrew Bible suggest that nineteenth- century Americans held beliefs in God-ordained that were being challenged by the slowly- permeating post-Enlightenment focus on human agency and individual progress. This tension is evident in the decline of typological methods in nineteenth-century American literature. While scholars such as Perry Miller, Sacvan Bercovitch and Ursula Brumm have elaborated on the function of both Testaments, and particularly the Hebrew Bible, in early American literature, the nineteenth-century shift away from typology has been largely neglected. To be sure, nineteenth- century writers paid ample attention to the Hebrew Bible; the upsurge of Christian Hebraism, scholarly infatuation with the Hebrew language, the integration of new European forms of Biblical exegesis, and multiple archeological expeditions to Palestine reinforced the Hebrew Bible's significance in cultural, religious and political frameworks in ways that have been, and still are, widely debated by critics. This attention to the Bible makes the scholarly neglect of the shift away from typology the more striking; it is therefore imperative to define the new uses of the Hebrew Bible in nineteenth century literature and to ask what this non-typological alteration implies about American society. One explanation for the decline in typological representations in American literature is the exegetical polemic regarding typology that emerged in the late seventeenth century. Two theological traditions facilitated the debate, first sparked by Bishop Herbert Marsh and Johannes Cocceius. The Cocceian school advocated that every analogy in the history presented by the Old Testament and New Testament was typical, whereas the Marshian school sought to limit types to

16 For more on the interpretations of the covenants in America, see Conn’s Literature in America and Porter’s Dictionary of Biblical Criticism and Interpretation.

19 only those analogies the New Testament explicitly stated to be so.17 In 1845, the Scottish biblical scholar Patrick Fairbairn published The Typology of Scripture, distancing himself from Marshian adherence to typology and from some of the leading American biblical scholars, such as Professors Calvin Stowe and Moses Stuart, who advocated a more limited use of biblical typology. Many nineteenth-century American writers who worked on Biblical themes participated in the debate about typology. Some did so unwittingly while others wrote in the hope of influencing religious and social norms, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Putnam—an educator whose works of biblical exegesis acknowledged and contributed to the controversy surrounding typology.18 Mason I. Lowance writes that Stowe, “steeped in the rhetorical principles of the Bible,” understood the historical implications and social consequences of appropriating typological interpretations of biblical passages. Through typology, “historical cycles of secular development could be fused with the biblical patterns of prophecy and fulfillment, so that the paradigm of Armageddon followed by a pastoral paradise could be demonstrated not only in contemporary events but also in the language of Scripture revelation” (164). Lowance perceives this language of revelation and fulfillment in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life among the Lowly (1852), which Jane Tompkins deemed a “political enterprise, halfway between sermon and social theory, that both codifies and attempts to mold the values of its time” (126). Tompkins argues that Stowe’s novel’s “distinguishing features” are borrowed from “the typological narrative,” explaining that Stowe uses the Bible to both evoke and invoke “redemption” as the necessary and guaranteed outcome of her contemporary social and political circumstances (134, 132). Tompkins compares the biblical typological tradition with that of the English novel, stressing that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is quite distant from those plots “in which everything depends on human action and decision unfolding in a temporal sequence that withholds revelation until the final moment” (134). Stowe’s novel, by contrast, understands “revelation” differently, since the “truths” it seeks to promote “are already revealed from the

17 Bishop Herbert Marsh (1757-1839) rebuffed the seventeenth-century over-extensive use of typology, such as Johannes Cocceius (1603-69) insistence that almost every phrase in the Hebrew Bible had a typological prophetic meaning. Marsh refers to these as “pretended types” (Kaiser 108).

18. For more on Putnam, see Marion Ann Taylor’s and Heather E. Weir’s Let Her Speak for Herself: Nineteenth- Century Women Writing on the Women of Genesis; see also Mason I. Lowance’s chapter in The Stowe Debate for more on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s uses of typology. 20 beginning.” This typological approach only enhanced the novel’s appeal, Tompkins urges, because Stowe supports contemporaneous conventional thought by demonstrating “that human history is a continual reenactment of the sacred drama of redemption” (134). In Uncle Tom’s Cabin as in her other works, Stowe’s biblical references represent her acceptance of a “pure” form of typology, a historical vision grounded in scripture and fulfilled in Stowe’s present-day America.19 Adhering to typological representation, the novel features biblical types, precedents, and characters prefiguring Christ, including many from the Hebrew Bible. Uncle Tom’s sacrificial, proselyting role make him the leading Christ type, but the novel also alludes significantly to David although critics have neglected these allusions. Wounded in Simon Legree’s shed, Tom awakes to “a solemn light of dawn” conveying the words “I am the root and offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.” Tom's vision merges Christ with his biblical predecessor, David, on “the great white throne” with “crowns, the palms, the harps” (538). Casting Tom as a David figure allows readers to discern the connection between Legree, Tom’s “persecutor,” and Saul, David’s rival who was haunted by a “spirit of evil” (583). Stowe also alludes to David in the scene where Cassy beseeches Tom to kill the sleeping Legree, modeling the scene on the biblical passage in which David prevents his men from killing Saul in his sleep. Just as David’s men emphatically exclaim that “[t]his is the day the Lord spoke of” when assuring David that he can dispose of his enemy and gain his freedom, Cassy taunts Tom with the promise of his liberty: "Tom, wouldn't you like your liberty?" "I shall have it, Misse, in God's time," said Tom. "Ay, but you may have it tonight," said Cassy, with a flash of sudden energy. (Stowe 404) Similarly, the biblical David’s vehement response, “The Lord forbid that I should do such a thing to my master, the Lord’s anointed, or lay my hand on him” is twice repeated by Tom at Legree’s plantation, along with his refusal to kill Legree, “not for ten thousand worlds!” (1 Samuel 24:4-6; Stowe 404).20 By using typology, Stowe links a biblical past with the historical present, promising her readers a divinely ordained future that would bring to an end “an age of the world

19 Jenkins describes how Stowe’s Woman in Sacred History also aims “to show the continuity and fulfillment of the Old Testament in the New” (68). See his study, The Character of God: Recovering the Lost Literary Power of American Protestantism for more on Stowe and the Bible.

20 Tom uses the phrase “Lord Forbid” twice: once with Cassy, vowing to continue helping the other slaves, and once to Legree’s demand that he throw away his Bible.

21 when nations are trembling and convulsed.” In the novel’s final paragraphs she entreats her readers: “O, Church of Christ, read the signs of the times! Is not this power the spirit of Him whose kingdom is yet to come, and whose will is to be done on earth as it is in heaven?” (456). Stowe’s novel draws its strength and popularity, not only from sentimentalism but also, as Tompkins has shown, from typology’s language and imagery. While critics have studied Stowe’s typological readings and revisions of the Hebrew Bible, few have considered the antithetical methods by which her contemporaries Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville rejected this convention. This dissertation traces nineteenth-century writers who questioned and refuted typological interpretations and representations of the Hebrew Bible in their works. These writers offered various alternatives to typology by emphasizing fiction’s creative potential (Joseph Holt Ingraham and the other writers I discuss in chapter one), myth making (Cooper), affect (Hawthorne), and allegory (Melville). I claim that these alternatives to typological thought reflect new historical paradigms in an evolving religious society; they question the existence, function and relation to literary and national origins, revealing the richness and complexity of American historical thought precisely by distancing their works from conventional typological literature.

Rethinking the Biblical Origins of American Literature By incorporating biblical themes, nineteenth-century writers simultaneously sustain and question the Bible’s role as originary narrative in literary, religious, and national terms. Before the nineteenth century, the Bible was perceived not only as a source of literary inspiration and imitation, but also as the origin of national identity, history, and ideology. The founders’ desire to fashion a cohesive identity that centers around and stems from one foundational textual origin produced national identity—constructed as well by the absorption of Native American and foreigners’ narratives they simultaneously deemed others. Merging a religious origin with a political one, politicians, religious thinkers and other leaders came to equate America with progress, understood as a preordained historical step in a narrative stemming from the Hebrew Bible. These national narratives designated America as a “redeemer nation” founded by a chosen people entrusted with an exceptional destiny such that world history was construed as relying on and revolving around the American experience. This narrative was established and spread thanks to popular literary texts that reproduced and circulated it. In E Pluribus Unum: Nineteenth 22

Century American Literature and the Constitutional Paradox, W. C. Harris defines America “as a textually based and sustained entity—a place in which writing is from the start a business that’s at once essential to sorting out identity and difference, but also a task that’s never finished, that is constantly in need of reformulation” (204). This idea of textual reformulation is similar to Edward Said’s understanding of “beginning” as “an activity which ultimately implies return and repetition rather than simple linear accomplishment” (xiii). Nineteenth-century U.S. writers revised their theories of origins by experimenting with various literary forms and subjects, questioning not only the fixation on a univocal origin embodied in a single foundational text, but also the presupposition that origins are necessarily textual. The nineteenth-century texts that Not That Type explores are preoccupied with the ideology of origins. Myriad biblical literary representations from the period emblematize varied reconsiderations of the Hebrew Bible as an origin of national and literary narratives, questioning the overarching acceptance of a single national foundation, highlighting the dubious and even subversive status of definite originary narratives. These texts underscore the tension between the idea of textual origins, whereby one text serves as the foundation for another, and the idea of originality, where any given literary text constitutes a new literary, historical, or temporal event. These two perspectives correspond to a related debate regarding the status of America as a new nation. The relation between each text analyzed here and the Hebrew Bible parallels that between the American nation and its imagined Biblical precursor. In the course of the nineteenth century America is sometimes portrayed as a new, unprecedented, exceptional socio-political entity, but sometimes its newness is still expressed as the typological reappearance or rebirth of an already chosen, preordained, exceptional nation.21 The four chapters of this dissertation analyze selected works by nineteenth-century writers who question the Hebrew Bible’s role as foundational in constructing a national narrative and create their textual responses in opposition to this accepted paradigm. Such oppositions take various forms, including the substitution of fictional forms for biblical narratives. These forms offer a conception of multiple, conflicting origins; an attempt to distance themselves from past

21 Seymour Martin Lipset’s sociological works, such as The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (1979) and American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (1997) reaffirms early colonial and republican discourses of the creation of a new, predestined American nation and the dual approaches this newness entails.

23 texts and the antiquated knowledge that informs them; and a critique of the reliance on purportedly unified, constructed origins. They differ in their allusions to and treatment of the biblical David, but share a common, tacit agenda of providing alternatives to typological interpretations of the present, past and future. The first chapter introduces the works of five non-canonical authors whose fictions were inspired by the Hebrew Bible on the one hand, and by the novel form on the other. These texts comprise the genre of Hebrew Bible fiction, which was produced by numerous writers (men, women, ministers and religious leaders, educators, and laypersons) who revised the Hebrew Bible’s David narratives while borrowing aspects of the emerging novel form. This combination reveals these writers’ ambivalence regarding the Bible as sacred, perfect origin. I analyze the works of Sarah Ewing Hall, Mary Ann (Brown) Hooker, Samuel Gallaudet, Horace Hooker, Joseph Holt Ingraham and Charles Beecher. Is the Bible, they ask, an untouchable, immutable sacred origin whose eternal value and meaning necessarily exceeds those of any antecedent? Or does the Bible perhaps serve as inspiration rather than origin, inviting revisionary textual formations to replace its outdated in style, content and themes? This chapter focuses on authors who viewed the Hebrew Bible as indispensable literary and ideological source while their works simultaneously represented it as a deficient text in need of supplementation. They situated their works between traditional typological interpretations that upheld the Bible’s pure, original status and turn-of-the-century secular fiction that critiqued religious doctrines, producing original texts that oscillate between these two interpretive modes. Their efforts resulted in an evolving hybrid genre. By attempting to make the Hebrew Bible more accessible for their readers, they tacitly undermined its sacred authoritative status. This turn away from typological doctrine replicates reformed approaches to Biblically-inspired originary national narrative, resisting the belief that the nineteenth-century present originated in a biblical past and would culminate in a foreordained future. The emergence of biblical fiction and the widespread use of novelistic techniques in its creation responded to perceptions of the Bible as a deficient, antiquated text of questionable relevance for the present. This chapter argues that questions regarding the nation’s origins are integrated with the pursuit of adequate, relevant literary forms. Exposing the constructedness and interchangeability of both origins and forms, the texts I explore attempt to corroborate the authority and authenticity of the Hebrew Bible, but their fictional adaptations paradoxically create the opposite effect. As 24 they blend the sacred with the earthly, this body of texts reveals the supplement’s potential for undermining the original even as it contributes to a cultural transformation that popularizes the Hebrew Bible’s themes and narratives. Having demonstrated the interdependence of origins and forms through writers who positioned the Hebrew Bible as significant for redefining both—by incorporating aspects of the novel in their writings—the next three chapters focus on novels in which David narratives and the Hebrew Bible more broadly play a greater allusive role. The novel as a distinct, increasingly popular and legitimate literary form enables a nuanced reconsideration of the Hebrew Bible’s function as an origin in both literary and social frameworks thanks to its potential for multiple, complex plots, its emphases on representation and reality, its critique of social attitudes, and its focus on individual action, development, and character. The authors whose novels I explore in Chapters 2-4—James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville— interweave the Hebrew Bible into the fictional American histories they narrate. Each of these authors points to a single era in American history, grounding national identity in a foundational historical event: Cooper returns to the French and Indian War in 1757; Hawthorne revisits Boston’s early years (1642-9); and Melville removes his readers to the British navy in 1797, ostensibly turning away from the more local and historically nearer turn-of-the-century American struggle with Britain. These novels’ historical attitudes frame their representations of the David chronicles, emphasizing their concern with the Hebrew Bible as an originator of national history and identity. My second chapter evinces how Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826), written as part of the “Leatherstocking” historical romance series, is concerned with the choice of historical origins that American society uses to frame and define itself. The novel positions the Bible alongside nature as two competing origins of American national identity. Through the character of David Gamut, the ridiculed psalm-master accompanying the protagonists on their journey, Cooper juxtaposes what he perceives to be a Native American claim to a “firstness” based on an innate familiarity and affinity with the wilderness with the settler narrative of preordained, rightful conquest. The novel parodies the biblical David through Gamut’s incompatibility with the other characters, suggesting that the Hebrew Bible’s capacity to explain and give meaning to the wilderness is limited. Despite what Perry Miller explains in his “errand” thesis, Cooper offers the historical romance as a fictional replacement for the Bible, an alternative beginning 25 appearing, significantly, not in the beginning at all, but half a century after the American Revolution. The Hebrew Bible, thus threatened, seems to vanish in the text in a manner similar to that attributed to Native Americans during Cooper’s period, as the text presents both nature and Indians as viable alternative “origins” of America’s historical ethos. Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales therefore rewrite American history by positioning a mythic fictional tale as the new origin fashioning American identity. By contrast, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), on which the third chapter focuses, evokes the Hebrew Bible in order to reject typological constructions of history in favor an alternative, affective, experiential form of knowledge. The novel’s allusions to David through the description of the tapestry in Arthur Dimmesdale’s residence invites a consideration of the parallels between Hawthorne’s narrative and the biblical tale of David’s adultery with Bathsheba, which the tapestry represents. I argue that, though brief and overlooked by scholars, the tapestry represented in Hawthorne’s text resists definitions of origins as the absolute source of that which seems to derive from them. As the Scarlet Letter resists its own literary precursor—the Biblical story of David and Bathsheba as well as that story’s Biblical ancestor, the tale of Judah and Tamar—Hawthorne undermines the idea of essentialist origins, suggesting that predecessors may not necessarily lead to derivatives. The novel’s convoluted depiction of genealogy contributes to this anti-foundationalist focus. This chapter critiques Hawthorne’s contemporaneous cultural genealogy, which attempts to fuse a mythic, Puritan past with a predestined redemptive future, positioning The Scarlet Letter’s own a-temporal potentiality as an alternative to textual-cultural genealogy. Instead of reading The Scarlet Letter genealogically, in other words, as if its references to a biblical past necessarily call forth a certain future, the chapter suggests that the novel breaks the traditional scriptural sequence, demanding an alternative mode of felt experience and interpretation that is facilitated through the novel’s emphasis on the present rather than the past or the future. The temporal potentiality manifested in the tapestry and in the material token of the scarlet “A” substitutes a fixed genealogy that promises a stable, continuous, and absolute future with a dubious, suspended present state that denies both an originating status, and a definite future of continuity. I argue that the novel favors the present over the past as a time frame that enables the formation of affective, experiential, palpable knowledge. The present’s heightened affective quality relegates origins to the status of 26 mere allusions and emphasizes that the affect allusions produce constitutes a more constructive form of knowledge than the source of the allusion. In both chapters 2 and 3, the texts I analyze diminish the Hebrew Bible’s significance as a national and literary origin by contrasting the knowledge it contains and generates with non- textual knowledge rooted in experience and affect. They defy the Puritan-inspired typological historical consciousness by rejecting dependence on the biblical origin. In chapter 4, however, I emphasize interpretive practices and reading strategies inscribed within the text through close readings of both the David character in the Hebrew Bible and allusions to David in Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (1890-1). I suggest that Melville’s allegorical method of representing David is a form of resistance to the typological historical heritage. I suggest that the text invites an allegorical reading of Billy Budd as David and I correlate Billy’s story to episodes in the biblical David tale by focusing on the violence that both texts portray as well as on the allegorical form Melville uses to reveal this parallel. This chapter returns to the early exegetical system, suggesting that Melville critiques it. I argue that the novella challenges the foundational interpretative typological framework by adopting an allegorical relation to the Hebrew Bible as its origin. Unlike the typological mode favored by the Puritans for grounding their expansionary mission in scriptural historiography, allegorical interpretations are founded on a struggle with origins, identifying an inherent doubleness shaping the original text/event, defying the cohesion typological readings seek to establish. I argue that Melville’s Billy Budd evokes the Bible as a socio-religious origin with which the subsequent text cannot accord but without which it has no meaning. I contextualize Melville’s nuanced relation to the Hebrew Bible within a post-war theological crisis and examine how Melville’s allegorical turn to the Hebrew Bible—which I read as a violent mode of interpretation reflected in the novel’s abundant representations of violence—refutes the implications of the original biblical narrative. Billy Budd suggests that the price of a cohesive national identity rooted in the Bible is endless and repetitive violence and destruction. This chapter does not suggest that Melville contests the notion of a national origin narrative, but rather calls attention to the social damages this narrative helped create. The conclusion completes these varied rejections of national origin narratives and the Hebrew Bible’s status as their facilitator through a reading of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s story “King David” (1878), a Reconstruction-era text focusing on the prejudices that pervaded post-war American society. The protagonist David King—narrow-minded, biased, proud and 27 ignorant— is (like Cooper’s David Gamut) a parody of the Biblical David, but unlike Cooper’s David, Woolson’s figure has no characteristics that provide a connection with his biblical precedent—nothing, except for his name. Woolson creates a false comparison lacking substantive logic; she evokes an origin but empties it, leaving just a title and a parody of it. I argue that Woolson joins the project of the other authors I discussed—Ingraham and the writers of biblical fiction, Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville—in their understanding of origins as constructs. Like the others Woolson offers an alternative, a non-typological reading of the Hebrew Bible, and a reconsiderations of historical processes. By emptying the Hebrew Bible of its content and function as origin, but still signaling the reference (by using the name “King David”), Woolson forms a literary space that allows for personal reflection and authorization, positioning the biblical narrative as one optional point of reference among others, and demanding a revised, inclusive narrative of American history and identity. I identify Woolson’s description of David King’s “failure” as the failure of typology in the nineteenth century, the failure of the Bible to function as a concentrated site of national, literary and religious origins. I conclude this research arguing that these processes of the denationalization of the Hebrew Bible turn it into a solely religious construct, capable of giving meaning on a strictly personal spiritual level, not on a social-national level. This transformation, anticipating twentieth and twenty-first century developments such as therapeutic culture and “New Age” religion, enables us to reconsider the complex historical relations between religion and literature in American culture.

28

Chapter 1 Between Divine Inspiration and Human Authorship: The King David of Nineteenth-Century Biblical Fiction

In 1856, Charles Wesley Andrews (1807-1875), an Episcopal minister in Virginia, published a pamphlet titled Religious Novels: An Argument Against Their Use, critiquing the widespread and fast-growing phenomenon of biblical fiction, a genre he claimed was drawing people away from the Bible. In his pamphlet he regards fiction as a means of deception, compares its effect to alcoholism, and, extending the metaphor, preaches “total abstinence” as a “grace more easily practiced than moderate drinking” (4). His conclusion is quite clear: “Pretended facts and narratives,” he maintains, “are not the instruments for man to use when he would teach the doctrines which God has revealed” (19). Furthermore, he proposes that though the “popular religious literature of the day” is not new to the literary scene, it has considerably shifted over the past fifty years; the “gradual” evolution of the genre, which at first stayed within the confines of traditional religious education, is what hitherto shielded it from criticism (3). Although Andrews’ objection to religious novels for being both not true (“pretended”) and not useful (“instruments”) is characteristic of antebellum anti-fiction commentaries, his detailing of the genre’s growth, suggests that many people—writers and consumers alike—probably disagreed with him. Indeed, among the diverse literary forms that nineteenth-century American writers produced and experimented with, religious fiction was influential in determining and altering the public’s religious and national identity, though its inception differed greatly from its eventual manifestation. In this chapter I examine the gradual development of biblical fiction, beginning with Sarah Ewing Hall's catechistic literature (a more conventional genre, as I will show, accepted by mainstream religious culture and authorities) and culminating in Joseph Holt Ingraham's biblical novels, which exemplify the popular genre Andrews fiercely attacks. Andrews aptly distinguishes Ingraham's novels from other forms of religious literature, not only in content, but more significantly, in their reception: while an obscure work of religious history titled The Christ of History (1855) sold only 2500 copies in ten months, Ingraham’s The Prince of the House of David—the first volume of his biblical trilogy, also published in 1855—sold 20,000 copies in the same period. As Andrews differentiates the first work from the second— 29 what he contemptuously terms “the Christ of Romance”—he stresses that “the first is a book of very extraordinary power and interest to a healthy religious mind, and was published by a [publishing] house of probably four times the business relations of the house which published the second, which is a book combining nearly every fault of the religious novel in an aggravated form” (5). Indeed, by the second half of the nineteenth century, novels were replacing other modes of religious literature while they simultaneously became the leading format through which religious ideas—or their distortion, according to Andrews and others—were spread.1 Many nineteenth-century writers were ambivalent about adapting the Hebrew Bible and integrating it into literary works, uncertain as to whether these incorporations augmented the Hebrew Bible’s sanctity or violated its sacred status. This chapter traces this ambivalence as expressed in literary representations of the Biblical King David in works by Sarah Ewing Hall, Mary Ann Hooker, Horace Hooker and Samuel Gallaudet, Charles Beecher, and Joseph Holt Ingraham.2 Differences of genre and style emblematize their conflicting understandings of the Bible’s role as both a literary and national origin, and their search for a fresh form to fit their stories expresses uncertainty and discomfort regarding the conventional Biblical format. While some of the texts I analyze—mostly the earlier ones—uphold a conservative, reverential view of the Bible as a sacred, complete and unchanging text, others regard the Bible as a source of inspiration rather than a relevant origin that demands literary reproduction. These contending perspectives inform contemporary debates regarding the Bible’s integrity and divinely-inspired genesis. This sense of inspiration is implicit not only in the idea of guidance and influence, embraced by many of the later writers, but also in the archaic definition: denoting “to breathe (life, a soul, etc) into” something or someone (OED). In other words, these authors present their texts as being brought to life by the Bible, reminiscent of the biblical depiction of the creation of

1 In a similar method, Ann Douglass’s The Feminization of American Culture denounces the sentimental culture (manifested in domestic novels, religious pamphlets and manuals) which she claims destroyed the Calvinistic-based male theological tradition. Jane Tompkins’ Sentimental Designs responds to this analysis by alternatively emphasizing the value and power of the sentimental novel tradition. See also Laura Wexler and more recently Claudia Stokes on these conflicting attitudes towards sentiment and literature.

2 Though these writers are mostly unfamiliar to readers and scholars today, some of them were extremely popular in their life. I will introduce them each separately in the section entitled “Rewriting King David: Catechistic Literature, Biblical Biographies and the Novel.”

30 man.3 They identify a deficiency in the Hebrew Bible and offer their revisions of the David stories as more accessible, relevant and readable supplements for their readers. They differ from “pure” typological works (see introduction) in their gradual incorporation of novelistic techniques that undermine the Bible’s sanctified originary status and reflect an altered historical understanding of human beings as creative authors and interpreters. Nevertheless, while these texts adopt novelistic techniques, they are different from the novel form as it simultaneously emerged and was employed by fiction writers such as Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville. To appreciate this difference, I first address the advent of the novel as a generic form in the U.S., focusing particularly on its formation as a distinct literary genre with religious and cultural implications. As my emphasis here is on literary representations of the Hebrew Bible in genre, form and history, I concentrate on the relevance of major twentieth- century formalist-historicist theories of the novel. For, if we take Andrews’ above-cited criticism at face value, his chief quarrel with Joseph Holt Ingraham’s text is embodied precisely in how he labels it—“the Christ of the Romance,” romance here synonymous with the novel (5, emphasis in text).4 Ian Watt’s foundational The Rise of the Novel begins by distinguishing the novel as “the logical literary vehicle of a culture which … has set an unprecedented value on originality, on the novel” (13). As straightforward as this may seem, I take Watt’s formulation as the focal point through which I approach the texts in this chapter and investigate how the forms they assume in representing the Hebrew Bible reveal each text’s relation to originality. If we place the novel (through Watt’s theories), at one end of the scale of originality, with the Hebrew Bible situated at the other end, the texts I analyze in this chapter oscillate along this scale in their adoption of certain defining features from each extreme. Recalling Bakhtin, Lukacs and Auerbach’s historical approaches to the novel, I synthesize Watt’s characterizations of the English novel with Cathy N. Davidson’s extensive research on the American novel, and focus on three aspects that I identify in these nineteenth-century texts that break from traditional biblical narrative styles:

3 The description in the Hebrew Bible reads: “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7).

4 Though for the purposes of my study, I am less concerned with generic distinctions between the two, many mid- twentieth century critics argue for crucial differences between the novel and romance: for example, for Northrop Frye the difference lies in the characterization of personality rather than individuality, and for Richard Chase, the main difference is in “the way in which they view reality”. See Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism and Richard Chase’s The American Novel and its Tradition (1957) for more on these distinctions.

31 imagery and the language of destruction; temporality and the development of plot; and the representation of textual authority. Recognizing a breach in the Bible’s function as both a religious and national origin, these writers embrace the novel to create a novel literary origin that simultaneously promotes a national narrative by sending readers back to the Hebrew Bible. The texts I study in this chapter vary in the degree to which they distance themselves from the Hebrew Bible and yet depend on it. They vary too in the extent to which their plainspoken intention of directing readers towards the Bible, is overshadowed by the novelistic features they incorporate, and the degree to which each text serves to substitute the biblical origin, or by contrast augment its popularity. But they all distinguish the Bible’s function as a religious origin from the function of their own texts in representing national origins and they all promote a concept of dual origins that nurture and complement each other. I suggest that the controversial genre of Biblical fiction (and specific to my concern in this chapter is Hebrew Bible Fiction, works of literature that revise the Hebrew Bible alone), creates a bridge between traditional typological literature and the novel, functioning as a hybrid genre, which nevertheless undermines typological interpretations of the Bible precisely because of the contamination caused by this hybrid form. In line with the recent turn in literary and religious studies, as I explained in my Introduction, this chapter aims to collapse binary critical representations that associate the Bible with antiquity and religion while representing the novel as symbolizing modernity and secularism; I thus contribute to theoretical understandings of the interdependency and co-existence of the religious and the secular in various cultures and forms.5 What’s more, in their affinity with typological origin narratives, these nineteenth-century texts affirm a secular streak that reflects back on earlier texts, especially in regard to the earthly imagery I discuss in this chapter. These nineteenth-century texts negotiate between novelistic claims to originality and traditional adherence to an ideology of banality, confirming the Hebrew Bible’s function as a religious origin even as they argue that the form must be modified in order to befit a post-revolutionary, progressive nation. They thus reconsider the nation’s biblical origin as an active agent, which is significant for its power to evoke and invite reproduction. The

5 Margaret Anne Doody was one of the first to criticize the “neat universe” expressed by Lukacs and others in the assumption of the progressive nature from the Epic to the Novel. See The True Story of the Novel for her discussions of the ancient novel.

32 biblical narratives that served as grounds for a national one demand reproduction and supplementation in any form that could point readers towards the Hebrew Bible—even as the supplement eventually becomes a novel origin (national and literary) in itself. In this chapter, I focus on these three non-typological novelistic features of biblical fiction and claim that the gradual movement towards the novel reflects American writers’ growing faith in their own creative powers as authors; inspired by the Hebrew Bible as legitimizing their mission, they also deviate from and alter the origin they rely on. Following Ian Watt’s analysis of “formal realism” in the English novel and the three levels it operates on—the linguistic, situational and personal—this chapter thus revises Watt’s categorization and analyzes the sub-genre’s subversion of the Bible’s religious, cultural, and social function by examining three features characteristic of this genre: the use of imagery and language of destruction; a nuanced depiction of temporality through plot construction; and an emphasis on individual authority and the textual methods used to create it.6 I will elaborate on Watt’s characteristics of the novel and show how taken together, and largely diverging from earlier, typological formations, these features in the sub-genre express their writers’ innovative understandings of the writers’ authorial authoritative roles. I argue that these texts’ recurrent descriptions of exhaustion and alteration attest to an inadequacy they detect in the Bible and in its appeal to contemporary audiences, while still designating the significance of maintaining such an appeal. I further claim that new modes of narration and allusions to alternative, extra-biblical sources of knowledge undermine the Bible’s infallible status and recast the author in an untraditionally creative and powerful position. Especially in the case of women authors, this recasting implies a reformed perspective on women’s active and creative roles of social leadership. Thus, these narratives reconstitute nineteenth-century perceptions of temporality by intertwining a conventional, Protestant narrative with a secular, modernist tradition. This synthesis, I argue, unlike previous typological writings, is evident in the language and imagery these authors’ use in their reclaiming of the Hebrew Bible. This literary development parallels a socio-religious shift, and together these processes emblematize antebellum discomfort and confusion regarding national origins. As these

6 Watt, “Realism and the Novel Form” in The Rise of the Novel. I borrow the categories of “linguistic, temporal and personal” from Davidson and will detail each category and my deviation from them in the next section (118).

33 authors take on the Hebrew Bible as the site of an all-encompassing national myth, their textual products emerge as devastating alternatives to the foundational text, questioning its function and nature as origin and extending their texts as indispensable supplements to the sacred text. Processes of supplementation, I suggest, imply that nineteenth-century religious understandings of origins require refinement and completion. As I will show, the sub-genre of religious fiction based on the Hebrew Bible develops from previous examples of children’s and catechistic literatures (in an age that blurred the boundaries of what we term children’s literature), as is apparent in its development of abundant novelistic techniques. These techniques distinguish it from the very forms of biblical and typological religious literature from which it derives.7 Stemming from a genre that sought to cultivate younger minds in the lessons and sentiments of Christianity, these novel forms manifest new antebellum emphases on personal, developmental conversion experiences at the expense of a momentary, uplifting religious event (revivals being the prominent counter-example).8 I begin the next section by briefly explaining how the three categories I borrow from Watt’s influential study clarify the manner in which works of Hebrew Biblical fiction negotiate typological and novelistic conventions. Next, I survey the development of nineteenth-century religious fiction, and its effect on both U.S literary culture and religious practices. I then introduce the texts I discuss in this chapter, situating their David stories within specific genres, explaining their authors' motivations, and demonstrating how the development of Hebrew Biblical fiction gradually subverted previous forms of typological literature while attempting to bridge typological and secular fiction. Finally, I analyze the characteristics of this generic evolution, explaining how the transformative nature of this genre replicates nineteenth-century reevaluations of origins and religious faith.

7 Courtney Weikle-Mills argues that many novels attempted to (unsuccessfully) stabilize the “unclear boundary in the nascent republic between childhood and adulthood” by very often dedicating their texts to younger audiences and by featuring children and young adults as the protagonists of their stories (98).

8 The majority of texts under discussion in this chapter correspond to the period between the end of the Second Great Awakening (1820s) and the beginning of the Third (late 1850s), and could be seen as a response to the Revivalist movement. See my discussion on Horace Bushnell’s opposition to revivalism below (pg. 12).

34

Watt’s The Rise of the Novel and the Novelization of Hebrew Biblical Fiction I focus in this chapter on theories of the novel as a historical entity in order to prepare the ground for my readings (in subsequent chapters) of the forms of historical awareness that various canonical texts developed as they integrated biblical David stories into their plots. I turn to Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957), for, as Michael McKeon puts it, “Watt conceives his task to be inseparably historical and theoretical. Watt’s understanding of the novel “as a distinct genre that is both continuous and discontinuous with what came before it” leads him to align the novel—as do Lukacs and Bakhtin—with modernity (McKeon 270). These theories, despite their appearance in the mid-twentieth century, are still very much revised and influential today, and therefore cannot be ignored. I briefly demarcate the central features of Watt’s theory of the novel in order to demonstrate the variety of ways in which nineteenth-century Hebrew Biblical narratives contributed to the novel tradition. Watt’s major contribution is his emphasis on the novel as a form that reflects an individualistic, original commitment to representing truthful experiences. His “formal realism” highlights “a set of narrative procedures which are so commonly found together in the novel, and so rarely in other literary genres, that they may be regarded as typical of the form itself” (32). As he argues, his formal realism is closely related to the philosophical realism of Descartes and Locke, which rejected universals in favor of viewing the pursuit of truth as an individual experience.9 Watt traces the eighteenth-century semantic process in which “realism” began to denote “a belief in the individual apprehension of reality through the senses,” and the meaning of “original” underwent a comparable change from “having existed from the first” to denoting “underived, independent, first-hand” (14). This emphasis on individual, particularized experience and identity, Watt argues, is a unique characteristic of the novel form, which brought together realism and originality in one genre. Watt identifies three features of the novel that produce its distinct form—the particularity of time, place and characterization. Cathy N. Davidson redefines these features as operating on three levels: (1) she terms Watt’s emphasis on the language of the novel—linguistic, (2) she synthesizes his particularity of time and place as the situational feature, and (3) she translates character to an emphasis on the personal aspects of the novel. Linguistically, Watt examines the

9 Watt, 29.

35 language that purport to be authentic accounts of individuals’ experiences, claiming that “the function of language is much more largely referential in the novel than in other literary forms” (30). In analyzing temporality and setting, he suggests that the novel’s conception of time is apparent in its causal structure, the relation it establishes between past and present, and its interest in representations of the “temporal dimension of human life,” in contrast to ancient and medieval literature (23). Finally, in his discussion of what he calls the “personal” aspects of the novel, Watt refers to the novel’s emphasis on particular people in specific circumstances, their preoccupation with questions of identity, and their distance from types and universals. Central to Watt’s theory is the claim that the novel focuses on an individual character, scene or experience, differentiating it from previous “epic” narratives, which largely concentrated on heroic persons or classes and/or generic or traditional or universal experiences and values. Mikhail Bakhtin similarly differentiates between the “epic and the Novel,” proclaiming that the novel, unlike the epic, is “yet uncompleted” and “is the sole genre that continues to develop” through the act of reading (3).10 A genre claiming to be “novel”— different, contemporary, and in touch with reality—Bakhtin contends, promotes and even forces a change in other genres through a process of “novelization.” Consequently, other genres become “more free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary heteroglossia and the ‘novelistic’ layers of literary language.” Most importantly, Bakhtin adds that “the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the openended present)” (7).11 I suggest that nineteenth-century Hebrew Bible fiction undergoes a process of novelization similar to the processes conceptualized by Watt and Bakhtin. These texts assumed the flexibility of language and representation of reality similar to, and in light of, the novel as a generic form. Hebrew Biblical fiction, while it may ostensibly fall under the category of the “epic” form of narrative, controversially displays several of the characteristics that Watt and Bakhtin (along with Lukacs and Ortega) pinpoint in the novel. Watt’s emphasis on the novel’s linguistic

10 See Bakhtin’s essay “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. For a more recent, succinct review of Bakhtin, see Michael McKeon’s extensive Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach where he aligns Georg Lukacs’ discussion of the novel’s “estrangement” from the given “extensive totality” of the epic with Jose Ortega y Gasset’s alternative understanding of the “absorption” of the epic in his Meditations of Quixote.

