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Harold Frederic: His position in the context of modernism

Jolliff, William Gerald, Ph.D.

The Ohio State University, 1988

Copyright ©1988 by Jolliff, William Gerald. All rights reserved.

UMI 300 N. Zceb Rd. Ann Arbor,MI 48106 HAROLD FREDERIC: HIS POSITION IN THE

CONTEXT OF MODERNISM

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of the Ohio State University

By

William Gerald Jolliff, B.S, M.A., M.A.

The Ohio State University

1988

Dissertation Committee: Approved by

Anthony Libby

Steven Fink

Julian Markels Copyright by William Gerald Jolliff 1988 To My Parents,

E. Gerald and Leila Mae Jolliff

i i VITA

March 15, 1958 ...... Born - Delaware, Ohio

1981 ...... B.S., Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan

1983 ...... M.A. Religious Studies, Ashland Theological Seminary, Ashland, Ohio

1984 ...... M.A. English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1983-88 ...... Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Oh io

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: American Literature

Minor Fields: Composition Pedagogy

Modern British and American Literature

The Novel as a Genre

Christian Theology and Thought

i i i TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION...... ii

VITA ...... iii

CHAPTER

I INTRODUCTION ...... 1

II A FATHERLESS MAN IN A FATHERLESS A G E ...... 41

III TYPES , CHARACTER, AND THE DIALECTIC OF MOTIVES ...... 86

IV FREDERIC AND FAULKNER: INTERTEXTUALITY AND FICTIVE REGIONS ...... 157

V FREDERIC AND LEWIS: PORTRAYING CHRISTIANITY IN A POST-CHRISTIAN W O R L D ...... 203

VI FREDERIC AND FITZGERALD: THE AMERICAN ADAM IN A WORLD WITHOUT F A I T H ...... 252

VII THE MARKET-PLACE AND THE MORALITY OF STYLE . . 2 83

VIII SAVING THE PARTICULARS: GLORIA MUNDI, ERNEST HEMINGWAY, AND HAROLD FREDERIC'S MODERN WORLD VIEW ...... 317

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 352

iv CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Few Americans of the 1890s were better prepared to write compelling realistic fiction than Harold Frederic.

The broad and varied experiences of the journalist had allowed him to see the full spectrum of life in his world,

from the small towns of upstate New York to the chief cities of Europe— London, Paris, and even Moscow. First his American experience.^

In 1875 Frederic started the newspaper career that would become his life's work. He began by reading copy on his hometown paper, the Utica Morning Herald; then, after finding the hours of a morning paper were not to his liking, he took a similar position at the Democratic Utica

Observer. Though he was only nineteen, he had already experienced a taste of big city life, having worked as a photograph retoucher in bohemian Boston, and he considered himself quite a knowledgeable man of the world. And he may have been, for four years later he became the news editor of that paper. A year later, when he became the chief editorial writer, he was only twenty-four years old. After

1 2

two years in that post, Frederic moved to Albany, where he

had accepted the editorship of one of the chief Republican

newspapers of the state, the Albany Evening Journal.

During this early journalistic career, the scope of his

coverage had already included everything from reporting on

the crudest murders in the upstate New York outback,

through covering theater events and reviewing books for

city papers, and on to playing a key role in throwing

Grover Cleveland from relative obscurity into the New York

governor's mansion, thereby making Cleveland's bid to the

White House a possibility which would be successfully

consummated.

Not surprisingly, Frederic's part in Cleveland's

election, along with his free-trade editorials, eventually

made his position with the Evening Journal difficult, and

when the paper changed hands, the young editor was fired.

He frantically sought a new position, and once again, he moved into an opportunity that would broaden his

experience. But in addition to broadening his experience,

this new position would also give him the distance from his native New York that he needed to help him turn his Utica and Albany experience into fiction, thereby realizing his nonjournalistic goal of writing serious literature in a realistic vein. In 1884 Frederic sailed from New York to be stationed in London as the European correspondent for

The New York Times. In London he established himself rapidly as a

brilliant and popular reporter, and as a splendid man about 2 town. A letter of recommendation from New York Governor

Cleveland helped to smooth Frederic’s entrance into the

London club scene, especially since the governor was soon

to become President. With a foot in the door, Frederic

could count upon his personal exuberance and gutsy

reporting to bring him an enviable position in the British

club scene. Indeed, his ability and networking resulted in

his becoming a well informed reporter— certainly the

preeminent American correspondent of his day.

By his thirtieth year, then, Frederic had acquired a

lifetime of experience. In America he had experienced and

reported everything from rural poverty to urban affluence,

and in Great Britain he was fast becoming a friend of

important public servants, journalists, and artists. And much of this experience he immediately worked into words.

So when the constraints precipitated by his London

lifestyle^ demanded that he begin his first novel in earnest, Frederic was well prepared, in experience and craft, to become a novelist. His first novel, Seth * s

Brother’s Wife (1887), has received more attention than his other works. The Damnation of Theron Ware excepted, primarily because it has certain similarities with the writings of the naturalists on one hand and the local colorists on the other. And it is a good first novel. But it was some years and several novels later before Frederic

would find a form that would allow his capabilities to

extend most fully.

By the middle 1890s Frederic had gained his artistic

maturity, and his best works followed. The earlier books

had been for the most part kindly received, though not

unreservedly, but their sales had been limited. With The

Damnation of Theron Ware, however, he became the most

important young novelist of his day. Theron Ware received

praise from all important quarters, including the one that pays the bills--it was the sixth best selling book of

1896. March Hares, a happy piece of romantic fluff that

Frederic had the sense to publish under the pseudonym

"George Forth" followed that same year. Gloria Mundi,

Frederic's first major fiction set outside New York, received mixed reviews when it was published in 1898, and has seldom had a fair reading since. But Frederic's next project in an English setting, an expert psychological study of a new financial superman, found his expertise renewed. In the unfortunate tradition of fin de siecle writers, however, Frederic died young, without seeing The

Market-Place (1899), his second masterpiece, published and well received.

It is worth noting that in his own day, people whom we still perceive as good literary thinkers did not fail to realize Frederic's importance. William Dean Howells 5

reviewed the early books well, save the historical romance

In the Valley. {Howells’s dislike of that genre is well-

known, and Frederic's attempt to use it is not in fact a particularly successful one.) And in spite of the fact

that Theron Ware may have violated certain of Howells's early opinions on morality and literature, he referred to

Frederic's masterpiece as a "work of power."

Frank Norris, when campaigning for American books to an anglophilic public, refers to Frederic along with

Howells as one of the few important American authors of whom the American public is aware (Norris 25). In another essay, he describes Frederic as brilliant, and laments that

"The Lawton Girl, The Copperhead, and Seth's Brother's

Wife, masterpieces though they are, never made any money for the writer" (Norris 148). Stephen Crane also had the greatest respect for Frederic, and came to England anxious to meet his literary hero. Crane lambasts the American literary community for missing Frederic for so long— here in reference to the volume entitled In the Sixties, which included the novella The Copperhead:

I believe at about the time of the appearance of these stories, the critics were making a great deal of noise in an attempt to stake the novelists down to the soil and make them write the impressive common life of the United States. . . . contemporaneously, there was Frederic doing his locality, doing his Mohawk Valley, with the strong trained hand of a great 6

craftsman, and the critics were making such a din over the attempt to have a certain kind of thing done, that they did not recognize its presence. (Crane 232)

Crane praises all the Civil War stories, notes that Seth1s

Brother's Wife and The Lawton Girl are "rimmed with fine

portrayals," and calls Frederic's In The Valley, the one work that Howells thought little of, "easily the best historical novel that our country has borne" (Crane 233).

Concerning Theron Ware, of course, important critical opinion was unanimous. The opinion of Frederic's contemporaries is rightly portrayed in this bit of conversation recorded by Booth Tarkington:

"I'm going to take you to dinner at the Lantern Club," he said. "Irving Bachellor’s the toastmaster; Steve Crane's a member and he knows Harold Frederic. Has anybody ever written a better novel than Frederic's Damnation of Theron Ware?" "No, it isn't possible to write a finer novel. . . ." (21-2)

In the current critical climate, it is surprising to hear

Stephen Crane considered primarily as the friend of Harold

Frederic; rightly or wrongly, history has inverted the order of importance.

Having been given such a reception by both the critical and the popular audience, it would seem that

Frederic would have been destined to be read, like Crane, by following generations. But in fact, Frederic was little 4 known even a generation later. And though Theron Ware has remained steadily available, Frederic today has no popular 7

audience, and a small critical one. He was destined, it

seems, to appear in the footnotes of nearly all the

critical books about the period, but seldom to receive more

than a mention in the texts proper.

Still, those critics and scholars who show evidence of

having read the Frederic canon thoroughly continue to

affirm with enthusiasm the spirited acceptance of

Frederic's contemporaries. Howells scholar Everett Carter

is one example: The Damnation of Theron Ware is, he

states, "among the four or five best novels written by an

American during the nineteenth century" (239). Ann Massa

and Scott Donaldson call it simply "the best American novel

on a religious theme" (221). And Edmund Wilson dedicates an extensive laudatory essay in The New Yorker to Frederic, as well as writing the introduction to a selective reissue of Frederic's shorter works, Harold Frederic's Stories of

York State.

What Frederic's reputation lacks is a broader scholarly audience, the kind of academic appreciation that would secure an initial reading by students of at least his best books. Why does he lack such an audience?

Twenty-five years ago, such a question was not difficult to answer. Much early Frederic criticism had been badly misleading, creating problematic misconceptions that have discouraged Frederic studies. For example, in 8

Vernon Parrington's influential Main Currents of American

Thought, Parrington, evidently having read Seth1s Brother's Wife, refers to Frederic as a bitter realist who wrote to

expose the dark stifling realities of farm life, an

evaluation which fits Parrington's thesis better than

Frederic's fiction. Such a position not only misses the

point of Seth, but silently misleads readers concerning

Frederic's more mature works. Seth is far from a bitter

expose of the horrors of farm life; it never approaches the

level of bitterness related in E. W. Howe's Story of a

Country Town or Hamlin Garland's Main-Travelled Roads. And

further, Frederic's other works vary widely, ranging from

Howellsian realism through light and dark comedy and on to

romance.

The Parrington synopsis today is no longer taken

seriously. During the sixties and seventies, sufficient

competent critical work was accomplished to broaden the

outlook of Frederic scholarship. A limited number of

worthwhile articles have appeared in major journals, a

bibliography of primary and secondary work has been

compiled, and a Frederic newsletter. The Frederic Herald, was even published for a few years. One would suppose,

then, that an artist with such a strong and varied body of work, who has received some good scholarly attention, should by now have found a secure position within the academic canon, especially since his body of work is not

only artistically strong but broad enough for a variety of

tastes, both scholarly and popular.

But in fact, it is this very breadth that has worked

against the potential of Frederic's work to sustain

academic attention. He is not faulted for working in a

variety of genres, both serious and popular— many of his

well accepted contemporaries, such as Howells, Twain, and

James, did the same. What makes the Frederic problem more

challenging is the fact that his best works have proven

difficult to classify within the categories to which

serious works in Frederic's milieu of literary history are commonly assigned. If Frederic could be placed readily within the realist canon with Howells and Twain or twisted

into the naturalist canon with Norris and Crane, he would have a secure place--a slot to fill on the survey syllabus, a week of discussion in the graduate seminar, an appropriate chapter to hold his stories or novellas in the anthologies.^ It is no wonder then that in the past critics have usually tried to classify Frederic either as a realist follower of Howells or as a naturalist prototype of

Norris and Dreiser. If only he could be classified, they might suppose, he would be read. But Frederic does not fit particularly well in either of those two camps, for reasons that we will be exploring. 10

His failure to fit, of course, should not affect his

critical reception. Not ideally. But in fact, because

Frederic's work is not easily confined and discussed within

the genre-centered terminology in general use, the task of

evaluating and teaching his works becomes increasingly complex. And since he exists only on the periphery, his

works, aside from his first masterpiece, Theron Ware, do

little to compel entrance.

In this essay, I will not attempt to draw Frederic

closer to the center of the mainstream by stretching the

canon or by redefining it in order to allow a second-rate

writer in. (For in all but two novels and a very few

stories, he can be called second-rate.) Instead, I intend

to spell out more clearly what rightfully keeps Frederic

from fitting in either the realist or naturalist school.

One purpose of this dissertation, then--a minor purpose—

will be to compare and contrast Frederic with the two

primary schools of his day, the realists and the

naturalists, highlighting certain key differences. But in

addition to this, I intend to posit another significance

for Frederic's work - For the factors which exclude him

from the two most common late nineteenth century genres suggest for Frederic a prophetic place among the American novelists of the 1920s, where his influence finally came to rest. Only in the writers of that later lost generation do we find an intellectual and spiritual disillusionment which 11

matches Frederic's dark world view— hence his importance as

a transitional figure.

The difficulty, as we have noted, with considering

Frederic in either the realist or the naturalist canon is

that while some writers are classified, however

tautologically, with relative accuracy and ease— Howells as

realist, Norris as naturalist--Frederic is not. Even

setting aside the difficulties inherent in the work of any

great author, definitions of the two trends are still

cloudy enough to create large grey areas around the

perimeters of those two segments of the canon. But since

the intent here is to distinguish Frederic from writers in

these two genres— actua1ly to voice distinctions tacitly

made whenever Frederic is left off a seminar syllabus or a

publisher's list— some clean, simple, working definitions

would seem to be appropriate. But even the simplest

definition is dangerous when dealing with genre; indeed,

the simplest may prove most dangerous. More closely

related to our problem here than specific definitions of

realism or naturalism are the varied, sometimes confusing ways in which realism and naturalism are commonly discussed. The problem this essay would like to help remedy--the dearth of attention that Harold Frederic

receives— is more practical than theoretical. Therefore,

instead of choosing or synthesizing a single definition, our purpose may be better served by reviewing some of the 12

most widely disseminated dialogue concerning the genres in

question. 6

When William Dean Howells stated that "realism is

nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment

of material" (LHUS 879) , it may well be that his

contemporaries knew precisely what he was talking about.

However, the fact that today we do not, that on the

contrary we see the statement as inviting a subjectivism

that makes real definition impossible, suggests the gap

that must be bridged between Howells's era and our own, and

later, I will suggest, between Howells's philosophical

positions and those of his avowed disciple, Harold

Frederic.

A common contemporary source. The Oxford Companion to

American Literature, defines realism as a

term applied to literary composition that aims at an interpretation of the actualities of any aspect of life, free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color. It is opposed to the concern with the unusual which forms the basis of romance, but it does not procede, as does naturalism, to the philosophy of determinism and a completely amoral attitude. (628)

The Companion continues to note that "the example of science, the influence of rational philosophy, the use of documentation in historical study, as well as the reaction against attenuated romanticism, all had their effect in creating the dominance of realism at this time [the nineteenth century] 13

The definition offered by the Companion covers realism

broadly; in fact, it would have pleased Howells in theory.

But scholars have had considerably more difficulty

discerning from the actual literary artifacts how a

descriptive definition of realism, particularly as that

form was practiced by late nineteenth century American

writers, should read. A telling example of this very

problem is evidenced in Donald Pizer's article "Late

Nineteenth-Century American Realism.'* Pizer begins with a

precis of George L. Becker's article "Realism: An Essay in

Definition," a widely read essay that receives continual

references in discussions of realism. In his discussion,

Pizer notes Becker's discernment of three primary criteria

of realism: (1) verisimilitude of detail derived from

observation and documentation; (2) an effort to portray the

representative— not the exceptional— in plot, setting, and

character; and (3) an objective--not subjective or

idealistic— view of human nature and experience. In

essence, Becker's conclusions are an expert clarification

of general handbook-type definitions of realism. But when

Pizer applies them in the context of practical criticism, he finds that these criteria simply do not fit American

literary realism. On the contrary, he argues that realism

is more diverse in subject matter than representative, that

it is essentially subjective and idealistic in its view of 14

human nature and experience— that is, it is "ethically

idealist ic." Using as test cases What Maisie Knew, The Rise of

Silas Lapham, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Pizer

demonstrates that none of the three takes what Pizer terms

an "objective"— as opposed to an "ethically idealistic"—

view of human nature (3-4). All three main characters,

finding themselves in positions of extreme ethical tension,

rise above the norms of the societies in which they live.

Maisie makes a moral choice in conservative contrast to

those made by most of the significant adults in her life;

Silas Lapham, the great new American businessman, chooses

against his best business sense; and Huck Finn rises above

his own twisted racist conscience, and, like a good

transcendentalist, follows a higher law. In fact, the three authors take a rather romantic view of human experience: they do not minimize the forces pressing aganst their protagonists, but they portray in each case the hard-

fought victory of the human spirit. Furthermore, Maisie can hardly be considered as representative of little girls at the end of the century. Not only is she set apart by her rather unique familial situation, but by her own sometimes startling insight and sensitivity as well. And

Huck Finn has hardly an experience that could be considered

"representative" in any context. 15

To these objections of Pizer to Becker's last two

features of realism may be added a useful distinction that

Edwin Cady makes concerning realism and verisimilitude—

Becker's first feature. Cady notes that verisimilitude of

detail has always been a feature of great literature, but

that the definitions of American literary realism should

not be stretched to fit every piece of literature that uses

it. Poe, for example, used verisimilitude expertly to

create the horror of "The Descent Into the Maelstrom," but

the tale is not a realistic one; more accurately, it may be

termed gothic. Cady contends that the term real ism is best

reserved for those works whose "final effect" is one of

realism. The occasional use of realistic techniques by Poe

and many other writers throughout literary history is

better distinguished as verisimilitude, since the overall

effects of these works are not realistic. Thus we may

admit that Becker's first feature is accurate, but by

itself contributes little to a definition of realism as a genre.

Attempting to define American literary realism, then,

is no simple task. For the fact is that finding a definition broad enough to encompass all that has been termed rea1 ism presents no problem for those whose contribution ends with definition. Definitionally, the perimeters can always be extended. But a definition sufficiently specific and exclusive for practical criticism 16

is more difficult. Yet such is our problem here, since the

purpose of this study is not to redefine realism or

naturalism but to ascertain those qualities commonly

associated with those two movements specifically enough to

contrast the works of Harold Frederic with them. We need,

then, working definitions broad enough to be common, but

narrow enough to establish the demarcation necessary for

comparison and contrast.

Harold Kolb presents one alternative to the

definitions of realism that are too broad to be useful. In

The Illusion of Life, Kolb defines specifically one

particular formal use of realism, that mode which found its

fullness in the middle 1880s in the writings of Howells,

James, and Twain. By so limiting his definition, Kolb succeeds in placing boundaries around the genre which, if arguably arbitrary, are nevertheless heuristically and practically useful. Our following discussion of realism, then, will follow Kolb's definition but, due to the broader nature of this study, it will be augmented by other scholars whose definitions have contributed to the common understanding of American literary realism. We need a definition :ith functional critical limitations, but we also need to approach the common understanding of the community of scholars. For it is this common understanding that ultimately, practically, determines canonical inclusion and exclusion. 17

Kolb's narrowed scope allows him to reach a relatively

specific definition of realism, one which centers on four

bases— philosophy, subject matter, morality, and style.

He observes that philosophically, the realists were "not

committed to dogmatic theories or fixed formulas, insisting

only that fiction be true to life, that it be interesting,

that it be honest, that it be the result of a direct

impression of life" (39). They agreed to a kind of

utilitarianism, and therefore purposed to see into

experience, not, like the romantics, to see through it to

some spiritual or ideal world. Kolb writes that the

realists do not deny the validity, necessarily, of supernaturalism or platonic idealism, but instead, "they simply ignore them as unknowable in ordinary human terms and thus irrelevant to ordinary human experience" (38).

The result then is not the practical atheism of which the realists' contemporaries accused them, but a "practical agnosticism applied to art" (39). Edwin Cady concurs. He states that historically realism was a literary revolt, influenced by a dominating agnosticism, along with a

"vaguely positivistic" factualism, and therefore it demonstrates an antiromantic attitude. Indeed, realism takes a view of reality which refuses to look beyond the real to either the transcendent of the romantics of the vast forces of heredity and environment favored by the naturalists. 18

Everett Carter takes a similar tack, but he sees more

than a "vaguely positivistic" philosophy standing behind

the theory and art of the realists. Carter emphasizes the

importance of positivism on realism, noting in particular

the preeminence of Taine's influence: "Hippolyte Taine took

positivism and made it into a literary credo, and it was

Taine's positivistic theory of the source and function of

literary expression that became the basis of conscious

American realism" (95). But Carter notes other

philosophical factors as well, including important native

sources. From the American transcendentalists, the

realists inherited a concern for the commonplace, and

thereby the immediate. From Scottish Common Sense

philosophy popular in America, they realized the importance

of perception. And from the neo-classical legacy, they

absorbed their concern for the world of the senses as well

as a disdain for metaphysics (89). In essence, the concern of the realists was with what is the case. Philosophically then, the realists were forerunners of pragmatism. They disdained a priori reason, fixed principles, closeJ 7 systems, pretended absolutes. Indeed, they rejected the absolute and embraced "the flux and change of experience. .

. ." (Carter 153).

The realists' subject onatter derives naturally from their philosophy. In reaction to the otherworldliness of writers such as Hawthorne, the realists perceived the 19

importance of telling not what life should be but what it 0 is. Naturally this led to an emphasis on the

autobiographical method, espoused by Howells as one way to

reduce the gap between fiction and real life. ^As^Qarter

notes,

The immediate result of the positivistic theory of literature was an accent on personal experience; the corollary was a conviction that the writer should concern himself with the surroundings which he knew completely, with truthful depiction of the people of his own region, with direct observation of their ways of life, with faithful rendering of their cadences of speech." (15)

Admittedly the realists were the kin of the romantics,

since both expressed a value for the common, the everyday,

the unextreme, the probable. The difference is that the

realists claimed to value these things for themselves, while the romantics perceived the common as linked in every case with the uncommon— the ideal. As we have noted concerning the Becker definition, however, the realists' subject matter was not quite as common and probable as it professed to be theoretically. Generally, Kolb notes, it was "imaginatively representative of the common experience," but somewhat out of the ordinary. With the same limitation in mind, Everet Carter contends that the realists did not seek to document the whole of life, but like the impressionistic painters with whom they felt an affinity, they ignored the photographic representation in 20

favor of "emphasizing those visual aspects which could

suggest the truthful aspect of the complexwhole" (137).

Likewise related to the philosophy of the realists is

the kind of morality present in their works, an everyday

morality theoretically based on the observation of real

situations. Though their contemporaries not infrequently

condemned Howells, Twain, and James for immorality and

amorality, it now seems clear that the realists adhered to

a strong ethical program. Kolb contends "the ethical

content of realistic novels is so essential that it demands a place as an integral part of the definition of realism"

(48). Quite possibly, the reason for earlier confusion about the realists' supposed immorality was due to the sophistication of their moral presentation. Kolb states that

the realists’ morality is intrinsic, integral, relativistic; it arises from the characters and narrative action, rather than being superimposed upon them. Significant fiction has always been ethical, and the realists come to rather conventional conclusions about the qualities men must have in dealing with each other— honesty, justice, mercy, love. (50)

In realistic novels, these qualities, however, are not sought in "an external, transcendental system of values.

Realistic protagonists are forced to work out their own codes of behavior, appropriate to their individual circumstances" (50). But inevitably, they believed, the artist who was true to his material would write morally. 21

for as Carter has noted, the American realist "felt that he

was portraying a world that could be believed in, a world

with all its imperfections, which was permeated with

morality; and he believed that the purpose of fiction was

to portray that morality and, by picturing it, to help men

to understand it" <153). The charge sometimes made by

Howells's contemporaries, that he had in fact forfeited the

moral purpose of literature, today seems wholly unfounded.

While it is true that the realists rejected all direct

moralizing in the novel, the moral message was usually

clear. Carter has noted that "the pragmatic mode of

fiction practiced by Howells and his followers began with a

rejection of any absolute standards of good and evil"

(156). This may be true, but even their rejection of the absolute left them a kind of consensus that would soon be

impossible in modern literature, and we will argue, in the mature works of Harold Frederic.

Such a moral consensus not only resulted in a rather conventional moral stance, but also in a Christian sense social responsibility in the community of writers. As

Edwin Cady has noted, realism held to "a disbelief in the health or safety of romantic individualism" (11). Indeed, the reform element is strong. And according to Kolb,

"Howells, James, and Mark Twain agree that we fully become human beings only when we escape the prison of ego" (55).

Thus for the realists, morality was of utmost importance, and that morality emphasized, as any discussion of morality 22

must, the life that humans lead together. But in a key

way, their morality was unlike any that Americans had

experienced before: "What the realists contribute in their

discussion of human values is the emphasis on the

complexity of moral choice and the necessity of individual

decision in a human context, unassisted by external

spiritual forces" (Kolb 56).

Like their subject matter and morality, the style of

the realists is derivable from their philosophical stance.

Kolb notes many commonalities among the realists of the

middle 1880s, and describes their style as characterized by

an antiomniscient point of view, a tendency toward

complexity and ambiguity, a primary concern with character,

and a tendency to be imagistic rather than symbolic. It

seems natural that a genre which emphasizes personal

experience would shun omniscience as unbelievable. As

Carter has noted, the realists made use of the dramatic method so that the author, having given the characters their lines, could disappear, thus renouncing all semblance of authorial subjectivity. Likewise, an art that attempts to describe life in the turbulent post-Civil War era, an era when moral codes, social structures, and economic situations were changing, would necessarily be complex and ambiguous. No kind of life--and certainly not life in the post-Civil War decades— falls naturally into symmetrical, tight plots, so the realistic novel would not have the 23

romancer’s neatness of plot line (Carter 132). Further,

the romancer could rightly use symbols, white whales,

decaying houses, and scarlet letters, to see through and

beyond the surface of things to a more real world; but for

the realist, who believed the beyond was unknown and unknowable, who only wanted to see into, not through life,

symbols were used only to reinforce the emotional dimension

to meaning already present in the text (Carter 134).

Traditionally, naturalism has been defined largely in

relation to the philosophical position most commonly

associated with it: loosely, pessimistic determinism. The

Oxford Companion to American Literature (which, as if to highlight the dangers of simple definitions, lists Harold

Frederic as a leading American naturalist) defines naturalism as a method of composition which aims at

"detached, scientific objectivity" and "holds to a philosophy of determinism," notingthat "since in this view man has no free will, the naturalistic writer does not attempt to make moral judgements, and as a determinist, he tends toward pessimism.” This definition is as good and bad as all necessarily simple definitions of necessarily complex terms tend to be: good in that it gives a useful synopsis of what nonspecial.ists probably call to mind concerning literary naturalism, at least when the term is mentioned with context; bad because especially in reference 24

to American naturalists, such doctrinaire simplicity fails

to note the various contradictions or tensions existing in naturalism. In fact, some of the most cogent theorizing on

the nature of American literary naturalism has been elicited by supposedly "naturalistic" novels' failure to conform to such a definition.

Attaching a specific philosophy to the naturalists may

itself be a problem, if for no other reason than the tremendous variation of philosophical and aesthetic sophistication to be found among the alleged members of this movement. But such attempts are still made.

Lars Ahnebrink's monograph has been an influential one; it seems to stand behind many of the handbook-type definitions, and represents one strain of naturalism, generally understood. He distinguishes between realism and naturalism in the following excerpt:

Realism is a manner and method of composition by which the author describes normal, average life in an accurate and truthful way (exemplified in Howells' The Rise of Silas Lapham). Naturalism, on the other hand, is a manner and method of composition by which the author portrays life as it is in accordance with the philosophic theory of determinism (exemplified in Zola's L'Assomoir). In contrast to a realist, a naturalist believes that man is fundamentally an animal without free will. To a naturalist man can be explained in terms of the forces, usually heredity and environment, which operate upon him. (vi-vii) Later, Ahnebrink adds that fatal ism, which he defines as

life not regulated by natural laws, but "made irrational

and illogical through the operations of irresistible

chance" (185n) was in the 1890s occasionally coupled with

determinism in the works of his three primary naturalists,

Crane, Garland, and Norris. When these two idea sets,

fatalism and determinism, occur together, any possibility

of free will disappears. Ahnebrink also notes, however,

that some writers are more deterministic than others— a

statement that seems rather true to the reading experience but is difficult to defend philosophically. Indeed, it seems impossible to make logically defensible the assignation of degrees to a concept like determinism which seems to exclude definitionally its opposite.

Charles Walcutt encounters the same problem. He attempts to use the term "naturalism" with its philosophical specificity, to indicate a philosophical orientation in which material causation is the only causation. In reference to the fictional portrayal of such views, he states that "when the idea of the free, responsible human will, making ethical choices that control its fate, is set aside in favor of such concepts as determinism and survival, a new notion of social process has appeared. It is dramatized (or enacted) in these new

[naturalistic] kinds of novels" (21) . It is important to note, however, that Walcutt does not believe that American 26

literary naturalism ever attained its truest forms— it

never wholly followed its materialistic premises {22).

Hence, tension exists in the naturalists’ novels.

More recently, John J. Conder has attempted to find a

philosophical undergirding for American literary naturalism

that is both philosophically consistent and true to the

reading experience. Inventively, Conder replaces the

either/or ultimatum of the naturalist argument with a

both/and. He finds the naturalists' philosophical father

in Thomas Hobbes, who posited that man was free but

nevertheless subject to the causal world, the kind of view

that William James called "soft determinism." To cope with

this Hobbesian problem, Conder supplies Henri Bergson's

theory of the dual self, one determined, the other free

(Conder 10-19). As interesting as it remains for the study

of the naturalist genre, Conder's theory does not affect

the Frederic problem. For even though Conder may be

correct, Frederic still does not fit in with the more

typical naturalist writers.

Donald Pizer's definition may well be the most

critically useful to date. He suggests that the naturalistic novel

usually contains two tensions or contradictions, and that the two in conjunction comprise both an interpretation of experience and a particular aesthetic recreation of experience. In other words, the two constitute the theme and form of the naturalistic novel. (12) 27

The first contradiction is that between the subject matter

and the concept of man that emerges from that subject

matter. The naturalist's characters are lower class; his

world is commonplace and unheroic. But his characters are

discovered to have qualities associated with the heroic or

adventurous, such as a tendency toward violence, sexual

adventuresomeness, bodily strength, and a predisposition to

violent death. Thus he differs from the realist because

while sharing the latter's setting, the naturalist finds

"the extraordinary and excessive in human nature"— not the

typical (13).

The second contradiction is that while the naturalist

typically describes his characters as though they are conditioned and controlled by "environment, heredity,

instinct, or chance," he also suggests a "compensatory humanistic value" in them and their fates which "affirms the significance of the individual and of his life" (13).

Part of the writer wants to show people as they are; the other part is somehow impelled to seek a new basis for human dignity. The naturalistic novel then is hardly as reductive as it is commonly thought, or as the Companion definition would suggest. On the contrary, American literary naturalism, in Pizer's words, "reflects an affirmative ethical conception of life by endowing the lowest character with emotion and defeat and with moral ambiguity, no matter how poor or ignoble he may seem. The 28

naturalistic novel derives much of its aesthetic effect

from these contrasts" (14). Thus the naturalist constructs

the romance of the commonplace, and sensationalism and

moral ambiguity are quite a part of a definition of

naturalism, even though they have been excluded from those

more doctrinaire naturalist prescriptions which consider

sensationalism and moral ambiguity as flaws in naturalist

novels.

Pizer's definition is not perfect, however. Warren

French corrects one oversight in Pizer's definition, noting

that contrary to what his definition would seem to suggest,

in fact naturalist characters are not necessarily poor,

uneducated or wholly unsophisticated. French argues that

regardless of social position, the defining characteristic

of the naturalistic character is that she is not wholly

aware of what she is doing. Environment, heredity,

instinct, and chance can baffle characters of all strata.

This addition to Pizer is a part of French's program to

shift the primary demarcator of the naturalistic novel then

clearly to character motivation, to distinguish in this way

between naturalistic novels and novels in which the

characters are aware of what they are doing and of the consequences of their actions. Borrowing a Jamesian term, he calls the latter "dramas of consciousness" (125). 29

Given the variation and latitude surrounding ideas of

literary naturalism, it is not surprising that attempts

would be made to place the problematic Harold Frederic

within its pale. Of those critics who would like to locate

Frederic among the naturalists, Charles Walcutt leads. We have noted above that Walcutt tends to view variation from

the materialistic, naturalistic world view as a flaw in the

naturalist novel; and that is the problem he finds in the works of Harold Frederic. Dealing particularly with Seth * s

Brother's Wife, Walcutt makes the first one hundred pages

fit his naturalist scheme, arguing that a determinism controls that part of the novel. But unfortunately, according to Walcutt, Frederic is unable to maintain the naturalistic approach— the author's moral earnestness overpowers his scientific analysis, and he turns to an ethical rather than a naturalisitic motivation (45-49) .

Tom Towers disagrees with Walcutt's conclusion that Seth is insufficiently deterministic, arguing instead that

"Frederic suspends his hero between conflicting elements.

The hero does not choose his way so much as it is chosen for him by natural, social, and psychological forces outside his will" (362). Towers states that while Frederic may be a realist in style, he is "an incipient naturalist in his vision of humanity" v.(364) . Likewise Allen F* Stein notes that in Theron Ware environmental and psychological determinism predominate, and that Frederic never portrays V

30

his protagonist as a free man (27). Gerald Garmon finds in

that novel "as naturalistic an explanation of human conduct

as may be found anywhere" (51). Lars Ahnebrink considers

Frederic a writer who was influenced by naturalism and

whose method of doing vast research to document the ideas

in his books is like the technique of the naturalists. But

he doesn't name Frederic among his three primary American

naturalist writers. Garland, Norris and Crane. Everett

Carter does study Frederic alongside his most important

naturalists, Crane, Norris, and Dreiser. However, Carter

does not see American literary naturalism as ever really

existing on its own, but only as "a deepening and

broadening of the realistic and critically realistic

techniques and attitudes extended to larger areas of society" (237). Certainly such a definition suggests a possible place for Frederic in the naturalist canon, and

indeed. Carter argues forcefully for Frederic's importance.

Frederic himself enthusiastically claimed to be a

"Howells man to the end," and such statements, made with the author's sometimes blurred vision of his own work, have added to the classification challenge. Generally, of course, Frederic can be called a realist: he attempts to be true to life as he sees it, to present his material objectively and in detail, to incorporate colloquial speech, to write about ordinary people. This is most obviously true in the superb Civil War stories, which

portray the lives of the soldiers' families left at home

with an accuracy only attainable by one who lived through

that troubled period. Daniel Aaron, in The Unwritten War

has praised Frederic's skill at depicting the bereft

community and of characterizing the unglorious people of

the civil war period, demonstrating his facility as a

realist. Far less positively, Warner Berthoff, whose

overall evaluation of Frederic seems strangely low in light

of current scholarship, sees Theron Ware in particular as a combination of realism and the problem novel, "full of bits and pieces of the characteristic pseudothought of the time"

(132). Thomas O'Donnell and Hoyt Franchere, in the first monograph dedicated wholly to Frederic, while rightfully referring to the difficulty of classifying a writer of such a varied set of texts, place him by and large with the realists, while noting that his works "push out of the drawing room realism of Howells and James to deal with the more moving and vital forces at work in a less polite and 9 sequestered world of men and women" (45). Larzer Ziff makes a similar statement, referring to Frederic as a realist, but one whose realism was "advancing in depth beyond Howells."

More recently one trend in Frederic criticism has been to examine Frederic's style with greater attention, and to attempt to place him in the American tradition of romance. 32

Leading Frederic scholar Stanton Garner argues in his

dissertation that the major stream of Frederic's writings

begins in Howellsian realism, with Seth and The Lawton

Girl, then turns to the tradition of the American romance

with Theron Ware, Gloria Mundi, and The Market-Place. Later, in his Minnesota Pamphlet on Frederic, he reiterates

this claim: "Readers have classified him as a regionalist,

as a realist, and as a naturalist, whereas his true descent

from Hawthorne and Melville has largely gone unnoticed"

(45). Everett Carter points out that as the younger

realists went deeper into the lives of the individuals the

surface techniques of the older realists would not work,

and that what Norris called a new romanticism was the

result. Joan Zlotnick compares Frederic with Hawthorne, noting that when Frederic departs from the realistic tradition, he moves toward elements pronounced in Hawthorne

— symbolism, allusion, paradox, ambiguity--elements she claims are absent from the Howells tradition. While this statement, it could be argued, understands the Howells tradition too simplistically, it does highlight an important similarity of Frederic with his literary grandfathers. George Johnson notes that Frederic combined elements of the realistic novel and the romance, with the result that Theron Ware is a "literary near miss"— the realistic protagonist can not bear the weight of romantic action. Nancy Siferd, in keeping with the romantic. 33

readings, places Frederic in the American symbolic

tradition of Cooper and Faulkner. Likewise Stanley Witt

discusses Frederic as a romancer, since Witt reads each of

the novels as centering around a mythical dialectic. In

addition, he notes a progression in Frederic away from the

realistic and factual, toward a symbolic, mythic view of life.

While in the final evaluation those who read Frederic

as a romancer may be no more right or wrong than those who

read him more strictly as a realist or naturalist, they do

add to Frederic scholarship an increased attention to style

and imagery, an augmentation which suggests for Frederic a

unique place in the tradition of the American novel. But

even if Frederic were deposited securely in the tradition

of the romance, he would not necessarily find a surer place

in the continuum of literary history. In his own milieu,

he would still be an anomaly, and a major one.

A more important--though incidental--effect of considering Frederic as a possible romancer is that such

reconsiderations have formed a natural step toward discussing and revising the artistic context in which we evaluate Frederic. For discussions of Frederic as romancer reflect the same kinds of classification problems which arise in the cases of certain twentieth century writers, such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who are sometimes viewed

in an equally ambiguous romantic-naturalistic-realistic 34

light. The Literary History of the United States comments

with an important insight which it fails to follow through

when it states that Frederic's writing "anticipates the

mingled realism# naturalism# and disillusion of the

twentieth century" (992). Likewise Stanton Garner# in the concluding paragraph of his Minnesota Pamphlet on Frederic,

alludes to--but does not discuss— the problem that this

dissertation will address more fully. In noting the loss

of innocence apparent in many of Frederic’s novels# Garner discerns Frederic's understanding that

a loss of innocence might not bring a dignified# saddened wisdom, but might transform youthful egotism into debased cynicism, and ultimately into predatory rapacity. Thus Frederic wrote for the twentieth century# not ETisown# and in his greatest works achieved a vigorous and alarming vision of the civilization to come which has, as we can now see, verified his worst fears and proved him to be one of the most perceptive and important novelists of his time. (4 5# my emphasis)

The question of Frederic’s modernity is a crucial one if

Frederic is to claim a place in the canon. First, if

Frederic can be shown to prefigure and to influence— even slightly— some major modern writers, his place in the canon will be enhanced. Furthermore# comparing and contrasting

Frederic's works not only with his contemporaries, the realists and naturalists, but with important post-WWI writers as well, will allow his work’s major strength— its prophetically modern world view— to be highlighted. 35

The perspective of my work, then, will be formed in part by shifting the chronological pale of significance in

regard to Harold Frederic. Granted, Frederic's prose style

at times falls below the standards of his finest

contemporaries, and only seldom touches the sophistication of the modernists; but his world view is a fascinating augury of the twentieth century. In this respect, Frederic stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the moderns, much closer to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Sinclair Lewis than to James,

Howells, or Norris. In Chapter Two I will discuss the biographical and historical factors which contributed to pushing Frederic ideationally ahead of his contemporaries. 36

NOTES

1No published biography of Frederic yet exists, an unfortunate irony in the case of a figure whose life reads as well as— and often better than--his novels. For the biographical information, I am indebted to the still unpublished dissertation by Paul Haines, "Harold Frederic," and to the Twayne Series monograph by O'Donnell and Franchere, both listed in the bibliography. Because of the lack of a biography, many if not most dissertations have begun with a full biographical chapter. My essay will introduce biographical elements, but will not add another short biography to this collection. For a brief overview of the events of Frederic's personal life and publishing history, see O'Donnell and Franchere, pages 11-14. 2 I will mention Frederic's exciting reporting in a later chapter, when I compare him with another American reporter in Europe, Ernest Hemingway. 3 Frederic's correspondence reveals throughout that the perceived stinginess and slowness of the Times, and Frederic's own tendency to spend money where and when he felt it should be spent, whether he had it or not, resulted in his being continually strapped for money. And when he added a second family— his mistress Kate Lyons and the couple's children--in the early 1890s, his financial situation was not helped. He died unable to provide for the future of either of his families. 4 The scandal surrounding Frederic's death, occasioned by the refusal of medical attention, the presence of a Christian Science healer, and the manslaughter trial of Frederic's mistress and the healer, while increasing contemporary sales, probably did little for his reception among the literary community, and no doubt played a part in precipitating his fall from prominence. 5 The exclusion of Frederic's short works from the common university anthologies is one of the more startling aspects of his lack of critical attention. Not only are many of them superb--"The Copperhead" and "Marsena"come immediately to mind--but just as importantly, they are important social documents of the Civil War period.

^ Indeed, for the purpose of this exploration, commonly tossed about definitions of realism and naturalism will prove more appropriate than specific but widely exclusive ones. Here I am thinking primarily of June Howard's Form and History in American Literary Naturalism and John J"I Conder’s Naturalism in American Fiction: The Classic Phase. I will mention the latter briefly later 37

on. Howard’s study, while it may later prove to be important in Frederic studies, is too recent to pertain to our problem here, which centers on the way that Frederic is currently received. 7 It should be noted, however, that such a position is not so free of philosophical presuppositions as it would claim. It precludes, for example, a priori, the possibility of the revealed religion which was in fact still dominant among many factions of the American population, as we shall note in Chapter Two. 8 Edwin Cady also makes an interesting defense of the realist's subject matter— and of the value of studying realism— which addresses the modern criticism that reality is wholly subjective. He argues for the existence of a common reality, and for realism— the artistic portrayal of that reality, based on the fact that the art of realism can create in the reader an effect that parallels that of the event portrayed from life. Cady suggests that realism represents the art-variety of a 'real* order of non-art experience— "an order, that is, which even those who held to deeply opposed tempermental and metaphysical notions of ultimate reality might agree to accept as ’real' in some useful and common, even though minimal sense. That variety I should propose to be the socially agreed upon 'common vision* which permits ordinary processes of law and social control to succeed, creates the possibility of games, makes most technical, economic, and even educational enterprises possible. That world of the common vision is, indeed, what is ordinarily referred to as 'reality'" (19). g However right or wrong O'Donnell and Franchere may be about Frederic— and they are usually right--I think that this kind of a statement is unnecessarily belittling of Howells. Few people were more responsible for expanding the boundaries of realism than Howells, in spite of the often quoted "young ladies" and "cheerful aspects" statements. 38

WORKS CITED

Aaron, Daniel. The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.

Ahnebrink, Lars. The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U; Uppsala, Sweden: A,B. Eundequistkar, Bokhandeln, 1950. Rpt. New York: Russel and Russel, 1961.

Berthoff, Warner. The Ferment of American Realism, American Literature, T884-1919. New York : The Free Press, 19 65.

Cady, Edwin H. The Light of Common Day. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1 9 T T ^

Carter, Everett. Howells and the Age of Realism. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1954.

Introduction. The Damnation of Theron Ware. By Harold Frederic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard-Belknap, 1960. vii-xxiv.

Conder, John J. Naturalism in American Fiction: The Classic PhasFT Lexington: U of Kentucky P^ 19 8 4.

Crane, Stephen. “Harold Frederic.” Chap-Book 15 March 189 8. Rpt. in The Theory of the American Novel. Ed. George Perkins. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1970. 231-3.

Frederic, Harold. The Correspondence of Harold Frederic. Vol. I of The Harold Frederic Edition. Ed. George E. Fortenberry, et al. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1977.

French, Warren. "John Steinbeck: A Usable Concept of Naturalism." American Naturalism: A Reassessment. Eds. Yoshinobu Yakutani and Lewis Fr ied. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1975. 122-35.

Garmon, Gerald M. "Naturalism and The Damnation of Theron Ware.” West Georgia College Review 272 (19 69): 44-51.

Garner, Stanton. Harold Frederic. U of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers 83. Minneapolis: U of . Minnesota P, 1969.

. "Harold Frederic: The Major Works." Diss. Brown U, 1963. 39

Haines, Paul. "Harold Frederic." Diss. New York U# 1945.

Howard, June. Form and History in American Literary Natural ism~ Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 19 85.

Johnson, George W. "Harold Frederic's Young Goodman Ware: The Ambiguities of a Realistic Romance." Modern Fiction Studies 8 (1962-3): 361-74.

Kolb, Harold H. The Illusion of Life. Charlottesville, VA: U of Virginia P, 1969.

Massa, Anna, and Scott Donaldson. American Literature: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Newton Abbot, London, and Vancouver: David and Charles, 1978.

Norris, Frank. "Our Unpopular American Novelists." Wave 5 October 1895: 7. Rpt. in The Literary Criticism of" Frank Norris. Ed. Donald Pizer. Austin: U of Texas P, 1964. 25.

"Fiction Writing as a Business." Boston Evening Transcr ipt. 1 January 1902: 17. Rpt. Ibid. 148.

O'Donnell, Thomas F., and Hoyt C. Franchere. Harold Frederic. Twayne's U.S. Authors Series 3. New York: Twayne, 1961.

O'Donnell, Thomas F. Stanton Garner, and Robert H. Woodward. A Bibliography of Writings By and About Harold Frederic. Boston: GT KT Hall and Company, 1975.

Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth- Century Literature. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois T)t>7-T966.------Siferd, Nancy Kay Blackford. "Textural Range in the Novels of Harold Frederic." Diss. Bowling Green State U, 1970.

Spiller, Robert E. and others. Literary History of the United States. 3rd ed. New York: MacMi1lan, 1973.

Stein, Allen F. Evasions of an American Adam: Structure and Theme in The Damnation of Theron Ware." Arnerican Literary Realism 5 (1972): 23-36.

Tarkington, Booth. The World Does Move. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1928. 40

Towers, Tom. "The Problem of Determinism in Frederic's First Novel." College English 26 (1965): 361-6.

Walcutt, Charles Child. American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream. Minneapo1 is: U of Minnesota P, 1956-

Wilson, Edmund. Introduction. Harold Frederic's Stories of York State. Ed. Thomas FT 0 'Donnel1. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, T966.

. "Two Neglected American Novelists: II. Harold Frederic, the Expanding Upstater." New Yorker, 6 June 1970: 12+.

Witt, Stanley Pryor. "Harold Frederic as Purveyor of the American Myth: An Approach to his Novels." Diss. U of Arizona, 1976.

Zlotnick, Joan. "The Damnation of Theron Ware, with a Backward Glance at Hawthorne." Markham Review 2 (1971): 90-92.

Ziff, Larzer. The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation^ New York: Viking, 1968. CHAPTER II

A FATHERLESS MAN IN A FATHERLESS AGE

On February 23, 1858r a New York Central train hit a broken rail three miles west of Amsterdam, New York. The

train jumped the track, throwing the cars down an embankment. Named among the casualties was the freight conductor, Henry Fredericks, dead in the rubble. Suddenly

Francis Grace Ramsdell Fredericks was a widow, and the 18- month-old child who would become the novelist Harold

Frederic was fatherless.

He was not destitute, however, as some early, unfortunately misleading Frederic criticism has implied.*

His mother's entrepeneurial abilities never allowed her son to know want. And even had she been less capable, her marriage two years later to William DeMott would have secured young Harold Fredericks a home. But Mrs. DeMott was a very able woman, more able and more dominant in the household than her second husband; as Stanton Garner has put it, DeMott entered the family "more as vassal than as manor Lord" (3). Unquestionably Frederic's mother remained the primary parental force in her fatherless son's life.

