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University Microfilms, a XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan 7 1 -2 2 ,5 5 2 WYSS, Hal Huntington, 1940- INVOLUNTARY EVIL IN THE FICTION OF BROWN, COOPER, POE, HAWTHORNE, AND MELVILLE. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1971 Language and Literature, general University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan 0 Copyright by Hal Huntington Wyss 1971 THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED INVOLUNTARY EVIL IN THE FICTION OF BROWN, COOPER, POE, HAWTHORNE, AND MELVILLE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Decree Doctor ot' Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University !Jal Huntington Wyss, B,A,, A,M The Ohio State University 1971 Approved by A J Adviser fodpartment of English PLEASE NOTE: Some pages have indistinct print. Filmed as received, UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS. VITA June 3» 19^0, . • E o m - Delaware, Ohio 1962. «••••» B.A., Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut 1962--196^ • * • • Teaching Assistant, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 19#+. A.M., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1960— 1970 • • * , Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1970-1971 • • • * Instructor, Department of English, Albion College, Albion, Michigan FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English Modern American Poetry, Professor Gordon K* Grigsby Early American Fiction, Professors William Charvat and Julian Markels ii TABLE OP CONTENTS Page VITA................................................ 11 Chapter I. INVOLUNTARY E V I L .......................... 1 Involuntary Evil Character Typos Critics Gothicism Faustianism Puritanism Psychology Positive Alternatives II, CHARLES BROCK DEN BROWN , ................. 59 IIr, COOPER AND F O E ............................ 9^ IV. HAWTHORNE.................................. 13*t V. MELVILLE............................. , . 199 BIBLIOGRAPHY................... 250 111 INVOLUNTARY EVIL A major force for continuity in early American fiction is a pre­ occupation with evil. This is one of two clear generalizations which emerge from a wide reading of such authors as Charles Brockden Brown, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, A second is that America of the nineteenth century, as viewed by these writers, has much in common with America of the i970fs, as described by our most acute contemporary ob­ servers, And tho parallels between the two eras are summarized by the single notion that the American dream is fatally flawed, that despite the great promise of our national experiment, seen by R, W, B, Lewis as expressed symbolically through the Adamic ideal, our culture consistently destroys what it creates. In direct opposition to the American Adam is the American Satan, Richard Chase has recognized what he calls "the Kanichaean quality"'*' of American fiction, A similar quality in the national character has been identified by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr,, among others. We like to think of ourselves as a peaceful, toler­ ant, benign people who have always lived under a government of laws and not of men. And, indeed, respect for persons and for law has been one charac­ teristic strain in the American tradition. Most Americans probably pay this respect most of their lives. Yet this is by no means the only strain in our tradition. For we also have been a violent people. When we refuse to acknowledge the existence of this other strain, we refuse to see our nation as ^■Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, N, Y,, 1957), P. 11. 1 2 it is,^ A modern historian, Schlesinger does not label our national charac­ ter evil, hut rather violent. The old good against evil dichotomy does not fit current terminology because it reflects an essentially individual and theological rather than social and political world view. The modern lexicon substitutes for evil such social abstractions as exploitation, corruption, violence, defacto enslavement, and 3ick society. But the place name3 , Los Alamos, Dallas, Watts, the Santa Barbara Channel, My Lai, and Kent State, give modem relevance to the concept of evil as part of the national heritage. This concept was first expressed as a psycholog­ ical, as opposed to theological, reality by our early novelists, Schleslnger's identification of the dualism in the American charac­ ter illustrates the contemporary relevance of Hawthorne and Melville who emphasised a good versus evil dxiallsm. In Mo by-Dick, for example, Ishmael sees the contrast between the land and the sea as symbolically representative of the dual nature of man, "Consider them both, the sea and the landj and do you not find a strange analogy to something in your­ self? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so In the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life,"^ And in "Earth's Holocaust," Hawthorne suggests that even if we could purge ourselves of all the evil we have inherited from past generations, we would be left with the depravity of man's heart, that the tendency to do evil is part 2 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr,, "The Dark Heart of American History," Saturday Review, 19 Oct, I96S, p, 21, '3Herman Melville, Mo by -Dick t or The Whale, ed, Charles Feidelson, Jr, (New York, 196*0, p, of our psychological makeup. Since my main purpose in this study is to analyze the treatment of evil in our early fiction, I will not cite further examples at this time. Abundant illustrations are forthcoming in later sections. What X want to emphasize here is that while we have recognized the historical and artistic value of our literary heritage, we have perhaps not been fully enough aware of its value as one source of a psychological point of view which in large part still persists. And the tendency to belittle the ideas expressed in early American fiction may be seen as the natural result of our willingness to accept several conventional critical gener­ alities which have long been in need of revision. For example, it has long been customary to see Hawthorne and Melville's treatment of evil as looking backward to the Mathers rather than forward to contemporary psy­ chology, Of course Hawthorne and Melville were influenced by the Puritans, However, this does not automatically permit us to dismiss their psychology as reactionary. David Davis, a sociologist, insists that exactly the contrary is true, A, . , recent /I95J7 ‘the symptoms of the morally Insane or psychopath has a striking resem­ blance to the fictional villain of 18^-0: superficial charm and good intelligence; no delusions; no ner­ vousness or psychoneurotic symptoms; unreliability, untruthfulness, and insincerity; lack of remorse or shame; inadequate motives for antisocial behavior; pathologic selfishness and incapacity for love; general poverty of the major affective reactions, such as sympathy; • , . poor judgment; . • . inabi­ lity to withstand tedium or pressure, and evidence of quick temper, /List taken from Manfred S, Guttmacher and Henry Weihoffen, Psychiatry and the Law (New York, 1952), P. 90./* It David Brion Davis, Homicide in American Fiction, 1798-1860 (Ithaca, 1957)» PP. 82-83. Thus, what may appear to be easily understood, if we confine our investi­ gations to past influences upon authors becomes complex when we begin to look at the degree to which authors participate in continuing psychologi­ cal trends# Countless words have been written about the subject of evil in early American fiction# But because the sources of that evil have been thought of as readily apparent, few scholars have deemed it worthy of their full attention. Instead, they have discussed it in connection with some other concern which they have judged to be more in need of explanation i symbol­ ism (Charles Feidelson), artistic merit (F# 0# Matthiessen), the Faust archetype (William Bysshe Stein), the Adam archetype (R# W, B# Lewis), and so forth. Why approaches of this kind do not yield a fully accurate description of fictional evil is explained in a later part of this chapter, My main contention here is that evil plays such a prominent part in the works of Brown, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville and that if is so useful in establishing not only the relevance of these authors to our own time but, also, the thematic continuity of their fic­ tion that It ought to be analyzed, not as a corollary to some other theme, but as a major issue in its own right# The five authors named above are bound together by a shared interest in a particular type of evil, the type I have chosen to designate by the adjective "involuntary#" Involuntary Evil The meaning of the term, "involuntary evil," is, I suspect, fairly obvious, but a word or two of explanation may help to avert any possible misunderstanding. It is descriptive of actions which a character cannot 5 avoid performing by force of will alone but which are nonetheless judged to be evil by the character or by the author or by the reader (assuming the readerfs values are in basic agreement with those of the culture at large) or by all three. Not all evil is involuntary. If, for example, I rationally decide to bribe the president of the AFL-CIO to support my candidacy for governor (an act I know to be evil), I am committing an act of voluntary evil which may get me dected, which will make mo a good Machiavellian and which would make me feel at home in a novel by Dickens or Thackeray, If, on the other hand, I succumb to an irresistible urge to murder the mailman (an act from which I can expect no reasonable personal gain and an act which goes directly in the face of my better judgment), then I am committing an act of involuntary evil; I will be more at home in a novel by Charles Brockden Brom than in one by Dickens, Involuntary evil is the more terrifying of the two types. An act of voluntary evil, regardless of how repulsive it may be on its surface, may be logically explained; it satisfies the mind's desire for orderly causal patterns and functions as an essentially conservative action in that It reinforces systems of thought.
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