11 I develop this sense of indeterminacy in my reading of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in Chapter 3.

36 aspects brings to mind the Hebrew Bible narratives’ extensive use of earthly imagery of the here and now, of this world (not the next), and language of destruction and exhaustion. Hebrew Bible fiction features a complex depiction of temporality and plot construction that differs from both epic and Biblical constructions of time and development. These texts unmistakably feature the Biblical David as their protagonist, but rather than typologizing and universalizing his heroic character, their complex portrayals grant him a Bakhtinian “openendedness” highlighting the author’s individual authority and creativity rather than that of the biblical character. Before I turn to these features and their novelizations of Hebrew Biblical narratives, I will first examine the emergence of these texts in the context of the larger nineteenth-century phenomenon of religious fiction.

The Emergence of Nineteenth-Century Religious Fiction Critics from Ann Douglas through Dawn Coleman observe that over the course of the nineteenth-century popular print culture took the place of institutional religion in spreading Christian ideas and mores; narrative replaced the pulpit both in its capacity to elicit emotional responses, and in its ability to represent reality.12 In 1871, Mark Twain satirically summed up the growing feeling that popular forms of culture, not the Bible itself, were responsible for “nine- tenths of all the kindness and forbearance and Christian charity and generosity in the hearts of American people today.” Twain emphasizes the role of popular cultural forms in disseminating these ideas, which flowed through dramas and tragedies and comedies on the stage, and through the despised novel and the Christmas story, and through the thousand and one lessons, suggestions, and narratives of generous deeds that stir the pulses, and exalt and augment the nobility of the nation day by day from the teeming columns of ten thousand newspapers, and NOT from the drowsy pulpit!13 While conventional religious genres such as sermons and tracts were extremely popular in the early republic (the American Tract Society was the most prolific publishing house in the nineteenth century), these forms became less relevant in the fast-growing Antebellum society

12 See for example, Dawn Coleman’s “The Unsentimental Woman Preacher,” on how Stowe utilizes ministers’ preaching styles in Uncle Tom Cabin that challenge antebellum sermonizing.

13 Mark Twain’s satirical “The Indignity Put Upon the Remains of George Holland by the Rev. Mr. Sabine” was published in The Galaxy in February of 1871.

37 and culture. 14 David Reynolds argues that in the course of the nineteenth century, “religion prospered and theology went slowly bankrupt” as Puritan religious literature was replaced by Civil War religious bestsellers, nonsectarian and secular (3). Indeed, as Gregory Jackson documents, during the second half of the nineteenth century, religious pedagogy was largely influenced by the novel and other forms of popular culture, and ministers began incorporating narrative strategies into their sermons. For American Protestants, the world and the novel were two forms of representation “that largely obscured, while occasionally disclosing, the invisible reality beyond the material” (Jackson 167). The ability of the “despised novel” form gradually to surpass the sermon in popularity corresponded to an epistemological shift that reshaped the nature of religious pedagogy. If the Bible and Christian thought once functioned as the tool that formed human knowledge, new scientific modes born of Enlightenment humanism and empiricism, and specifically Darwinism and Higher Biblical Criticism, questioned “fixed notions of origin … [and] opened the way for doubt about the future” as Milette Shamir explains (36). This, coupled with new ideas regarding the significance of experience in shaping spiritual and moral faith, made room for the novel as a form that many felt could adequately bridge the difference between reality and representation.15 The outcome of these processes is evident in the era’s bestselling fiction—written not by Cooper, Melville and Hawthorne—but rather by Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Joseph Holt Ingraham in the antebellum period, culminating with the publication of Lew Wallace’s best-selling Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ in 1880. For, as Neil Sinyard emphasizes, “by the end of the nineteenth century, [Ben-Hur] had sold more copies than any other novel ever written” (xi).16 The genre of biblical fiction gained prominence and popularity in the early antebellum period, and, despite increased Protestant opposition to the novel, by mid-century many ministers were themselves turning to this popular biblical genre, mostly in order to rewrite the story of Jesus Christ. As Paul Gutjahr elaborates in An American Bible, “by the 1850s a wide variety of fiction was winning acceptance among Protestants as a viable means for people to become

14 Bode, The Anatomy of American Popular Culture, 1840-1861, pg. 132.

15 See Gregory A. Jackson’s discussion of the experience of reality in The Word and its Witness, especially in his chapter “Hell’s Plot: The Hermeneutic of Fear”.

16 See Barbara Ryan and Milette Shamir’s edited volume Bigger than Ben-Hur: The Book, its Adaptations, and Their Audiences.

38 imaginative participants in the Bible’s narrative. Americans increasingly turned to these biographies of Jesus as a way to connect with the biblical narrative without having to confront the complex text of the Bible” (143). Jackson also demonstrates how homiletic novels, such as Charles Sheldon’s 1896 In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? “offered character types and social roles that had to be filled by the reader’s engaged imagination, reinforcing the experiential basis of religious realism” (207). Gutjahr shows how this more accessible and “defamiliarized” figure of Christ was often accompanied with illustrations and at times even bound in a format that resembled biblical binding.17 While Gutjahr’s and Jackson’s studies analyze late nineteenth- century religious novels, their discussion is relevant to ours since the popular works they discuss—Sheldon’s and Wallace’s novels as prime examples—are substantially enabled by the works and processes I present in this chapter.18 There was, of course, opposition to this rapidly burgeoning successful genre, as we have already seen. Besides the already present fear regarding children’s neglect of Bible-reading “in an age of many books,” there was an additional anxiety concerning the substitution of Bibles by novels.19 Indeed, while religious fiction pointed readers to the Bible, it also provided an escape from reading it. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Bible was beginning to disappear from the public sphere, following Horace Mann’s republican educational policy, which slowly removed Bible reading from school curriculums (in order to maintain the public schools’ nonsectarian status), and the biblical fiction published at the close of the century intensified widely shared concerns that many people were reading Biblical fiction instead of the Bible itself. Gutjahr takes the era’s best-selling novel as a case in point: Wallace’s Ben-Hur, published in 1880 was not quite a biography of Christ (he barely appears there), though it certainly accorded with many nineteenth-century Protestant ideas regarding the Bible’s authenticity and the Christian mores it

17 Barbara Hochman argues for this method of defamiliarization in her reading of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s introduction to her brother Charles’ The Incarnation; or Pictures of the Virgin and her Son (1849). Hochman proposes that Stowe defends Beecher’s blend of truth and fiction, as a method of tackling the problem “of how to tell a well-worn tale so as to make it new,” in anticipation of the literary license that she too would take in the construction of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Hochman 1321).

18 Erin Smith’s What Would Jesus Read?: Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth Century America also focuses on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings and challenges critical consensus regarding changes in the religious literary scene, arguing that “religious reading continues to shape the ideas and assumptions of millions of modern and contemporary Americans” (2).

19 See Zboray and Zboray’s “Books, Reading, and the World of Goods in Antebellum New England,” as well as Candy Gunther Brown’s study of opposition to religious novels. 39 espouses, while exhibiting new scientific and historical methods. Ryan and Shamir assume that Wallace “probably consulted several hundred sources to provide a meticulously realistic literary account of Palestine and Rome in the first century” (6). However, while Protestant readers could rationalize their reading of Wallace's book by indicating its religious elements, Gutjahr proposes that Ben-Hur may have actually appealed to them primarily because of its secular aspects, and Ryan and Shamir concur that though “Ben-Hur was not the first attempt to supplement the Gospel’s lean reportage,” it was one of the most appealing and most apt in combining a historically-accurate realist picture with Wallace’s “vivid pictorial gifts and ranging imagination” (7). Gutjahr reads Ben-Hur “as a parable for the place of the Bible and the biblical narrative in nineteenth-century American culture” (173). Sunday Schools did not need the Bible to describe the Holy Land, Gutjahr explains; they could simply refer students to Wallace’s novel. And so, “the Bible increasingly found itself on the periphery of American print culture” (173). Though it remains to be seen if the relegation of the Bible to the private sphere and its reshaping in a fictional form have indeed engendered a nonreligious modern society (and whether, indeed, that is an accurate definition of twentieth-century America), one cannot discount this genre’s influence in nineteenth-century literature and society. As a sub-category within this body of literature, works that fictionalized Hebrew Bible narratives reflect how popular culture redefined the concept of origins and historical thought by synthesizing religious ideas with a secular literary form. My argument for viewing the works of Hebrew Bible fiction as sequential literary instances in a single, evolving broader genre presupposes that this transition in the literary culture is indicative of contemporary theological debates—especially in relation to child rearing and the significance of a felt religious experience. One of the most influential religious thinkers of his time, Horace Bushnell (1802-1876) suggested that conversion was a developmental process achieved through Christian education and family nurture, therefore shifting the public focus towards educating young people, rather than investing in revivals and singular spiritual occurrences. In Bushnell’s un-Calvinistic view, much influenced by European romanticism, an individual becomes a Christian through “a gradual lifelong process of growth and deepening awareness” (611).20 His ideas of how faith develops through nurture accord with his extensive theory of language as a social construct. In some sense, Bushnell envisions conversion as a

20 For a thorough analysis of Bushnell’s influence, see Ahlstrom’s A Religious History Of The American People. 40 novel; his emphasis on language’s non-literal potential and his definition of the “supernatural” as any element of reality which does not follow a physical sequence of cause-and-effect constitute a philosophy of religion that could anticipate the appropriation of religious ideas into the novel form (612). As Ahlstrom argues, Bushnell’s influence is not only in his approach to children’s religious education, but also in his ability to bridge Romanticism and theology in a manner that juxtaposes, rather than cancels out, the secular and the religious: “Through [Bushnell] the romantic movement made its entrance into theological seminaries and pulpits” (613). Bushnell’s writings corresponded with the mid-century appearance of religious fiction in the marketplace. In the next section I introduce five works of Hebrew Bible fiction that reproduce the David narrative. After introducing their authors, clarifying the literary genres they chose, and providing historical-cultural context, I proceed to analyze the three aforementioned novelistic features—language and imagery, temporality, and personal authority—and assess how these texts negotiate between the epic and the Novel, between “religious” and “secular” modes of writing, and between originality and banality. These texts revise the David story in a manner that evinces their complex perspective on the Hebrew Bible as a perfect and complete origin, while responding to the “increased demand for different kinds of books” which helped “call […] the novel into being” (Davidson 141). These books, published sequentially during the first half of the nineteenth century, reflect the way the Hebrew Bible participated in a generic and cultural transformation symptomatic of larger social changes and understandings of the Hebrew Bible as the unequaled and ultimate word of God.

Rewriting King David: Catechistic Literature, Biblical Biographies and the Novel Considering Hebrew Biblical fiction as a transformative genre necessitates an examination of previous expressions and representations of the Hebrew Bible in early nineteenth-century American literature. I begin this survey with the popular form of religious texts written for children. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature for children mainly consisted of translated European texts, moral tales and stories of Christian martyrs, and of course, religious books written for a general audiences but also popular with children, such as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678).21 Catechistic literature is one example of how

41 child-oriented texts figured in antebellum literature, and Sarah Ewing Hall’s Conversations on the Bible: Between a Mother and her Children (1818), emblematic of the genre, was one of the first antebellum literary frameworks to revise the Hebrew Bible’s plot. Hall (1761-1830), writing under the pseudonym “a lady of Philadelphia”, was well- acquainted with the city’s literary figures, and contributed numerous letters and poems to Port Folio, a literary journal founded in 1800. Conversations on the Bible, which appeared in three American editions and a British one, uses the form of a conversation between a mother and her three children (Catherine, Fanny, and Charles) to retell and comment on the Hebrew Bible. Hall’s narrator-mother emphasizes the importance of narrating in abidance with the “true” biblical accounts, even when the biblical characters are controversial. Often she refrains from either approving or censuring the actions and ideas she narrates, which confirms her belief in and reverence for the Hebrew Bible as a sacred text. At times, the conversation is laden with the language of biblical scholarship, and at others, the narrator alludes to popular secular culture.22 In terms of both structure and themes, Conversations on the Bible differs not only from earlier forms of religious texts, but from contemporaneous catechistic literature as well. Patricia Demers classifies the features of catechistic literature— its emphasis on responsibility for correct behavior, dialogue as a pedagogic tool, and consistent allusions to Scripture. 23 Following her work, Bernard P. Lee identifies dissent in Hall’s text: while Demers’ three elements remain, Conversations does not follow a topical format, but rather supports the scriptural chronology and features a preoccupation with doctrinal questions. The text encourages questions at the expense of solid, unequivocal answers. As Lee explains, “[e]ngaging a child’s curiosity in religious

21 On children’s literature in Early American literature, see E. Jennifer Monaghan’s chapter on “The New World of Children’s Books” in Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America and Gillian Brown’s essay on “Child’s Play” in Levander and Singley’s study The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader. Although Bunyan did not intend Pilgrim’s Progress as a children’s text (he later published A Book for Boys and Girls; or Country Rhimes for Children in 1686), many nineteenth-century children and young adults texts replicated the themes, structure and plot of Pilgrim’s Progress and it was the second most-read book after the Bible. For more on Pilgrim’s Progress in relation to childhood and children’s books, see Dunan-Page’s The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan, pg. 120-1, and Jan de Maeyer’s Religion, Children’s Literature and Modernity in Western Europe, 1750-2000, pg. 127.

22 For more on Sarah Ewing Hall and her Conversations, see Marion Ann Taylor and Heather E. Weir’s Let Her Speak for Herself: Nineteenth-Century Women Writing on the Women of Geneses.; Nicholas Rombes’ “Sarah Ewing Hall” in American Women Prose Writers to 1820; and Bernard P. Lee’s “Conversations on the Bible with a Lady of Philadelphia” in Recovering Nineteenth-Century Women Interpreters of the Bible.

23 See Demers, Heaven Upon Earth, pgs. 61-2.

42 matters [in Hall’s text] replaces the focus in earlier works on the catechumen’s ability to supply answers to questions concerning theology and moral life” (52). What’s more, though the structure of the Conversations follows that of the Hebrew Bible, Hall’s text is untraditional in its intertextual references to extra-biblical works of literature. The narrator-mother repeatedly stresses women’s roles in the Bible, insisting on “filling in gaps” to explain character’s motivations—very often by providing Christological explanations—a technique that obfuscates the straightforward sequential narrative structure. These features separate Hall’s Conversations from the catechistic genre and indicate an affiliation with later forms of Hebrew Biblical Fiction, which together undermine the Hebrew Bible’s traditional role as the foundational, unquestionable origin of national history and literary culture. Following the publication of Conversations on the Bible, and most prominently during the antebellum era, many writers—ministers and laypeople, professional writers and amateurs, men and women—undertook the task of rewriting the Hebrew Bible in a format accessible to a wider, and at times younger, audience. One such form is biblical biographies, where select biblical characters or books are adapted into a more colloquial language, sometimes with illustrations and maps, and occasionally with commentary or footnotes. The narratives almost always draw directly on the biblical origin, by paraphrasing the King James Version to create dialogue, though they also feature added imagery and emphasis on characters’ motivations, thoughts and emotions. Some were published as segments in a larger series, or through a religious society or prominent publishing house.24 On the one hand, the mass of publications in this genre and era suggests a desire to understand the Hebrew Bible and its key foundational status in American national culture, but on the other hand, this abundance also implies a struggle against the Bible's traditional literary and cultural mission. Two biblical biographies, deserve/repay attention in the context of my argument about Biblical fiction, The Life of David, King of Israel (1832) is a text that attests to the gradual development of biblical fiction and its subversive relation to narratives of national religious origins. The book was authored by Mary Ann (Brown) Hooker (1796-1838). Not much is known

24 See Paul A. Gutjahr for the various publications of scripture biography. Also, Harriet Beecher Stowe was much influenced by this and fashioned her own hagiography after this genre, see for example in Transatlantic Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture, and Mary De Jong analysis of female scriptural biography in "Dark- Eyed Daughters: Nineteenth-Century Popular Portrayals of Biblical Women" (199-200).

43 about Hooker, an educator who wrote numerous essays as well as a series of scripture biographies for children. In 1828 she married the Reverend Horace Hooker, who himself edited a series on biographical biblical characters. Mary Ann Hooker’s book on David, along with her other narratives, reconstruct the Hebrew Bible, adding illustrations, an elaborate and descriptive style of language and detailed chronology, as imaginative endeavors to engage children with biblical tropes and tales, even, as I will show below, at the expense of loyalty to the Scriptures. The main structural departure from Hall’s Conversations on the Bible is in Hooker’s biographic narrative style, her emphasis on imagery and description, and fictional details not found in the Hebrew Bible. Taken together, these features of Hooker’s text designate her text as a supplement to the original—and imply that the Hebrew Bible is somewhat deficient and in need of such supplementation. Similarly, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet’s Scripture Biography for the Young: David and Solomon, Including Saul and Rehoboam (1843), also revises the Biblical story in a manner that disaccords with the original text. Gallaudet (1787-1851), a minister, educator and pioneer in the education of deaf people, wrote a series of biblical biographies for the American Tract Society. The Scripture Biography collection was initiated and compiled by Gallaudet, and, following his death, Horace Hooker organized and edited his material.25 Horace Hooker and Gallaudet’s texts demonstrate an altered relation to the Hebrew Bible: as I will shortly elaborate, they reorder temporal sequences, make plot selections and adaptations, and allude to extra-biblical sources and textual forms, substantiating their authorial status and intervention in a biblical historical scheme. I analyze their text in accordance with the theme of inspiration I introduced above, whereby texts relate to the Hebrew Bible as endowing them with a life, distinguished from the origin they claim to reproduce. But the text most central to this chapter, which bespeaks of the generic transition to the novel and the important role the Hebrew Bible played in this transition, is The Throne of David (1860) written by Joseph Holt Ingraham (1809-1860). In his text, these defining features of the genre surface with particular clarity, as his approach to the Bible is twofold; on the one hand, the Bible is the novel’s unquestionable source and foundation, but on the other, the scriptures are

25 Horace Hooker (1793-1864), whose first wife was the abovementioned Mary Ann Brown, was an American Congregationalist minister and author, born into a well-known Connecticut family of ministers and religious leaders. He edited a religious paper, the Connecticut Observer, and also held the office of Missionary Societies.

44 presented as a deficient text in need of alteration. Taken together, this emblematizes an antebellum discomfort and confusion regarding a narrative of national origins that had once been widely accepted; this duality legitimizes Ingraham’s supplementation of this origin narrative in the form of his novel. In Ingraham’s texts, as in the works of Hall, Mary Ann and Horace Hooker and Gallaudet, the introductions, plots, and reviews share recurrent images and language of exhaustion and destruction, attesting to the insufficiency they attribute to the biblical text they nonetheless designate as their source— which could be regarded as a sacrilegious act. Ingraham’s novel epitomizes this tendency, not only because of its author’s popularity and its undisputed novelistic status, but also because, as David Reynolds puts it in Faith in Fiction, “Old Testament Fiction did not become important until [after] Joseph H. Ingraham’s last two novels” were published (123).26 Joseph Holt Ingraham published over 100 novels and 100 contributions to periodicals, mostly cheap adventure fiction and travel narratives; he was alone responsible for ten percent of the fiction published in the 1840s. His first novels were received favorably, and even Edgar Allen Poe was impressed; but as the 1840s progressed, his books—now printed as installments in periodicals—received less positive responses, though he continued to write with much energy. According to Robert W. Weathersby, II (one of the first and sole scholars of Ingraham’s work), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow claimed after visiting Ingraham in 1846 that Ingraham received more than $3,000 a year for his work—a salary that no other novelist, in the North or the South, was consistently earning in the 1840s.27 In 1847 Ingraham renounced his popular writing and began studying theology; he was ordained as an Episcopalian minister in 1853, and shortly thereafter he resumed his previous profession by altering his subject matter. Ingraham published a series of epistolary novels as a biblical fiction trilogy; the first, published in 1855, The Prince of the House of David, a novel about Christ’s reign, was according to some claims the bestselling antebellum novel—one estimate in 1931 has the book’s selling rates at four or five million since its publication, and the book did not go out of print until 1975. As Weathersby argues, “this pioneer effort in biblical fiction broke down much resistance to novels in general and paved the

26 Weathersby also quotes from Longfellow’s record of this meeting in 1846 that Ingraham told him “he had written eighty novels, and of these, twenty during the past year” (Weathersby, 3).

27 Weathersby, 3.

45 way for later writers of biblically based tales” (2). The second book in the trilogy, The Pillar of Fire (1859) traces the story of Moses and the final installment, The Throne of David (1860), an epistolary novel, retells the David story. The Throne of David is narrated from the perspective of Arbaces, cousin to king of Assyria, sent as envoy to negotiate a treaty with the king of Egypt, and along the way, to visit the Hebrew prophet Isamel (Samuel). In a series of letters sent from the land of the Hebrew people, Arbaces describes his encounters with their leaders—Jonathan, Samuel, Saul and then David— and details his growing familiarity with and appreciation of the Hebrew people’s history, practices, and beliefs. As he narrates the history of Saul’s fall and David’s ascent, Arbaces adopts the Hebrews’ faith, which the novel constructs as eagerly anticipating Christ’s coming. As Arbaces claims, “[f]ragmentary prophecies of some mighty Being to descend upon earth are not only scattered through all the Hebrew writings, but glitter in their obscurest traditions” (272). Ingraham's narrator, who has busied himself with reading the chronicles of the Hebraic nation he is visiting, interprets their writings semi-typologically (since the analogous anti-type fulfilled in Christ’s figure in the New Testament has yet to appear in the narrator’s historical present). Arbaces fleshes out the historical meanings of this exegetical reading practice in a fuller national sense: “The whole national mind seems to live in an expectation—not so much dwelling peacefully upon the present as looking restlessly to the future; not like a nation who realise their high hopes: a nation not so much possessing a positive good, but expecting one to come” (273 emphasis in original). Ingraham’s novel embeds this typological consciousness into the Hebraic tradition, constantly aligning David with Jesus, the “divine and wonderful Prince” and portraying a national Hebraic history consecrated by both text and practice (273). This typological language speaks of a unified Judeo-Christian foundation, typical of the national scriptural consciousness and familiar to Ingraham’s contemporaries (as I explained in my Introduction). However, as I will show, the text complicates this perspective by converting the biblical tale into a work of fiction. The Throne of David obfuscates the theory of origins nurtured by exceptionalist typological thought. Ingraham’s novel, like many of the other texts analyzed here, while indeed adhering to a typological vision of redemption in its theological understanding of the David story, simultaneously evinces a complex attitude towards religious, literary and national origins. The original narrative is featured in the novel form, the “wineskin,” to borrow from Paul Gutjahr, 46 used to unfold the familiar biblical story of David, and the various literary allusions interspersed within, but which also processes it into something else—a supplement to the origin (142). This controversial form, which Twain mockingly called the “despised” genre, enables the blending of the secular and the sacred, and revises the Hebrew Biblical narrative in a manner that resists classifying the Bible as the originator and fashioner of a national narrative and culture. By so doing, Ingraham joins the other writers in this chapter in suggesting that for the Bible to retain the function of an originating narrative to remain a religious origin in nineteenth-century U.S. culture, it needs support from the popular and more relevant novel form to confirm its national originary status as well. Lastly, I introduce Charles Beecher’s The Life of David King of Israel (1861), along with his sister Harriet’s preface to the work, both of which attempt to alleviate qualms regarding the mixture of fact and fiction as well as the issue of individual undertakings and an author’s justification for revising the Bible. Charles Beecher (1815-1900) was a music teacher, abolitionist and minister who preached in several congregations between 1844-1863 until the Church charged him with heresy and terminated its relation with him because of his unorthodox preaching on “the preexistence of man, the condition of souls after death, the Atonement and Divine Sorrow.”28 Beecher’s Christological novel alludes to both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament as well as to extra-biblical scientific and literary sources. The text self-reflexively locates the “danger” that Ingraham and other writers faced in their appropriation of the novel form: the danger of combining what was conventionally considered the “truth”—the Hebrew Bible—with fiction’s imaginary literary attributes. Beecher’s emphasis on spiritual messages and social injustices (also typical of the novel at large), aims to draw attention away from the critique of assumptions regarding the Bible’s divine inspiration in scientific studies and Higher Criticism. Beecher and Stowe, like Ingraham, Hooker, Gallaudet and Hall, all agree that the task of rewriting the Hebrew Bible is necessary in their era, but they vary in the degree to which they allow their texts to be “inspired” in the metaphorical, biblical sense. All deal with the question of whether their fictions are independent texts in relation to the Hebrew Bible, or whether they are reverential subordinates of a sanctified origin. Their literary products emerge as supplements to the Biblical origin, and demonstrate an idea of origins as developmental and progressive,

28 For more on this affair, see “The Trial of Rev. Charles Beecher: HE IS CONVICTED OF HERESY. RESULT.”.

47 reconsidered and reformulated to befit post-revolutionary, modern and secular audiences. I now proceed to examine these texts more closely in light of the novelistic features I developed from Watt’s theory—imagery, temporality and authority—and show how they deviate from earlier forms of religious typological literature, incorporating these features in a method that undermines the Hebrew Bible’s originary role.

Hebrew Bible “Treasures” and the Secular Imagery of the Biblical Source Central to these writers’ revisions of Hebrew Bible stories of King David is their use of imagery and a writing style that resonates with an earthly, secular representative framework. While “secular” etymologically implies “of or pertaining to the world,” the idea of secularity also connotes specific “earthly” aspects—and in some languages the distinction is crucial.29 In his Introduction to Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, Edward Said remarks that the 1961 English edition of Auerbach’s work on Dante, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt, is translated Dante, Poet of the Secular World, disregarding a definition of irdischen as “earthly” which the original German phrase offers.30 Said designates Auerbach a “critic of the earthly world” (emphasis mine), suggesting that Auerbach’s interest in various representations of reality is related to the critic’s exiled status, created through Western Literature and in alienation from it, both physically and spiritually (also interestingly denoting secularism in opposition to nationalism, not religion).31 According to Said, this liminal space is reproduced in Auerbach’s attention—in his work on Dante, Homer, Scriptures and other classics—to the relations between “earthly” and “Divine” representations of reality. Said further argues, following Auerbach, that despite these texts’ ostensible emphasis on eternal transcendence, reality is chiefly represented as “basically human,” as is the kind of history these texts delineate (28). Auerbach claims that Western Literature evolves through this tension between divine and earthly realities, and that history’s subsequent triumph over the classical epic is grounded in “earthly situations.” Said calls this “a radically humanistic thesis” (29). This theoretical framework contextualizes my reading of

29 “secular”, adj. The Oxford English Dictionary. In Hebrew, also, the word for secular chilun shares the same root with sand- chol.

30 Said, “Introduction,” 13.

31 See also Said’s The World, The Text and the Critic (1983) and Representations of the Intellectual (1994)

48 nineteenth-century biblical fiction and the earthly imagery writers employ to reformulate the biblical narrative and the human-centered reality they propagate. In their literary reproductions of David stories, despite the overt objective of relating divinely-oriented subjects and tropes, writers frequently utilize images of earthly, human reality to realize these objectives. This contradiction informs these writers’ projects which, on a larger scale, centralize a divine creator and the text he presumably “authored.” By creating a textual supplement for a text they revere as their origin they also become rival authors. Images of working and developing the earth are often joined by descriptions of and allusions to secret treasures in need of unearthing and discovery. Along with these images, these writers present their revisions of the Hebrew Bible “through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms,” providing their readers “a full and authentic report of human experience” that is much more detailed and elaborate than the biblical origin (Watt 32). As Auerbach argues in Mimesis, the Bible is less unified, “more obviously pieced together” than the Homeric poems, and in Biblical style, “the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feelings remain unexpressed” (Auerbach 9). What gives the Bible its unity, Auerbach maintains, is the “vertical connection” to a single God who surfaces throughout the biblical narrative, guiding a universal, unified history. The nineteenth-century writers I present in this chapter attempt to particularize the biblical accounts in their focus on individual tales of David, their elaborate additional descriptions to the biblical plot, and in their assigning earthly imagery to their justifications for rewriting the Hebrew Bible. However, in the process of assuming these novelistic features, they destabilize the biblical unity that according to Auerbach revolves around an authoritative God and the history he presumably dictates. Sarah Ewing Hall’s Conversations on the Bible (1818) is unlike the other texts in this chapter in its aspirations to provide a complete historical narrative; the text revises the conventional “history of the Jews” as chronicled in the Hebrew Bible—alleging to provide a comprehensive, universal account of the Biblical stories and their meanings, compatible with the epic style Auerbach identifies (330). However, Conversations compartmentalizes the larger story by breaking it down into sections, and these into a catechistic dialogue between mother and children, allowing room for reflection on specific incidents and motives, and for extra detail. For example, when the character Fanny begs to understand a specific point—“the objection of David 49 requires an explanation, mother”—or when the son Charles adds his own observation—“Poor David has had a turbulent passage from the sheep-cote to the throne. I hope he was now permitted to reign in peace”—mother’s responses dwell on particular instances typically left unexplained and compressed in the original narrative (193, 208). Conversations on the Bible is an example of an early nineteenth-century text that evinces a dual, conflicting approach to the Hebrew Bible it designates as its source. While the text aims to introduce the Hebrew Bible to a wider readership, it also presents the Hebrew Bible as flawed and lacking. For example, in Hall's “conversation” on the Book of Ruth, regarding the origins of the Davidic dynasty, the daughter Fanny notes that the story "bears so strong a resemblance to the Palemon and Lavinia of our favourite Thomson.” This leads to a long dialogue regarding the differences between the narrative qualities of the biblical version and “The Story of Palemon and Lavinia” by Scottish poet James Thomson, a fictional poem inspired by the biblical narrative and published in Thomson’s poetry cycle The Seasons (1730). Mother decisively concludes that “The Bible is the inexhaustible source from which rhetoric and poetry have delighted mankind in every age” and that “it surpasses all attempts at imitation” (176). Careful not to underestimate Thomson’s “genius,” the narrator contends that Thomson’s poetry is “inferior in variety, in pathos, and in moral interest, to the history of Ruth the Moabitess” and provides two arguments to back up this assertion: first, that the “affecting incidents, calculated in themselves, without the ornament of language, to excite the deepest sympathy, are wanting in the fiction of Thomson”; and second, that “the original is more strongly impressive because we know the picture to be genuine” (177). It is therefore ironic that Hall herself chooses the narrative style, with its own “ornament of language” to revise the biblical narrative, and equally remarkable that she sees the need to validate the “genuineness” of the “picture” with biblical scholarship. In the preface to the first edition, she explains her initiative as amending the “erroneous indifference to the study of the Old Testament,” metaphorically labeling the Christian Bible as “the casket” and the Hebrew bible as “the key which displays the treasure in the clearest point of view” (v). As I will show, this figurative reference to accumulated treasures, wealth and exploration, is common to many attempts at explaining authorial motivation (in prefaces or reviews) to writing Hebrew Biblical fictions. By configuring the Bible as an unopened, undeveloped entity seeking completion, they 50 seek to justify their revision of the biblical tale and promote a perception of origins as likewise continuously developing and in need of supplementation and completion. Mary Ann (Brown) Hooker’s The Life of David, King of Israel (1832) centers on the character of David, from “childhood” to death, featuring chapters on his “character,” “talents,” and “the history of his memory”—all conspicuously absent from the biblical account (5, 222, 243, 248). Unlike Hall, Hooker casts David as her story’s protagonist, adding details that would endear him to her readers. While the biblical text condenses David’s introduction to a brief passage describing Samuel’s trip to Bethlehem to anoint a new king (soon shifting the focus to the evil spirit troubling Saul [1 Samuel 16]), Hooker dedicates her first two chapters to David’s childhood amidst the Judean Hills, emphasizing the natural scenery and thoughts of the young David, and then detailing David’s anointment with much suspense and elaboration (5-26). In 1842, a review by J. Fletcher in The Independent Magazine named Hooker as “perfectly unrivalled as a writer for young children,—perfectly,” stating that Hooker’s biography of David did much more than paraphrase “the language of the sacred historian, and [supply] the dates and other necessary connections.” The reviewer uses the imagery of quasi-scientific exploration and observation to praise her reconstruction of the biblical narrative. Hooker, he writes, “visited, in imagination, the places of which she was about to present a picture.” He suggests that she “wandered” through mountains, valleys, rivers and shores, “observing minutely the flowers, the landscape, and all that has life and motion among them.” Her research is carefully conducted as she enters fictional residences, and “identifie[s…] herself” with her characters’ social customs and religious rites. “And she thus,” Fletcher concludes, “gathered together whatever could give truth, and beauty, and effect to the picture she was about to draw; and then gave herself with studious diligence to the pencil” (107). Transforming the Bible into a work of fiction is presented as a “truth” constructed through human toil, labor and selection, with the author “[gathering] together whatever could give truth, beauty and effect,” by contrast to the presumably insufficient biblical origin. Fletcher’s approval of the text’s emphasis on retrospective revision of the Bible elevates imitational sequels above their origins, but also suggests the inadequacy of the Biblical origin that justifies such revisions. The relation between an origin and an imitation is more complex in Joseph Holt Ingraham’s works, in which the Biblical precedent is portrayed as giving life to a subsequent text. This slippery and ambiguous perspective (the Bible represented as simultaneously 51 indispensable and inadequate) is portrayed in his “Outline” to The Throne of David, where he turns to the Hebrew Bible as the origin of “ART” while simultaneously subverting the Holy Book’s foundational status in relation to both art and history, explaining that he writes in order to “invest [the Bible] with popular interest” (xiii). Although Ingraham expresses his hope that his novels will direct “attention to the Bible, the inexhaustible FOUNTAIN from which they are drawn,” he paradoxically undermines this claim by challenging the effect the Bible may have on its readers when encountered in its original non-fictional form. “The Bible,” he asserts, “is a legitimate field for human research. Like the globe, its mines of gold and silver are by man lawfully penetrated and worked for their treasures. Every sermon gathers its wealth of thought from its sacred placers; every commentator finds in the golden sands of its rivers of Life, his riches of illustration” (xiv). Alluding to the biblical description of creation in Genesis, the spatial metaphors “field,” “globe,” “sacred placers,” and “sands” suggest an inert earth waiting to be subdued for the benefit of man. And when man comes—with his “research,” “sermon” or “commenta[ry]”—to actively “penetrate,” “work,” “gather” and “find” the earth, he is met with an agentive “inexhaustible fountain,” paralleled to “the rivers of Life,” which encourage him to recreate and master the original. What’s more, Ingraham appropriates the imagery of labor— “mining,” “penetrating,” “working” and “gathering”— adapting a secular, earthly discourse for sacred religious ends that are far from passive or divorced from “works,” and are necessary to maintain a dubious covenant.32 Ingraham legitimizes his novelistic writing by embedding it within the “lawful field of duty,” which the Bible “permits” in order “to make known the Scriptures.” As he attests to his own decision to “delineate the characters of Holy Writ” and “present them to the imagination of the devout reader,” he explains that the books of his trilogy are presented in the form of “Letters” in order to secure more familiar and vivid expression (xiv). However, the language of “penetration” and treasure-hunting, of working the land and extracting its wealth, ironically corrupts the purity of the text as these metaphors align it with the national ideology of manifest destiny—territorial expansion and improvement. Thus in John L. O’Sullivan’s call: The expansive future is our arena, and for our history. We are entering on its untrodden space, with the truths of God in our minds, beneficent objects in our hearts, and with a clear conscience

32 As I explained in the introduction to this study.

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unsullied by the past. We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march? (427) This perception of the world as created for man’s utility, and specifically the American continent as “destined” to be conquered, is replicated in Ingraham’s portrayal of the relation to the biblical origin, a “field” waiting to be excavated. By creating a supplement that calls attention to the Hebrew Bible’s religious originary role, Ingraham similarly expresses a concern with its debatable attraction as a national one. As Ingraham synthesizes a typological historical consciousness with the form of the novel, so Charles Beecher in his David story, ostensibly adheres to earlier typological formations (especially in its language and spiritual messages), but employs novelistic devices. Indeed, his sister Harriet deemed it necessary to legitimize the conversion of Scripture into the novel form.33 According to Stowe, her brother’s text is “designed to interest young readers in the study of the Old Testament.” Fearful of readers’ indifference towards the topic, she approves of the fictional novel form, explaining that “[it] is sometimes useful, . . . when one set of words have worn smooth by use, so as to leave no trace in the mind, to employ another set, even though not so good, by way of restoring and deepening the original impression” (iii).34 Stowe configures origins as inaccessible, and perhaps even undesirable, and asserts the function of their imitations as substitutes which must fail in order to lead readers back to the forsaken original text. Stowe posits that this is “more particularly needful now, when the disposition of so many minds is to undervalue the Old Testament as compared with the new,” since people assume that the Hebrew Bible narrative is outdated, primitive, and at odds with Christian sentiments. However, Stowe reminds readers “that it was the Old Testament which was the Bible of Jesus,” and that since the moral difficulties and severities of the Hebrew Bible belong to the “God of Nature,” believers in a God of “Eternal Love, in spite of all the horrors [they] see in nature,” can likewise believe in the accounts detailed in the Hebrew Bible. Assigning the Hebrew Bible and its God to the natural world also corresponds to those descriptions of the Hebrew Bible as an earthly foundation that believers can legitimately rummage for treasures. Stowe thus proclaims the goal of her brother’s

33 Consider Hochman’s analysis of Stowe’s introduction to her brother Charles earlier work (1849), where she defends this method of defamiliarization.