41 42

By inheritance and example, she passed on to Harold

tremendous energy and a passion for success— traits that

would make him editor of a major newspaper by the time of

life when most newsmen are still editing copy. All things

considered, it is hardly possible to imagine a widow in

1858 doing better by her family than did the former Grace

Ramsdell; nevertheless, Harold was deprived of a father,

and the signs of paternal deprivation are evident in the

characters inhabiting the mature Harold Frederic’s literary

consc iousness.^

That Frederic drew heavily upon his own life for the

characters and events in his fictions need not be proven

here--it is as obvious in his work as it is in the work of

Twain and Howells. In Frederic, however, one particular

autobiographical fact predominates in his unique

characterizations: Frederic's own paternal deprivation

resulted in a pattern of secondary characters and

protagonists who are either fatherless or inadequately

fathered.

One of Frederic's strengths was his ability to paint with only a few brief strokes young, often fatherless characters memorable for their wry wisdom and sharp speech. In fact, most of the stories have characters that

fall into this role; it almost seems that Frederic was signing his works with his portrait in a lower corner.

Lafe Hornbeck, for example, the drummer-boy protagonist in 43

"A Day in the Wilderness," has an exasperatingly smart tongue, especially as he jeers his senior soldiers. In keeping with the Frederic pattern, Lafe has joined the army after his mother's death, his father having died long before. Similarly the story of "The Deserter" is told from the point of view of Job Parshall, who has become a choreboy on the Teachout dairy after his father's death and his mother's remarriage. Like Lafe, Job delights in out­ smarting his seniors; for example, he makes a point of letting Hose Whipple know that he has has found his ring in the oat bin and therefore has already discovered that deserter's secret arrival. Another urchin, known only as

"the devil," makes a brief appearance in "The Eve of the

Fourth" as a nameless printshop apprentice. His

Frederickian character is revealed when he makes a wager with an older, larger boy concerning a news item--the type for which he has just set himself. The comic complacency of these three however, cannot compare with that of the nameless photographer's assistant in Marsena Pulford’s shop. The taciturn Marsena seldom speaks to his partner, the garrulous Newton Shull. So Shull must turn his talkative attention to their boy assistant, who with each smug response puts his employer and his elder immediately in his place, always in a superior and knowing way. For example, when Shull excitedly informs the boy about a new romance in town that transcends customary class boundaries, 44

the boy keeps right on working, sulks, and finally responds

with an apathy that galls his senior, "I suppose this is a

free country" (178). Then after Shull remarks with

considerable detail upon the paucity of surveying, the

romancer's profession, the boy simply sniffs and answers,

"George Washington was a surveyor" (180). In each of their

exchanges, it is the boy who makes the clinching comment.

Ira Clarence Blodgett, the narrator of "My Aunt

Susan," is less of a wit but similarly fatherless.

Parallelling Frederic's own case, Ira's father had

disappeared when the boy was just a toddler. Andrew, the

narrator of "The Eve of the Fourth," is likewise

fatherless, and suffers from having been made somewhat of a

sissy by his overprotective mother. His male models are

the older boys of the town, one of whom promises him a

Pi ace in the military drill team they plan to form— no

doubt a team like that the young Harold Frederic joined.

The "The War Widow" is related by the adolescent Sidney

Turnbull, a grandson of the family patriarch Arphaxed

Turnbull upon whom the story focuses. Sidney's father

Wilbur died when Sidney was seven, leaving his mother to

rear him alone. The young narrator of the novella The

Copperhead is also an orphan who, when left to make his own way, hires out to dairyman Abner Beech as a choreboy. 45

The most thoroughly drawn of these half-portraits,

though, is Harvey (Frederic's boyhood name was Harry), the

boy-of-al1-trades in The Damnation of Theron Ware. We

first meet him delivering milk to the Wares, or rather,

explaining why he does not deliver it to them on Sundays.

The Methodist trustees frown upon sabbath milk delivery, a

fact that Harvey reveals only after returning Theron's good-

natured chaffing with interest. He enjoys his position of

being in-the-know too well to explain the delivery

situation to the Wares right away:

"Oh, I'll bring you milk fast enough on Sundays, if you give me the word," he said with nonchalance. "Only it won't last long." "How do you mean,— 'won’t last long'?" asked Mrs. Ware, briskly. The boy liked her,— both for herself, and for the doughnuts fried with her own hands, which she gave him on his morning round. He dropped his half-defiant tone. "The thing of it’s this," he explained. "Every new minister starts in saying we can deliver to this house on Sundays, an' then gives us notice to stop before the month's out. It’s the trustees that does it. ..." "Well, we’ll try it, anyway," said the preacher. "You can bring it on Sundays till— till— " "Till you cave in an' tell me to stop," put in the boy. "All right!" and he was off on the instant, the dipper jangling loud incredulity in his pail as he went. (12)

The half-defiant talk did not disappear for long. No doubt

Frederic, a milk delivery boy himself, may have occasionally taken a similar tone. Throughout the story appearances of Harvey fit the character revealed in the 46

dialogue above. Later he appears as the assistant in Levi

Gorringe's office who reveals the extent of the lawyer's

gifts to Alice Ware, and again he turns up to witness

Theron*s forest meeting with Celia— and to walk away

whistling. Such boys as Harvey, whether fatherless or

simply independent, demonstrate Frederic's tendency to use

boys who are responsible not to their fathers but to

themselves.

Although Harvey does not fit into this technical role,

the fatherless boys are especially important when they serve as the narrators or centers of consciousness, and for good reason: Harold Kolb has observed that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was Twain's most successful work because it allowed him to place all of his strengths--his satire, his knowledge of the Mississippi, and especially the point of view gained through the pose of the naive narrator— into a single book (80). A similar observation can be emphasized concerning Frederic's use of the device.

A fatherless boy is nearly always a sympathetic character, and in Frederic's case he is also an autobiographical one.

Frederic was the child at home during the war years he so ably recounts, observing with a child's wide-eyed fascination the sorrow of the adults around him, the urgency with which they watch the postal notices for news from the front, and the fact that all the rag carpets are woven blue. Like Twain, by using a naive narrator Frederic 47

could leave the reader alone with the story and allow him

to make his own conclusions through the innocent recounting

of the events and details. And the fact that Frederic was

even closer to being his narrator than Twain was to being

Huck only added to the strength which Howells rightly attributed to the autobiographical method.

Thus naive, fatherless narrators allow Frederic’s most

natural use of point of view, especially in the period preceding the psychological realism of Theron Ware. And as we have noted, the pattern of fatherless men and boys in

Harold Frederic's fictional world forms an important

incidental pattern. But fatherlessness is more than

incidental in Frederic's works; in a broader sense, the lack of dependable authority which finds a fit metaphor in the concept of fatherlessness is the primary motivational impetus in Frederic’s most complex character development.

Certainly Frederic was aware of the autobigraphical influence that led him to choose fatherless narrators, and to distribute throughout his fictions wise boys about town who do odd jobs, know too much, and speak too smugly. Less self-conscious, however, is the more important artistic result of the author's paternal deprivation as revealed in the novels. Indeed, every protagonist populating the world of Harold Frederic's longer fiction, along with many secondary characters, is paternally deprived. Fathers are either nonexistent or inadequate. 48

In Frederic's first novel, Seth's Brother's Wife, we

discover Seth as a young man who is severely paternally

deprived. His father, Lemuel Fairchild, is an ineffectual,

muddle-headed man. His commercial ineptitude has allowed

the once respected family estate to ease into decay, destroying the family's position within the community.

Furthermore, his well-meaning but inept conversation with

his neighbor M'tildy destroys the informal engagement

between her niece Annie, the book's heroine, and Seth.

Lemuel dies a third of the way through the novel, and Seth,

now leading a rather ill-disciplined life in the big city

of Tecumseh, is called back to the farm. Home again, Seth

is struck by the many changes that have taken place during

his thirteen-month absence, but regarding his father's

death, he feels nothing: "Of all the alterations his

father's disappearance was among the least important.

Everybody had grown out of the habit of considering Lemuel

as a factor in any question. Nobody missed him now that he

was gone, or felt that it was specially incumbered to

pretend to be so. . . ." (143) . The statement above is

all the more harsh since no reason is given to dislike

Lemuel— belittling him is rather like belittling Rip Van

Winkle. His only sin is his ineffectuality— his family neither wants nor needs his presence.

The historical romance In the Valley also features fatherless characters. Douw Mauvrenson, the book's 49

protagonist and narrator, is the son of a Dutch parson who

has died leaving his enormous brood behind. To lessen the

burden upon herself and the other children, the widow sends

Douw to live with a wealthy neighbor, Mr. Stewart, who

becomes in effect a surrogate father for the boy. Now

Stewart himself never knew a father either--he is the

bastard son of the Duke of York and Albany. And though he

is an affectionate caretaker for the boy in his youth, as

Stewart ages, he rejects his Dutch step-son Douw, because

the boy proves to be overly democratic, inadequately

aristocratic.

The Lawton Girl features another fatherless boy.

Reuben Tracy is the hero of sorts, an Algerian self-made

man. As we might expect, his father was killed in an 3 accident when Reuben was a young boy. His mother was

remarried to a man who worked him too hard, even to the point of exhaustion and illness. So Reuben left the farm while still young to work his way through school. Horace

Boyce, the other leading male character and Reuben's unethical partner, has a father, and he likes to fancy the former Civil War general a leading man of the city. But upon his return from Europe, Horace realizes that his father spends his days drinking and cavorting with the lower classes, and in the book’s opening scene Horace is humiliated by his father's habits. As the story progresses, it is revealed that the general has lost his 50

business due to his ineffectuality. Keeping the old man

solvent then becomes a contributing factor in Horace's

moral defection. Finally Horace's father disowns him for

his illegal work with Wendover and Tenney.

In a more light-hearted track, The Return of the

0 1 Mahoney takes a different approach to paternal

deprivation, but the characters are equally fatherless.

Zeke Tisdale (who becomes The O'Mahoney) is revealed in the

comedy's opening line to be the "father of company F," the

beloved leader and provider, a parallel position to that he will later hold as The O'Mahoney in Muirsic. But as for himself, Tisdale has no family or past, making it all the easier for him to adopt the real O ’Mahoney heir's position and to represent the position of the traditionless American

in an Ireland hampered by misplaced emphasis on tradition.

The real O'Mahoney's son, however, who enters near the end of the book to complete Tisdale's rejuvenation of Muirsic, has all of Zeke's positive characteristics. In the

Frederic pattern, the young O'Mahoney's good character is at least in part due to the fact that his father had died when he was a child, making him one of Frederic's many wise and good-hearted fatherless boys.

Theron Ware is considerably more complicated in the area of the protagonist's father; for while Frederic never tells us anything about Ware's father, the minister does evidence traits that indicate inadequate fathering, traits 51

that suggest the lack of a dominant male role model. Of

Theron's childhood, we know that he, like Reuben Tracy,

rejected the farm life to which he was bred, and that his

labor to gain an education was motivated by his longing to

leave farm life behind (17). Theron does mention his

mother, however, at least three times: once in reference to

the flowers in Alice's garden reminding him of those in

hers; and again, stimulated by laying his head against

Celia's clothing, he has the sensation of "being a little

boy again, nestling in an innocent, unthinking transport of

affection against his mother's skirts" (257). Finally

during the same hillside adventure, he tells Celia that

when he lay down beside her, "It was absolutely as if I

were a boy again, a good, pure-minded, fond little child,

and you were the mother that I idolized" (259). Comments

like these begin to present an idea of the parental 4 relationships of the minister’s childhood.

Theron is also strongly drawn to the professionally

sexless Father Forbes, who becomes for him almost at their

first meeting a male authority figure, the model that he

had always lacked of the scholarly and sophisticated man;

Forbes's title, that of "Father," is not accidental. But at the same time, Theron's sex role confusion is highlighted by his attraction to Forbes; he is drawn to the priest with the "quaint sensation of feeling as a romantic woman must feel in the presence of a specially impressive 52

masculine personality” (281). Theron's inadequate

fathering is reflected in both tendencies. In one

particularly notable passage, Ware's difficulty with his

masculine self-concept is clearly revealed. Alice begins:

"I don't see why a minister shouldn't carry one [an umbrella] as much as a woman carries a paraso 1.11 Theron gave her a rueful, meditative sort of smile. "I suppose people really do think of us as a kind of hybrid female,” he remarked. Then, holding his hat in his hand, he drew a long breath of relief at finding himself in the shade, and looked about him. (171)

Passages like this, along with other details in the novel

and in the rest of the Frederic canon, suggest that Theron

Ware was a paternally deprived boy, one whose personality

did not fit the life his father led, and whose primary goal

as a young man was escape.

David Mosscrop, the protagonist in March Hares, also

fits into Frederic's pattern of paternal deprivation.

During an early conversation with Vestalia, he emphasizes

the fact that he hated his childhood, which seemed to be made up wholly of going to school. His father was a drunkard and his mother died when he was eighteen.

Frederic's next novel, Gloria Mundi, portrays another group of fatherless men. The protagonist Christian Tower's

father, Ambrose Torr, left England to become a mercenary after trouble with his family. But he died soon after

Christian's birth, and Christian has only the faintest childhood memory of his father, a child's impressionistic 53

memory of his father as a handsome man in a soldier's

uniform. When he is called to England, hoping to find a

father-ancestor in his grandfather whose heir Christian has

become, he finds that the old duke is and has been

throughout his life a complete degenerate, a vulgar aristocrat who loves his hounds more than his family, and

who has made his death chamber a foul-smelling kennel. The

cousins whom Christian replaces as heir are also

fatherless, and their traits parallel those of the duke.

On the opposite pole are Lord Julius and Emanuel Tower, who

are not only cultured and benevolent, but who form the only

positive father-son relationship in a Frederic novel;

Frederic highlights the rarity of this occurance by making

Emanuel childless--their good relationship is an anomaly

that will not recur.

The two primary male characters in The Market-Place

follow the more typical Frederic pattern. Joel Stormont

Thorpe as a young man refused to take a part in the family business of bookselling, and he fought with his father concerning his refusal. During the time in which the story is set, the elder Thorpe is dead and has been dead for some time. He is visible, however, in Joel's sister, who has the father's distrust for the son, and whose own husband has died, leaving her own son fatherless. Lord Plowden, the character with whom Thorpe is most complexly paired, is also inadequately fathered; his father died after his inept 54

management had destroyed the family fortune, leaving the

present Lord Plowden the title his grandfather had won but

without the money to support it.

Thus in all the novels, each protagonist suffers from

paternal deprivation. Even when the characters do have

fathers whom they can remember, the fathers are in each

case ineffectual blunderers. In this we may suppose that

Frederic was being true to those dictates of William Dean

Howells which instructed novelists to write only about what

they know from their first-hand experience. Obviously

Frederic, who was fatherless before he was two years old

and whose step-father was dominated by his mother, had no

way of knowing how a boy or man rightly relates to his

father. So he does not attempt to show it in his

characters. But he does reveal something else; paternal deprivation plays a key role in Frederic's character mot ivat ion.

Psychologist Henry Biller has reported that fatherless boys have been shown both to seek male figures and to rebel against male authority figures, and he suggests that this is due to a process of disillusionment which occurs when boys are paternally deprived (67) . This same kind of contradictory longing becomes the central force in the motivation of Frederic's best characters. For Frederic's best characters are motivated by two opposing sets of longings. On one hand, they are seeking some kind of 55

order, some kind of security, some direction. But on the

other hand, they resent any kind of imposition of order, and seek to free themselves from it. The Theron Wares and

Joel Stormont Thorpes best represent this process of contradictions; they will be the focus of my examination of

Frederic's character development in Chapter Three.

I do not wish, however, to reduce Frederic's character motivation to this single, wholly personal dialectic— to attribute too much importance to the author's own fatherlessness. The character creations of great fiction are larger than an isolated personal consciousness; they demand greater causes than the death of one freight- conductor. For whether he succeeded or not, Frederic fancied himself a kind of realist, a disciple of Howells.

And unless he wholly failed to portray the common life as he perceived it in the world of women and men around him, that world should have had some demonstrable effect on

Frederic's fiction. Here we may find the key to Frederic's strength as a novelist, the factor that pushed him beyond most of his contemporaries: I suggest that the world

Frederic experienced around him was itself experiencing, on an ideological level, the same fatherlessness that Frederic was experiencing on a personal level. Frederic lived in a

Fatherless Age.® 56

Discussing the personality of an historical period is

by its very nature a metaphorical activity. Historical

eras are not persons. Nevertheless, when we examine an era

closely, our most urgent concern is nearly always with what

people were like then--what they attempted and

accomplished, how they helped and hurt one another, and

maybe most of all, what they believed in. And since

certain commonalities and tendencies do inevitably appear

(whether or not they are the application of the perceiving

mind is not the question here), we inevitably find

ourselves describing an age by characterizing it, and by

doing so with the metaphors of human personality and

activity: the Age of Faith, the Age of Reason, the Age of

Analysis and so on.

To write about America from the close of the Civil War

to the end of the nineteenth century is to consider a personality more divided than unified, more troubled than whole. Indeed, my thesis, since I write from a perspective of moral philosophy, perceives that age as not only bereft of secure moral foundations but as both desparately avoiding and seeking them. The disintegration of Judeo-

Christian ideology experienced by those living in that era was a freeing disintegration only as long as certain of the moral constraints of that ideology remained practically, though not professedly, intact. The moral memory of post-

Civil War society— the habits of reasoning, judgment, and 57

action based upon principles derived from a Judeo-Christian

world view--continued to function in most people long after

the philosophical basis for the morality remembered had

been undercut*

Chief among the Judeo-Christian concepts of

personality and society is that of a creator God, regularly

referred to and conceived of within the metaphor cluster of

fatherhood. Particularly in regard to ethical concerns,

the fatherhood cluster is dominant. The God of the Jewish

and Christian scriptures is not simply a despot who

establishes a relationship with his subject people via the

ancient protocol of the suzerainty treaty, not only a

shepherd who feeds and protects his sheep; most

importantly, he is a Father--a Father who does not hesitate

to chastize his children for prohibited behaviors, but who

through this action demonstrates that he loves them and and

seeks their restoration; hence this admonition

traditionally ascribed to Solomon:

My son, do not despise the Lord's discipline or be weary of his reproof, For the Lord reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights. (Proverbs 3:12; RSV)

Having set the moral boundaries, and having communicated

them to his children, the Father both punishes and loves.

The two apparently contradictory actions are in practice mutually dependent. This metaphor pattern finds many 58

voices in Judeo-Christian philosophy, providing an integral

part of the ideology of that belief system, and thereby of

the belief system dominant in pre-Civil War America. The

disintegration of the American Judeo-Christian ideology

naturally then included the loss of the Father idea in its

functional fullness, a loss which was, as I will note

below, made only all the more evident by the impotent

attempts of post-biblical American Christianity to engender

an idea of God as Father.

It is within the context of the line of thinking

presented above that I suggest that in the ethical terms of

an American, Judeo-Christian context, the period following

the Civil War may be considered a Fatherless Age. Demon­

strating the appropriateness of this metaphor, however, will demand a brief additional examination of certain characteristics of fatherlessness, and a somewhat more extensive exploration of the age itself. Particularly

important are the two branches of modern thought which undermined the Judeo-Christian moral base, thus precipi­ tating the Fatherless Age.

What are some characteristics that accompany fatherlessness? Fortunately, paternal deprivation has been the subject for hundreds of studies by psychologists. And many of the characteristics observed in father-absent children and paternally deprived children more generally describe with considerable accuracy the personality of the 59

Fatherless Age as well. It is worth keeping the late

nineteenth-century capitalist mind-set in view as we

consider some of the characteristics of paternal

deprivation.

First, according to studies compiled by Henry Biller,

one of the more common phenomena associated with inadequate

fathering is a high level of anxiety in boys: a low level

of identification with the father leads to greater anxiety

in the child (58-9). Second, father absent boys show a

tendency toward immediate gratification (64), a tendency

complicated by the fact that many antisocial acts are

associated with the inability to delay gratification. As

Biller reports, "The father-absent boy often lacks a model

from whom to learn to delay gratification and to control

his aggressive and destructive impulses" (66). Finally,

looking directly at ethical issues, it is worth noting that

father-absent boys score lower on conscience development,

lower on guilt following transgressions, lower on

acceptance of blame, lower on moral values, and lower on

rule conformity than their father-present peers (65). Not

surprisingly, it has been found that paternally deprived boys may find it difficult to follow the rules of a society

(66). Paternal dominance, on the other hand, can have quite a different effect. In discipline, for example, research indicates that paternal dominance coupled with high paternal affection— the same coupling that Solomon's 60

proverb attributes to God— is associated with a child's

sensitivity to moral transgressions (65).

This characterization fits post-Civil War America with

considerable accuracy; the signs of paternal deprivation

are present in Frederic's literary mindscape not only

because of his own personal loss, but also because certain

of the same kinds of traits made up the life situation of

the world in which he lived. In his General Introduction

to Psychoanalysis, Freud notes that "to the son the father

is the embodiment of the social compulsion to which he so

unwillingly submits, the person who stands in the way of

his following his own will. . . (216). For Harold

Frederic the father was absent during those early important

years. And furthermore, the era in which he came to

manhood was one which was in the process of throwing off

thousands of years of the social compulsion of Judeo-

Christian thinking, and it was suffering in the expulsion.

The doubt and anxiety, the lack of restraint, the absence

of any bases for absolute authority and values that

Frederic himself suffered and reflected in his characters--

all of these things find a broader correspondence in the anxious age of transition in which he came to maturity, in

the ideological wanderings of the last third of the nineteenth century in America. Because of his personal

fatherlessness, Harold Frederic was a plate particularly 61

sensitive to the new patterns of light developing in the

fatherlessness of his age.

Howard Mumford Jones has called the years form 1865 to

1914 "The Age of Energy," and with good reason. In his

book by that title, he supports the thesis that energy is

the idea underlying the great activity of the fifty year

segment he addresses, energy of all sorts--"the discovery,

use, exploitation, and expression of energy, whether it be

that of personality or of prime movers or of words." The

idea of fatherlessness, however, that I wish to apply to

that era, attempts to qualify Jones's idea of energy with

adjectives carrying moral denotations--unchecked,

unrestrained, irresponsible, and therefore excessive,

abusive, dangerous. In fact, Jones comes very close to the

idea of fatherlessness when he composes this characterization of business practices of the gilded age:

"The discovery that energy could be channeled into vast and profitable projects of destruction created in the era a kind of fierce, adolescent joy in smashing things. . . ."

(Jones 107; my emphasis). And indeed during this time the human and natural resources of America were used without thought for the morrow— an unfortunate convergence of wealth and power had occurred in a society no longer able to feel the ethical implications of such an unhappy accident. In his title chapter, Jones goes so far as to 62

compare the new American rich of the gilded age and the

years following to the wealthy merchants of the Italian

Renaissance, emphasizing the excessive use of money and

power. Most remarkable in Jones's account is the extent to

which the rich would allow their financial power to take

them, not only in the destructive amassing of wealth, but

in the equally destructive extravagances they created for

the sake of finding just what kinds of pleasure that wealth

could bring. With their abundant wealth considered to be

sure and the basis for ethical behavior considered to be in

doubt, the new rich naturally suffered no financial

limitations, and allowed no moral limitations. They had no

reason even to seek ethical--or even aesthetic--maturity.

Jones is therefore correct in labeling their behavior

adolescent. In fact, many of the rich, and even of the not-

so-rich, were like adolescents left alone while their

parents were on vacation, left alone with access to the

household account and the key to the liquor cabinet. And

while Jones does not mention that the final effect was

disappointment, one cannot help thinking of the Solomon's

Preacher of Ecclesiastes, who, in the similar situation of

wealth and license, found that "all is vanity."

Two particular negative thought trends deserve primary

attention in the first thirty years of this era, and help go further to explain our characterization of those years as a Fatherless Age. Each played a role in the 63

disappearance of the idea of divine, transcendent authority

from the intellectual mainstream. Each contributed to the

breakdown of the previously little questioned religious

authority which had served to provide the common mind with

a transcendent basis for philosophical and moral thought

and decision-making. (That the moral basis was and is

often misused is not an argument against its presence.)

These ideas were not particularly new, but until the close

of the Civil War Americans had had little opportunity to

think about them. First, the new trend in biblical

cr iticism.

In the intellectual centers of Europe, scholars had

been performing Higher Criticism— criticism aimed not at

establishing the best text, but at judging the generation

of that text and its trustworthiness— for hundreds of years. Christian scholars since Jerome at least had pondered over the origin of certain obvious textual oddities, such as the account of Moses's death occurring in a book penned by Moses. Problems like this one were problematic only to the most mindlessly literalistic. Even the more sensitive higher critical problems, however, could trace a history of nearly two hundred years by 1865. In

1682, for example, R. Simon, in his Histoire critique de

1' AT, pointed out that the doubling of certain pericopes in

Genesis would suggest that multiple accounts had been assembled, thus calling into question the Mosaic authorship 64

of the Pentateuch. By 1711, scholars had noted the

differences in the divine names used, thus beginning the

pattern of author identification continued even to the

present. And in 1787 J. G. Eichhorn used the very words

"higher criticism" in the preface to his Old Testament

introduction, referring to the usage as "a new name to no 7 human ist.H

Such a history, however, does not imply that higher

critical views were held in America. On the contrary,

American Christendom had remained remarkably orthodox and

remarkably Protestant during the early nineteenth century.

Although in the context of literary studies, one might gain the false impression that the early nineteenth century was a time of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism, these movements touched directly but a small percentage of the population. On a broader scale, these were the years when the great denominations— Methodists, Baptists,

Presbyterians, Disciples of Christ, Congregationalists— were leading the popular thought, and leading it in very orthodox directions, following the Bible with a complete and often literalistic trust that held little in common with the spiritual vagaries of literary New England which discounted on philosophical grounds the importance of scripture. As George Marsden has pointed out, "It would be difficult to overstate the critical importance of the absolute integrity of the Bible to the nineteenth-century 65

American evangelicals' whole way of thinking" (Marsden

285). The Bible was not only the highest authority for

faith and practice, but was perceived to be literally

accurate even in incidental detail.

By the time that Higher Criticism did begin to work

its way to the American mainstream, however, after the

Civil War, it had already developed into an extremely

sophisticated and convincing form. Therefore, it was all

the more persuasive during its American conquest. And equally important, it had by this time gained, in its attempt to cast a shadow of doubt over the Bible and the believers' absolute faith in it, a powerful ally--Darwinian evolution.

Together the two sets of ideas justified a powerfully convincing grounds for doubt that brought a new kind of skepticism to the popular mind. Their power to shake faith in the absolute stands at the inception of the Fatherless

Age. Even among believers, regardless of how they or their preachers might ridicule the heterodox ideas, new, powerful causes for doubting the previously absolute authority formed the groundwork for a far more modern kind of belief- 7 in-spite-of-doubt. Belief would never be as secure again. Faith in a loving and chastizing, morality- ordaining and limit-setting Father God would never be so absolute again. For how could one reckon the seemingly ex nihilo account of Genesis 1-2 with plausible sounding 66

evidence that humankind had evolved, or, as the liberal

Christians preferred, "developed"?

To be sure, considerable reckoning went on— new

theories did not find acceptance easily in the scientific

community, let alone in the religious community. At

Harvard, for example, the department led by the brilliant

and heretical creationist Louis Agassiz— the key scientist

used by literalistic Christians to support their anti-

Darwin defense--could name among its members brilliant and

devout Christian Asa Gray— America's leading evolutionist,

Darwin's greatest American scientific ally, a widely

respected scientist and popularizer, the man whom Darwin

himself called a "thorough master of the subject [Darwinian

thought]" and "one of the best reasoners and writers I ever

read" (Boiler 7-8). Yet even Gray and Darwin could never

conceive of the theory on the same plane— the problem was

not so much evolution but natural selection. Natural

selection left a teleological black hole that was

unfathomable to a mind like Gray's, a mind essentially

religious. "A fortuitious cosmos," he once stated, "is

simply inconceivable. The alternative is a designed

cosmos" (Boiler 10). If even such a would-be Darwinian--

and such a superb thinker— as Asa Grey could not wholly

find conceivable of the idea of Chance and Time in the place of the guidance of a Father God, it seems little wonder that lesser minds would be perplexed. Nevertheless, 67

as time went on, many scientists did succeed in putting

their faith in Darwin, until in 1877 Yale paleontologist

Othniel Marsh could address the American Association for

the Advancement of Science with this firmly religious

conviction: "To doubt evolution today is to doubt science, and science is only another name for truth" (Boiler 20).

Such a statement demonstrates not only the rapid

dissemination of Darwinian thought, but the religious

fervor with which it helped science to become the center of

devout thought. In Marsh's statement, science takes a

divine place in the equation with truth; formerly, only God

would have fallen naturally into that grammatical slot.

Similar if less learned sentiments led the popularizing

skeptic Robert Ingersoll to call science "the only true

religion . . . the only Savior of the world" (Schlesinger

306) .

But if Darwinism won the battle on scientific grounds, having begun to do so in the gilded age and completing the victory in the decades that followed, the religious field presented an equally heated contest, and essentially for the same reason--the dissolution of a human compact with a

Father God left a teleological deficit that science was unable to fill. The emptiness left in the wake of

Darwinism sounded something like this:

Life without meaning; death without meaning; and the universe without meaning. A race tortured to no purpose, and with no hope but 68

annihilation. The dead only blessed; the living standing like beasts at bay, and shrieking half in defiance and half in fright. (Boiler 23)

That statement reads like something from a lost book of

Albert Camus, but Borden P. Brown, professor of philosophy

at Boston University, composed his reflection on the universe without God in 1878. Some philosophers and

religionists, then, perceived in very modern ways the

implications of the antitelic universe. With good reason,

intellectuals would go to war over the new ideas. Jones

captures the seriousness of what was at stake:

In ante-bellum America the universe was sometimes mechanical and sometimes dynamic and sometimes both. But it was always divinely ordered. The shattering effect of the Civil War, of the evolutionary hypothesis of Darwin and the evolutionary philosophy of Herbert Spenser, of German biblical scholarshiip, and of a flood of new ideas from Europe . . . tended to antiquate older cosmogonies and to demand newer explanations. (19)

And indeed, battle lines within the American

Christendom seem, at least from a century's distance, rather clear. On one side stood the accomodating liberals, led by such preachers as Henry Ward Beecher. On the other stood the rejecting conservatives represented by such scholars as the brilliant Charles Hodge and A. A. Hodge of

Princeton, who, if somewhat more narrow in their approach, may have in fact better understood the philosophical implications of natural selection than their liberal counterparts cared to understand them. 69

But the accomodating species won out. Evolution did

not mean the death of God, necessarily, but a change in the

way God was perceived. Among liberal Christians, evolution

and Christianity could be unified. For example, Beecher,

the most widely known preacher of his day, delighted his

congregation of 2000 at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn with

his vision of Darwinism as fully in harmony with

Christianity as the most highly evolved system of ethics.

Indeed, the new science was just the impetus he needed to

complete the de-Calvinizing of his own theology (Boiler

32). Although he was the son of Boston's Lyman "Brimstone"

Beecher, he was far less concerned with biblical accuracy

than with keeping Christianity progressing with the times.

Unlike his Calvinist forefathers whose Christianity was all- encompassing, the younger Beecher centered his

interpretation of Christianity on that religion's highly evolved system of morals, a system he saw epitomized in respectable middle class culture. Not surprisingly, he found and continued to find a large and appreciative audience among that middle class (Marsden 290-1). Yet a reading of Beecher, accomodating and wise, is indicative as well of some of the real problems with the modernist, liberal Christianity of the Fatherless Age. As Howard

Mumford Jones has noted,

'Traditional' theology, whether one likes it or not, had an intellectual cutting edge to it; 'liberal' theology is vague in its definitions. 70

permissive as dogma, and reaches unity only by funnelling into one a blurred notion of science, a blurred notion of history and a blurred notion of religious faith. (Jones 30)

With its its perceived basis in divine, transcendent

absolutes shaken by Higher Criticism and Darwinism, then

sacrificed for the sake of accommodation, much of the

intellectual rigor disappeared from mainstream

Protestantism, from its writing and preaching.

As able minds aligned themselves along either side of

the two-fold threat to orthodoxy, the period came to be

characterized by unrest within churches and denominations.

Indeed, the nation witnessed many debates and a plethora of

heresy trials. Historian George Marsden notes that

"between 1878 and 1906 almost every major Protestant denomination experienced at least one heresy trial" (326).

Had these difficulties been limited to the knowledge of the

learned, their impact might have been limited, and of less use for our study here. We could agree then with Howard

Mumford Jones that for the man on the street, the "unitary explanation of the universe was what it had always been"

(19). But in the post-Civil War era, theology was still a popular concern— the intellectual ruckus did not begin and end with the intellectuals. Many common people held to their beliefs, to be sure, but not, I suggest, in quite the same way. For the news of new theories spread. A large percentage of the population was church-going, and new 71

thought was announced--and often renounced— from Sunday

morning pulpits. For those who did not attend, or who did

not have access to contemporary controversy, the sermons of

preachers such as Beecher and Thomas Dewitt Talmadge were

reprinted each week in literally hundreds of newspapers.

Further, historian Arthur Schlesinger notes that the

popular acceptance of new critical views was somewhat

facilitated by the appearance of the revised version of the

King James Bible (NT 1881; OT 1885). The new translation

did not change any doctrine, but it did add to the growing

public spirit of change, to the feeling that the ethical,

religious foundation of society was not as eternal as it

had been traditionally perceived. And it would be wrong to

discount the widespread popularity of such a phenomenon—

the average man was interested; for example, when a revised

version of New Testament was first published, 200,000

copies were sold in New York alone in less than a week. In

the Middle West the interest was equally great: the Chicago

Times and the Chicago Tribune printed the text in its

entirety, so widespread was the popular attention to

serious religious matters (Schlesinger 304). Washington

Gladden's Who Wrote the Bible? (1891), a book which put

forth higher criticial views, gained wide popular acceptance and was even used in YMCA Bible classes (304).

And finally, in an event that epitomizes the popular

interest in religious matters, and demonstrates the 72

widespread interest in new ideas, the New York Chatauqua

invited Henry Drummond, the Scottish evolutionist, to

deliver its 1893 'lectures (303).

Many popular magazines also devoted space to the

happenings in religion, and theology was discussed in

fiction as well. In 1888 Margaret Deland’s John Ward,

Preacher was a bestseller, and in the same year, Mrs.

Humphrey Ward's widely read Robert Elsmere sold even more

copies in America than in her native England (305). Both

of these books dealt with contemporary theological issues,

a trend in fiction which would reach its zenith eight years

later in The Damnation of Theron Ware. Religious unrest,

and the psychological trauma that it entails in a religious

society, was at its most crucial moment during these years

in America. As Schlesinger observes, "the wayward

religious tendencies of the times help explain the fears of the pious that, once old moorings were cut, the people would drift into uncharted seas" (306). The fears, it seems, were justified--the loss of theological absolutes became a part of the popular mind, a formative force in the

Fatherless Aqe.

My point is this: When the coupled force of Darwinism and Higher Criticism brought about the most valid reasons for religious doubt yet experienced in America, the professors of theology, scientists, and other intellectuals were not the only people to experience the loss of the 73

possibility for absolute faith in a chastizing and loving

Father God. A good percentage of the common people were

left fatherless as well.

But just how did this fatherlessness affect the

popular mind? Which way did the people drift, their

moorings having been cut? Or, in the chosen metaphor of

this dissertation, with the fear and love— the moral

guidance— of the Father God placed with a new kind of

doubt, even for those within Christendom, what was the

result?

A cursory glance shows that the church felt tremendous

growth during the Fatherless Age, making it easy to

conclude that the influence and power of Christendom grew

in America. Many details support such a claim. Marsden writes that great church growth was experienced during the period of our study: from 1860 to 1900, major Protestant groups tripled their numbers (283). Schlesinger points out that during the last two decades of the nineteenth century alone, the number of Protestant communicants rose from ten million to eighteen million, Catholic from six million to ten million— a growth rate clearly exceeding that of the population (312). And in support of the claim that the society as a whole was becoming more religious, it should be noted that of the Protestant members, three~fifths of them were in the supposedly more conservative, revivalist 74

churches, with the Methodists and Baptists boasting of the

largest memberships*

How then can we suggest that these generations were

somehow more at a loss for moral direction— more fatherless

— than those preceeding?

To begin with, one cannot rightly equate membership in

a Christian church with adherence to or even belief in a

traditionally Christian belief system. This is especially

true when the very nature of the emphasis of Christendom

was changing, when the gospel of eternal salvation was

taking a second seat to the social gospel of the rapidly

expanding institutional churches, churches which created a

strong drawing power with their attractive variety of

social programs. Like Latourette, we cannot prove that "as

the percentage of church members mounted, the degree of

discipline exercised by the churches lessened and the trend

was towards conformity to the general level”— nevertheless,

the suggestion is a convincing one (201) . The only fact

that such growth does make plain is that people were

seeking— and we may infer that they were seeking something traditionally associated with religion.

As a whole, though, society was clearly becoming

increasingly secular. Religion, as Robert Mathison has noted, ceased to be an independent variable and became a dependent one during this era (xii). Churches were bigger, but their influence was less widespread and distinctive. 75

This is clearly demonstrated as we consider the role of

Christendom in science and in higher education (Marsden 286-

7). Before the Civil War, science was dominated by

Christian thinking and purpose. For example, one of the

widespread apologistic techniques for Christianity was the

argument from design, and the development of science was

perceived as making this Christian argument increasingly

sound. But with the passing of surprisingly few years,

talk suddenly turned from science as the ally of

Christianity to the "warfare of science and religion"--

essentially a new idea in this context. In the realm of

higher education, one may note that previous to 1850,

almost every college was headed by a Christian clergyman.

But this majority soon dissolved. By the end of the

century, a German university model dominated, and the

distinctly evangelical and moral attitude uniting all areas

of study to a single Christian purpose had disappeared. As

Marsden states, "Within hardly a generation, vast areas of

American thought and academic life had been removed from all reference to Protestant or biblical considerations"

(287). The real influence of Christendom, then, at least

in its conservative expression, declined as memberships grew. "After 1865," writes Mathison, "leaders in science, education, industry, and other areas replaced religious leaders as dominant spokesmen of American society" (181). 76

This trend is equally obvious in economic theory and

practical economics, especially as Darwinism spawned Social

Darwinism and the survival of the fittest found application

in economic decisions. While Christian values at least

dictated fair and just--even, theoretically, compassionate—

treatment (whether or not the dictates were followed),

Social Darwinism felt no such compunction. On the

contrary, to help the poor was to weaken the race by

encouraging less fit elements. Those who escaped the

dictates of a Father God found that in America, as one

Frenchman wrote home, "Honey here is tyrant as it is tyrant

nowhere else" (Boiler xii). Spenserians like Yale's

William Graham Sumner believed that it was in fact wrong to

remove people from the suffering through which the fittest

would be decided. With a matter-of-factness that evidently

marked him as one of the fit, Sumner noted that "the

drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be.

Nature is working away at him to get him out of the way. .

. {Boiler 58). with terrifying accuracy, Howard Mumford

Jones has affirmed that when Social Darwinism was

considered the proper management of the universe, "viewed morally, the result was the Great Barbecue" (107) .

Economics seldom came under serious religious review during

this period. And certainly a government which itself operated out of a "politics . . . effectively free from

internalized moral restraints" was not fit to keep it in 77

check (Marsden 287) . Church membership numbers and even

high-sounding democratic rhetoric should not mislead us

concerning the moral climate of the Fatherless Age. Again

Jones: "A philosophy of self aggrandizement tended to

overthrow or overshadow both republican virtue and

Christian altruism, despite the growth in church membership

and the increase of philanthropic giving and charitable

associations" (106) .

One could continue to delineate the loss of real

religious influence during the Fatherless Age: the

scandalous character of presidential administrations headed

by men who professed Christianity, the tyrannically

straightforward proclamations by religious business giants,

and so on. These phenomena and others characterize the

loss of a real, working set of transcendent values; thus

the fatherlessness of the years during which Harold

Frederic grew up and wrote his fiction. He lived his forty-

two years during an era that historian Paul Boiler has

called "the most violent, bloody and turbulent peacetime

era in the history of the country" (vii), during an age day

when the old certainties disappeared, and great anxiety

accompanied the concept that the universe was not static but somehow dynamic (xii) . Marsden has characterized those years well: "A veneer of Sunday-school piety covered almost everything in the culture, but no longer did the rhetoric of idealism and virture seem to touch the core of the 78

materialism of the political and business interests. It

was a dimestore millenium" (280) . While it is true that

"the fatherhood 'of God and the brotherhood of man" became

the points of unity within post-biblical Christianity, it

was a brotherhood torn by derision and a fatherhood rent by

a loss of transcendent authority. The late 19th century

Christian might look to brother Jesus for example and

father God for guidance, but he could do so on his own

terms, and not in a manner dictated by divinely revealed

authority. Faith in the old sense of unquestioned belief

in a loving and chastizing Father God was reduced to an

incipient form of faith in the modern sense of less-than-

rational, quasi-heroic, belief.

One other characteristic of the Fatherless Age should

be briefly noted. If the increase in church growth (and we

have not even mentioned the multitude of spiritualist cults

that popped up at the end of the century) indicates the

fact that with religious surety gone, something was still needed and sought, the same can be said for the growth of a mystical nationalism. For during the years following the

Civil War, the idea of nationhood was transformed. Before the war, national issues in American were political and moral. But after the war had ended and the union had survived, the language of nationhood became increasingly mystical— belief in the nation became religious, with the

Constitution as scripture (Jones 32-3, 7). With religious 79

symbols in doubt, national ones took over; this we perceive

as the fatherless personality seeking some kind of

authority, some kind of unity, in a democracy torn apart by

its own individualistic progress. If a mystical belief in

democracy and the constitution could replace broad ideas of

theocracy and a scientifically and spiritually perfect

scripture, then such belief was worth holding.

In the Fatherless Age American society was beginning

to throw off the strictures of the Judeo-Christian world

view, represented by the ethical constraints of the Father

God; but it was simultaneously beginning to feel the

despair of a world without a trancendent basis for decision

and action. With centuries-old ideas of religion being

questioned in new and devastating ways, with a strangely

religious concept of nationhood evolving, with economy and

industry creating possibilities and problems never before

imaginable, it is no wonder that some of the best minds of

the day felt themselves riding a machine gone out of

control. Indeed, for the especially sensitive, the ethical

fragmentation normally associated more closely with the

twentieth century was already occuring in the final decades

of the nineteenth. Like the Hebrews in the book of Judges,

the people needed a king. But lacking a wise Samuel to make the proper choices, "every man [continued to do] that

which was right in his own eyes." Harold Frederic felt all of this— he had been prepared by the death of his own father to be particularly receptive to the anxiety-creating dialectic. And as we will see in the next chapter, his best characters are motivated by this same longing for stability, a longing which results in their actively seeking some kind of dominating order. But at the opposite pole, equally strong, these same characters are driven by an urge to rebel against any kind of stability, any kind of order taking upon itself the right of imposition. From such contradictions come the energy that drives the characters— the contradictions that make up the literary mindscape of a fatherless man in a Fatherless 81

NOTES

^Frederic helped the cause of bad biography along through his convincing tale-telling. As a primitive American in sophisticated London, he could fascinate his listeners with his tales of his hard life in the New York outback, and he was too good a storyteller to let facts interfere. Misguided published biography is well represented by Carey McWilliams's "Harold Frederic: A Country Boy of Genius." 2 Since Frederic lost his father so early, and since his mother remarried, one might suggest that the boy would hardly have felt the effects. But in fact research indicates that such a loss is most important during the first two years (Biller 53). Occasionally details concerning the absence of fathers have been noted previously in Frederic's work. The most notable comment regarding fatherlessness in Frederic's work, however, Stanton Garner's dissertation, follows a wholly different trajectory than my own. Garner deals with the absence of fathers in some works of American romance as one of the symptoms of the absence of a "cultural radical" in American fiction, Garner's own term for "that complex of assumptions and associations which refer back to the very roots of a culture"--the cultural myth or mythic memory. Garner posits that authors of a given culture "effect a channel of communications between the conscious creative faculty and the innermost or mythic response to the external world" (24), a natural position for a critic who perceives the American romance as the dominant American tradition, a tradition with little debt to other literatures. My work, on the other hand, attempts to deal more directly with fatherlessness as a precipitator of certain tendencies of Frederic's characterization. And I attempt to do so solidly in the context (1) of historical events, and (2) of literary realism, broadly defined, as reflective of observable ideological strains. I am not dealing with the kind of deep structure which demands the oracular artist as revelator and interpreter. This is one reason that I usually have chosen, when psychological support is called for, to use reported studies of research psychologists instead of the broader theories of personality and culture forwarded by Freud and others-- though my approach is not anti-Freudian. Garner's thesis and my own are not, I think, mutually exclusive, but they do reflect different views of art in general, and a different view of Harold Frederic's art in particular. 82 3 It would be tempting here, and arguably legitimate to try to carry Frederic's biography into Reuben Tracy's. Robert Woodward, however, in his article "Reuben Tracy and S,S. McClure: Self-Made Men," expresses persuasively a better source: he states that the story McClure told to Frederic of his own boyhood stands as a model for Reuben Tracy. For our purposes, it doesn't much matter. Tracy’s boyhood is still in keeping with Frederic’s unfailing pattern of fatherless and paternally deprived boys. 4 George W. Johnson, in "Harold Frederic's Young Goodman Ware," has noted the absence of fathers in Theron Ware, and attributes to this fact the "psychic celibacy" which causes Ware to turn to "'the worship of the maternal idea1" {Johnson 369). Along a similar line, Fritz Oehlschlaeger has written about Ware's need for absolute maternal acceptance, and his "questionable" maleness in "Passion, Authority, and Faith in The Damnation of Theron Ware." 5 The best discussion of authority in Theron Ware to date has been the article by Fritz Oehlschlaeger mentioned under Note 4. While he speaks correctly of a lack of authority in American society, his rhetoric is that of the lack of authority which is a common conceit of the American romance; he does not deal with the specific kind of authority for relatively specific historical reasons that I deal with here. Oeh1schlaeger's important article will be addressed futher in Chapter III.

^Obviously this paragraph is meant only to be representative of the kind of issues that arose during this period. My source for the specifics noted is the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. 7 This kind of belief-in-spite-of-doubt that was born in late nineteenth-century America seems to prefigure the existential faith/doubt dialectic that characterizes much twentieth-century thinking. One relatively accessible discussion of the concept is the substance of Paul Tillich's The Dynamics of Faith. While it would be wrong to toss about anachronistically terms like "existentialism" in regard to Frederic, concepts considered by existential theologians, philosophers, and artists do seem to hold something in common with Frederic's works--a concept similar to that which we hope to demonstrate by comparing Frederic with the American writers of the 1920s. This will be especially obvious in the discussion of the similarities between Hemingway’s Jake Barnes and Frederic's Christian Tower, which will be one of the points considered in Chapter VIII. while Christian does not suffer the 83 nihlistic despair for which Hemingway's protagonist is rightly famous, he does, nevertheless, suffer something 1 ike it. 84

WORKS CITED

Biller, Henry B. Paternal Deprivation: Family, School, Sexuality, and Society. Lexington, MA: Heath- Lex ington, 1974.

Boiler, Paul F. American Thought in Transition: The Impact of Evolutionary Naturalism. 1865-1900. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969.

Bruce, F. F. "Criticism." International Standard Bible Eneyeloped ia. 1979 ed.

Frederic, Harold. "The Copperhead." The Copperhead and Other Stories. 1894. Vol. II of The Major Works~~" of Harold Frederic. New York: Greenwood, 1969. 1-162.

