Modern American Pilgrims: Dwelling and Religious Travel in the Lives and Works of Herman Melville and T.S
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MODERN AMERICAN PILGRIMS: DWELLING AND RELIGIOUS TRAVEL IN THE LIVES AND WORKS OF HERMAN MELVILLE AND T.S. ELIOT A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY JOSHUA MABIE IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DR. DANIEL PHILIPPON, ADVISER JULY 2012 ii © Joshua Mabie, 2012 i Acknowledgements I am grateful for the support of family, friends, and colleagues. My adviser, Dan Philippon, has been a steady guide throughout the entire dissertation process. In addition to being a careful reader and adviser, Dan has been a model of a productive scholar, a dedicated teacher, and a wonderful person. Brian Goldberg and Edward Griffin turned me back towards the nineteenth century and to American literature after a brief flirtation with Renaissance drama. Jeanne Kilde has always paid my work the compliment being worthy of unvarnished feedback. John Archer is more responsible for the method of this dissertation than anyone. Beyond my committee, I owe thanks to Nabil Matar, Thomas Augst, and Paula Rabinowitz who stimulated, nurtured, and directed the ragged ideas and observations that grew into this dissertation. I am also grateful for the time that Kevin Riordian, Eun Joo Kim, Erik Carlson spent considering my project and for their timely suggestions that helped me work out of dead ends. June Padgham and Charlie Fuller were the first great teachers I encountered. A generous grant from the University of Minnesota’s Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment, and the Life Sciences supported my research for the Melville chapters. The University of Minnesota Graduate School made the Eliot chapters possible by providing a Graduate Research Partnership Program grant that paid for my research travel to England. The Department of English funded both research travel and travel to conferences where I presented early versions of each of the chapters. My parents sacrificed much so that I could complete my undergraduate education at Taylor University. Even more than their selfless financial support, I will always be grateful for their support of my intellectual growth. They nurtured curiosity and adventure in me. David and Sue Durtsche generously provided the childcare that gave me the time to complete the final two chapters. My brother, Nathan, read early versions of this project and covered it with more ink than any other reader. His pressing questions and enthusiastic encouragement gave me hope at a moment when I very much doubted whether I could gather the disparate strains into an argument. My sister, Ashley, was a gracious host and an enthusiastic fellow literary pilgrim in England. Peter helped me check citations this spring. I owe my most heartfelt thanks to my wife Kerstin, who put up with piles of books and stacks of articles on the dinner table, who commuted to work while I read in my pajamas, who always expressed faith that I would finish, and who never doubted that six years of graduate study of literature was a worthy pursuit. ii To Kerstin iii Abstract Part biography, part critical study, and part literary field guide, “Modern American Pilgrims” considers the houses and families, the churches and congregations, the schools and educations, and the offices and businesses that formed Herman Melville’s and T.S. Eliot’s senses of identity and understanding of the power of literary art. This dissertation argues that the degradation and destruction of the material and institutional structures that constituted Melville’s and Eliot’s homes led them to purposeful and directed journeys to traditional sites of Christian pilgrimage. Unlike many of their contemporaries and most of their antecedents, these two American pilgrims did not seek open space where they could make something new, they sought to recover something old that could both ground and transform them. The first chapter of the dissertation shows that the project of self-fashioning that located Herman Melville’s ancestors in a family tradition, in a community, and within American history broke down in the face of early nineteenth-century urbanization and economic change. The second chapter considers Melville’s 1856-57 journey to the Holy Land as a response to his failure to secure a satisfactory literary and spiritual place for himself. I argue that the epic poem Clarel records Melville’s attempt to construct poetically a coherent landscape out of the crumbling landmarks he encountered in the Holy Land and that the poem testifies to his engagement with, but ultimate rejection of, religious discipline within an historical creed. The second part of the dissertation turns to T.S. Eliot and considers a degradation of Eliot’s St. Louis context that parallels the destruction of Melville’s New York homes. In the first of two Eliot chapters, I argue that Eliot did not reject outright the St. Louis iv world his family