34 Stowe cites as an example James Russell Lowell’s derogatory assessment of Nathaniel Willis in A Fable for Critics (published anonymously in 1848). In his poem, Lowell mocked notorious poets and critics, and his criticism of Willis is that he “ought to let scripture alone-- 't is self-slaughter,/ For nobody likes inspiration-and-water” (51). 53 book to support Christianity, as its base and origin, even if the means he uses undermine a central tenet regarding the sanctity and divine inspiration of the Bible. She thus paradoxically intertwines two origins, the Hebrew Bible and the Christian one, and reads one through the other in a mirror-like method—the imitation sends readers back to the origin, which sends them back to the imitation, and so forth—highlighting the origin’s status as incomplete and in need of supplementation. The figurative language of supplementation these texts employ in acknowledging and justifying their biblical revisions discloses an understanding of the Bible as inadequate in its present form, despite their declaration of loyalty and faith in Scripture. Moreover, the distinction between earthly and heavenly endeavors calls to mind contemporaneous debates challenging the divine authority of Biblical texts, even though these texts do not directly engage this controversy. Instead, they emphasize the right—perhaps even obligation—the Bible grants them to recreate the tropes they find essential to their present-day society, and to use whatever means necessary in order to meet these ends—even at the cost of lessening the authority of the Bible itself by depicting the origin as in need of supplementation. In their newfound authorial roles, these texts undermine two central aspects of the Hebrew Bible: first, they rework both its form and its temporal schemes of cause-and-effect, so central to Biblical narrative and religious teachings; second, they incorporate extra-biblical textual references which, while attempting to validate the biblical tale, in effect lessen its sole authority as a single, inerrant origin, and emphasize their authors as participators and creators in a literary tradition.

Out of Order: Disrupted Temporalities and Extra-Biblical Sources To understand how these nineteenth-century narratives deviate from previous forms of biblical writings, we must first establish the poetics of biblical writing, or what Robert Alter defined over thirty-five years ago as “the art” of Biblical narrative.35 Drawing on Auerbach’s influential definitions, Alter argues that biblical writing has a style, a “preference for direct discourse” and a “special rhythm with which the Hebrew writers tell their tales”: each biblical segment depicts a pattern consisting of narration/exposition, followed with dialogue, and

35 Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative.

54 concluding with narration that centers on “the sharply salient verbal intercourse of the characters, who act upon one another, discover themselves, affirm or expose their relation to God, through the force of language” (67, 75). Consistent with my analysis above, Alter maintains that the Hebrew Bible’s narratives use few visual representations and descriptions, and feature “minimal authorial intrusion” that maximizes the space for dialogue among characters (86). What unifies these narratives, according to Alter, is mostly repetition in various forms: of biblical “type- scenes” (which deviate from Homeric ones by depicting universal themes rather than the details of everyday life), and of words, images, actions, and themes. Though the biblical characters often assert their free agency, impulses, or transgressions, “the actions they perform all ultimately fall into the symmetries and recurrences of God’s comprehensive design” (113). The biblical narratives’ repetitive structure thus exhibits the “inescapable tension between human freedom and divine historical plan” and the linear movement towards the revelation and unfolding of such a plan (113). As I demonstrated in my Introduction, this linear understanding of religious time—from Creation until Revelation, guided and instrumented under God’s auspices—is central to Protestant visions of a universal history and the social conditions that may advance it. However, in revising the biblical David narrative, nineteenth-century writers fragment this foundational, all-encompassing linear construction by directing attention to alternative “beginnings” and “ends,” and by reconstituting the biblical plot in a particularized manner that positions time itself as a significant factor in the characters’ lives. In typological Protestant interpretations, the temporal condition of a character is meaningful only in so far as it promotes the future Revelation. In Biblical fiction, by contrast, time is meaningful because it facilitates character development, in a manner symptomatic of novelistic writing.36 Development is another method of contesting a notion of the Bible as a sacred origin; the representation of character development over time is central to the act of supplementation that the novel form promotes. A major challenge these writers contend with in revising the David narrative is the decentered Biblical representations, which they need to transform into an independent, isolated

36 Watt claims that “the novel in general has interested itself much more than any other literary form in the development of its characters in the course of time” (22) and Northrop Frye argues in The Anatomy of Criticism that “It is perhaps the link with history and a sense of temporal context that has confined the novel… to the alliance of time and Western man” (307).

55 story with a logical, well-contextualized plot. The biblical chronicles of David, among the longest in the Hebrew Bible (in books 1 and 2 of Samuel), are interwoven with parallel stories of Saul’s decline in these books, and they refer both to the tales of Ruth and Boaz in the book of Judges, and to Genesis’ description of Judah and Tamar, whom the Hebrew Bible depicts as David’s ancestors.37 Indeed, Sarah Ewing Hall’s Conversations addresses the Hebrew Bible as a single cohesive narrative: she labels the chapters of her text according to the biblical books, discussing David in a chapter entitled “Samuel.” Conversations detects a deficiency in the format of the original biblical text, and modifies the lengthy biblical narrative by using the “conversational” mode: as the daughter, Fanny, self-reflexively insists, conversation is “more impressive than reading; and in this instance especially, it will diminish the trouble of travelling through so large a book” (9). Consistent with the secular imagery of exploration and exhaustion, reading the Bible is likened to troublesome travel. Mother, horrified by the use of the term “trouble,” answers that reading the Bible gives pleasure, awakens curiosity, and “opens to man his origin and destiny,” but agrees to using conversational style at Fanny’s perseverance and accedes to her demand for a “simple connected narrative of the story” (9). Hall thus acknowledges the Bible’s flaws, which she remedies by creating a new narrative sequence, overlooking biblical scenes that interrupt her thematic flow, and bridging together those that accord with the specific subject she is addressing at each point of her narration. Similarly, in the process of converting the Bible into a popular children’s text, Hooker’s book embraces the novelistic narrative technique of ruptured temporal sequence that also challenges the Hebrew Bible’s originary status, thus paralleling antebellum religious literary culture’s reconsideration of its exceptionalist ethos. The novel form not only encourages the creation of fictional reality through invented events and descriptive details that challenge a religious social order (as I will explain in the next section), but it also presents a temporal framework that complicates traditional forms of historical sequencing. By contrast, the Hebrew Bible, as a narrative of origins and developments, from its renowned first sentence—“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”— references events and stories as evolving from previous ones. This temporal dependability upholds the notion of an unbroken covenant

37 See Chapter 3 where I discuss the significance of this genealogy in nineteenth-century understandings of the Bible as a literary and national origin.

56 between a creator and its creations by portraying circumstances invariably as consequences within a logic of divine causality. By contrast, Hall’s Conversations on the Bible and other antebellum texts, though they overtly claim to enhance the Bible’s status as an origin, appear as alternative literary and historical “beginning” narratives. In Hebrew Bible fiction, the tendency to disrupt the biblical genealogy which fuses past with present and future is especially evident in the recurrent practice of isolating the David narrative from the larger biblical plot that contextualizes it. For example, Mary Ann Hooker’s story begins: “Nearly three thousand years ago, there lived in Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, a very good man, whose name was Jesse,” an opening that discards the elaborate biblical genealogy that precedes Jesse, culminates with David (or Jesus, in the Christian tradition), and produces all three figures (5). In addition, this beginning skips the tale of Samuel in whose book the David narrative appears, and that of Ruth, who engendered the Davidic line. The result is a mystification of the Biblical narrative’s linear causality, which suggests that an isolated, independent David might be more accessible for Hooker’s readers than the one who relies on the biblical frame that produces him. However, the narrator reminds the young readers early on that David was born “in the year 2919, that is, 1085 years before the Lord Jesus Christ was born,” thus signaling the definite end of David’s “history,” replacing the Hebrew Bible’s focus on David’s origins with an emphasis on David himself as Jesus’s forebear (5).38 The literary license the author takes in altering the biblical story is already apparent in the first pages of the book: a description of Bethlehem’s landscape and atmosphere, discussions of the “weather in Palestine” (which “is very different from what it is in New England, but it is in some respects like the climate of South Carolina and Georgia” (6)), of the flora and fauna, etc. The characteristic description of David the young child, “reading the word of God”— again provides detail that is absent from the original biblical story (11). These fictional additions convey a perspective on origins as neither fixed nor determining, but rather developmental and ever-changing, demanding alterations and adjustments to befit changing audiences and eras. Another method of adjustments is evident in Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet’s Scripture Biography for the Young: David and Solomon, Including Saul and Rehoboam (1843) and the text’s commencement in medias res, and then proceeding to add missing details in retrospect.

38 The Hebrew calendar dates years to the creation of the world according to Genesis.

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Gallaudet’s text begins: “A youthful shepherd becomes the king of a great people. Such was the wonder-working providence of God at that eventful period in the history of the Israelites which we now proceed to consider” (7). Beginning the story at the end, and then piecing together details of the past (Saul’s sin and David’s family heritage), creates a disorganized and ambiguous narrative plot, which, though common in the Greco-Roman classical writings (as well as in novels), does not accord with the textual unity inherent in the original Biblical text. Similarly, in a later episode of Gallaudet’s text, obliquely detailing David’s adultery with Bathsheba, the narrator again anticipates future events, stating that “[in] the subsequent part of his life David must suffer severely for his great wickedness” (200). Unlike Hall’s loyalty to the biblical sequence, Gallaudet’s temporal narrative strategy emphasizes David as an individual characterized by particular weaknesses and strengths, rather than as member of a longer historical narrative. He thus moves closer to the generic norms of the novel as a form. These examples of non-sequential biblical stories also mirror the antebellum shift away from Protestant perceptions of national descent from a biblical past, toward ideas regarding America as a “new” site of unprecedented history. “Our national birth,” John L. O’Sullivan plainly asserts, “was the beginning of a new history, the formation and progress of an untried political system, which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only.”39 These temporal disjunctions, O’Sullivan emphasizes, so typical of Biblical fiction, imply that the evolving experience of nineteenth-century America may not originate in a biblical past, an implication that challenges the prevailing typological consciousness. Previous forms of typological writing, as I demonstrate in my introduction, adhere to the theological principle of textual unity and its consequential historical paradigms. However, early nineteenth century texts such as Hooker’s and Gallaudet’s reflect not a challenge to religious doctrines themselves, but rather an alteration and reconsideration of how these doctrines are experienced. The narrative techniques employed in Hooker’s and Gallaudet’s books perform this varying experience by distancing themselves from the straightforward, informative style of earlier biblical literature, preferring elaborate dialogues and diversified plots that reorder plot chronology. However, like their invention of detail regarding character and landscape, these narratives’ absorption of the novel’s poetics through representation of ruptured temporality

39 O’Sullivan, “The Great Nation of Futurity,” 426.

58 further undermines the Bible’s originary status. Ingraham’s novel repeatedly features scenes describing past events alongside futuristic prophecies, long time lapses and temporal gaps. In “Letter IV,” for example, Arbaces visits “the School of Seers” overlooked by Samuel, where he first meets the yet-to-be-anointed David, and encounters scrolls “containing the history” of the Hebrews (128). One of these texts, Samuel explains, “is called ‘The Story of Ruth’ who was the mother of [David’s] grandmother. It was written by [David] in his nine-teenth year at Bethlehem … in order to preserve the genealogy of his family” (129). Marking David as the author of the Book of Ruth—a description absent from the biblical source—enhances David’s character as a talented writer, adding prestige and accountability to his Messianic role.40 It also serves as a plot device through which the narrator inserts absent biblical information (appearing in a tale traditionally assumed to have been written earlier) in order to substantiate David’s worthiness, foreshadowing his imminent designation as the next king; as Samuel decrees, David’s story “is a poem of great beauty, for the youth is, by nature as well as by divine inspiration, a true poet!” (129). Arbaces justifies his digression into David’s “interesting history” by promising “that nothing concerning this wonderful people, whose God ever walks among them, invisibly seeing all they do, powerful to protect, and terrible to avenge, will be uninteresting to you.” The pronoun “you” implicitly refers not only to the letter’s addressee (his fictional royal cousin), but to readers of Ingraham’s novel (174). The novel also frequently features select psalms interspersed within the narrative, which on the one hand corroborates the narrative’s authenticity (because the book of Psalms is traditionally attributed to David), but on the other further obfuscates the linear biblical narrative, collapsing the boundaries between distinct texts and disconnected time frames. This double movement is similar to others evinced by works in this genre, stressing their dual attitude towards the biblical origin that is indispensable to their project, and yet inadequate as well—a perspective that informs any attempt at reproduction or imitation. One example of Ingraham’s use of the psalms to create this dual perspective is in his description of David’s psalm written after he is admonished by Nathan for his conduct with Bathsheba. The narrator (now Prince Isrilid, Arbaces’ son who is king of Tadmur and no longer resides at David’s court), describes

40 Biblical commentators consistently attribute the Book of Ruth to Samuel, following a passage in the Baba Bathra tractate in the Babylonian Talmud (14b).

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David’s reaction to God’s judgment of him as a “solemn act of public contrition in the Tabernacle,” the “composition of a penitent psalm, which he humbly recited aloud before all the people” (551). Psalm 51 is then penned verbatim, with Isrilid concluding: “This psalm seems to exhaust the language of humble penitence. He feels his sin is too great for the blood of bulls and of goats to atone for, but casts himself outside of all these upon the mercy of his God” (156). Isrilid’s depiction of David is an elaborated commentary on the psalm, which reads “For thou desireth no sacrifice, else would I give thee; but thou delightest not in burnt-offerings. The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, shalt thou not despise” (Psalms 51:16-16). The author’s conclusion to the novel explains the universal significance and unitary function of the scattered psalms, as they imaginatively travel through history. Like the imagery of travel and exploration in Fletcher’s review of Hooker’s David narrative, Ingraham describes the psalms as having first “cheered the solitude of the desert caves of Engedi” and then through “the glens or the hill-sides of Judea,” slowly reached “almost every part of the habitable world, in the remotest islands of the ocean, among the forests of America, on the sands of Africa… bringing [diverse communities’] affections into unison with their deep devotional fervor” (591). The interspersed psalms, epitomizing “the universal language of religious emotion,” are explained in the Conclusion as a trans-historic, cross-temporal form of literariness (591). Yet their insertion into Ingraham’s storyline creates a tension with such implied trans- historicity insofar as each psalm is assigned a confined context and space. Thus, religious fiction in the nineteenth century slowly developed from catechistic literature into the novel form and, in its developmental structure, it challenged the stability and authority its authors believed to be integral to the Hebrew Bible’s status as an origin of history and literature. This transformation of religious literature into a popular genre is most conspicuous in the epistolary form of Ingraham’s novels that references and reinforces both an epistolary Christian scriptural and a secular European narrative tradition. Though the novel’s dedication is addressed “to the AMERICAN HEBREWS,” the invocation of this European tradition obstructs the biblical narrative’s immediate manifestation in the American nation; this narrative tradition disrupts linear historical progression by conflating the biblical past with the American present, while referencing parallel, European literary and national histories. The epistolary form allows for chronological shifts, reflection on past events and anticipation of future ones by contrast to the Bible’s causative structure. 60

Moreover, these Hebrew Bible narratives often refer to contemporary non-biblical scientific sources, mainly works on biblical landscape, archeology and travel narrative. Such references, designed to validate the biblical narrative, actually undermine its status as self- sufficient authoritative origin. For if the Bible was once valued as the singular “source” or “foundation” from which all knowledge evolves, these texts suggest otherwise with their incorporation of supplementary forms of knowledge. Charles Beecher frequently evokes travel narratives such as Edward Robinson’s popular Biblical Researches in Palestine and in the Adjacent Regions (1841) as well as those by Charles Leonard Irby and James Mangles (105); Sarah Ewing Hall bases her biblical commentary on Edward Daniel Clarke’s travels and other Holy Land expeditions (198); and Ingraham’s text occasionally references Henry Milman’s History of the Jews (1829), a text that rationalism of which challenged orthodox views of the Bible and was censured by the Church. In her introduction to the Conversations Hall claims that she attempted nothing but “brief illustrations from authors of acknowledged credit,” but her text is replete with references to works by scholars, theologians and philologists. She also defends her incorporation of often-quoted theological debates in her “conversations,” stating that they “are sometimes incidentally thrown in, either to furnish the uninformed with an answer, or to give spirit to the dialogue” (vi). In these texts’ attempt to confirm the chronicles of the Hebrew Bible, references to extra-biblical, secular, contemporary literature produce the opposite effect and undermine the Bible’s status as the quintessential source of knowledge. Their writings thus affirm their view of the Hebrew Bible as both an essential and insufficient origin, and their supplements, in their constant invocation and alterations of the origin, conceive of origins as developmental works-in-progress, rather than complete and authoritative historical points.

Novel Authors between Originality and Authority The extra-biblical references in Bible fiction not only devalue the Bible’s status as the ultimate source of knowledge and quintessential origin of a national historical and religious consciousness; they also call attention to themselves as authors—figures whose creative power may authoritatively reconfigure biblical narratives. The plethora of references and sources in their works—including footnotes, maps, illustrations, and prefaces that detail their motivation for writing, create a body of texts independent of the Bible, through which the authors’ textual presence overshadows the biblical subject-matter they write about. These attempts to depict an 61 authentic account of the David narrative accord with Ian Watt’s discussion of the novel’s “formal realism,” which granted writers the new license and incentive to focus on individual, rather than universal histories, and emphasize motivations, character and development. In terms of gender norms as well, biblical fictions anticipate the broader implications of the rise of the novel, enabling women writers to claim a role of authoritative social leadership. However, as Hall’s and Hooker’s texts show, this new-found authority did not extend to the Biblical female figures they discuss in their David stories, whom they portray in fairly conventional, even banal, terms. For them, the Bible’s inspirational role is what grants them independence and authority, which does not entail their revisions of the content of the biblical text; their interest lies with the form that exhibits their authorial status. Sarah Ewing Hall’s journal Port Folio published numerous essays that promoted nontraditional views on gender and women’s roles, yet her readings of female biblical characters in the Conversations are confined to conventional boundaries. For instance, Hall departs from her usual chronological revision of the Hebrew Bible to elaborate on David’s wife, Abigail, and the circumstances surrounding their marriage. After Mother explains how Abigail stopped David from killing Nabal, she adds that “the judicious conduct of Abigail in this instance may be a lesson to all women. In every station to which Providence has called them, they may find opportunities of mediating between violent men” (200-1). Assigning women the role of peacemaking mediators is a conventional trope in fiction by both male and female writers, and Hall is consistent with these portrayals. However, Hall’s dissent is evident when she assumes her role as author, criticizing biblical commentators for ignoring the Israelite women’s perspectives, and offering her own interpretations of biblical passages. When discussing how the Amalekites destroyed Ziklag (where David and his party dwelled) and captured the women and children of David’s party, Mother implies that David’s consideration of and loyalty towards his wives rather than his sense of loss or vanity set him in pursuit of the captures. Introducing the artistic potential of the Ziklag scene for fiction writers, Hall adds, somewhat digressively, that “although the pen and the pencil have borrowed some of their finest subjects from the Bible, it yet contains many that remain untouched” (209). The biblical description of Ziklag’s destruction is indeed terse and seldom reproduced in art and literature: 62

And it came to pass, when David and his men were come to Ziklag on the third day, that the Amalekites had… smitten Ziklag, and burned it with fire; And had taken the women captives, that were therein . . . So David and his men came to the city, and, behold, it was burned with fire; and their wives, and their sons, and their daughters, were taken captives. Then David and the people that were with him lifted up their voice and wept, until they had no more power to weep (1 Samuel 30: 1-4). Rising to the occasion, Hall elaborates on this biblical scene: The distress of the Israelitish women on the irruption of the barbarians—the conflagration of their dwellings before their eyes, and their own captivity; the desolate scene on the return of fathers, lovers, husbands—the united cries of grief and rage—the tumultuous rush of desperate men to pursue the spoilers, and the sudden recovery of all their treasures, are affecting circumstances, on which genius might dwell to delight. (209) Hall recognizes that this part of the David story carries an unrealized artistic potential absent from both the Biblical narrative and as yet untapped by biblical fiction writers. Her text accentuates these absences by lengthily interpreting and describing what she defines as biblical esteem for women’s roles and perspectives.41 This is merely one instance of a more elaborate process whereby Hall’s readings of biblical passages reproduce ideals developed to support “the cult of true womanhood” while her selections and emphatic criticism of a literary tradition simultaneously assert Hall’s status as a creator and originator of a new form of writing.42 Hall’s biblical fiction, as both an extension of the biblical origin and a supplement to it, attempts to combine the conservatism associated with the Bible with a progressive morality, reconstituting origins that are liable to change in essence when their form becomes more developmental and progressive as well. Thus, in its departure from traditional religious texts for children and adaptation of catechistic literature, Hall’s Conversations on the Bible plays a leading role in the evolving genre of Hebrew Biblical fiction. Although Hall’s Conversations cannot be categorized as a novel, it adopts novelistic features and emphasizes characters’ particular actions. In addition, Hall’s

41 One cannot discount the objectifying tone and imagery here, however: the text relegates the Israelite women to the realm of “treasures” and the men’s possessions.

42 Barbara Welter analyzes the four virtues by which a woman was judged—“piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity”—and which were common to the nineteenth century “Cult of True Womanhood” (152). See also Douglas and Tompkins, as well as Mary Kelley’s Private Woman, Public Stage, on nineteenth-century woman writers.

63 intertextual references, her rearranging of the biblical plot sequence in order to explain characters’ motivations, and her confirmation of her own authority all exemplify the way antebellum writers slowly began to pierce through the rigid conventional form hitherto used to discuss Biblical stories. Like Hall’s texts, Hooker’s The Life of David, King of Israel eschews progressive ideas regarding women’s roles, and appears to model its descriptions on previous orientalist tales. The eighteenth-century fascination with the Orient spiked imaginary travel narratives that David Reynolds categorizes as “the first body of religious fiction in America” (37). Hooker’s illustration of the women mourning Samuel’s death could be derived from this genre. Her description of “men and women crowding the roads that led to Ramah, weeping and singing mournful songs” is amplified by her emphasis on the various sounds she attributes to these biblical women. While the narrator describes “continual sounds of mourning … especially from the apartments of the women,” the “female relatives” sat in silence “while some women at a little distance sung songs in praise of the prophet who was dead.” This scene culminates with a final picture of discord when “the mourners arose and ran around the room with melancholy shrieks, wringing their hands, tearing their garments, and throwing ashes upon their heads. The chief mourner sat still, in the centre, weeping and tearing her hair” (129-130). These audible emotional responses range from “weeping” and “singing” to “silence,” “shrieks,” and the imagined sound of tearing garments and hairs. This scene has no biblical precedent; Hooker ironically augments the Biblical origin with a context and discourse imported from the oriental genre in order to achieve a more realistic affective depiction.43 In this context, she constructs women figures who are hyper-emotional, violently “shrieking,” “tearing,” and “[running] around the room”—an affective excess signaling primitivism rather than progress, distancing her readers from the Hebrew Bible rather than making it central. Such references to other sources and genres destabilizes the Hebrew Bible’s role as a singular precedent and flawless foundation especially in the reconstruction of women’s characters and roles. Hooker’s biblical fiction complicates the stability of origins through their portrayal of change, and in their appropriation of popular forms that convey transformations and reformulations.

43 The book of Samuel features the prophet’s death tersely, in one short verse: “And Samuel died; and all the Israelites were gathered together, and lamented him, and buried him in his house at Ramah.” (1 Samuel 25:1)

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Hooker and Hall’s gradual appropriation of the novel as the preferred form for spreading the gospel shares a perspective on the Bible, on society, and on authorship with works by canonical nineteenth-century female writers such as Stowe and Warner. All four writers express a new Protestant perception of the covenant, demanding that believers change their society and interfere in earthly affairs rather than accepting their current circumstances as divinely ordained—as though their social and historical role must be one of passive resignation.44 As Jane Tompkins exemplifies with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “the novel functions both as a means of describing the social world and as a means of changing it" (135). Substituting the novel for the Bible, these narratives not only question the secure and previously-undoubted outcome of a prescribed history but also evince uncertainty regarding how its purported beginning may be imagined or grasped. As these texts turn to the David story in order to validate a scriptural consciousness, they simultaneously lay the foundation for controverting this story’s role in engendering the exceptionalist national narrative that was a central aspect of nineteenth-century US culture. The novel form, as emblematic of a literary culture that sought not only to represent reality but reform it as well, conflicted with contemporary religious literary forms that read the Bible through the typological lens, as a complete, adequate reality in no need of alteration and for which the mere suggestion of alteration was blasphemous. As Cathy Davidson writes, clarifying widespread resistance to novels, “the early reviewers, by attacking fiction, were defending a vision of society that they viewed … as well ordered and manifestly worthy of defense.” According to Davidson, these critics—mostly privileged white men of significant social authority—struggled to support the “need for the very social authority that the novels themselves presumed to question,” because, as they understood it, “an aberrant form of literary culture equaled an aberration in the very design of America” (104). Therefore, in their simulation and ultimate adoption of the novel form, Biblical fiction writers collaborated with a literary tradition that sought to repair social realities by unifying a divided nation around a single narrative of national origins.

44 See for example Dawn Coleman’s recent work on the novel form as articulating a sermonic narrative mode that enabled women to participate in a tradition they could not access publicly, as well as Mary Kelley’s analysis of “literary domestics” in her Private Woman, Public Stage describing how women, though confined to their homes, still took on public roles of responsibility in leading and educating to religious salvation.

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Conclusion: The Novel Between Divine and Human Inspiration When writers of biblical fiction turned to the novel as a vehicle of reformation, they frequently needed to resolve the tension between themes promoted by the Hebrew Bible and their present, historic situation. Like Joseph Holt Ingraham’s novel, Charles Beecher’s text tends to justify events in the Hebrew Bible by using Christian theology, at times effacing the Hebrew Bible’s value as literary and historic origin. For example, following his depiction of David’s victory over Goliath, Beecher plays down David’s warring features by allegorizing them: Now, that simple faith in God, which this stripling David had, is the same which the true reformer needs, in going out to meet gigantic wrongs. In those days, great principles were decided by swords; now, by words; and between swords and words there is but a letter’s difference; one pierces bodies, the other pierces souls. And it requires precisely the same element of naked reliance of God to cope with giant odds, whether with swords or words. If there is anything the Church wants in these days, it is the simple, yet sublime faith of David (91). The reformist intentions of Beecher’s text are unambiguous: he encourages readers to act, and to challenge “gigantic wrongs” such as slavery and Indian Removal. For that purpose, he represents the narrative form of fiction as an appropriate means for changing reality “by words.” Beecher implicitly elevates the novel’s “words” over David’s (and the Hebrew Bible’s) militaristic attributes, claiming that words are better suited to uphold the shaky covenant between God and what he defines as the “American Israel.” But by rejecting the militaristic language and themes emphasized in the Hebrew Bible’s David narrative, Beecher justifies his revision of the Biblical narrative as necessity for conveying his reformist, Christian sentiments, which are not present in the original.45 Beecher’s image of the transition from swords to words leads me to a final note regarding the transition from the Biblical tenet of faith in “the Word of God” to novelistic emphases on authorial design. Whether the “words of God” are no longer familiar, or rather too familiar to engage a reader (as Harriet Beecher Stowe implies in her preface to her brother’s works), or whether they are inaccessible to a diverse population, the language and style of the texts

45 I will introduce another aspect of these militaristic aspects, and of allegorical representations of Davidic violence, in my analysis of Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor in chapter 4.

66 discussed here emphasize their distance from their source, and their status as supplemental literary products that, in their ability to redirect attention to the biblical original, stand out as superior in form. As Ronald F. Satta suggests, an acceptance of the flaws inherent in Scripture was crucial for the continued expansion of the nation’s Christian faith, which led scholars and religious leaders to accept “that errors of fact existed in Scripture but were inconsequential, incapable of tarnishing the vibrant spiritual message of the Bible” (xiv). This acknowledgment of Biblical imperfection is replicated, I conclude, in the era’s religious fiction, which identifies flaws in the Biblical origin and offers literary constructs as alternative methods for spreading the Gospel. My work in this chapter has aimed to clarify how adaptations of Hebrew Bible texts into fiction did more than invent a new literary genre; this body of literature challenged the typological consciousness that pervaded educational, political and cultural institutions. These fictional revisions of Hebrew Bible stories demonstrate how narratives of national origins developed from an established religious and cultural prophecy to a questionable and unstable, constantly changing literary genre, which often sought to reform rather than sustain the nation. These texts, written by diverse members of American society, offer a complex understanding of how a religious literary culture did not obstruct, but rather facilitated the construction of secular ideas and practices, thus synthesizing the secular with the sacred as early as the 1800s—and probably even before. In Biblical fiction, processes of supplementation, and the blend of the secular, earthly with the sacred and eternal in the adoption of features from the novel form, reflects on aspects of the Puritan culture that could themselves be regarded as secular. As this chapter demonstrates, nineteenth century writers sought alternative literary forms for the Biblical story that they believed was central to their post-revolutionary American Christian narrative, identity and culture. The gradual emergence of more diverse fictional forms, with the novel as the preferred, leading framework, created a body of popular literature that referenced the Bible in various ways, either by elaborating on a biblical story, or by creating fictional plots for biblical characters or themes. In the following chapters, I focus on three canonical novels that, in their construction of non-biblical plots, differ from the body of biblical fiction I have analyzed in this chapter, while still incorporating aspects or themes relying on the Hebrew Bible’s treatment of David. Chapter 2 shows how James Fenimore Cooper, in his historical romance The Last of the Mohicans, creates a parodic David character in order to 67 critique a religious historical consciousness that he deems irrelevant and unproductive in a post- revolutionary era. I argue that Cooper proposes his historical novel as a substitute for the biblical text and the view of history it espouses. While the writers I have analyzed in the present chapter all concur in their acceptance of a religious origin for human history, but diverge in the degree to which they invest in creating a supplementary national one, Cooper’s novel contests the Hebrew Bible as a relevant and useful origin for his central project of constructing an American beginning narrative. Cooper’s historical novel is constructed in opposition to two originary narratives, which the novel itself proposes as irrelevant historical sources and stories: the colonist typological narrative grounded in the Hebrew Bible, and Cooper’s idealized Native American narrative manifested in nature. By contesting both narratives, and offering his historical romance as a literary substitute for national origins, Cooper emphasizes the constructedness of origins and their problematic function in the politics of myth-making.

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Chapter 2

Competing with Nature: Vanishing Biblical Origins in The Last of the Mohicans Many of James Fenimore Cooper's texts, pioneering the American historical romance genre, are concerned with identifying the starting point around which antebellum American society frames and defines itself. Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) takes readers back to the French and Indian War (1754-61) and the 1757 massacre at Fort Henry, pinpointing a specific historical moment that paved the path toward the American Revolution and significantly shaped an American ethos that dramatized and legitimized the fate of white settlers: to conquer the wilderness from what they perceived as a menacing Native population—an American ethos that Cooper shared. As a number of scholars have demonstrated, in order to achieve this goal, Cooper distorts and conflates historical records, simplifying complex alliances and confounding tribal histories, creating metaphoric “Indians” befitting the prevailing contemporaneous doctrine by which the presumably imminent disappearance of the Native population was expected to give way to white domination. To bolster this claim, Cooper rewrites settler history: while positioning characters based on historical figures (such as Monroe) alongside fictional ones, he juxtaposes alternative values and historical perspectives in a manner that promotes one narrative over another. Critics often focus on the novel’s revisionist history of Native-settler relations, emphasizing racial and cultural conflict and discrimination, on the one hand, and historical paradigms and literary representations, on the other.1 But there is another aspect of Cooper’s engagement with history, and his endorsement of a specific settler narrative, that has been neglected in scholarship. This narrative not only

1 Fully aware of the “improbable” and “unbelievable” strategies characteristic of Cooper’s historical writings, scholars attempt to reclaim the novel’s literary status by focusing on significant themes that bypass the “embarrassing” historical inaccuracy (Rans 118, and Tompkins 99, 96). Jane Tompkins argues that the novel offers its critique against cultural—rather than sexual—miscegenation and its attempt to restore order in her Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860; Geoffrey Rans offers his “secular reading” of the novel, defending it by taking account of the chronological order of publication of the Leatherstocking series, see his Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels: A Secular Reading. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Earlier critics tried to verify the historical accuracy of Cooper’s plot, while also attempting to clarify Cooper’s relation to Native and settler history. See Robert Clark’s discussion of Cooper’s conflation and erosion of historical records—specifically the missionary John Heckewelder’s accounts—in his writing of the novel in “The Last of the Iroquois: History and Myth in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans”; as well as more recently, Joshua David Bellin’s The Demon of the Continent: Indians and the Shaping of American Literature.