. "The War Widow." Ibid. 163-211.

"The Eve of the Fourth." Ibid. 211-244.

. "My Aunt Susan." Ibid. 245-268.

The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination. Eds. Charlyn Dodge and Stanton Garner. Vol. Ill of The Harold Frederic Edition. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1985.

"The Deserter." The Deserter and Other Stories. 1898. Vol. II of The Maior Works of Harold Frederic. New York: Greenwood 1969. 3-138.

. "A Day in the Wilderness." Ibid. 139-238.

Gloria Mundi. Ed. Larry Bromley. Vol. IV of The Harold Frederic Edition. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986.

. The Lawton Girl. New York: Scribners, 1890.

March Hares. Vol. V of The Major Works of Harold Frederic. ^ vols. New York: Greenwood, 196$^

. The Market-Place. Eds. Charlyne Dodge and Stanton Garner. Vol. II of The Harold Frederic Edition. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1981.

. The Return of the O'Mahoney. 1892. New York: Dillingham, 1699. 85

* Seth's Brother's Wife. Vol. I of The Major Works of Harold Frederic. 5 vols. New York: Greenwood, 1969.

Garner, Stanton. "Harold Frederic: The Major Works.” Diss. Brown U, 1963.

Johnson, George W. "Harold Frederic's Young Goodman Ware: The Ambiguities of a Realistic Romance." Modern Fiction Studies 8 (1962-3): 361-74.

Jones, Howard Mumford. The Age of Energy. New York: Viking-Compass, 1973.

Kolb, Harold H. The Illusion of Life. Charlottesville, VA: U of Virginia P, 1969.

Latourette, Kenneth Scott. The Nineteenth Century Outside Europe: The Americas, the Pacific, Asia, and Africa. Vol. 3 of Christianity in a Revolutionary Age: A History of Christianity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. 5 vols. New York: Harper Brothers, 1961.

McWilliams, Carey. " Harold Frederic: A Country Boy of Genius." U of California Chronicle. 35 (1933): 21- 34 .

Marsden, George M. "The Era of Crisis: From Christendom to Pluralism." Eerdmans Handbook to Christianity in America. Eds. Mark Nol1, et al. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983. 277-391.

Mathisen, Robert H., ed. The Role of Religion in American Life: An Interpretive Historical Anthology. Washington: University Press of America, 1982.

Oehschlaeger, Fritz. "Passion, Authority, and Faith in The Damnation of Theron Ware.1* American Literature 5 8 (1986): 238-55.

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Sr. "A Critical Period in American Religion." Rptd in Religion in American History. Eds. John M. Mulder and John F. Wilson. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1978. 302-17.

Woodward, Robert. "Reuben Tracy and S. S. McClure: Self Made Men." Frederic Herald 2.2 (1968): 5. CHAPTER III

TYPES, CHARACTER, AND THE DIALECTIC OF MOTIVES

Like many other writers, especially commercial,

prolific ones, Harold Frederic used character types— not

only the popular types of traditional American letters or

of magazine fiction, but types that he himself developed.

Frederic's types are important not only for their formal merit, but because of what they reveal about the author's

world view; the fictional people that fill the human-shaped

spaces in his literary mindscape are important indicators

of Frederic's understanding of the human condition. As I

suggested in Chapter Two, the period in which his thought matured and during which he wrote his fiction--broadly, from the end of the Civil War through the 1890s— was a period that lacked absolutes regarding authority, social and personal. It was a Fatherless Age, an age that suffered the instability of a radically changing society.

And Frederic, who like the men in so many of his novels and stories had lost his own father, was particularly sensitive to the lack of authoritative absolutes. Inevitably for a novelist determined to write only about what he knew, this

86 87

sense of lostness, this fatherlessness, would appear in his

characters. One purpose of this chapter, then, is to

explore and delineate Frederic's types at various social

and economic levels. Keeping such a view of society in

mind, my second purpose is to demonstrate that Frederic's

types generally find their most complete development in

characters who are motivated by a dialectic rooted in the

effects of paternal deprivation— the condition that the

author and his creations share.1 Like fatherless boys,

Frederic's most interesting protagonists simultaneously

seek after and flee from authority.

As this dialectic of motives is developed further, two common terms with specialized definitions will be helpful

in representing the thesis and antithesis of the dialectic:

License will stand at the pole that represents the desire

for unchecked personal freedom and rebellion from all authority. Law will stand at the pole that represents the acknowledgement of social responsibility and the desire to conceive of oneself in relation to a higher authority. In the types that I will discuss, it becomes evident that the dialectic of License and Law is at work in Frederic's creative faculty: some characters develop primarily around the pole of License, with a desire for unchecked personal freedom and with a rebellious attitude toward any authority; other characters develop around the pole of Law, with a dominating sense of social order and responsibility, 88

and with a desice for the stability that authority can

bring. The most consistently interesting, however, are

those characters who are responsive to both senses, and are

therefore caught in the generated conflict.

I

With experience that ranged from reporting rural

murders in New York State to hobnobbing with M.P.s in

England, Frederic was well prepared to compose accurate

delineations of all levels of society. His experience as

an upstate New York reporter had prepared him to draw

Milton Squires and Abe Beekman as surely as his London experience had prepared him to draw Lord Plowden and

General Kervick. So, prefiguring the American writers of the twentieth century, Frederic created a mythic world

replete with cities and countryside, mountains and rivers, and most importantly, a full range of social classes. His contribution in this regard is worth exploring.

The early novels, especially Seth's Brother’s Wife, have been considered within a naturalistic framework primarily because of the scenes of farm life that

Parrington and others have found so harsh, scenes "as bitter as any tale of the western border" (Parrington

288). I have already noted that Parrington1s thesis concerning Frederic's hatred of farm life is now discounted, but that should not imply that the details that 89

he noticed lack significance. On the contrary, such

details demonstrate Frederic's awareness of the authority

of social class boundaries, and of the toughness of life as

one descends; they are one feature of his work that allows

insight into his characters' motivation.

Frederic wrote no book with a protagonist from the

lowest social class, so no full picture of the License/Law dialectic may be drawn from that context. Nevertheless, the characters featured in the scenes which influenced

Parrington supply the opportunity of examining Frederic's types at the bottom of the socio-economic scale: some of the best examples here are the various members of the

Lawton family, both in Seth's Brother's Wife and The Lawton

Girl. And in Jessica Lawton, the more complex, dialectically developed type is almost achieved.

Seth begins with a chapter entitled "The Hired Folk," featuring something of the life of the servants; Frederic notes the fact that they refer to their masters with familiarity, and later that they eat at the same table.

Nevertheless he marks them as lower class not only by their position as hirelings but by painfully countrified dialect 2 and haggard appearance. This is true not only of Alvira and Milton, the two principal servants, but of the Lawton girls as wel1--Melissa, who works with Alvira for the

Fairchilds, and Samantha, who works for the Fairchilds' neighbors, Annie and M'tildy Warren. The Lawton family has 90

become a type in American literature, the tribe-like lower

class family with an unending crowd of relations and

dependents. Frederic characterizes the whole family when

he refers to one sister as "a slatternly young slip from

the ever-spreading Lawton family tree" (145). It may be

characteristic of period-bound bigotry that Frederic

commonly uses terms describing the Lawton girls that have

connotations of sexual promiscuity as well as slovenliness:

in the reference to Melissa above, "slatternly" is such a

term, as is "huzzie" in Mrs. Warren's description of

Samantha (83) . But in spite of any protestations of

classlessness, we recognize the type.

Frederic reveals the family more fully in Seth1s quasi-

sequel, The Lawton Girl; there he has opportunity to reveal

the variations within the type as well as the type itself.

The Lawtons occupy the lowest tier of Thessaly society.

Their heritage rests in the former canal workers, people whose way of making a living has since passed but whose way of life has not; their mode of housekeeeping has never risen above that appropriate for a canal boat cabin. They are the upstate New York equivalent of William Faulkner's or Erskine Caldwell's white trash. The girls are hired out as factory girls and kitchen help, except for the eldest and formerly most promising, who is now a Tecumseh prostitute. Their apparent contentedness at the bottom of the spectrum seems to project a willingness to serve, but 91

it is a willingness precipitated by hopelessness, not

choice. Such is the implication of the type.

Having typified them, Frederic can then draw

variations within the type; then the individuals become

more interesting, and the dialectic of motives becomes a bit more appropriate. Though they come out of the same

home, and though five of the girls have the same mother and

father {Jessica alone was born by Ben's first wife), the

Lawtons differ widely in ability, in personality, and in

the completeness with which they are integrated into their

class. The father Ben is a low-order Rip Van Winkle, a

good-natured ne’er-do-well who, while pleasant enough, is

wholly ineffectual as a father. For example, when

Jessica's betrayer, Horace Boyce, offers Ben fifty cents to

deliver his luggage, money that Jessica begs her father not

to take, he secretly does so, for the sake of the family.

But before he arrives home, he loses his money on whiskey and wagering, then curses his luck— a typical reaction from a character conditioned to see the world as against him,

Jessica's longing to erase Horace Boyce and his well-monied temptation from her world— especially upon the day of her return from moral exile in Tecumseh— is a longing that Ben cannot understand. For him fifty cents represents two shots of whiskey, three shots at the prize turkey, and little more. Ben's wife is equally predictable, and could have stepped out of the pages not only of Frederic's works 92

but from the frontier realism of Hamlin Garland, E.W. Howe,

or Joseph Kirkland. She is a "pallid, ignorant, helpless

slattern, gaunt of frame, narrow of forehead, and bowed and

wrinkled before her time" (76).

From these parents come five daughters. The two

youngest, Georgians and Arabella, are coarse, giggling

hoydens who work at a button factory. An equally

predictable Lawton daughter is Lucinda, the dense though

well-meaning factory worker who becomes Jessica’s millinery

assistant. But with Melissa, the dark and discontented

kitchen girl who works for the Fairchilds, Frederic reveals a greater variation— she is not satisfied with her position, and she is willing to do anything necessary to rise. Her lighter sister Samantha is equally self-serving, and she has the reputation of being intelligent, witty in a biting way, and quite pretty— a surprising off-spring of the slow-witted Ben and his wife. Samantha's intelligence and pernicious attitude place her along with Melissa, in opposition to her passive parents. It is Samantha who, in

Seth, is caught listening at the door by old Matilda Warren during Lemuel Fairchild’s ill-fated visit, who hears Annie

Fairchild's exclamations to herself in the woods, and who, in Lawton Girl, must be bribed not to make problems with

Jessica's sponsors. 93

Though seemingly subservient to others, the Lawton

girls strive for dominance among themselves, forming and

dissolving their sisterly alliances as opportunities appear

and change. Their self-centered, survivalist mindset is

well demonstrated by their conversation at the Thanksgiving

table, as they gather round a turkey that Horace Boyce has

given Ben. There they snarl out double entendres to each

other about Jessica, their reformed prostitute sister. Not

only do they take satisfaction in degrading Jessica; they are also fascinated by the sophistication of this technique

for insult, introduced by Samantha. Jessica has just

returned from a four-year absence in Tecumseh, and the sisters' meanness is riled by her failure to come bearing gifts. The girls self-centered amorality allows them to see no inconsistency in reviling Jessica equally both for selling herself and for failing to share with them the money and goods thereby obtained. The table scene is ferocious--the girls hate Jessica for coming home broke; they even curse Melissa for having come home from the

Fairchilds' for the holiday and therefore needing to be fed. The eating itself recalls the competitive gluttony of

Crane's Johnson family and of London's canines.

Unlike her sisters, Jessica is so shaken by the disheartening scene that she cannot eat. Even in this failure of animal appetite, Frederic marks her as the greatest variation within the type. As a girl, she was the brightest student in her country school, a girl her teacher

Reuben Tracy thought would become a fine woman. And even

after she has been "ruined" by Horace Boyce, some basic

goodness remains. By giving Jessica a different mother

than her sisters, Frederic leaves open the possibility that

her goodness is determined by her genes. Furthermore, the

narrator refers to Jessica early on as one "who distinctly

belonged to the managing division of the human race." It

seems just as likely, though, that the reformer Reuben

Tracy, her teacher, planted the seed of hope and goodness

in her; in any case he nurtured it, as did the "pure-

souled" Annie Fairchild, who sought Jessica out and rescued

her from her prostitute’s life in Tecumseh. Nurture or

nature, the difference shows. As was evident in the

incident of the fifty-cents, Jessica is not motivated merely by physical desire; she has a more complex set of motives. Need, of course, plays a part. The need to escape her rotten home drove her to Horace Boyce, and the need to exist after Horace had tired of her drove her to prostitution. But in her return to Thessaly she evidences a more complex additional set of motivating factors. First among these, though faint, is a feeling of self-worth.

Jessica wants to come back to Thessaly and live down her shame, a purpose that suggests personal pride, as well as a concern for the attitudes of her home community, even though she is and must remain forever an outsider, both by 95

birth and by reputation. But that concern with the

community takes more than a personal emphasis: the teaching

of Reuben Tracy, along with her more recent associations

with Annie Fairchild, has evidently endowed her with a

value system that includes feelings of responsibility for

the good of the community. In her case, this concern

expresses itself in a plan to save other girls from her

fate; she wants to start an evening club for girls to help

them escape the squalid and often brutal environments which

dishearten them and make them more susceptible to the kind

of debauchery that Jessica suffered. If successful her

plan will give her a place in the community and fulfill her

perceived responsibility to her fellows. This intention is

more than submission to middle-class morality. In any

case, the code she accepts and acts upon is less enslaving

than the life of prostitution which, while in one sense

representing license, on a more important level represents

the grossest form of class slavery.

Jessica's struggles also suggest the idea of the

expiation of sin, though it is difficult to see her

expiation as a positive element in the book's structure.

For while Frederic does not suggest the idea of penitence

through most of the book, he does nevertheless in the

story's climax send Jessica on a self-sacrificial journey

through a snowstorm to fetch Tracy, the one man who can save the town from a labor riot, a pilgrimage which results 96

in her death and peace in the town. Thus the reformed

prostitute-saint gives her life for others, and one more

strand is added the the already complex braid of motives.

This complex motivation sets Jessica apart from her type,

as she must be set apart to maintain our interest in her as

a major character. On one hand, the need to act in a way

that merits the approval of people above her who are

significant to her--Tracy, Annie Fairchild, and even Kate

Minster— includes submitting to the moral authority that

they represent. But on the other hand, the assertion of

herself as a worthy human, though a former prostitute, is a

step outside the typical authority, so much so that it

causes problems for the fin-de-siecle writer. Frederic

must kill her or marry her to a worthy man, and the latter

is socially impossible. In many scenes--Tracy's visits to

the Lawton home and his visit to the millinery, for example

— Frederic sets up the romantic possibility of a joining of

Jessica and Reuben Tracy, but the idea is never allowed to

go beyond the suggestion: a leading reformer of

unquestionable integrity cannot marry a scarlet woman,

regardless of their mutual attraction, budding friendship,

and similar points of view about civic life. It is fitting

then that Jessica, who has taken a role of Savior, cannot herself be forgiven--the most natural conclusion, the marriage, is deemed impossible. This impossibility marks a sharp class-bound contrast with the ironic conclusion of 97

Seth, in which the reformer Ansdell (Tracy's mentor) can

openly court and marry Isabel Fairchild, Albert's

disreputable but rich, socially acceptable widow, the woman

who tries to make her husband a cuckold by his own brother,

and who later sanctions fratricide as a romantic possibi1ity.

Jessica, then, is a complex moral being. Unlike her

acguiesent father and step-mother, she is not satisfied

with her position on the social and economic scale of

Thessaly. But unlike Melissa and Samantha, any change she makes must be based within the working contexts of social authority. In spite of unfortunate parents and home life, she has a concern for others which she is intelligent enough to follow through with practical good works. By doing so, she rises above the type Frederic usually draws in her social class. But the possibility of her completely rising from her type and class is averted by her death, in an ending that the more mature artist came to regret."^ In her, the dialectic of motives does not have full play: Law necessarily takes precedence.

Milton Squires, the low-life villain of Seth's

Brother's Wife, comes to an equally bad end but for different reasons. His attempt to rise above the boundaries of his servant class consists of becoming a thug for Seth's unscrupulous brother, Albert, the New York lawyer who has decided to buy his way into congress. 98

Unhampered by any notion of social responsibility or

authority. Squires is just the man that Albert needs to

help him wage his corrupt campaign for an office in

Washington. Finally, however, the opportunity to steal

Albert's bribery money presents itself— a more immediate gratification than anything Albert could promise. License

takes the day, and goaded on by Albert's insults. Squires

becomes his employer's murderer. Throughout the book, the

uncomplimentary physical descriptions of Squires contrast

with his rise above his station. It seems here that even

Frederic suggests the possibility that the servant should

have kept to his place. In the scene in which his crime is

revealed to legal authorities, Alvira, the kitchen girl

whom Milton has spurned after his rise to power, voices

such an opinion: "'Oh, don't tell me! Ef you'd be'n

contented with yer lot in life, 'n' hadn't tried to swell

yerself up like a toad in a puddle, this wouldn't a

happen'd. But nao, yeh poor fewl, yeh must set yerself up

to be somebody! 'N' naow where air yeh?'" (389). Where he

is, is on his way to the prison mines, wholly cast out of

the society whose formal authority he has violated. Unlike

Jessica, whose inculcated morality keeps her from attempting to rise out of her social class in this radical way, Milton sees the simple advantages in killing Albert, and does so. In his amorality, he is very close to being a typical naturalistic character: he remains throughout 99

consistent with the low physical description he is given in

Chapter One, where, in the entire scene of the run-down

farm, "Milton was the least attractive object" {2).

II. What Milton wanted to be, even more than rich, was a

leading man in Dearborn County, a man who is respected and

whose opinion on community matters is sought. A number of

characters in Frederic's works fit within the rather loose

boundaries of this type, the public man. Generally

speaking, these men work at public professions, such as

journalism and law, and demonstrate an interest in

political affairs. On one hand are those who act upon

legitimate, practical authority derived from and resting in

society; on the other, those who attempt to circumvent this

authority with individually manipulated power, sometimes

physical, more often economic and quasi-legal.

Richard Ansdell is the epitome of the faithful public

man, and his character is built around the idea of

legitimate authority and social responsibility. A

successful lawyer, stirring speaker, and undying idealist,

Ansdell refuses to play political games, remains faithful

to his charges, and is sufficiently brilliant to win. His

idealism is the motivating force behind Seth and John

Fairchild, in Seth, and he is the friend and mentor of

Reuben Tracy in Lawton Girl and Seth. Little of his 100

private life is revealed; we know only his political

stances and overhear what his disciples tell each other

about him. John Fairchild indoctrinates Seth into the

wonders of Ansdell, so much that Seth becomes a disciple.

Also Mr. Workman, owner of the Tecumseh Chronicle, and usually a reliable source, tells Seth that Ansdell "knows

men like a book" {185) . (Possibly he knows women less

well, since in the end, he is planning to marry Isabel

Fairchild.)

In this last detail, and in others, he is contrasted

throughout Seth with Albert Fairchild, a public man of the

second kind in whom License is the controlling factor.

Albert too knows something of the minds of men: namely,

that money is authority, and that by using it you control

men's actions. Ansdell has run his campaign for congress

completely as a reform candidate; not only has he not put a machine together, he has not even gone to the district

conventions to deal with the other two machines, Albert's

and Abe Beekman's. Albert has taken the opposite tack: he has established his residence on the Fairchild farm, in an area he cares nothing about, in order to be in place for a

less competitive congressional seat than is available in his home— New York City. And he has refurbished the run­ down farm by buying goods and services from as many of the surrounding farmers as possible, in order that his money may buy good will throughout the district. Finally, he 101

attempts to secure his nomination by buying the support of

Jay County boss Abe Beekman.

Both of these public men depend on their knowledge of

human nature for success, Ansdell for public-spirited

success, Albert for personal success. And both know

something of the human animal: Ansdell's reform views do

become influential among key men, and his enthusiasm even

carries some men who care little about his ideals. By the

same token, Albert does manage to put a working political machine together in just over a year using his well-monied method, and he knows what is in the heart of some of the so- called reformers. For example, he tells Seth--and no

reason surfaces to doubt him— that his employer at the

Tecumseh Chronicle, Mr. Workman, only decided to turn reformer and bolt the party ticket after the illegal gratuities that should have gone to his brother failed to materialize. But neither Albert or Ansdell is perfect in his knowledge. Albert, trying to do too much too fast, and disregarding ethical constraints, hires a man who becomes his murderer, Milton Squires. And Ansdell, the idealistic public man, does in fact end up drinking tea in parlors, as 4 Albert had prophesied. Their similar weakness in their knowledge of human nature is exemplified in the fact that they both choose Isabel as helpmeet— a truly undesirable companion. 102

Abram Beekman, the third candidate in the election,

while lacking the brilliance of Ansdell or the strength of

Albert, is older, more thoughtful, and always reliable. He

has the knowledge of human nature that both of these men

lack, and this knowledge has helped him to put together his

Jay County political machine— a machine not built on money

alone. Instead, he has established over many years

relationships with his people that go beyond the strength

of money. He knows the kinds of loyalties that last, and

has built upon them. Complementing this more sound theory

is the fact that Abrams is a superb judge of character.

For example, he discerns that Albert is not a good man because he places Milton Squires in a position of trust.

And he knows that Ansdell is a good man from what he has

inferred before meeting him.

This knowledge of character is invaluable as Abe centralizes political authority in the district. For example, Mr. Bunner, his right hand man, cannot be purchased for any price, though he is a very poor man.

Why? Because ten years ago Beekman helped him give his child a decent funeral. Granted, money plays a small part. But Beekman has gained authority by becoming wholly intertwined into the network of the society in which he lives. He knows that true authority is derived from the people who grant that authority. He does not love political involvement for the wealth it can bring— he is 103

offended by the idea of Albert’s bribe. Nor does he value

it for the great idealistic good it promises— he remarks that reform movements like Ansdell's don’t "winter well.”

He loves political involvement--social involvement with his

fellow human beings, whom he values— for its own sake. He

himself does not seek political office— Jay County is his

domain. He simply wants to do his duty by his own county,

and to wield a positive influence, and he knows the sphere

in which he can successfully do so. In relation to the

dialectic of motives, Beekman is sufficiently motivated by

Law to recognize his responsibility, and sufficiently

motivated by License to recognize the value of his

autonomy.

I have centered the discussion of the public man type

on characters from Seth, because in that book Frederic has purposefully presented the complete dialectical paradigm

for the public man in the three candidates for congressional office, Albert (Fairchild), (Richard)

Ansdell, and Abram (Beekman). But the type surfaces in other works as well. For example, Reuben Tracy, in The

Lawton Girl, is a reformer who, like Ansdell, is idealistic about the great good that can be accomplished with social involvement. Tracy's opposite number is Horace Boyce, who, like Albert Fairchild, comes home to trade on his family name for social prominence and wealth, and when the name disappoints him, he turns to illegal means for social and 104

financial success. Thus in that novel as well, one

character is grounded in Law and the other in License. But

no synthesis obtains.

Ill

Like the public man, the capitalist exists in two

subtypes, each centering on one pole of the dialectic of

motives. Those who are primarily motivated by Law realize

that legitimate authority is derived from the community,

and they therefore use their abilities and capital for the

community; those who are primarily motivated by License

sacrifice the good of the community and the legitimate

authority it offers, choosing to work instead through

personal power and the egocentricity license allows.

Frederic has given us two good examples of the first

type: Stephen Minster in The Lawton Girl and Jeremiah

Madden in The Damnation of Theron Ware. In both cases our

knowledge is second-hand--we never see Minster and only one chapter follows Madden--but in both cases the reports are

laudatory. Stephen Minster is the founder of the iron­ works in Thessaly, the plant to which the town owes its growth and prosperity. His plant is so intelligently located and supplied that even when other plants shut down, the Minster works keep producing, and the workers stay employed. In Algerian fashion, he has started with little and through hard work and virtue, ended with much. Equally 105

significant is the fact that his memory is held in complete

favor among all people of all classes— even the cynical

Squire Gedney. One of Frederic's minor types is the

crotchety but insightful old man, epitomized as one aspect

of the more complex Abe Beekman. Just as Abram spotted Milton and Albert as dishonest. Squire Gedney sees into the

shallowness of Horace Boyce. Indeed, the comical Gedney’s

primary purpose in life is to voice, loudly, a sometimes

general and sometimes individual condemnation of the human

race and everything associated with it. Yet the reader is

told that even he has never criticized Stephen Minster. It

seems clear that though the Minster family now controls the

capital, old Stephen Minster's authority came not simply

from the ability to gather and invest, but from the

confidence and good will that he established. His workers and townsmen, then, with their confidence and support, entitled him to the authority which his business and financial position gave him. No negative light is ever cast on his family, either, until outside agitators are used by his estate's would-be defrauders. As his aptly chosen name suggests, Minster ministered to his community; he sought the good of the community above his own material prospects, and he received the community's good will in return. 106

Stephen Minster's parallel in The Damnation of Theron

Ware is Jeremiah Madden. Though a rich man. Madden still

thinks, feels, and to some degree lives like an Irish peasant. In fact he is an Irish immigrant turned wheelwright who, in the freedom of America, has been able

to start his own wagon-making business which has grown to become a successful one. He is a devout Catholic, and his personal habits are beyond reproach— he never even raises his voice or listens to an off-color story. His single oddity is that his sadness for those fellow immigrants who I died before him has never dissipated. As with Minster, greed plays no part in Madden's life; as the narrator tells us, "Jeremiah Madden was supposed to be probably the richest man in Octavius. There was no doubt at all about his being its least pretentious citizen" (83). He has never sought to become wealthy; each step of his progress from peasant immigrant to factory owner has come to him

"naturally, easily'* (84). True, he has a fine new home, but he still works every day, and he spends his evenings sitting in the kitchen smoking his clay pipe. The only reproach given to his name is that he has asked MacEvoy, one of his wheelwrights, to trim a tree for him, a duty outside his profession. As a result, he falls to his death; this does not, however, rank with the type of abuses of authority which we generally associate with nineteenth- century American capitalists. 107

Minster and Madden represent for Frederic a type of

businessman that has occasionally existed on the American

scene, and who Frederic nostalgically associates with a

generation earlier than his own. Both of them are notable

for the harmony between labor and management that

characterizes their industries, for the respect for people

that such management demonstrates. Their authority as the

chief men of their communities derives not simply from

their capital, but from their relationships of trust with

their people. Both of these capitalists are noteworthy for their refusal to misuse the authority that their economic positions legally provide for them.

The opposite is true of the new capitalists, for whom money and the ability to make money, and to wield the power thereby entailed, is the source of authority. The evaluative description of Lawton Girl badman Schuyler

Tenney sets the type that Frederic is drawing. He looks like "ten hundred hundreds of young Americans who are engaged in making more money than they need" (115), writes

Frederic; he is slender, has a sprinkling of grey hair, a thin, serious face, cold grey eyes, and a trim, drab mustache. In essence, this is the description of Colin

Semple as well, Joel Thorpe's right-hand man in The Market-

Place . He too is slim and wholly serious, "without a trace of unnecessary politeness, or humour, or sensibility of any sort," and like so many of Frederic's capitalists, has 108

confident grey eyes (90-1). Likewise both men are perfect

in their visible habits— their pleasures are more purely

financial than corporeal. Indeed, their lack of human

pleasure is a kind of condemnation. Tenney, for example,

never touches liquor. Semple is able to drink or smoke

with a natural air if it seems a part of the money-making

task at hand, but the reader, like his partner Thorpe,

" [does] not conceive him doing anything for the mere human

reason that he liked to do it" (91). Money and the making

of money are these men's rules of life, beyond any

relationship or set of values. Nevertheless, they have a

fear of the power of social authority. Therefore, even though they work only for their own good, they work strictly within the letter of the law— the legal code is their only morality; ideas of fairness and the spirit of the law do not enter in. For example, as Schuyler Tenney is demonstrating the plan by which the Stephen Minster's widow and daughters will be swindled out of their money through the use of a dummy corporation— a move which will throw most of Thessaly into economic turmoil--he shows no guilty emotion. He is offended at Horace's suggestion that the procedure might be illegal, and responds: "Dishonesty is wrong, and it is foolish. It gets a man disgraced, and it gets him in jail. But commercial acumen is another thing. A smart man can get money in a good many ways without giving anybody the right to call him dishonest" 109

(227). The last phrase is key, for to be honest for Tenney

is to live in such a way that "no man can put his finger on

[him]." If he cannot be fingered, then, for legally

defrauding the Minster widow and her daughters, the act is

not dishonest, and he is within his "moral" rights to do

so. The notion of authority here is wholly self-centered;

the good of others or of the community does not enter in to

the decision-making. On the contrary, a given set of laws

creates legal possibilities, thereby giving Tenney the

authority his ability and capital provide.

Wisely, Harold Frederic never centers a story on

either subtype of the capitalist. Neither the wholly good

Madden or Minster, whose authority derives from the

community, nor the seemingly amoral Tenney or Semple, who

see the codified authority of law as a set of boundaries around which their license must navigate, could have held our attention for 100,000 words, interesting secondary characters though they are. But from these two he derives a third in the person of Joel Stormont Thorpe, protagonist of The Market-Place. Thorpe uses a radically self-centered energy and intelligence to gain economic power. But at the same time, he seeks the approval, the sanction, the restrictions of traditional centers of authority. Thus in 110 5 Thorpe the dialectic of motives has full play. In fact,

next to Theron Ware, Thorpe becomes Frederic's most fully

developed--and, as I will argue in Chapter Seven, his most

dangerously 1ikable--character.

Thorpe’s freedom from social authority appears at

first to be his dominant motivator. Thorpe is considered,

by himself and most others, to be a superior being, more

intelligent and cunning than his competitors, with a

stronger will and a harder nerve. His intelligence is not

only native; it has developed during years of travel and

opportunity seeking. Indeed, he has himself been defrauded

by men with more cunning, and he has learned from his

losses, a fact which recurs as he tells his story to his

s ister:

He seemed, by his account, to have been a hundred times almost within touch of the goal. In China; in the Dutch Indies; in those remoter parts of Australia which were a waterless waste when he knew them and might have owned them, and now were yielding fabulous millions to fellows who had tricked and swindled him— everywhere he had missed by just a hair's breadth the golden consummation. . . . But someone had always played him false. There was never a friendship for him which could withstand the temptation of profitable treason. (17)

His life on the world's frontiers has to some degree made him, it would seem, the intelligent but ruthless hero of

The Market-Place. His past also reminds us that Thorpe is always more buccaneer than businessman. It is important to note, and easy to lose sight of the fact that Thorpe is in Ill

no way a "legitimate" business man. He provides no

service; he manufactures no product. As we listen in on

his sister Louisa's reflection, the point is innocently

made: "It did not surprise his hearer— nor indeed did it

particularly attract her attention--that there was nowhere

in this rapid and comprehensive narrative any allusion to

industry of the wage-earning sort. * * . This was so like

Joel that it was taken for granted in his sister's mind"

(18) .

Even the rubber plantation, in which his current scam

supposedly rests, is valuable only in the eyes of those who

know nothing about South America. He claims to hold title

to a valuable tract of trees, but in fact such forest is so

plentiful that his holdings are worthless. Thorpe states,

"A property of rubber trees has no real value— so long as

there's a wilderness of rubber trees all round that's

everybody's property" (188). Furthermore, he does not even

hold his tract legally. The Central Government at Mexico

has repudiated his concession, and in a revelation that

makes his cunning clear, we learn upon the arrival of his

former colleague Tavender that Thorpe had sold him the

concession before he returned to London (187). Thus the company Thorpe has been floating. Rubber Consuls, is

completely devoid of holdings. Thorpe's authority is wholly based on his ability to stay a step ahead of everyone and to follow his own will. 112

The bear squeeze itself--the manipulation by which

Thorpe catches his stock market enemies selling short,

corners all available stock, then raises the price— is a

questionable maneuver, always ethically and in this

instance legally. But since Frederic makes no attempt at

showing Thorpe as a legitimate businessman, a far more

important element of the squeeze is in its revelation of

Thorpe's character. For men such as Schuyler Tenney and

Judge Wendover in The Lawton Girl, Albert Fairchild and

Milton Squires in Seth's Brother's Wife, and even for

Thorpe's own partner and broker Colin Semple, money and the

power to make more money are the end; for Thorpe, however, money is but one of several concerns. He perceives in the

bear squeeze an opportunity to take vengeance, to exercise power, to prove himself free of any restraint. As he later

states in conversation with Celia Madden, "There's nothing else in the world so big as power— strength. If you have that, you can get everything else" (236). The squeeze allows him an inebriating license to exercise his rage upon every man who has ever tried to check his will, from his father to his defrauders, including of course, the Kaffir stock traders. The fullness of his perversion is evident in the book's opening scene; he has just completed the maneuver with his own board of directors, and his imagination is vivid with hallucinations concerning the 113

possibli1ities for revenge:

Vistas of unchecked, expanding conquest stretched away in every direction. He had at his mercy everything within sight. Indeed, it rested entirely with him to say whether thre should be any such thing as mercy at all--and until he chose to utter the restraining word the rout of the vanquished would go on with multiplying terrors and ruin. He could crush and torture and despoil his enemies until he was tired. . . . A picture of these faces of his victims shaped itself out of the flames in the grate. They were moulded in a family likeness, these phantom visages: they were all Jewish, all malignant, all distorted with fright. . . . The faces were those of men he had seen, no doubt, but their persecution of him had been impersonal; his great revenge was equally so. As he looked, in truth, there was ony one face— a composite mask of what he had done battle with, and overthrown,, and would trample implacably under foot. . . . Then he shook off the reverie and got to his feet. (1-2)

Such a description of cruelty seems melodramatic until it

becomes evident that the author is not only serious, but

that Thorpe's plan checks out--it is workable,^ And as

Chapter Seven will show, the vision is more terrifying as

Frederic manipulates his readers into sharing Thorpe’s perverse satisfaction. The position gained by his stock manipulation gains for Thorpe a way of exercising cruelty-- and mercy, cruelly— without restraint. With the bears caught selling short, Thorpe is all-powerful.

The satisfaction Thorpe takes in finding himself a step ahead of his competition--that is, of everyone— and therefore having them in his power, is revealed in Thorpe's more personal relationships as well. When Lord Plowden 114

tells Thorpe, "You are going to be able to make and unmake

men as you choose," then adds, "I should be very much

obliged indeed if you would make me" (6), he makes just the

right request in the right way, for it acknowledges the

power that Thorpe wields, an acknowledgement all the

sweeter for having come from a titled personage. And

though Thorpe's always emotional rhetoric of appreciation

may mislead ("I shake hands with you again," [Thorpe] said,

speaking rapidly, "because this afternoon it was what you

may call formal; it didn't count. And— my God— you're the

man I owe it all to" [3]), his later action, deciding not

to make but to belittle Plowden and to marry the Lord's own

choice, reveals that after reflection, no gratitude is

felt.

With General Kervick, Thorpe behaves similarly. At

first, the general makes a happy enough addition to

Thorpe's bogus board of directors, and when he finds out

that the general is the father of Lady Cressage, Thorpe is pleased to keep the old man on retainer. But Thorpe will not suffer Kervick to forget his subservient position, or to feel any personal pride that might limit the depth to which he will plunge for money. Thorpe has by this time chosen to take Lady Cressage as his wife, and it annoys him to hear her father deride her for her filial inadequacies.

So he tells the old man to stop: "I don't want to hear you abusing your daughter. . . . you don't want to have any row 115

with me. You can't afford it. Just think that over to

yourself--you— can't— afford--it." Under Thorpe's rage, it

takes the old man but a moment to debase himself. And in

the process, Thorpe has learned just how he will be able to

use this man. He reflects, "If [Kervick] had the fierce meannesses of a famished old dog, he had also a dog's awe

of a stick. It was almost to easy to terrorize him"

(109). A military man, Kervick respects Thorpe's power.

Furthermore, he is bitter about her undaughterly treatment; thus he gladly agrees to her sale. He will supply Thorpe with any information he needs for his barely romantic negot iat ion.

Examples of Thorpe's exercise of unrestrained power abound. He squeezes his competitors with relish; but when he learns that he is pressing one to such a degree that his daughter will not be able to marry, he lets the old man off, thus losing thousands of pounds. The satisfaction of so doing is for Thorpe the same satisfaction that he gets from the squeeze. He shows a like liberality with many others, but such actions should not be seen as accommodation to a higher power or to some external ethical authority. This same Thorpe is willing to kill old

Tavender and even Gafferson without a moment's hesitation.

The liberality is only another method of confirming the nonexistence of any power or authority higher than his own. 116

But here is the twist that makes Thorpe's character

hold interest: even given his passion for license, he

nevertheless needs, simultaneously, to submit to a more

traditional authority, as is demonstrated by his genteel

aspirations, his need for familial affirmation, and his own

final turn toward altruism. Thus his character is

motivated by Law as well as License.

Though unwilling to allow Plowden or any other titled

person to lord position over him, he is nevertheless in awe

of all that is represented by the aristocracy. Thorpe is

wholly impressed with Plowden's family, with their home, with their seemingly natural sophistication, and he values his own blooming abilities to take part in such society.

His goal, he believes, is to be an English gentleman, and becoming one is the first expression that his new power takes. First he needs a family.

So, lacking one of his own, he buys one. He assumes control over his sister's children, both of whom are about twenty, and he generously takes them with him on his tour of the continent. Like any young people, they want such a trip, and Thorpe needs the polish their more educated tastes supply to the traveling party. The trip not only allows him to continue his stock market ruse by disappearing; just as importantly, such a trip allows him to begin to act according to his pattern of an English gentleman and a patriarch. Furthermore, the trip provides 117

him with the chance to meet and court Lady Cressage, after

Kervick telegraphs her whereabouts. Thorpe needs a wife if

he is to become a real gentleman, and she is the perfect mate. First, she has a title, and is therefore certified worthy by that traditional power that Thorpe so respects, a

realm into which his own authority born of power does not easily enter. She has been widowed by one noble--Christian

Tower's cousin— and might, as Thorpe learns from Kervick, have become the wife of another, Lord Plowden, had he not been too impoverished. Indeed, Plowden and Cressage are doubled throughout. Both are titled, both are poor, both are beautiful, and, most importantly, both are infatuated with Thorpe's personal and economic power. Cressage has the reputation of being the most beautiful woman in

England, he the handsomest man (56,4). When he needs the prestige that a lord can give, Thorpe courts and purchases

Lord Plowden. When he needs a wife to complete his English gentry ideal, he courts and purchases Lady Cressage.

Thus Thorpe proceeds to make himself a gentleman. He changes his given name from Joel to the more stately

Stormont, and he begins to fancy that indeed his own forefathers, London booksellers, are a fine heritage (66,

97). But this heritage is another window through which is revealed Thorpe's need for authority. And here we see it 118

embodied in his sister Lou. Lou takes, in a manner both

unique and undeniable, the role of Thorpe's father.

Thorpe and his father had fought. His father had

wanted him to go into the family business, the book trade.

So he sent him to a good school, but refused to send him to

university, lest he should be ruined for business ("he

thought that Paul's [Joel's schoolj would help [business]--

but that Oxford would kill it"). Not surprisingly, Joel

went his own way, and his sister, to whom Thorpe refers by the masculine name "Lou," took over the family business--in essence, she became the father's dutiful son, having married a mild-mannered man willing to join her in the business. Since then, the father as well as her husband, an invalid, have died, and she runs the shop alone; she is essentially male in position and habit, and she lives and works in the father's house and shop, where the Thorpe family has lived for three generations, where Joel himself grew up. And in their discussions— for Thorpe in his

London wanderings seems always to be drawn to his father's place, the bookshop— Lou takes the role of the father,

Thorpe the prodigal son. Thorpe wants, in the only sincere human longing— the only vulnerability--he displays, for his sister to believe in him--all that he has been able to do seems less significant since she does not. Now this longing cannot be attributed to sibling affection; they have none. Indeed, when Thorpe sets up his own household-- 119

with her children— he finds no reason to have her a part of

it, nor does she wish to be. But he does desire her

approval; to gain it will be to find himself finally in the

traditional relationship with his father that he never had. Thus we see the limit of Thorpe's self-centered

freedom— he will control the stock-market and even ruin noblemen; but he is willing to submit to the father, to

restore the paternal relationship, by taking her views very seriously and even submitting to them.

This longing then ends up shaping Thorpe's ultimate goals. Having gained the country estate, the certified noble wife, and so on, he is still unsatisfied. And Lou points out that he really does no good. It is then that the idea of social reform enters Thorpe's vision.

Disappointed with the life of the country gentleman, Thorpe travels to London on whim, and visits Semple, his broker, and Lou. Semple rightly analyses the boredom Thorpe has been feeling, and points out to him that he hasn't "the ten thousand little habits and interests that [gentlemen] take in with their mother's milk, and that make such a life possible. . . . It doesn't come to you by tradition,"

Semple advises, "— and you haven't the vacancy of mind which might be a substitute for tradition" (305). Thorpe is susceptible to suggestion by the time he reaches the bookshop, then, and his sister confronts him bluntly:

"Didn’t it ever occur to you to do some good with your 12 0 money . . . in the world at large?" (314-15). Ultimately

Thorpe responds once again, as to his father, with "you never did believe in me," and Lou as father responds, "I don't believe in you now, at all events." With this most painful stimulus, Thorpe immediately adopts the air of a misunderstood man, one who has intended to do great good all along— even though such philanthropic ideas are "quite strangers to his brain" (317). But he immediately embraces the idea of addressing himself and his money to the problems of the poor, and his character thus far has demonstrated that when such an idea dawns upon him, he carries it through. Thorpe has then, in essence, been forced to turn with his money and power to the most traditional and legitimate use of authority, the most legitimate use of money and power— the good of the commun ity.

It would be ridiculous to see Thorpe's new goals as wholly altruistic; in this regard, Larzer Ziff's conclusion that Thorpe's new direction is a good partnership between the businessman and the public seems too optimistic (Ziff

216). But clearly Thorpe is driven by his father and traditional morality, embodied in his sister and intensified by his own boredom. still, this is the same

Joel Thorpe who is driven by license, by affirming his lack of restraint. Thus the complexity that fuels Frederic's 121

most compelling characters: Thorpe is motivated by the

complex dialectic of License and Law.

IV

If Harold Frederic found the models for his new businessmen among his American acquaintances, a parallel

British referent was doubtless the source of a type developed with equal thoroughness, the aristocrat. For

Frederic knew the English upper classes well. Ernest

Earnest has noted that Frederic "strips the glamour from the British aristocracy" (231) and adds that while his contemporary Henry James "had viewed English life from the terrace; Frederic, with his newspaperman's eye and ear, knew what went on behind the scenes" (235).

In Frederic's works, aristocrats generally fit into one of two subtypes, and once again, like the public man and capitalist types, the aristocrats may be considered in the dialectic of Law and License.7 Those centering on the first pole of the dialectic acknowledge and accept the responsibility of their positions, and are motivated primarily by that responsibility. Like the responsible capitalists and public men, they accept the fact that their positions demand submission to another, final authority— the good of the many. Those centering on the second pole of the dialectic are motivated by their desire for personal freedom, an unchecked freedom which degenerates into the 122

extreme license and irresponsibility that high positions

allow--any submission to authority is avoided. In Gloria

Mundi, however, the work which centers most fully on the

peerage, Frederic manages to create a third type of

nobleman who is motivated both by responsibility, the

desire to work with just authority, and by license, the

longing for unchecked personal freedom.

Those motivated by license are the most common

noblemen in Frederic's fiction, a ratio consistent with the

author's familiar knowledge of the British peerage. In

comic portrayal, Frederic's ignoble noblemen are a

pleasant, if not very original, diversion. For example.

Lord Drumpipes— huntsman, world traveler, and boyhood

friend of protagonist David Mosscrop— is a worthwhile

addition to the menagerie of fools in March Hares. His

life consists of adventures and hunts, avoiding his

responsibility and other unpleasantries. The only

responsibility he admits is an undesirable wife, and she

has the good sense to die in time for him to marry a

beautiful American heiress. But in Frederic's more serious

novels, the same qualities are destructive. Such is the

case in both Gloria Mundi and The Market-Place.

Lord Plowden, partner and victim of Joel Stormont

Thorpe in The Market-Place, is in a difficult position.

His father died when Lord Plowden was relatively young,

leaving him titled but financially ruined. He has a worthy 123

roof over his head only because a typical country home

belongs to his mother's family. But like his peers, the Torrs in Gloria Mundi, moral judgment finds no place in his

life, and therefore does not interfere with his attempts to

restore the family endowment. To the degree that he is brighter than his Torr counterparts his immorality finds a

more complex expression. Lord Plowden has learned to make

money by lending the respectability of his position to

companies that lack it; that is, he sits on boards and

shines his title. And not only does he join Thorpe

energetically in his stock fraud, he takes Thorpe to his

country place with the idea of rewarding his crude

accomplice with his sister. Most notable in Plowden is a

complete willingness to submit to Thorpe's authority, to

tolerate what he cannot help perceiving in Thorpe as the

pretentiousness of new money— a perception that bothers him

far more than the unethical business scheme. In fact,

Plowden only conceded to meeting Thorpe as they sailed together to England because he thought the adventurer was an American— he would not have condescended to meet a

fellow Englishman of that class. Given Plowden's aristocratic air, his unashamed submission to Thorpe is pathetic— all the more so because he understands exactly what he is doing. 124

In spite of the pathos of such actions, however,

Plowden is still a character more sympathetic— or at least more interesting— than some of his fellow peers; he is at

least attempting to feel his responsibility. Unlike the other nobles that we see, including Plowden*s brother Balder--an expert huntsman too stupid to pass military exams— he has realized the responsibility that goes with his title and has tried to find a living, unethical though he may be. He has a sister to marry off, a household to uphold, a brother who may never be able to keep himself, and a title to pass on if he can make enough money to marry. But there are problems. As a peer, he perceives the professions as closed to him, and even his military career was aborted because, titled but without income, he was unable to keep face. As he accurately tells Thorpe,

"you were never responsible to anybody but yourself." But

Plowden, in what he perceives as his "ridiculous position"— a title with no money--is responsible to others as well.

Ultimately, however, it is his title and the mindset that goes with it which prove to be his undoing. He is willing to degrade himself to associate with Thorpe, but his manner and class sensitivities are still those of a lord. It does not occur to him that by making Thorpe— whose benevolence is his only real financial hope— wait on him, first at the train station, then at his country place, he is taking the role of an aristocrat. Thorpe senses this 125

keenly, especially when on their pheasant hunt, Plowden

orders a stool for himself but allows Thorpe to stand at

his post, like a domestic. Plowden means no malice, but

his actions are as class-bound as Thorpe perceives them to

be; during their argument about vendors shares Plowden even

refers to Thorpe's possible marriage with his sister as a

great match for a "commoner." And as a new economic

aristocrat— a person with the ability to control skillfully

money and nerve— Thorpe takes his opportunity to ruin

Plowden, whom he had earlier intended to help.

Gloria Mundi features the whole range of characters

typical of Frederic's noblemen. Most representative of the

degenerated type is the elder Christian Torr, the

Torr/Tower family patriarch. Young Christian Tower, the

naive orphan who becomes heir to the Torr titles and

fortunes, travels to Caermere, the family estate, expecting to meet an honorable English Duke, a nobleman like those he has no doubt read about in stories. But his disappointment with his grandfather is just one of many disappointments for which his fairy-tale conception of the English nobility has prepared him. He finds the duke ill, being waited on by physicians and nurses. Even more upsetting is the fact that his less than noble grandfather Torr has changed his sick-room into a kennel. His dogs surround him, the only life form for which he has— and has ever had--any real affection. The heir is still more disappointed when he 126

hears his uncle babbling to his dogs about running the hunt

through peasants' fields, and beating them when they

protest. The reliable Uncle Julius, the elder Christian's

critical brother and the younger Christian's good angel,

tells the heir that in fact he has planned this meeting with the duke to serve as a lesson, a lesson concerning

just what kind of man has been the head of the family. He

describes his brother as a man who has been "a duke for

nearly eighty years--which is, I believe, unprecedented--

but he has been an ass still longer than that" (77).