labored to build as much as he fled its collapse. In the final chapter, I show that Eliot responded to the instability of the city of his youth by searching for new spiritual refuges among the churches of England. Though London’s cityscape was manifestly more historically stable than the rapidly industrializing St. Louis, it too was being undermined. Ultimately, Eliot found a series of satisfactory dwelling places on the idiosyncratic pilgrimages described in the Four Quartets. The dissertation’s conclusion proposes Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love as a twenty-first century analogue to Melville’s nineteenth century and Eliot’s accounts of modern American pilgrimage. v Contents List of Figures vi Introduction: American Pilgrims and Modern American Pilgrims vii 1. Herman Melville and Nineteenth-Century American Dwelling 1 2. Melville’s Holy Land Pilgrimage and Poem 59 3. T.S. Eliot’s St. Louis 86 4. T.S. Eliot’s Idiosyncratic English Pilgrimages 129 Conclusion: Creating Late Modern American Pilgrimage 189 Bibliography 216 vi List of Figures 1. Canopy, Plymouth Rock (1867-1920) x 2. Canopy, Plymouth Rock (1920-Present) x 3. First [Congregational] Church, Boston 14 4. Dutch Reformed Church, Albany 14 5. Broadhall Farm, Pittsfield, New York 28 6. New York State Bank, Albany, New York 28 7. Herman Melville’s Arrowhead 39 8. Kitchen and chimney, Arrowhead 39 9. Gansevoort estate 43 10. Hall, Broadhall 43 11. Plan, Arrowhead 50 12. Church of the Messiah, Locust Street, St. Louis, Missouri 92 13. Detail, Church of the Messiah 92 14. Stained glass, Church of the Messiah 95 15. Church of the Messiah, Union and Enright Streets, St. Louis 100 16. Plan, Church of the Messiah, Union and Enright 100 17. Detail of trusses, Church of the Messiah, Union and Enright 100 18. Site of Eliot home, c. 2009 107 19. Henry Ware Eliot house at 4446 Westminster Place, St. Louis 109 20. William Greenleaf Eliot house, St Louis 109 21. Charlotte Eliot’s bedroom, 4446 Westminster Place 111 22. Study fireplace, 4446 Westminster Place 111 23. Parlor fireplace, 4446 Westminster Place 111 24. St. Mary Woolnoth in 1923 136 25. Detail of cherubim, St. Mary Woolnoth 139 26. Architectural rendering for St. Mary Woolnoth’s crypt remodel 141 27. St. Magnus Martyr 150 28. St. Magnus Martyr in context, nineteenth century 153 29. St. Magnus Martyr in context, after 1923 153 30. Interior of St. Magnus Martyr 156 31. Interior of St. Stephen Gloucester Road, Walsingham image 164 32. Shrine Church of Our Lady of Walsingham 166 33. Church of St. Julian after destruction by a German bomb. 181 vii INTRODUCTION: AMERICAN PILGRIMS AND MODERN AMERICAN PILGRIMS A small notice in the January 3, 1805 Plymouth Independent Chronicle reflected on the state of the site of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock and contained the following statement: “Among the glorious events recorded in our history,” the anonymous author begins, none claim our grateful recollection more, than the pilgrimage of our venerable fore-fathers . While in the full enjoyment of their inestimable inheritance, let it not be imagined that prosperity has contracted our hearts, or debased our character; but, let us pay our annual tribute to their shrine, and perpetuate the theme to future generations. Plymouth should be the consecrated spot; there the footsteps of our fathers, the revered rock, and their more sacred relics are proper objects to employ our contemplations and animate our zeal.1 Far more than a flippant New Year's resolution or an isolated outburst of civic pride, this notice is a call to action reminiscent of the Puritan jermiads of the previous centuries. This anonymous author has achieved prosperity and he acknowledges that it is the monetary share of the "inestimable inheritance" of his forefathers, the Pilgrims, but like the Puritan preachers of old, this author knows that this prosperity and the rest of his birthright can vanish in an instant if he and his neighbors wander from their true calling. This author was not first to express such a worry. In the 1790s, in the full flush of early national pride, groups of prominent Bostonians founded Pilgrim societies to perpetuate viii the memory of the Plymouth settlers. Whereas these societies sought to keep the memory of the Pilgrim Fathers alive through intellectual labor and public scholarship, this anonymous author is disturbed by the fading of the material record of the Plymouth settlers - and he had reason to be nervous. By 1805, 175 years after the first settlers stepped ashore from a Mayflower skiff, Plymouth Rock had been broken in two while it was being relocated, eager tourists had chipped off pieces of what remained of the rock, and the original site of the landing had been entirely overlaid by bustling wharves. The author writes that Plymouth should be the consecrated spot because it was not at all a place set aside for memory or devotion; instead, it was dedicated wholly to the gritty work of international commerce.