69 devalues Native history and rights, but also dismisses a conventional exceptionalist doctrine grounded in and stemming from biblical historical culture. Cooper channels biblical culture into the character of David Gamut, the Calvinist singing master, a character who employs biblical rhetoric and who embraces Calvinist doctrines about fate and predestination, the Puritan religious ideology that Perry Miller deemed an “errand into the wilderness.” The figure of David Gamut embodies the incompatibility of this biblical consciousness with a post-revolutionary society.2 The novel presents the Bible-embodied-in-Gamut as a parody of typological thought and of the cultural dependence on a biblical origin that purportedly explains historical occurrences; the figure of Gamut further destabilizes this historical consciousness with the novel’s depiction of nature as a competing origin. The representation of the David character as incompatible with the others and with the novel’s historical project suggests that, unlike in Miller’s “errand,” in Cooper the biblical origin fails to explain and give meaning to the wilderness. The Hebrew Bible, dispossessed of its role as the sole producer of historical meaning, appears to “vanish” in the novel in a manner similar to the process supposedly occurring to Cooper’s contemporaneous Native Americans. The novel suggests that nature— which Cooper depicts in dialogue with specifically the Native Americans characters—is like the Bible, a candidate for fulfilling the originary role of the American historical narrative. Cooper portrays nature in The Last of the Mohicans as a Native American spatial territory, which enables constructions of knowledge that can explain historical occurrences. This alignment of nature with Native Americans is a romanticized settler perception that Cooper adopts in order to juxtapose alongside Gamut’s representation of a settler narrative, which gains its power by typological interpretations of the Hebrew Bible. Cooper’s novel thus proposes these two perceptions as possible national origin narratives—but he soon dismisses them both. This competition between the Hebrew Bible and nature eventually dissolves as both candidates are overtaken by a third one—in the form of Cooper’s novel. Cooper offers the historical romance, his fictional replacement, as an alternative beginning narrative, which significantly appears not in the beginning of the nation at all, but half a century following the American Revolution. Cooper’s Leatherstocking narratives therefore attempt to rewrite

2 I elaborate on Miller’s concept of the “errand” and the development of American exceptionalism in my introduction.

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American history by positioning a mythic fictional tale as a new originator and fashioner of an American identity, an act that weakens the authority of an origin altogether. Neither Cooper's themes nor the theological debates in which his characters engage undermine Christian faith or scripture, yet Gamut's character embodies the novel’s critique of the passivity it attributes to mere actors in the prescripted historical schema that the typological approach represents in this text.3 I argue that The Last of the Mohicans portrays typology as an anachronistic mode of understanding history, condemning its use in contemporaneous culture in two ways: first, as a concomitant of a post-Puritan religious society critical of predestination and Calvinism, and second, as criticism of the exceptionalist historical narrative that disregards Native American histories (despite his belief in their imminent disappearance). Cooper incorporates these two narratives in order to override and overwrite them, offering his historical novel as an attempt to replace divinely-inspired typological writings with authorially-dominated literary constructions of history—similar to the paralleling process I charted in my previous chapter. As writers such as Hall, Hooker and Ingraham reformulate the Hebrew Bible tales in a manner that predominately promotes their author status, Cooper also interweaves the David narrative to endorse and enhance the authority of his literary project. The vanishing of two separate models of origins—the settler typological originary narrative, and the Native American narrative inspired by nature—facilitates Cooper’s revision of national origin myths. In this chapter I examine how The Last of the Mohicans develops the narrative of contest between the two dominant competing accounts of origins for American identity – the Bible and nature—and how in the process, the novel cancels both their prospects as viable narratives while presenting itself as an alternative. I begin by analyzing the novel’s description of David Gamut as a parody of the Biblical character he replicates. I read his character as a metaphor for the irrelevance of the Hebrew Bible in post-revolutionary America and the inefficacy of typological interpretations of texts and history. I suggest that by negating the Bible’s role in nation-building

3 Not much is written about Cooper’s own religious beliefs and practices, neither by himself nor by his biographers; exceptions to this are discussions of his famous deathbed conversion and his specific criticism of organized religion in his Notions of the Americans (1828). However, many of Cooper’s texts betray an uneasiness toward Puritan ideology. Karen Sloan suggests that in his American Democrat (1838), Cooper’s comments on residual Puritanical “peculiarities of religion and of religious feeling in America” are “at best, superfluous to the nation’s progress; [and at] worst, a threat to America’s domestic goals and international prestige” (Cooper 179; Sloan 35). John T. McAleer similarly reads in Cooper’s texts, “his determination to direct men… to persuade them to supplant the legacy of Puritanism with the basic Christian teachings of love of God and neighbor” (223). For more on Cooper and religion, see McAleer, as well as Barbara Alice Mann and Wayne Franklin.

71 myths, Cooper defies traditional allusions to the Bible. Next, I analyze the novel’s juxtaposition of the Bible with nature, as they compete for the title of the more reliable origin of knowledge, historical developments, and American identity. As I highlight the novel’s endeavor to delineate a specific Native American space, confined to the wilderness, I show how settler attempts to master land and their language of overcoming the wilderness leading to its destruction and disappearance, correspond to the course that the Hebrew Bible undergoes in its parallel vanishing. I then align this depiction of competing narratives and their disappearance with a parallel issue the text is concerned with: the issue of firstness and lastness, challenging the implied antecedence of one narrative and culture over the other. I conclude by positioning Cooper’s historical novel, which blends history and myth-making within its complex attitude to scripture, as a counternarrative both to traditional typological sequences and to Native American histories, one that promotes the “American Scott” and his contemporaries, granting them full rights of authorship as creators of literary origins.4

Flawed Types: Between King David and David Gamut In The Last of the Mohicans, when Cora and Alice Munro journey to meet their father, stationed at Fort William Henry, along with Major Duncan Heyward and their Indian guide Magua, David Gamut asks to join their travelling party. Though introduced in great detail in the novel's first chapter, Gamut remains nameless for the first six chapters, a narrative technique that marks him as an exceptional “other.” Indeed, he is initially described as "a marked exception" to the other spectators watching the soldiers depart from Fort Edward (6). Gamut is repeatedly featured as a contradiction, deemed “ungainly, without being in any particular manner

4 I refer to Cooper’s novels as “historical novels” for their mixture of historic facts and fiction and for the purposes of this research, am less interested in discriminating between the historical “novel” and the historical “romance.” George Dekker argues that Cooper’s historical romances followed Sir Walter Scott’s understanding of the genre as a superficial method of dealing with both history and “the heroic ‘matter’ of the epic,” aiming to produce “family entertainment which wanted the dignity of both epic poetry and ‘real’ history” (23). However, these romances also provided a platform for discussing intellectual, political and social interests—a “potentially confusing mixture of fiction and history” (24). Specifically, Dekker argues that Cooper’s Mohicans is a novel because it “tests the possibility of racial and regional harmony in America”—or more accurately, the impossibility (25). Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse also read the narrative as an American novel following both the European and colonial “romance” traditions. This analysis is similar to the definition of the “novel” I’ve given in the previous chapter, and will therefore continue to refer to Mohicans as a “historical novel”. See Dekker, “James Fenimore Cooper and the American Romance Tradition” and Armstrong and Tennenhouse, “Recalling Cora: Family Resemblances in The Last of the Mohicans.”

72 deformed,” though he has “all the bones and joints of other men, without any of their proportions” (7). The novel portrays his appearance as misleading and confusing: “Erect, his stature surpassed that of his fellows; though seated, he appeared reduced within the ordinary limits of the race.” The narrator details his disproportionately-constructed body from top to bottom, starting with his large head, narrow shoulders, “long and dangling” arms, his “small, if not delicate” hands, thin and almost-emaciated legs and thighs, which are, nevertheless, “of extraordinary length.” At once comic and degrading, the description concludes with his knees, which “would have been considered tremendous, had they not been outdone by the broader foundations on which this false superstructure of blended human orders was so profanely reared" (7). The narrator continues to ridicule Gamut's character, dismissing and diminishing both his shape and manners, by referring to him as, for example, "the ungainly man," "the shapeless person" and "the single-minded disciple of the King of Israel" (13, 19, 177). Besides being overtly comic and ironic, the narrator’s tone in describing Gamut’s appearance is one of criticism and disapproval. What is more surprising is the suggestion that Gamut’s disproportionate structure is somehow his own fault; that his ostentatious manners and narrow-minded opinions are linked to his misshapen appearance. As if admonishing Gamut himself for his “false,” “blended” and “profanely reared” form, the novel implies there has been an error in the primal creation of his body by comparison to the forms of other white male characters (Cooper 7). Identifying an “archeological language… [which] suggests that the novel is returning to a primal scene of the emergence of persons,” Shirley Samuels reads Gamut’s “blended human orders” with his borrowed “bones and joints of other men,” as a kind of “miscegenation” that questions “generation and descent” in a novel that “attempt[s] to establish new forms of bodies” (90-91). As an “artificial construction,” Gamut challenges assumptions about the natural makeup of the human body and its divine origins, according to Biblical sources (91). The character of David Gamut is unusual not only because of his odd appearance but also because of his tendency to disappear from the narrative. Only a number of critics have inquired into how the novel ambiguously and evasively mystifies Gamut's role, questioning his gender, race, and identity; even fewer have related Gamut’s role in the novel to nineteenth-century historical and religious constructions. Matthew Knip, analyzing the range of queer characters and relationships in the novel, designates Gamut as an “unmanly” character, based on his musical 73 profession, religious fervor and ungainly appearance, which together seem to compromise his masculinity.5 However, Knip insists that the combination of Gamut’s queerness and Hawkeye’s masculinity, and the way the novel features the subversiveness and fluidity of these constructs, suggest that together these qualities can imply cultural progress and civilization. Moreover, while David Seed designates Gamut as “the most forgettable character” in the novel, Knip argues that Gamut was deliberately “erased” in director Michael Mann’s 1992 film version—ensuring audiences’ comfort and “self-assur[ance], with a heterosexuality that is purified and ratified” (Seed 218; Knip 66 n. xix). However, Gamut is more than an effeminate, misshapen, comic and useless character: through his comparison with the biblical David, the novel presents a more complex and significant persona. Gamut, a wandering psalmodist by profession, constantly identifies himself with the biblical King David; he has devoted his youth, "like the youth of the royal David," to the study of psalmody and he "utters nothing but the thoughts and wishes of the King of Israel himself" (17). I suggest that David Gamut’s role within the novel's historical agenda is a symbolic embodiment of the Hebrew Bible. This role is apparent not only in direct allusions to King David, but in his reproduction of traditional typological interpretations of scripture and history. In fact, David Gamut is a walking/singing embodiment of typology—with his commitment to relaying "nothing but the thoughts and wishes of the King of Israel himself," his unyielding Calvinist ideology, and repeated insistent faith in New England’s original translation of Psalms.6 He constantly chooses to interpret events as subordinate to Hebrew Bible stories by referring to "the foal of Miriam," "Balaam's ass," and Saul and Goliath among other examples (Cooper 41, 282). Identifying a Hebraic tone to his character, Deidre Dallas Hall, one of the few critics to address the implications of Gamut's religiosity, identifies Gamut as "Cooper's [flirtation] with Judaism" and envisions Gamut, a hybrid Judaized/Indianized construct, as "a

5 Knip draws on David Leverenz’ “The Last Real Man in America” and aligns Gamut within the “hapless male musician myth” as Gamut’s ostensible prototype (Knip 65 n.8). Leverenz’ essay from 1991 delineates the production of the myth of “the last real man” in American culture, beginning with Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales and culminating with the 1991 cinematic production of Batman. Leverenz pays brief attention to David Gamut’s character, noting that he is a significant foil to Hawkeye, an unmanly character that “cannot even manage his mare” (755). For further readings of Gamut’s character, see Seed, Leverenz, Knip, Romero and Hall.

6 David Gamut is repeatedly described as carrying with him the "six-and-twentieth edition" of the 1744 Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs of the Old and New Testaments; faithfully translated into English Metre, for the Use, Edification, and Comfort of the Saints, in Public and Private, especially in New England (Cooper 17).

74 new type of American that will mingle and manipulate whiteness and Otherness in wholly unfamiliar ways" (47). David Gamut thus aspires to carry, not only civilization into the wilderness, as Lora Romero argues, but also specifically the Hebrew Bible and the tradition of typological interpretations.7 Through this parodic character, Cooper questions the complex relation between reproductions and the originals they presumably imitate. Ultimately, David Gamut is a flawed type of the biblical David, simplified to reduction; his role has been narrowed down to a mere psalmist, eliminating other aspects of the biblical persona—warrior, lover, poet, sinner—casting him as a ridiculous, passive, worthless foil to Hawkeye.8 As an imitation of David, Gamut exposes the limits of imitation, which cannot contribute to progress. Hawkeye derogatorily labels him a “non-composer,” insisting that “the Lord never intended that the man should place all his endeavors in his throat, to the neglect of other and better gifts!” (Cooper 234). Gamut fails in his role as “David” because he lacks the other qualities of the biblical David, especially his gift of poetic composition. Gamut's musical expressiveness is limited to his voice and to playing the pipe without extending to creative composition. Gamut himself is an imitation that is necessarily less than the original—suggesting that the same could be said of typological historical constructions. Moreover, as a parody of a typological biblical culture and historical construction, Gamut’s imitation underlines the construcedness of the very idea of a stable origin. To borrow from Judith Butler’s discussion of drag in her treatment of gendered human bodies, “the parody is of the very notion of an original… constituted by a fantasy of a fantasy” (175).9 Just as “gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin,” Cooper’s parody of typological thought facilitates a discourse that undermines the biblical narrative’s meaning as an origin. Parody reveals that the original itself “is a production which, in effect—that is, in its effect—postures as an imitation,” and Butler

7 See Romero below and McAleer for an extensive review of Gamut’s embodiment of Puritan ideology.

8 In The Last of the Mohicans Natty Bumppo’s character is referred to mostly as “Hawkeye” and “La Longue Carrabine,” but he goes by other names as well, such as “Deer-slayer” and “The Leatherstocking” for his attire. I will relate to him chiefly as Hawkeye.

9 My reading of Gamut through Butler’s parody and performance draws on David Mazel’s similar analysis of parodies of nature in The Last of the Mohicans in his American Literary Environmentalism.

75 concludes: “imitations which effectively displace the meaning of the original […] imitate the myth of originality itself” (176). As I will show, the parodic narrative technique, contributing to the delegitimization of the biblical narrative, enables the creation of Cooper’s alternative myth in the construction of his historical novel. In the many scenes in which he recites his psalms, David Gamut’s singing represents a typological interpretation of history that merely replicates and never creates; a historical vision that has a prescribed rhythm and pattern. Gamut carries his notes everywhere, as a map or guide to explain his situation, and obliges his travelling companions to join in his song, designating for each a specific role in the melody. Karen S. Sloan explains how Cooper found this form of replica threatening to the prospect of American progress, and argues that his comic Gamut character “implicitly questions the wisdom of allowing religious ideology an official voice in nineteenth-century America’s nascent imperial project” (34). Reading the Puritan choirmaster as a representation of a nineteenth-century public debate concerning sacred music, Sloan identifies in his character “a resurgent strain of nineteenth-century neo-Calvinism that the author viewed as archaic, nonsensical, and potentially detrimental to America’s national and international prospects” (34). As Sarah Rivett recently adds, “Gamut’s psalms are comically inadequate to their landscape … [they] appear in The Last of the Mohicans as an awkward and out-of-date tradition, peculiar to New England yet inadequate for an American Wilderness in July” (259).10 Representing Gamut as an allegory of typological thought, the novel therefore critiques the inactivity and rigidity attributed to typological structures and the threat awaiting a nation that insists on clinging to such a religious ideology. Not to be mistaken, Gamut has his redeeming qualities. These are implicit through his biblical parallel as well, and represent the novel’s struggle with questions regarding the extent and form of the biblical heritage’s presence in the early Republic’s historical and cultural consciousness. The major compliment the text pays to Gamut involves his voice—“a voice as remarkable for the softness and sweetness of its tones, as was his person for its rare proportions”—which corresponds to the description of King David, “the sweet psalmist of Israel” (Cooper 8; 2 Samuel 23:1). As Cheryl C. Boots elucidates, Gamut’s music rescues him

10 Rivett’s recently published Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation studies colonial interpretations of Native American forms of communication and their significance for understanding the origins of peoples and languages.

76 from “one-dimensionality,” offering what she describes as moments of egalitarianism and community where people transcend their differences (118).11 The strength of Gamut’s voice is indeed exhibited as a form of communication that is never ignored and always elicits responses—be they positive or negative—from his interlocutors. Similarly, Knip emphasizes Gamut’s advantages of “alternative masculinities” by noting the surprising efficacy of his role in the rescue endeavor. Despite Hawkeye’s repeated ridicule of his uselessness and Hawkeyes' incessant lecturing to Gamut regarding manliness, Knip demonstrates that ultimately, “the novel refutes Hawkeye’s proselytizing” (58). What’s more, late in the novel the narrator shockingly discloses that Gamut’s figure could easily be confused with that of Hawkeye’s, allowing Gamut to take Uncas’ place as prisoner, and enabling Hawkeye to impersonate the singing master in his escape, as “their statures were not dissimilar” (Cooper 288). Gamut’s noble deed of self- sacrifice, his gratitude toward Uncas and request that his (assumed future) death not be avenged, all lead Hawkeye to confess that the Calvinist’s “scent is not greatly wrong” and that, despite his disagreement with his faith and contempt for his passivity, he values Gamut's knowledge, courage and intuition (289). Furthermore, the fact that Gamut can imitate Hawkeye or Uncas metaphorically underscores this interchangeability between the two parallel origin narratives – Cooper’s settler typological narrative and his affiliation of Native Americans with nature. However, Gamut fails where King David did not, since even his strength and power— Gamut’s music—is displaced and futile in the setting of Cooper’s novel. During the massacre at William Henry, Gamut—though "helpless and useless"—attempts to save the Munro sisters. He asserts that "[if] the Jewish boy might tame the great spirit of Saul by the sound of his harp, and the words of sacred song, it may not be amiss […] to try the potency of music here" (182). The effect of his song on his audience, the attacking “savages,” is astounding: “Astonishment soon changed to admiration, and they passed on to other and less courageous victims, openly expressing their satisfaction at the firmness with which the white warrior sang his death song” (182). Though his song temporarily empowers and transforms him into a “warrior,” the novel insists on his role as a deluded, eventually powerless character. His attempt fails because music is portrayed as only a momentary distraction that cannot compensate for the physical strength he

11 In her chapter on Mohicans, Boots reads Gamut’s music in two scenes—at the cave in Glen’s Falls and in the final funeral scene—as ostensibly capable of bridging racial differences, but in effect it only signals more separation and clearer, stricter boundaries.

77 naturally lacks. Then, "perceiving he was left alone, utterly disregarded as a subject too worthless even to destroy," Gamut decides to chase after the escaping Magua and his hostages (184). But the discrepancy between the two Davids is apparent; unlike the Biblical king, the powerless David Gamut cannot "tame" this Goliath—Magua. Even at the novel's conclusion, when Gamut "[supplies] himself, like his royal namesake, from among the pebbles of the brook," killing one of the natives threatening Cora, he is still immobilized before the menacing Magua who flees "where the arm of David could not reach him" (348, 359). This is what leads Seed to conclude that "David Gamut becomes more and more irrelevant as the novel unfolds" (219). He is irrelevant to the action in the novel because he misunderstands the multi-faceted role the biblical David performs, and consequently, is a flawed misrepresentation of his biblical precedent. But also, the novel suggests, because any attempt at replication and repetition is antiquated in a post-revolutionary, ever progressing, American culture—discrediting typology entirely.

Rethinking Origins: David Gamut and the Hebrew Bible in the Wilderness The novel portrays David Gamut’s character not only as a distortion of the biblical character Gamut emulates, but also as a spatially displaced one, constantly highlighting his incompatibility with the wilderness—and concomitantly, the incompatibility of one origin myth with the other. Seed writes that it is “the sheer incongruity of [Gamut's] presence in the wilderness” that renders him “the most forgettable character” in the novel, and the narrative details that incongruity in Gamut’s attire, accessories and vocation (218). His music has no place in the woods; Gamut’s tendency to sing and play music while travelling on hostile grounds endangers the travelers’ safety. Furthermore, Hawkeye consistently dismisses Gamut’s pitch pipe, which he carries along with his Bay Psalm Book, as a useless tool in the "wilderness," and advises Gamut to "part with the little tooting instrument" (115). Having already established that Gamut metaphorically stands for the Hebrew Bible and a biblically-infused religious culture, Cooper implies that the Hebrew Bible is as foreign to the wilderness as the civilization the Bible claims to represent. Through Gamut's caricatured representation, the novel prioritizes the noble values of the Mohicans and Hawkeye, grotesquely displacing the effect of the Bible in these spaces. Hawkeye dismisses Gamut’s book of psalms, as well as Heyward’s books of “white sagacity,” avowing that only the book of nature—“the 78 open land of Providence”—can lead one properly through the wilderness (Cooper 213, 226). The displacement of the Bible is thus two-fold: first, the Bible is displaced by the body and form of David Gamut and his failed attempt at fully reproducing the spirit of the biblical King David; second, the Bible is displaced from its role as the definitive and authoritative narrative of national origins—first replaced by nature, and later, by the novel with its own mythic construction. The Last of the Mohicans depicts the wilderness, and its inhabitants, as an alternative origin of American historical narrative by redefining and intertwining seemingly stable and distinct spheres and ideologies. Thomas Philbrick argues that in the wilderness, “the lines that distinguish races, nationalities, and occupations—the lines, too, that separate the living from the dying, the animal from the human, the natural from the supernatural—are crossed and blurred” (34). The novel’s natural descriptions are of a wild, inharmonious and dangerous space, on the one hand, but also of a sacred space with a clear set of mandatory codes and prohibitions. Nature thus competes with organized, scripted religion presented through the Hebrew Bible, as the origin of American civilization, history and knowledge. In its vitality, ever-shifting and constantly transforming, the novel’s natural descriptions represent a progress that contrasts with typology’s account of events as preordained. The novel positions David Gamut as the vehicle through which this competition between nature and the Hebrew Bible is constructed, a competition embodied in the contradictions and extremes of Gamut himself. Gamut introduces the dichotomous language of “sacred” versus “profane” music in his initial discussion with Alice Munro as they ride toward Fort Henry. Ironically, while Gamut carries the Hebrew Bible into the wilderness, the novel focuses on his "false superstructure of blended human orders [that] was so profanely reared" (18). Though his voice and words may echo David’s, his profane body that presumes to replicate the biblical David lacks the creativity to live up to this parallel; his presumption is therefore almost sacrilegious and an abomination to Divine creation and to pristine form—“the open land of Providence” Hawkeye revers (226). But Gamut is not the sole character to be tasked for his profane body; the other colonists are punished as well, not because of their bodies but because their bodies have entered inviolable spaces. After the massacre at Fort Henry, the narrator describes how nature becomes wild, the sunny weather changes to an “unnatural shower,” and the natural landscape appears in its “harshest but truest colors, and without the relief of 79 shadowing” (186). Within this harsh, wild scene, the narrator emphasizes the discord between nature and the victims of the massacre: “it was a scene of wildness and desolation; and it appeared as if all who had profanely entered it had been stricken, at a blow, by the relentless arm of death” (Cooper 187). The narrator criticizes the colonists for inhabiting the wilderness disrespectfully and disobeying the laws of the sacred space they settle—perhaps also critiquing settlement itself. However, the novel will qualify this criticism by highlighting the problem the text identifies in settlement—not the act of conquering itself, but the claim to do so in the name of an antiquated, irrelevant origin. Nature metaphorically spells out this opposition; it not only forces itself on the settlers, through the description of the harsh weather demolishing the bodies, but also demonstrates its precedence over the Hebrew Bible that governed the settlers’ typological mission dictating that they enter and conquer the wilderness and remove the Native Americans. Implicitly the settlers’ destruction is a sacred form of punishment; the text ascribes to nature a divine role with the ability to punish and reward according to specific acts its inhabitants perform. Ambiguous as to whether nature is replacing a divine deity with its authority over human occurrences, or whether nature is acting in accordance to a presumed divine will—nature is sacred and the settlers are “profane” either way. This result thus undermines the religious errand the settlers claimed to be fulfilling in their typological interpretations of the Hebrew Bible. Cooper's opposition to a dependence on typological thought and its incongruous place in the wilderness is intensified by Hawkeye’s repeated dismissal of books, mostly religious texts, and his preference for the book of nature. To Gamut’s demand for a “chapter and verse” to support Hawkeye’s repudiation of theories of predestination, Hawkeye asserts his disuse of books, claiming to read just one—that “is open before [his] eyes… and he who owns it is not a niggard of its use” (137-8). As John Gatta argues in Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present, the book of nature as antithetical to the Bible is a prevalent metaphor in antebellum environmentalist texts. Focusing on William Cullen Bryant’s poetry, Gatta traces the theme of forest worship (as God’s temple, “worship in the woods rather than of the woods”), explaining the development in religious thought, which “sees the book of nature presenting a more open canon than historical scripture. … For Bryant, nature’s text reveals more strikingly than Scripture the prospect of an unfixed canon and the 80 marvel of God’s continuous Creation” (75-6). However, though Bryant’s nature is calm and serene as befits God’s sanctuary, Cooper’s wilderness and the hunters and killers who dwell within it bring to mind pre-Christian settings and myths. Going “back to nature,” Gatta suggests, would entail “accepting a way of life governed by hunting and violent death” (82). The settlers in the Leatherstocking tales are depicted as “sinful despoilers of the New Eden,” corresponding to their “profane” descriptions, because they and the Bible they attempt to transport have no place in the wilderness (80). This Edenic language of impossible reconstruction and return brings to mind Butler’s understanding of parody as an imitation that exposes the origin itself as an imitation—a construct. If indeed there is no original nature to return to, the novel asks, then what are the settlers doing with the Hebrew Bible—both metaphorically and literally—in the wilderness? Though nature is envisioned as wild and unrestrained, the novel stresses that nature has precise, distinct sounds that are incompatible with those emanating from David Gamut. Cheryl Boots argues that Gamut “envisions his mission as inculcating the uninitiated into the orderliness and structure of regular singing.… In Connecticut, he may have fulfilled his role, but in the wilderness, he is master of no one” (121).12 The wilderness, Philbrick concludes, is “a world which will not yield to his art” (39). Nature has a rhythm and sound of its own, and no “singing master” can outdo and master the natural world. As Rivett argues, “the landscape has a lyrical quality, consisting of sounds that must be heard to be known and a music that needs a language to be understood” (258). Gamut cannot fathom the sounds of the natives, or of the wilderness; when the party is attacked at Glens Falls, Gamut arises to the sounds of “yells and cries” to which he exclaims—“Whence comes this discord! Has Hell broke loose, that man should utter sounds like these!” (62). And again, after he recovers from his injury, he recalls that he “[had] been mocked with the likeness of sleep, while sounds of discord have rent [his] ears, such as might manifest the fullness of time, and that nature had forgotten her harmony” (80). Gamut’s books and religion teach him that everything has a structure and a specified, preordained role— the Bible, history, music, civilizations, and nature. He projects his beliefs on the harmony of

12 Boots’ analysis clearly diverges from Thomas Philbrick’s positive and heroic reading of Gamut as “Cooper’s chief vehicle for delineating, sustaining, and finally diminishing the values that lie at the opposite pole from the prevailing struggle and confusion of the narrative. In a world of bloodshed, Gamut tries to heal the sick with music; in a world of discord, he attempts to establish harmony” (36). Philbrick reads the novel as synergizing the harmonic sounds of David’s psalms and the “discord” of the Iroquois yells and calls, as the combined sounds of the forest.

81 music, its calculated meter and parts, and of Calvinist history—onto nature. But Gamut is mistaken—Matthew Knip emphasizes Gamut’s errors in musical knowledge itself—and with his limited understanding, he fails to realize that nature has a different set of rules, encoded in specific sounds and harmony.13 Nature has not “forgotten her harmony”; its absence is what characterizes nature and sets it apart from, perhaps superior to, those constructs confined to their rigid forms—such as typological historical constructions. By stressing the irrelevance of Gamut’s Hebrew Bible and religious music to the wilderness, Cooper portrays nature as a pre-historic space freed from the limitations and doctrines of civilization—and therefore also from the constraints of typology. Wayne Franklin traces Cooper’s writing process, and specifically his familiarity with the actual historical site of Glens Falls, and observes that at the time of writing, Glens Falls was no longer in its presumably original, “wild” condition. Franklin argues that Cooper “found the wilderness … not by rendering a concrete historical landscape or copying and elaborating on some scene from an earlier book, but rather by erasing history from nature” (33). Despite Glens Falls’ cultivated and constructed state, Cooper’s ability to describe the site “as a natural fact unburdened by human signs,” removing “the signs of order from the physical space of his tale,” evinces his motivation to decontaminate the natural sphere from the historical excess imposed on it (Franklin 35, 39). However, Franklin and Cooper seem to misunderstand both nature and history. As William Cronon argued in his influential essay, “there is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny” (16).14 Cronon critiques attempts to present nature as a pristine, untouched entity, contending that it is an “always already” product of human intervention. Of these literary constructions that erase its history, Cronon argues they are “one of the most striking proofs of the cultural invention of wilderness” a prominent example being that, “in virtually all of its manifestations, wilderness represents a flight from history. Seen as the original garden, it is a

13 Knip notices that when Gamut asks Heyward, Cora, and Alice to join him in signing, he notes that “four parts are altogether necessary to the perfection of melody”—though in fact, four parts make up a complete standard harmony, not melody. Knip also reveals that the Bay Psalm Book did not contain melodic notations, only texts (49).

14 “The time has come to rethink the wilderness,” Cronon’s essay begins, in which he calls for a reevaluation of what constitutes as nature—arguing that the wilderness is not natural, but a constructed concept. See Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.”

82 place outside of time, from which human beings had to be ejected before the fallen world of history could properly begin” (16). Therefore, rather than calling for a pre-historical state, Cronon’s understanding of the wilderness invites a reconsideration of the natural spaces as evoking an analogous, alternative historical narrative, which is nonetheless identical to the typological history of the Hebrew Bible in its constructedness as an origin.15 The settlers, Gamut, civilization, and the progress they aspire to, along with their typological interpretation of the Bible—all belong to a history that is not part of the nature Cooper’s novel creates. These oppositions—the historic, open natural space on the one hand, and the enclosed, bound Hebrew Bible on the other—suggest two originating points for American historical narrative, represented by the two populations in conflict throughout Cooper’s novel: the natives and the white colonists. But, as each population claims its originality and authority by presenting its evidence—nature, and the Bible—they simultaneously reveal their own fallibility in a self-eradicating act that makes space for Cooper’s historical novel to mythically overwrite them.

Vanishing Indians, Vanishing Bibles: “And Then There Were None” The Last of the Mohicans grants the native population, and the natural world Cooper affiliates with them, recognition as a possible starting point for American history, though it simultaneously dispossesses them from this title. In other words, Cooper creates analogous perspectives on Native Americans and on the Hebrew Bible. Whether the natives are “thievish” (such as Magua and the Iroquois) or “noble” (such as the Mohicans), they are all destined to vanish, according to the novel. The violent descriptions of natives plunging to their deaths and disappearing from the scene reinforce a sense that their strength and perseverance are limited, even within the wilderness.16

15 David Mazel’s chapter on “Performing Wilderness” in his American Literary Environmentalism similarly explores the mechanisms of Cooper’s distinctions between “nature” and “culture” and highlights the performativity in the novel meant to expose the un-natural status of the wilderness.

16 This dichotomous and generalized stereotype is prevalent in many textual representations of Native Americans, see Brantlinger and Krauthammer. The idea of plunging to death is first introduced by Romero in “Vanishing Americans”, pg. 386.

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The Last of the Mohicans is one of many antebellum texts featuring a shared belief that the native population is destined to vanish in order to make way for progressive, white civilization.17 Cooper famously asserted in his 1831 introduction to the novel “the seemingly inevitable fate of all these people, who disappear before … the inroads of civilization, as the verdure of their native forests falls before the nipping frost,” equating the Indians with their native space and linking the two in an “inevitable,” predestined, demise (Cooper 6).18 Lora Romero observes Cooper’s elegiac “already happened” tone in the preface (Romero 385). Similarly, Jerome McGann reminds us that Cooper’s text “unfolds as the extinction of Indian sovereignty by migrant colonizers determined, as Cooper’s famous father put their lofty purposes, ‘to cause the Wilderness to bloom and fructify’ for the benefit of ‘civility and civilization’” (130-31).19 According to McGann, William Cooper was more troubled by his fellow white population’s greed for their neighbors’ (mostly white) properties, and the demolition of natural spaces, than by the “catastrophe inflicted on the red people of America by European invaders” (131). Some critics debate whether Cooper’s treatment of the native population in his texts validates their rights and sovereignty over their lands, or whether he sides with U.S. governmental policy of removals and dispossessions. While most critics concur that Cooper's fiction represents the Indians and their destined disappearance sympathetically, he does not condemn or directly challenge the political and social processes creating this situation.20 However, juxtaposing Cooper’s treatment of Indians with his treatment of typological readings of the Bible complicates this tradition by contextualizing it within a wider criticism of his contemporaneous society and its reverence of Biblical origins that Cooper deems irrelevant.

17 Historian Brian W. Dippie was the first to address the “Cult of the Vanishing American” as a myth that deserves evaluation, specifically as it appears in the nineteenth-century representations of the Native Americans that Dippie suggests reflect on and motivate political and religious policies. See Leslie Fielder for an earlier understanding of the vanishing American myth, and Jean M. O’Brien for a more recent historicist account.

18 See Dippie’s The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Policy.

19 McGann quotes from William Cooper’s A Guide in the Wilderness; or, The History of the First Settlements in the Western Countries of New York (1810). For more on Fenimore Cooper’s father and his regard and relation to the Native Americans, see also Alan Taylor’s William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic.

20 See Barbara Alice Mann for a recent summary of critical responses to Cooper’s characterizations and regard of indigenous peoples and U.S. removal policies.

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In The Last of the Mohicans the myth of the vanishing Native American gains additional support from David Gamut’s character, and specifically his Calvinistic dialogues on predestination and inevitability. Although Gamut never speaks about Native Americans' disappearance nor legitimizes this allegedly predestined fate, his presence in the novel recalls early Puritan writings where the characterization of the “noble” versus the “ignoble” savage Indian frequently appeared. Anna Krauthammer suggests that “the Puritan concept of the Indian as an agent of Satan” governed eighteenth-and nineteenth-century writings such as Cooper’s (4). In Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930, Patrick Brantlinger elaborates how this theme developed over the seventeenth century to include scientific reasons for the destiny of the Natives to disappear—an innate flaw, whether shaped by providence or by nature. Brantlinger suggests that Cooper’s Leatherstocking narratives establish a generic pattern of “proleptic elegy” that decrees the death of a future that has yet to occur—as in Chingachgook’s mourning of Uncas’ death (60). Gamut’s character contributes to the discourse of the vanishing American, not only through his Calvinism, but also through his distorted body. Gamut's ineffectiveness and implied sexual impotence is contrasted with the other male characters—Heyward, Hawkeye and Chingachgook—but especially with the graceful, noble, and dignified Uncas, paradoxically "the last of the Mohicans.” Lora Romero focuses on their dissimilar "proportions" to analyze Cooper's "ideological transformation of Native Americans into Vanishing Americans ... by foregrounding issues of proportion and equilibrium so crucial to antebellum accounts of the disappearance of races" (392). Though it seems counter-intuitive, Romero's comparison of Uncas' "beautiful proportions" with Gamut's "rare proportions" contextualizes Cooper's writing within a discourse reminiscent of the neoclassical nostalgia for an ancient Greek culture (or race) that is destined to disappear, concluding that "civilization necessarily spells the end of archaic proportions" (394). Indeed, the narrator describes how Alice first looks at Uncas “as she would have looked upon some precious relic of the Grecian chisel,” foreshadowing the Mohican’s death and the ostensible disappearance of his race (Cooper 48). Drawing on Romero’s analysis not only amplifies the longstanding critical identification of the novel's historiographical interest in the necessary role of the "vanishing Indians" within ideas about American progress, but also adds to our discussion of Gamut’s and the Hebrew Bible’s role in the novel as signaling rival narratives, with both the typological understanding of history and the Native American belonging with the 85 wilderness, struggling for legitimacy. By juxtaposing Gamut and the Mohicans, as well as the Hebrew Bible and nature, Cooper delegitimizes these two traditional points of origin and depicts in his novel a parallel process of their own “vanishings” – the delegitimization of traditional accounts. He offers his own literary production in their place.