The two young nobles whom Christian has displaced as

heirs are of a similar kind. Like the elder Christian,

like Lord Drumpipes, like Plowden's brother Balder, they

live primarily for the hunt, having insufficient

intelligence to enter the military service and remaining

too unconcerned about life outside their own immediate

interest to involve themselves in other matters befitting

their position— including Parliament, which proved for them

insufficiently profitable. Lest we think that the vileness

of these men is just a trait of the Torrs, Frederic

comments upon the peerage through Lady Cressage, who tells

Christian that his cousins "were not worse than other men

of their class" (63). Her description of her late husband

as an "overgrown, bullying, blubbering, ignorant boy, who never got beyond the morals of the stables and kennels, and the standards of taste of the servants' hall" (267) is an 127

apt characterization of the elder Christian and his typical

progeny.

Now, in spite of they fact that they are of noble

blood, because of Christian's inheritance, the cousins will

be wholly dependent upon Christian for a living. Like Lord

Plowden, they have position but no money, and still less

wherewithal to get any. Willingly they submit to the

stranger Christian's care, and when he announces his

renewed funding of the hunt, they even forget, with the aid

of alcohol, all that they have lost. They have lost the

authority of position--they have gained a freedom from

responsibility. They will be cared for by Christian

because he has merited the goodwill of Lord Julius, who

holds the economic power in the family.

Lord Julius and his son Emanuel Torr not only

represent the wealth of the Torrs; more importantly, they

represent the less common aspect of the British peerage,

the responsible, devoted side. Lord Julius and Emanuel attribute their different attitude toward their position, as well as their considerable fortune, to the influence of

Lord Julius's wife, a Jewish woman known for her goodness and wisdom. The practical fruit of their attitude is

Emanuel's "System," a kind of highly moral feudalism which demands sacrifice and severe responsibility on the part of the nobles in authority in order to function well. But there are problems. Zeke Tisdale, the paternalistic lord 128

in The Return of The O'Mahoney, can in fact rule his domain

with goodwill and energy; his light-hearted system is

remarkably similar to Emanuel's. But there is one

important difference between Zeke and Emanuel: Zeke rules

in a land of farce, and Emanuel finds his responsibility in

a serious novel. To make his System work, Emanuel

essentially sacrifices his life to it, thus forming the

polar opposite of the Torrs, who demand the livelihoods of

their peasants. Emanuel's paternalism, though, is in some

ways as much of an affront to human nature as is his

cousins' degeneracy. It is dependent upon human goodness

and absolute dedication to duty--two rare motivators.

What does motivate these nobles? Both sides of the

Torr family act upon the authority that their titles give--

but their completely different senses of ethical

responsibility drive them to opposite extremes. The

Caermere Torrs stand, completely, on the License side of

the License/Law dialectic. For the degenerate huntsmen at

Caermere, the only authority even tacitly recognized is

economic authority; the only tradition to which they submit

is that which says a young noble should not have to work.

They will submit to the authority of the man who controls the financial support of the estates, because he controls

it, but they disregard their high position and the

responsibility it should bring. Lord Julius and Emanuel, on the other hand, realize that their authority derives 129

from the people that their positions allow them to affect.

Thus, position brings with it a responsibility, and they submit, even to their own detriment, to the responsibility

of position.

Most interesting though, and most thoroughly mixed in

his conceptions of Law and License, is Christian Tower,

protagonist of Gloria Mundi. Because he was reared on the

continent, away from his family and the rest of the British

aristocracy, and not as an English peer, he does not have

the aristocratic expectations of the Caermere Torrs. In

fact, Christian is a kind of blank slate upon which

Frederic can demonstrate the temptations of authority and

license that present themselves to a young English heir.

The discussion thus far has mentioned aristocrats driven

primarily by their desire for license, and others driven primarily by a desire to fulfill social responsibility. In

Christian, both drives are present.

When young Christian Tower is lifted from his dull position as a tutor on the continent to that of being the heir of the Duke of Glastonbury, he is rightly appreciative to those who have made his rise possible. Indeed, the ability to feel gratitude is remarkable in his nature, and this gratitude is coupled with the feelings of sentiment and rightness traditionally associated with storybook nobility. Furthermore, until the intervention of Emanuel and Julius, Christian has been essentially alone in the 130

world: his older brother has long been gone, his mother has

died, and his father he has never known. In fact, his only

first-hand knowledge of his father is a single memory, a

dream-like picture of a handsome soldier standing in a

doorway, going off to fight for a noble cause. This dream-

image is his model of right behavior, the only male role-

model that he has. In his twenty-sixth year, however, he

is suddenly made aware of two facts: he has relations in

England, and they want to do well by him. When these men

turn out to be famously upright, tremendously energetic,

and affectionately paternal, it is little wonder that the

fatherless Christian is willing to adopt their ideal of what it means to be an English duke. Emanuel and Julius, however, have actively worked to guarantee Christian's acceptance of their methods. They bring him to England only after their detective work has assured them that

Christian is a sensitive, highly malleable young man of good moral stature. Once in England, they guarantee his rejection of the more common conventional nobleman's life by exposing him to the degenerated old Christian Torr, a man whose mind and morals never surpassed those of a huntsman.

The British tradition of the degenerated aristocrat, then, is never really open to Christian. With a child's romantic memory of a father, an orphan's faith in his uncle and cousin, and a vision of what his grandfather has 131

become, he is happy to pledge his support Emanuel's

System. He cannot take charge of the Caermere estates,

however, until his grandfather dies, and the Somerset Torrs

insist that he winter in London in order to experience

"society" there; as Emanuel's wife Kathleen puts it, having

experienced the ideal society of the System, they want him

to experience society "which— well, which isn't in an ideal

state" (144) . Thus Christian goes to London. As he tells

his only London friend, "I am really living upon a

programme arranged for me, I should think, by a committee

of my relations" (173).®

A season of social activity has in fact been arranged

for him, complete with the proper social guide. Lord

Lingfield. Having just experienced Emanuel's rigorous idealism, he tires quickly of the calls and dinners. Thus

far, then, the time in London has precipitated the effect

Emanuel and Julius desire--Christian hates the

shallowness. But while in London, he also has time to

reflect upon Emanuel's System. The seeds of doubt have already been planted, for in his discussions with Kathleen,

Emanuel's wife, he has sensed the fact that something is amiss in the "ideal society." Most obviously, he has noted a phenomenon which Kathleen confirms— women seem to have little place in the System. Furthermore, it is wholly demanding of Emanuel's time and energy, and additional reflection helps Christian to realize the impossibility of 132

ever being able to run such an enterprise: "It was clear

that Emanuel’s hopes about his taking up the System were

doomed. It was not in him to assume such a part. He had

not the capacity for such work; even if he had, he lacked

both the tremendous driving energy and the enthusiasm”

(199). Christian, therefore, is in a difficult position.

He has anaylsed his situation and concluded that he has two

options in England: he can be a conventional person, but

the shallowness of convention and society makes him sick at

heart; or he can be the exceptional kind of being that

Emanuel wants him to be, but he does not fully agree with

the System, and he hasn't the ability for it anyway.

Having found himself incapable of turning his life

over to the authority of either option, then, Christian

impulsively turns to license. Though in small steps, he

has learned to like the life that money affords. He likes

to carry around a roll of notes, he likes to ignore

invitations, and he longs to enjoy what he ironically calls

the "soul-satisfying possibilities" of money. Now it is

Christian’s perception that giving up Emanuel's favor will mean giving up any additional financial rewards, except for a relatively humble yearly allowance. Nevertheless, he rejoices in his projections of bohemianism, and designs a course to make them possible. His plan is to not only give up the money, but to wholly reject the responsibilities that go with his title and to go abroad. On the continent. 133

he can live in luxury on his allowance. It seems, then,

that Christian is destined to live out a slightly more

sophisticated, continental version of the hedonistic

lifestyle of his Caermere cousins:

He would have a yacht on the Mediterranean; he would have a little chateau in the marvelous green depths of the Styrian Mountains. . . . Why, he could go round the world in his yacht, if he chose--to remote spice islands and tropical seas! He could be a duke when, and as much, as it pleased him to be one. Instead of being the slave to his position and title, he would make them minister to him. He would do original things--realize his own inner fancies and predilections. (201)

These daydreams are real possibilities for a man in his position. In fact, they are natural activities for a duke-- hardly different, ethically, from the self-serving activities of his conventional cousins. Simply put, they represent Christian's desire for unchecked personal freedom, and their appeal is strong. "Now that I am a free man," he tells Lady Cressage, "it astonishes me that I did not rebel long ago" (262). Before Christian can carry out his rebellious plan, however, his grandfather Christian

Torr dies, and the situation— along with Christian's state of mind— changes.

With his uncle gone, he falls immediately into a rather traditional mold of a duke, almost instantly. One moment he is about to ask Cressage to marry him and to flee to the continent. The next, a few seconds after having overheard Cora, his cousin's wife, tell Cressage about the 134

duke's death, he is changed: "Then, as other thoughts

crowded in upon him, he straightened his shoulders and

lifted his chin. 'It's all right,' he said, with a

reassuring wave of the hand toward the womenfolk of his

family" (272). With the responsibility now come to him, he symbolically assumes a different posture, and all

thoughts of bolting disappear. Austin Briggs has argued

that his position overpowers him, that in fact, "Christian

has not inherited power; it has inherited him" (170). This

may well be. Certainly the dialectic of Law and License

has found some resolution in the power of tradition. He

cannot submit to the authoritative demands of Emanuel's

System; but neither can he live a life of license either in

an English or a continental fashion. For the first time,

Christian holds a real position of responsibilty in a

family.

He is responsible to people other than himself, and it becomes clear that he likes the feeling. He immediately returns to Caermere and takes up the tasks of his office.

In his new position, he must balance the license that his wealth and position make potential, against the other extreme, that of sacrificing himself to duty. The former possibility is the greater temptation. During his first week as Duke, he nearly falls into the temptation of acting the lord over his family members and friends: on the day of the funeral, he does not come downstairs to meet Julius and 135

Emanuel, and he condescends terribly to his cousins and to

his friend, Westland. Fortunately, all of them make him

aware of his excesses.

Concerning the possibility of sacrificing his life to

duty, his disillusionment with the chances for reform seem

to preclude it, a preclusion all the more sure after

Emanuel's own rigorous example of the System fails. In

creating Christian from the tension in the dialectic of

License and Law, of freedom and responsibility, Frederic

creates a character more constantly interesting than would

fit within the limitations of either subtype. He is more

likable than the Torrs at Caermere, more believable than

their saintly cousins. And the fact that his character

develops largely as a young innocent dealing with the

options offered by various authorities relates him closely

to another Frederic type, the countryman in the city.

V

What was I to do? It's easy enough to talk, John, about knowing good people and all that, but how? . . . You dump a young countryman in a strange city, new at his work, without knowing a solitary soul— and then you complain because he gets lonesome, and makes friends with the only people who show any disposition to be friendly with him. Do you call that fair play? (163-4}

In this plea, Seth Fairchild is defending himself against the accusations of his brother John. John, who is a combination brother and father for Seth, has chastized the 136

young journalist for not having fully used his

opportunities at the Tecumseh Chronicle. Instead of

spending his time with men who could further his career and

improve his mind, Seth has fallen into the habit of

spending his evenings drinking beer with the Bohemian segmet of Tecumseh, a group he finds most receptive. His

rationalization, as stated above, is simply that he has been offered no other opportunity. John's chastizement has

its effect, though, especially when combined with an introduction to the reformer Richard Ansdell. Seth's subsequent change, during which he turns away from the license of the Bohemian life and becomes a reformer journalist, becomes the focus as the story continues.

Seth's position— that of the intelligent young man from the country who goes to the city to seek a better life

— is a common one in Frederic’s novels; indeed, one of the types that most frequently draws the attention of the upstate-New-Yorker-turned-London-correspondent is the displaced countryman. Upon entering the unknown city, encountering unfamiliar formulations of authority, and being faced with new social valuations, these men experience a variety of reactions. As in the types discussed above, the dialectic of License and Law is central, and is nowhere more thoroughly developed than in

The Damnation of Theron Ware. In Theron Ware this dialectic motivates a protagonist

who seeks to gain complete personal freedom while

simultaneously submitting himself to new seats of

authority. Thus Theron is constantly in turmoil,

constantly changing. Most obviously, through the influence of modern thought as represented by Father Forbes, his

friend Dr. Ledsmar, and Celia Madden, Theron goes through

what seems to be an ideological purging. Their influence

motivates Theron to cast off the beliefs and attitudes of

the parochial minister; in this light, his change seems to

be a turning away from authority toward greater license.

But like the ancient Israelites with whom the Octavius

Methodists like to compare themselves, Theron does not turn

from the domination of authority to freedom— he goes off

seeking strange gods--the stability of some new Law, some new authority, to replace the old. What seems a turn toward License then is also a search for a new authority to which he can submit; Theron is lost without some authority. The little that we know of his boyhood proves to be a paradigm for the wanderings of the adult Theron

Ware. 9 Only a few sentences are given to Theron’s boyhood.

We know that as a boy he suffered through an "early strenuous battle to get away from the farm and achieve such education as should serve to open to him the gates of professional life," and that he went through a "later wave 138

of religious enthusiasm which caught him up as he stood on

the border-land of manhood, and swept him off into a

veritable new world of views and aspirations” (17). Yet

these two phrases--actually parts of a single sentence—

establish Theron's lifelong desire to escape from

dominating authority. Frederic used the young countryman

protagonist with sufficient frequency and regularity to

allow us to view Theron1s "strenuous battle to get away

from the farm" in reference to the type. The kind of farm

life from which Theron escaped is detailed in many of the

stories, as well as in Seth and The Lawton Girl. And for

the character type in these rural poverty situations, the

relationship with the father is in every case either bad or

absent. In Chapter Two I noted the range of orphans and

fatherless boys in Frederic's works, as well as boys and men who are insufficiently fathered. One of the latter,

Seth Fairchild, is like Theron, stuck on a farm and essentially alone. His brother John gives some paternal guidance, but his father Lemuel, as I have already noted,

is ineffectual to the point of not being considered. When

Albert's renewed interest in Dearborn County politics make

Seth's removal from the farm desirable, Seth is anxious to leave his reponsibi1ities on the farm and learn the trade of editor in Tecumseh, where he finds himself guided and misguided, like Theron. Likewise, Reuben Tracy's father is dead, having left his family in poverty. To save the 139

family from starvation, Reuben's mother marries a wealthy

man who works the young Reuben to exhaustion. At first

opportunity, he gladly becomes a chore-boy to a town family

in order to earn an education that will lead off the farm.

The escapes of these two men from the farm, then, were

escapes from the dominating authority of labor. We may

reckon Theron's escape similar.

The only other recorded impressions of Theron’s boyhood concern his mother, and they are as positive as the

impressions of the farm, which we typically associate with the father, are negative. Strolling through Alice’s garden, he remembers that his mother grew flowers, a detail which carries the opposite connotation of the strenuous labor which was the boy's own plight. Later, during their rendevous in the woods, Theron feels, when brushing against

Celia, that he is nestling in an "innocent, unthinking transport of affection against his mother's skirts" (257), and at another point, he perceives in Celia "the mother that I idolized" (259). Objectively, the comparison demonstrates the comic ineptitude of Theron's perceptions— the wholly self-occupied Celia is hardly reminiscent of anyone's nurturing mother. True, something can be made about the broader, maternal idea here; Celia speaks of it, 10 and the romance-centered critics more so. For my purpose, it is most important to note that in contrast to the strenuous activity of the farm, which Theron flees and 140

does not try to remember at all, stands the opposite set of

images that relate to his mother, of a restfulness in her

abiding care. His experience of childhood that he carries

with him, then, includes both the enslaving authority of

responsibility which precipitates a turning toward freedom,

and a submission to authority, to the care of another, that

brings about contentment or stability.

The same pattern is the motive behind Theron's adult

activity; first, Theron is driven by an urge to rebel

against any kind of stability, any kind of order attempting

to take upon itself the right of imposition. But at the

opposite pole, equally strong, is a longing for stability,

a longing which results in his actively seeking some kind

of dominating law or order. As we have argued throughout

the chapter, this contradiction motivates Frederic's best

characters, including the rebellion of Theron Hare.

Theron's rebellion is most notable in the ease with

which he throws off his primitive Methodism, the bearing of

which has become as burdensome as his early farm life. The

church at Octavius is represented synechdochally by the

trustees, especially by Loren Pierce, and in his brand of

Methodism the denominational laws of conduct are key. As

Pierce tells Theron, "We stick by the Discipline an’ the ways of our fathers in Israel," that is, to a primitive

Methodist rule of life (27; my emphasis). Theron is correct in determining, concerning his Octavius charge. 141

that "their Methodism seemed to be sound enough, and to

stick quite to the letter of the Discipline, so long as it

was expressed in formulae. It was its spirit which he felt

to be complicated by all sorts of conditions wholly novel

to him" (105). He is anxious to dump the religious

subculture that has placed what seem to be meaningless

limitations upon his intellectual and cultural development.

While Theron is most weary with the authoritarian yoke

of Octavius Methodism, he makes the acquaintances that will

serve as his introduction to intellectual society. He has

decided to write a book about Abraham--a study that will

examine the implications of the son's revolt against the

father, and of the son's turning away from the father’s

idols. He makes the decision, significantly, just after

reviewing his domination by the trustees, and just before

first meeting Celia Madden and Father Forbes. The young

Theron, having left behind the drudgery of the farm, found himself drawn to Methodist religious fervor. As an adult, with his religion itself having become a laborious authority— primarily because the Octavius church and the trustees have made the Discipline their idol— he finds himself drawn to the more intellectual life in Father

Forbes and Celia, drawn with a fervor and completeness that compares with that "wave of religious fervor" that had once introduced to him another "new world of views and aspirations." 142

Theron’s conversion to intellectua1 ism is portrayed in

his first conversation with Ledsmar and Forbes. The two

have been enjoying the sport of baiting the innocent,

chuckling and exchanging glances at Ware’s ignorance.

Forbes has been playing the intellectual, dragging the young minister through some of the difficulties of modern

theology, saving for his knockout punch a seemingly off­

hand reference to "this Christ-myth of ours” :

Theron Ware sat upright at the fall of these words. . . . For the instant his mind was aflame with this vivid impression,— that he was among sinister enemies, at the mercy of criminals. He half rose under the impelling stress of this feeling, with the sweat standing on his brow, and his jaw dropped in a scared and bewildered stare. Then, quite as suddenly, the sense of shock was gone; and it was as if nothing at all had happened. He drew a long breath, took another sip of his coffee, and found himself all at once reflecting almost pleasurably upon the charm of contact with really educated people. (72)

Thus Theron is converted; and it is important that while he

may have been seeking license, freedom to do and to think

what he pleased, no independence of thought is ever

evidenced. He progresses directly from the ’’fathers in

Israel" to Father Forbes, whom Ledsmar calls the

"paternal, ceremonial, authoritative head and center of his

flock, adviser, monitor, overseer, elder brother, friend, patron, seigneur" (74) . Forbes parallels in authority the

Methodists and their Discipline, and Ware’s longing to be accepted by this authority leaves him little better off 143

than he was before— save for the fact that his authority is

a little more sophisticated.

Theron's church is not the only authority that

dominates him; as he characterizes the situation, his is a

"double bondage" (261)* His rebellion is not complete,

therefore, without the flight from the second limiting

convention in his life: along with dumping his religion, he

wants to be free from the limitations of Alice and their

marriage--the institution most clearly representative of

social authority. His reluctance to relinquish his

position allows him to take no public or formal procedings,

but he does dissolve the bond emotionally. Even before he

meets Celia, we see an increasing lack of concern for his

wife. He ceases to share with her his intellectual and

social growth; instead, he condescends to her just as he

condescends to his congregation. But his license is once again coupled with seeking authority— in this case, Celia

Hadden and her erotic aestheticism.

Theron is attracted by Celia's beauty, and his longing for license predisposes him to be converted to her idea of being a "Greek," that state which she perceives as

"absolute freedom from moral bugbears.After being introduced to the concept, Theron tells her, "I am going to get you to teach it all to me. . . . I want be a Greek myself, if you're one. I want to get as close to you— to 144

your ideal, that is, as I can. You open up to me a whole

world that I had not even dreamed existed" (202).

The irony of Ware's contradictory longings for License

and Law is exemplified here. He could hardly have greater

freedom than he has with his wife Alice; she is wifely in

traditional sexist ways, caring for his physical needs, and

leaving him, because of her naivete and complete trust,

free to do whatever else he desires. In Celia, however, he

is manipulated into accepting a rule of life and thought that he does not even understand; indeed, his conversion is precipitated by an infatuation with Celia's idea of freedom, not with real choice. But to submit to her authority, not freedom, is what he wants. During her pathetic discarding of him after he has followed her and

Forbes to New York, he tells her, "No other man in all the world can yield himself so absolutely to the woman he worships as I can. You have taken possession of me so wholly I am not in the least master of myself any more"

(319). This is one of Ware's few wholly accurate statements. His longing for license carries with it a longing to submit. He is not the master of himself; his search for license has been an attempt to cast aside authority, but he immediately begins seeking another authority to be ruled by. Celia does not want to take this position, however; unlike his convert-hungry Methodism, she can simply reject his offer. When he fails to be a 145

sufficiently interesting acquisition for Forbes and by

Celia, he is left completely free. Predictably, the free 12 Theron attempts suicide.

His failure, even at this, results in his return to

another authority figure, Sister Soulsby, a figure at once

authoritative and nurturing. Like Theron, she is both male

and female, religious and secular. Where she exceeds the

clergyman is in the sophistication of her adaption to a

flawed world. While Theron has been knocking about for an

ultimate system of beauty or truth, Soulsby has developed

an adaptive relativism which disregards transcendent ideas,

and judges actions only by whether or not their result is

one she desires. (This would seem to be her definition of

"good.") Early in the novel, she has converted Theron to

this pragmatic approach to his pastorate, assuring him— when the remnants of his traditional ethical code seem to demand his leaving the church— that he need not believe in the simplistic faith of his parishoners to remain in the ministry. She sells him on his superiority to his parishoners and even to his wife, pointing out that these differences are elements of a situation that he will simply have to deal with. She tries, with some success, to teach

Ware to adapt, to use whatever means are necessary to achieve his desired result. His acceptance of her system is first demonstrated with Theron's complicity in the defrauding of Levi Gorringe. And her second session with 146

Ware, when he comes to her for nurture after suffering the

rejection of Forbes and Celia, going on an alcohol spree,

and failing at suicide, furthers his education in what she

calls "the wisdom of the serpent."

Soulsby remains, it is true, one of the most

entertaining characters that Frederic ever created. So it

is tempting to see her common sense approach to life as an admirable one. Nevertheless, many critics today rightly see her in a negative light, and even as the moral villain 13 of the book. One such critic is Fritz Oehlschlaeger, who

interestingly concludes that "the ending of the novel can be read as a confirmation of the wisdom of Christian insistence on metanoia. Theron’s delusion is ensured by

Sister Soulsby when she prevents his ego from being entirely broken by God" (239). Certain of Oehlschlaeger*s particulars are accurate here: it may well be that real change— not Sister Soulsby's kind of adaptation, is

Theron's only hope. But what Oehlschlaeger misses, and what I wish to emphasize, is the historical impossibility of such a change.

It is interesting that Oehlschlaeger (even though he does not give any particular definition he wants associated with it) uses the transliterated Greek work "metanoia," generally translated in Christian tradition as

"repentence," or "conversion" and notes that it is the quality that Theron lacks. This is so. Etymologically, 147

the word transliterated "metanoia" is from meta (meaning

"backwards," "back again," "reversely"), and noeo ("to

perceive," "apprehend," "gain insight into"), compounded in

a word that means to change one's mind, or to turn one's

thinking around; theologically, to follow the true way of

God's righteousness. The problem, however, is that in

Theron's— and I think Frederic's--world-view, there is

nowhere for the mind to turn. The bridges to primitive

Methodism, and synechdocally to traditional Judeo-Christian

values, have been made unstable by the evolution and higher criticism that Ledsmar and Forbes champion, and effectively burned by Theron's easy and faithful acceptance of their intellectual authority. In fact, the bridges to any kind of morality with a philosophical undergirding more absolute than the pragmatically based relativism of Sister Soulsby have disappeared for the intellectual in Frederic's world.

Another of Oehlschlaeger's conclusions is related to that concerning metanoia, and confronts a similar problem.

He concludes that "what Frederic actually shows respect for in the Damnation are certain religious values" (253). The primary basis for Oehlschlaeger's statement is the admiration that Frederic seems to hold for the elderly preachers at the Nedahma conference who, in their day, served sacrificially with no thought of reward, and whose very presence "was in the nature of a benediction" (3). If the first chapter of Theron Ware, in which these elders are 148

portrayed, were a sketch that stood alone, Oehlschlaeger's

conclusion might be appropriate. For in contrast to the

younger ministers, the old men are portrayed as a devoted

and other-worldly lot. These descriptions of supposedly

holy men are not, however, the only data presented to the

readers' judgment concerning primitive Methodism. On the contrary, the church at Octavius— Theron's own charge— is

representative of that early Methodism. It is so old- fashioned, in fact, that the Free Methodists, who broke away in other cities because of the liberality of the

Methodist mainstream, never had to break away in Octavius.

As trustee Loren Pierce tells Theron, "We stick by the

Discipline an' the ways of our fathers in Israel" (27; my emphasis)— here a reference not to the ancient Hebrews but to the early Methodists, as it was in the earlier desciption in Chapter One of the older exhorters and circuit riders (2). Indeed, they have "kept to the old paths, an' seek for salvation in the good old way" (28).

Frederic’s vinification of these trustees, faithful though they may be to the good old Methodism, precludes a looking backward for something to respect. Of course

Frederic, one may suppose, respected the selfless giving that occasionally characterizes people in various walks of life in various historical periods. But any more specific idealization of old Methodism is strained at best, and cannot represent an element in the story that the author 149

respects. On the contrary, the Octavians' old-time

Methodism is what precipitates the events that lead to

Alice's sadness, Theron's demise, and all the accompanying

complications. A significant part of old-fashioned

Methodism as represented consists of sticking with the

"Discipline"— the codified regulations of Methodism that

are shown to behave as codified books of regulations always

do. They allow people to hold fast to the letter while

forgetting the spirit, to go through the motions of

religion while forgetting the purpose. If the first

chapter of Theron Ware, as a set-piece, can be read as a

satire of new Methodism in light of the old, the portrayal of the church at Octavius returns the favor by satirizing the attempt to live out old-fashioned Methodism in a new- fashioned world.

But in fact, the simplistic glorification of the "good old ways" is not a part of Frederic's vocabulary of thought forms. If he sees something good in the elder clergymen, it is in the act of honest adherence to a faith— a faith that Frederic conceived as currently impossible.

Oehlschlaeger may be right in interpreting the touching portrayals of MacEvoy's funeral and the old preachers at the Nedahma conference as positive; but if so, they are positive in a purely nostalgic way, as pleasant things in 150

the past that have now disappeared:

The sight of these venerable Fathers of Israel was good to the eyes, conjuring up, as it did, pictures of a time when a plain and homely people had been served by a devoted clergy. . . . These pictures had for their accessories log- huts, rough household implements, coarse clothes, and patched old saddles which told of weary years of journeying; but to even the least sympathetic vision there shone upon them the glorified light of the Cross and Crown. (2-3)

Nostalgically pleasant, yes. But their religion is not

pictured as a positive present day option--an important

distinction as we work toward a valid understanding of

Fredreric's modern world-view. Theron cannot without

tension turn to the god of an earlier Methodism; he prefers

the pose of intellectuals like Forbes and Ledsmar,

insensitive and self-centered though they may be, to the

faith of his forefathers. Still, Theron is seeking some authority, some law.

With his old absolute faith gone, Theron will not embrace a faith-in-spite-of-doubt, nor will he give up the comfortable living the church supplies. The only pilgrimage his thought can follow is that presented by

Sister Soulsby, a way which preaches accomodation, not real change, a philosophy which places the self at the absolute center of the world. That indeed is where Theron's interest lies. There is no metanoia in Theron*s attitude or in his world. Freedom is sought, and authority is sought, and the self remains the center of the dialectic. 151

Theron is the type of the innocent countryman who enters a

more sophisticated environment of the city to seek a better

life. But he is at the end of the book just where he

began, with his only real interest, himself.

In the first three chapters, Frederic's prefiguring of

the American modernists has been suggested in broad terms.

Concerning his place in the canon, it has been posited that

Frederic’s works do not fit into either of the dominant

schools of his period, realism or naturalism.

Historically, it has been suggested that Frederic lived in a Fatherless Age, an age that lacked authoritative absolutes. Psychologically, the point has been made that

Frederic’s own fatherlessness made him particularly receptive to the changes occurring in American ideology during the Fatherless Age. The most obvious result of these factors pertains to the motivation of Frederic's characters. His best characters, such as Theron Ware and

Joel Stormont Thorpe, are motivated by simultaneous, contradictory longings to gain freedom and to submit to authority— hence the Law/License dialectic of this chapter.

In the pages that follow, Frederic's prefiguring of the moderns will be explored in more specific terms: it will be demonstrated that he shares specific thematic and stylistic traits with many of the best writers of the modern period. To begin, my next chapter will center on 152

Frederic's use of fictive regions and intertextual characters. His Upstate New York counties will be compared with the region of the modernist best known for creating a world of his own, William Faulkner. 153

NOTES

■^In his dissertation, Robert Woodward suggests that Frederic's characters grew up slowly over a period of years, developing from book to book. He uses this point to confront accusations, like those of Warner Berthoff (132) that Frederic worked too hastily. 2 Opinions vary on Frederic's use of dialect. It is safe to say that it was not his greatest gift, and it never is as strained again as it is in Seth, his first novel. 3 In his preface to the uniform edition of his works, Frederic regretted the sacrificing of Jessica, arguing that she did not deserve to die, and that killing her off was a cowardly act (4-5). Nevertheless, the theme of expiation remains intrinsic to the text. A Austin Briggs reads Seth as comic throughout, and points to this scene as a proof of the novel's comic nature (Briggs 46-7)•

5Jean Frantz Blackall, in a study that in some of its conclusions parallels mine, points out that opposition is Thorpe's distinguishing principle, and that he demonstrates both commercial prowess and moral ambiguities (388) .

^Paul Haines points out that The Market-Place was quite timely in that the procedure Thorpe used was not at all unknown to the world of the stock market in Frederic's day. In fact, similar maneuvers were successful in real life. 7 In her dissertation, Nancy Siferd diagrams in greater detail her understanding of the English types appearing in Gloria Mundi (241 ff). Q In Chapter Eight, I will examine in greater detail the changes that take place during Christian's London experience. g Fritz Oehlschlaeger has written the most thorough article thus far on authority in Theron Ware in "Passion, Authority and Faith in The Damnation of Theron Ware." While I disagree with his romantic revisionist approach on a number of points, a few of which will arise later on, here it is most important to point out that his claim that Ware is "cut loose from all connection to place or past," 154

and that "Theron*s family is not even mentioned . . . (Oehlschlaeger 250) does not square with the textual evidence. 10 Many critics have written about the maternal idea, including Oehlschlaeger (Note 8), and John Crowley, whose Freudian reading in "The Nude and the Madonna in The Damnation of Theron Ware" suggests an oedipal triangle of Theron, Forbes, and Celia. ^Just how free from "moral bugbears" Celia is may be in doubt. Samuel Blufarb suggests that "her fin-de-siecle stance is no more than that, and she remains through- out . . . a prude" (30) . A case can certainly be made for his position. 12 In his dissertation, Robert Woodward suggests that Frederic may have at one time intended Ware's suicide to succeed; the Frederic papers relating to Theron Ware contain a full page of notes on the topic of suicide. 13 Sister Soulsby is the most controversial of Frederic's characters. The only thing agreed upon generally is that she does represent pragmatism or relativism. Oehlschlaeger criticizes her for keeping Theron from the repentence that he needs; Spangler perceives her as playing a decisive role in Ware's degeneration, noting that she is capable of doing good, but is incapable of "principled action"; Garner calls her diabolical, associates her with the "Prince of Darkness," and accuses her of bad faith. On the other hand, Witt sees her as a positive, purposeful, didactic aspect of the work; Stein suggests that she frees Ware from moral absolutism; and, for Warner Berthoff, who apparently doesn't much enjoy Frederic's work. Sister Soulsby is a high point, "as plain and comfortable as a warm bath." And so on. 155

WORKS CITED

Bauer, Walter, ed. A Greek-Eng1ish Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. 2nd ed. Revised and Augmented by William F.Arndt and F Wilbur Gingrich. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979.

Berthoff, Warner. The Ferment of American Realism. New York: Free Press, 1965.

Blackall, Jean Frantz. "Perspective on Harold Frederic's Market-Place.” PMLA 86 (1971): 399-405.

Bluefarb, Samuel. The Escape Motif in the Modern American Novel: Mark Twain to Richard Wright. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 197£.

Briggs, Austin, Jr. The Novels of Harold Frederic. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1969.

Brown, Colin, ed. The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology. 3 vols. Grand Rapids: Zondervon, vrnr.— ------'

Crowley, John. "The Nude and the Madonna in The Damnation of Theron Ware." American Literature 45 (1973) : 374- 89.

Dooley, Patrick K. "Fakes and Goods Frauds: Pragmatic Religion in The Damnation of Theron Ware." American Literary Realism 15 (1982): 74-85.

Earnest, Ernest. Expatriates and Patriots: American Artists, Scholars, and Writers in Europe. Durham, NC: buke UP, 1968.

Frederic, Harold. The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination. Eds. Charlyn Dodge and Stanton Garner. Vol. Ill of Harold Frederic Edition. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1985.

. Gloria Mundi. Ed. Larry Bromley. Vol. IV of Harold Frederic Edition. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986.

• The Lawton Girl. New York: Scribners, 1890.

. March Hares. 1896. Vol. 5 of The Major Works of Harold Frederic. 5 vols. New York: Greenwood, 1969. 156

The Market-Place. Eds. Charlyn Dodge and Stanton Garner. Vol. II of Harold Frederic Edition. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1961•

. The Return of the O ’Mahoney. 1892. New York: Dillinghaim j ”1899------.

. Seth's Brother's Wife. 1887. Vol. 1 of The Major Works of Harold Frederic. 5 vols. New York! Greenwood, 1969.

Garner, Stanton. Harold Frederic. U of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers 83. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1969.

Haines, Paul. "Harold Frederic." Diss. New York U, 1945.

Oehlschlaeger, Fritz. "Passion, Authority, and Faith in The Damnation of Theron Ware." American Literature 58 (1986): 238-55.

Siferd, Nancy Kay Blackford. "Textural Range in the Novels of Harold Frederic." Diss. Bowling Green State U, 1970.

Spangler, George. "Theron Ware and the Perils of Relativism." Canadian Review of American Studies 5 (1974): 36-46.

Stein, Allen F. "Evasions of an Aemrican Adam: Structure and Theme in The Damnation of Theron Ware." American Literary Realism 5 (1972): 23-36.

Witt, Stanley Pryor. "Harold Frederic as Purveyor of the American Myth: An Approach to his Novels." Diss. U of Arizona P, 1976.

Woodward, Robert H. "Harold Frederic: A Study of His Novels, Short Stories, and Plays." Diss. Indiana U, 1957.

Ziff, Larzer. The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation. New York: Viking, 1966. CHAPTER IV

FREDERIC AND FAULKNER: INTERTEXTUALITY

AND FICTIVE REGIONS

"Every novelist," writes David Daiches in The Novel

and The Modern World, "must select from the welter of

events which make up human behavior." No one writes down

everything that any character has done or felt, and when selections are made, they are based upon some principle of what is significant. "The modern novelist," Daiches continues, "is born when the publicly shared principle of selection and significance is no longer felt to exist, can no longer be depended upon" (5). This kind of limitation leads the critic to conclude that, "Every man is the pri­ soner of his own private consciousness, his unique train of association, which results from his own unique past" (8).

Daiches is writing about important English novelists of the first few decades of the twentieth century— Conrad, Joyce,

Woolf, and Lawrence. But I think that a similar claim can be made concerning the loss of a publicly shared set of values in America. My thesis is that an equally influential kind of fragmentation came about in post-Civil

157 158

War America, with the result being the collapse of

traditional sources of values, of traditional seats of

authority. Moral and intellectual standards held for

centuries began to be questioned, and a radical kind of

modern freedom emerged, a freedom that at once begged to be

contained and rebelled against containment; this

ideological disintegration, while it would not become

widespread for twenty years, surfaces in incipient form in

the works of Harold Frederic.

In Chapter II I discussed this fragmentation

metaphorically, and noted the parallels between the loss of

traditional authority in a society and the loss of a father

on an individual child, arguing that Harold Frederic's psychological situation as a fatherless boy rendered him particularly susceptible to such a period of ideological

fatherlessness; in Chapter Three I noted one of the most

important results of this fatherlessness— characters motivated by a dialectical impulsion fueled simultaneously by a desire for law and a desire for license. In this chapter, I will examine another result of the loss of a dependable set of publicly shared values, a result which suggests once again Frederic's similarity with the moderns: his creative use of a fictional region, particularly for his novels of central New York. 159

What does a writer do when the world breaks down?

What does he do after realizing that what holds true

for him does not do so for others, or at least, that he has no reason to think it should? Both the realists and the naturalists, as "objective" as the first purported to be, and as dedicated to "universal principles" as the second claimed, could presuppose a kind of practical absolutism.

The realist, even after theoretically disposing of a prioris, was nevertheless, if only by accident of birth, guided by a moral memory which contained the overwhelming sense of what is right according to the Judeo-Christian heritage. The American naturalists, while theoretically protesting, acted in a very similar way. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine writers more thoroughly moral than

Howells and Twain, Norris and Crane, and they are usually moral (not pious) in rather traditional ways. For the most part, their world had changed, and the changes may have been sad, but for them at least, it had not broken.

Frederic's world had. So again, what does one do when the world breaks down? One answer— start over and reconstruct. Nick Adams gives a post-dated parable: Go back to what you know best, the country along the banks of the Big Two-Hearted River, and begin again. Forget the world and remake a World, a personal world with a good dry tent and a fire, a stream with fish that you handle as carefully as you do your fire and food and concentration. 160

Concentrate only on the particulars of your world, keeping

your problematic mind on the particulars, away from

problems that have no solutions, at least for a while, at

least until, like the grasshoppers, you can adjust to the

world that has ended in fire. Nick built his world along

the river; Hemingway, following the same cure, had m^

Paris, Africa, m^ Michigan, m^ Pamplona and so on.

Likewise Faulkner had his Yoknapatawpha County, a

place where he could construct the space and control the

time, a place small enough to understand in a world that

defied understanding, where order, even if it could not

rule, could at least make its existence known by that of

its opposite--in any case, a state very different that the

ideological flux over the border. The map Faulkner drew of

Yoknapatawpha County is marked "William Faulkner, Sole

Owner and Proprietor,” and that is no small comfort.

An imaginary gazetteer of Harold Frederic's central

New York might be marked similarly. For Frederic, sensitized by his own loss to the losses in the world around him, constructed a world in which he would make his art, a fictive region which, more than any of his books, stands as his greatest achievement. The constructing of such a world strikes one as a modern practice, and sometimes the completed construction— and the philosophies that knock about inside it— seem equally modern. 161

Writing about a region was certainly nothing

revolutionary in the late nineteenth century. Local color

writing was already an established form by the time

Frederic sold Seth's Brother's Wife, his first novel of

upstate New York, to Scribners in 1886. Bret Harte's “The

Luck of Roaring Camp" {1868), along with much of his best work, was by then nearly twenty years old. Sarah Orne

Jewett had already turned in Deephaven (1874) , A Country

Doctor (1884) , and A White Heron (1886). George Washington

Cable had published much of his best known work in the late seventies, including Old Creole Days (1879), and Joel

Chandler Harris had already begun producing the work for which he would be best known, including his first volume of

Uncle Remus stories. Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings

(1881) .

Elements of local color were working their way into regional realism as well. Edward Eggleston had concentrated on the manners and custom of his southern

Indiana in The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), and E.W. Howe had told The Story of a Country Town (1883) . Twain had already found fame as a writer of comic sketches in The

Celebrated Jumping Frog of Caleveras County, and Other

Sketches (1867), Roughing It (1872), and Life on the

Mississippi (1883), and he had just published his best work on a larger scale with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

(1885). Even writers not generally associated with 162

regional writing were, in Stephen Crane's phrase, "doing

their regions," influenced at least in part by William Dean

Howells's dictums to write about what you know first hand,

an imperative that drives one home. Indeed, it is

difficult to imagine such works as A Modern Instance

(1882), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), and The

Minister's Charge (1887) outside Howells's own repeated

Boston settings, which draw upon the habits and manners of

his Boston as surely as Eggleston his Indiana and Twain his

Missour i.

What then is sufficiently unique about the settings

of Frederic's novels of upstate New York to warrant their

anachronistic comparison with the regions of a more modern

writer--with William Faulkner? How is Frederic's region of

Dearborn and its surrounding counties, Adams, and Jay, more

like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha than it is like the regions

of his contemporaries?

Most obviously, it is, like Faulkner’s, a region that

has no real-world referent. Frederic's counties and towns

resemble those that he spent his boyhood and young manhood

in, both in present form and history, but the region itself

is wholly fictive, though it may be, as Frederic states in his "Preface to the Uniform Edition" of 1897, "identified

in a general way with Central New York" (Correspondence 5-

6) . And as such, it places a different kind of

responsibility upon the imagination of the reader. While 163

scholars may enjoy finding the real-world sources of this

street and that building, the reader must finally accept

the fiction as a fiction; Frederic is not writing

sociology, regardless of how sociologically aware his

fiction is. Ultimately, the features of his region are not

those of Utica or Albany but of cities in Frederic's

fictive mindscape such as Thessaly and Tecumseh.

Carefully, then, his world may be termed "mythic," but

doing so invites misunderstandings and readings with flawed

emphases. The term invites a search for deep structures,

surfacings of the writer's unconscious, and sometimes a

less than scholarly symbol-mongering. Further, the term suggests that Frederic's work be placed in an American tradition of romance, the tradition in which Ishmael's real places are never on maps, but where truer truths nevertheless are discovered. Such readings do indeed bear fruit in a writer as complex and dense as Frederic, but they can cause problems as well. Readings accenting the myth of Yoknapatawpha County or Frederic's central New

York, while they may attract the reader to great psychological depths, can simultaneously cause her to miss the truth that lies on the fiction's surface, and the author's analysis of his society. Finally, to call a given fiction "mythic" is to suggest that some recreations of the 164

world are not mythic— a suggestion out of place in an era

when, like Frederic, most readers know how personal a world

can be.

A useful definition of the term "myth" is "the solidly

imagined realm in which a work of fiction is enacted"

(112). This is M. H. Abrams's most conservative

definition, but a worthwhile one for our study. Most

importantly, it implies that the myth exists apart from the

work of fiction, and in the cases of Faulkner and Frederic,

this is true. Both of these writers tell various stories

and tales which exist within a mythic world, a fictive mindscape, a greater text of the authorial imagination that

extends both in fictional time and space beyond the realm

of any single work. Because of the extension and the

intertextuality that is its most obvious result, the works

lay a greater claim upon the reader's imagination than that supplied in a single work's world— the texts interact and perfect each other's meanings.

One of the claims that Frederic's fictive world makes and supports is the historical claim, and its importance is one that distinguishes Frederic from his contemporaries.

One has little sense of the history of a region when reading Howells's Silas Lapham--that is, of a history that is unique to the fictive world in which the novel takes place. Howells's is a story of the new rich, and is a given that the new rich have come from somewhere--in 165

Lapham’s case, a geologically blessed farm in Vermont.

Doubtless Howell's contemporaries already knew enough

Boston history to allow the author's characters* social

movement to be justified, and scholars today can obtain a

similar knowledge. But Howells need not bother, for

example, to inform us concerning the history of Boston that

made a new upper class a set to be reckoned with socially.

He could presuppose that his readers would carry into their

reading a sufficient knowledge, that their knowledge would

correspond to his, and that real-life historical reasoning

would therefore meld with fictional historical reasoning.

A somewhat stronger effect is presented by Lemuel Barker's

hometown in The Minister's Charge, but the effect is gained

more or less through the kind of detail popular with the

local colorists. While Howells does help to demonstrate

the gap existing between Lemuel's home and his life in

Boston by dressing his mother in bloomers, the final effect

is more comically picturesque than indicative of the

history of a region. And naturally so— I am not lambasting

Howells. He is writing about the present problems of a young countryman, and he gives sufficient background to make Lemuel's feelings of radical displacement believable to his contemporaries. The same reasoning stands behind

Silas Lapham, and much of the rest of his work. A similar comment can be made concerning the works of

the naturalist writers, though for different reasons. In

Crane's tales of the Bowery, for example, he includes next

to nothing about the historical factors that have led up to

the demarcation of social classes. For example, in Maggie,

A Girl of the Streets, Crane does not need to tell his

readers about why slums exist in a given part of New York

City, or how people end up living in them. The possible authorial presuppositions exist for them as they exist for

Howells: (1) his readers may know enough already, {2) they may find out, or (3) they may deem extra-textual historical causes unimportant. Certainly in either of the first two cases, the Johnson family's confinement to a social class is easily enough discovered, and as for the third, formalist readers may not have much interest in the book anyway. Another example in Crane's work is George * s

Mother; there too, the reader is told little of the social past that created characters like George Kelcy or Charlie

Jones, or of why their fellowship in the upper room of their favorite pub is presented as more satisfying than that found in George's mother’s church. Frank Norris's settings are drawn with similar effect. His San Francisco is as intrinsic to his work as Crane's New York Bowery is to his. Setting is important in the development of charac­ ters in McTeague, especially in the secondary characters such as Zerkow and Maria whose perversions emphasize the 167

degradation of the slum. But their histories, beyond the

fact that they are linked to their environment of poverty

and greed, and for that matter the history of the city, are

of little importance.

The more important history for these naturalist

writers, both in Crane's Maggie and Norris's McTeague, is

their scientifically presupposed history of the race, a

history that occasionally surfaces to precipitate atavistic

actions. The bloody scene that opens Maggie features

"small warriors" fighting with "savagery," "in the modes of

four thousand years ago." Jimmy's home life is terrible,

but it is something deeper than a bad life at home that

makes his energy take the expression of a stone-throwing

primitive. Likewise, while Norris does tell something of

McTeague's poverty-stricken boyhood in the mining camp, the most important history is that given in Chapter 21, where we learn that dentist is driven by "the brute that in him

slept so close to the surface." He rightly admits,

regarding the dominating instinct that precipitates his

flight, "It's stronger than I am. I can't go back."

Naturally, and naturalistically, he ends his life bound to dead weight in a "primeval lake."

Both for the realists and the naturalists, who give their tales settings in places that are on the map, pertinent historical background must be carried into the story by the reader. That is, the reader is expected to 168

carry into her reading of their fictions the details of a

real world she already knows. This is true of the more

romantic naturalists, and even more true of those realists

such as Howells who perceived of their art as a direct

detailing of real life. Why, Howells might have asked, should he supply us a history that we could as easily get

from history books and newspapers? The history of his

fictional Boston is the history of the real Boston.

Howells could count on his readers' familiarity with 1880

Boston to supply all necessary background, Crane could

similarly count on his readers' familiarity with New York,

and Norris their familiarity with San Francisco.