“But every story has two sides:” Between the Last Mohican and the First American Story The Last of the Mohicans centralizes these rival narratives and introduces the novel’s heroes—the Indians (Chingachgook and his son Uncas), and the white scout Hawkeye—through their disparate beliefs in the originary narratives. Readers first meet these protagonists in a heated discussion concerning the history of the land they occupy, the beginning of its civilization, and implicitly, its rightful owners. Though the two are presented as atypical outsiders to their cultures/races—Chingachgook as the “last of the Mohicans” and Hawkeye as a white man living with the Delawares—each character makes the case on behalf of the culture/race they ostensibly represent. The text at first lends itself to a discourse presupposing the peaceful co-existence of these competing narratives. This position is best voiced through Hawkeye, and his assertion that “every story has two sides”; in response to Chingachgook’s claims to honesty, Hawkeye asserts that “the holy Bible is not more true, and that is the truest thing in nature” (35, 36). Aligning the Bible’s “truth” with the truth of nature, Hawkeye personifies the character of the noble, white hero who seemingly legitimizes a Native originary narrative, and absorbs it into his white character. Shari Huhndorf in Going Native described this process by which “the socially alienated character [adopts Indian ways and] uncovers his own ‘true’ identity… as an essential means of defining and regenerating racial whiteness” (5). 21

21 Shari M. Huhndorf focuses on the politics of “Going Native” by analyzing scenes which define European Americans’ identities and histories by reinterpreting and reassuring America’s past and reaffirming white dominance. Before her, Phillip J. Deloria in Playing Indian analyzed the ways European Americans emulated Native culture, attire and practices as means of substantiating their own modern identity and authenticity, see Huhndorf’s Going Native and Deloria’s Playing Indian. More recently, Shona N. Jackson in Creole Indigeneity discussed the same process of self-nativization that displaced indigenous peoples in the Caribbean and Yael Ben-zvi argues for a similar process in her analysis of rights theories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories. A. J. Prats traces the representation of Native Americans in Western films, analyzing these films’ delineations of cultural development through conquests that render Indians “invisible”. See his Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western; Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse similarly observe a process in the novel by which settlers assume the characteristics of the natives in order to rid them of their land in “Recalling Cora.”

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However, as the story progresses, the truthfulness of both Cooper’s portrayal of the Natives’ nature narrative and Gamut’s Bible narrative are proven irrelevant, and both narratives are exposed as destined to vanish. Emphasizing Hawkeye’s error, the text dismisses both the Indian narrative and the biblical one in favor of a new narrative of beginnings and firstness. Though the title The Last of the Mohicans signals the Mohicans’ demise, foreshadowing the narrative’s focus on endings and terminations, the story is equally interested in depicting beginnings—the “first” people, individuals and cultures. The text thus integrates lastness and firstness as interrelated themes, and indeed, Hawkeye’s character symbolizes this synthesis. Though he identifies with the Indians, he is also figured as “an American Adam” who is “outside history,” as A. J. Prats states, and as such, Hawkeye “not only outlast[s] the Indian, he outfirst[s] him” as well (248). As the scout adopts aspects of an originary narrative that prioritizes Native Americans, emulating their culture and occupying their spaces, he paradoxically acquires a “‘native’ quality” which serves “as the magical supplement endowing the colonists with mastery of the wilderness” (Armstrong and Tennenhouse 229). With the Indians’ ultimate departure from the narrative, Prats argues, the white hero becomes “not so much the last Indian as the first American. America can begin in him—not again or anew but absolutely, as without a past. The Indian’s impending disappearance, coupled with his endorsement of the white hero’s ascendancy, guarantees the precedence of the American Adam—what we might call, in a homely neology, firstness” (247-8 emphasis in text). As Jace Weaver similarly asserts: “By relegating Natives to an increasingly distant, and therefore comfortable, past, Amer-Europeans are freed to pursue their designs and complete their conquest of an ethnically cleansed America unimpeded. They can convince themselves of their own indigeneity” (21).22 And O’Brien similarly adds: “Thus, the ‘first’ New Englanders are made to disappear, sometimes through precise declarations that the ‘last’ of them has passed, and the colonial regime is constructed as the ‘first’ to bring ‘civilization’ and authentic history to the region. Non-Indians stake a claim to being native— indigenous—through this process” (xv). Accordingly, Chingachgook’s and Hawkeye’s retelling of the “beginning” of American history and civilization is ultimately a question of firstness, and specifically, not the question of who came first but what this title means and entails. When Hawkeye asks Chingachgook, “what

22 Weaver, Other Words: American Indian Literature, Law and Culture.

87 passed, according to the traditions of the red men, when [their] fathers first met,” he indicates a specific historical time, the beginning of the American narrative (36 emphasis mine). But Chingachgook points to an earlier point in history: his narrative details how the Delaware people arrived “from the place where the sun is hid at night” and fought the Alligewi, and then discovered before them an empty continent, with “none to meet [them]” (37). Explaining that the former occupiers of the land had disappeared, Chingachgook then describes how “the salt lake gave [them] its fish, the wood its deer, and the air its birds,” until, after the arrival of the Dutch, his people were forced to “[part] with their land” (37).23 Chingachgook answers Hawkeye’s question on the settlers’ first encounter with the natives by asserting his people’s firstness—both in terms of their arrival on the continent preceding that of the settlers, and in regard to the land’s response to their presence there. Hawkeye identifies a parallel between Chingachgook’s narrative of conquest and the colonists: “Your fathers came from the setting sun… fought the people of the country, and took the land; and mine came from the red sky of the morning… and did their work much after the fashion that had been set them by yours; then let God judge the matter between us, and friends spare their words!” (35). The Delaware, too, Hawkeye argues, simply replaced a people who had lived there previously, and he is therefore unmoved by Chingachgook’s claims to firstness. But Chingachgook refuses to accept this parallel, since for him, firstness is not a matter of precedence but rather one of responsibility and belonging; he dismisses the white settlers’ claims to the land and Hawkeye’s alleged parallel between the two conquest narratives by claiming what Joshua David Bellin calls “an immediate, hereditary knowledge of the land” with his familiarity with the landscape and the natural phenomena (162). Chingachgook’s narrative of belonging is closely linked to Native American creation stories, which bespeak of a relation to land, space and history quite different from the Western tradition originating in the Hebrew Bible. “In traditional Native cultures,” Weaver explains, “there is no superiority assumed or claimed for humanity, and humanity is, in some sense, undifferentiated from the rest of the created order” (302). Weaver goes on to clarify that land ownership was a foreign idea also, since Native Americans did not consider land the property of one individual or another. Unlike the biblical depiction of creation in Genesis, which provides

23 Joshua David Bellin explains how Cooper relied on Heckwelder’s accounts of the Delaware narrative, but not entirely. See his The Demon of the Continent: Indians and the Shaping of American Literature.

88 instructions for humans to dominate creation, Native creation stories emphasize communal belonging, collaboration and cultivation, and a continuous, ongoing creative process.24 In their recent contribution to American Literary History, Armstrong and Tennenhouse take a different approach to the question of firstness, analyzing how Cooper’s synthesis of two romance traditions—the European and colonial models—converge into a narrative of national origins. They detect “the tactical value of situating a novel about the prehistory of the new US within the framework of a war between the great monarchies of Europe for control of North America” (228). Attempting to clarify why Cooper points to the 1757 massacre at Fort Henry as the beginning point for his narrative of American history, they focus on The Last of the Mohicans’ opening paragraph, where Cooper introduces the French and Indian Wars. However, they note that something blocks his turning an account of the French and Indian War into a tale of national emergence … this treacherous wilderness is not ready for domestication. Unless it is redefined as virgin land, the wilderness cannot be expected to provide a stable basis for home and, by implication, a homeland. It requires the violence of Native Americans to displace that of the colonist conquest. If the wilderness belongs to someone else, the future community would still be a colony established by act of seizure rather than a national community that emerges in the wilderness through cultivation and acculturation.” (229) Armstrong and Tennenhouse stress that the settlers needed not only to drive the Natives away from their lands but also to learn from them how to live in the wilderness. Once the colonist is marked as “the original American,” they assert, “having done its work, and in compliance with the literary tradition, the figure of the Indian disappears” (330). Cooper taunts his readers with a promised beginning of American history, which he systematically invalidates over the course of his novel. What emerges, then, as a substitute for these two origin narratives is Cooper’s fictional historical romance. As Bellin explains, “displacing Indian fathers by transforming their traditions to myth, Cooper thus creates an original claim for his nation while creating himself as the father, the originator, of a literary tradition” (169). Following Bellin, as well as the earlier works of Robert Clark and W. M. Verhoeven, I suggest that having invalidated the role of the Hebrew Bible as the relevant

24 For more on Native American religious culture, belief and practices, see Vine Deloria Jr.’s God is Red and Laura Adams Weaver’s “Native American Creation Stories”.

89 beginning of an American ethos, Cooper substantiates his own myth of American identity and exceptionalism—as a new national and literary origin.

The American Historical Novel Vies with the Hebrew Bible As his letters and diaries frequently show, Cooper wrote his novels with a sharp awareness of how they can influence and reformulate American history. “From the beginning of his career onward,” Verhoeven explains, “Cooper was particularly sensitive to the powerful role the popular author could play in deciding the nation’s ideological debates” (10). Cooper hoped not only to determine public debates and policies, I would add, but also to shape a historical ethos by revising historical accounts. Because, Brantlinger explains, “the new nation was too new to have either a literature or a history,” Cooper “offers a future-oriented history or prophecy by hindsight, according to which the past of the new nation-state of America lies all in the future” (62). In order to create this history, not only did the Mohicans’ history need to be eradicated, but the Hebrew Bible had to be dispossessed, granting space for the “future-perfect, epic history of the United States” (Brantlinger 62). Since the Hebrew Bible held such a firm grip the historical awareness of Cooper’s contemporaries, his novel contextualizes the erasure of the biblical culture within the more familiar discourse of vanishing Native Americans in order to legitimize the necessity of creating a new origin. Critics agree that Cooper's historical novels—and specifically his Leathersocking tales, as Winfried Fluck clarifies—have a mythic aspect to them, central to the creation of national narrative and legacy. George Dekker highlights Cooper’s preference of myth over history, taking example from Scott’s and Hawthorne’s Puritans, [who] are able to persevere in spite of repeated defeats and sacrifices because their myth is so powerful that is can make an ally of history by assimilating and converting it into myth. Whether the history they enact goes for or against them, the history they write invests its heroes and events with a typological significance like those of the Bible, and so makes secular history sacred and reconfirms the faith of following generations (145). Dekker envisions a mythic history that replaces the Bible and serves a religious function, creating a congregation of believers. Verhoeven reads Cooper’s “imaginary America”— a scene “cleared of all traces of discord and conflict” and projected onto the “realm of myth”—as a “reality gap, a carefully constructed void that has subsequently been filled by myth” (73). 90

Verhoeven relates this to the Barthesian myth, “a perceptible absence,” its function being to “empty reality” in an active and intended manner (73). As erasure and vanishings are a prerequisite in the construction of a myth of an imagined America, it is apparent that Cooper’s parodic representation of the Biblical narrative is part and parcel of his investment in national myth making. Robert Clark accounts for Cooper's alterations of the historical records of the Iroquois league during the French and Indian Wars by stating that he "transform[s] history into myth … by violating the historical record." As a result of this process, Clark detects in the texts "both instances of distortion and attempts to cover the traces of the deed" (Clark 118).25 Cooper's strategy of simultaneously presenting and effacing the Bible (and its fictional representative, David Gamut) is crucial to this aim. Extending Fluck’s claim that the historical novel elevated the status of the novel to the rank of “a modern epic that depicted the formation of a nation and captured the soul of its people,” I conclude by suggesting that the historical romance itself virtually vies with the Bible as a propagator of a national myth and identity (117). As I showed in the previous chapter, writers of Biblical fiction adapted the Hebrew Bible’s accounts of David in their search for alternative forms and styles to convey their stories; as I argued, their method for doing so evinced their uncertainty regarding the Hebrew Bible’s status as a national origin. Similarly, Cooper proposes a generic replacement to the period’s most authoritative, canonical text and anticipates much of what Biblical fiction writers do later. Cooper, similar to Hooker, Gallaudet, Ingraham and Beecher, seeks the proper form that would best express a national originary narrative, and sustain its claims to legitimacy, authority, and relevance. But while these other writers exhibited ambivalence regarding their new-found authority and repeatedly expressed their loyalty to this origin, Cooper goes further by proposing the existence of multiple originary narratives in a manner that allows him to emphasize their nature as constructed narratives, tales that can easily be invalidated and replaced with other myths. He utilizes the form of the historical romance for its capacity to provide more “flexibility” as a “medium of dissent” than earlier histories, on the one hand, and from the novel, on the other (Gould 13). As Phillip Gould explains, “the mediating role of the historical romance

25 Probably best described in Richard Slotkin’s 1973 Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860.

91 further contributed to generic instability, for its cultural position at once called attention to and denied its status as a ‘novel’” (11). For Cooper, then, the origin of national American experience is also shaped by literary texts, and he offers his literary version of national origins as a counternarrative to the two conflicting narratives —as the novel embodies them in the character of the Calvinist David Gamut, and the claimed Native American belonging to nature—as it is described in the fictional portrayal of the Native American claims to origination. The Last of the Mohicans displaces traditional typological interpretations of the Hebrew Bible and the biblical historical legacy they entail, proposing that the historical romance genre with its mythic resonance and trans-historical implications can play an authoritative role in defining the origins of the nation. By exposing David Gamut, and the Bible he represents, as irrelevant and unproductive in explaining historical events, Cooper also proposes an alternative method of reading the Hebrew Bible in post-revolutionary American literature and culture. It should be read, he suggests, as a text to be incorporated and thus overwritten in a national identity and culture—a process replicating that of the white settlers’ incorporation of Native American culture and originary narrative. Embedded, parodied and effaced within the historical novel, the Hebrew Bible emphasizes the urgency Cooper and his contemporaries affixed to the task of creating and substantiating a national literary origin and myth.

Conclusion: Vanishing Bibles From Cooper to Hawthorne Cooper’s effacement of the Hebrew Bible and rejection of typological culture in The Last of the Mohicans constitutes a dissenting view on national and religious origins, which is amplified by other nineteenth-century novelists, especially Hawthorne and Melville. Like Cooper’s method of presenting and then effacing the biblical narrative as a literary and national originary tale, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter also alludes to the Hebrew Bible’s David story but at the same time, more forcefully than Last of the Mohicans, undermines its authority as an unequivocal source of knowledge and interpretation. Through an analogous theme of vanishing and absence, the text calls attention to the David narrative by depicting a tapestry portraying King David in Dimmesdale’s room; it also implicitly indicates an absent, missing reference to the parallel story of Judah and Tamar which, in its absence, undermines the authority of the David reference. As I show in the next chapter, Hawthorne’s positioning of the tapestry severs the orthodox genealogical biblical lineage descending from Judah, through David, to Jesus and, 92 by doing so, defies the form of genealogical knowledge typological interpretations entail. I argue that the novel celebrates this absence, emphasizing knowledge that is generated through affect and immediate experience rather than dependent on past, scripted texts. While Cooper and Hawthorne concur in their regard for the Hebrew Bible’s centrality in defining an American ethos and national character, they differ in their understanding of its originary status. For Cooper, the Hebrew Bible commonly functions as a tool for interpreting history and his critique is thus two-fold: first, he is critical of a reproduction’s attempt to imitate the origin, and second, of the presumptuous endeavor to inseminate a biblical ideology in an inappropriate space—and dispossessing that space of its originary status. For Hawthorne, however, the significance of the Hebrew Bible as an origin is encapsulated in understanding the Bible as a form of knowledge, and the typological interpretation as constructed through genealogical processes. By challenging these kinds of knowledge and interpretation in light of the affective knowledge in the novel, The Scarlet Letter similarly investigates a reproduction’s relation to the origin but suggests that it can potentially supersede the original by not referring to the antecedent as an origin. As many nineteenth-century texts depict the prevalent consensus regarding vanishing Americans, they similarly delineate the vanishing of the Hebrew Bible in public discourse, a parallel development that has been neglected in scholarship. Cooper’s contemporaries, out of related concerns with origins, explored other methods of incorporating Biblical tales into their fictional historical framework. Exploring another originating point in American pre-history, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter too adopts the discourse of the vanishing Bible in order to confront the complex relationship between an origin and its reproduction, analyzing the implications of such a relationship for nineteenth-century American culture and history.

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Chapter 3:

The Figure in the Tapestry: The Non-Derivative Scarlet Letter and the Affective Potentiality of the Present

In an entry in his English Notebooks dated February 8th, 1856, Nathaniel Hawthorne describes a hermeneutical reading convention typical of his religious denomination and culture, while also expressing his reservations concerning this doctrine. Hawthorne narrates reading St. Luke’s account of Christ’s resurrection and revelation to his disciples, how Christ taught them the Scriptures and “showed the application of the old prophecies to himself”—those passages in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) read typologically as I discuss in the introduction (Hawthorne Passages 348). Hawthorne observes that although “it is supposed” that Jesus also expounded on “all other essential points of doctrine,” “none of this doctrine … is recorded.” Hawthorne stresses that the only significant “point” St. Luke makes about Christ is that he was the one "foretold in the Jewish Scriptures.” Hawthorne concludes that this, “therefore, must have been the one essential point” (348 emphasis mine). Hawthorne’s entry ending there, is ambiguous in its implications: while it could be read as though the writer is substantiating the typological reading practice as a central tenet of Christian thought, it may alternatively raise doubt concerning the importance of this practice, noting the lack of evidence to support the "essential point" of the doctrine. Hawthorne underscores this doubt by describing the book he reads from, a “little office-Bible (greasy with perjuries),” which he used as consul in Liverpool when taking depositions from seamen (348). This description of the Bible emphasizes his criticism, not of the Bible itself, but of how it is used. I argue that in The Scarlet Letter (1850) Hawthorne questions the typological reading practice and the historical construction it entails by refusing to define origins as sources of that which presumably derives from them. Hawthorne identifies the Hebrew Bible and the biblical delineation of Christ’s genealogy as the predominant originary narrative in antebellum U.S. culture. However, he interweaves biblical narratives in his novel in a manner that demonstrates the text’s resistance to its alleged literary precursor. Critics often read the novel’s biblical references typologically, finding parallels between biblical precursors and various characters or themes. Some readings of the novel also propagate a historical schema which interprets events 94 that occur in the present or foreshadow the future as already contained within the narrated biblical codex.1 My reading of the novel’s resistance to its biblical sources, and its implied anti- foundationalist defiance of the definition of origins as necessarily leading to derivatives, objects to this typological critical trend and the inferiority it assumes to the resultant text under comparison, and identifies an altered temporal construction that rejects biblical genealogies and the knowledge this linear framework generates. I substitute the biblical genealogy with a Foucauldian one, which is uninterested in “how continuities are established” or “how the origin may extend its sway well beyond itself to that conclusion that is never given,” but rather focuses on discontinuity, limits and transformations (5).2 I propose that The Scarlet Letter intervenes in the conventional scriptural history suggested by the novel’s representation of biblical revelation, by frequently drawing attention to the present as a repetitive, prolonged time frame that is necessarily distanced from, and disregarding of, the future. By doing so, I claim that Hawthorne takes his critique of the role of origins in US culture and society one step further than Cooper. While the previous chapter questioned the Hebrew Bible’s function as a narrative of national and literary origins, this chapter proposes that Hawthorne uses the Hebrew Bible to counteract an epistemology that reveres and relates one originating point to a series of historical, cultural, and religious events. The novel’s intervention in this scriptural epistemology and history complies with recent treatments of temporality in contemporary analyses of nineteenth-century American literature. Holly Jackson’s review of the “new American temporality studies” attests to this critical consensus on the role of literature, which was “long held to be instrumental to the consolidation of American identity through the cultivation of a shared national time characterized by both linear progress and synchronicity,” but is now perceived as significant “in both disrupting and abetting the formation of national consciousness” (323).3 The Scarlet Letter exemplifies this disruption of efforts to create a

1 While most of these structural-typological readings appeared in the early-to-mid twentieth century, recent readings suggest that writers continue to employ this mode of interpretation. See for example, Ursula Brumm’s chapter on Hawthorne’s typology, Jason Courtmanche’s published dissertation, and more recently, Claude Le Fustec’s chapter on Hawthorne (2015), and Tadd Ruetenik’s essay (2012).

2 My reading in this chapter is informed by Michel Foucault’s (and Nietzsche’s) discourses of anti-foundationalist historical constructs, mostly from The Archeology of Knowledge and Language, Counter-Memory, Practice.

3 Jackson reviews the “temporal turn” in American studies, focusing on Dana Luciano’s Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America and Lloyd Pratt’s Archives of American Time: Literature and 95 collective national temporality by highlighting the present and the direct and especially the affective knowledge associated with it. Hawthorne’s novel critiques the cultural genealogy which attempts to fuse a mythic, Puritan past with a predestined, redemptive national future, and poses Hawthorne’s text’s a- temporal potentiality as an alternative to the biblical textual-cultural genealogy.4 Following Brant M. Torres’ recent essay on the novel, I draw on Giorgio Agamben’s view of potentiality as the “existence of a non-Being, a presence of an absence,” and suggest that The Scarlet Letter demands a direct, experiential mode of knowledge and interpretation, which it achieves by representing the present as a suspended and dubious time frame.5 The novel portrays this potentiality in the brief description of a tapestry that hangs in Dimmesdale’s residence—both in the scene it exhibits, and in the implicit one to which it alludes, but which it does not depict. This artifact, almost entirely neglected in scholarship, is mentioned twice in the novel: the first appearance is in a description of Dimmesdale’s lodgings, and the second is at the climactic moment of Dimmesdale’s return from the forest (Chapter 20). The tapestry shows the biblical scene of Nathan the prophet condemning David for his adultery with Bathsheba (2 Samuel 12) and functions as an analog to the scarlet letter—the most significant pivotal material artifact in the novel. The scene woven into the tapestry—the condemnation of David for adultery—aligns Dimmesdale’s character with an adulterous biblical precedent, tacitly suggesting his affiliation with other biblical adulterers. Through the scene of David and Bathsheba, the tapestry also alludes implicitly to story of Jacob’s son Judah, traditionally considered the progenitor of the Davidic dynasty, whose narrative shares many parallel themes with Hawthorne’s novel, including the figure of a leader who transgresses, an accusation of adultery (at a scaffold in both

Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century. Jackson, “The New American Temporality Studies: Narrative and National Times in the Nineteenth Century.” Criticism 53.2 (2011): 323-330.

4 In his major work on The Scarlet Letter, Sacvan Bercovitch explains how the scarlet letter functions as “cultural genealogy” that “moves from the mid-nineteenth-century customshouse back to its Puritan origins, to recall a major shift from ‘civic’ to individualistic norms” (xv). His reading of the text is ideological rather than historical in his assessment of individual dissent in the political and institutional context the novel represents, and the scarlet ”A” itself embodies this cultural genealogy as a “vehicle of continuity at a time of cultural disruption and social change” –much like the novel (xviii). My work in this chapter, though indeed very much indebted to Bercovitch’s work, calls attention to the discontinuity displayed conversely, through the emphasis on unrealized potentiality, affect and the present. See Bercovitch’s The Office of the Scarlet Letter and specifically his Introduction.

5 Agamben combines his understanding of potentiality with Aristotle’s and emphasizes potentiality as not just an unrealized capacity, but rather the existence of privation, a mode of existence connoting “to not do or not be” (181).

96 texts), and a moment of revelation and acceptance of responsibility (Genesis 38). Through this recurrent pattern of adultery, the Bible introduces a genealogy of repetitions and similarities that seems to encourage typological theorizations of historical development. As I will show, however, through portrayal of the tapestry and its effect on the novel’s characters, the novel repudiates such genealogical construction and implies a present state, which denies both a fixed origin for present events, as well as the promise of continuity. Besides the tapestry, I examine other scenes in the novel that portray material objects— specifically the scarlet “A”—that resist their presumed originating status by remaining fixed in an unchanging, present form. I claim that the tapestry and the scarlet letter work together to substantiate an alternative epistemology to the typological one associated with the Hebrew Bible, enriching each other’s significance in the text. The Scarlet Letter presents the tapestry and the scarlet letter as material yet ambiguous works of art that replace biblical-textual materiality and artfulness as relevant and useful sources of knowledge. Whereas the works of Biblical fiction analyzed in Chapter 1 respond to the Hebrew Bible’s irrelevance in post-revolutionary society by offering textual substitutes whose fictionality create individualistic, and authoritative appeal, Hawthorne’s fiction releases the Bible of its textuality, reconfiguring it as material, artful handiwork, replacing prescribed, textual knowledge with experiential affect. I argue that the novel links this distinction to a temporal one, in which the present enables the formation of affective, experiential, material knowledge, by contrast to the remote, insensible and prescribed knowledge of the past informed by the Bible. The heightened affective quality of the present (notably in scenes such as the narrator’s experience in the Custom House, the description of Hester’s release from prison, and the meeting between Dimmesdale and Hester in the forest—all of which are analyzed below) transforms revered origins into suggested references, emphasizing the affect produced by these references rather than affirming the source itself as absolute, reliable form of knowledge.6

6 J. Hillis Miller similarly pinpoints Hawthorne’s skeptical view of knowledge in his reading of “The Minister’s Black Veil” and the supposition that history can “remain safely stored up in traces, texts, memorials, records, vestiges, or material artifacts that can then later on be deciphered by future generations as the means of access to the original happening as it really happened” (113-4). By reading the politics of allegory in Hawthorne’s fiction, Miller argues for Hawthorne’s theory of history that obstructs access to knowledge and understanding. For more, see his Hawthorne and History: Defacing it.

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Hawthorne’s novel does not ignore the past and its problems that the characters need to face in the present; rather, the novel challenges claims of the past’s superiority and absolute authority that necessarily supersedes and impacts the present, by devaluing the knowledge associated with the past in favor of the affective knowledge produced in the present. Lauren Berlant explains the paradox of the historical novel, “to become embedded in the affective life of a past moment that might have been the run-up to the future that was now a present, and to create distances from the present moment of writing whose own shared contours one can only intuit” (66).7 She explains the genre’s purpose as follows: “to engender in an aesthetic field of historical signification a punctum than appears singularly ahistorical—affect—but which is, because of the detail it cuts across and unites, a relay through which the historical can be said to be sensed before it is redacted” (66). This chapter draws on Berlant’s conception of the present in Cruel Optimism, where one main claim is that “the present is perceived, first, affectively … If the present is not at first an object but a mediated affect, it is also a thing that is sensed and under constant revision, a temporal genre whose conventions emerge from the personal and public filtering of the situations and events that are happening in an extended now” (2). The Scarlet Letter, I argue, portrays the present as “a thing that is sensed and under constant revision,” a form of affect that replaces the Hebrew Bible’s textual knowledge, represented by Hawthorne as anachronistic. Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter therefore diverges from the works of Hebrew Bible fiction, on the one hand, and Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, on the other, both in its relation to origins as well as in is form of reevaluation. While authors of Biblical fiction such as Ingraham revised the original narrative and thereby created a new form that disrupted the presumably sacred completeness of that origin, and Cooper struggled with two competing originary narratives in order to make way for, and override them with, his own literary form, Hawthorne aligns Biblical origins with material forms so as to highlight their effect in the creation of knowledge. The novel highlights a politics of affect that is accessible in the present as an alternative to forms of knowledge taken for granted as the foundation of identity and history, especially the knowledge generated by and through the Bible. Emotions, theorists remind us, do not reside in

7 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2011.

98 objects and subjects but rather in the web of relations between them, and as Sarah Ahmed clarifies, it is the movement of emotions which binds subjects together, and the “nonresidence of emotions” that grants them this “binding” ability (118). A focus on affect entails reconsidering people as possessors of emotions, and suggests instead “that ‘the subject’ is simply one nodal point in the economy, rather than its origin and destination” (121). Ahmed aligns affect with the same imagery and terms theorists use to define potentiality, “the failure of presence—or the failure to be present” that governs the relations between subjects and objects (121). Theorizing affect as devoid of origin, an “open-ended in-between-ness,” crystalizes its availability and temporal orientation toward the present (Gregg and Seigworth 3). That emotions are not bound to a subject grants them circulative power, which forcefully creates affective identities, nationalities and histories.8 In what follows, I begin by reviewing The Scarlet Letter’s emphasis on the present and how this emphasis contrasts with typological temporality which considers the present as an interim stage, valued solely for its role as a bridge between the past and the future. I trace the novel’s accentuated language of temporality, which designates the present as a singular site of knowledge and comprehension. I then proceed to demonstrate the significance of biblical genealogy and genealogical practices in the conservation of a specific, typologically constructed knowledge, and explain how the novel disrupts these genealogies by subtly incorporating the biblical David story into the tapestry, in a method that recalls and yet eradicates the link to the biblical Judah and Tamar story at the same time. Given this partial intertextual allusion, the tapestry becomes a space of potentiality that undermines the Hebrew Bible’s authoritative, originary role, drawing attention to its own materiality, and the affect it produces, as the only relevant, present form of knowledge. Drawing on an intersection of potential temporality and affect theory, I concur with scholars such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Justine S. Murison and their call for the production of an “affective history,” which locates the affective aspects of a text while simultaneously resisting its historical contextualization and embodiment. My work in this chapter aims to augment their claims specifically through the example of The Scarlet Letter’s

8 Sarah Ahmed provides an “economic” reading of affect theory and how emotions bind together individuals into communities, see her “Affective Economics” for a more thorough account; Mellisa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth’s foundational The Affect Theory Reader brings together the works of central theorists of affect and the contribution this awareness of affect has on various disciplines. See their introduction to the collection “An Inventory of Shimmers” and the essays therein.

99 substitution of affective experience for biblical knowledge and history—taken for granted in typological thought as the dominant source of knowledge. I conclude by analyzing the novel’s abundant references to ghosts, manifesting the potentiality of the “presence of an absence” which, together with the fabrics of the tapestry and the symbol of the scarlet letter, convey an alternative form of affective knowledge that does not derive from the Biblical origin, but is rather established through lived experience and emotions.

“The Present Grief:” Back to the Present in The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne’s historical romance is largely devoted to understanding time, questioning the past’s influence on the present and future, and conceptualizing the prospect of change and development. The novel introduces these concerns in “The Custom-House” opening chapter and pursues them throughout the text through the conceit of revelation. Multiple forms of the verb “reveal” appear in the novel, an excess that culminates in the penultimate chapter aptly titled “The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter”; much of the narrative thus echoes the biblical myth of revelation and redemption.9 Although the novel focuses on a story of the recent past, a moment and problem created several years before the beginning of the action, I argue that it is very much involved with the present. While seemingly on the one hand obsessed with the past and its ramifications, Hawthorne is equally critical of this obsession and creates an over-emphasis on the “now” to challenge typological historical constructions, which devalue the present. Typological exegesis and thought revered the present primarily in its relation to scriptural events—those the Bible relates as having already occurred, and those it prophesizes. Carolyn Dinshaw explains this “scriptural history” as a “particularly compressed Christian understanding of temporality in which both past and the future inhere in the present of the incarnate Christ” (45). Drawing on de Certeau’s Mystical Fable and Augustine’s Confessions, Dinshaw explains this divinely-written “rhetoric of temporality,” in which “past, present and future exist simultaneously” as something which “direct[s] attention away from the everyday toward the

9 See for example, Claude Le Fustec’s recent Northrop Frye and American Fiction, where his chapter on The Scarlet Letter argues for the novel’s exploitation of the powerful myth of revelation. See also Tadd Ruetenik’s recent reading (2012) of The Scarlet Letter as a novel of revelations, where he locates the revelation of the scapegoating mechanisms which falsely accuse Dimmesdale of adultery. Bercovitch, in his The Office of the Scarlet Letter, was one of the first critics to identify this pattern of “concealment and revelation”; for him the “office” of the scarlet letter is as “to lead from the willful self-binding of a truth … to the redemptive vision of many possible truths” (13).

100 eternal” (46, 16). Scriptural historical consciousness aspires to hasten the future and therefore overlooks the present moment while condensing human temporal experience of the present to an effect of the past. However, Hawthorne’s novel critiques the attempt to fuse the past with the future, and advocates the construction of a counter-scriptural consciousness by repeatedly drawing attention to the present as a time frame that not only denies the originating status or the past but also postpones and implicitly denies the expected future promise of continuity. For Hawthorne, the present enables the formation of affective and experiential knowledge. The novel imbues the present with multiple meanings and functions, establishing it as a site of potentiality and knowledge that supersedes past and future events, and the prescribed scriptural knowledge that created them. The novel thus critiques the idea of redemption as well as that of overdetermined origins. In order to confirm the present’s temporal priority in the novel, the text distinguishes it from the unambiguously conservative past and highlights its manifold expressions and functions. To exemplify this version of the present, I focus on one scene, shortly after the novel’s commencement, where the narrator declares that “Hester Prynne’s term of confinement was now at an end” (55). This sentence, the opening of the novel’s fourth chapter, contains a double- meaning: it alludes to Hester’s physical release from the prison, while suggestively hinting that her real confinement— to the social, psychological and spiritual implications of the scarlet letter—is only just beginning. But there’s more to this sentence; the novel implicitly uses it to align two temporal frames: the “now,” on the one hand, and the “end,” on the other. While the “now” can safely be described as the present moment, the idea of an “end” blurs distinctions between a moment which has already passed—and thus belongs to the past—and an “end” which belongs to the future. The present functions here as both a boundary between past and future and as an encompassing center, and despite its multiple functions, is clearly demarcated as a unique temporal point detached from the past. As the passage continues and Hester crosses the fictional boundary from one confinement to another, the novel calls attention to a specific temporal unit, favoring it above others and detaching it from those ostensibly thought to frame, support, and endow it with meaning. “Now,” the narrator foretells as Hester leaves the prison, her “daily custom” begins, “and she must either sustain and carry it forward … or sink beneath it.” The narrator aligns this shift in Hester’s 101 mental and emotional state with a shift in time, and in the meaning Hester identifies in her present state: She could no longer borrow from the future, to help her through the present grief. Tomorrow would bring its own trial with it; so would the next day, and so would the next; each its own trial, and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to be borne. The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with the same burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never to fling down. (55) The narrator describes this “scene” as “a separate and insulated event,” captured in the grievous “present” moment of walking from the prison, as a scene “[occurring] but once in her lifetime” that is to be echoed in future occurrences. With no promise of change, there is no comfort in repetition, and the present becomes the defining time period that distances her from the “far-off future.” This understanding implies a present that does not rely on a past, or a future, a present of non-evolutionary “sameness” defying ideas of progress and development, and countering orthodox views of redemption and salvation. The narrator professes a historical vision that reveres the present as a source of power and knowledge—one celebrated through Hester’s “strength” and ability to “carry” and “sustain” her “daily routine;” these physical capacities relocate the authoritative power in Hester’s body, her feelings and senses, devaluing the past and its implied prophetic significance, and distancing the future as subjected to the ever-present “now.”