Harold Frederic, however, like Faulkner, set about a

different task. His understanding of a fragmented world,

his personal imperative toward consistency and realism, and

his knowledge of the importance of historical factors in

their effects upon the present— what he called the

influence of the "dead men"— mandated a history for his

fictional region. In The Valley presents the early stories

of Frederic's New York, points out problems of social caste

that already exist, and even details the lives of figures

from whom characters in his contemporary novels will

descend. For example, it portrays the tension between the

British settlers, who want to recreate a European-style

plutocracy, and the Dutch settlers and traders, who are more democratic. In The Lawton Girl, which takes place in 169

the same area over a hundred years later, a similar kind of

tension exists between the upper and lower classes. The

well-monied Minsters, who own the Thessaly ironworks and

are at least in part— by negligence--responsible for the brooding labor problems, are descendents of Douw Hauvrensen, protagonist of In The Valley. In this ironic turn, however, it is the descendents of the anti- plutocratic Mauvrensen who are identified with the oppressors, and even they are barely holding their position against swindlers and unionizing workers. Lines of class are no longer drawn along the same lines of Dutch and

English nationality, but lines are drawn nevertheless.

Thus, in this intertextual historical play, Frederic is able to communicate a theme that will arise later in Gloria

Mundi, and that he stated in his notes for the later novel:

"People do not improve as the world grows older. They still fluctuate, as they always did, between imitating good models and then forgetting why they did so" (Briggs 15).

This kind of movement in history is like that gained by

Faulkner as we see the various families of Yoknapatawpha

County rising and falling through time. Like the

Mauvrensens, the fortunes of the Compsons, the Sartorises, and the Snopeses change positions from generation to generation, while the most basic social bifurcation, a class that controls the wealth and a class that does not

(but wants to), remains constant. These social and 170

economic inversions help to stengthen the claim on the

reading imagination— the reader's imagination is captured

not only by what happens in the text but by what must have

been happening in the myth, the greater story that stands

behind the texts.

Faulkner and Frederic are likewise similar in another

particular feature which strengthens the historical claim

on the reader's imagination. Though Faulkner's is a more

conscious effort at giving the background of particular

families, both men wrote stories of the Civil War set not

on the battle lines but at home— Faulkner's The

Unvanquished and the seven war stories collected in

Frederic's In The Sixties and The Deserter and Other

Stories. Both men set their stories in their created

regions, and by doing so expose one more link in the causal

chain that creates the society of their contemporary

novels. It is also worth mentioning that Frederic used boy

narrators in his Civil War stories; as one critic has

noted, "the persistence of the naive, usually orphan,

adolescent narrator . . . suggests that Hemingway and

Salinger are a bit later in the field than is often

realized" (Baldanza 251) . Faulkner, of course, did the

same in The Unvanquished; in the case of both Frederic and

Faulkner, this choice holds a number of advantages. First

of all, the use of boys at home in worlds largely made up of women reminds the reader that a unique society is 171

created when the able-bodied men are at war. And, as with

Twain’s use of Huck Finn, the boy narrator gives a

believable naivete to the perceptions— a child's

subjectivity seems less likely to distort, and with such a

believable narrator reporting, the effects of irony are heightened.

Faulkner's saga of changes from pre-Civil War times

through Reconstruction and into the twentieth century is

too well known to be recounted here. The reader's knowledge of Bayard Sartoris, for example, initially formed

in the novel Sartor is, is broadened and even revised when, nine years later, Faulkner presents in another part of his

Yoknapatawpha tapestry the wartime stories of the boys

Bayard and Ringo. While Frederic seems to have set out less consciously to create a family saga, he nevertheless achieves something of the same effect, as in the case of the Bovce family. When General Boyce is initially introduced, he is presented as the drunken father of Horace

Boyce in The Lawton Girl. While walking along the street together, Horace and his future partner, the painfully upright Reuben Tracy, are commenting upon the unseemliness of a local tavern. Then much to Horace's chagrin, the two hear Horace's father's name shouted inside— he is obviously the chief reveler. Throughout the book, the elder Boyce is portrayed as the rather companionable but short-sighted

General, whose drinking and carousing have destroyed the 172

family name and fortune. And though he is more personable

than his insufferably conceited son, the reader's opinion

of him cannot stand too high. The character expands,

however, when the Civil War stories, published four years

after The Lawton Girl, are considered.

A contrasting view of General Boyce, the leader of

"Boyce's Brigade," can be derived from "A Day in the

Wilderness." In that story, Boyce is an admired officer,

and one who even comes to visit his wounded. As the boy hero Lafe is lying wounded in his hopital bed, he hears voices and finds a half-dozen officers near his bed.

The light hurt Lafe's eyes, and he closed them. The general's cheery voice remained in his ears, though, and conveyed so true a notion of the man that Lafe seemed to continue to behold him, the red torchlight heightening the glow of health on his round cheeks and shining in his brave, kindly eyes. (226; my emphasis)

In this passage, the reader is following the perceptions of

Lafe, but the evaluative phrases carry the voice of the author as well. And it is one of these authorial phrases that tells us that Lafe's perception was "so true a notion." The general pays just attention to the accounts of the boy's actions, and sees to the punishment of the battle scavenger, Red Pete, who, like some of Faulkner's non-soldiers, has used the war for personal gain. This portrayal, then, gives support to a more positive reading of General Boyce's actions in The Lawton Girl, such as his 173

disowning of Horace after his part in the Minster swindle.

A more ambiguous mention of Boyce, however, plays a part in

another of the Civil War stories. In "The War Widow," the

fact that General Boyce was even then a heavy drinker is

confirmed. The boy-narrator of "The War Widow" tells us

concerning his magnificent cousin Alva Turnbull's rapid

military rise, "We understood vaguely that he might have

climbed vastly higher in promotion but for the fact that he

was too moral and conscientious to get on very well with

his immediate superior. General Boyce, of Thessaly, who was

notoriously a drinking man" (180). What makes the

statement ambiguous is the fact that the reader is as

predisposed to think the worst of Alva as his family is

predisposed to think well of him, since his rise has drawn

all attention away form the equally faithful but less

gifted family members. He is too much the hero, and the

justification voiced sounds too much like the excuse made

by an adoring family for a child's failure to do well.

These different portrayals, however, are far from

inconsistent. in The Lawton Girl, General Boyce's commonness is a refreshing relief from his son Horace's pretentiousness and Reuben Tracy's ivory-towered piety.

Nevertheless, the general's boozing and careless affiliations lead to his destruction and indirectly to

Horace's. The stories thus form the historical motives 174

that stand behind another Frederic/Faulkner similarity,

this one between The Hamlet and The Lawton Girl.

In"the beginning of The Hamlet, Jody Varner has

decided to cheat Ab Snopes by letting him raise a crop on

one of the Varner farms, then scaring him away at harvest

time with threats of exposing Ab's former criminal acts.

But Jody finds out a bit about Snopes's background, and

realizes the impracticality of any scheme to defraud Ab

Snopes by intimidation. In a typical over-reaction, Jody

then hires Ab's eldest boy Flem to work in the general

store, and as the story continues, Flem's single-minded

dedication to business and penuriousness in general allow him to assume most of what was and would have been Jody's.

In fact, Jody, with his well dressed swagger, passes from significance. Faulkner's story is well known; less well known, however, is the fact that Harold Frederic told a very similar story in The Lawton Girl. In Frederic’s parallel story, General Boyce owns a hardware business, but after the war, has taken on as an associate Schuyler

Tenney, a character whom one critic, in an off-hand but accurate characterization, has called a "Snopes” (Briggs

79). In Chapter III, I characterized Schuyler Tenney as one of the new capitalists, neat, quiet, efficient, and able to work his immoralities within the boundaries provided by law. He is a man who does nothing merely for pleasure, but whose every inclination is bent upon 175

acquisition. The type is repeated in Flem Snopes. In

fact, the two characters and their schemes are very similar

indeed. Both begin as clerks in the businesses of men who

lack the business minds to succeed against those who abide

by the highly competitive economic guidelines of the late nineteenth century. As their careers continue, both manage

to take over more and more of the businesses until they

become owners, and both do so with a quiet ease. Schuyler

Tenney works General Boyce into his debt just as Flem

Snopes does Jody Varner, and in doing so, Tenney gains an

advantage over the only slightly more discriminating Horace

Boyce, just as Snopes gains advantage through Jody over

Will Varner.

The parallel schemes of Snopes and Tenney are just one

way that the two authors demonstrate the shifting nature of

class and authority in a historical context, in both cases

by detailing the economic changes of their regions.

Faulkner even more securely develops his region’s historic

and economic context by portraying the riches to rags

regression of the aristocracy of the old South--one of the

recurrent themes of his Yoknapatawpha text. But Frederic preceded Faulkner with a story of central New York that, if

less gothic, and even less tragic, is equally the story of a family’s fall. 176

Seth's Brother’s Wife is set on a decaying farm in

rural New York. The Fairchilds, once a great county

family, have fallen on hard times since the Civil War

ended, and their prominence has long fallen away. Albert

Fairchild, the eldest brother and a successful lawyer, home

for a funeral visit, tells his brothers that agriculture is dead in New York State, and that the decay that they see on

their farm is "the natural course of affairs, so long as the East tries to compete with the West in farming" (61).

Earlier he has bullied his aged aunt, who still cherishes the memory of the glory days, with this reminder:

Your grandfather Roger was a journeyman shoemaker, who walked all the way here from Providence. There was nothing incongruous in his son becoming a Senator. Very well; if you have a state of society where sudden elebations of this sort occur, there will inevitably be corresponding descents— just as lean streaks alternate with fat in the bacon of commerce. The Fairchilds went up— they come down. They have exhausted the soil. Do you see? (56)

The statement above is reminiscent of one of the ironies with which Jason Compson III might have battered Quentin.

And though the statement comes from the deceptive Albert, here he seems to be speaking something like the truth. On the Fairchild farm, the livestock lacks vigor, the buildings are in disrepair, and as on the Compson estate, the farm land has gradually been sold off to paydebts.

All that is left is mortgaged. While the Fairchild’s decay owes something to bad management, it is nevertheless true 177

that best years of agriculture in Dearborn County have

passed^ and rural life is taking a secondary position to

life in the growing cities. The contrast is made clearer

when the Fairchilds are considered in the context of the

stories set on farms twenty years before, during the Civil War. In those stories, farmers like Abner Beech in The

Copperhead, Arphaxed Turnbull in "The War Widow," and to

some degree Elisha Teachout in "The Deserter" are the

leading men in their communities, the wealthiest and the most respected. The same is also true of Seth's grandfather (also named Seth), a farmer and a state senator, but Seth's father, the inept Lemuel, had been in the generation that experienced the farm's decay. The boys are satisfied to leave; only Aunt Sabrina, living like

Reverend Hightower or Rosa Coldfield in the glorious past, still loves the country her family settled.

In all of Frederic’s works with contemporary settings, the most successful men are always the city dwellers, factory owners and merchants such as Stephen Minster in The

Lawton Girl and Jeremiah Madden in Theron Ware. Thus

Albert's statement takes on its full significance in

Frederic's region only when it is understood intertextually and therefore historically--Frederic readers have seen in the stories and novels the historical economic progression of the district that Albert describes. 178

Like Faulkner's rural South, Frederic's rural New York

districts are impoverished. They are not, however,

considered below the cities in every way. And here again,

we see a similarity between Faulkner's use of his rural

region and Frederic's. Cleanth Brooks has written that

"Faulkner's work . . . embodies a criticism of the

prevailing commercial and urban culture, a criticism made

from the standpoint of a provincial and traditional

culture" (Brooks 2). As such, Yoknapatawpha County

provides Faulkner with "a vantage point from which to

criticize, directly or perhaps merely by implication, the powerful metropolitan culture" (1). If we take the liberty of changing a couple of Brooks's adjectives--"prevailing" to, say, "ascending," and "powerful" to "rapidly expanding," we have in the passages quoted above an accurate description of Frederic's use of his fictive New

York. This becomes most obvious when we consider the pattern of details associated with the city in Frederic's

American novels.^

Beginning with Seth* Brother's Wife, Frederic associates decadence and economic power with the city.

Albert, the eldest Fairchild brother who attempts to buy a congressional seat, despises the farm, and has lived all of his adult life in New York City. There, this man who is rightly distrusted even by his brothers, is well thought of, and there he has learned his method of political 179

influence. On the night his when his journey to bribe Abe

Beekman results in his murder, he has just returned from

New York with the necessary cash. Beekman, always one of

Frederic's most reliable voices, draws the urban rural

distinction clearly in this passage, where he is explaining Albert's political mistake to his brother Seth:

They tell me ther air* some country caounties in th' State where money makes the mare gao. But Jay ain't one of 'em. Yer brother wanted to git into Congress. Ther was nao chance fer him in New York City. He come up here 'n' he worked things pooty fine. I'm baoun* to say, but he slipped up on me. Bribes may dew in yer big cities, by they wcn't gao daown in Jay. (383)

The difference in values pointed out by this passage corresponds with the differences of character in the two men, Beekman and Albert. In Chapter Three, I noted that both are types of the public man, but that while Albert works primarily for himself, Beekman realizes that his authority is derived from the community, and that he must therefore hold himself responisble to it. The city/country distinction reminds the reader that the sense of interdependency that Beekman feels may be common enough in

Jay County, but the city fosters in its place an independence and anonymity that make the rise of a purely bad man like Albert possible.

An equally successful pairing that highlights the city/country distinction is that of Annie and Isabel, in whom Frederic rather nicely disguises a city cousin/country 180 cousin conceit. Both are Seth’s cousins, and both are prospective lovers, Annie the virtuous dark and Isabel the seductive light. (Note the reversal of the romantic convention.) More importantly, Annie represents the values of a rural village culture— her demeanor is as genuine as

Isabel's is staged; Annie is quiet while Isabel lapses into speeches "like a tragedy queen on the stage"; Annie wants whatever is best for Seth, and accepts his laxness quietly, while Isabel coerces him for attention, and would have him make his brother a cuckold to break her boredom. The distinction is most evident, if melodramatically so, when

Seth falls into the river during the picnic scene: Annie immediately goes in after him, risking her life; Isabel remains on the bank, but she is anxious to share half the credit for Seth's salvation. Her half consists of providing her lap as pillow for Seth's wet head.

Frederic's characters need not fall under the extreme influence of New York City, however, to forfeit the values of the rural village culture. Seth Fairchild finds sufficient stimulation for a hearty debauch within his first few hours of having set foot in Tecumseh, the chief city of Frederic's fictive region. Likewise it is in

Tecumseh that the protagonist of The Lawton Girl, Jessica, becomes a prostitute after being led astray--and away from the village of Thessaly--by Horace Boyce. In that same novel. Judge Wendover, who along with Schuyler Tenney plans 181

the defrauding of the Minster women, comes from New York,

and Horace Boyce, whose pose as a cosmopolitan fop makes

him a sucker for the Tenney/Boyce plot, has just returned

from a tour of the chief cities of Europe.

As a young man reared on the farm, Theron Ware also

pays a price for his increasing urbanization. It is at the

Nedahma Conference in the major city of Tecumseh that

Theron's head is turned toward the possibi1itites of a

pulpit before a fashionable congregation. His assignment

in Octavius, though a smaller city than Tecumseh, is

considerably larger than Tyre, his former charge. In

Octavius he is introduced to the monthly installment plan,

a culture sufficiently cosmopolitan to include a heterodox

priest and a tantalizing red-headed decadent, and most

importantly, a pragmatic, faithless approach to religion

which finally results in his spiritual death. And the death-blow, significantly, is dealt in New York. Theron

chases Celia and Forbes there to receive it, half-drunk and

in style. He then goes on a week-long bender, and when all his religious errors point to the spiritual death of the self and a re-awakening to his faith, he is "saved" by

Sister Soulsby, who, like Seth's temptress Isabel, is associated with cities.

While an association of the city with the loss of rural village values is clear enough, especially in

Theron's regression, the shortage of well developed good 182

characters in the book makes the urban/rural comparison

somewhat difficult to complete. Theron's wife Alice*

however, can represent the sincerity and uprightness which

Frederic seems to associate with rural values; but she also

stands as an example of just how out of place those values

are in a world of Celias and Soulsbys. Still, she

maintains throughout her honest faith. Early in the story,

when she is saddened after being sent to Octavius instead

of Tecumseh, she simply says so. Later she submits to the

limitations of the Octavius bigots, though she knows they

are wrong, and she does not let their narrowness destroy her faith. She even keeps her faith in Theron when he is at his insufferable worst. And finally it is she--not

Soulsby or Celia--who insists that Theron, who no longer believes, leave the ministry. Morally and structurally, she stands opposite Sister Soulsby--Alice is as innocent and faithful as Soulsby is worldly and practical (though

Alice's faith has at times its own practicality). For a complete coming together of rural goodness and cunning, however, I will suggest the importance of another character, Abe Beekman. Doing so will direct our discussion to another--and possibly the most important-- benefit that arises naturally from the use of a fictive region: the natural development of intertextual characters. 183

Frederic was not alone among late nineteenth century

writers in using recurrent characters. Possibly the most

famous example among Frederic's contemporaries is Mark

Twain's use of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. The Adventures of

Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn do not,

however, strike the reader as being cut from the same

cloth. The reader who encounters the second book first

will likely have trouble perceiving the Huck Finn of the

first book the same boy he has come to know on the river

voyage. Part of the difference is caused by the growth of

Twain's technique: the relatively mundane omniscience of

Tom Sawyer is naturally less compelling than the successful use of a naive narrator and complex dialect of Huck Finn.

But additionally, the serious moral struggles portrayed in the second book seem to demand a mind other than the less developed and less intelligent Huck of the first.

William Dean Howells also repeated characters, and with a consistency one would expect from Howells's nearly perfect craftsmanship. The Bartley Hubbard who interviews the title character of The Rise of Silas Lapham is quickly identified as the Bartley whom friends and readers have learned to distrust in A Modern Instance. During the

Lapham interview in Chapter One, his cynical interjection,

"'Worked in the fields summers and went to school winters: regulation thing,” as Silas is beginning his tale of poverty and success brands Bartley (7). Likewise The 184

Reverend Sewell whose comments on life and literature

parallel the author's own at the Corey dinner party in

Chapter 14 of Silas Lapham is consistent with the clergyman

in The Minister's Charge whose conscientiousness makes him

feel keenly his own responsibility in the life of his "charge," Lemuel Barker.

In Twain's work then, we have recurring characters

who, while appearing in multiple texts, would in fact

function quite as well in each text independently. And in

Howells, the actions of recurring characters viewed in

extended action are consistent with their briefer

appearances, though nothing has changed off-stage to suggest a larger intertextual myth. Twain’s recurring characters do not necessarily detract, as long as the

reader keeps her imaginary boundaries up between the texts; and Howells's recurring characters do add some richness, to

Silas Lapham, for example, for readers who are also familiar with A Modern Instance and The Minister’s Charge.

Other examples can be found as well; I bring these to the fore because they help to highlight the far more extensive use to which Harold Frederic uses recurring characters, and which suggests to me the term intertextual in describing them; that is, Frederic introduces recurring characters in such a way that the fullest understanding of each text is dependent upon a familiarity with all the texts. The impression is that the characters have an existence apart 185

from the printed page, that somehow in Frederic's literary

mindscape of central New York, all of these characters are

alive and only occasionally step into a book. We feel that

we no more know them completely from one or two fictional

meetings than we know new neighbors from one or two

conversations. As with Bayard Sartoris, Quentin Compson,

or Flem Snopes, the next book may tell us more about the

character's present, past, or future that may clarify some

ambiguous action and even necessitate revaluation. For

example, when Quentin swears that he does not hate the

South at the end of Absalom, Absalom, the words ring very

differently if we have added to our knowledge of the future

of Quentin and Yoknapatawpha County by reading The Sound

and the Fury. The characterizations in the two novels work

intertextually to change and heighten their claims upon the

imagination. As Cowley has stated, the Yoknapatawpha books

create a pattern and "its existence helps to explain one

feature of his work: that each novel, each long or short story, seems to reveal more than it states explicitly and to have a subject bigger than itself" (431). Here I will look at the similar effect of intertextual characters on the interpretation of Theron Ware.

Abe Beekman is particularly important intertextually, and I suspect that it is because his narrative contribution must be understood intertextually that his significance is often overlooked or underestimated in Theron Ware. In 186

Chapter Two, before his first meeting with the Octavius

trustees, Theron has been remembering the years spent at

Tyre. The first year year was spent happily going into debt, the second suffering with the debt, tortured by the hostility of a congregation which knows its pastor is "poor pay" and a bishop who sees value in the suffering the young pastor is enduring. This line of thought leads to the reflection below:

Beginning in utter blackness, the third year, in the second month, brought a change as welcome as it was unlooked for. An elderly and important citizen of Tyre, by name Abe Beekman, whom Theron knew slightly, and had on occasions seen sitting in one of the back pews near the door, called one morning at the parsonage, and electrified its inhabitants by expressing a desire to wipe off all their old scores for them, and give them a fresh start in life. As he put the suggestion, they could find no excuse for rejecting it. He had watched them, and heard a good deal abouth them, and took a fatherly sort of interest in them. He did not deprecate their regarding the aid he proffered them in the nature of a loan, but they were to make themselves perfectly easy about it. . . (20-1)

And a few moments later, in the same revery, now centering on the blessedness of his religious life, Theron

smiled to remember that Mr. Beekman, speaking in his shrewd and pointed way, had asked him whether, looking it all over, he didn't think it would be better for him to study law, with a view to sliding out of the ministry when a good chance offered. In amazed him now to recall that he had taken this hint seriously, and even gone to the length of finding out what books law-students began upon. (22) 187

For the critic unfamiliar with Seth's Brother’s Wife, these

references to Beekman mean little. But on the other hand,

readers familiar with the Frederic canon know that the Jay

County boss is a master of character discernment: simply

put, he makes no mistakes. Therefore by referring to

Beekman's judgment, Frederic is telling his readers how to

read the novel.

In his reading of the Theron Ware, John Henry Faleigh

praises the novel by writing, "I know of no other novel in

which this device of involving the reader in the

imperceptions of the protagonist is so artfully and so

fairly done, and yet no other novel that is so puzzling,

without being at all incomprehensible, in its early parts.

. . . Only at the very end are all suspicions allayed"

(213). Now generally Frederic deserves this praise.

Indeed, as I will emphasize in Chapter VII concerning The

Market-Place, Frederic is uncannily able to manipulate his

readers into the perceptions and imperceptions of the protagonist. But concerning Theron's character Frederic is not trying to be incomprehensible; in fact, Beekman's judgments should function to help the reader anticipate the action in an otherwise puzzling set of perceptions.

It is important that these passage occur early in the novel. For at this point, Theron is still enjoying the religious high of the annual Nedahma Conference, which though a business meeting of the district, also performs 188

the function of spiritual renewal— it works like a camp

meeting for clergymen. So inspired is Theron that he has

taken his failure to achieve the lucrative Tecumseh post

without dismay. Indeed, in the same revery in which the

passages that refer to Abe Beekman appear, Theron also

reflects that

The influence of the Conference, with its songs and seasons of prayer and high pressure of emotional excitement, was still strong upon him. It seemed years and years since the religious side of him had been so stirred into motion. He felt, as he lay back in the chair, and folded his hands over the book on his knee, that he had indeed come forth from the fire purified and strengthened. The ministry to souls diseased beckoned him with a new and urgent significance. (22)

Clearly then, the reader unfamiliar with Beekman will delve into the book with expectations, which, if not necessarily false, are certainly less helpful in anticipating Theron's outcome than those of the informed reader. The uninformed reader may even believe that Beekman tempted him to go into a more lucrative profession, and that Theron, spiritually strong, would not give in. The informed reader, however, knows from Chapter Two that Abe has spotted a weakness, and that Theron had best get out of the ministry. Such a foreknowledge continues to play a part in the informed reader's perception of many scenes. For example, when

Sister Soulsby, who many readers continue to see in a positive light, encourages Theron to stay in his 189

profession, the reader who knows the greater text realizes

that the fund-raiser is not as perceptive as her knowing

manner and clear superiority over Theron make her seem, and

that she in in fact encouraging Theron in a dangerous

direction. The book's finale, in which Theron is

disgraced, his marriage functionally destroyed, and his

faith eradicated, confirms the logic of the larger text,

and stands as a natural result of Theron's not taking

Beekman's advice. Too much credit is given Sister Soulsby

for her seemingly insightful statement to Alice, "If there

hadn't been a screw loose somewhere . . . Octavius wouldn't

have hurt him. No, take my word for it, he never was the

right man for the place. He seemed to be no doubt, but he wasn't" (341). She seems to have forgotten that it was through her encouragement that Theron remained in the parish ministry after having decided--with pre-Soulsby professional integrity--that his change of belief mandated a change of work. "Just put a good face on it," the sister had told him, "and make up your mind to get through by treading on as few corns as possible, and keeping your own toes well in, and you’ll be surprised how easy it'll all come to be" (174). Her lesson in parish pragmatics did give Theron a new beginning, but a beginning along a trajectory of bad faith toward increasing degeneration.

Sister Soulsby is the soul doctor of the last chapter only because she treats a symptom that her earlier medicine has 190

precipitated. Abram Beekman, whose given name means

"exalted father," took a "fatherly sort of interest" in

Theron, and gave the minister a very different kind of new

start in life, both with financial relief and advice that

would have saved him considerable trauma. But just as

Abraham--the subject of Theron Ware's proposed book—

rebelled against his father and sought a new god, Theron

rebelled against the advice of Abram Beekman.

An intertextual understanding of Celia Madden also

changes the way that Theron Ware is read. Opinions of

Celia's function in the book vary widely; no one doubts the

fact that she plays a hand in Theron's change, but is she a

teacher or a temptress? Is she magnanimous or malicious?

Or is she neutral— is she only, in Thomas O'Donnell and

Hoyt Franchere's terms, "a spokesman for the nineteenth century gospel of beauty" (115)? Given Frederic's own belief that the sexual appetite is "the mainspring of human activity," man’s "power to deal his only counter blow against his enemy, death," I do not think the sexual power of Celia's effect upon Theron should be discounted, even if she is not actively, purposely seductive (Haines 138). But she is more, I think, than current critcism seems to indicate--more than a representative of fin de siecle aesthetics, more than a simple adjunct to a minister's fall, more than the "dark woman" of the romantic imagination (Witt 137). Nancy Siferd's complaint that many 191

have failed to see Celia's full humanity is rightly taken

(154).2

I think that the best way to see Celia's full humanity

— and to ascertain her role in Theron Ware— is to examine

her in the context of The Market-Place. For in that book,

Celia is more fully divulged as a character in her own

right, consistent with but not identical to the Celia of

Theron Ware. In the intervening fictional years she has

matured, so much so that she can be used as a dependable

authorial voice. Her subtle commentary on the incidents of

Theron Ware can guide the reader to a fuller understanding

of the Celia that tempted Theron.

If Celia were to appear wholly changed, as a new character with an old name for the sake of homely familiarity, she would be of no use as an interpretive mechanism. But instead. The Market-Place witnesses the

fact that she has grown in a believable direction. She still evidences some of her old mannerisms within her new, more thoughtful pose, and Frederic reintroduces her by showing the new and old together. When introduced in The

Market-Place, she is not in her private chambers keeping the city awake with midnight renditions of Chopin, as was her custom in Theron Ware. Instead, she is playing low and doleful airs; she tells her listeners— for here she is playing to a sitting room full of friends--that they are

"old Danish songs that I picked up on the quai in Paris for 192

a franc or two . . . I arranged and harmonzied them— and,

oddly enough, the result is rather Keltic. . . (61).

Though introduced in a social setting, Celia is

nevertheless aloof from these nobles, and the familiar

aloofness suggests that this is indeed the old Celia. Her

attitude is noticeable even to the protagonist Joel Thorpe,

who is far more attentive to Lady Cressage, having interest

neither in Celia nor her music. Her similarity to the old

Celia is certified in the next meeting, at a hotel in

Montreax alongside the Lake of Geneva. Proving his worth.

General Kervick has informed Thorpe that Lady Cressage will be at the resort, and Thorpe has directed his party there to meet her. Looking down from his hotel window, Thorpe's nephew Alfred directs his uncle's attention to a woman standing beside a sign prohibiting the feeding of the gulls, feeding the gulls. Even before recognizing her,

Thorpe notes the graceful beauty of her "unconstraint."

After realizing that he has met her before, Thorpe reflects upon her as "the red-haired lady who laughs hotel rules to scorn" (129). Soon Lady Cressage appears beside her, and

Thorpe realizes that the two must be traveling together.

When he calls upon them later in the day, he finds that

Celia, true to form, is devising a way to travel through

Simplon Pass during the winter, a journey which the authorities discourage and the liverymen prohibit. But the narration reflects her attitude— "It was said that she 193

would not be allowed to proceed by this [the post road

through Simplon], but it often happened that she did the

things that she was not allowed to do" (138)* Equally

characteristic of the Celia from Theron Ware/ as the two parties of travelers spend time together, Celia exerts a strong, even worrisome attraction on Thorpe's nephew

Alfred, who like Theron Ware, is artistically sensitive.

Like Theron he would like to become her pupil. She

immediately dominates the boy with her opinions as she infatuates him with her magical hair and manner. And a later statement to Edith Cressage, kindly meant though it is, is an obvious allusion to the old Celia's bad habit of acquiring people: "you are the possession that I am proudest of and fondest of" (164). Thorpe rightly discerns that she is "a wilful sort of person, who would not be restrained by small ordinary considerations from doing things she wanted to do" (140), and Thorpe should know— he is characterized in the same way.

Much to the credit of Celia's psychological maturity, she recognizes that she and Thorpe are cut from a similar cloth. The passage below, which occurs in a later conversation with Thorpe on the day of his engagement to

Lady Cressage, reflects Celia’s insight, and is worth quoting at length:

"We11— I should say that you possessed a capacity for sudden and capricious action in large matters, equally impatient of reasoning and 194

indifferent to consequences, which might be very awkward, and even tragic, to people who happened to annoy you, or stand in your road. . . . The man smiled and nodded approvingly: "You've got me down fine," he said. "1 talk with a good deal of confidence," she went on, with a cheerless, ruminative little laugh, "because it is my own organization that I am describing, too. The difference is that I was allowed to exploit my capacity for mischief very early. I had my own way in my teens, my own money, my own power— of course only of a certain sort, and in a very small place. But I know what I did with that power. I spread trouble and misery about me— always of course on a small scale. Then a group of things happened in a kind of climax— a very painful climax— and it shook the nonsense out of me. My brother and my father died— some other sobering things happened . . . [Frederic's ellipsis] and luckily I was still young enough to stop short, and take stock of myself, and say that there were certain paths I would never set foot on again. . . . But with you- -do you see?— power only comes to you when you are a mature man. Experiences, no matter how unpleasant they are, will not change you now. You will not be moved by this occurrence or that to distrust yourself, or reconsider your methods, or form resolutions. Oh noi Power will be terrible in your hands, if people whom you can injure provoke you to cruel courses " (234-5)

The characterization that Celia presents of Thorpe is an excellent synopsis, quite in keeping with the impression that Frederic has presented of his protagonist throughout the story. Her accurate analysis guarantees the fact that

Frederic wants the reader to see her as an accurate mouthpiece. With her accuracy thus certified, the reader may trust her as well as giving an accurate delineation of her own character motivation. This personal characterization can then be transferred intertextually to inform readings of Celia in Theron Ware. At least in her 195

creator's view, she was not then simply the voice of end-of-

the-century aestheticism; neither was she a temptress from

stock romance or a teacher for Theron Ware. She was, if

we take her words in The Market-Place as Frederic's

retrospective commentary on the character he had created, a realistically delineated portrait of second generation

wealth, wholly self-centered, infatuated with her own

power, careless about the lives of those around her. For

the intertextually informed reader knows that "the other

sobering things that happened" included the destruction of

the local Methodist parson. What has remained unknown until Celia's analysis of Thorpe— and herself— and whatcan

inform our revaluation of her previous actions, is that

Celia has enough depth to realize her carelessness and cruelty. This does not make any more likeable the character who told Theron Ware, "we find that you are a bore." Still, a reading informed by a familiarity with the

Celia of The Market-Place encourages realistic evaluations of her earlier actions. Rereading Theron Ware in light of

Frederic's last novel reveals that Celia is worthy of the realistic depth naturally suspected, but often hidden behind overly symbolic readings of Theron Ware, and in particular, readings not informed by familiarity with the

Frederic canon. Clearly Celia is in the ealier novel what she seems to be— a wealthy young woman who uses people then leaves without cleaning up her mistakes. 196

In order to bring to light the importance of

intertextual development in Frederic's works, I have left

Frederic's upstate New York behind, and followed Celia

Madden, one of its residents, to England. Doing so, I

think, makes all the more evident the degree to which all

of Frederic's serious works are of a piece, and how

important a knowledge of his canon is to an understanding

of his best individual works. Many other examples of

intertextual characterization exist, some of which may be

as important as those of Abe Beekman and Celia Madden are

to Theron Ware. Even setting aside the abundance of

passing references to minor characters which emphasize the

density of the region's community, my study indicates that

many major characters fully exist only intertextually. For

example, John, Seth, and Annie Fairchild's characters are

only fully divulged to readers who study both Seth1s

Brother's Wife and The Lawton Girl. As I will note in

Chapter VIII, the disillusionment of Christian Tower and

the System of Emanuel Torr are never fully understood until both Gloria Mundi and The Market-Place are studied. And certainly Lady Cressage's complex role in those same two novels deserves a study of its own.

In sum, Frederic surpassed his contemporaries in his complex development of a fictive region and the intertextuality that naturally developed within that region's boundaries. The result: a unique claim upon the 197

reading imagination, and the kind of fictional extension

that would not be surpassed until in the twentieth century

the same kind of approach would be taken by a more gifted

author. Malcolm Cowley has stated concerning the

Yoknapatawpha novels and stories of William Faulkner that

they "have the quality of being lived, absorbed,

remembered, rather than merely observed," and the same can

be said of Frederic's works. "It is as if each new book,"

Cowley writes, "was a chord or segment of a total situation

always existing in the author's mind" (431). Frederic's

art, comparatively, is a handful of chords harmonizing a

relatively simple melody of his fictive New York.

Nevertheless, Frederic and Faulkner were practicing the

same art, an art particularly appropriate for finding some kind of unity and order in a fragmented world. 198

NOTES

^Clayton Eichelberger notes the city-country motif in Frederic's New York novels, and suggests that Frederic considers the ideal man one who is able to fuse "worldy sophistication and ease with an agrarian honesty and purity even after innocence gives way to knowledge" (4). 2 The discussion of Celia's role in Theron’s damnation is one of the more contested aspects of Frederic studies. Austin Briggs perceives in Celia both temptress and tempted. While she attracts Theron, she is also attracted; she has a "taste for celibate priests and married ministers" (131). He further notes that while she seems dedicated to a lifestyle that seems to follow every whim, she also has a sadness that voices itself in dark depressions, that stimulates her late night concerts. Robert Woodward, who reads Theron Ware as a deterministic novel, views Celia as one of the forces, along with Ledsmar and Forbes, which control Theron (180-2). John Henry Raleigh notes that Celia combines two forces to which Theron is subjected, "Catholicism cum Art" and the English culture of the "Pre-Raphaelites and the Yellow Book and Aubrey Beardsley." Structurally, he sees her as "the Achilles heel of the novel, never quite credible and always verging on the preposterous" (216). Ernest Earnest disagrees, noting that her behavior, as preposterous as it seems, is not atypical considering the habits of her class at her time, and he points out that her brand of aestheticism flourished at Harvard as well as at Oxford (228-9). Readings that emphasize her sexuality include Everett Carter's "Introduction" to the Harvard-Belknap edition, in which he accents her sexuality and notes the importance that Frederic placed upon the sex urge, and refers to her as "the most alluring of Theron’s seducers. Likewise John Crowley associates Celia with Theron's sexual awakening, noting that she is associated in Theron's mind with "animal lusts and ferocities" (382). Both she and Soulsby are "disreputable enough to be alluring" (385) to the young minister--thus Celia is a nude in Crowley's nude/madonna scheme. Further, Crowley's Freudian presuppositions further lead him to argue that Celia is a "seductive mother to be freed from a father's [Forbes's] grip" (383). George Spangler sees the importance of her sexual attraction, but adds the important point that her wealth is equally attractive to Theron (37ff) . In what is possibly the most negative recent reading of Celia, George C. Carrington suspects her of knavery proper--his reading of the novel as a formal farce casts Celia as one of the 199 knaves playing Theron the fool. Fritz Oehlschlaeger perceives her as representative of sexuality as well, and adds that her desire to take Theron as an acquisition makes her a discredited authority figure. Considering her as an authority figure, even a discredited one, brings about a question as to the possible positive direction that she could have given Theron. Indeed, Leo O'Conner posits that Celia does not mean to be seductive to Theron, that neither she nor Ledsmar nor Forbes realized the negative effect they were having on the minister; O'Conner points to Celia as "the most important factor in Theron Ware's education" (144). In a similar fashion, Samuel Bluefarb sees her as the second member in a secular trinity of wisdom, beauty and knowledge. Stanton Garner sees no villainy in her either, but sees her, along with Forbes and Ledsmar, as "genuinely, if unwisely, anxious to help him rise in knowledge" (34). 200

WORKS CITED

Abrams, M. L. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 4th ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981.

Bluefarb, Samuel. The Escape Motif in the Modern American Novel: Mark Twain to Richard Wright. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1972.

Briggs, Austin, Jr. The Novels of Harold Frederic. Ithaca, New York! Cornell UP, 1969.

Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1963. 427-46.

Carrington, George C. "Harold Frederic's Clear Farcial Vision." American Literary Realism 19 (1987): 3-26.

Carter, Everett. Introduction. The Damnation of Theron Ware. Cambridge, MA: Harvard-Belknap, 1960. vi i- XXIV.

Cowley, Malcom. "An Introduction to William Faulkner." Critiques and Essays on Modern Fiction, 1920-1951. Ed. John W. Aldridge. New York: RonaId, 1952. T37-4 6.

Crowley, John. "The Nude and the Madonna in The Damnation of Theron Ware." American Literature 45 (1973): 374- VTl------

Crane, Stephen. Maggie: A Girl of the Steets. New York: Fawcett-Premier, 19(3(S.

George's Mother. New York: Fawcett-Premier, 1960.

Earnest, Ernest. Expatriates and Patriots: American Artists , Scholars, and Writers in Europe. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1968.

Frederic, Harold. The Damnation of Theron Ware or 11lumination. Eds. Charlyne Dodge and Stanton Garner. Vol. Ill of The Harold Frederic Edition. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1985.

. "A Day in the Wilderness." The Deserter and Other Stories. 189 8. Vol. II of The Major Works of Harold Frederic. 5 vols. New York:"Greenwood, 1969. 139-235.

. The Lawton Girl. New York: Scribners, 1890. 201

The Market-Place. Eds. Charlyne Dodge and Stanton Garner. Vol. II of The Harold Frederic Edition. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1981

"Preface [to the Uniform Edition]." The Correspon­ dence of Harold Frederic. Eds. George—E.~ Fortenberry, et al. Vol. ! of The'Harold Frederic Edition. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1977. 1-6.

Seth1s Brother *s Wife. 18 87. Vol. I of The Major Works of Harold Frederic. 5 vols. New Yorlc: Greenwood, 19 69.

. "The War Widow." The Copperhead and Other Stories. 1894. Vol. II of The Major Works of Harold FrederTc. 5 vols. New York: Greenwood, 1969. 164-209^

Eichelberger, Clayton L. "Frederic and the City-Country Motif." Frederic Herald 2.2 (1968): 5.

Garner, Stanton. Harold Frederic. U of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers 83. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1969.

Haines, Paul. "Harold Frederic." Diss. New York U, 1945.

Howells, William Dean. The Rise of Silas Latham. New York: New American Library-Signet Classic, 1963.

Norris, Frank. McTeague. New York: New American Library- Signet Classic, 1964.

O'Connor, Leo F. Religion in the American Novel: The Search for Belief, 1860-1920^ Lanham, NY: U Press of America, 1984.

O'Donnell, Thomas F., and Hoyt C. Franchere. Harold Frederic. Twayne's U.S. Authors Series 3. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1961.

Oehlschlaeger, Fritz. "Passion, Authority, and Faith in The Damnation of Theron Ware." American Literature 58 (1986): 238-55.

Raleigh, John Henry. "The Damnation of Theron Ware." American Literature 50 (19 58): 210-27.

Siferd, Nancy Kay Blackford. "Textural Range in the Novels of Harold Frederic." Diss. Bowling Green State U, 1970. 202

Spangler, George. "Theron Ware and the Perils of Relativism." Canadian Review of American Studies 5 (1974): 36-46.

Witt, Stanley Pryor. "Harold Frederic as Purveyor of the American Myth: An Approach to his Novels." Diss. U of Arizona, 1976.

Woodward, Robert H. "Harold Frederic: A Study of His Novels, Short Stories, and Plays." Diss. Indiana U, 1957. CHAPTER V

FREDERIC AND LEWIS: PORTRAYING CHRISTIANITY

IN A POST-CHRISTIAN WORLD

In Chapter IV, I noted that Harold Frederic was not marking out a wholly new tradition by addressing a particular region in his New York novels; on the contrary, local color writing and regional realism were already becoming acceptable forms during his years of creativity.

Nevertheless, by creating a fictive region that has imaginative implications going beyond the texts themselves, he gave an exciting change to an existing form, a change that prefigures the work of modern innovators such as

William Faulkner. A similar statement can be made of

Frederic's use of Christianity and religious doubt. Quite possibly no era has experienced a greater interest in religious fiction than the end of the nineteenth century, and yet Frederic, always an innovator, extended the way that Christianity could be portrayed. Possibly more than any other American novelist, he ushered in the post-

Christian era. A brief review of some of the novels published preceding and during Frederic's productive years

203 204

will demonstrate the literary situation in which his

innovations took place.

Many novels in the sentimental tradition of American

letters took for their subjects religious themes.^" Most

famous, of course, is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's

Cabin (1852), a novel which is orthodox in its religious portrayal, a fact sometimes overlooked because of its

immense social importance. Other religious novels early in

the sentimental tradition dealing with religious themes

include Orestes Brownson's Charles Elwood (1840), Theodore

S. Fay's Hoboken (1845), Susan Warner's Queechy (1852), and

C. L. Hentz's Ernest Linwood (1856). A common problem, however, if we may judge it as such, is that in these novels any doubt that occurs in the mind of the religious is rather too easily targeted and converted. This is the case as well in such later novels as E. P. Roe's Barriers

Burned Away (1872) and Opening a Chestnut Burr (1876),

Edward Eggleston's Roxy (1876), Margaret Deland's Sidney

(1890), Elizabeth Phipps Train's, Doctor Lamar (1891), and

F. R. Alden's As in a Mirror (1897). Certainly this criticism can also be made of the works of the most famous religious novelist of the late nineteenth century, Charles

Sheldon, whose career roughly parallels that of Harold

Frederic. Sheldon was exceedingly popular with such 205

religious titles as Richard Bruce, or The Life That Is Now

(1892), In His Steps (1896), and His Brother's Keeper

(1898) .

So uniform are these novels in their stories of belief

and doubt that critic Elmer Suderman has drawn upon them to

construct a paradigmatic plot type of the American

sentimental religious novel. According to his paradigm,

the protagonist, a young male skeptic, has been led from

the straight and narrow by such ideas as evolution, and

encouraged in his departure by orators and writers such as

Ingersoll and Renan. Fortunately for his soul, however, he

meets a beautiful and devout young girl with whom he falls

in love— naturally, she reminds him of his faithful mother

and his own lost innocence. The young girl knows her Bible

well, and delivers convicting sermons that lead the charmed

doubter to re-examine his faith. Some trauma follows, a

dusky if not dark night of the soul in which he reflects

upon his smoking, drinking, and gambling. Then the sun

comes up, shedding its light of hope, and the skeptic is

saved. Herbert Ross Brown has noted that the sterner form

of Calvinism were "handled roughly by sentimental novelists who proclaimed the excellence of human nature and gloried

in the perfectibility of man” (324). Similarly, in

Suderman's paradigm of the later religious novels, the

faith to which the doubter converts is not Calvinism or fundamentalism but "liberal Christianity and humanism," 206

which emphasizes "progress, the goodness of man, the moral

nature of the universe, and a loving God who cares for man"

(65). Suderman completes his paradigm in considerably

greater and more entertaining detail than I have here, but

the type is clear enough even from this sketch. The

strength of Theron Ware, Suderman demonstrates, is that he

inverts the typical sentimental plot with his devout young

man, tempting young girl, and finally, his damnation.

Of course Theron Ware is more than a simple inversion

of the sentimental. Suderman*s work, however, is important

to our study because it demonstrates that sufficient

similar religious novels were being written to feed upon one another, to be considered as a tradition. Furthermore,

it emphasizes the degree to which Frederic was aware of the tradition of popular novels upon the frontier of which he was working. All religious novels, however, cannot be considered with the philosophically naive company mentioned above. In some other contemporaneous novels, such as

Charles Egbert's The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains

(1885), doubt was taken seriously. Still others foreshadowed Frederic's work by demonstrating that doubt was precipitated by current findings in comparative religions, science, and Biblical criticism. Among this group are Minot Judson Savage's Bluffton: A Story of Today

(1887), Cecelia Parker Woolley's Love and Theology (1887), and Margaret Deland's John Ward, Preacher (1888). Another 207

full step beyond these in their religious problematic is at

least one book as skeptical as Theron Ware--Henry Adams's

Esther (1884).2

Certainly a tradition of religious novels dealing with

the belief-doubt dilemma was known to Frederic. Why then

is it advantageous to see his work in light of later

writers? Why can it be claimed that Frederic played a key

role in initiating the post-Christian era among American

novelists? First of all, the above writers are (aside from

Henry Adams) popular sentimentalists. It would be wrong­

headed to consider a novel as realistic in its approach as

Theron Ware with books in which the rising of the sun and a

pretty girl's smile drive dull doubt away— Frederic's only

usage of such a pattern is as a foil. More important,

however, is the fact that in Theron Ware Christian

orthodoxy does not win in the stretch, or even place a particularly close second. The Christianity of the

Soulsbys is relativistic and stands only on its practicality. In essence it is a denial of revealed truth and of the supernatural, since, though it makes its effect, the effect is naturalistically made. Similarly Celia

Madden accepts the aesthetic pleasure of Christianity but makes no pretense of belief— she accepts the wine because she loves the jug that contains it. Father Forbes appreciates the fact that Christianity plays an important role in the social order, but he does not believe in any 208

orthodox sense, no matter how broadly one defines that

decaying term. And while it is true that questioning

parsons are not rare in the American tradition or the

religious novel— indeed, they are a feature of the

tradition— Forbes is not struggling with belief: for him

the case is settled and he is quite happily adjusted to the

life of a non-believing priest. True, Michael Madden and

Alice Ware are believers of a traditional sort and are more

or less sympathetically portrayed, but neither is integrel

to the story's central questions; that is, the option they

represent is never considered a valid one for the questing

Ware or for any of the well-educated central characters.

Michael is about to die, like his belief, and Alice's

goodness is rather easily overpowered by evil, like her

belief. Thus Frederic radically breaks the tradition of

the "Christian" novel. Finally, the question that Theron's

crisis poses about humanity's place in the universe

demonstrates that the author is grappling not simply with

problems of Christianity or theism. Man is left alone,

though not well enough alone. And Theron's is the kind of horror generally associated with twentieth century writers—

the horror of life without moral or telic significance.

The effect is accentuated by the fact that Theron is common

— he is no intellectual on the forefront of progressive thought— he is a relatively uneducated Everyman, and his crisis foreshadows every human's coming crisis. 209

Frederic's transitional position in the matrix of post-

Christian thought becomes more clear when, forsaking

Christian genre fiction, we examine his work alongside that

of mainstream writers of equal artistic quality and

seriousness of intent, such as Twain and Howells. Neither

of them treats Christianity any more kindly than it

deserves to be treated. Twain, for example, gives

Christianity a well-deserved roasting in Huck Finn, and

takes delight in pointing out the hypocrisy often

associated with Christians. The perversely narrow Miss

Watson justifies Huck's relinquishing heaven for fear of an

eternity in her presence; Twain's satire of practical

prayer (line without hooks, and so on) is a satire deserved

by simplistic reductionist theology; the Shepherdson and

Grangerford feud serves as an allusion to the bloody

history of children of a single God slaughtering one

another; and the Christian rationalizations of slavery,

touchingly but no less surely ridiculed in the kind but

sadly ignorant Uncle Silas, reveal the far-reaching

interpenetration of perverted Christian teachings in

American ideology. Relief from such darkness, however, is

found in Huck, Jim, and their relationship--a relationship which continues to exist because somehow Huck is able to choose what Twain obviously thinks is a moral course--

"real" morality over socially developed and perverted conscience. When Twain has Huck choose going to hell over 210

betraying a friend, he is doing more than demonstrating how

well the ironic possibilities of the naive narrator can

function. He is affirming an essential morality.

Paradoxically, though, he is doing so in an awfully

Christian kind of way— no sin has a stronger or more

emotional resonance for the Christian than the kiss of

betrayal. The fact is that Twain's ranting on hypocrisy,

while seemingly rough on the church, could just as easily

have come from within the Judeo-Christian position, from

Amos or Isaiah, Jeremiah or Jesus--all of whom referred

frequently to the same kinds of hypocrisy with the same

kind of indignation. There is nothing in Huck Finn to keep

a Christian from saying of Huck's choice, "Ah, Huck is

acting as a true Christian," nothing even to keep a good

northern Presbyterian from saying, "Yes, Huck is the proof

of common grace." Furthermore, Twain writes under the assumption that we will read his story his way; he must assume that we share, at least to some degree, the same 3 morality. Otherwise his irony would not work.

Likewise Howells presupposes a similar Christian moral undergirding, which would eventually grow into his approach to Christian socialism. Although he was writing during a period when capitalistic ruthlessness was stretching its own definition, he centered his best novel on Silas Lapham, a self-made man of the commonest variety who chooses-- against all naturalistic odds— not to use to its fullest 211

extent his entrepeneuria1 ability. As a new American

businessman, he is too moral for his own good. Though

generally too full of himself to be wholly sympathetic, he

responds when his wife Persis chastizes him about having

dumped his old partner Rogers, even though Rogers is not

only a chump but a cheat. Nor will Silas conspire to save

enough of his capital for another start. He chooses

bankruptcy instead of any salvation brought about by less

than forthright dealings. And Howells, it is clear, practices his craft under the assumption that as readers, we will agree that by doing so, Silas rises.

The moral reins are drawn still more tightly around

Reverend David Sewell in The Ministers Charge. There

Howells gives fullest exploration to his doctrine of complicity— the mutual responsibility that all humans bear in one another's fates. Because Sewell has failed to tell the rustic Lemuel Barker, with uncomfortable honesty, just how bad his poetry really is, he feels responsible when

Lemuel moves to Boston to make his way as a literary man.

The story details not only Lemuel's growth and

(mis)adventures, but just as importantly, the responsibility that Sewell takes in attempting to rectify his misdeed. Of course Sewell is no fundamentalist, no

Theron Ware, but the principle of complicity under which he reasons seems traditionally Christian, in spite of the fact that Sewell's Christianity may share little with historic 212

orthodoxy; his ethical stance develops from a "love thy

neighbor as thyself," "Am I my brother's keeper?" kind of

mindset. Howells leads us to ask important questions about

Sewell's complicity, and vicariously, about our own

responsibility to one another. While Howells is too good a

novelist to give an easy answer, the idea that we are moral

beings, and that our every action must be judged morally

and in terms of telic significance, is intrinsic to

Howells's world. Further, it is only because Howells can

presuppose some community of morality with his readers that

such an inquisitive work is possible. He never leads the

reader to ask, "Am I morally responsible for the effects of

my actions?" Howells's question is always, "To what degree

am I responsible?"— a very different question indeed. The

ultimate moral question--Is moral action possible?--is

never asked.

Howells, along with Twain and their generation of

realists in general, presupposes the affirmative to the more basic question. While exhausting the logical

possibilities behind such a presupposition is not possible,

I suggest that historically two possibilities are most

likely for these authors: one, a moral essence, as the

savage Huck's nobility would lead us to believe, exists; or

two, in the generation of Twain and Howells, the moral memory of Judeo-Christian thought was outliving the religion's decline, and was actively operating in the minds 213

of these authors, maybe consciously, maybe subconsciously,

but certainly effectively. Either answer can fit within a

Christian framework. Howells in particular is more or less

sympathetic to Christianity as well. He does, after all,

make the sensitive David Sewell a Christian clergyman who

is admirable both in the responsibility he takes for Lemuel

and in the advice he gives Silas Lapham. Frederic, though

in many ways similar to his contemporaries, does not follow

their traditions of treating Christianity with a feeling

more positive than indifference and of presupposing in

their readers anything akin to unconditional acceptance of

a Christian world view. Frederic is unable to presuppose either an essential or an ideological morality in his mature works— in his post-Christian world.

To the reader familiar with Frederic's apprentice works, it comes as no surprise that when the author reached his artistic majority, the clergy and Christianity in general would receive a thorough examination. A brief look at Frederic's portrayal of religion in those early works will demonstrate that the opinions standing behind Theron

Ware had been developing throughout Frederic's career.

As early as Seth's Brother's Wife, Frederic demonstrates his disdain for organized religion through a pillorying description of Seth's mother's funeral. The description of the two attending clergymen is brief but certain. The family and ministers, one Baptist, one 214

Episcopal, are gathered for a meal before the service.

Such a situation and captive audience cannot be ignored by

The Reverend Stephen Bunce, the Baptist, who decides to

capitalize on the occasion by demonstrating vociferously

"how the man of the people who had a genuine call towered

innately superior to mere beneficed gentility" (36-7). To

do so, he ridicules the gowns and manner of the

Episcopalians, represented at table by the ineffectual

Reverend Mr. Turner. Turner, the narrator tells us with

damning small praise, is not as stupid as he appears; he is

simply having trouble using the antique three-tined steel

fork, and wondering why the other clergyman is present.

Bunce, using his ignorance to grand advantage, is not at

all ill at ease, but is wholly able to keep the discourse

moving with his lips smacking and his mouth stuffed.

Neither cleric is able to muster a sincere, believable word

of comfort to the family; Bunce is spouting religious

cliches, trying pick a theological argument, and Turner is

too full of his own uneasiness to focus outward. The table

scene is cut short, however, since the faithful community

of friends and riff-raff are all gathering at the house

early, trying to get good seats and to see how unclean and

ill-kept the house may be. As the brethren wait, they check the quality of the rugs and furnishings and pass

rumors about one of the singers, who is said to have had 215

"trouble with her husband;" furthermore, she has a bird on

her bonnet.

The funeral sermon, preached by Bunce, is derided as

well, and in a way that prefigures the pulpit "tricks" that

Theron Ware will later use. The narrator writes that what

Bunce preached

was largely nonsense, from any point of view, but his voice was that of the born exhorter, deep, clear-toned, melodious; there seemed to be a stop in it, as in an organ, which at pathetic parts gave forth a tremulous, weeping sound, and when this came, not a dry eye could be found. He was over-fond of using this effect, as are most men possessing the trick, but no one noticed it, not even Isabel, who from sitting sternly intolerant of the whispering women around her, and indignant at Mr. Bunce for his dinner performance, found herself sobbing with all the rest when the tremulo stop was touched. (43)

Just what the nonsense is, Frederic does not state

explicitly. The implication, however, is that the nonsense

is the message usually given at fundamentalist funerals

then and now, the nonsense to which Bunce has already

alluded at the meal: because of the Christian hope of

resurrection, "even so sad an occasion can be converted

into a means of grace, a season of spiritual solace" (37).

The description of the actions and the antispiritual

implications of the funeral scene demonstrate why the narrator opens the funeral chapter by refering to the

"American farm-house funeral" as "the most pathetic" way the end of a life can be marked (34), and the pathos is 216

increased when the scene is read as it is written, with a

post-Christian world view.

Bunce’s offensive stupidity is such that it almost

invokes pity for the high-churchman Turner, but the

latter's behavior in The Lawton Girl stays any such tendency. His position in the community demands that he attend the formative meetings of Reuben Tracy's Thessaly

Reform Club, but reform is not his primary concern. When he and Father Chance, the Catholic priest, are placed on the roll of a committee, he is most concerned that his name be enrolled above that of the priest. And his wife is equally shallow. Jessica, the prostitute turned reformer, visits the Turner's church one Sunday. Not realizing who she is, Mrs. Turner talks to her. Later she realizes her social mistake, and meeting her a few days afterward in town, "cut the girl dead in the street" (194).

Frederic continues to show Christianity in a negative light in The Copperhead. The character most closely associated with Christianity in that novella is Jee

Hagadorn, the local cooper. Frederic's criticisms of Jee are all the more pointedly religious because Jee is allied with what is generally perceived as the right side— he wants slavery, which he considers a terrible sin in

American society, done away with. But because he is a religious fanatic, misguided if not mad, he alienates those 217

around him through his narrow condemnation of all differing

opinion, not just about slavery but about anything.

Jee is first introduced as the man who drives the

copperhead, Abner Beech, away from religious services. The

church in their county is a union meeting house, where

people of all denominations meet together to hear the

preaching of whatever itinerant minister happens to be

passing through the area. It is clear, however, that such

unity is impossible for a Christian such as Jee. Abner

finds himself denounced weekly for his copperhead beliefs, and finally quits attending. But Abner is not the only person that Jee drives away. A later flashback reveals that a local Universalist was once asked to become a part of the assembly, and did so. He patiently listened to the

Protestant fire and brimstone, and contributed to the budget; therefore a Universalist minister was allowed to take his turn filling the pulpit along with the other denominations. This minister preached "a highly inoffensive and non-committal sermon, and 'Jee1 Hagadorn stood up in his pew and violently denounced him as an infidel, before he had descended the pulpit steps. . . .

The Universalist farmer, of course never darkened that church door again'* (57). Jee’s lack of concern not only for his neighbors but for his family further casts a dark shadow on his Christianity, identified as "Shouting”

Methodism--a kind that will enter Frederic's world again in 218

Theron Ware. Jee's farm is completely run down, and he

does not practice his trade of coopering sufficiently to

make a decent living for his dependents. His lack of

concern for them is made clear when, upon his return from

the post office where the names of the newly dead are

regularly posted, his daughter tries to find out the fate

of her lover. She begs to know if he has been killed, but

instead of answering her, Jee continues on a jeremiad to no

one in particular, celebrating for himself it seems the

Emancipation Proclamation. Finally he "descended for the

moment from his plane of exultation" and answered her life

and death question with, " I didn't see" (63).

These three works, then, foreshadow the treatment that

Christianity receives in Frederic's post-Christian

masterpiece, Theron Ware. in the books touched upon above,

his Christians are in each case presented unsympatheti­

cally, without redeeming features. Christianity is a

belief of the past, now dysfunctional. Frederic does not,

however, take an easy goodbye-and-good-riddance attitude.

Realizing the major significance that Christianity has

exercised in the life of Everyman, he proceeds to explore

what is left when humankind is relieved of the moral and

telic bases traditionally attributed to Christianity. And he senses the moral void. Nevertheless, it is in this

regard that he may be distinguished from such naturalists as Crane and Norris. It would seem logical that a writer 219

proceeding in his direction would end up making more

typical naturalistic statements, such as Crane's "A Man

Said to the Universe":

A man said to the universe: "Sir, I existi" "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation."

Or one might suspect Frederic to express a view of man like

that put forth in Norris's McTeague or Vandover and the

Brute. In those two stories the formula seems to be that

since man is no higher than the animals, situations will

ultimately obtain in which man becomes an animal. Yet

while Frederic certainly felt the despair of Crane and the

atavism of Norris, he looked beyond any simple reductions

to keep asking, "then how should we live?"

Like the modernist writers who would follow him,

Frederic does not work under the assumption that

traditional Christianity provides the only possible

structure upon which a working morality can be built. Of course he is correct in pointing out that with the rapid passing of Christian influence, a severely unsettling philosophical void obtains, at least temporarily. But the void need not remain so. Theron Ware and, as I will suggest in later chapters, the last two English novels, suggest some of the complications of life in a post-

Christian world, complications to be developed more fully 220

in twentieth-century writers. In the second half of this

chapter, I will demonstrate his kinship with modern

novelists in this regard by showing in detail the extent to

which his influence permeates one of the more important

religious novels of the early twentieth century, Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry.

"I've been re-reading 'The Damnation of Theron Ware.* Do you know it?" "Yes. It was clever. But hard. Man wanted to tear down, not build up. Cynical. Oh, I do hope I'm not a sentimentalist. But I can't see any use in this high-art stuff that doesn’t encourage us day-laborers to plod on." (68)

That Sinclair Lewis's optimistic and talkative Miss Sherwin

would dislike the darkly brooding Theron Ware is true to

character. Equally true to character is the fact that

Carol Kennicott, the dissatisfied newcomer to Gopher

Prairie, would read and re-read Frederic's most popular

novel. Like Theron, and like Celia Madden, Carol is

feeling the breadth of the chasm that separates her from any easily engagable social sphere; she feels the narrow

village limits closing in around her. This fact is made all the more important for our study since Lewis's biographer Mark Schorer notes that Carol Kennicott is to no small degree a picture of the author (286); we may almost surmise that the Sauk Centre native read the book more than once himself. In fact Schorer reveals that like his 221

fictional stand-in, Lewis knew the book quite well (481),

and he refers to it as "one of the relatively few novels

that we can place in the background of Main Street, and,

later and for a different reason, in the background of

Elmer Gantry" (275) . It is the relationship between Theron Ware and Elmer

Gantry that will be the focus of this study. By having his

Main Street heroine refer to the book by name, Lewis

demonstrates his awareness of the tradition in which he is

writing; his book is part of a progression of American

novels that demonstrate the darker side of small town

life. Likewise Elmer Gantry fits into a tradition that

includes the work of Harold Frederic. Along this line,

Edward Martin argues that Lewis's great skill is "mimetic

activity of a sophisticated sort" and that by using Theron

Ware in the writing of Elmer Gantry, he "made extensive and

brilliant use of the literary tradition available to him"

(117). It would seem natural then, that considerable

critical activity would have been spent exploring the degree to which Elmer Gantry finds its source in the earlier novel, but this is not apparently the case.

The scene in which Theron is seduced by Celia in her private chamber and that in which Sharon Falconer consummates her choice of Elmer are often considered in a source relationship by Schorer (481), Martin (125), and others. The extent of even this single parallel was not 222

fully explored, however, until Charles Genthe's

provocative 1964 essay, "The Damnation of Theron Ware and

Elmer Gantry.” Genthe's is even now the only published

study given solely to demonstrating the influence of

Frederic's best novel on Lewis's religious satire, and it

is not representative of what critics seem to take for

granted. For Genthe's study gives the Elmer Gantry-Theron

Ware relationship a different turn by comparing Theron not

with Elmer, but with the far more idealistic Frank

Shallard, the character who first serves as the seminarian

Gantry's conscience, and later, as Lewis's predictable but

effective secular martyr to religious bigotry.

Genthe rightly does not wish to suggest a one-to-one

correlation between Frank and Theron; instead, he wishes to

show similarities in their backgrounds, their environments, and the influences that affected them. He notes that both of them emerge from narrow and sheltered environments, making their introduction to difficult questions painful.

This becomes especially true when the two men find themselves in situations in which they are influenced by new ways of thinking about the world, ways that seemingly disable their faith. Among these influences, Genthe names

Darwinism, Higher Criticism, and the social gospel. In Dr.

Ledsmar, Frederic presents a character knowledgable in evolutionary theory, a scientist who refers often to evolutionary ideas. Likewise in Forbes, Frederic covers 223

the Higher Critical element of Theron's loss of faith; with

a seeming relish, he bullies the young pastor with his

superior education and blasts him with asides about "this

Christ-myth of ours" and his then popular theories about

eponyms and Old Testament history. Frank is similarly

influenced, though in a far more kindly way, by his

professor at Mizpah Seminary, Bruno Zechlin. He introduces

Frank to modern scientific and critical thought, and becomes Frank's friend as well. Genthe quite rightly observes these first two similar influences.

But the social gospel makes no verifiable appearance

in Theron Ware. Genthe claims that the social gospel appears in Dr. Ledsmar's argument that the church "should exist for those who need its help" (Genthe 115); but this statement seems too broad to tie to a social gospel mooring, all the more so because the remark comes from

Ledsmar, the least philanthropic of men. Neither does

Father Forbes, who having given up preaching one might expect to find voicing some high social purpose, seem much concerned with social issues. Finally, neither Forbes nor

Ledsmar gives the reader any evidence of being a social gospel proponent. On tlSe contrary, Forbes seems kindly only in a self-centered kind of way, with a more than priestly emphasis on bodily comfort and intellectual gaming. Ledsmar is not even kindly: he has given up the practice of medical healing, which he now disdains, to do 224

dangerous experiments* at least one of them on a human

subject. Certainly neither pushes Theron in the direction

of religiously justified social service. Frank Shallard,

on the other hand* becomes a radical advocate of the social

gospel* and finally becomes one of its martyred Christs.

Like Theron he is half-educated, but he has a sincere

intellectual energy. Furthermore* when he finally acts* he

works philanthropically; Theron becomes increasingly self-

centered. In this, they are more opposite than parallel.

Nevertheless* Genthe's study is enlightening for a

number of reasons. He rightly points out that some of the same influences are exerted on Theron and Frank* and that their sheltered early years and narrow educations make them particularly susceptible to these influences. Finally,

Genthe explores fully the idea that Schorer and others only suggest* that the "bower" seduction scenes in which Theron and Celia and Elmer and Sharon have their respective consummations are connected. But* need we stop with

Genthe* who claims that "no direct influences can be established" (334) between the two title characters? More,

I think, can be made of a comparison of the two title characters.

With many similarities and details Lewis seems to be telling the reader that Elmer is a new version of Theron.

First, the two make a similar first impression. Repeatedly

Lewis describes Gantry as an animal. His college nickname 225

is "hell-cat1* (9); in drunken consideration, he "arches his

paws" (10); he is handsome, but handsome "as a Great Dane

is handsome" (16). And as the book progresses, it is

Elmer's animal energy, physical presence, and instinctual

leadings that bring him success--and that make him brutal. Theron, for the most part, keeps a thicker veneer of

humanity through most of the book; he begins with a more or

less real religious belief, changes to a belief in beauty,

and finally is left with nothing but the physical.

Essentially, he ends where Elmer begins. Nevertheless,

Frederic does not allow us to forget throughout that Theron has a beast within--when Theron goes subconsciously seeking

Celia after Soulsby has left, he "was only obeying the universal law of nature" (185); after Theron's visit,

Ledsmar changes the name of one of his lizards: "your name isn't Johnny any more. It*s the Rev. Theron Ware" (226).

And most importantly, Theron’s name derives from a Greek word meaning "wild beast"— a constant reminder of what

Theron is, or is becoming.

More definite inflences present themselves as well.

When Frederic introduces Theron, he tells us that he is

"the American Senatorial type" (6). Likewise when Gantry is introduced, Lewis tells us that he was "born to be a senator" (9). Theron, after his exposure to Forbes,

Ledsmar, and Celia, can no longer enjoy the company of his own people, even his wife. This is all the more awkward 226

because he does not have the background to actually

understand his new acquaintances. The same problem exists

for Elmer Gantry when he becomes bored with his peers.

While Gantry is attending Mizpah Seminary, the narrator

states that "Elmer liked the company of what he regarded as educated people. He never understood what they were

saying, but to hear them saying it made him feel superior"

(85-6); like Ware, he is fascinated with their talk.

Another motif is the fascination that public speaking holds

for both men. It is through public speaking that Theron

thinks he can rise in the Methodist Church, and were it not

for the disciplinary measures taken by his bishop, his

oratorical powers would doubtless have won for him the

Tecumseh pulpit. Likewise, Elmer Gantry is a superb

natural preacher, and as his career continues, he, like

Theron, perfects his technique. In a similar manner, both men divorce belief from the words they say; Theron learns to do this, and intensifies his practice after he is

"converted" to relativism by Soulsby; Gantry does it all along, though when he is at his best, he, like Sister

Soulsby, believes what he is saying while he is saying it.

One difference, however, is that Gantry's Methodist bishop is only to glad too push his star orator along toward bigger cities and congregations, while Theron's "drains the cup of discipline." 227

Indeed, the fact that both men attempt their career

building, their "holy climbing," in the Methodist Church

also serves to tie them together. Elmer started as a

Baptist, and attended a Baptist Seminary. That Lewis would

later have him convert to Methodism--he could just as easily have gone back to a Baptist church, or have become a

Campbellite or Presbyterian— seems one more instance of the author purposefully modeling his character on Theron Ware.

Both can then make light of the same things, the stinginess, the narrowness, and often, in the cases of both men, the "Discipline"— the Methodist handbook.

Furthermore, by making Gantry a Methodist, Lewis gains the opportunity to borrow another successful scene from

Frederic's work. Genthe and others have noted the parallel seduction scenes: heretofore unnoticed, however, have been the similarities between the two Methodist Annual

Conferences scenes. Frederic's opening setting in Theron

Ware is a familiar one to all readers, and most certainly it was a familiar one to Lewis, who liked it well enough to borrow.

In both books, the scene takes place in the crowded auditorium of a large Methodist Church, with the ministers of the district gathered together. The ministers' purpose, in both cases, is to find out who will be assigned to which parish for the coming year. Both writers introduce the idea ironically: Frederic writes that an observer on the floor of the assembly "might have guessed that they were

watching for either the jury's verdict in some peculiarly

absorbing murder trial, or the announcement of the lucky

numbers in a great lottery" {1). Lewis notes that the

parsons "met together for prayer and rejoicing, to hear of

the progress of the Kingdom and incidentally to learn

whether they were to have better jobs this coming year,"

and that they were "trying to look as though prospective

higher salaries were unworthy of their attention" (289).

Lewis chose well in borrowing this setting, for it gives

him the opportunity to analyse the categories of ministers

attending, and then to fit Elmer into his new Methodist

social context. He notes that there are country parsons, simply dressed and content with the learning of the Bible and the denominational weeklies; new-fledged country preachers, some with a couple years of high school, who depend on the Bible for their history and geology; preachers of larger towns, dressed as well as business men in their suits and ties, some with a knowledge of new science, some of them even modernists; "inevitable successes"— district superintendents, pastors of larger city congregations, candidates for denominational appointments— all of these realizing the importance of politicking for positions; and finally the "aristocrats," preachers assigned to big city tabernacles and churches in university towns, men wholly willing to skip over seemingly 229

unreasonable portions of the Bible or problems with

Methodist theology. Elmer is the newcomer in this final

group.

As the progression continues, the ministers are

noticeably less devout in their traditional Methodism, more

devout in their working toward worldly success. A very

similar catalog is used by Frederic to introduce the

variety of ministers in his earlier portrayal and to place

Theron Ware among them. in his opening catalog of Theron

Ware, Frederic begins with the oldest men, with whom he

associates the sincere, primitive Methodism of the frontier-

-of these men, he states that "their very presence there

. . . was in the nature of a benediction" (3). Next come

the middle-aged men, most of whom are robust, looking like

dignified farmers; interspersed with them is a handful of

pastors from "citified charges" notable by their dress, and more rarely, some strong, simple, scholarly faces of denominational seminary faculty members. In all, the

effect of these middle-aged faces is "toward goodness." In

the last group, however, made up the youngest pastors and

the new seminary graduates, the pious look of the eldest, most rural men, and even the more pleasant if self- complacent look of the middle-aged men, is absent. The narrator states, "The impress of zeal and moral worth seemed to diminish by regular gradations as one passed to younger faces, and among the very beginners, who had been 230

ordained only within the past day or two, this decline was

peculiarly marked" (3). The two catalogs summarized here

are approximately the same length and perform the same

function in the two books* The primary difference is that

in Frederic, the primary index of Methodist orthodoxy is

age, while in Lewis, the primary index is education. The

two catalogs, however, are parallel not only in that they

use the same formal technique, but in that they delineate,

one by age, the other by education, the modernist departure

from traditional Methodist belief. Furthermore, in both

scenes the tension builds as the time comes for the

assignments to be made. And in both scenes, the climax is

the reading of these assignments by the presiding bishop.

For the politically naive Theron, the assignment is a heart­

breaking disappointment— he wants the larger charge of

Tecumseh, he gets Octavius. The politically wise Elmer, on

the other hand, wants a larger charge and he gets it.

Frederic's influence on Lewis, however, is more than a matter of parallel details. A case can be made, I think, regarding important similarities in how the two protagonists are motivated. That the two preachers have similar wives, and that they are dissatisfied with for some of the same reasons, serves as a place to begin to demonstrate this larger influence pattern. 231

In the Elmer Gantry conference scene, Lewis notes

emphatically, by using a single sentence paragraph, that

"Cleo’s graciousness added to his [Elmer1sj prestige"

(290). The same can be said of Alice and Theron. The

attending members of the Tecumseh congregation, who are set

upon having the stylish Theron Ware as pastor, are also

concerned with his stylish wife; indeed, "Tecumseh noted with approbation that she knew how to dress" (6). Further examination of these two women demonstrates the degree to which they are parallel, and the degree to which they serve as motivating factors for Theron and Elmer. Theron recalls that when he met Alice, she was

fresh from the refinements of a town seminary: she read books; it was known that she could play upon the piano. Her clothes, her manners, her way of speaking, the readiness of her thoughts and sprightly tongue— not least, perhaps, the imposing current understanding as to her father^ wealth— placed her on a glorified pinnacle far away from the girls of the neighborhood. (15-16)

And she is particularly attractive because of her presence in Thero^s "remote country charge." Likewise Elmer, in his remote charge of Banjo Crossing, finds a similar girl.

Cleo Benham is the "daughter of the village magnate"— "her father was reputed to be worth not a cent less than seventy- five thousand dollars" (259). And like Alice, she is better educated than her village peers; Lewis writes that

"Cleo Benham had spent three years in the Sparta Women1s

College, specializing in piano, organ, French, English 232

literature, strictly expurgated, and study of the Bible."

Then she returned to Banjo Crossing, where her beauty, her

manner, and her father's fortune make her, like Alice

Hastings, a rare match. In both novels, the protagonists

choose their wives for two primary reasons--their superior

refinements to the other girls, and their fathers*

fortunes. Romantic passion plays no part.

With Theron and Alice, love and money fuse into a

motif that is carried further in the relationship with

Celia, and it is worth noting that Lewis follows suit, not

only with Elmer and Cleo but, to a lesser degree, with

Elmer and Sharon Falconer as well. But the marital

relationships built on this confused foundation do not

endure. For in fact, Alice and Cleo, unlike their

husbands, take their religion quite seriously, and cannot

wholly support their husbands' holy climbing. Even in

Octavius, Alice tries to adjust; she accepts the

limitations placed upon her by the local bigots, and

practices her Methodism, even when it demands a public trip

to the altar. Her concern for Theron is a spiritual

concern; her greatest fear is that he will be or is a backslider. Cleo is equally concerned with a believing kind Christianity. In one scene, after Elmer has performed a funeral with his best staged comforting manner, he tells

Cleo, disgusted with the lack of financial reward, "We got to get on to some burg where I'll have a chance." And she 233

responds, quite rightly, "Don't you think God's in Banjo

Crossing as much as in a city?” Elmer's response: "Oh,

now, Cleo, don't go and get religious on me! . . . You may

find God here, but you don't find the salaries!” (288). By

this point, Elmer is completely indifferent to his wife.

The fact that both of these wives are orthodox in

their Christian beliefs and pious in their lives casts

them, through no fault of their own, into the uncomfortable

role of conscience for their husbands. This psychological

positioning begins to explain why neither holds any sexual

or erotic appeal for her husband. One need not be a

Freudian to see the truth in John W. Crowley's reading of

Theron Ware in light of the nude/madonna motif. Crowley

argues that "Theron*s sense of incongruity between the nude and the madonna, between sensual woman and maternal woman, distorts and undermines his relations with the three women

in his life"— Alice, Celia, and Soulsby (379). From the day that Theron allows Alice to be ordered to take the flowers out of her bonnet, the two are divided, both emotionally and sexually. Passion, as we have noted, had nothing to do with his original attraction to her. Celia

Madden, with her flaming hair (covered by a flowered hat), her grand manner, her emotional piano playing, and her secret chamber, overshadows any appeal that Alice might have once had for Theron. While consciously Theron may see

Celia as a madonna, he subconsciously sees her as a nude. 234

as someone degenerate enough to act as his sexual partner;

the same kind of psychological confusion is evident in his relationship with Soulsby, whose sordid past and sensual

manner attract Theron. As the story progresses, one result

is that he becomes increasingly aloof from Alice, considers

her his inferior, and generally ceases to see her as a

living, sexual being— quite in contrast with the two women

whose companionship he covets, she is a madonna, and she

bores him.

It is much to Lewis's credit not only as a writer but

as a reader that he discerned this motif in Theron Ware and used it to develop his Elmer Gantry. For example, we note that Elmer is never sexually attracted to Cleo— "somehow, she did not stir him" (280), either before marriage or after, when her lack of passion precipitates cycles of violence and indifference. Just as Theron can never see

Alice as erotically stimulating after experiencing Celia's attractions, Cleo, a similar madonna, is obscured by the memory of the passion Elmer has known with Sharon

Falconer.

Not surprisingly, both men look for reasons for infidelity, for rationalizations that allow them to condemn their wives, and therefore be relatively free from blame.

Theron, his love relationship with Alice dead and all real communication gone, is excited about the possibility of an

Alice-Levi Gorringe relationship. He blames Gorringe's 235

flower gifts for the coldness he perceives in Alice--

actually a coldness he projects upon her. Meditating upon

the facts of the situation, however, even Theron rightly

finds that nothing could really be wrong. But this is not

the conclusion he acts upon:

Yet there the facts were, while Theron pondered them, their mystery, if they involved a mystery, baffled him altogether. But when he had finished, he found himself all the same convinced that neither Alice or Gorringe would be free to blame him for anything he might do. He had grounds for complaint against them. If he did not himself know just what these grounds were, it as certain enough that they knew. Very well, then, let them take the responsibility for what happened. (270)

Thus Theron, with bad faith reasoning, comes upon a way of

justifying his premeditated infidelity. After the two men

argue, the lawyer Gorringe analyzes Theron perfectly:

He's got a wife that's as pure and good as gold, and he knows it, and she worships the ground he walks on, and he knows that too. And yet the scoundrel is around trying to sniff out some shadow of a pretext for misusing her worse than he' already done. Yes, sir; he'd be actually tickled to death if could nose up some hint of a scandal about her. . . . (275)

On the next page, as Theron reflects on his conversation with Gorringe, he celebrates the fact that he has "a moral

right to turn his back upon them [his fellow Methodists]."

Elmer Gantry works a similar scam--Lewis's formulation

is typically cruder than Frederic's, but the reasoning is similar. For months Elmer has been having sex with Lulu, 236

one of young girls in his first congregation* and he has

become tired of her. But after he has decided to dump her* her father finds out about their relationship and forces an

engagement. Thus a plan of escape is needed. Elmer

arranges a picnic with Lulu and her cousin Floyd* who has

long wanted to marry her. On the way to the picnic, Elmer

intensifies his emotional abuse of Lulu, realizing that she

will probably go to Floyd* innocently enough, for comfort.

He then leaves them alone, secretively observes that indeed

she is crying on Floyd's shoulder, and runs to bring her

father. Fueled by Gantry's accusations, her father

perceives the scene as incriminating* and Gantry is

released. Likewise, Gantry uses his sexual dissatisfaction

with and alienation from Cleo as an excuse for future

sexual relationships. He becomes expert at abusing his

wife until she wants nothing to do with him, then* having

forced her away, he feels justified in filling the void.

The problems that Theron and Elmer have with their

wives are symptomatic of deep problems in male-female

relationships, and Lewis follows Frederic in associating

these problems to the mother-son relationship. Both

clergymen are obsessed with their mothers. We know nothing

of Theron*s father; he is mentioned but once, when Theron

tells Ledsmar that his father made him rub his back as a

boy. And Gantry's father died when he was a toddler— his only paternal memory is of his father's funeral. 237

Concerning the mothers, however, more is revealed. I have

already discussed the fact that all positive memories of

Theron's childhood are memories of his mother. Most

importantly, during Theron's hillside tryst with Celia he

has the sensation of being "a little boy again, nestling in

an innocent, unthinking transport of affection against his

mother's skirts" (257). During the same meeting, he tells

Celia that when he lay down beside her, "It was absolutely

as if I were a boy again, a good, pure-minded, fond little

child, and you were the mother that I idolized" (257). It

is in this same scene that Celia tells Theron that the

"maternal idea" is "the deepest of all instincts— love of

woman who is at once daughter and wife and mother. It is

that that makes the world go round" (259). And Theron completely agrees, telling Celia that if they could change estates for a moment, she would realize experientially the truth of what she has been saying. What would more naturally have been a sexual coming together is thereby transformed into an exercise of Theron's maternal obsession. It may be partly due to this obsession that

Theron never becomes a fully sexual being. During the New

York scene in which she rejects him, his final attempt at securing her affections is an offer of subservience:

"No other man in the world can yield himself so absolutely to the woman he worships as I can. You have taken possession of me so wholly, I am not in the least master of myself any more. I 238

don't know what I say or what I do. I am not worthy of you I know. No man alive could be that. But no one else will idolize and reverence you as I do. . . .**(319)

What Theron wants above all is to serve Celia, to have her

dominate him, to be his mother, his guide. During the

seduction scene in her chamber, he tells her that he wants

"to get as close to you— to your ideal, that is , as I can.

. . . Only you must help me; you must tell me how to begin"

(203).

Gantry in contrast is a fully sexual being. But the

fact that he is more animalistic in his sexual drive should

not obscure the fact that Gantry’s is an obsession that

parallels Theron Ware’s, at times quite closely. In

Gantry, however, sexuality takes a more perversely violent

turn. Indeed, after his relationship with Sharon, his

sexuality is far more twisted; in his abuse of Cleo, sex

becomes a weapon, most horribly brandished in his violent

wedding night rape, a rape he blames upon her sexual

timidity. Nevertheless, like Theron's, Gantry's sexual

failures begin with an obsession with his mother, with whom

he associates the religious beliefs he tries and fails to

hold and the security he forever fails to attain. The

usually unsympathetic Elmer comes close to gaining reader

sympathy with his tragic failure to break the perverted maternal bond. 239

From the beginning, Lewis makes it clear that the last

place Elmer Gantry wants to be is in college, especially in

a religious college, but the boy reflects that "if his

mother wanted him to be a college graduate, he'd stick by

it" tl2). And while Gantry's only concern is usually for

himself, we learn nevertheless that he "vaguely worshiped"

his mother (14). Elmer's fear of church is tied to his

mother as well. She made him attend as a boy, and he was

terrified by the preachers' sermons and awed by the

buildings; he further remembers his mother "weeping when he

failed to study his Sunday School lesson" (27). It is

fitting then that on the night when Judson the evangelist

is after Elmer, his mother chooses to visit the college and

accompany Elmer to the evangelistic meeting. So when the

invitations begin, Judson is not the only person on the

floor encouraging hell-cat to convert; his mother is there

as well, pleading with him and shrieking (52). On the day

of Elmer's ordination, his mother is "panting" with joy, so

excited is she by her son the cleric. But almost

simultaneously she is nagging him to give up his remaining

habits (80). Elmer’s mother is clearly an obsessive force

in his life, and as he matures, and as thoughts of religion and sexuality run together, his mother seems always in the background. On his first parish assignment, Elmer spots Lulu Bains

as a likely sexual partner. She is impressed by his status

as a minister, and apparently unaware of her own

sexuality. As Elmer is trying to talk Lulu into bed, he

tells her she reminds him of his mother (106). The pattern

continues after Elmer has been fired from Mizpah, next with

Sharon Falconer. Immediately before first coming upon

Sharon Falconer, he has visited his college friend Eddie

Fislinger's church, and imagined what he could do with it

were he in Eddie's place. Then, for reasons Lewis does not

name but which are clear enough in the mother-religion

complex, Elmer "flitted across the state" to see his

mother, who tells him that his dismissal from Mizpah nearly

killed her. She then extracts from him a promise that he

will consider re-enter the ministry sometime (155). So

when he first meets Sharon the next day, he is under the

influence of his complex obsession of religion and mother.

In Sharon, he finds that lover and religion and mother can

all be the same.

After his audition for Sharon's meetings, he seeks her approval: "He moved toward her, his arms out, and for once he was not producing the false ardor of amorous diplomacy. He was the small boy seeking the praise of his mother. But she moved away from him, begging. ..." (my emphasis). She flirts with Elmer seductively and kisses him, while simultaneously assuring him that for her, sin is 241

impossible— she is wholly sanctified. "* You can never

understand,'” she tells him. "'But you can serve me.

Would you like to?'" Elmer's response: "'Yes I would'”

(173). Later, as he begs for a place on her staff, he

says, "Except for my mother, you're the only person I've

adored. I love you! Hear me? Damn it--yes, damn it, I

said--I worship you. . . . Will you let me serve you?"

(177). Two pages later, we learn that his dream of being

with her is that "she would rule him" (179). (We can

almost hear Theron Ware in the background saying, "No other

man in the world can yield himself so absolutely to the

woman he worships as I can.”) Immediately before the

seduction scene in Sharon's quarters, he tells Sharon, "I'm

no good. I have cut out the booze and tobacco— for you— I

really have! But I used to drink like a fish, and till I

met you I never thought any woman except my mother was any

good" (182). After Elmer has become a part of the Falconer

show, his mother visits him and of course, she is pleased—

all her doubts about his spirituality vanish.

As well they should. For the first time, he is more

or less at peace. He is fulfilling his impulse to submit

to his mother and her fault-finding by submitting to Sharon

and her restrictions, and by becoming a part of her soul- winning show. From a Freudian perspective, he is

vicariously sleeping with his mother by sleeping with

Sharon— the two women have melded together into a single 242

religious-sexual concept, and are finally accessible.

Clearly Theron Ware and Elmer Gantry express themselves

sexually— in Theron's case asexually— in different ways,

but the difference is one of degree, not kind.

This concept is not unique, and would not stand alone

to confirm Lewis's dependence on Frederic were it not for

the sexual parallels already noted, and one more, one which does cast Theron and Elmer even closer together: Lewis

follows Frederic by tying his protagonist's sexual obsession to his clericalism. In Chapter Two I discussed the fact that Theron demonstrates traits of having been inadequately fathered, particularly in relationship to his inadequately male self-concept. At one point he remarks, when Alice has recommended that he carry a parasol, '"I suppose people do think of us [clerics] as a kind of hybrid female'" (112). A similar concept is voiced in this conversation between the two future partners, as Elmer is pursuing Lulu. She speaks first:

"And of course, you are a real ordained Baptist clergyman." "Urn, uh--But does that keep me from being a man, too?" "Yes, it does! Sort of!" "Then you couldn't imagine me kissing you. . . . Look at me! (105)

The idea is still more clearly stated by Lewis in one of Frank Shallard's reflections:

But Frank still resented it that, as a parson, he was considered not quite virile; that even clever people felt they must treat him with 243

a special manner; that he was barred from knowing the real thoughts and sharing the real desires of normal humanity. (320)

Frank never, it seems, achieves while a cleric the full

humanity that he seeks. Elmer, on the other hand, does

manage to kiss Lulu. In fact, he has an affair with her,

an affair that is dropped when the two nearly are forced to

marry, then rekindled years afterwards, when Elmer is

making a name for himself as a great moral crusader.

Lulu's initial reaction to their first copulation after the

affair is rekindled plays an important role in Lewis's

coupling of sexuality and clericalism.

[Elmer] inquired interestedly, "Do you feel wickeder because I'm a minister?" "No! I'm proud of itl Like as if you were different from other men— like you were somehow closer to God. I'm proud you're a preacher! Any woman would be! It1s— you know. Different! (326)

This reference to a woman's sexual fascination with a cleric alludes directly to that same topic as it was discussed earlier in the seminary dormitory, during a conversation in which Elmer and Harry Zenz, the atheist minister, comfort the virginal seminarians with the fact that the minister need not be ashamed to face his sexual partners afterwards, even in church (94-5). Together, these two scenes allude to one of the themes of Theron

Ware, in which Dr. Ledsmar explains this same concept to

Theron Ware. The doctor, like Zenz an atheist and a 244

student of comparative religion, impersonally points out to

Theron, who understands personally, and particularly in

regard to Forbes, Celia, and himself, that "women like

their religious sentiments embodied in a man, just as they

do their romantic fancies." Ledsmar continues with the

fact that the church long ago instituted celibacy in an

attempt to check such problems (220). The point strikes

home, however, both for Theron and for the reader, for, as

Austin Briggs has rightly noted, Celia Madden evidences a

fascination not only for the celibate Father Forbes but for

the married— and for her, relationally celibate— Theron

Ware (131).

In sum, that Lewis follows the pattern set by Frederic

seems likely: both protagonists have to deal with a beast within, revealed in animalistic descriptions of Elmer and

in Theron*s descriptions and name; both are inadequately

fathered and are obsessed with their mothers; both marry a woman for her religious manner and her father’s money; both

instinctively seek out another woman to whom they can submit--a woman who is erotically appealing, religious after a fashion, and strongly authoritative. When all the other external and internal evidence is considered, it seems to suggest that in Elmer Gantry, Lewis has taken the same obsessions that haunted Frederic's cleric and extended them, first by placing them in a more aggressive character, then by using the greater freedom available to him as a 245

twentieth-century writer. One other conclusion also

suggests itself from a comparison of the two books.

Viewing Frederic as one who prefigures the moderns, it is

important that ideationally Theron Ware may be placed at an

anterior point along the same trajectory that Elmer Gantry

continues. In short, Elmer Gantry takes up philosophically

where Theron Ware left off.

By the end of the Frederic novel, the hero is left in

a world view crisis. His faith, changed into doubt by

higher criticism and Darwinism, is finally destroyed when

he converts to the relativistic pragmatism of Sister

Soulsby. The fall is softened by his belief that he can

find a better "religious" expression in the aestheticism of

Celia Madden and the intellectualism of Father Forbes, but

this proves impossible, and his attempts are met with

Celia's condescending rebuke. Thus Theron's religion is

gone, and the life that he would put in its place is not

accessible to him. His own statement of his position near

the book's end is often overlooked in the shadow of Sister

Soulsby's rebuke, and her explanation of her own damnedly practical religion. But this is unfortunate, for Theron's questions are in fact the questions the book asks:

Everything about me was a lie. I wouldn't be telling the truth, even now, if--if I hadn't come to the end of my rope. Now, how do you explain that? How can it be explained? Was I really rotten to the core all the time, years ago, when I seemed to everybody, myself and the rest, to be good and straight and sincere? Was 246

it all a sham, or does God take a good man and turn him into an out and out bad one, in just a few months--in the time it takes an ear of corn to form and ripen and go off with the mildew? Or isn't there any God at all--but only men who live and die like animals? And that would explain my case, wouldn't it? I got bitten and went vicious and crazy, and they've had to chase me out and hunt me to my death like a mad dog! Yes, that makes it all very simple. It isn't worth while to discuss me at all as if I had a soul. I'm just one more mongrel cur that's gone mad, and must be put out of the way--that's all. (336)

The conclusion that Theron anticipates in the passage above

is the conclusion that typifies the world view of such

naturalistic writers as Frederic's contemporary Frank

Norris. But Theron is speaking here, not Frederic. The

reductions implied by Theron and affirmed by the late

nineteenth-century naturalists are offered as conclusions

based upon man's perceived loss of significance in the

universe. Frederic, I think, is more interested in the questions than conclusions. For the tragedy of Theron Ware

is this: he asks the right questions, but does not seek better answers— he himself refuses to grapple with the questions. Instead, he simpistically accepts for himself

Soulsby’s answers. True to her character, Soulsby answers

Theron easily with her down-home wisdom. She threatens him with a "good cuffing" and tells him that everybody is a mix of good and bad, and that he only needs "to slow steam, pull up, and back engine in the other direction." And so on. Thus she eases Theron through the crisis instead of 247

letting the crisis do its work, instead of allowing Theron

to seek real answers in good faith, regardless of what they

may be. For indeed, the questions that he poses are honest

questions, when Theron asks, "Or isn't there any God at

all— but only men who live and die like animals?” he is

voicing an exciting question that writers would center upon

and explore in decades to come.

It is fitting then that Sinclair Lewis, writing thirty

years later, would begin just where Frederic left off. But

in some ways it is not unreasonable to suggest that

Frederic is more modern than Lewis. One might argue, for

example, that the character Elmer Gantry fits more easily

into the naturalist genre than does Theron Ware. The late

nineteenth-century naturalists, as I noted in Chapter I,

begin with a philosophic theory of determinism, and their

novels often work in a doctrinaire manner to demonstrate

this presupposition. In keeping with this pattern, Elmer does not go through the long decline suffered by Ware— he

is down to begin with. Theron begins as a believer; Elmer never really was. Theron is an animal by the book's end;

Elmer begins and ends as an animal. Theron learns, after becoming a Soulsbyite, to fake his clerical pose; Elmer

fakes his from the beginning. Theron learns to act in bad

faith; Elmer acts in bad faith all along. Finally, Theron does wrestle, though inexpertly and half-heartedly, with

issues of conscience; the inner war precipitates a 248

hesitancy that leads to his failure; then his conscience

dies--he may well become the senator he envisions. Elmer

does not care much for wrestling; deals with his conscience

radically and quickly, with his animalistic ferocity; and

succeeds perfectly in his quest for power. He is an animal, and a strong one.

We know more or less from the beginning what will

become of Vandover, of McTeague, of Maggie Johnson— and of

Elmer Gantry. When Vandover ends up barking like a dog,

and when Gantry continues to betray his vows, we are not

surprised. But when Theron Ware comes to his crisis as

"one more mongrel cur that’s gone mad," we still hope for

real change, and we ache when he slips into a Soulsby's

relativistic mold. And we, along with Frederic, condemn the minister for his refusal to pursue the ultimate questions he rightly asks.

In the end, Frederic does not leave the reader in the post-Christian world with an easy answer built upon the memory of a religion that has been rendered foundationless. But neither does he leave the reader with an easy deterministic answer. Instead, he ends, like so many modern novelists, with a questions larger than any static answer: Am I, in the words of Celia Madden, "the most helpless and forlorn and onesome of atoms," in a

"world swelled out in size a thousandfold"? 249

NOTES

^For my comments on this tradition, I am indebted to Elmer F. Suderman's "Skepticism and Doubt in Late Nineteenth Century American Novels" and also to his "The Damnation of Theron Ware as a Criticism of American Religious Thought," to Leo O'Conner's Religion in the American Novel, and to H. R. Brown's The Sentimental Novel in the American Tradition, all listed under "Works Cited.*' 2 Twain's Mysterious Stranger was written only two years after Theron Ware, and philosophically it may be considered alongside Esther, I have not included it in my discussion, however, because it was not published until 1916. 3 Everett Carter makes a similar point, arguing that Twain could count upon his readers to judge rightly by the "true code of humanism" shared by the writer and his readers (162). 250

WORKS CITED

Briggs, Austin, Jr. The Novels of Harold Frederic. Ithaca, New Yorkl Cornell UP, 1^69.