Alternative, Absent Genealogies: From David to Dimmesdale The novel’s nuanced portrayal of temporality and its focus on the present is further complicated by the interwoven biblical narrative, which bespeaks a genealogical historical construction. Typological exegesis, and the scriptural historical consciousness it engendered, considers the lineage of Christ a central tenet in upholding scriptural unity and continuity.10 What’s more, as Karin Wulf recently explains, nineteenth-century Americans imitated the biblical genealogy and absorbed this scriptural historical view of compressed Christian temporality by documenting individual family histories—very often inside family bibles. As Wulf clarifies, “the Bible is recognizably and fundamentally genealogical; its texts emphasize

10 See my introduction for more on the typological exegetical unification of the scriptures.

102 the holy significance of lineage,” and very often these characters’ legitimacy “rests on lineage connections” (473-4). The practice of “embedding one’s own family history in the most important book of Christian family history,” Wulf argues, “created an authoritative echo” (479). As this genealogical practice proclaims the prominence of an individual family within a nation’s story, it also simultaneously reinforces the Bible’s authority as origin, a foundation of American society and culture. But though Hawthorne incorporates aspects of this lineage narrative in The Scarlet Letter, in the explicit reference to David and Bathsheba and the implied suggestion of the Judah and Tamar story, his mode of partial intertextuality—marked by the absent reference to Judah and Tamar—undermines the genealogical authority of the Bible-as-origin. Nineteenth-century US readers, invariably acquainted with the Hebrew Bible, registered the David story as a significant component in Christ’s genealogy and history, anchored in the biblical tale of Judah and Tamar, a tale with direct relevance to Hester Prynne. In Genesis 38, Judah prevents his daughter-in-law Tamar’s marriage to his youngest son Shelah (after the death of his two older sons, who were each previously married to her), though mandated to do so by the Hebraic practice of levirate marriages. Eager to bear a child in Judah’s line, and in response to her father-in-law’s prohibition, Tamar then deceives Judah by veiling herself as a prostitute, and, in exchange for her sexual favors, Judah leaves his staff, seal and a cord as a pledge of future payment, but when he returns to pay he cannot find her. Later, Judah discovers that Tamar is pregnant and condemns her to execution by fire, but when Tamar cites the owner of the staff as the father of her child, Judah realizes that he had impregnated her, and publically confesses his fault and her righteousness. Tamar gives birth to twins, and at the time of delivery––to signal the oldest of the two––the midwife wraps a scarlet thread around the first hand that emerges, only to see the other baby, Perez, push his way out first. It is through that baby, Perez, and his descendant, David, that the Christian tradition marks the beginning of the genealogy of Jesus Christ. One cannot overestimate the nativity discourse and the importance of this genealogy in Christian thought.11

11 For this is how the Gospel of Matthew begins: “This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham: Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, Judah the father of Perez and Zerah, whose mother was Tamar, Perez the father of Hezron, Hezron the father of Ram, Ram the father of Amminadab, Amminadab the father of Nahshon, Nahshon the father of Salmon, Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David. David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah’s wife.” (Matthew 1:1-6)

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The story of Tamar and Judah is echoed in the biblical tale of David as it appears in the book of Samuel: David sleeps with Bathsheba, wife of Uriah the Hittite, and then has her husband killed. The prophet Nathan denounces the king’s actions (with the parable of the poor man’s ewe-lamb), and David confesses and repents his sin. Though the Bible does not downplay the sinful weight of adultery, the biblical tale emphasizes the value of confession, and exegetes laud David for his atonement and make of him the model of repentance. Since the biblical plots of Judah and David share key features and events—the unavailable woman; a transgressive leader; public accusation and climactic confession—the Judeo-Christian tradition links Judah with David not only genealogically but also thematically. Still, Christian biblical exegetes, struggling with Judah’s story and its role within a wider Christian consciousness, tend to value it solely for its genealogical function. David Steinmetz reviews Calvin’s and Luther’s commentary on Genesis, and details their diverse approaches to this narrative: For Luther, the Judah and Tamar story teaches believers “that a Canaanite woman was the mother of the whole tribe of Judah and therefore the remote mother of Christ” (85). Steinmetz also suggests that Luther viewed human sexuality as the “context within which the incarnation should be understood. Jesus Christ was not born from a line of ancestors who were beyond reproach in their sexual morality” (85). Calvin, on the other hand, emphasizes the moral implications of the tale rather than historical-theological ones, and identifies humiliation as the key moral of the story. He concludes that Christ was born to the Judaic line in order to show that he “derives no glory from his ancestors” and “no glory in the flesh” (Steinmetz 88). In both Luther and Calvin’s accounts, the Judah and Tamar story is significant for its role in engendering Christ’s lineage. The correlation between the Judah and Tamar story and The Scarlet Letter is striking: Tamar, like Hester Prynne, engages in an illicit sexual affair and is exposed with the discovery of her pregnancy; Tamar is sentenced to be burned at the scaffold, an object that figures prominently in Hester’s public condemnation. Judah’s public acknowledgment of Tamar’s virtues (and his sins)—"And Judah acknowledged them, and said, She hath been more righteous than I; because that I gave her not to Shelah my son”— parallels the moment of Dimmesdale’s final revelation: “I stand upon the spot where, seven years since, I should have stood; here, with this woman, whose arm, more than the little strength wherewith I have crept hitherward, sustains me, at this dreadful moment, from grovelling down upon my face!” (Genesis 38:26, Hawthorne 104

161). And of course, the scarlet thread wrapped around the child born out of a secret, adulterous sexual encounter, is echoed as the central figure which Hawthorne interweaves into The Scarlet Letter—not only in the emblem affixed to Hester’s dress, but also in little Pearl’s attire—“the scarlet letter endowed with life!” (Hawthorne 69). Despite these shared themes and symbols, however, critics have yet to consider The Scarlet Letter’s implicit allusions to the Tamar story. I introduce this story as an intertextual reference in order to study the novel’s discourse of ruptured genealogies and questionable origins. Although the Tamar story is ostensibly absent from the novel, the biblical genealogy is implied in the reference to David and Bathsheba, the subject of the tapestry on Dimmesdale's wall, in the house he shares with Chillingworth. However, the novel seemingly effaces the David story, leaving only a fleeting material trace behind in the tapestry. For Hawthorne presents this allusion neither through Dimmesdale’s “Bible, in its rich old Hebrew, with Moses and the Prophets speaking ... and God’s voice through all” (142), nor in parallel with any specific character or event (as is common in typological literature). Though Dimmesdale does, as Mistress Hibbins attests, “[chew] a Hebrew text of Scripture in his mouth” (143), he is never explicitly likened to or typified as a biblical character, certainly not as David. David’s overt qualities and attributed virtues are not spelled out in the novel, as opposed to, for example, the epithet the townsman applies to Chillingworth regarding the mystery of Pearl’s father. Referring to Chillingworth as “the Daniel who shall expound” the riddle, the townsman alludes to the biblical persona known for interpreting dreams (46). Thus, the juxtaposition of David with Dimmesdale is subtle and has consequently been very little noted. It is not presented in the traditional form of an act of similitude aimed to compare or contrast the two, nor is it directly linked to the biblical text; rather, David is depicted through a different mode of representation—in the tapestry, a fictional space of suspended temporality.12

The Potentiality of the Present: The Tapestry’s “Unfaded” Presence Though the reference is brief, the text presents the allusion to the Biblical David story within a discourse rich with references to origins. The narrator shifts the perspective from

12 This concept of suspension is evident also in Torres’ definition of how certain objects, affects and relation perform a “suspension within the actual” as a clear marker of The Scarlet Letter’s “queer potentiality”, see Torres’ “Gold Rush,” 152.

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Dimmesdale’s “library, rich with parchment-bound folios of the Fathers, and the lore of Rabbis, and monkish erudition”—where one would expect to read about David—to “[t]he walls” which are “hung round with tapestry, said to be from the Gobelin looms, representing the Scriptural story of David and Bathsheba, and Nathan the Prophet, in colors still unfaded, but which made the fair woman of the scene almost as grimly picturesque as the woe-denouncing seer” (84). Here the tapestry is displayed and differentiated from its original textual space—the Bible. The Scarlet Letter thus removes the David story from its “bound” and “constrained” origin, with the theological-historical implications of this hallowed text, and resituates it in a material present, an “unfading” scene that defies both reinstitution in a stable, originating past, and, by freezing a moment in pictorial time forestalls alteration and change in the future. Drawing on Brian Torres’ analysis of how alchemy functions in the novel, one could say that the tapestry also marks the text’s potentiality as having a “not-yet” quality, suggesting change but never actualizing it. Though the text identifies a modification of the biblical story, depicted in the artwork’s uncanny doubling of Bathsheba and the prophet, the narrator’s hesitant and ambiguous language—“said to be,” “still” and “almost”—frame the description in a suspended state of questionable transformation. The tapestry, associated with the prestigious workshops of the “Gobelin” family, is instilled with an authority enhanced by the narrator’s reference to its “unfaded” colors. The tapestry represents originality as it depicts a scene presented as the unofficial origin of the novel’s plot. At the same time, however, this emblem of tradition questions the authority and even probability of an original source. Dimmesdale’s and Chillingsworth’s residence that houses the tapestry is itself established on a site with multiple origins. It is “a house covering pretty nearly the site on which the venerable structure of King's Chapel has since been built. It had the grave-yard, originally Isaac Johnson's home-field, on one side, and so was well adapted to call up serious reflections” (84). Highlighting the uncertainty, temporality and fluidity of objects and events, the narrator suggests that just as Johnson’s field became the graveyard, so too this fictional residence, with its original tapestry and timeless artwork, is destined to be replaced by an even more “venerable” chapel. This depiction of origins and substitutes undermines the prominence of these assumed original elements—specifically as represented in Scripture— questioning their role in a limited, interchangeable sequence of events, and even intimating that their often presumed originating status is essentially non-existent. This “temporal disjuncture” is 106 similar to the one Torres recognizes in the description of the Governor’s Hall; he analyzes the scene as a site of “not-yet” as well as “having a once-was quality,” and so highlights “potentiality’s multiple temporal directions … an archive of various pasts with unpredetermined futures” (164). I extend this view to my consideration of the Hebrew Bible’s function in the novel, and add that The Scarlet Letter’s counter-scriptural historical consciousness not only offers “multiple directions,” but also designates the present as a site of affective authority that challenges the authority of an original object, including the Bible (164). The David story is a significant allusion in Hawthorne’s plot because it departs from the traditional scriptural consciousness and challenges the biblical genealogy in two ways: first, in the distance the novel draws between the biblical David and its fictional Davidic manifestation, Dimmesdale; and second, by dispersing the origins of the genealogy, i.e. the Judah story, into the novel’s various images and characters. Ironically, the tapestry depicting the Biblical tale is Dimmesdale’s own testimony of guilt, a constant reminder of his participation in a forbidden act of adultery and his inability to confess his sin. Though the text withholds further information regarding Dimmesdale’s perception of the tapestry, it appears again in the chapter entitled “The Minister in a Maze” when Dimmesdale returns from his nocturnal wandering: “he entered the accustomed room, and looked around him on its books, its windows, its fireplace, and the tapestried comfort of the walls, with the same perception of strangeness that had haunted him throughout his walk” (142). This reference is ironic for the tapestry is anything but “comforting” at this point in the narrative when significantly Dimmesdale is about to pursue his relationship with Hester and follow in the footsteps of the biblical David by taking another man’s wife. And yet, the Dimmesdale who returns from the forest is described as “incited to do, some strange, wild, wicked thing or other,” hardly penitent or self-deprecating like the biblical king (139). Thus, David’s image in the tapestry signals a break in the traditional exegetical scheme of typological interpretation of text and history. In this doubled ekphrastic moment, Dimmesdale is simultaneously compared to and distinguished from the David figure and his legacy of sin and confession. Furthermore, as noted, the allusion to David in the tapestry simultaneously calls attention to what is absent in the narrative—the reference to Judah and Tamar. The recognition of this absence demonstrates the text’s potentiality, Agamben’s “existence of a non-Being, a presence of an absence” (181). It also reinforces the novel’s anti-foundationalist historical claims, what 107

Foucault would call the "ever-receding point that is never itself present in any history; this point is merely its own void" (25). This absence materializes throughout the novel, both in the Biblical allusions and in the more general depiction of materials and fabrics—the tapestry and the scarlet letter itself. These materials exhibit their potentiality in the kinds of affective knowledge they advocate and sustain. The novel therefore replaces authoritative origins with suggestive referentiality by focusing on the products—the fabrics and materials of the cloth and the tapestry—rather than the threads that were presumably used to create them. As Jane Zwart asserts, “the scarlet letter pulled from that Salem garret is neither relic nor germ… it is fabrication” (430). Zwart emphasizes the manifold artistic manipulations of the scarlet letter: “[Hawthorne] forges the A as Custom-House relic… and he fabricates a story around Hester Prynne, while she bears the ornate letter he embroiders” (432). Similarly, the Hebrew Bible as it is utilized in the novel is neither “relic”—a remnant of a disconnected past—nor is it a “germ”—a propagator of events and their sole interpreter. The Hebrew Bible is reduced to “fabrication”— as reflected in the scarlet letter, the tapestry, or the narrative itself. Its significance abides in its “queer potential” to form affects (Torres 151). It is dismissed as the ultimate origin of authority and is effaced in order to give space for a time frame that allows for an alternative form of affective knowledge to emerge.

“Materials of Local History” and the Formation of Affective Knowledge Though the tapestry ostensibly evokes a scriptural sequence and genealogical interpretation, it also subverts this form of knowledge and demands an alternative mode of interpretation rooted in lived experience. The novel presents the tapestry, a fabric with special relevance to the lingering present, as a producer of affect. The narrator describes Dimmesdale’s return from the forest as an uncanny experience; he responds with a “perception of strangeness” to the “accustomed room” with its “tapestried comfort of the walls” (142). In this situation, Dimmesdale sets himself apart from his previous self—the person he was before he went out— by acquiring a different form of knowledge. “Another man had returned out of the forest,” the narrator notes, “a wiser one; with a knowledge of hidden mysteries which the simplicity of the former never could have reached” (142). This “knowledge” is generated through affect, and the sermon he sits down to write “with such an impulsive flow of thought and emotion” is composed 108

“with earnest haste and ecstasy” (143).13 Dimmesdale’s transformation evolves through an extended present state, a recent past that is granted space in the present where the contrast between the two “men”—Dimmesdale and David— is articulated. The scarlet letter, the fabric that more centrally challenges temporal constructions and functions as a source of affective knowledge, paradoxically incarnates and mystifies these distinct categories of time—the past, present, and future. As the relic of a past affair, a signifier repeatedly interpreted and misinterpreted, and a cautionary warning against future transgression, it further illuminates the function of the tapestry. In his encounter with the scarlet letter in the introduction, the narrator highlights the mystification of time and considers the traditional privileging of the past over the present in light of the knowledge and authority that his discovery of the letter grants him. The scarlet A, like the tapestry, in its potentiality and affect, undermines the authority of an origin as an ultimate source of knowledge, and severs the sequential bond between a source and its derivative. The narrator explains his presence and status in “The Custom-House” to establish it as a site of affective intensity and counter-scriptural knowledge. The narrator begins his tale by recalling his previous writings, distinguishing his current endeavor from previous ones by claiming that “now—because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enough to find a listener or two on the former occasion—I again seize the public by the button, and talk of my three years' experience in a Custom-House” (7 emphases mine). The narrator’s depiction of his Custom- House experience—“rhetorically rich and charged with affect” as Savoy observes—are significantly framed within this “now,” the moment of delivering the narrative to the public (“Anxiety” 40). Justifying his narratorial urge with affective drives (a mixture of surprise and happiness), the narrator continues to perform intense rhetorical acts of immediacy, “seiz[ing] the public by the button,” and “cast[ing] his leaves forth upon the wind,” demanding that his present readers “understand him” and his tale (7).

13 In a related claim Lauren Berlant suggest that Dimmesdale’s “phenomenal spiritual power” resides in the “tonal affect of his language”: he attracts his parishioners not through “the light of reason and nature… but because his affect speaks of yet a deeper experience within the conventional Puritan frame of reference” (124). And Dawn Coleman more recently aligns Dimmesdale’s sermon with the response of nineteenth-century auditors who “actually listened, with a readiness to experience the sermon through conceptions of the sublime” (119). Patricia Crain adds that “Dimmesdale’s gift of the ‘tongue of flame’ allows him sympathetic knowledge, akin to the kind Hester gets from the A” (203). See Crain’s Story of A, Berlant’s Anatomy of National Fantasy, and Coleman’s chapter on the Scarlet Letter in her Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel.

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The narrator interweaves texts and fabrics as images of a temporal space independent of another text, presumed to define and precede then. Both the text of The Scarlet Letter, and the fabric of the scarlet letter, deny access to their presupposed original forms. The “certain affair of fine red cloth,” which he is attracted to, “gives evidence of a now forgotten art, not to be recovered even by the process of picking out the threads,” like the work of the Gobelin weavers, revered for their unique stiches and designs (26). Speaking the negative language of lack and absence, the narrator identifies this article of cloth—though seemingly displaced from an original, past state—as emblematic of a present anti-recovery condition, which only taunts viewers with the suggestion of an origin. Similarly, the text of The Scarlet Letter refuses to exhibit “the original papers,” which the narrator regards as “a most curious relic,” documenting the “authorized and authenticated” tale (27). The narrator has no scruples regarding this erosion of his sources; amidst all the “rubbish” and “worthless” texts, he signals out those he lauds as “materials of local history” (24, emphasis mine). The Scarlet Letter is therefore a text that creates a history through materials (fabrics and texts) which resist an originating status, materials that by denying access to their assumed origins redefine history through its discontinuities, ruptures and divisions. This correlation between text and fabric is significant because of the fabric’s role in creating a felt absence that produces affect. When the narrator discovers the scarlet letter, it demands that he embrace a non-analytical form of interpretative knowledge that “[streams] forth” through his “sensibilities” (26). He then experiences an instance of what Lloyd Pratt terms a “diachronic simultaneity,” a collapse of past and present, when he inattentively holds the cloth to his chest (84). This act triggers a series of affective responses as he affixes the symbol to his chest and “experience[s] a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat; and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron. [He] shudder[s], and involuntarily let[s] it fall upon the floor” (26). These experiences, both the heat transmitted through the conversion of the “red cloth” into “red-hot iron” as well as the subsequent “shudder,” add a sensory element necessary for the production of understanding needed in an age that “evades” analysis. The fabric is the vehicle for these “transformations,” which Sylvia Soderlind defines as “not just superficial; something of Hester’s soul is transmitted through her handiwork,” delineating this affect as multidimensional, existing both on the surface and at some interior depth (67). 110

The Scarlet Letter portrays this transitional and unbound feature of emotions, an absent presence, in the form of the scarlet letter. The affect transmitted when the narrator wears the fabric—identification and shame—exemplifies this notion of a feeling that is created within a body by an external stimulus and which blurs the boundaries between the two subjects, on the one hand, while delineating their clear boundaries and difference, on the other.14 The fabric’s affective potential is linked to its artistic status, and, as both “fabric” and “art” etymologically denote “skilled workmanship” (Oxford English Dictionary), the two suggest a creativity that has the power to transmit and share emotions.15 The handicrafts analyzed in this chapter all channel affects that derive their strength precisely from this materiality and sensory availability.16 However, central to these representations of materials and their affective power is the novel’s resolve in determining the fabric’s potentiality emanating from its present state, as having no accessible origin and no definite prospect of future alterations.

“The Past was not Dead:” The Scarlet Letter’s Ghosts and the Creation of Affective Knowledge In its ongoing emphasis on the present, the text exhibits the potentiality of both the scarlet letter and the tapestry, the kinds of affective knowledge they produce, and the absence they indicate by their very existence. Eric Savoy traces a “ghostly presence” in “The Custom-House,” creating an affect which charges the narrator, and his subsequent narration, with an authority and historical power that challenges other forms of historical knowledge depicted in the narrative itself, especially the Bible (“Filial” 397).

14 Alluding to the narrator’s assertion that the scarlet letter gave Hester “a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts,” Patricia Crain similarly observes how “the A allows Hester to exceed the limits of her body by giving her the power to read people as texts, to enter into them without their knowledge” (Hawthorne 86, Crain 195). See The Story of A, 195.

15 Deleuze and Guattari, in their chapter on “Percept, Affect and Concept,” determine the artist’s goal in creating (even inventing) affects. According to them, the work of art—“a bloc of sensations… a compound of percepts and affects”—draws the viewer/reader “to wrest… the affect from affections” (164, 167). Deleuze and Guattari stress that art’s resemblance (or reference) to an object “is because sensation refers only to its material: it is the percept or affect of the material itself, the smile of oil, the gesture of fired clay, the thrust of metal, the crouch of Romanesque stone, and the ascent of Gothic stone” (166).

16 Consider also Kumiko Mukai’s essay on needlework in Hawthorne’s texts.

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As a space of heightened presentness, not only fabrics but also figures from the past are incorporated in “The Custom-House” as ghosts of a non-accessible origin whose present state overwrites the significance of their past. The Custom-House is replete with ghosts, absent figures and lost and undelivered documents. The narrator takes note of Surveyor Pue’s ghost, with his “immortal wig,—which was buried with him, but did not perish in the grave,” as the character who ordains him with the “filial duty” of writing the story and reconstructing a fragmented history (Hawthorne 27). Moreover, as Savoy indicates, the Custom-House, though “littered with textual corpses,” is distinguished from the Derridean archive since Hawthorne’s archival Custom-House has “lost the connective thread of its commencement; it’s at best the detritus of history” (Savoy 52).17 The text, and the body of Surveyor Pue, are both disconnected from history through fabrics that cannot be untangled, and which speak of an inaccessible, ghostly origin. The nature of these ghosts, the narrator explains, is their present location: constantly exciting “surprise,” they “[make] us doubt whether [the ghost] had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside” (29). The fact that the narrator doubts whether the ghost has ever left, whether there is return here or simply ongoing lingering, stresses the idea of a prolonged present that continues through the tenacity of the ghost, much like the “tenacity” that Hawthorne refers to when he discusses his relationship to Salem earlier in “The Custom-House” (11). Thus, the novel features ghosts as another mode of conveying a felt-absence, a non-present affect, which is central in creating an alternative form of knowing.18 In addition to the tapestry, and the description of the embroidered "A" in “The Custom- House,” the novel draws attention elsewhere to this ghostly form of affective knowledge, emphasizing a suspended, present moment. One such scene is when Dimmesdale and Hester meet in the forest. Unsure whether she is a “woman or a shadow,” Dimmesdale is prompted to ask her—“Art thou in life?” (122). The narrator then explains why “it was no wonder that they

17 What Derrida defines as “archive fever,” through Freud’s work and example, “is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (91). See his Archive Fever for a more deconstructive- psychoanalytic reading of the origin.

18 Focusing on the mechanisms of citizenship and political institutions that create a “necro ideology” that violently dispossesses and alienates, Russ Castronovo significantly begins his research by referencing a scene of ghostliness in The Scarlet Letter—Hester appearing “as a walking corpse” (xi). He traces moments of dematerialization in cultural productions such as Hawthorne’s text to highlight the de-politicized persons U.S citizenship creates. See his Necro Citizenship for another aspect of the functions of ghostliness in the novel.

112 thus questioned one another's actual and bodily existence,” by relocating them in a parallel, ghostly scene: [It] was like the first encounter, in the world beyond the grave, of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering, in mutual dread; as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost! They were awe-stricken likewise at themselves; because the crisis flung back to them their consciousness, and revealed to each heart its history and experience, as life never does, except at such breathless epochs. The soul beheld its features in the mirror of the passing moment. (122) The narrator captures two aspects of the present in this scene: on the one hand, he describes the present moment as reminiscent of a “former life,” but on the other, the moment is also a new, unfamiliar “not yet.”19 By yearning to account for their own ghostly status, as well as each other’s, this ostensibly “passing” moment of mirroring paradoxically creates an endless hall of mirrors “fl[ingi]ng [their own images] back” at the characters. The moment “enclosed a charm that made them linger upon it, and claim another, and another, and, after all, another moment” (126). As the moment “lingers” and is repeated (the word “lingered” is repeated three times in the passage), the scene emphasizes sharpened senses. The characters sit “side by side, and hand clasped in hand” amidst a forest that is full of sounds, “[creaking] with a blast that was passing through it” and trees that “groaned dolefully” as if “telling the sad story” (126). This extended present, a present so intensely charged with affect that it almost denies the prospect of an impending future, grants entry to these ghosts of the past, creating the potentiality of transformation but also of persistence in these ghosts’ present absence. Only in the lingering (but fleeting) present and its unrealized potential can these two ghostly characters overcome the “doubt” of their existence (122). In another instance bursting with affect, Dimmesdale then, enveloped with “fear” and an unwilling “necessity,” “put forth his hand, chill as death, and touched the chill hand of Hester Prynne. The grasp, cold as it was, took away what was dreariest in the interview. They now felt themselves, at least, inhabitants of the same sphere” (122-3). Within this present “sphere,” the two characters’ moment of “touching” echoes their previous undramatized physical contact (also alluded to in the subsequent description of their

19 Consider also Marxist theorist nest Bloch’s “Ontology of Not-Yet Being” which, responding to Freudian theories of repression and interpretations of dreams, continually strives towards a concrete, material utopia but cannot realize this potential because the material reality is not yet available. See his Natural Law and Human Dignity for more.

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“intercourse”), which constitutes an epiphanic moment of revelation and self-knowledge (123). Following Hester’s confession of Chillingworth’s relation to her, the transmission of knowledge is complete. To Dimmesdale’s cry—“I might have known it … I did know it!”—and subsequent denunciation of her secrecy, she responds by “thr[owing] her arms around him, and [pressing] his head against her bosom” (125). What’s more, Hester refutes any suggestion of baseness in their shared “sin” and unambiguously justifies its “consecration” with her alternative, Puritan- defying, form of affective knowledge: “[we] felt it so!” (125). The Scarlet Letter highlights this affective moment as a counter-epistemological form of comprehension and interpretation of reality.20

Conclusion: From Genealogical to Affective History This chapter has argued that while the incorporation of the David and Bathsheba story into the Scarlet Letter via Dimmesdale’s tapestry ostensibly supports a genealogical historical construction, the dissemination of the Judah and Tamar tale (implicit both in the tapestry and in the scarlet letter) conversely constructs a counter-scriptural narrative that repudiates reliance on preordained script and purpose. Resisting a view of the Hebrew Bible as the text’s origin or source, the plot seemingly defies a past narrative that could be regarded, both historically and thematically, as the very condition of the narrative’s present. Furthermore, when the Biblical master narrative is thus playfully omitted and deconstructed into artifacts, fabrics, and alternative “letters,” the text undermines the Hebrew Bible’s authority as an exclusive source of knowledge and interpretation. Instead of reading The Scarlet Letter genealogically, as if containing a biblical past calling forth a certain future, my research suggests an understanding of the novel’s potentiality, which breaks the traditional scriptural sequence and instead demands an alternative mode of experience and interpretation.

20 We could read this as another instance of the scarlet letter not doing “its office”—which Bercovitch argues to be “a story of socialization in which the point of socialization is not to conform, but to consent” (xii). Emphasizing the affect and the experiential mode of knowledge subverts this consent that Bercovitch deems central to Hawthorne’s assessment of “American ideology” which controls dissent. Lauren Berlant similarly identifies Hester Prynne’s female body as a site of contestation and challenge to the state, as “a politically neutral category of knowledge and experience” (149). Bercovitch and Berlant acquiesce in their readings of the novel’s ideological challenges to Puritan theory and polity, though they vary in their conclusions regarding the degree of Hester’s conformity; see Bercovitch’s The Office of the Scarlet Letter and Berlant’s The Anatomy of National Fantasy.

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The Scarlet Letter’s intervention in canonical biblical genealogy critiques scriptural conceptualizations of temporal succession and contingency. By severing the past from the present, it sets the future likewise at a distance, postponed and posited as independent and unforeseen. This temporal construction calls for a nuanced consideration of historical process and relations between various times and contexts. I thus concur with Justine S. Murison’s recent exploration of history as “open to affects and productive of them,” contrary to the dominant critical assumption that “affect theory, in general, is not particularly interested in history” (521). In her analysis of Hawthorne’s Civil War writings, Murison deduces that this “is what affective history allows us to glimpse: that history itself is a process of both embodiment and displacement, of being both here and elsewhere simultaneously” (546). I find that her conclusion is relevant also to Hawthorne’s earlier writings, and locate this affective history within The Scarlet Letter’s counter-scriptural historical consciousness, with its affective and experientially- based knowledge formations. I conclude this chapter by returning to Lauren Berlant’s understanding of the historical present, and the historical novel by extension, as an “affective contract” (66). “The historical novel,” she writes, “aimed to induce certain affects in the reader whose value sutured that reader to history and genealogy, producing a capacity to sense historical experience in an aesthetic feedback loop.” Hawthorne also relates to the affect of aesthetic forms in his “Preface” to The House of the Seven Gables, where he defends his generic preference of writing in the “Romance” tradition, and “in the attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us.” He explains: It is a legend prolonging itself, from an epoch now gray in the distance, down into our own broad daylight, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist, which the reader, according to his pleasure, may either disregard or allow it to float almost imperceptibly about the characters and events for the sake of a picturesque effect. The narrative, it may be, is woven of so humble a texture as to require this advantage, and, at the same time, to render it the more difficult of attainment. (1475) Like the tapestry, the scarlet letter “A,” and The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne introduces another text that is also “woven of so humble a texture” that grants the reader the choice of “attain[ing]” the “flitting” present—a “difficult” act, Hawthorne admits. But only in the potential of the present, he nonetheless grants, can the reader choose to take this “prolong[ed]” legendary past and make use of its pleasure and knowledge. 115

While Hawthorne’s text undermines the Hebrew Bible’s status as an origin by featuring a text that resists its presumed precursor’s foundational claims, and by evoking an affective form of knowledge that can only be gained through the immediacy of a vitally present context, Herman Melville features an alternative mode of resistance to the Bible’s originary role—within the framework of biblical exegesis. In his November 1851 letter to Hawthorne, just before the latter’s removal from his stay in the Berkshires, Melville writes a farewell note to his literary companion: “Lord, when shall we be done changing? Ah! it's a long stage, and no inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But with you for a passenger, I am content and can be happy. I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.”21 As if reproducing the affect of Hawthorne’s characters, Melville too dispossesses the Bible of its singular epistemological authority and transfers knowledge to the body. Much has been written about Hawthorne’s relationship with Herman Melville and about their shared interest in the Bible, among other subjects. The two friends were also committed to understanding history, time, and the Biblical or religious resonance of these temporalities. Hawthorne records one of these discussions in his journal on August 1, 1851: “Melville and I had a talk about time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters, that lasted pretty deep into the night” (Bloom, 8). However, as I hope to show in the next chapter, the two comrades approach the Hebrew Bible, and the Bible’s role within historical consciousness and constructedness, in two distinct ways. While Hawthorne evokes the Hebrew Bible mostly to efface it and proposes a counter-scriptural historical consciousness, Melville views the Hebrew Bible as an origin that inherently contains a self- effacing mechanism which lends itself to the allegorical interpretative mode. The next chapter discusses Melville’s integration of the Hebrew Bible into Billy Budd, Sailor and the novel’s presentation of an alternative method for challenging the typological interpretative framework.

21 Melville, “Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne”, November 1851 (Bloom, Herman Melville, 70-72).

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Chapter 4 Violent Forms and Allegorical Origins in Billy Budd, Sailor

“The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction,” Melville’s narrator explains in one of Billy Budd, Sailor’s concluding chapters, “can not so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial” (167). It is typical of Melville to justify the inherent imperfection of truth- writing and his narrator professes to excuse the novella’s non “symmetry of form”—evinced in narrative gaps, leaps and digressions, and in the amalgamation of styles and sources. But Melville also gives the desire for form a more problematic embodiment in Captain Vere’s rigid, disciplinarian figure, and his conviction that “[w]ith mankind … forms, measured forms are everything” (166). As in many of his previous texts, Moby-Dick and Pierre standing out as two prime examples, Melville was concerned in Billy Budd with the proper form for his content— especially insofar as the novella professes to be a truthful account. The conclusion to Billy Budd’s narrative, however, expresses his unease with those “ragged edges” compromising the unity and symmetry of form and accompanying the desire for it.1 Accompanying Vere’s self-destructive call for proper forms, the novella depicts its characters’ quest for origins as an analogous desire marred by the persistent, innocent belief in the completeness of a single origin, and the possibility of accessing it. Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (1888-1891, published posthumously in 1924) questions the definition and retrieval of a text’s or subject’s origins while it simultaneously establishes the reproduction’s subversive relation to its presumed source. Ironically, the writing and publication history of the novella also emphasizes the impossibility of establishing a single and complete origin. Melville first envisioned Billy’s character in his poem “Billy in the Darbies,” which he intended to include in his John Marr and Other Sailors, With Some Sea-Pieces (1888); the headnote he added to the

1 Elizabeth Renker’s Strike Through the Mask describes Melville’s frustration with the scene of writing and how his literature evinces this ongoing anxiety. In Surface and Depth, Michael T. Gilmore also attends to Melville’s quest for legibility and “Truth” highlighting the manner such a quest involves demagogic tyranny; see also John Bryant, David Reynolds’ Beneath the American Renaissance and Michael Paul Rogin’s Subversive Genealogy.

117 poem later evolved into three extensions, each adding another character and layer to the story.2 But with his death in 1891 the manuscript lay unfinished, until Raymond Weaver transcribed and published the first version in 1924.3 Tracing, the “origin” of the novella then is itself an issue that requires meticulous care because, as John Bryant notes, “an aura of incompletion suffuses the text” which Melville himself “had not prepared for publication” (61). Whether or not Melville foresaw these complications that would follow from the existence of the unpublished manuscript, close scrutiny of the novella discloses that the text is to a great extent obsessed with origins. Throughout this dissertation I have been tracing the ways nineteenth-century texts turn to the Hebrew Bible to formulate their desire for form and their quest for origins. I have suggested that these are competing endeavors (in some cases) or simply non-related ones (in others). Here I argue that Melville’s turn-of-the-century novella essentially synthesizes these two textual and theoretical preoccupations, and identifies in the two a shared desire for unity and order, as well as an acceptance of the violent implications accompanying this impulse. Billy Budd repeatedly depicts the demand for unequivocal origins and proper forms as paradoxical and self-subverting processes that subvert the possibility of achieving these goals and result in costly social ramifications. This theme is replicated, I argue, in the pivotal debate that Melville develops regarding the truthfulness of appearances and the accessibility of interiority. As the narrator opens his tale “in the time before steamships,” he alludes to the motif of the “Handsome Sailor” as the prototype for Billy’s character—an antecedent Melville revises subversively and racially. Referring to this prototype as “the superior figure of his class,” the narrator first provides a description of a sailor “intensely black” an “ebony” “native African of the unadulterated blood of Ham,” adorned with his gold hoop earrings, silk scarf and Scotch Highland bonnet (103). However, when applying this image of “strength and beauty” to introduce the fair and “welkin-eyed” Billy Budd, the mythical reference initially meant to serve as comparison, metamorphoses into a contrasting image, creating an unsettling starkness

2 See Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts Jr.’s in-depth discussion in their 1962 publication of Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative).