Brown, Herbert Ross. The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1940

Crowley, John W. "The Nude and The Madonna in The Damnation of Theron Ware. American Literature 45 T1973): 379-85.------

Frederic, Harold. "The Copperhead." The Copperhead and Other Stories. 1894. Vol. II of The Major Works of Harold Freder ic. 5 vols. New York: Greenwood, 1969. 1- 162.

The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination. Vol. Ifl of The Harold Frederic Edition. Eds. Charlyne Dodge and Stanton Garner. Lincoln. U of Nebraska P, 1985.

. The Lawton Girl. New York: Scribners, 1890.

. Seth's Brother's Wife. 188 7. The Major Works of Harold Frederic. 5 vols. New York: Greenwood, 1969.

Genthe, Charles V. "The Damnation of Theron Ware and Elmer Gantry." Research Studies 32 (1964): 334-343.

Lewis, Sinclair. Elmer Gantry. New York: New Aemrican Library-S ignetT 19 80.

Main Street. New York: New American Library-Signet, 198?:

Martin, Edward A. H. L. Mencken and the Debunkers. Athens: 0 of Georgia P, 1984. ’

O'Conner, Leo F. Religion in the American Novel: The Search for Belief, 1860-1920. Lanham, NY: University tress of America.

Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth Century American Literature. Carbondale, IL; Southern Illinois UP, 1966.

Schorer, Mark. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961. 251

Suderman, Elmer F. "The Damnation of Theron Ware as a Criticism of American Religious Thought." Huntington Library Quarterly 33 (1969): 61-75.

"Skepticism and Doubt in Late Nineteenth Century American Novels." Ball State University Forum 8.1 (1967): 63-72. CHAPTER VI

FREDERIC AND FITZGERALD: THE AMERICAN ADAM

IN A WORLD WITHOUT FAITH

No character in the American literature of the late

nineteenth century is more pristine in his thinking--or in

his non-thinking--than Harold Frederic's Seth Fairchild.

Fresh off the farm, Seth travels to Tecumseh to begin a

position on a newspaper, and before he finds a place to set

his suitcase down he has fallen in with a rowdy companion

who introduces him to German beer and hack journalism. He

seems destined to remain a copy-editor and a doltish one at

that, at least until he is adopted by some political

machine in need of an insider. His dangerous if

schoolboyish flirtation with his brother's wife continues

to demarcate his pattern of moral descent, and since his

soul degenerates as his opinion of himself rises, Seth becomes a singularly unlovely character. Fortunately for

Seth, however, his brother introduces him to the charismatic reforming politician Richard Ansdell, who, in coalition with Seth's prematurely wise sweetheart-cousin

Annie Fairchild, inspires Seth to rise from his moral

252 253

degeneration and professional despondency. Thus his fall

from rural innocence into worldly experience ultimately

fits within the category of fortunate ones. R. W. B. Lewis

explains the Christian doctrine of the fortunate fall

below, as he uses the concept in The American Adam: The Christian suggestion teeters on the verge of heresy, and, for all its cheerfulness, it has always made its proponents uneasy. But as a metaphor in the area of human psychology, the notion of the fortunate fall has an immense potential. It points to the necessary transforming shocks and sufferings, the experiments and errors--in short, the experience- -through which maturity and identity may be arrived at. This was just the perception needed in a generation that projected as one of its major ideals the image of man as a fair unfallen Adam. The claims of newborn innocence for the individual in America inevitably elicited the response that innocence is inadequate for the full reach of human personality. . . . (61)

Certainly Seth's innocence was not sufficiently bracing to

fend off the temptations of immorality confronted by a big-

city newspaperman. But having fallen, and having rebounded

older and more experienced to live a life of moderately

idealistic virtue, Seth's experience has accomplished what

simple goodness could never do. Seth becomes an honest,

virtuous, and rapidly advancing editor.

The concept of the fortunate fall seems, as we apply

it to much American literature, to be a concept far more

realistic and sane than an Emerson-like optimistic dependence upon created virtue; so common sensical does it seem in opposition to the worship of innocence that there 254

is a tendency to overlook an important fact: the doctrine

of the fortunate fall is, like dependence upon human

goodness, a doctrine that demands faith, and faith of an

active kind. The original Adam was not, after all, easily

and immediately restored after he had fallen; according to

orthodox Christian theology, only the promise of divine

sacrifice could grant Adam the hope of full restoration

that is salvation. Lewis's references to "necessary shocks

and sufferings" apparently carry with them the idea that

Adam will necessarily arise bruised but morally whole from

his fall, that indeed, Adam's moral state is an innocence-

that-leads-to-goodness which inevitably will be braided

together and strengthened by an experience-that-leads-to- goodness. But to claim such an impressive set of moral a prioris is to take a position of faith. For once the Adam who knew nothing of evil falls into evil, there is no natural reason to think that the Adam who knows the satisfaction of evil will overcome it and choose good. The doctrine of the fortunate fall, however, is not so dependent upon reason as upon faith, in faith that good does win out, in faith that fallen Adam arises determined but not disillusioned, still clinging to his prelapsarian principles. The tone of faith is all the more noticeable 255

in Lewis's summary of Horace Bushnell's idea of the happy

fall:

Fortunately, as it turned out, there had been a fall. Happily, there had been a sin. And consequently, there had followed the long story of educative experience. All of that experience was at the disposal of each new member of the race. The new member inherited the corruption, but he likewise shared in the wisdom. If he could never regain Adam's radical innocence, he need never regress to Adam's ignorance. Conscience was, after all, higher than innocence. Moral history and the energies of tradition gave Bushnell grounds for a more substantial hope. (73)

The intellectual precipice down which Bushnell's Adam falls

seems by modern standards to have been a rather gentle

decline. The telic significance of man remains the same

all the way down to hell and all the way back up. Taken

for granted— or taken by faith--is the fact that the same

moral system will be sufficient for Adam upon his return,

that it is indeed the right moral system, and that a

devirginated Adam will feel impelled to follow it. This

claim is not justified; it is only understood— and that by

faith.

And yet the fortunate fall is so much a part of the

American moral memory that most writers at the end of the

nineteenth century could follow their romantic-religious

forbears and act upon it without bringing it under examination. It seemed to be quite a sufficiently

significant step just to allow the American innocent to

fall and suffer; to allow him to stay fallen, or to gain 256

nothing through the pain# was unthinkable. A strenuous

example of such an Adamic fall is that of Isabel Archer.

After Cousin Ralph has seen to it that she has enough money

to set her "going before the breeze" (159) , she, surely

enough, becomes a shipwreck. She is not, however, even

after her pragmatic and heartless usage by Madame Merle and

Gilbert Osmond, reduced to moral floatsam. On the

contrary, her educative experience while supremely costly

is still an educative experience in line with the tacit

morality with which we may assume that she began. She is

not disillusioned, though she is stripped of some

illusions; she is only sadder, wiser, and all the more

appealing. Likewise in The Ambassadors, the older but

little less Adamic Lambert Strether finds himself a better

man for his knowledge of European ways. His Adamic

sensibilities are shocked by the revelation of Chad's

relationship with Madame de Vionnet, and shocked a little

more by the extent of the relationship (Little Bilham is

not quite honest in his affirmations of the couple's

virtue), but he is not disillusioned by the differently

structured moral atmosphere of Paris. On the contrary, he

is forced for the first time in his life to make moral decisions outside the confines of his parochial Yankee social class. Still, his values in a broad sense remain relatively traditional; and because he overcomes the temptation to sacrifice what he perceives as Chad's 257

improvement in order to secure his own fortune and bride,

he actually becomes more moral, less controlled by his own

materialism. He is, then, in his fallen state, a far more

likable human than the less-than-noble savages with whom he

is contrasted— his friend and watchman Waymarsh and Chad's

sister Sarah Pocock, among others. Like Isabel, Strether

gives up a fortune for his fall, but gains experience and

breadth of greater worth.

A fortune is Silas Lapham's price as well. This

Vermont farmer's initial introduction into the ways of the

world of business is made smooth by the unexpected

accidental of mineral rights— his paint mine virtually

guarantees his early success. But when he finds himself

years later in a kind of cut-throat competition demanding a

more complex kind of commercial prowess than knowing a few

laws of supply and demand, he is faced with a more thorough

test of his moral make-up. And if we share Persis's

sensibilities, it seems that Silas failed his first moral

test with his partner Rogers. But like Isabel's refusal to

be rescued by Caspar Goodwood, and like Strether*s refusal

to succumb to the temptation of Mrs. Newsome's estate,

Silas's refusal to deal illegitimately in order to save his business demonstrates that his fall, his experience, has

resulted in moral growth. He is, as an old man reflecting upon his experience, a fully likeable character for the

first time in the novel. 258

Before their experience these characters# like Seth

Fairchild, are in what R. W. B. Lewis terms a "premoral"

state. In falling they become morally self-conscious

beings# and they grow. But it is important to note that

their moral recovery demands of author# reader, and

character a certain kind of tacit faith that in fact

principled action is possible and ultimately worthwhile.

Ultimate moral questions, such as "Is moral action

possible?" and "What demands can any non self-generated

system of morality make upon me?" are never asked. Faith

in morality, and in a morality Judeo-Christian in

derivation, is maintained. And tacitly posited is the fact

that such a morality is so over-poweringly right that

Adamic falls are inevitably fortunate--mora1 faith is

recoverable.

And so Isabel, Lambert, and Silas are disheartened but

not disillusioned; their essential morality is discovered,

not destroyed, and it is demonstrated in rather traditional

kinds of ways— by acting upon beliefs even when doing so is

costly, by valuing immaterial things above material ones,

by placing others' interests before one's own. As I

suggested in Chapter V, the moral memory of a Judeo-

Christian world-view is outliving the decline of belief,

and is actively operating in the worlds of most late

nineteenth-century writers. Furthermore, it is doing so with a vigor that results in a faith in the possibilities 259

for good in spite of the tainted circumstances of day-to-

day experience. In the mature works of Harold Frederic,

however, such is not the case.

Lewis's Adamic terminology and concepts are not alien

to Harold Frederic studies, but as usual Theron Ware has

received the only moderately extensive treatment. The most

doctrinaire study of Theron as a typical American Adam is

that of Samuel Bluefarb, which defines Theron almost as the

type of the American Adam. He argues that all the forces against Theron

do not make so much for damnation as for a (rather limited) fall. If Theron is damned, then the word ought to be put in quotation marks, since at the end of the novel and his stay in Octavius, Theron is better able to handle himself in his confrontation with his own weaknesses and the world that was partly responsible for them than he was at the beginning of the novel. (27)

Bluefarb concludes that indeed Theron's is a fortunate fall, for when he leaves Octavius he leaves his greater innocence behind and has grown into a broader knowledge of the world and his own limitations (40). Few other critics, however, perceive Theron, or the novel as a whole in such an optimistic light. Austin Briggs, who, it should be kept in mind, reads Sister Soulsby as a bearer of authorial opinion on matters of morality, notes that the dialectic that Lewis describes never ceased within Harold Frederic— no resolution between Frederic's innocent younger self and experienced older self was ever reached. Concerning Theron 260

Ware, Briggs contends that •’its opening and closing

chapters alike contradict the view that it is a tale of

spiritual innocence falling into corruption'* (123),

primarily because Theron has in fact been fallen all along--

he was never innocent, but was always, as Sister Soulsby

explains, a mixture of good and bad (See Briggs 111-23).

In a similar vein, Allen F. Stein's attention to the

structure of the novel reveals that each of the book's four

sections holds a fresh start for Theron, but that each of

these new starts is ironically a new way for Theron as

American Adam to evade coming to terms with the problems

inherent in his romantic viewpoint. The Adamic Theron is

an initiate, but he is "ultimately unchanged" by his

processes of initiation (24).

While the positions of Briggs and Stein are correct in

their less optimistic views of Theron, it denies Frederic

some of the credit he is due as an expert observer of contemporary culture to claim that Theron is not changed by his introduction to a world without ethical absolutes.^

And it is this introduction that I see as causing the real change in Theron Ware, and the real change in his generation and the one that followed. I perceive Frederic to be asking questions like these: What would occur if the moral influence of the Judeo-Christian world view was omitted? What would happen if some author began to say in effect, "Since people don't believe, why should they act as 261

if they do? What would happen if, after the American Adam

fell, he chose to stay down for the count?" If these

question were asked, Adamic American Dreaming, which has

always had as an integral element the presupposition

(sometimes as a religiously reasoned undergirding,

sometimes as a maddeningly pollyanna optimism) that right

wins out in the end, would be, one might expect, distorted.

And certainly any random handful of serious twentieth

century writers proves this to be the case. But the

blurring of the American dream that matured into the

disillusionment of Nick Carroway had begun long before WWI—

a fact that becomes evident in the mature work of Harold

Freder ic.

Frederic's prefiguring of the modernistic inversion of

the American Adam would be a literary phenomena worth noting if his works had been buried in a time capsule and dug up last weekend. But his prophetic role takes on far greater importance in the American literary tradition when

it is realized that certain of Frederic's conceptions were influential in the formation of the same ideas in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author who, possibly more straightforwardly than any other modern, presents the paradigm of the Adam disillusioned by American materialism. In the rest of this chapter, I will demonstrate the detailed way that Frederic's influence permeates F. Scott Fitzgerald's first story of Adamic 262

disillusionment, "Dalyrimple Goes Wrong." Then I will

suggest certain Frederickian elements that work through

that story and on into The Great Gatsby.

Fitzgerald's debt to the fin de siecle American

naturalists in general is well documented. The fictional

Princetonian Amory Blaine gives the most famous reference

to the influence in This Side of Paradise, when Amory finds

himself "rather surprised by his discovery through a critic

named Mencken of several excellent American novels:

'Vandover and the Brute,' 'The Damnation of Theron Ware,'

and 'Jennie Gerhardt' (Paradise 209). Amory's reference,

however, should not mislead the reader into considering

these writers to be Fitzgerald's early influences. On the

contrary, one of Fitzgerald's biographers, Henry Dan Piper, states that "Fitzgerald wrote this particular passage during the summer of 1919, when he revised his novel for the last time. It is likely that he had heard about all three books very recently" ("Norris and Fitzgerald" 395).

This is not to say, however, that Fitzgerald did not come upon the novels of Norris, Dreiser, and Frederic at an important point in his literary formation. On the contrary, he discovered them just as he was writing— for the third time— This Side of Paradise ("Norris and

Fitzgerald" 393); and though by then. Piper suggests, it was too late for them to have much of an influence on the first novel (Portrait 88), they did play a part in the 263

conceptualization of the second novel# The Beautiful and

the Damned. In fact, Fitzgerald’s interest in the American

naturalists was so intense and influential that it kept him

from getting on with his second novel (Portrait 84).

Critics agree that of the three naturalists, it was

Norris who made the most important impression, particularly

his Vandover and the Brute, the novel that clearly stands 2 behind The Beautiful and the Damned in theme and detail.

Both feature young protagonists who, like their authors, go

to eastern colleges, Vandover to Harvard and Anthony Patch

to Princeton, and both feature closely delineated

atavistic declines— a common naturalistic conceit. Piper

adds that the fine story "May Day," which is in fact a

scrapped beginning for the novel that would become The

Beautiful and the Damned, also shows the Vandover

influence. Like the novel, "May Day" features the "grey

aura of moral bankruptcy," and quite clearly foreshadows

the plot line that would be taken by the novel. So taken

was Fitzgerald with Norris that in October of 1920,

Fitzgerald even enlisted Mencken's support in encouraging a

collected edition of Norris's works, which were then

difficult to obtain. Unfortunately Fitzgerald’s version of

the project never developed (Grandeur 148).

While Norris's place as the primary vehicle of the naturalistic influence on Fitzgerald cannot be denied, the effect of Harold Frederic’s work on Fitzgerald has been 264

inadequately calculated— an oversight somewhat surprising

in light of Fitzgerald's avowed appreciation of the upstate

New Yorker. In a letter written to Sinclair Lewis on 26 3 January 1921, Fitzgerald states, "I want to tell you that

Main Street has displaced Theron Ware in my favor as best

American novel" (Turnbull 467). Once again as his

interests are reflected in his advice to his publisher, in

April of 1922 Fitzgerald suggested that Scribners start a

reprint series to compete with Modern Library and Lambskin

Library. The plan that Fitzgerald sent to Charles Scribner

named eighteen novels, among which is Theron Ware (Grandeur

154). Further, Theron Ware remained a book that Fitzgerald

recommended to others; for example, in the reading program

that Fitzgerald planned for Sheilah Graham, recounted in

her College of One, Theron Ware by "Fredericks" is included

in the "Substitute List of Good Novels" (206). Frederic's

importance then should not be overlooked.

In reference to the letter to Sinclair Lewis quoted

above, Lewis's biographer Mark Schorer comments, "It is

surprising to discover that Fitzgerald, whose own work was

so different from that of both Sinclair Lewis and Harold

Frederic, should have held such regard for The Damnation of

Theron Ware. . . (275). To share Schorer's surprise,

however, one must accept his judgement of the work of

Fitzgerald and Frederic as so very different. I suggest, on the contrary, that certain key similarities, both of 265 concept and detail, are shared by the two, and I am not quite alone in this suggestion. Quite the opposite of

Schorer, Piper asserts that "it is easy to understand how

Fitzgerald was attracted to The Damnation of Theron Ware, not only because it was an outstanding novel but one that had dealt sympathetically with the American conflict between Catholic and Protestant that he himself had experienced" (88). I would not necessarily call Frederic's treatment of the problem "sympathetic," but I can certainly see how Fitzgerald might. In This Side of Paradise, for example, Monsignor Darcy is the sympathetic confidante of

Amory Blaine, and their relationship is closely patterned on that of the young Fitzgerald and his friend Monsignor

Sigourney Fay. Piper notes that Fitzgerald had a great admiration for Father Fay, "who introduced him to his first glass of wine and to a more sophisticted world than he had ever known" (47). Interestingly, the same claims can be made of Father Forbes and Theron Ware. So if Fitzgerald read Father Forbes as a positive guide for Theron, as one who attempted to help Theron Ware along on a path to intellectual maturity, it is not surprising that

Fitzgerald's reading would tend to imitate his own parallel experience.

Turning now to the internal evidence, the influence of

Theron Ware on "Dalyrimple" seems very likely indeed.

Fitzgerald promises the reader the story a young man's 266

disillusionment, and he fulfills his promise. Bryan

Dalyrimple returns from the war a here. But a month later

he is forgotten, and he goes to a local financial magnate,

T. G. Macy, for a job. He is awarded a place in the stock

room with a promised promotion, but he learns from his more

worldly colleague Charley Moore that his job is a dead end;

unless he has "drag" with Macy, he will remain in the stock

room forever. Realizing not only that is this true, but

that his meager salary is insufficient to pay his bills, he

decides to take advantage of every situation. Thus Bryan

enters a successful career as a mugger and a burglar. Late

in the story he is called into Macy's office, and in fear

he nearly bolts. But he does not, and that evening he

finds that Mr. Fraser, the biggest political boss in the city, wants to take advantage of Dalyrimple's military record by placing him in the senate.

Now Dalyrimple's story is different from Theron

Ware's, but the theme is the same. Both are innocent, able youths who have believed that work would lead to success;

Theron would escape the farm; Bryan would overcome his father's low financial status. Next, both are influenced in this belief by the "silly flattery" of "a lot of women"—

Theron as a cleric, Bryan as a war hero. Then both are informed that this is not the way of the world. Just as

Soulsby tells Theron that he must use "sabe"— common sense— to get ahead, Charley Moore and later Alfred J. Fraser 267

inform Bryan; in both stories, the very American term

"common sense" is the code word for the sacrificing of

moral codes. Also Soulsby tells Theron that he should not

worry about the way she raises money--the tactics that he

finds disillusioning are simply parts of the "machinery"

(174). Echoing the same terminology, Fraser tells Bryan

that placing him in the senate is simply "mechanical"

(172). Next, Soulsby assures Theron that he will be able

to remain a pastor as long as belief does not get in the

way; Fraser tells Bryan that making him a state senator

will be no problem as long as he does not have "too many

ideas" of his own (172). In sum, Theron must give up his traditional ideas about the pastorate just as Bryan must give up his about public service.

Other parallel details accompany the two men’s growing understanding. Long walks at night play a part in their gradual realizations, and both men's walks are all the more dark because the town councils in both fictions are two stingy to use street-1ights consistently (Theron Ware 183;

F & P 166). After the Soulsbys' meetings end, Theron takes a walk and finds himself in Celia’s chambers, where in his post-nervous-breakdown state he experiences the concert that makes him Celia's disciple and completes his alienation from Alice and his parishoners. Likewise Bryan, after learning that his boss's nephew has begun with a salary half again greater that his own, goes on a evening 268

walk, "bis brain whirring with the frightful jar of

discovering a platitude for himself" (163). During this

half-dazed walk, he comes to the conclusion that it is time

for him to begin "rejecting the old childhood principles

that success came from faithfulness to duty, that evil was

necessarily punished and virtue necessarily rewarded— that

honest poverty was happier than corrupt riches" (164). If

this statement were the intellectual climax of the story,

it would be simply a cynical inversion of the Alger myth.

But following the more serious nature of Theron Ware,

Fitzgerald spells out the moral importance of the

statement. Bryan reflects, "Good and evil aren't any

standard to me— and they can be a devil of a bad hindrance

when I want something. When I want something bad enough,

common sense tells me to go and take it— and not get

caught" (164) . Having made this decision, Bryan steals

enough to pay his rent, and continues to become a true

professional. Later we learn that "happiness was what he

wanted— a slowly rising scale of gratifications of the

normal appetites" (166) . Theron has the same revelation.

From Sister Soulsby*s Theron learns to scrap his

traditional ideas of good and evil and to use common sense

to attain what he wants. As he tells Celia, "I see now what life is really worth, and I'm going to have my share of it" (251). Both men have decided to be guided by their desi res. 269

Another parallel is that having made this decision,

both men become better at their legitimate work. Although

he is "morally lonely," Bryan becomes a "better" person;

his self-concept improves as he appropriates the name that

the newspapers give him, "Burglar Bill of the Silver

District," and he even becomes a more satisfied, employee--

His attitude toward Mr. Macy underwent a change. He no longer felt a dim animosity and inferiority in his presence. As his fourth month in the store ended he found himself regarding his employer in a manner that was almost fraternal. He had a vague but very assured conviction that Mr Macy's innermost soul would have abetted and approved. (170)

Theron Ware experienced a similar change after he changed to an amoral approach to life. As he tells Celia, "I've learned to be a showman. I can preach now far better than

I used to, and I can get through my work in half the time, and keep on the right side of my people, and get along with perfect smoothness. I was too green before" (251).

Finally, both end their stories in trance-like visions of future greatness. Theron imagines a crowd, "attentive faces all— rapt, eager, credulous to a degree. Their eyes were admiringly bent upon a common object of excited interest. They were looking at him . . ." (344). The crowds are gathered to hear Theron give a campaign speech.

"Who knows?" he tells Alice and Sister Soulsby, "I may turn up in Washington a full-blown Senator before I'm forty."

Likewise, Dalyrimple ends his story in a dream: "The world 270

was opening up suddenly--The State Senate, the United

States Senate--so life was this after all--cutting corners—

cutting corners— common sense, that was the rule" (172-3).

Furthermore, for both men public speaking is key in their

success. As Mr. Fraser tells Dalyrimple about his choice,

"It was a speech [of yours] I've remembered. It was a

brainy speech, straight from the shoulder, and it got to

everybody in that crowd. I ought to know. I've watched

crowds for years" (171). Theron has great pulpit prowess,

and his becoming a senator is based upon that same

ability. As he tells Alice and Sister Soulsby, "I can

speak, you know, if I can't do anything else. Talk is what

tells these days." In sum, both idealistic innocents seek

fame and fortune virtuously; both are informed of their

errors; both choose an amoral course; and both show promise

of success— they may end up senators. Fitzgerald calls

Dalyrimple "a new psychological rebel of his own century—

defying the sentimental a priori forms of his own mind" (£

& P 166). He is, however, a psychological rebel who

follows in the footsteps of an older psychological rebel.

It is fitting that the younger rebel, in reflecting upon his new amoral way of life, had the "assured conviction that Mr. Macy's innermost soul would have abbetted and approved" of him; for, in an allusion to the work of the author he used as source, Fitzgerald named Dalyrimple's amoral mentor "Theron G. Macy." 271

The fact that Fitzgerald based one of his stories on

Theron Ware is worth noting, but if that were the extent of

Frederic's influence on Fitzgerald, it could not be deemed

very important. I have pursued the influence, however,

because "Dalyrimple" plays a significant if minor role in

the Fitzgerald canon; it points as directly to The Great

Gatsby, a fact which has been occasionally noted by

critics. For example Andre Le Vot, has noted that

"Dalyrimple Goes Wrong" and The Great Gatsby both

demonstrate "Fitzgerald's panic, his horror of the poverty

stalking him," and that both feature "ex-soldiers thrust

jobless into civilian life with no way to survive except

crime" (68). Another of Fitzgerald's biographers, Matthew

Bruccoli, states, "Dalyrimple" is "Fitzgerald's earliest

ironic treatment of the Horatio Alger success story"

(106) . The finest such treatment would occur five years

later in The Great Gatsby. Most important, however, is the

fact that because Fitzgerald created the fallen Adam Bryan

Dalyrimple on the Theron Ware model, we have a good reason

to explore the influence of that model on the Fitzgerald's next Adam, Jay Gatsby. Doing so, it becomes possible to suggest that when Fitzgerald broadened and extended the

inversion of the American Adam to include the romance of money, he may well have been recalling, consciously or subconsciously, the same Frederic novel he had used to good advantage before. For both Frederic and Fitzgerald feature 272

the coupling of money and love into a single erotic complex

which becomes a temptation too great for their American innocents.

This theme has been observed by critics in both

authors, but apparently no critic has yet noted the fact 5 that the two men used the theme similarly. The most

thorough examination of Harold Frederic's coupling of love

and money is George Spangler's "Theron Ware and the Perils

of Relativism." Though the primary emphasis of his article

is to suggest the impossibility of principled action in

Soulsbyite amorality, Spangler also deals with the

importance of money in Theron's attraction for Celia.

Spangler notes that "Celia is not only beautiful and

sensual, she is rich— and this is a fact of great

consequence to Theron" (37). Celia is, after all, the daughter of the richest man in town, and in the forest- picnic scene Theron begins to realize the implications of this: "the daughter's emancipation might run to the length of a personal fortune. He knew so little of rich people and their ways." But he has a vivid imagination. Having considered her riches, Theron

lifted his head, and looked at Celia with an awakened humility and awe in his glance. The glamour of a personal banking account shone upon her. Where the soft woodland light played in among the strands of her disordered hair, he saw the veritable gleam of gold. A mysterious new suggestion of power blended itself with the beauty of her face, was exhaled in the faint perfume of her garments. (254) 273

One can easily imagine Jay Gatsby feeling the same way

about "the king's daughter, the golden girl," Daisy Fay

(120). For just as Celia is the richest girl in Octavius,

Daisy is the richest girl in Louisville, and Gatsby is as

enamored with her riches as he is with her beauty and

decadent sophistication. Throughout, Daisy is a symbol of

the dream of affluence that motivates Gatsby, and Gatsby is

somehow aware that the two attractions, romantic desire and money, have come together. As he tells Nick, her voice is not just sensual, not just "indiscreet"--"her voice is full of money" (120) . Certainly after the first time he makes

love to her, he is aware of the double passion. Nick tells us that Gatsby had

intended, probably, to take what he could and go- -but now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail. He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn't realize just how extraordinary a "nice" girl could be. She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life. . . . (149)

In the same way Theron, after the first time that he kisses

Celia--and it is worth remembering here that the kiss was sometimes a nineteenth century symbol for total possession-- finds that the ideas of love and money flow together:

Side by side with the moving rapture of thinking about her as a woman, there rose the substantial satisfaction of contemplating her as Miss Madden. She had kissed him, and she was very rich. The things gradually linked themselves before his eyes. (264) 274

Finally, it is of some significance that the life of

romance and riches is in both books represented

synechdocally by life on a yacht. Jimmy Gatz becomes Jay

Gatsby by swimming out to Dan Cody’s yacht to warn him of

an impending storm, and Jay's first successful step of his

Algerian mission is becoming the keeper of that yacht,

which "represented all the beauty and glamour in the world"

to the young man (100). Theron's formulation of affluence

uses the same sign. Concerning his overblown dreams of

Celia, Theron tells Sister Soulsby, "She was very rich, and

she loved me, and we were to live in eternal summer,

wherever we liked, on a big, beautiful yacht" {337).

Neither protagonist, however, is able to keep the girl

or the yacht, and the problem is not simply one of money—

the problem is one of class. In "Scott Fitzgerald and the

Collapse of the American Dream," Marius Bewley suggests somewhat extravagantly that more than any other American writer, Fitzgerald’s novels are based on a concept of class: "He is the first American who seems to have discovered that such a thing as American class really existed. ...” (260). For it is, after all, Gatsby's failure to understand the intricate workings of the rich that allows him to pursue senselessly his dream of Daisy.

Meanwhile the reader comes to realize that Daisy and Tom are members of a "rather distinguished secret society" that

Gatsby can never crack— his money is at least one 275

generation too new. Daisy can be amused with him, but she

cannot take him fully seriously. Tom, on the other hand,

is a member of her class, though a barbarian; it is worth

noting that he is more upset about Daisy's affair with

Gatsby because he is "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere," than

because he is angered by her infidelity. Gatsby's all-

night vigil to protect her from Tom’s violence demonstrates

the degree to which Gatsby can never understand the rich;

they are, as Fitzgerald writes in "The Rich Boy,"

"different from you and me"— and from Gatsby. For reasons

that Gatsby can never understand, Daisy has nothing to fear

from Tom; on the contrary, she can sit calmly in their mansion having chicken and ale with the very man whose

lover she has just killed, and who himself will betray her

lover to his murderer. And as they quietly conspire,

Gatsby waits out the night behind the hedge.

Bewley is correct in seeing in Fitzgerald the notion of class; he is not correct in assuming, however, that

Fitzgerald was the first American author to realize its

importance. For just as it is finally more a matter of class than of money that separates Gatsby from Daisy, it is class that separates Theron from Celia. Although he is a man of some ability, some aesthetic sense, and a little education, Theron is nevertheless fresh off a poor farm, wholly unknowledgeable concerning the upper classes with whom he has never had any contact, too full of mother's 276

milk and too naive even to understand the workings of his

own counter-culture. Unable to out-guess his own

relatively simple-minded bishops and trustees, he can never

understand the ways of the little society of Celia, Forbes,

and Ledsmar. He is amusing for them, at first, but when he

presumes to be a real part of their clique, he is deemed a

pretentious bore and cast out. He cannot understand that

they can gossip slanderously about each other, but that he

cannot say a word about any of them without offending. The

resonance of his tragic and comic confession to Celia ("but

you see I was brought up in the country— on a farm. They

don't have kisses in assorted varieties there") is

significant in more than just the realm of sexual romance.

Theron finds himself, or loses himself, in a world that

scrambles his perceptions by giving contrary signals he cannot accurately understand. Theron’s confusion is like that of Gatsby, who is taken aback when the wealthy East

Egg Sloanes ask him to dinner, evidently expecting him to refuse, then leave while he is dressing. Gatsby was supposed to have turned down the invitation, but like

Theron, he grew up in the country, on a farm, where, as

Frederic might have written, "they don't have invitations in assorted varieties." Jay cannot understand that he is a temporary acquisition for Daisy, a useful tool in her complex relationship with Tom, just as Theron cannot understand that he is just a project for Celia, an 277

acquisition, a tool to use against her not-quite-enemy

Ledsmar— and little more.

Because Theron is socially below them, the three

Octavians do not deem it necessary to deal honestly with

him, but feel free to close their houses to him, to lie to

him as they find it convenient, to avoid him until he

finally becomes too grotesquely bothersome, and then to

destroy him. Just as Gatsby is sacrificed so that the

society of Tom and Daisy can remain intact, Theron is

sacrificed for the integrity of the Octavius

intelligentsia. The evaluation that Bewley makes of

Gatsby, that he "never succeeds in seeing through the sham

of his world or his acquaintances very clearly" and that

"it is of the essence of his romantic American vision that

it should lack the seasoned powers of discrimination" (271)

can be made of Theron Ware as well. Both men are trapped

by their class, and the doors upward are, if not quite

closed, marked with impossibly ambiguous letterings.

Earlier I asked this question: "what would happen if,

after the American Adam fell, he chose to stay down for the count?" In Theron Ware, Bryan Dalyrimple, and Jay Gatsby we see three possibilities of what could happen, and as the twentieth century continued to realize and use as material

its lack of traditional values, modern disillusionment could appear in a variety of forms. Fitzgerald's artful and energetic attention to economic and class disparity 278

made him the typical voice of his materialistic age. But

if Fitzgerald was the voice of the lost generation, then

Frederic was its prophet. Comparing the two writers

reminds us that radical materialism did not begin in the

twenties; on the contrary, Fitzgerald had a tradition,

though a recent one, to work within, and he had models to

work from. Granted, his genius was greater than

Frederic's, and he pressed the theme of materialism

unchecked by moral restraint as much further ahead of

Frederic as his generation was beyond Frederic's; nevertheless, both of these writers realized that the

American Adam could suffer a moral fate more permanent than falling; both realized that experience would not necessarily— and maybe never again--guarantee a wisdom expressed in a traditionally Christian moral framework.

The society they perceived around them— the society that

Frederic observed in its incipiency and that Fitzgerald chronicled at its height— was in consumptive practice and phil osophy a materialistic one. It lacked the faith of the generations preceding, and it lacked the moral memory that stood with the realists and naturalists in the place of faith. In the next chapter, we will see how even stylistically the story of a materialistically attractive fallen Adam has the power to seduce readers into identification in spite of their own moral constraints. 279

Such a seduction is Frederic's paradoxical accomplishment in his second masterwork, The Market-Place. 280

NOTES

^Everett Carter's statement in his 1960 introduction to the Harvard-Belknap edition, that Frederic depicts "the fall of intellectual America from innocence into knowledge,” while a promising proposition, is, I think, insufficiently moral in its emphasis— hence my different t rajectory. 2 For a thorough look at Norris's influence, see the Piper article listed in the Works Cited and Richard Astro's "Vandover and the Brute and The Beautiful and The Damned: A Search for Thematic and Stylistic Reinterpretations."

3Fitzgerald dated this letter January 26, 1920, though since Main Street was not published until October 23, 1920, he must have intended to date the letter "1921." 4 "Dalyrimple" was published m the February 1920 number of The Smart Set (Grandeur 106).

^Fitzgerald critics who have written about this particular demon of a theme are legion; a list of other criticism which has noted some elements of its significance in Frederic's work would include the dissertations of Christopher Simoni, Nancy Blackford Siferd, and Stanley Pryor Witt. 281

WORKS CITED

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Bruccoli, Matthew J. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. New York:Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1981.

, and Margaret M. Duggan. Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald. NY: Random House, 196ft.

Bewley, Marius. "Scott Fitzgerald and the Collapse of the American Dream." The Eccentric Design. London: Chatto and Windus, 1959. 259-87.

Bluefarb, Samuel. The Escape Motif in the Modern American Novel. Columbus: Ohis State UP, 1972.

Briggs, Austin, Jr. The Novels of Harold Frederic. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1969.

Carter, Everett. "Introduction." The Damnation of Theron Ware. By Harold Frederic. Harvard-Belknap, 1960. vii- xxi v.

Eble, Kenneth. F . Scott Fitzgerald. Rev. ed. Twayne U. S. Authors Series # 36. Boston: Twayne, 1977.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Flappers and Philosophers. NY: Scribners, 1920.

The Great Gatsby. NY: Scribners, 1925.

Frederic, Harold. The Damnation of Theron Ware or I1lumination. Vol. Ill of The Harold Frederic Edition. Eds. Charlyne Dodge and Stanton Garner. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1981.

Graham, Sheilah. College of One. NY: Viking, 1967.

Le Vot, Andre. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Trans. William Byron. NY: Doubleday, 1983.

Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955.

Piper, Henry Dan. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portra it. New York: Ho It, Rinehart, and Winston, 1965. 282

. "Frank Norris and Scott Fitzgerald.” Huntington Library Quarterly 19 (1956): 393-400.

Schorer, Mark. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. NY: McGraw Hill^ 19^1.

Siferd, Nancy Kay Blackford. "Textual Range in the Novels of Harold Frederic." Diss. Bowling Green State U r 1970.

Simoni, Christopher. "Harold Frederic's Social Vision: A Critical Study." Diss. Marquette U, 1977.

Spangler, George, "Theron Ware and the Perils of Relativism." Canandian Review of American Studies 5 (1974): 36-46.

Stein, Allen F. "Evasions of an American Adam.” American Literary Realism 5 (1972): 23-36.

Turnbull, Andrew, ed. The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald. NY: Scribners, 1963^

Witt, Stanley Pryor. "Harold Frederic as Purveyor of the American Myth: An Approach to His Novels." Diss. U of Arizona, 1976. CHAPTER VII

THE MARKET-PLACE AND THE MORALITY OF STYLE

Few critics have found it worthwhile to write opinions

on Harold Frederic's novels with English settings, and his

final work, The Market-Place (1899), is no exception. But during the last few decades the diversity of evaluative critical opinion concerning this book has been particularly unsettling. The views of two respected scholars who have both spent considerable energy on Harold Frederic and who have written introductions to The Damnation of Theron Ware serve as examples of the extreme polarities. Introducing the Harvard-Belknap edition in 1960, Everett Carter wrote concerning Frederic's English novels that "they are scarcely worth mentioning" (ix-x)— a comment which is all the more important since it comes from the same critic who named The Damnation of Theron Ware "among the four or five best novels written by an American during the nineteenth century" (Realism 239) . Standing at the opposite evaluative pole a quarter-century later, Scott Donaldson introduced the Penguin edition of the same novel, and referred to The Market-Place alongside Theron Ware as

283 284

"still another* first-rate novel" (vii). It seems that most brief evaluations of the Frederic canon are aligned with Carter, while most scholars specializing in Frederic, naturally enough, claim to recognize the artistry of The

Market-Place. But in such a situation of critical diversity, it is difficult to say which critics have given the novel a sufficiently thorough reading and which may be skimming with their essays already drafted.

Part of the unfavorable discrimination against

Frederic's English novels in general may be due at least in part to the fact that Frederic is usually considered in the company of his contemporary naturalist or regional realist fellows. Not surprisingly, those who favor Frederic for what he reveals about the spirit and manners of rural

American life in the nineteenth century--and read him for that reason— are not interested in his novels with English settings. Further, the immediate and the lasting appeal of his one critically acclaimed novel, Theron Ware, has been so great that the author's other works, before and after, fall unfortunately in its long shadow. Neither should the fact be overlooked that those who read Theron Ware, then attempt to read his later books must cross over the romantic pot-boiler March Hares (1896) and the stylistically and thematically problematic Gloria Mundi 285

(1898) before reaching Frederic's second powerful

psychological novel. But I suspect that the real cause of

the low critical stature of The Market-Place is a moral

one.

Previous chapters in this dissertation have explored a

number of ways in which the work of Harold Frederic

prefigures certain elements in the work of some mainstream

American modernists. On the broadest level, it has been

demonstrated that his characters are people in tension due

at least in part to the fading influence of an

authoritative Judeo-Christian ideology. More specifically,

it has been demonstrated that his use of an intertextual fictional region, his critical treatment of religion, and his inverted handling of the American dream are all more characteristic of the modern era than of his own. One element somewhat slighted, however, has been Frederic's narrative technique--and for good reason. Generally speaking, Frederic's technique is not particularly modern or even experimental. For the most part, aside from the occasional brilliance of Theron Ware, Frederic does not touch the narrative intricacies of a Hemingway or a

Faulkner; indeed, too often the critic sees little evidence to separate Frederic's work from that of the average popular writers of his day. Still, since it is the purpose of this dissertation to demonstrate the fact that Frederic does prefigure the moderns, the case would be strengthened 286

if it could be demonstrated that Frederic's work does in

some way partake of the stylistic freedom by which the

modern era is characterized. It is important for this

argument then that in The Market-Place, Frederic did in

fact attempt the kind of narrative sophistication that was

pioneered by Henry James and carried on by his modernist

progeny. But Frederic's attempt was not wholly successful,

and it led to a problem with the way his protagonist has

been perceived. As a result, instead of boosting Frederic

to a new level of artistry, his imperfectly executed

narrative technique precipitated a practical moral failure—

not the moral failure of which The Market-Place was

originally accused, but moral failure of a very modern

kind.

Many of the original readers and reviewers of The

Market-Place considered the book as patently immoral.^ And

if a character's receiving what he or she justly deserves

is the measure by which one measures morality in

literature, then one can hardly imagine a less moral book.

For in fact Joel Stormont Thorpe does not pay duty or percentage on the fortune he swindles from his stock-market enemies. On the contrary, events turn out quite the way he wishes them to turn out. He sets out to make himself a fortune and to become a country gentleman, and he does so.

He allows no legal or moral restriction to stand in his 287

way, and his amoral choices are never countermanded. In

the final tally, Thorpe has his fortune securely won and

his acceptance by good society is pending.

While one set of critics censured the book for

immorality, other early reviewers judged that by suggesting

Thorpe's philanthropic plottings at the book's end,

Frederic had in fact given the story a moral. The ending

proved, these readers supposed, that Thorpe was not happy with his illegally gained wealth, and could only be

satisfied when his fortune was put to the moral use of

supplying the needs of others. These readers, however, evidently missed the fact plainly enough stated that Thorpe

is unhappy only because the playing of economic war games

is so much more challenging and entertaining than living peacefully on a gentleman's estate. Thorpe's planned philanthropic activity is in fact just what he says it is-- part of his plan to rule England. The book's real moral failure is of another kind than that noted by the early reviewers and is not dependent upon the protagonist's fate.

In the most extensive piece of criticism yet published on The Market-Place, Jean Frantz Blackall rightly directs attention to the duality of the protagonist Joel Stormont

Thorpe, the contraries in his nature that impel him to be at once kind and cruel, confident and doubting, admirable and despicable. She suggests that Frederic 288

had the sound impulse to cast Thorpe in roles in which contradictions and ambiguities are inherent: as the psychological product of two worlds, the old and the new; as the type of the financial buccaneer, whose commercial prowess is attended by moral ambiguities; and as the double man, in whom opposition is the distinguishing principle. (388)

The moral ambiguities to which Blackall alludes demand

primary attention here. She suggests that Frederic was

himself unsure about the morality of the new, commercial man, and that his doubt is reflected in a moral ambiguity

surrounding Thorpe. Because of his unsureness, Frederic would not condemn Thorpe, or show him in a wholly evil light--hence the ambiguity. Blackall presents a convincing variety of textual evidence to support this claim. It is in the conclusions drawn from the evidence that she and I differ; I suggest that Frederic did not hold ambiguous feelings about his protagonist, and that he intended to condemn Thorpe thoroughly; but his intentions were thwarted by the seductive tendencies of a psychologically complex point of view. In fine, he failed to anticipate adequately the sympathy-creating effect of the point of view in relation to the signals of narrative irony. Before developing this point fully, however, I will address

Blackall's arguments supporting her thesis that Frederic did not wish to condemn Thorpe. 289

First, Blackall suggests that if Frederic had wanted

to portray Thorpe as an evil man, he would not have allowed

him to end the novel more happily than he began it— a line

of reasoning which parallels the charges of immorality

posed by early reviewers. If granted, however, this point

would preclude many of the possiblities of realistic

fiction. Simply put, there is no mimetic reason that low

and bad characters cannot be as happy as the good and high

ones, unless happiness is made dependent upon some uniform

moral system or world view. Silas Lapham would doubtless

have been miserable had he cheated his partners and conned

his buyers, but Joel Thorpe lives in a different moral

world.

Secondly, Blackall argues that Frederic would not have portrayed the people financially ruined by Thorpe as stock market "wreckers," men as cut-throat in their dealings as

Thorpe himself, if he had wanted to stimulate the readers’ condemnation of Thorpe. Malicious victims do not gain

reader sympathy or that of their fictional peers, and the average people ripped off by Thorpe's bear squeeze, the parsons and spinsters, Blackall states, "do not appear in the novel" (400). But this is not quite accurate.

Granted, we do not meet the small stock buyers as faces and names, and if we had, our identification with them would have been stronger. But Frederic does make it known that they are the average people all across England, a point 290

made forcefully during an ironically touching scene between

Thorpe and his broker Colin Semple, a character who seems

to be a cross between Hardy's Donald Farfrae and Faulkner's

Flem Snopes. As the two part, just before they "shook

hands with the deep-eyed earnestness of comrades who have been through battle and faced death together," the narrator tells us that for a time they "dwelt no further upon these halcyon beginnings of a fresh plan for plundering the public" (279; my emphasis). The irony could not be plainer-

-or more condemnatory.

Along the same line, Blackall notes that Tavender, who is permanently silenced with alcohol by Thorpe's man

Kervick, "is caricatured by Frederic as a doddering old fool whose own inanity and weakness for drink create

Thorpe's opportunity to manipulate and destroy him. He is not a victim that the reader mourns over" (400). I disagree. Possibly readers do not identify closely with

Tavender, but in fact the old man's only sins are gullibility, poor judgement, and an alcohol problem— none of which justify execution. Furthermore, Tavender's innocence is emphasized by his Quaker-like appearance, a trait Frederic notes repeatedly. Failure to take umbrage is the fault— or the moral option— of the reader, and I suspect that Frederic would be surprised to know that some of his readers write old Tavender off so easily. 291

Next Blackall argues that if Frederic had wanted to

portray Thorpe as evil, he would not have allowed us a

reason to excuse Thorpe for luring away his sister Louisa's

children, Julia and Alfred, to his own more affluent

household. Indeed, Blackall argues that Thorpe's act of

financial seduction is not as immoral as it at first seems

because "it is [Louisa's] stubborn inflexibility, not her

moral rectitude" that ultimately separates her from her

children. But is Louisa's resentment and the resulting

"inflexibility" unjustified? She has, after all, raised

two children alone in London as a businesswoman struggling to make a living, succeeding only by living humbly and working diligently. Quite the opposite, Thorpe has ventured since his youth to make a fortune, but the narrator makes it clear that his life's story reveals "no industry of the wage-earning sort" (18). As a youth he deserted the family business to go adventuring, thereby loading all family responsibility onto his sister.

Certainly she has grounds to suspect that Thorpe is up to no good, and though she does not venture to develop her inferences and intuitions with particulars, one can identify with her justifiable doubt— she knows Thorpe's ways as well as the reader.

Neither is it such a small thing that her children choose to change their name from the humble "Dabney" worn by their mother and late father to "D'Aubigny"— a name they 292

deem more dignified, more appropriate for their new

lifestyle. Like Thorpe, Julia and Alfred make themselves

anew, and in so doing they make their mother less their

mother. I do not think her resentment, even her

obstinance, is strange; neither do I find it irrational.

On the contrary, although her children are the more

attractive characters, Frederic’s readers, the average

people across England, may have identified strongly with

Louisa, especially when in anger she voices her ambiguous

feelings:

If you ever have children of your own . . . and you slave your life out to bring them up so that they’ll think themselves your betters, and they act accordingly--then you'll understand. But you don't understand now— and there's no good our talking any more about it. (173)

Such a statement— the portrait of a hurting mother— is

clearly an authorial attempt to create sympathy.