3 The publication history and differences in manuscripts and versions is an everlasting topic for critical debate, since Hayford and Sealts’ edition was published in 1962. See Hershel Parker’s Reading Billy Budd and John Bryant’s “How Billy Budd grew Black and Beautiful” for more on Melville’s writing process and the novella’s publication history.

118 between the antecedent and its derivative.4 The text amplifies this attention to origins when suggesting that Billy’s physique and manner “indicated a lineage in direct contradiction to his lot.… Noble descent was as evident in him as in a blood horse” (104). But, the narrator is quick to emphasize, Billy’s parentage and place of birth are a mystery; and to his commander’s questions regarding his “beginning,” Billy withholds any knowledge and answers “God knows,” reciting a tale he was told of his being “found” hanging in a basket (104). The text therefore introduces the theme and significance of origins by mystifying the relation between the character Billy Budd and his presumed origins— cultural-mythological and biological alike. In addition to these examples of obfuscated origins, highlighting a textual preoccupation with the “origin” as an “already always” site of ambiguities and discrepancies, I detect a similar concern with origins in the novella’s references to the biblical David stories and its representation of the evocation of the allegorical exegetical mode as the adequate form to understand the biblical origin narrative which shaped an American ethos of justified violence. As I have suggested, it is important to differentiate allegory from typology, especially because these two forms of interpretation differ in their understanding of the status of origins. Allegorical interpretations delineate a struggle with their own origins, identifying a doubleness inherent in the original text/event that defies the cohesion typological readings seek to establish.5 In this context, Melville’s Billy Budd evokes the Bible as a socio-religious origin with which the anteceding text cannot accord, but without which it has no meaning. I argue that this nuanced approach to the Hebrew Bible as an origin corresponds with a post-Civil-War theological crisis which, following the brutality of the war, questioned the allegedly unbreakable covenant between the Abrahamic God and the American people. The text’s allegorical reading of the Hebrew Bible—a violent act of interpretation, and reflected in the novella’s abundant representations of violence—positions the original biblical narrative within attempts to achieve a cohesive national identity at the cost of endless, repetitive moments of violence and destruction. Whereas my previous chapters contested the existence of a unified national origin narrative, my

4 John Bryant’s account of the draft revisions of the Handsome Sailor from a non-racially-categorized person to a white sailor, to the final beautiful, “intensely black” man, exemplifies the complexity of this image—a source of comparison which also suggests an interiority, embodied in a variety of options and versions.

5 In my Introduction to this dissertation, I provide a thorough recount of theories of typology that emphasize a unification of the Hebraic-Christian texts and cultures. See the section entitled “Typological Interpretations of the Hebrew Bible in Early American Literature” for an elaborate discussion.

119 reading of Billy Budd calls attention to the social damages an insistence on this narrative helped create. I begin this chapter by aligning the text’s abundant violent images and associations with the allegorical interpretative method I believe to be central to reading Melville’s texts generally, and Billy Budd in particularly. Allegory facilitated Melville's complex attitude to the violence he both disdained and nonetheless saw as necessary in sustaining civil order. The chronicles of King David that I analyze here highlight a biblical narrative of necessitated, unending violence. In order to elaborate on the novella’s focus on forms—both textual and social—and the violence by which forms are imposed, I begin by noting the scene in which Captain Vere refers to Orpheus. This reference appears after Billy’s execution, when Vere justifies his decision to deviate from the strict military routine and dismiss the sailors to their quarters early. Vere’s view of Orpheus as the imposer of order implicitly evokes David as well—a frequently-conflated artistic convention. I argue that the emphasis on violence in Billy Budd responds to the Civil War and other manifestations of civil strife characteristic of postbellum society. By allegorizing the Hebrew Bible, Melville ultimately found a form that effectively corresponded with and replicated the biblical origin and the ingrained, albeit incongruous, description and forecast of societies’ historical development. I end by foregrounding the era’s theological crisis concerning the providential covenant with the American nation, and the text’s dubious reconsideration of such a covenant by emphasizing its ambiguous and unsteady origin as well as its segregated and self-destructive social form.

From Jesus to David: Allegorical Doubleness in Billy Budd Notwithstanding the novella’s heightened violent discourse, critics frequently focus on the novel’s references to the New Testament and the repeated intimation of Billy as a Christ figure—innocent and pure, self-sacrificing and forgiving. The Hebrew Bible is often unaccounted for in readings of Billy Budd. Thus in Melville's Bibles, Ilana Pardes affirms that "in [Melville's] later works … the Christian Bible is far more central than the Hebrew Bible," and also adds that "Billy, in fact, is one of Melville's most prominent Christ figures" (157, 173); Indeed, since the novella's publication in 1924, critics have consistently understood Billy Budd as an innocent, merciful Christ figure whose death atones for the shipmates', and perhaps all mankind's, rebellious sins. Furthermore, Billy's obscure parentage, his role as a "peacemaker," 120 and his immaculate physiognomy appearing without "blemish," are only some of the regularly used by scholars to support this view (107, 111).6 Not to mention, of course, the scene of Billy's hanging, the symbolic cruciform structure and the final act of sacrifice, which thwarts any attempt at mutiny and preserves civil order. Yet these analyses have overlooked key Hebrew Bible images, which work against the Christian motifs and complicate the novella's events, specifically the portrayal of endless violence and the retributive, forceful dictates of the law. It is the text's emphasis on violence, its necessity and inevitability, which prompts me to counter a reading of Billy as Christ and analyze Billy instead as an allegory of King David, while simultaneously reevaluating the role of violence in allegorical interpretation. In my Introduction, I briefly explained the biblical interpretative system that distinguished typology from other methods—in terms of historical conceptions and imagery— and specifically clarified the difference between typology and allegory.7 Popular in early American Protestant writings, the typological relationship of promise and fulfillment conceives of the Biblical texts and the historical context as whole, unified constructs. A typological relationship is not merely repetition; typology attempts, according to Mason I. Lowance, "to give continuity to the canon of the Holy Scripture… [it] exists in the historical context of time, and its relation to the substance it represents is that of foreshadowing" (4).8 In this manner, John Timmerman explains Billy Budd's typological allusions to the Bible (focusing especially on Billy as a type of Christ), as an "evocation of a secondary and anagogic imaginative sphere which is whole in its own right and thereby forms a mental construct from which the reader may view the primary action" (26). The typological pattern of continuity addresses texts through their commonality, its goal being to harmonize and compare rather than to contrast. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century ministers, educators and other commentators commonly employed typological interpretations to provide evidence for the everlasting covenant, endorsing the colonists’ pioneering mission, and most important, laying the groundwork for American Exceptionalism and the historical formation it entails—a belief that American society was

6 See Timmerman and Teskey as some examples of "Christian" interpretations.

7 See the section “Typological Interpretations of the Hebrew Bible in Early American Literature” in my Introduction.

8 Lowance, Language of Canaan, 4.

121 bringing about the "very end of history by establishing the conditions for Christ's return to earth, heralding the apocalypse" (Madsen American Exceptionalism 6). Theorists, from the early medievalists to the Puritans to today’s readers, attempt to distinguish typology from its often-confused exegetical counterpart—allegory, structuring the main difference around the two interpretative systems’ relation to history. Samuel Mather, Increase Mather’s older brother, writes in his The Figures or Types in the Old Testament (1683) that "there is an Historical Verity in all those typical Histories of the Old Testament. They are not bare Allegories … but they are a true Narration of Things really existent and acted in the World, and are literally and historically to be understood" (128, emphasis in text). Twentieth- century theorists such as Erich Auerbach and Northrop Frye continue to analyze the distinction in historical terms; Anthony Thistleton similarly elaborates that "typology represents a parallel, analogy, or correspondence between two or more historical events; whereas allegory represents an extension of meaning in terms of parallels, analogies or correspondences between two or more ideas" (164, emphasis in text). Pursuing this distinction, allegory can be defined as an extra-historical, timeless, concept. Thus, an allegorical relationship necessitates the abstraction of the signified event, implying a relationship that remains detached from any specific historical context. Building on these understandings, I situate the opposition between allegory and typology in two main domains: historical dependence and textual coherence. The difference between typological and allegorical interpretations resides in the conception of unity. Whereas the typological interpretation aims to provide continuity and wholeness, the allegorical act, on the other hand, necessitates both distortion and force; the distance between the represented and the representing creates an ongoing tension, an unsettling incoherence that cannot be resolved. As Gordon Teskey writes in Allegory and Violence, allegory is a "struggle" "between a represented conceptual order and a representing narrative action, between static ideas and dynamic agents" (33). Teskey's historical conception of allegory's emergence with the transition from paganism to Christianity is explained as surfacing from "chaos to impose schematic order on historical process" (75). Allegorical agents, Teskey continues, are "built up out of the material remains of the past in a manner that violates the original state of those remains" (45). Therefore, while typology envisions the relationship between texts as "a repetition of biblical events [that is] part of the same divine providential scheme" (Madsen "Allegory" 238), 122 allegory looks back at an event and subverts it, seizing its power and meaning, demanding that it "speak otherwise" (the etymology of allegoria). For above all, as Angus Fletcher expounds in his fundamental Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, allegory is a "secondary meaning," another mode of communication answering to the "peculiar doubleness of intention," stressing the text's original inherent otherness and ambiguity (7). As Copeland and Struck similarly explain, "allegory entails alienation from meaning, and is suggestive of the very condition of history and human temporality" (10). Allegory thus contests the typological idea of a "whole" work and insists on resisting the unification of event/text and its meaning—already at its foundation. Furthermore, allegorical writing is also “violent” in its refusal to create characters and scenes that demonstrate a complete, realistic action. Claudia J. Brodsky explains, analyzing Pierre in her aptly titled The Imposition of Form: Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge, allegory does not submit to a narrative demand for an exact correspondence between representation and reality. Drawing on Brodsky’s claims about the disjunctures of allegory, I argue that Melville invites an allegorical reading which enables a focus on appearances, a representative level that may or may not conceal (or reveal) an interiority beneath. The meaning of the characters, events and dialogues of Billy Budd remain impenetrable. In terms of historical consciousness, allegory embodies an ambivalent relation to past events, a tension evident, to a large extent, in nineteenth-century attempts to reconcile with and/or depart from the Puritan heritage. For Melville, coupled with this double movement was the desire to formulate a proper response to his immediate catastrophic past—the War. Allegory refers "insistently to a prior set of meanings with which it can never fully coincide but without which it loses its significance," Dana Luciano clarifies, stressing "the temporality of the relationships [that allegory…] enfolds" (181, 182). Following Walter Benjamin's characterization of allegory as "a referential relationship that is both arbitrary and necessary," Luciano explains that allegory consequently implicates history as a "script, a set of meanings superimposed over the debris of human existence" (182). Ironically, in this sense, allegory and typology share a common preordained historical consciousness. Nevertheless, where typology indicates refinement and progress, allegory dictates deterioration. As Benjamin eloquently explains, in allegory “history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay" (177-78). For Benjamin then allegory is again conceived as antithetical to a 123 preceding meaning, not complementary to it. This process of allegorical interpretation, detached from both the "literal" and the "historical" event, necessitates a reassessment of the referent in discussion and its promised sustainability and timelessness. Allegory thus tends to dehistoricize and question essential ideas of linearity and progress. I argue that Melville's final disavowal of typological unity is reflected in his turn to an allegorical reading of the Bible in Billy Budd, an interpretive act which echoes the violence portrayed in the text. This shift away from typology is noteworthy throughout his career; according to Pardes, Moby-Dick, Melville's rebellious "bible" novel, opposes the accepted "image of America as a New Israel," thus revealing Melville's denegation of his contemporaries' religious interpretation of their immediate daily experiences (84). This typology/allegory distinction is crucial for realizing Melville’s understanding of war and violence as inevitable features of society, which nevertheless expose and dispose of the anachronistic typological conception of Americans as the “peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time” (Melville White Jacket 189). Melville was devoted to the project of debunking this myth, especially after observing the heinousness of the War, and Billy Budd culminates this project by arguing against the popularity of typological interpretations and returning to the Hebrew Bible through allegory and its depiction of endless violence. The problem in Billy Budd lies in the text's simultaneous endorsement and condemnation of violence; while the use of force is commended for its power to restore order, the text also underscores the continuous cycle of violence perpetuated by each of the main characters—Claggart, Billy, and Vere— both as both victimizers and victims. The Hebrew Bible similarly portrays violence, specifically in the David story, as both a necessary means for creating order and as a punishment. Consequently, allegory is defined as a necessary but destructive hermeneutic, necessary when other figural modes are ineffective, and yet disruptive in the fissure it creates between text and representation, event and meaning. This allegorical form, stemming from a conflict resonating between one text and another, which it pinpoints as its origin, is evinced in Billy Budd’s intertextual relationship to the Hebrew Bible. As we shall see, by invoking the figure of David, the novella designates the Hebrew Bible as the origin for both the story and themes it develops, Billy Budd at once allegorizes its own origin in the Hebrew Bible and subverts this connection/interpretation, creating a form that defies cohesiveness in its disagreement with the text that engendered it. The novella’s allusions to David and his violence as a form of communication emphasizes this understanding of the 124 distance between surface and depth as emblematic of a socio-cultural preoccupation with forms and origins.

"Rose-bud" Billy and the Ruddy King David In describing Claggart's jealousy of Billy, the narrator stresses that it did not "partake of that streak of apprehensive jealousy that marred Saul's visage perturbedly brooding on the comely young David. Claggart's envy struck deeper" (Melville BB 129). This specific reference may come as a surprise considering the numerous stories of jealousy and rivalry in the Bible; still, the story of David and Saul fits the Billy Budd narrative considerably: both are tales of leaders who fear the mutinous capacities of a younger, well-liked, man. They are both presented as godly figures: just as Claggart observes that "the spirit lodged within Billy" (129), the Bible describes "the Spirit of the Lord [coming] upon David" (1 Samuel 12:18). And like the composer of the Psalms, Billy "could sing" and "was sometimes the composer of his own song" (110). What's more, the similarity between Billy's and David's physical appearance is striking: Billy is described as “young,” and actually “look[s] even younger than he really was, owing to a lingering adolescent expression in the as yet smooth face, all but feminine in purity of natural complexion, but where, thanks to his seagoing, the lily was quite suppressed and the rose had some ado visibly to flush through the tan” (109). His "rose-tan" or "rose-bud" complexion is repeatedly stressed throughout the tale, along with an emphasis on his bright "welkin" eyes (104). Similarly, David in the book of Samuel is described as "the youngest" child, "ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to" (1 Samuel 1 1-12).9 Both the Bible and the novella suggest that a character's capacities, specifically the potential for violence, are manifested in their external appearance. Despite the emphasis on beauty in these descriptions, another aspect points to a different shared element, also implicit in their physical appearance—violence. However, while the Biblical tradition allows for some flexibility and ambiguity in ascribing a congruity between one’s appearance and interior, Melville’s narrative is unequivocal in drawing this parallel. In describing Billy's complexion, the narrator states that "the bonfire in his heart made luminous the rose-tan in his cheek" (129). His

9 Interestingly, while the King James Version emphasizes the eyes of the beholder, the original Hebrew passage: “Admoni im yefe einayim vetov ro-ii,” roughly translated as "ruddy with fair eyes," highlights David's eyes, the only eyes in the Bible described thus. 125

"ruddiness" is easily associated with David's red complexion which, according to the Hebrew tradition, discloses his violent potential through the juxtaposition with another ruddy biblical character—Esau, the hunter who devoted his life to killing his brother. However, according to a Rabbinic commentary called the "Midrash HaGadol" (The Great Midrash), "if you see a person of ruddy complexion, [he is] either completely wicked like Esau, or completely righteous like David" (Midrash HaGadol on Deuteronomy 1:17).10 The fact that the Midrash, and probably most of the Hebrew tradition, portrays David as "completely righteous" is noteworthy in light of David's use of violence during and following his ascent to the throne. Analyzing two scenes of violence in David's story—his battle with Goliath and his confrontation with Saul in the cave— I show that attention to David clarifies the figure of Billy and his use of violence. Justified violence in the Davidic pattern functions as a form of communication when other forms are ineffective; one that aspires, through its ostensible dialogue, to achieve civil unity. David's confrontation with Goliath is renowned for the former's physical disadvantage, accentuated by his youth and innocence, and his spiritual resistance to the personification of evil that “defies” God. As Goliath threatens the Israelites, David's act of violence attempts to unite the fearful people, to defend God's honor, and restore faith in God's power over His enemies. David's message is not, however, that physical violence is unapproved or ineffective; rather, in this act of necessary violence, he professes a form of violence that is non-mechanical, an almost natural, infantile force manifested in the form of his slingshot. As a result of this violence, David assumes a heroic function that ignites Saul's jealousy. Similarly, Billy Budd is first introduced as the "peacemaker" who "[sugars] the sour ones," despite the repeated harassments of one envious man nicknamed Red Whiskers (106-7). However, when Billy’s attempts to "reason" with him fail and the bully gives Billy a "dig in the ribs," the captain narrates what follows: Quick as lightning Billy let fly his arm. I dare say he never meant to do quite as much as he did, but anyhow he gave the burly fool a terrible drubbing. It took about half a minute... And, lord

10 Another Midrash expounding on the same biblical passage describes how Samuel, on first perceiving the ruddy David, feared he too will be a murderer like Esau; God soon reassured him that, while Esau killed for his own pleasure, David kills on behalf of the Sanhedrin—the High Court—also described in Midrashic literature as “the eyes of the People” (Midrash Bereshit Rabba 63:8). The Midrash thus links the description of David’s fair eyes to the highest legislative authority.

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bless you, the lubber was astonished at the celerity. And will you believe it, Lieutenant, the Red Whiskers now really loves Billy—loves him. (106) Billy's strength, something he cannot fully control, is the mode of communication he reverts to when "reason" fails. Surprisingly, this power grants him a place of honor and respect among the men, and indeed, the “spontaneous, electric action of Billy’s arm has a unifying effect” (Drysdale 321). Red Whiskers can be seen as a combined Goliath-Esau character, an antithesis to Billy's "natural regality," a foil to present a type of violence respected and necessitated, especially when intended to bring peace and promote a quarrel-free atmosphere (103). Although Billy’s first act of violence, like David’s battle with Goliath, has a positive outcome, Billy's second and fatal act of violence, leads to Claggart's death and his own. This act is presented not as an analogue but in contrast to the second act of violence in David's career, in which David shows restrained violence and uses his strength to send a message of superior force, but not murder. While fleeing Saul, David chooses not to kill his rival, but rather to cut off a piece of his coat, explaining that he could not "put forth [his] hand against [his] lord; for he is the LORD'S anointed" (Samuel 22:8-10). This act of controlled violence—cutting the cloth, rather than cutting Saul's head— demonstrates the threat of David’s potential violence, along with the “restraint [that] proves David's moral superiority to Saul," as Warren Rosenberg clarifies (61). David communicates not only through speech, but also in the act of partial violence, which implies that greater power still lies beyond. He is commended for this act, for his resolve to sustain the order and unity of the people, but also for retaining both his and the residing king's honor. By contrast, the crucial act of violence in Billy Budd is triggered by Billy's tragic flaw: his inability to speak clearly, thus barring any effective form of communication. David successfully defends himself from accusations regarding his disloyalty, but when Billy is wrongly charged by Claggart for mutiny, he strikes Claggart and later explains to the drumhead court: “I did not mean to kill him. Could I have used my tongue I would not have struck him. But he foully lied to my face and in presence of my Captain, and I had to say something, and I could only say it with a blow, God help me!” (Melville 150). Aware of his impediment, Billy searches for some other means of communicating his innocence, and of restoring his honor before his Captain. But, as Larry J. Reynolds suggests, "'Baby' Budd's crime is that he strikes— instinctually, irrationally, murderously" (200). Billy's tendency to speak through violence, which 127 previously reclaimed his dignity and enabled his reformation of the "rat-pit of quarrels" ship, now becomes a fatal liability and leads directly to his death (106). But not only Melville's "fated boy" is destined to die; the Hebrew Bible's pattern of endless violence ensures the tragic downfall of David, the warring king, as well (Melville 145). The Bible describes David leading battles demanded by God, along with his debasement in the case of Bathsheba and her husband's murder. The two consequences follow: in the first, David is prohibited from building the temple, a house of peace, as God proclaims it cannot be erected by one who has "shed blood abundantly" (1 Chronicles 22:8). The second consequence is a curse: as punishment for murdering Uriah and for his transgression with Bathsheba (the major sin being his exploitation of power, as Nathan's denunciatory parable of the poor man's ewe lamb elucidates), David is condemned to endless violence through "the sword [that] shall never depart from [his] house" (2 Samuel 12:10). The Hebrew Bible comments on and critiques David's acts of violence through the respective rewards and punishments David receives. These acts, both permitted and condemned, at times reserved and at others unrestrained, expose a tradition that legitimizes violence, as a form of communication that can bring order, while also condemning it and recognizing its status as a punishment. Its perpetuation, and the inability to show restraint, can never bring unity or peace. This emphasis on violence in Billy Budd is therefore informed by an allegorical aura of incongruity and discord, which is amplified through the suggested intertextual relation to the Hebrew Bible, and which similarly condemns a biblical culture emanating from such a tradition. Opting for the allegorical narrative, a form that bespeaks violence both in its subject matter and its mode of representation, Melville demonstrates his own reservations regarding the belief in a biblical origin, specifically, the social consequences that result from a belief in a presumed, cohesive origin. Melville’s use of the David narrative has additional implications for his ambivalence about the constraints of form, as the next section will show.

“Measured Forms are Everything:” Orpheus, David and the Form of Civilization As evinced in the convoluted writing and publication history of Billy Budd, and in common with other Melville writings, the novella experiments with different literary genres and forms in order to demonstrate the inescapable “ragged edges” accompanying the rigorous task of writing (166). Besides the story’s apparent narrative form, a fictional tale claiming truthfulness 128 and enriched with historical data, the narrator also incorporates the “Billy in the Darbies” ballad into the novella, its authorship attributed to “another foretopman” the narrator declares to be “gifted … with an artless poetic temperament” (169, emphasis in origin). As the story ends with this fragment, it complicates the narrative’s claim to authority regarding the events occurring aboard the Bellipotent— according to the journalistic report in the “naval chronicle,” an “authorized weekly publication” (168). The narrator makes plain that this record is as removed from the “truth” of the events as possible, based on a “rumor” that “deflect[ed]” the facts “and in part falsif[ied]” them (168). The narrative thus juxtaposes two alternative literary forms— journalistic writing and poetry—with that of the novella itself. This juxtaposition highlights how different forms deliver meaning in conflicting ways and for varying ends. In accord with the difficulty of peeling through the multiple layers and revisions of the texts, the parenthesized sub-heading appearing in one of Melville’s versions—“An Inside Narrative”—furthers the novella’s preoccupation with issues of form. This suggestion of an interior story, lying not at the surface level of the text but somewhere deeper, has similarly captured readers’ and critics’ attention and promoted additional scrutiny and understanding. As I will show, the complexity of formal feature increases as the tension between appearances and interiority intensifies in Vere’s decision-making process in the drumhead court. The text highlights a desire for form and promotes an orientation with interiority, while it likewise discloses the social implications of this insistence on forms by alluding to Orpheus. To recall, I began this chapter with the narrator’s assertion that truth-writing does not enable symmetry of form and then showed how the text retreats from this argument by evoking Vere’s antipodal tenet, that “[w]ith mankind… forms, measured forms are everything; and that is the import couched in the story of Orpheus with his lyre spell-binding the wild denizens of the wood" (BB 166). While Vere’s mythical allusion to Orpheus’ lyre invokes the moment of the refinement of civilization—perhaps even its origination—and the ability to give form and order to the “wild” and unruly, the allusion also resonates with David’s lyre and with the story’s other references to the figure of David and his role in creating harmony and order. In what Hannibal Hamlin declares to be a “[typical] Renaissance syncretism,” David and Orpheus were frequently linked together as two characters voicing their unique writings (psalms/odes) to the accompaniment of musical instruments (harp/lyre) (227). Elisabeth Henry actually traces the beginning of this conflation of the Hebrew biblical David and the mythical Greek Orpheus to 129 medieval writings and explains that in many medieval illustrations and artistic representations, David is featured surrounded by animals, in “scenes [that are] unmistakably Orphean” (47).11 Consider, for example, the mosaic in the Gaza Synagogue (508 CE) which depicts David as an Orpheus figure:

Illus. 1: “King David as Orpheus in a Synagogue” (508 CE). Photo courtesy of Israel Antiquities Authority, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem/ by Abraham Hay

11 See her Orpheus with his Lute: Poetry and the Renewal of Life and Hannibal Hamlin’s Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature for more on this connection.

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Here, David is recognized by the Hebrew inscription “David” (dwyd) and through the combination of his musical traits and his royal figure, sitting on a throne. However, critics point out, the figure’s Byzantine dress attire, and his portrayal alongside various animals (a snake, lion and giraffe)—liken him more to Orpheus than to the Biblical description of David (a synthesis that appears elsewhere, as in the Dura-Europos Synagogue in Syria).12 Probably influenced by Hellenistic culture, Orpheus adds to the David figure an imperialistic, worldly element, granting him an authoritative, shared space in a multicultural environment. This conflation of David and Orpheus in literature and other artistic practices may also come across as a self-reflexive promotional agenda. For, according to conventional interpretations of the Orphic/Davidic tradition, and strongly voiced by Greek philosophers too, “music so clearly possesses an intellectual structure as well as emotional expressiveness” which can “train” humans to subdue their “emotional impulses” and restore their “mental harmony” (Henry 46). Accordingly, what Orpheus did to the beasts, and David to King Saul, was to overcome their basic, internal (and evil) instincts through the rhythmic, sophisticated form of music. This tradition represents music as a symbol for the power of civilization—the order it brings with it, and its cultural, artistic and musical products—which create harmony and presumably elevate human nature to a higher, more advanced form. However, as we already established in the first chapter of this dissertation discussing Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, nature has a rhythm of its own and does not yield before an external demand for submission. David Gamut’s music in the wilderness had not the power he believed it to hold in his Puritan society; on the contrary, the characters’ insistence on their music and its ability to master the Natives and the natural space—eventually led to their downfall and their failure to substantiate and live up to their originary narrative and destiny. Similarly, the image of Orpheus as creating order, to which Vere alludes in his veneration of “forms, measured forms” may very well be an image of ironic self-destruction and the signal of

12 Moshe Barasch was the first to see a connection between David, Orpheus and Christ; Asher Ovadiah examines Orphaic mosaics in the Byzantine area. For more on the conflation of David and Orpheus in the Gaza mosaic and in other archeological findings, see Moshe Barasch’s “The David Mosaic of Gaza,” as well as Asher Ovadiah’s “Orpheus Mosaics in the Roman and Early Byzantine.” Lee I. Levine’s chapter on “Jewish Collective Memory in Late Antiquity: Issues in the Interpretation of Jewish Art” in Antiquity and Antiquity and Steven H. Werlin’s Ancient Synagogues of Southern Palestine provide thorough analyses of the Hellenistic influences on Jewish culture and suggest various meanings for the David as Orpheus image.

131 his demise. For the cost of these forms is the eradication of an interior, affective part of one’s self by the invasion of an external, foreign feature. William B. Dillingham adds that these forms Vere is committed to emanate “from an Orpheus inimical to his deepest nature,” holding that this “false Orpheus” of the tale spell-binds him to his death, since, as Christopher Sten points out, the “lyre’s forms do indeed ‘lie’” by disguising their super-imposed, external nature (Dillingham 376; Sten 48).13 Furthermore, envisioned as a symbol of civilization, this aspect of music recalls the process Gordon Teskey connects with the flourishing of allegorical interpretations in the transition from a pagan to a Christian culture, surfacing from "chaos to impose schematic order on historical process" (75). But while music may imply a harmonic and refined cultural transition, the imposition of allegorical order merely establishes its own disharmony with that text/event it succeeds and responds to. Billy Budd creates a parallel between cultural forms such as music created to subdue the natural, prehistoric interiors of people and societies—and between allegorical interpretations of origins that express a multiplicity of warring meanings in their response to a presumed point of origin. The novella’s forms—the ones it describes (musical, military etc) along with those it replicates in its structure (narrative/ journalism/ poetry)—frame the narrative’s theme of violence and introduce doubt concerning the truth and necessity of “measured forms.” As William Spanos argues, explaining the significance of the appended “official” navy report at the novella’s conclusion, the narrator’s version becomes the “inside story” and the newspaper the “outside story’ … that is, a narrative imposed on the things themselves from above” (132). The disjuncture between the form of the navy report and Captain Vere’s forms conveys a violence that corresponds to and is enhanced by the story’s setting during the Napoleonic wars – and the contemporaneous backdrop of post-Civil War violence.

13 These works by Dillingham and Sten reflect the critical debate regarding Melville’s “testament of acceptance” or “resistance” to Billy’s hanging—whether it is a necessity or a tragedy. See Harris’ E Pluribus Unum for a detailed explanation of this historical critical debate.

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“War Looks But to the Frontage:” Billy-Budd as a Post-War Text The text of Billy Budd, Sailor is saturated with violence, beginning with the moment of Billy's impressment (a subtle act of violence, given how the “Handsome Sailor” good-naturedly accepts his forceful enlistment), and ending with Captain Vere's death in the scrimmage with the Athée and the debasing report in the naval publication, which unjustly reverses the events aboard the Bellipotent. This framing of violent events, coupled with the descriptions of the characters and their passions, those strengths which also pose as their fatal weaknesses, all testify that Melville in his final work, as in many of his earlier texts, was increasingly interested in—perhaps haunted by—violence. This preoccupation has not escaped critical observation; be it Gregory Jay’s contextualization of the novella within the rise of lynching, Martha Merill Umphrey’s analysis of the homoerotic identifications and their repression, or Phillip Loosemore’s and Larry J. Reynolds’ assessment of revolutions in Billy Budd—to cite a few examples. Critics repeatedly unearth the novella’s manifold forms of violence, illustrating how the novella exposes and condemns some brutal essence of society, history or culture.14 Though Melville began writing the novella twenty years after the Civil War ended, I read Billy Budd as his reply to the war and to the legacy of legitimate violence it imparted to American society. Disregarding this lapse of time, critics have recently reconsidered Melville’s last text as responding to the War that both began and ended as a coercion of unity, though its termination triggered more violence and unrest in the form of Reconstruction. In line with other “late Melville” works, most notably the poetry of Battle-Pieces and Aspects of War, I suggest that Billy Budd responds to the Civil War—and to other post-war events of civic unrest occurring during Reconstruction—by lamenting the inexorable circle of violence which had been justified as part of, and necessary to, the maintenance of a civil order. Using a different method than the one initiated by Michael Paul Rogin, I too conclude that the “Civil War allowed Melville to imagine Billy Budd,” and find, like Cody Marrs, that the War "reshaped Melville's career" (Rogin 282; Marrs 94).15 However, I differ with these readings by locating a significant aspect of

14 Phillip Loosemore and Larry J. Reynolds examine the violence of revolutions in Billy Budd; an illuminating discussion of the intricacies of the law and violence can be found in Umphrey’s analysis of the homoerotic identifications in the novella; and Karcher’s work has been foundational to studies of the violence of slavery and racism.

15 Among other critics who read the novella as responding to the Civil War, John Bryant recently claimed that “this narrative is Melville’s most profound reflection on the cost of war” (60); Michael T. Gilmore also contextualizes Billy Budd in light of Melville's "continuing preoccupation with slavery and its long aftermath” of the Civil War and 133 the War’s influence on Melville in his radical turn to allegorical interpretations of the Hebrew Bible. I suggest that the call to reassess the politics of interpretation governing and guiding postbellum U.S. culture is central to Melville’s final writing years. In order to create a defamiliarized, critical perspective on the American Civil War, Melville displaces his plot into European space and time, setting the novella in the 1797 Napoleonic Wars—his characters all English, their enemy the French. Within this episode in the “ongoing history of civil unrest and mutiny” that, as David Drysdale proposes, “threatened to grind British imperial expansion to a halt, …[the novella] describes the inauguration of a nineteenth century organized around insurgency and counterinsurgency, the former always resisting the imposition of the ‘forms, measured forms’ so desired by the latter” (315). Melville’s narrator laments historians’ disregard of this crucial episode in naval history, though admitting that “like some other events in every age befalling states everywhere, including America, the Great Mutiny was of such character that national pride along with views of policy would fain shade it off into the historical background” (110). Though only mentioned in passing, the narrator alludes to dark periods in American history—not the War explicitly—but to violent affairs and acts of injustice that historians would choose to “abridge” (110).16 But just as the Civil War is removed from the novella’s setting, so too the Napoleonic wars only loom in the background (and resurface in the record of Vere’s death): the real war in the text is the one aboard the Bellipotent, between Claggart, Billy, and Vere. Though the Napoleonic War is mostly absent from the story, its violent implications are apparent not only in the initial retelling of Billy’s impressment, but even more so in Vere’s application of the “Articles of War” in Billy’s sentence. Claiming that Billy’s offense is “a capital crime” elicits the officer of marines’ “emotional” response, that “Budd purposed neither mutiny nor homicide” (154). But according to Vere, intention or malice is beyond the scope of the drumhead court’s ruling: “In feature, no child can resemble his father more than that Act resemble in spirit the thing from which it derives—War. …War looks but to the frontage, the appearance. And the Mutiny Act, War’s child, takes after the father” (154). Though Billy may be

Reconstruction (492). Peter Coviello’s “Battle Music: Melville and the Forms of War” offers another perspective of the necessity of the war and the politics in engendered; See also Gilmore’s “Speak Man!”, Rogin’s Subversive Genealogy; and Marrs’”A Wayward Act”.

16 Gregory Jay and John Bryant both read Billy Budd in the context of late nineteenth-century lynchings.

134 morally innocent, Vere applies the Mutiny Act sentence to incriminate him, and by doing so “turns his back on depth, on the possibility of interiority, of multiple interpretations” (Harris 146). The creation of an almost natural, genealogical bond between War and the Mutiny Act, which assumes their continuous and identical consequences, enables Vere to focus on the resulting outward appearance of Billy’s act rather than accept its motivation. Vere lauds the “appearance” because he knows that the depth of the act—its origin—is not as simple. This too, is a form of violence specific to war and the legal system that developed through it—one that forces an acceptance and reliance on appearances rather than interiorities. Besides his historical repositioning of the story, the allegorical strategy of foregrounding one war to critique another, Melville also alludes to the biblical chronicles of King David as a narrative that, like Billy Budd itself, exposes the price of using war to attain unity. As I show in the next section Melville presents this comparison in the form of allegory, an exegetical method that identifies the possibility of multiplicity at the site of the origin, and which features a sort of violent interaction between these possibilities in the process of creating interpretations and meaning. W. C. Harris describes a similar process in his reading of Melville’s post-war Clarel, whose protagonist “reaches for an originary site not already saddled with multiple interpretations.” Clarel “return to origins,” to the physical space where “oneness was sacralized,” and by doing so delineates the problem of achieving unity despite differences of human experience and understanding (114). In Billy Budd, I venture to add, Melville is still concerned with the ability to achieve unity and questions the culture of violence produced to maintain it.

Billy Budd, the Civil War, and the Theological Crisis Melville's allusion to the Biblical David is noteworthy not only for his role as the emblematic propagator of a tradition of justified violence, but also in his cataclysmic position as the establisher—against his will, it should be noted—of the first civil war in the Biblical chronicles of the Hebrews. According to the Biblical narrative, Saul was the first king to unite the tribes under one kingdom, but with David's covert anointment a group assembled around him, creating a threat and challenge to the throne. This eventually backfired as the Davidic line failed to hold the kingdom in union and several years after the death of David’s son and heir Solomon, the kingdom split into two—Judea and Israel. The presence of civil strife in the 135

American historical narrative haunted Melville until his death, and Billy Budd expresses this preoccupation with war and violence by illustrating the War's effect on interpretation. Though the Civil War brought about many alterations in American society, politics and culture, George C. Rable argues for one unshifting trope: the expansive belief in a providential shaping of both individual lives and a general national course. He concludes: “Religious certitudes had sustained morale and had likely prolonged the bloodshed. The Civil War had in fact been the ‘holiest’ war in American history” (397). Nonetheless, a significant development occurs, Mark Noll suggests, in the realm of Biblical interpretation. He explains that, prior to the War, Americans shared major beliefs concerning the Bible’s extra-religious authority: that “it also promoted republican political theory, that it was accessible to every sentient person, that it defined the glories of liberty, that it opposed the tyranny of inherited religious authority, that it forecast the providential destiny of the United States, and that it was best interpreted by the common sense of ordinary people” (22). However, these principals are uprooted from their historical context in the war’s aftermath, specifically following, Noll continues, debates over the Bible’s view of slavery and race as well as discussions of the role of providence in shaping a national scheme. But I would argue that these trends involving conflicting approaches to biblical interpretation arise even before the war. Among the many changes affecting antebellum Protestant American religious practices, the appearance of new Biblical exegetical modes similarly respond to fluctuations in the various ways that Protestant denominations understood scriptural authority and personal interpretation. One observable distinction arises in the relation to Biblical typology. Several nineteenth-century debates revolving around typological interpretations of the Bible undercut this popular mode of thinking and indicate a change in typology's literary and religious relevance and significance. One prominent thinker who reconsidered the traditional use of typology was Theodore Parker, whose anti-Calvinist notions, coupled with the influence of German scholarship, "called into question the predominant tendency to idolize the biblical text as the emblem of divine inspiration and instead accentuated its human origin" (Pardes 51). Reading the Bible in this way concurrently demanded that Parker reassess the role of typological interpretation. And so, in his seminal A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion (1842), he renounces the “Messianic prophecies… [that] commonly pretended that there are in the Old Testament clear and distinct 136 predictions of Jesus of Nazareth.” Instead, he declares that “it has never been shown that there is, in the whole of the Old Testament, one single sentence that in the plain and natural sense of the words foretells the birth, life or death of Jesus of Nazareth” (342).17 Severing the seemingly natural correlation typology establishes between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, Parker boldly condemns such prophetic readings of the Bible. He is also unafraid to voice his indignation with the interpreters themselves. He explains his disdain with typologists, insisting that “[in] the hands of both Protestant and Catholic interpreters, the Bible is clay, to be turned into any piece of ecclesiastical pottery the case may require; persecuted in one sense they flee into another” (445-46). In such forceful language Parker continues to accuse early and contemporary exegetists alike of "abusing" scripture (447). Differing with Parker's liberal approach to biblical criticism, in what might be defined as the other end of the interpretative scale, Moses Stuart championed the infallibility of a divinely- inspired biblical codex. A professor situated at the Orthodox Andover Seminary, Stuart, like Parker, nonetheless eschewed the over-arching use of typological references in biblical scholarship, and much of his work is devoted to synthesizing his doctrine of divine revelation with an emphasis on human authority, reason and common sense.18 Still, Stuart's criticism of typology in Hints on the Interpretation of Prophecy (1842) echoes Parker's disdain, though not as harshly. In his chapter on the "double meaning of prophecy," Stuart sets apart “true” types, stressing they are not "every resemblance which fancy can draw, between an earlier and later occurrence or personage" (34). By this he means to curb scholars' extended use of typology, limiting them to those typological relations that the New Testament and early Church fathers deemed as such. I reference these two antebellum religious figures because they participate in what I define as the first breach in the Protestant American exegetical practice of typology.19 There is an obvious key difference between Parker and Stuart in their understandings of the biblical text as a historical and divine "truth." Stuart aims to retain the divine authority of the Bible and restrict

17 Parker's reference to "plain and simple" language, perhaps ironic in a sense, alludes to the Calvinist doctrine concerning a "literal" approach to Scripture (Thompson 67).

18 For more on Stuart’s Biblical exegesis (and Parker’s), see Walter H. Conser, God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America.

19 See also my introduction where I elaborate on the American typological debate.

137 fanciful interpretations, while Parker would like to encourage what he sees as legitimate and necessitated individual responses. Still, as these two examples illustrate, theories of typological interpretations continue to evolve over the nineteenth century and drift away remarkably from their initial function in early American writings. Typology is increasingly questioned as a useful, relevant and justified exegetical tool, as is its ability to enhance individual and constructive responses to the biblical texts while still proclaiming the sanctity and integrity of the Scriptures. I argue that it is within this discursive context, debating the role of typology in the nineteenth century, that contemporary writers situated their own reflections on and responses to the Hebrew Bible. Melville, always alert to the changing trends in biblical exegesis, concocted his method of biblical commentary as an innate expression of a post-war society. As Cody Marrs identified in Battle-Pieces' poems, and in Melville's turn to poetry in general, "Melville discerned neither chaos nor progress" but rather a conception of history "as a series of related destructions… [with] no promise of messianic deliverance" (94, 95). Melville’s work indeed participates in the rift I detect in the typological pattern as revised by many nineteenth-century writers, a rift that transformed the unwavering belief in a society and culture directed by a divinely inspired mission. Turning to the Bible not typologically, but allegorically, and wresting from it a theme not of peace and unity, but rather endless and repetitive violence and destruction. Melville creates Billy Budd's necessary "blow" in an age of miscommunication and misinterpretation. This complex portrayal of violence and civil wars is pivotal to understanding Melville's own qualms about the use of force, aware that his and other Northern writers' "moral framework had provided both the rallying language for the [Civil] war and a powerful incitement to repudiate [it]," as Michael Warner incisively observes (Warner 43). Carolyn L. Karcher further affirms that Melville recognized "the inevitability, and indeed the necessity, of the revolution his early stories heralded, and when the long dreaded Civil War at last broke out, he repressed his misgivings about its outcome, throwing himself heart and soul behind the Union side he perceived as battling for the 'Right'" (346). Karcher's description of the violence Melville almost embodies in his endorsement of the war and its violence is substantiated by Melville's prose "Supplement" to Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War, where he decides in favor of that "agonized violence" which brought about emancipation, admitting to the failure of "deliberate legislation" (Melville "Supplement" 181). Putting all irony aside, he stays true to the ideas that 138 engendered the war and even dedicates his Battle Pieces to "the memory of the three hundred thousand who in the war for the maintenance of the union fell devotedly under the flag of their fathers" (2). But, as Gilmore also argues, Melville “put the necessity of preserving peace ahead of the plight of the bondsmen” (495). My analysis of Billy Budd contributes to this debate surrounding Melville's approach to violence insofar as I suggest that the novella finally implies that violence—be it physical or lawful—cannot achieve unity, chiefly because violence can only produce more of the same kind. As a final note on the inability of attaining unity through violence, Melville's last work reconsiders the role of allegorical interpretations in the context of the civil turbulence he perceived and experienced, during the Civil War and later, in Reconstruction, and post- Recontruction riots and strikes. While Melville accepts the inevitability and necessity of violence in preserving social order, he does not sanction such acts, especially if violence is performed under the mere pretense of preserving unity. Melville’s depiction of Billy, which lends itself to an allegorical reading, expresses the inability to fully reconcile the various aspects of violence implicit in King David's use of force, while also acknowledging the discrepancy in the two characters' approach to that violence, though its lethal effect remains the same in both tales. As he positions his protagonist amidst a Hebrew Bible tradition of necessitated violence, Melville demonstrates his acceptance and simultaneous resentment of violence in civil life, by also reassessing the politics of interpretation through the affirmation of allegory’s unique method of de-prophesizing and deconstructing a uniformed understanding of history.

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Conclusion

“Reading an Unseen Book:” “King David” and the Failure of Typology in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

This dissertation has attempted to trace how writers throughout the nineteenth century wove the Hebrew Bible into their fiction, redefining the relation between their perception of contemporary American society, and the Puritan settlers’ idea of a divinely-inspired historical progress dictated by the Hebrew Bible. By interpreting the Hebrew Bible non-typologically, these writers’ fictions generated new understandings of national historical processes and religious origins, emphasizing that literature could neither mediate nor merge these two constructs. They resisted typological interpretations in diverse ways: first, by turning to fictional adaptations and adoption of the novel form; second, by incorporating multiple narratives as a mode of myth-making; third, by subversively emphasizing affect and temporality; and fourth, by using allegorical representations. Taken together, these examples of non-typological writings demonstrate a growing socio-cultural desire to break away from earlier literary and historical frameworks that imagined the nation as a unified entity, stemming from a single, shared past and progressing into a fixed promised future. These rejections of typological approaches to the Hebrew Bible reflect mounting doubt regarding the value of using Scripture as an authoritative site of religious, national and literary significance, and whether the religious source explains the development of the nation. These fictions also attest to a reformed consideration of religion in the nineteenth-century United States, which sought to separate a private, religious sphere from a public, socio-political one. I conclude this study with a reading of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s story “King David” (1878), a Reconstruction-era text focusing on the prejudices that pervaded post-war American society. “King David,” first published in Scribner’s Monthly and reprinted in 1880 in Woolson’s Rodman the Keeper: Southern Stories, tells of a young Northern school-master named David King who decides to go South to teach the Freedmen following the Civil War. He is described as a committed former abolitionist with deeply racist feelings. He believes whole- heartedly that “it is right they should be freed” yet he “[shrinks] from personal contact with the 140 other race” and constantly uses derogatory language to describe the townspeople (112, 109). Though successful at first, after a few months David feels that his students are neither advancing in their studies nor growing in numbers. Believing them to be ignorant and lazy, David buys some land from a neighboring ex-planter who expresses his disdain towards Freedmen and the Northerners who freed them. David then attempts to persuade the townspeople to work for him for wages, but finds himself overpowered by a carpetbagger called “the captain” who seduces the townsmen with liquor and a false promise of rights in exchange for their votes. Finding that he is fighting a lost battle, and that he “[has] not succeeded… as [he had] hoped to succeed,” David convenes the town’s elders and shares his decision to leave, which they accept, telling him that he has never understood them (120, 121). David returns to his home in the North, having learned, the narrator explains, “the great lesson of a failure” (122). I introduce Woolson’s protagonist David King and his “failure” to educate the newly freed people in the South as emblematic of what I refer to as the “failure of typology” more broadly (118). Woolson’s story critiques the typological historical framework by divorcing David King’s act of attempted education in the name of national unity and responsibility, from the Hebrew Bible that allegedly engenders this “calling” (106). The text produces a doubly- parodic representation of David, who shares no characteristics or traits with his Biblical precedent, and yet is mockingly nicknamed “King David” by the Southerners. As a parody of the Hebrew Bible, an empty reference to an origin lacking substance or logic, the text renders the Hebrew Bible an “unseen book”—a term I borrow from the story’s epigraph, a poem by Richard Watson Gilder, editor of Scribner’s1—and reinstates an understanding of the origin as always already a reproduction or imitation.2 In what follows, I analyze Woolson’s “King David” and the significance of the way its titular figure lacks any recognizable characteristics of David as he appears in the Hebrew Bible. I argue that the “failure of typology” in Woolson’s story is emblematic of the process I detail in this study as a whole—a nineteenth-century literary and cultural redefinition of the relation

1 Gilder (1844-1909), an American poet, reporter and editor, became editor of Scribner’s Monthly in 1881, shortly before it was renamed as The Century Magazine. He remained editor until his death in 1909. His poem was published in The New Day, a Poem in Songs and Sonnets (1875).

2 Here, as in Chapter 2, I draw on Judith Butler’s theories of parody and imitation, which clarify that works of parody, whatever their specific target, are always also a parody of the idea of and belief in a stable, authoritative origin.

141 between the American nation and God. David King’s mission is informed by his typological understanding of divine history and national cohesion, but the text highlights this enterprise as presumptuous and ironically misguided. Then, using Woolson’s text as my point of departure, I proceed to sum up key arguments addressed in this dissertation, each of which subverts an aspect of typological interpretive methods by questioning the function and significance of origins and beginnings; their influence or control over their presumed successors, the Bible’s role as a unifying national construct, and the substitution of past, textual forms of knowledge with affective and experiential ones. I conclude with some final meditations on the implications of this dissertation for literary and religious studies, and suggest additional directions for exploring the relationship between literature and religion in American studies.

“King David” and the Parody of the Hebrew Bible Critics generally regard the story’s focus on Reconstruction and the prejudices of American society as its major theme, and disagree as to where this “failure” is most apparent. Anne Boyd Rioux has recently declared it Woolson’s “most controversial story” which can be read “as a parable of the failure of the white North to truly care about the plight of freed slaves” (89, 105). Peter Schmidt argues that “by the story’s end, not surprisingly, Woolson’s story becomes less subtle and ambivalent in its message… that Reconstruction Negro schools were disasters” (54). And Carolyn Hall concludes that “Reconstruction failed because many Northern whites extended a victorious manifest destiny at the expense of black Americans, who were no longer slaves but still were more foreign than fellow citizens” (189). Taking up Hall’s cue, I suggest that the idea of a “manifest destiny” is implied in the story as problematic not only for its racial divisions, but also for its national-religious perception of the American nation as a divinely-chosen people. Two years after its initial publication, Woolson included “King David” in a collection of stories, and added an epigraph from Richard Watson Gilder’s poem “The Traveler”:

I met a traveler on the road His face was wan, his feet were weary; Yet he unresting went with such A strange, still, patient mien—a look Set forward in the empty air, As he were reading an unseen book. (105)

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Though in Gilder’s original poem, the traveler’s immersion in the unseen book is a positive portrayal of strength and patience, when embedded in Woolson’s text and linked to her “tired and dispirited” protagonist, Woolson suggests that David’s problem lies in his “empty air” and obstinate reliance on an “unseen book” (107). Indeed, the Hebrew Bible is absent from Woolson’s story; the only mention of Scripture appears in the description of the makeshift church in Jubilee, where the narrator says the so-called preacher “poured forth a flood of Scripture phrases with a volubility, incoherence and earnestness alike extraordinary” (110). This description is but one example of David’s inability to understand and relate to his black pupils. Besides this single mention, the story references no biblical tales, phrases, or tropes—except, of course, for the titular “King David.” The allusion is thus ironic as David King shares no characteristics with his biblical forerunner. As we have seen, Cooper’s David Gamut is linked to the biblical David through his psalmody and music, Hawthorne’s Dimmesdale is Davidic in his adulterous role, and Melville’s Billy Budd could be likened to David through the story’s emphasis on violence and civil unity. By contrast, Woolson’s David King has no character trait to compare or contrast with the Bible’s David. This inversion underscores both the distance between David King and the Hebrew Bible, and that between him and the Freedmen: “The title struck in the imitative minds of the scholars, and, turning it around, they made ‘King David’ of it, and kept it so” (107). By reversing the order of the words and emptying the biblical reference of a meaningful point of comparison, the text questions the function and significance of “imitation” as it simultaneously emphasizes the constructedness of both origins and reproductions. The Hebrew Bible’s absence in the story extends from the conspicuous dissimilarities between the two Davids to the text’s moral lesson and social missions, which are presumably but ineffectivey directed by the Bible. David decides to go south “feel[ing] the call to go” and believing “it was duty” (106, 109). Carolyn Hall elaborates that “David interprets the Freedmen’s Bureau ‘call’ as a project of deliverance,” suggesting that his biblical name “implies that a divine mandate informs the Northerner’s ‘call,’ if not his flawed response” (Hall 181, 188). David attempts to assume the role of leader, teacher and guide (perhaps more of a “Moses” figure than a “David” one), by following a decree the Puritan founders identified in the Hebrew Bible, but in the process of doing so, the biblical chronicles become an “unseen book” in the story, both for David and for those he tries to deliver. 143

As I have shown, nineteenth-century writers demonstrate diverse techniques for reimagining and referencing the Hebrew Bible as an “unseen book.” Hawthorne’s conversion of the biblical reference to an image in the tapestry is one example of such erasure, and Cooper’s parodic representation of David Gamut and his displacement in the wilderness is another. Woolson’s method here resembles Cooper’s parody, alluding to a concealed biblical text as an origin, but inverting this relation and therefore reinforcing Butler’s understanding that “parody is of the very notion of an original” and that “imitations which effectively displace the meaning of the original … imitate the myth of originality itself” (Butler 175, 176). Woolson’s parody of the “unseen book” that David King blindly follows undermines the presumed essence of an original and empties it of meaning, creating the “empty air” referred to in the epigraph. Through this parodic allusion to the Hebrew Bible, Woolson underscores the failure of typology as a historical construct with socio-religious demands. As Schmidt explains, “King’s ignorant pupils comically invert their teacher’s name to ‘Mars [Master] King David,’ thereby allowing Woolson to suggest that Reconstruction’s dream [that] the blacks might be America’s Israelites destined for greatness in a new Canaan of freedom was nothing but a dangerous delusion” (52). Schmidt stresses the danger of the typological imagination which promised future salvation but produced more social unrest and disorder. Hall adds that Scribner’s Monthly was “a magazine known for adopting the sentiment of national reconciliation that had found its way into many postwar periodicals” (177). Though Reconstruction was renounced by the Federal government a year before the first publication of Woolson’s story, it expresses a Northern desire for national and social unity, while also clearly declaring such an enterprise as a “failure.”

Beginnings and Endings: Deconstructing the Bible as Origin In its implicit portrayal of typology’s failure, Woolson’s “David King” considers the relation to origins that typological frameworks entail by distinguishing origin from beginning, a distinction which follows from my analyses in this dissertation. Typological interpretations of texts and historical processes conflate origins with beginnings, consolidating the two ideas in the Hebrew Bible into a single spatio-temporal foundational narrative. As I explained in Chapter 1, the Hebrew Bible encapsulates the widely accepted beginning of human history, founding the relationship between humans and God as a religion that presumes it will sustain its consistent 144 authority and relevance over time. In typological thought, the Hebrew Bible is a narrative of beginnings because it is the origin of history, religion, and civilization. But when David King hears the “call” to go teach the freedmen, guided by an “unseen book,” he struggles with the typological fusion of origins and beginnings and, by implication, with endings as well. Telling his Northerner neighbors that “[their] responsibility is great; [their] task is only just begun,” he learns that “they were not prepared to hear any talk about beginning. Beginning indeed! They called it ending” (106). The Northern farmers disagree not only with David’s typological view of their social responsibility, but also with his typological view of history; they contest the idea of divinely-guaranteed progress towards social improvement, reconciliation, and salvation. Instead they read the new social order as an “ending,” and not the redemptive one foretold by typological historical views. The story’s focus on endings resurfaces several months later in Jubilee. As David’s school project begins to fail, he is accosted by the white planter Ammerton, who demands that David “keep in order those miserable, drinking, ruffianly negroes of [his],” asking him: “What are you going to do? How will it end?” (116). To David’s response, “God knows,” Ammerton replies: “Of course He knows; but the question is, do you know?” (116). By severing divine knowledge from human knowledge, Ammerton compromises the typological vision of history that plainly frames history’s beginning and end by Jesus Christ’s life and death. Belief in this designated end instilled the early settlers with their self-claimed authority to conquer, expand and convert the land and its inhabitants. But within the social chaos and national divide detailed in Woolson’s story, David King’s tenacious adherence to typological thought stands out as an irrelevant doctrine not applicable to postbellum American society. The absence of the Hebrew Bible-as-origin is emphasized by the text’s replacement of a discourse of origins with one of beginnings and endings, highlighting a distinction between the two concepts that informs the dissimilar practices that develop from them. Edward Said defines the difference between origins and beginnings by emphasizing that beginnings are always implicated within a web of circumstances; he focuses on the aftermath of the two concepts to show their divergences: while origin is divine, mythical and “centrally dominates what derives from it,” beginning is historical, humanly produced and “encourages nonlinear development” (373).3 Said reads the difference between the two retrospectively: beginning is a site of active

3 Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method. 145 creativity engendering some response, continuation or departure, whereas origin is understood to be the passive foundation of something else. In Woolson’s story, the sense of active beginning is apparent as the story shows how a consideration of beginnings instantaneously leads to a focus on endings. The particular beginning in question indicates the impossibility of continuity or renewal. Many of the texts explored in this dissertation resist the typological framework’s identification of the Hebrew Bible as an origin, and highlight its foundational role as a beginning. These distinctions determine the form writers use to produce their David stories, and indicate their different understandings of what origins mean in historical and literary productions. I have argued that many nineteenth-century writers adopt the novel form to recreate the biblical story that they sought to substantiate, but in the process of doing so, their fictional supplements became works of origins in themselves: in the biblical fiction chapter, their stories became origins of a new, hybrid genre that could potentially replace the Hebrew Bible because it was both more alluring and more accessible. However, as my discussion of Cooper’s fiction demonstrates, the historical novel functions not only as a literary and mythical origin, but also as the substituted beginning of the post-revolutionary nation. The historical novel thus questions the Bible’s function as a beginning and as origin; the human and the divine aspects Said analyzes represent the central point of divergence between these two concepts. While Cooper resists typological interpretations by resituating national beginning at an alternative historical and literary site, Hawthorne contests typological interpretations of origins by interfering in genealogical constructions, subverting typological perceptions of origins as sources of their derivatives. In the Scarlet Letter Hawthorne strangely resists a sense of a fixed beginning altogether. Conversely, Billy Budd manipulates origins into beginnings by emphasizing allegorical disharmony and the impossibility of upholding textual and social sites of unequivocal unity. These texts substantiate the idea of origins as relegated to a divine realm that cannot be fully comprehended. Therefore, their writers approach the Hebrew Bible as a beginning by highlighting earthly aspects that can be considered and revised historically. Woolson’s “King David” resists the typological pinpointing of the Hebrew Bible as origin in two ways. First, it subversively defines an alternative “beginning” to American society and history through the Northerner’s dismissal of David’s mission. Second, it challenges

146 discourses of beginnings and endings through what “the captain,” another foil to the protagonist, tempts David to accept: a new temporal concept – “transition” (114). Reconstruction, a new historical period, is unacceptable to minds cultivated by American typology; post-slavery “transition” demarcates a grey zone inviting change without specifying its direction and therefore potentially creating a space free of social rules and in subversively defined presuppositions. David is disgusted with the captain’s ideas “that the negroes have got to have somebody to lead them”—the captain’s form of leadership freely distributes alcohol—and instead insists on “influence” as a more controlled means of guidance and direction.4 However, the story dismisses David’s idealization of his role by questioning both his (personal) ability and the (general) possibility of influencing others. Thus the story redefines the relation between origins and their assumed consequences as a question of influence, and aligns this theme with the failure of typology in nineteenth century American culture.

Influence and Control: Undermining the Authority of the Hebrew Bible Throughout the story, David King is concerned with his influence over others, at first wondering whether such influence exists, and later debating whether he seeks to influence his students or rather control them. David King measures his success or failure with the freedpeople in Jubilee through the degree of influence he or others have on them. The narrator explains that David’s thrift was “daily robbing him of the influence which he so earnestly longed to possess,” clearly indicating that he exercised no power over his pupils. Noticing that “they did not even respect him as they had respected their old masters,” David realizes that “none of his pupils looked at him with anything like that affection” with which they regard Harnett Ammerton, in comparison (113, 112). David misunderstands the effect of the influence he seeks to “possess” because he grotesquely idealizes the “respect” and “affection” the former slaves had presumably felt towards those who enslaved them. His desire for influence suggests that he himself not those whose social status he claims to want to improve, constitutes his main focus. Similarly, he wrongly assumes that Ammerton and the captain possess the kind of influence he hopes to achieve for himself. He pleads with Ammerton to assist him and “act now, while [he] [has] still influence left,” to which the planter bleakly replies—“then you think that we have influence”

4 The text also toys with the distinction between the captain’s “influence” alluding to consumption of alcohol, and David’s desire to be influential. 147

(115). For Ammerton, emancipation signaled the end of his influence over slaves, clarifying that he defines influence as total control over them. David, acknowledging his “utter lack of influence” asks Ammerton if “it [had] been wiser to have obtained some post of authority over them,—the office of justice of the peace, for instance, with power of arrest?” (120, 116). David’s need to have “power,” be influential and control, could easily be translated into a desire to be a master of slaves, like Ammerton had been. The story slowly demystifies this concealed fantasy, suggesting that David’s overt desire to influence is actually a deep-rooted desire to control and master. While both influence and control imply some exercise of authority and power over others, the difference lies in the latter term’s emphasis on restraint, suggesting that one who is controlled submits completely to the controlling agent; power is a quality of the controller rather than the controlled. David’s deliberations over the fine line between influence and control support this dissertation’s analyses of the way that nineteenth-century writers variously interpreted the relation between the Hebrew Bible as origin, and their own literary productions. David King’s failure to gain influence over the freedmen dramatizes the demise of typological interpretations and the historical formation this framework dictates. In a typological relationship, the biblical origin has total mastery and direction over that which follows from it; the characters and the situations that follow in time are different, but the temporal direction is prefigured and the lessons and values are already prescribed—with little room for variation. The typological interpretative method identifies direct references and links that would bridge the gap between the Hebrew Bible and subsequent events or texts. Typology affirms the Hebrew Bible’s control of the non-biblical text or event which is understood to have been prefigured in scripture. However, the writers whose texts I analyze resist this total submission to the Hebrew Bible’s influence, and present independent and original narratives in defiance of such strict textual control. The writers of biblical fiction acknowledge their inspiration by the biblical origin, while their use of novelistic techniques simultaneously suggests that the Hebrew Bible’s influence over their works is only partial. Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales present “the book of nature” as a competitor to the Bible that challenges the mastery attributed to biblical precursors. Hawthorne’s narrative opposes the Hebrew Bible’s control by offering material affect in the story as more influential and palpable than biblical forms of knowledge. And Melville’s novella exposes the Hebrew Bible as an original site of ambiguity and incongruity, which is therefore 148 limited in its capacity to influence or explain. These writers’ decisions to constrict the Hebrew Bible’s influence over their works evinces their critique of its presumed power to determine specific historical and epistemological constructions.

One Nation Under God: The Hebrew Bible and the Fallacy of Unity In their anti-typological representations of the Hebrew Bible, nineteenth-century American writers challenge the promise of unity that the typological framework encouraged as an exegetical mode, one that sought to consolidate distinct texts and temporalities. As my introduction explains, the vision of a nation unified through a Bible-based Christianity emerged with the Puritan settlers to guide their territorial expansion. When these nineteenth-century writers deconstruct the typological biblical unity of the biblical David story with their reproductions, they implicitly reject the attempt to unify a nation around the Bible. The failure of typological unity is evident in David King’s failure to unite the South and the North. The narrator describes how David the Presbyterian joins the Freedmen’s Baptist church, “because he steadfastly believed in ‘the public assembling of ourselves together for the worship of Almighty God’”; yet the narrator admits that he fails to “understand” the preacher (110). Religion cannot function as a unifying national construct in the story because David is less interested in communication or equality, than in his own success and calling. As he leaves Jubilee, he describes the former pupil who comes to see him off, portraying her as a dog following her master “from a sort of instinct” (122). David’s actions replicate the imposition of Reconstruction and expose its false pretense to overcoming social and racial distinctions, while still enforcing inequality and prejudice. The story mocks such attempts, emphasizing unity as impossible in a society where racism and hatred are so deeply engrained. But Woolson’s story offers only one method of critiquing the fallacy of imagined typological unity between origins and their derivatives in its association of influence with coercion; the other writers examined here explore additional implications of configuring the Hebrew Bible as a unifying national construct in the nineteenth century. This is especially apparent in Cooper’s and Melville’s texts. The Last of the Mohicans demonstrates the way the Hebrew Bible narrative precludes settlers’ representations of a Native American narrative of connection with nature. To overcome this limitation, the novel offers itself as a literary construct that professes an alternative form of cohesion that could be shared by the entire nation. And even 149 more harshly, Billy Budd questions the appeal of national unity, warning that attempts to achieve civil cohesion necessitate violence as an inherent and inescapable component, as Woolson’s Reconstruction text also indicates.

Affects and Forms: A Rejection of Biblical Knowledge This dissertation did not explicitly discuss the social and national parameters shaping The Scarlet Letter. However, my analysis of Hawthorne’s novel in Chapter 3, emphasizes affect as a counter-scriptural form of knowledge, and thus invites similar considerations of affect which expose the Hebrew Bible’s failure to create national and social cohesion (in line with Berlant’s and Luciano’s theories briefly presented herein). Throughout this dissertation, affect resonates in contrast to the textual, preordained, structured and bound kinds of knowledge promoted by typology. Affect becomes a more relevant, accessible and useful form of understanding and interaction, capable of crossing spatial, temporal and social boundaries. Typology fails in “King David” in part because its reliance on distant biblical constructions cannot account for an immediately accessible and genuine affect. The text synthesizes these two modes of knowledge, when David states his decision to move South by saying: “I feel the call to go” (106 emphasis mine). Though the calling is a typological textual mission, David’s eagerness to take responsibility is presented in metaphoric affective language, as “the fire which had burnt within burst forth in the thought, ‘the Freedmen!’” (106). But David very quickly grows “tired and dispirited,” continuing his work from “duty, not liking” (107, 109). As I have shown, affect connects people and situations, and David represses the affective qualities of his work in the name of the rigid, biblical mission which cannot succeed. The text suggests that his reversion to typological “duty” thwarts David’s educational efforts as he fails to see and connect to the “keen sharp eyes” of his students, which are “as intelligent as his own” (110). The discussion of Hebrew Bible fictions (in Chapter 1) implies that writers turned to the novel form as a literary mode that privileged individual characters’ experiences and affects after having recognized that the original biblical text restricted their capacity to transmit knowledge and explain changing social environments. These writers use earthly images of exploration, prioritizing the affective aspects of the new sub-genre of biblical fiction, and stressing the individual’s power to create and modify. Most of the writers whose works I discuss grapple with 150 the proper form for retelling their biblical David story—suggesting that form determines the kind of impact each text will have on its readers. Cooper promotes his historical novel as a more appropriate form than the Bible for constructing a national myth, divorcing it from the biblical account of origins, which he finds to be outdated and at odds with settler representations of the settler/Indian interactions. Melville similarly addresses questions of form in his allegorical representation of David’s violence and his image of the nation as a social construct created through the super-imposition of a unity that always requires violence (which is, in itself, another form of affect). Typology’s failure to function as a meaningful creator of knowledge gives rise to an alternative literary fascination with forms of telling and representing, especially forms for containing and producing affect as substitutes for biblical forms of knowledge.

If Not that Type, then What? The Hebrew Bible in a Post-Typological America In this dissertation, I have introduced the various modes by which nineteenth-century writers reject typological representations of the Hebrew Bible, in the context of their evolving considerations of the Bible, the nation, and literature. Their renunciation of typology parallels broader nineteenth-century religious-cultural transformations in the Hebrew Bible’s function as a site of religious, literary and national origins. These writers repudiate the Hebrew Bible’s role in dictating a national ethos of shared identity, and regard the former Puritan ideal as either irrelevant, improbable, or simply erroneous. They also see the literary appeal of the Hebrew Bible and especially the King David stories they incorporate into their fictions with keen awareness of growing public interest in contemporaneous popular nineteenth-century forms. But these texts diverge in their contradictory relations to the Hebrew Bible as sacred origin, and in their disparate views of the religious claims regarding these origins. The writers of Hebrew Bible fictions revere the scriptures as representing the word of God, providing Christian believers with a history detailing the foundation of their religion and its central tenets. Their fictions aim to support this consecrated aspect of the biblical origin. By contrast, the novels by canonical writers such as Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville, are not committed to preserving the sanctity of the Hebrew Bible; their allusive references to the biblical stories seek to detach religious obligations from literary ones. This distinction between the two traditions delineated in this research may provide a parallel to theories regarding processes of canonization in American literature. 151

Furthermore, in their innovative, non-typological relation to the Hebrew Bible, nineteenth-century authors seem to demand the Bible’s removal from the public, national sphere to a more private and individual locale. Not only do these texts emphasize the denationalization of the Hebrew Bible and call for more inclusive originary narratives, with careful attention to complexities and differences in cultures and histories; they also suggest anon-typological role for the Hebrew Bible as a text that does not partake in nation-building s and is irrelevant to definitions of a national identity and ethos. Their works attest instead to two movements which may seem paradoxical, but which resonate with post-secular perspectives. On the one hand, by stripping the Hebrew Bible of national historical claims, these writers advocate a repositioning of the biblical narrative in a strictly personal religious context. Yet their persistent return to the Hebrew Bible in the public literary sphere demonstrates the reading public’s expansive preoccupation with the Bible as a common cultural artifact. In any case, these two movements clearly indicate that the Hebrew Bible no longer functions as the exclusive interpretative prism for understanding national historical developments. This dissertation has emphasized the Hebrew Bible’s relegation to the private sphere of individual experience, where it was conceived as a sacred and divine entity. As most of the texts I study were published prior to the rise of Higher Criticism, source criticism, and Darwinism in the United States, my analysis addressed neither questions of authenticity in biblical scholarship, nor the origins of the Hebrew Bible. The texts I have analyzed developed in a literary-cultural atmosphere that corresponds to new pursuits and insights in biblical scholarship and their rejection of typology could be conceived as a step in that direction even though their works do not thematize questions of divine inspiration or biblical infallibility. Therefore, what remains to be explored is whether writers envision the Bible’s function as a human construct rather than a divine one and if they do, for what aims, with what effects, and through which literary forms. As my research charts a historical era where writers denationalized the Hebrew Bible while simultaneously seeking to retain its religious significance—for the public as well as for themselves, it remains beyond the bounds of this study to consider cultural and literary responses to the challenges of biblical criticism on believers’ perceptions of the Hebrew Bible’s divine authority and originary status. To conclude, this dissertation has analyzed the Hebrew Bible’s non-typological functions, demonstrating literary rejections of the typological exegetical method and earlier historical 152 considerations of national and religious origins. My intention was to fill a literary and historical gap in our scholarship by paying attention to the slowly disintegrating typological interpretative practice, a practice that once held such strong claims to any consideration of American culture and historical development. The writers whose fictions I analyze all suggest that typology’s demise has not eroded the Hebrew Bible’s significance as a religious origin, but mainly separated it from national historical consciousness, enabling us to consider religion in more complex modes. I hope that this study will enrich our understandings of the nuanced relations between texts and religious practices and beliefs that post-secular theoretical sensibilities enable us to perceive, allowing us to see how questions pertaining to the secular and the religious overlap and complement each other. This study thus invites renewed assessment of originary discourses and the practices in which their perceived authority results. I hope to contribute to the growing body of criticism that seeks to better understand the relation between literature and religion, and specifically to comprehend the mechanisms that created and sustained the Hebrew Bible’s cultural and social roles in nineteenth-century American literature.

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