Also, though it seems at first that Thorpe is beneficently taking responsibility for Louisa's children, the narrator compels us to realize the pragmatic precipitators of Thorpe's paternalism: Alfred and Julia become the family that Thorpe's career as buccaneer had theretofore precluded, but that his vision of himself as country patriarch now demands. More specifically, Julia's usefulness reaches its peak at the Lake of Geneva when her girlish presence is the key to Thorpe's establishing an easy relationship between the Cressage-Madden party and his 293

own. Celia and Edith, weary with each other, fasten on to

the neutral Julia to escape one another, and Uncle Stormont

becomes part of the party by carefully crafted accident.

Even Alfred is useful; he is sufficiently foppish to

fulfill Thorpe's stereotypical understanding of a

gentleman's son. Subtly, however, the narrator suggests

that Alfred's tenure in the grace of Thorpe may be

limited. Only Louisa can foresee the possible problem in

the nephew-uncle relationship, and she sees it early on.

Thorpe, having made great promises to his sister about

Alfred and Julia, has bragged that unlike himself, the boy

will begin life as the nephew of a rich man. Louisa's

reaction, though, is one of foreboding:

'I'm almost afraid to have such notions put in his head,’ she replied, with visible apprehension. 'You mustn't encourage him to build too high hopes, Joel. It's speculation, you know— and anything might happen to you. And then--you may marry, and have sons of your own.' He lifted his brows swiftly— as if the thought were new to his mind. A slow smile stole into the little wrinkles about his eyes. He opened his lips as if to speak, and then closed them again. (36)

This subject is dropped for nearly 300 pages, but after

Thorpe's fortune is made, he makes one of his intuitive,

impulsive decisions:

It was very clear to him now that he desired to have children of his own,— say two at least, a son and a daughter, or perhaps a son and two daughters. . . . As he prefigured these 294

new beings, the son was to exist chiefly for the purposes of distinction and the dignity of heirship. . . . (280)

When a son is born, Alfred will no longer be useful, and

will become a liability. And when Thorpe's people lose

their usefulness, they lose his favor. Such narrative

promptings to raise reader suspicions are subtle and

demanding, but clear.

Finally, Blackall asserts that Thorpe's sentimentality

justifies him in the author's view, a critical judgement

which she supports by noting that both Lady Cressage and

Celia Madden (the latter acting as Frederic’s mouthpiece)

forgive him this trait. This effect is overstated,

however. Certainly Thorpe has some good traits, some bad

ones, and some neutral ones, but his sentimentality has no

more to do with whether or not we should condemn his rotten

actions than does his punctuality. Whether or not Frederic

commended such emotions, they hardly form the basis for a

positive relationship with a character.

Professor Blackall does, however, make one very

important point in her argument with which I am in total agreement, and it is important in my argument as well. She has pointed out that the long inside views of Thorpe entice the reader to identify with him, and with this I fully agree. The critical difference lies in the fact that I do not thereby infer that these long inside views indicate that Frederic was ambiguous in his opinion of Thorpe, or 295

that the long inside views were therefore intended to keep

the readers from condemning Thorpe, though that may

occasionally be the result. On the contrary, I suggest

that both the internal and the external evidence indicate

that Thorpe, even when performing good acts, must be

considered a dangerous man, portrayed in the field of

irony. Frederic expects his readers to draw from the

subtle clues of his narrative that Thorpe, in spite of an

occasional neutral or even pleasant particular, is a very

bad man indeed, and all the more dangerous because he is

not the villain from a cheap mystery whose every action is

branded black. Instead, he can manipulate seemingly good

acts to his own power-mad advantage; further, he can do so

not as a regular man who feels guilt and remorse, but far

more efficiently--as a sociopath, one wholly without

traditional conscience. The problem is that to some

degree, Frederic’s stylistic experimentation betrayed him.

He inadequately estimated the power of the long inside

views.

I will return later to internal evidence to support my claim; since the issue is in part one of authorial

intention, I will address first the likelihood of

Frederic's condemnation of Thorpe based upon the external evidence which indicates that in all likelihood Frederic would have condemned unequivocally a man like Thorpe.

While untraditional in many areas of moral consideration, a 296

fact to which his two simultaneous households, mates, and

sets of children attest, Frederic was a raging idealist

concerning honesty in business and politics; indeed, he

called himself the "original mugwump" (Haines 85). His

concern with the public morality is nowhere better

represented than in this letter to his very public personal

friend. President Grover Cleveland:

I do not know whether you feel as fully as I do that the public tendency since the war, in business, in politics, in social life, has rotted and infected almost every condition of our existence. Moral sensibility has been blunted, the keen edge of honor turned, the standards of justice clogged, the ardor of patriotism chilled, the confiding ignorance of the half-educated tampered with, the ambitions of good men perverted— unti1 there is in these latter days a condition of things as gross and wretched in its way as that under which Germany, and in fact, all Continental Europe, weltered four hundred years ago. . . . It is within your power to mark and create an era in your country's history as decisive, and in its field as beneficent, as that which Luther marked for Christendom. (Correspondence 37-8)

The idealistic voice in such passages is not a rare one for

Harold Frederic; and most importantly for the purposes of this chapter, one can hardly imagine words less likely to be uttered by any friend of Joel Stormont Thorpe. For in the twisted psyche of Thorpe, intuitive will precedes morality; the adoring opinion of his accomplices and those in his personal influence precedes honor; justice consists of what one can get away with; he is educated, but only half-way— a fact which the author points out by making him 297

a public school man who was denied a university education;

and finally, his ambitions throughout the story, for

example with Alfred and Julia, and at the end, with his

decision to rule England, take on the character of good

intentions which have been twisted and perverted for

personal gain. In short, Thorpe is the fictional

incarnation of the post-war tendencies that Frederic

despised.

But these perversions are melded with still another

set of traits which Frederic despised: for Thorpe also

resembles the Russian type that Frederic condemns in The 2 New Exodus. In attacking what he perceived as a Slavic

tendency that had resulted in the latest pogrom, Frederic

was describing Thorpe as well:

The Slavic brain is nothing if not juvenile. It is invincibly optimistic; it rushes headlong into enthusiastic beliefs founded upon the merest hearsay or imagining; it invents lies and excuses with incredible swiftness and in entire disregard for probabilities, or for cause and effect. . . . Withal, it is kindly and ferocious by turn.. . . (32)

Indeed, so is Thorpe's. Although Thorpe dons a mask of

reason for the sake of those about him, the reader who

spends time within Thorpe's mind is continually aware that

he works by his intuition and imagination, then lies to

justify his often successful intuitions. For example when

Tavender staggers into his office more or less by chance, he reveals Lord Plowden's blackmailing scheme and probably 298

saves Thorpe at least a fortune if not a term in jail as

well. But when Thorpe meets Plowden later on and foils his

attempt, he lies and brags to the nobleman, "I've been

watching every move you've made, seeing further ahead in

your own game than you did. Why, it was too easy” (263).

As the reader well knows, good fortune had played the major

role. Likewise when he squeezes the bears for two extra

pounds per share at the final reckoning, he does so because

he is angry, and in so doing risks the whole scheme. But

his intuitions are right, and his bluff is so strong that

even the worldly wise Scotchman Colin Semple is amazed at

what he believes to be Thorpe's prowess. And that is fine

by Thorpe. Similarly, when near the book's end Louisa

chastizes him for not putting his money to good use, he

defends himself like an attacked child, and skillfully

wields a tale of his intentions to follow such a philanthropic pattern; he even claims to have been working on it that very day— and he spins his tale convincingly.

He may well believe it himself. But as he nods and agrees with her concerning various social theorists, the narrator

ironically points out that he is making mental notes of all that she mentions (and that he confirms), so that he can look it up later. Also in keeping with the Slavic characterization, Thorpe is kindly and ferocious. With

Lord Plowden, for instance, he is— sequentially— mawkishly grateful, offended and condemnatory, destructive. 299

incredibly forgiving, and beneficent— all with minimal

provocation. And he never understands quite why, as the

following conversation which occurs after Thorpe short-

circuits Plowden's attempt at blackmail demonstrates.

Plowden begins:

'The most amazing thing, though--to my mind--is that you don't seem--what shall I say?— particularly enraged with me about it." 'Yes— that surprises me, too," Thorpe meditatively admitted. 'I was entitled to kill you--crush you to jelly. Any other man I would. But you,--I don't know— I do funny things with you." (265)

Funny indeed. Thorpe is here far less offended by the fact

that Plowden nearly blew the entire scam than he was by the

thought that Plowden had supplied a stool for himself but

not for Thorpe when the two went hunting. But most

importantly, these are quite the actions of the Slavic mind

that Frederic thoroughly condemned in his journalistic writing. And it supports our thesis here that Frederic

compared the Russian abuses later in The New Exodus with

the kind of competition that prevails on Wall Street— and, we may suppose, on the London exchange as well.

Neither is The New Exodus an isolated incident of

Frederic's idealism. As Austin Briggs notes, Frederic had a "deep disgust with getting and spending in the Gilded

Age" (181). This disgust in notable in all the novels. In

Seth's Brother's Wife, Albert Fairchild is villified for his attempts to achieve political power for his personal 300

gain. In The Lawton Girl, the unscrupulous capitalists

Wendover and Tenney are condemned for their abuses of the

public— but like Thorpe they escape punishment. Likewise

in that same story Frederic parodies Horace Boyce and the

Thessaly Reform Club when they work for their personal good

under the guise of philanthropy. In Theron Ware, judgement

on the protagonist comes to a head because he abuses the

trust of his parishoners and others about him. In Gloria

Mundi, the people most thoroughly condemned are those in positions of aristocratic or governmental authority who abuse their power and the public trust— the elder Christian and his ne'er-do-well nephews. The list could continue

indefinitely; betrayers of public trust never fail to be condemned in Frederic's journalistic or fictional works.

It is unlikely then that Thorpe would suddenly arise as an except ion.

Still, Frederic was a man of the world, and as Austin

Briggs states, "Frederic almost never allowed his personal disgust with predatory society to interfere in his fiction with his inquiry into the failings and shortcomings of the individual" (181). Here Briggs begins to touch upon the problem with Frederic's final novel, for in that story

Frederic's style betrays him: the condemnation he intended for Thorpe is in essence reversed by the rhetorical accidence of his modernistic point of view. In The

Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth mentions three narrative 301

phenomena that can precipitate audience problems with

authors' uses of irony that can allow their intentions to

be misinterpreted: (1) a "lack of adequate warning that

irony is at work" (316), (2) "extreme complexity, subtlety,

or privacy of the norms to be inferred" (320) , and (3)

"vivid psychological realism" (322). Booth mentions that

in modern literature problems created by these

characteristics are intensified. I suggest that in this

regard, Frederic is, for good or ill, modern— he runs into

problems on all three counts.

While Frederic's condemnation of Thorpe is signalled

clearly enough for some readers, his warnings are evidently

inadequate for others, and it could be argued that he fails

to warn adequately that irony is at work. I have already

alluded to some of his more subtle narrative signals, but

for a moment it may be worth our while to examine further

the obvious textual evidence for Frederic's condemnation of

Thorpe which is intended to establish the context of

irony. Thorpe bullies people continually, especially those

over whom he holds financial power; he cheats Tavender in

Central America then has him killed in England; he

displaces the affections of his sister's children; he keeps

General Kervick on retainer in order to better pursue his

daughter, Lady Cressage; he buys her as a certifed gentleman's wife just as he buys a gentleman's estate; as I mentioned above, his stock-market schemes defraud the 302

public; and finally his greatest defrauding is yet to come—

I see no reason to doubt that he will in fact gain power

over a nation under the guise of philanthropy. These

things alone, I think, are sufficient to assure us that the

author is condemning him at least in part, but I have not yet mentioned the protagonist's most despicable trait:

Thorpe is violently anti-Semitic.

Frederic would have judged no trait more thoroughly despicable and more sure to bring reader-condemnation than anti-Semitism. He is, after all, the same New York Times correspondent who was ultimately barred from travel in

Russia for his brass-knuckled expose of the treatment of

Russian Jews under the Czars. But it may be that many of

Frederic’s readers, both in 1899 and today, fail to feel the repulsion from Thorpe's anti-Semitism that the humanistic author understandably anticipated. Thus

Frederic also falls into the second area of confusion mentioned by Booth— Frederic's beliefs about his public's reaction to the horrors of anti-Semitism were not shared with the same fervency by many readers. To a greater degree than he anticipated, his norms were private ones.

O'Donnell and Franchere do not mention Thorpe's anti-

Semitism in their Twayne series monograph; Austin Briggs notes it, but primarily as it reflects the generalized brute force of Frederic's tycoon; Blackball mentions it. 303 but briefly. The importance of Thorpe's anti-Semitism and what it reveals about the distance between the author and his protagonist has not been sufficiently considered.

Certainly it would seem that the average reader would have no trouble developing a thorough, lasting, totally irreconcilable disgust for a character whose revealed inner life and statements to others includes passages that could have been taken from some forgotten Nazi's journal:

A picture of these faces of his victims shaped itself out of the flames in the grate. They were moulded in a family likeness, these phantom visages: they were all Jewish, all malignant, all distorted with fright. They implored him with eyes in which panic asserted itself above rage and cunning. (1)

"We’ve got them in such a position that--why good heavens! we can squeeze them to death, crush them like quartz. . . . I don't know them apart, hardly— they’ve all got names like Rhine wines— but I know the gang as a whole, and if I don't lift the roof clean off their particular synagogue, then my name is mud." (8)

'. . . S o there's nothing for us to do but apply to the Stock Exchange for a special settlement date, and meanwhile lie quiet and watch the Jews stew in their own juice. Or fry in their own fat, eh? That's better.' (33)

[Gazing at his own fist] 'That's the kind of hand,' he began thoughtfully, 'that breaks the Jew in the long run. . . . Their fingers are never still; they twist round and keep stirring like a lobster's feelers. But there ain't any real strength in'em. They get hold of most of the things that are going, because they're eternally on the move. It's their hellish industry and activity that gives them such a pull, and makes most people afraid of them. But when a hand like that takes them by the throat*-- he held up his right hand as he spoke, with the thick and uncouth fingers and massive thumb 304

arched menacingly in a powerful muscular tension- -'when that tightens round their neck, and they feel that the grip means business— my God I what good are they? He laughed contemptuously. . . . (178-9).

It is difficult to imagine a character portrayed more

thoroughly in anti-Semitic evil; it is more difficult to

imagine that a generation of readers which witnessed

Thorpe's Nitzchean perversions threaten world civilization

would fail to notice their significance here. What then

could possibly make a reader think that Frederic does not

wholly condemn Thorpe?

Possibly this: just as anti-Semitism repels us, so

does class bigotry. And while Thorpe's anti-Semitism comes

through only occasionally, we are in Thorpe's mind, feeling

the class bigotry that is directed against him

continually. It is especially in this regard that Booth's

third problem with ironic confusion comes in, a problem to which Professor Blackall rightly alluded--the vivid psychological realism of the long inside views of Thorpe highlights the feelings of inadequacy and self- consciousness that Thorpe feels as he begins to move in the social circles traditionally above his class. And with such feelings readers sympathize. Though it seems somewhat less repulsive than anti-Semitism, class bigotry is terrible nevertheless, particularly to the not quite mythical American sensibility that proffers hard work and 305

virtue as the sufficient counterweight for any lack of

privilege. Couple this propensity with constant exposure

to Thorpe's vital and powerful personality, and we begin to

understand how the ironic perspective is lost in The Market

Place and why reader perspective continues to be scrambled

by this uncomfortable novel. "Even characters whose

behavior would be intolerable to us in real life," Booth

writes, "can be made sympathetic by means of this

paralogical proof that they are human beings like

ourselves" (278)— Joel Thorpe could serve as Booth's

example. It places but small demand upon the critical

imagination to see that the average middle-class reader

would identify with Thorpe, who, having suffered at the

hands of in-the-know traders and blueblooded

underachievers, rises, with appealing vigor, to give back

his oppressors' hard usage with hellish interest compounded.

For indeed, because we experience the situations

largely as Thorpe does, we end up sharing his hatred for his enemies; we cannot escape a gratifying feeling of comaraderie with the protagonist precipitated by a hearty co-belligerance. The condescending Lord Plowden, representing the old aristocracy, does not think it necessary to keep his appointments with Thorpe, and he pays dearly for his snobbishnes. And as if to outdo himself 306

with foolishness and seal his doom, Plowden refers to the

possibility of Thorpe's marrying his sister--whom Thorpe

finds unattractive--as a great match for a "commoner." In

such situations, the readers feel Thorpe's wounded pride,

and are thus prepared to share Thorpe's delight in

manhandling this conceited but inept nobleman. We despise

Plowden further because he complains of his own poverty

while living what would be to most readers, and certainly

to Thorpe, a lavish life. The situation created by the

fact that his rich estate actually belongs to his mother

does not, for the common reader, make his condition merit

the adjective poverty. Along a different vein, like Thorpe we hate him because he is willing even to trade his sister

for a better financial condition. And finally he stupidly attempts to blackmail Thorpe or send him to jail, then, a

few moments later, begs Thorpe to help him. And Plowden is not the only such blueblood portrayed.

General Kervick, similarly representing the military aristocracy, is equally despicable; he is a soldierly follower of orders, who, for a price, allows Thorpe to use him as he wills. Once his allegiance is purchased by

Thorpe, it is unbounded by feeling or intellect; indeed, when he receives his orders to drown old Tavender in drink and leave him a corpse, he seems almost gratified to 307

receive such a serious responsibility:

The soldier's richly-flor id face and intent, bulging blue eyes expressed vivid comprehension. He nodded with eloquence as he slipped the notes into his trousers pocket. "Absolutely," he murmered with martial brevity, from under his white, tight mustache. (248)

Earlier in the story readers may have been shocked at

Thorpe's threatening, humiliating cruelty to Kervick, but

the soldier remains unlikeable nevertheless, and not only

because he takes orders too well. Like Plowden, he

complains about his own hard way, though all the while he

is seemingly sufficiently monied and well-fed. Like

Thorpe, the reader thinks Kervick less than a man for

wanting to live off his daughter and her moderate

inheritance, an income gained from a marriage that he was

originally against. Finally, just as Plowden is willing to

offer his sister, Kervick offers to help Thorpe win the

affections of his daughter. Lady Cressage.

These identifications with Thorpe, however, are not

the most painfully compromising for the reader. Most

obviously, something in us wants Thorpe to succeed in his

stockmarket fraud. From Thorpe's amoral angle which we

share, the fraud seems like sport--we are on Thorpe's team, and we want to win. And the revenge does seem to become

sweet, since, as Blackball has mentioned, the Jews that

Thorpe seeks to ruin are themselves wreckers of new businesses. But the most serious moral problems of the 308

novel arise because race and market practice become

convoluted in Thorpe's twisted mind, and the urge for

vengeance takes on the aforementioned anti-Semitic

element. Thus unsuspectingly the reader falls into a share

of the emotions of a madman.

But aside from the perspective given by major

incidents and exchanges, the inside view of Thorpe

throughout the novel reveals a multitude of minor, morally

neutral details and reactions that, while in themselves

insignificant, effectively produce sympathy when compounded

— in spite of the fact that they are attributed to an

abusive, self-serving racist. The result is that Thorpe

becomes an Everyman living out the dream of a goodly

portion of the reading population— he experiences the joys

of great luxury, wealth, and power after the misery of

discomfort, poverty, and hard use. For example, Thorpe

truly appreciates the feel of "double-silk underwear" (38)—

it is a small detail, but it humanizes him. In a similar

vein, upon Thorpe's entering into polite society he is as

ill at ease as most of his readers would have been, thus

increasing identification and sympathy. Like other social

climbers of his day, he does not quite know how to act around titled company or their domestic servants, and he is amazed at the resourcefulness of these fascinating liveried beings. He worries about his dress and manners, and is delighted when he discovers ways to keep from making 309

himself a fool. In addition to this, he is unnerved at

times by vague doubts and anxiety about his own schemes and

ability; nevertheless when the pressure is on, he trusts

his own intuition, and it serves him. And because we

readers share Thorpe's vision, we vicariously enjoy his

success, his amazement, his delight, his anxiety. Even in

his comical mispronounciations, he becomes more forgivably

ignorant than repulsively pretentious.

The story of his past helps to prepare the reader for

this effect. Never are we more drawn to Thorpe than in the

story of his life abroad as he relates it to his sister

Louisa in Chapter Two. The portrayal— composed of course by the self-absorbed mind of Thorpe— is that of a poor

Londoner, a complete underdog, who is cheated around the world by self-serving criminals. In the New World he comes close repeatedly to making his fortune, "but someone had always played him false. There was never a friendship for him which could withstand the temptation of profitable treason" (17-8). Still, Everyman perseveres and fights diligently to rise in the world. Back in London he is nearly broken again by cheats on the stock market and blackmailers in the press, but he finds his chance to overcome them. And because he seems to be recounting his adventures at least in part to gain the affection of his sister— a noble goal— a sister he wants to believe in him,

"as a sister should,” the account is all the more 310

touching. Ironically the narrator points out that none of

the money-making schemes included any honest labor, but the

authorial reminder is nearly overshadowed by the vitality

of the tale. Thus as his story progresses in the self-

glorifying abstractions of his own mind, Thorpe portrays

the perfect self-made man, as humble as he is powerful, as

beneficent as he is rich, as capable of forgiveness as of

wrath. And because Thorpe feels absolutely no guilt about

the sordid details, the reader, who lives in Thorpe's mind,

does not either.

On the contrary, we experience his boyish frankness.

Throughout Thorpe is willing to learn from his mistakes, to

reward those who teach and help him, and even to show

unrequested generosity to those who show him common

friendship and courtesy. He makes no annoying pretence of

piety, and when the harder aspects of his character are

accurately revealed by Celia Madden, he admits to them.

When she warns him, in the presence of his fiance, that

there is something in him which "stands quite apart from

standards of morals or ethics or the ordinary emotions," he smiles and nods approvingly, responding, "You've got me down fine." In the same conversation, she prophecies as well that "power will be terrible in your hands, if people whom you can injure provoke you to cruel courses" and he responds, "That's the kind of man I am" (235). In a paradox of narrative technique, the honesty with which he 311

reacts to the analysis makes a greater effect than the

somewhat horrible truths that the analysis reveals. And

yet the reader who has been paying close attention to this

point knows that in this book Celia is Frederic's voice,

and that her terrible understanding of the situation is

true.

While the evidence already cited supports my

assumptions about Frederic's condemnation of Thorpe from external, non-literary evidence, from the Frederic canon, and from the narrative signals within this book, it does not change the overall rhetorical effect of the novel: the sympathy created by the apparently inadequate signalling of ironic intent, the author's overgeneralization of his own intense hatred of anti-Semitism, and the almost exclusively limited point of view seduce many readers into becoming the unsuspecting accomplices of a madman. Such an effect is common enough in modern literature, and once again,

Frederic's technique fits better in the modern era than in his own.

In Chapter Six I compared Frederic with Fitzgerald, and that comparison commends itself again here. Jay

Gatsby, for example, places the reader in character relationship something akin to the one we experience with

Thorpe. We know from the facts that Gatsby is a questionable character. No doubt his activities cause suffering in the lives of thousands of regular people: he 312

is a gangster, a bootlegger, a colleague of men like

Wolfsheim. And yet his opponents that we do see are so

repulsive, and his own romantic vision so winning, that we

find ourselves simultaneously despising Gatsby and wanting

him to achieve his vision. Jake Barnes presents an even

more difficult example. Certainly the first few times

through The Sun Also Rises, most readers rightfully

identify with Jake. It takes considerable distance to

realize the moral ambiguity in which Hemingway portrays

him. For in fact, Jake betrays his relationship with the

aficionados, and he does so by becoming a pimp of sorts.

Furthermore, while we empathize with his romantic dreaming,

we finally realize that his will and even his intentions

are morally ambiguous, especially as he chases after his

unobtainable grail.

The post-modern period introduces narrative problems

even closer to that of The Market-Place. One parallel case which creates similar difficulties is that of Vladmir

Nabokov’s Lolita, and as with Frederic's novel, the morality of the narrative effect, especially since it is practiced purposefully, is questionable, while it may be true that the academic audience is not compromised by

Lolita— since that audience supposedly understands the formal techniques Nabokov uses and appreciates his aesthetic challenge— the academy is not the only or even the largest audience the book reaches; thus the moral 313

problem obtains. As Booth has written concerning this

issue, "the moral question is really whether an author has

an obligation to write well in the sense of making his

moral orderings clear, and if so, clear to whom** (386).

But moral questions are never easy, and when part of the

problem, if we call it such, may be unintentional, the

moral question is muddier still. It is doubtful that

Frederic was attempting to construct a Nabokovian puzzle,

or even toying with Jamesian ambiguity. Experimenting on

the moral frontier, he wanted to draw a character--an evil

character— as realistically as he could; but the deft

manipulation of point of view that had surfaced

occasionally in Theron Ware may have proven to be more

sophisticated than his own understanding of its effects

upon his audience. In this respect, I think, the

accusation can rightfully be entertained that the book is

at least in part a moral failure. Nevertheless, Booth has

rightly suggested that "to collaborate with the author by

providing the source of an allusion or by deciphering a pun

is one thing. But to collaborate with him by providing

mature moral judgment is a far more exhilarating sport"

(307). In this demand, Frederic's last novel is as

exhilarating as it is discomforting.

Finally, in its failings and in its limited success,

The Market-Place outlines some of the emotional difficulties and the exciting narrative experimentation 314 which would become the macks of the best writers in the coming decades. Readers are drawn in, then compromised by the work’s painful coupling of form and content. It may be then a failed, immoral novel. And yet if we read The

Market-Place in the company of modern novels, with the same attention to device and detail that modern novels demand, we may find that the book is not a failure at all, but simply another disturbing piece of modern literature. 315

NOTES

^Austin Briggs gives a more thorough review of the work's original reception; see especially pages his pages 176-82. 2 Austin Briggs also notes this fact (188-9). 316

WORKS CITED

Blackall, Jean Frantz. "Perspective on Harold Frederic's The Market-Place." PMLft 86 (1971), 388-405.

Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.

Briggs, Austin. The Novels of Harold Frederic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 196^.

Carter, Everett. Howells and the Age of Realism. New York: Lippincott, 195 4.

"Introduction." The Damnation of Theron Ware. By Harold Frederic. Cambridge, MA : Harvard Belknap, 1961. vii-xxiv. Donaldson, Scott. "Introduction." The Damnation of Theron Ware. By Harold Frederic. New York: Penguin, 1985. vi i-xxx.

Frederic, Harold. The Correspondence of Harold Frederic. Ed. George E. Fortenberry, et al. Vol. I of The Harold Frederic Edition. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1977.

. The Market-Place. Eds. Charlyne Dodge and Stanton Garner. Vol. Tl of The Harold Frederic Edition. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1981.

. The New Exodus: A Study of Israel in Russia. New York: Putnam's, 1892.

Haines, Paul. "Harold Frederic." Diss. New York U, 1945.

O'Donnell, Thomas F. , and Hoyt C. Franchere. Harold Frederic. Twayne's U.S. Author Series 3. New York: Twayne, 1961. CHAPTER VIII

SAVING THE PARTICULARS: GLORIA MUNDI, ERNEST HEMINGWAY ,

AND HAROLD FREDERIC'S MODERN WORLD VIEW

The first presupposition that has guided this

dissertation throughout is that the Harold Frederic canon

presents the critic with work sufficiently strong to

support the author's place among the best American novelists. The second is that one of the long overlooked strengths of his canon is the degree to which certain of his works prefigure those of American modernist writers of the twenties and thirties. Admittedly the best support for such premises is grounded upon his two strong psychological novels. The Damnation of Theron Ware and The Market-Place.

It may seem wrong-headed then, or at least rhetorically unsound, to center this last chapter on a weaker book.

Gloria Mundi, however, falls into that rather difficult but not uncommon literary category of being a novel more important than good. No one who has read the book needs to be convinced of its occasional weaknesses, especially when it is compared with Frederic's first-rate works. But underneath the book's frustratingly transparent

317 318

sentimentality lies a clear representation of Frederic's

mature modernistic world view; hence the value of the work

for my purposes. The novel is one of Frederic's most

directly philosophical. In fact, it can almost be termed a

world view catalog; our browsing follows that of the

protagonist, Christian Tower, the humble tutor who finds

himself suddenly a British nobleman with position, money,

power--and the responsibility to make choices. As he seeks

a worthwhile way of life, we follow his impressions and

disappointments. And finally, we settle upon his modernistic world view, a view all the more modern for its dependence upon the ancient sayings both of Job and The

Preacher of Ecclesiastes, figures in whom Frederic, like

Fitzgerald and especially Hemingway, found a kindred voice.* After a reading of Gloria Mundi, then, I will compare the world view implied there with that found in that most typically modern of novels in this regard, Ernest

Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

This chapter suggests that interpretive light may be cast upon Harold Frederic's work by placing it in the context of Hemingway's first masterpiece--a rather precarious approach to say the least, for no external evidence links Ernest Hemingway to Harold Frederic. Given the facts that Hemingway was a voracious reader, that other top writers of Hemingway's generation were reading and recommending Frederic, and that some of these writers were 319

significant in Hemingway's own development, it seems likely

that he would have cead at least Theron Ware, but we cannot

be sure that he did. But a literary confluence, not an

influence, is not what I am pursuing here. What Hemingway,

possibly the man most in tune with his time, and Frederic,

possibly the man most ahead of his, share is a view of man's place in the world, a modern view.

For the critic interested in both authors, a

comparison of the lives of Hemingway and Frederic is too

tantalizing to resist, and may in fact begin to account for their shared view of the world. Both men were born into respectable middle-class homes, though both homes were in actuality somewhat other than average; Frederic's was made so by the death of his father, Hemingway's by the various emotional problems of both father and mother. Outside the home, formal schooling was adequate but minimum for both writers. They finished high school, but neither attended a college or university; instead, they completed their respective educations by joining the staffs of newspapers, both beginning in their late teens the journalistic careers that would shape their lives. Both men ultimately served as European correspondents for major North American newspapers, Hemingway for the Toronto Star and Frederic for the New York Times, and in so doing became well-informed citizens and critics not only of the United States but of the world. Yet in one notable way the two careers 320

differed. Hemingway rather quickly achieved a goal that

Frederic forever failed to reach: that of successfully

giving up newspaper work in order to pursue single-mindedly

his art. Possibly this is why Frederic surpassed Hemingway

as a journalist of importance as clearly as Hemingway

exceeded Frederic as a literary author.

The European experience did more than broaden both

men’s literary range; for in Europe, both men led lives

that not only led to their writing superb stories but to

living them out as well. And just as the events of the two

lives sometimes found parallel courses, so did the men's

attitudes. Both Frederic and Hemingway were flamboyant

expatriates, men with charismatic personalities who made

friends with an almost automatic ease, especially in the

more bohemian circles of artists and writers. Similarly

both had more than a little of the romantic hero about

them. Hemingway's heroic exploits on the battlefield and

African savannah are to well known to need recounting; but

Frederic was also a hero of sorts. Like Hemingway, he was

long on intestinal fortitude as well as talent, and as a

result he made an immediate international reputation within weeks of first arriving in Europe. He was discontent with

the information he could gain about the cholera problem plaguing the continent, and chose to cover it himself. At

recognized risk to his own well-being, he traveled throughout cholera-infested southern France in order to 321

diagnose and report on conditions there. As O ’Donnell and

Franchere have written, "With no more than a sizeable piece

of cut plug in his mouth to serve as a preventative and

with his usual buoyant good health, Frederic took very real

risks to get his story" (52). The results of his reporting

were, for the people of Europe, a calming of their fears

concerning the spread of the disease, and for Frederic

personally, praise from around the world. The modern

reader can hardly help but fancy Hemingway, who taunted

Death on battlefields and in barrooms, taking the same

dare. Had Li fe magazine then existed, surely Frederic

would have preceded Hemingway with his place on the cover.

Again, less fortuitously foreshadowing Hemingway,

Frederic's public life of adventure and heroism was accompanied by a private life rocky at best, particularly

in regard to the women he lived with. For Frederic too had his problems with marriage. His having two mates and households seems tame in comparison with Hemingway's four, but the elder writer does have the distinction of having held his two simultaneously, and of having done so in a day even less frank about marital difficulties and infidelities than Hemingway's own. Not surprisingly, the life styles these writers chose, with the full complement of adventure, tension, and substances to deal with them, precipitated in both writers the early decay of the romantic hero as well as the romance. If Hemingway was very much a man on the 322

foremost edge of his rapidly changing time, Frederic, both

in his lifestyle and his work, prophesied that such a time

was coming. Gloria Mundi is a significant part of that

prophecy.

II

Gloria Mundi has suffered from a deceptively deft melding of a complex modern theme with a mythic, almost

fairy-tale frame; the marriage is generally considered an unhappy one. Such a judgement is not so easy, however, if we read the novel with its like company. I suggest that

Frederic realized that the fragmentation of modern life made more difficult than ever before a traditionally plotted novel, and as a result, like later American writers such as T.S. Eliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Frederic used a mythic method to give a narrative frame to his work. As many critics have pointed out, the story of Gloria Mundi 2 parallels that of the fisher king myth. Old Christian

Torr is sick, and his domain is suffering because of his condition. But a new ruler, who is in fact his rightful but lost heir, is summoned, almost supernatura1ly, and he comes from across the sea to restore vitality to the family and the kingdom. Frederic, however, like his modern counterparts, does not feel compelled to parallel his mythic model consistently, and the ironic twists and turns he takes have caused some ambiguity for readers and critics 323

alike. While the use of the mythic frame is conscious, so

are the departures, and ultimately they outweigh the

similarities in their interpretive importance.

Take for example the figure that young Christian Tower

makes of a returning king. From the beginning, we know

that he is a small man, that he is rather effete, and that

attitudinally he is a servant, not a leader--a trait he has

picked up during his career as private tutor. Certainly a

far more kingly figure is cut by the reports of his

brother, who, like Christian's late expatriate father, is

large, aggressive, and appropriately named "Salvator." But

the brother never appears; we infer that his birth outside

of legal matrimony makes him an illegitimate candidiate for

the dukedom. The other more likely candidate, a fact

Frederic signals once again by a name, is Christian's

cousin "Emanuel." Like Christian’s brother Salvator,

Emanuel bears one of the names by which the Christ is

referred in Christian myth, "God With Os." He makes no

fisher-king return, however; he is already busy saving a

region of his own. Furthermore the marks of infertility

are about him as well: he has no children, and his famous

System, the child of his intellect and will, is destined

even to precede him to the grave. So instead of either

regal figure, a diminutive French tutor becomes Duke of

Glastonbury. 324

In another important inversion of the mythic

structure, the returning king marries the wrong girl. In

the gothically dark castle Caermere, Christian's ancestral

home, a worthy princess is held a (financial) prisoner.

This woman, Lady Cressage (Joel Thorpe's wife in The Market-

Place) , is the widow of the former heir of Caermere, whose

untimely death has left her uncomfortably on the family

dole. All factors point to her marriage to Christian: she

is his cousin by marriage; she is already in place as the

lady of the castle he will inherit; she makes herself

attractive to Christian both physically and emotionally;

and in true princess fashion, she is said to be the most

beautiful woman in England--a bride fully suitable not only

for the new duke's position but for his breeding

requirements as well. But in what is to her a brutal twist

and for the reader an ironic one, Christian has met a

typewriter girl during his passage over the channel, and he

finally marries her— the masculinely named Frank Bailey, one of Frederic's "new women"— instead.

These are but two examples of Frederic's use of myth, but they may be sufficient to demonstrate that he did not

intend to follow the ancient narratives in any traditional way. On the contrary, for Frederic myth was "a way of controlling, or ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" (681)— Eliot's phrase, I believe. 325

rightly describes the work that Harold Frederic

accomplished in Gloria Mundi; the legitimacy of my

borrowing depends upon Harold Frederic's modern vision of

the world, to which I now turn.

Jean Frantz Blackall has written that the story is

Christian's "novel of education;" but while admitting that

it does delineate Christian's passage into a kind of maturity, I cannot evaluate the change so positively.

Ultimately, the result of his education is a progressive disillusionment into a world view that parallels Frederic's own mature modern world view, an approach to life which would be further delineated by Hemingway and other writers three decades later. Blackall and others have criticized the novel on the grounds that the "fairy tale" element and the serious element do not happily co-exist. I suggest, on the contrary, that the device is a justifiable one in a modern, philosophical novel. With a conceit that goes somewhat beyond James's introduction of American expatriates into the European scene, Frederic introduces a protagonist whose slate is truly blank in order to let the power and sophistication of modern British society have free play. Fresh from his humble existence as a French tutor, Christian has had no realistic experience of English society. He has only a predisposition that as an

Englishman and a gentleman, he should act honorably, and no wonder: his only memory of his English father is that of a 326

dark, dashing figure going off to war to fight honorably

for a lost cause— he never really knew him. His only other

secular male influence, his older brother Salvator, a Free

Mason and a socialist, is equally idealistic and almost as

far removed from daily reality in Christian's mind. To

these influences is added his parochial education in a

school run by the Christian Brothers. Thus in the

beginning we have in Christian an extremely idealistic

young man with something of the piety of the Brothers and

with a predisoposit ion to love England as his fatherland.

These elements, coupled with the advantage of a relative

poverty which has bred in him an attractive humility, allow

us to begin with a protagonist who seems to have a truly

blank slate in regard to England, spotted only by a

predisposition to do good. Unlike his cousins Edward and

Augustine, he is not environmentally predisposed to the

irresponsibility and dissipation which Gloria Mundi portrays as typical of the English peerage. Quite the contrary, Christian's knowledge of the peerage is a full set of storybook assumptions, and his vision of the nobility is noble indeed.

Thus Christian, a philosophical pilgrim, is perfectly suited for the first step in his progress toward disillusionment--his meeting with the Caermere Torrs. At

Caermere he is insulted by his habitually rude cousins, whom he is displacing, and he escapes his conversation with 327

them in less than regal manner by opening a window and

stepping out. Later, when he meets his grandfather the

Duke, his disillusionment with the aristocracy continues.

The old man is bedridden, but his physical decline is only

the visible parallel to the most disillusioning factor— his

spiritual lowness. Even in his decline, the Duke of

Glastonbury first ignores the presence of the heir he has never met nor acknowledged. His only response is a bitter

reference to his father's expatriation and marriage abroad:

"Did I know his mother? Who was his mother? I have no recollection of her" (88). Christian, like Theron Ware and

Joel Thorpe, is looking for an image of the father he never had; particularly, Christian is seeking a way to live his life that is as noble and English as the memory of his father. But in every way, the elderly Duke fails to be the figure that Christain had anticipated meeting, and because he is his ancestor, Chrisitian is particularly disappointed: "He had expected to be overwhelmed with emotion at the meeting, but he found himself barely interested. . . . He looked back again at his grandfather, and tried to say to himself that he was a great noble, the head of an ancient and proud line, and the actual father of his father— but the effort failed to spur his fancy" (87).

The Duke makes it clear that he cares as little for his family in his decline as he did in his health. This unnatural neglect is comically highlighted by the fact that 328

he retains a considerable knowledge of his hounds, many of

which reside in his sick rooms with him. Even though he

cannot recall his children, the attending physician reveals

that "His Grace hasn’t once miscalled a hound" (90).

Christian's meeting with the Duke justifies the description

with which Lord Julius had shocked Christian before: "He

has been a Duke for nearly eighty years--which is, I

believe, unprecedented--but he has been an ass still longer

than that" (77). The disillusionment that Christian feels

is not limited to his family, however. Christian, along

with the reader, is expected to see the Torrs as

representing the majority of the peerage. The elegant Lady

Cressage supports this indictment of the nobles by telling

Christian that what he has seen at Caermere is in fact

typical; concerning the men there, she states that "they were not remarkably worse than other men of their class."

And in fact, none of the other possible successors whom

Christian is displacing would have been "a startling anomaly in the peerage" (63). Her former husband, she adds, was somewhat worse than what he has seen.

Having thus shown Christian quite the opposite of what he was expecting in the Caermere Torrs, his educating angels, Julius and Emanuel Torr of Somerset, are ready to demonstrate to Christian what an aristocrat should be. His abrupt exposure to the degeneracy at Caermere, he learns, has been planned. As Emanuel tells him, nI wanted you to 329

start out with just that impression of the family's seamy

side. We have an immense deal to make up to the people

about us, and to humanity in general, have we Torrs. It

seemed to me that you could not realize this too early in

your experience here" (116). Thus Christian has been

prepared for his introduction to the method of benevolent

paternalism Emanuel calls the "System," his resuscitation

of medieval patriarchal patterns which he enacts on his

estates. But in fact, exposure to the System becomes not

the positive side of his education but the second stage of

his disillusionment.

Emanuel Torr is considered the leading man of his

generation both in terms of ability and moral goodness, and

he has developed a system of government on his estates that

does not disappoint those who think so well of him. The

details of the System are outlined clearly in the text and

in other commentary; here one only need recall that the

System is personal, paternal philanthropy pressed as far as

it can be pressed by a man who, the author convinces us, is

the most moral, the most able, and possibly even the 3 richest man of his generation. The superlatives are

logically necessary, for Frederic intends to leave no room

for the reader to surmize that a better man might have succeeded where Emanuel ultimately does not— there is no better man. Christian's exposure to the System is designed to convince him to incorporate it on the estates at 330

Caermere, and he infers, not without reason, that he will

be kept a pauper duke if he does not. Furthermore,

Christian ^s in sympathy with the goodhearted goals of the

System. But it is to his credit that he also sees that

only a man such as Emanuel can run such a System; Christian

himself has neither the tremendous energy nor the ability.

He also notes that Emanuel's discounting of individualism

and his traditional enslavement of women are far from

enlightened. Final disillusionment with this type of

paternalistic regressive reform comes in Part IV of the

novel, when Christian learns that even Emanuel has broken down under the strain. Later, in The Market-Place,

Christian reveals that when Emanuel left the country to

recuperate, the System broke down completely. This

intertextual reading also allows the reader to fully appreciate the irony of Emanuel's name— when "God [isl with

Us" the System works, but when God leaves, the medieval

Eden fails. Christian's awakening thus far has succeeded in assuring him of the rotten core of the traditional aristocratic system, and of the impossibility of reform, even on a relatively small scale, by the best and brightest of reformers. Thus the second stage of his education has become the second step toward his modernistic disillusionment— a disillusionment all the more unsettling because it is precipitated by wholly philanthropic goals. 331

Next Emanuel and Lord Julius send Christian to London

in order to complete his education with exposure to another

imperfect form of society— London in the height of the

social season. And there in fact not only his education

but his disillusionment is completed. Christian is a star

of London society, owing to the fact that his wealth and

position make him "a great match," but he quickly discovers

that good society is pointless and mindless. Even though

he has realized by this time that he will choose not to be

a part of Emanuel's System, the fact that he has just spent

some weeks breathing the reforming air of Somerset only

adds to his disgust with the triviality of London society.

Friendless, homesick, and trapped within a cage of social

calls and dinners, Christian is left feeling isolated,

surrounded by people, bereft of friends. And to intensify

his alienation, even his Somerset mentors are too busy for him when he goes for a visit seeking sympathy. To make matters worse, he feels the need of some great purpose but discovers none in his life; in his own recurring phrase, he

finds "no thing worth doing." He has seen the best in

Emanuel’s System, but the best has failed.

The climax of Christian's disillusionment is a single climactic and comedic night of rebellion, in which his despair ironically turns to resolution. The evening begins when in a conversation with his near-friend and fellow socialite Dickie Westland, Christian reveals his intention 332

to leave England. His reasons, though emotional, are

rather good. Since he cannot implement Emanuel's System at

the Caermere estates, he has supposed that he will be put

on a small retainer instead of given a fortune. In England

he would have a title without the wealth to support it.

Therefore he will go to the more economical continent and

act the part of a duke only when it is to his advantage.

Furthermore, he shares his hatred of London society with

Westland, and their discussion turns to the subject of

friendship. Christian states, "I live among a thousand

rich and fine people who are as good to me as they know how

to be--and yet I am as if I lived in a desert. And it is

very cold— and lonely— and heartbreaking in this desert of

mine” (168). He has sought "flesh-and-blood" and found

only "gun-metal.” Again the loneliness is complicated by

the dutiful benevolence of Christian's ideals, which make

him hesitate to join Westland's more hedonistic set of

bohemians. Feeling the weight of the oldest title in

England, he insists, "I have some work to do in the world"—

his problem is that he can find nothing worth doing. In

this doubly disturbing study, he and Westland begin their

last night on the town.

It would be stretching the borders of the text to call this period a "dark night of the soul"; still, the night does entail a three-stage diminuation of Christian's philanthropic intent. He begins by seeking the universal 333

good. He ends by settling on a sparse handful of

part iculars.

Over dinner Christian complains that Emanuel's

experiments in the countryside of Somersetshire only make

already fine village people better; he, on the other hand,

wants to work with the very poor, "the dogs without

collars, the homeless and hungry devils who look for bones

in the gutters" (174). His is a noble feeling, but his

compassion diminishes with the good wine, with the story of

Westland's friend who tried "settlement work" and failed

miserably, with Christian's own romantic memories of Lady

Cressage. The easy displacement of the idea reflects badly

on Christian, but as Westland affirms, Christian does not

understand the difficulties of actually helping the poor.

Having finished dinner and deciding to seek

entertainment, the two go to the Empire, and Christian's

philanthropic ideals suffer another reduction. At the

Empire prostitutes advertise for clients in a marketing

parade. Struck by what he perceives as the misery of the

spectacle, Christian finds a new charitable ideal: "I breathe in a new ambition here, out of this atmosphere. We were talking of the London poor. I thought they made the

loudest appeal— but they are nothing beside this! . . .

These are my sisters, scorned and scornful— oh yes, they are all my sisters!" (178-9). Once again, however,

Westland discourages him, and he is easily discouraged. 334

Westland explains that the compassion Christian is feeling

is nothing new, and that once again his pity is uninformed;

there is more to prostitution than he sees, and much of

what Christian does not know is unworthy of his pious

pity. Later still the two young men, Westland, the Voice

of Worldly Wisdom, and Christian, the Pilgrim without a

Cause, attend a bohemian stage party which begins at

midnight and continues to dawn. There Christian meets Cora

Bayard, who also discourages him from bestowing his charity

upon the prostitutes, and the reader is led to infer that

as an aging actress, she knows something about them.

Just as importantly, she suggests to Christian that

the people truly worthy of the reformer's help are those poor girls who must slave away for their bread at honest but dismal jobs. This reminder recalls to Christian Cora's sister Frank, the typewriter girl with whom he became infatuated on the channel boat. He decides then and there that taking Frank an extravagant gift of flowers is a thing

"genuinely worth doing," and his heart is not filled with reforming zeal alone. In the conversation that follows,

Christian decides that he does want to help the new working women, this "professional class" of which Frank is a part.

But they, Frank argues, want no help. Thus Christian is left once again without an object for his charity; his philanthropic is reduced again. Finally he explains his despair to Frank: "I have nothing in the wide world to do. 335

except wait for a very strong old man to die. And when he

dies, then still I have nothing to do worth doing. Don’t

you see that it is the most miserable of existences? X am

filled with disgust for it! I cannot bear it for another

day" (239).

So, he will go abroad and live a life of relative

luxury. He has decided not to think about noble goals, but

instead, to live a life filled with the good things that he can enjoy and friends whose company he cherishes. As if to begin, he takes Francis to lunch and proposes to her--in spite of the fact that he has met her only twice. Thus in an evening, Christian has seen his life's purpose reduced from saving the poor, to saving one class of the poor, to helping a rising sub-class, to helping himself.

Sensibly Frank refuses his proposal. Leaving her,

Christian is puzzled, like some fin-de-siecle Meursault, by his inability to feel the anguish that his mind tells him he should feel. He is saved from thought, however, by reading his previous day's mail. Finding an invitation from Lady Cressage, he visits her and the two commiserate on their loneliness. He is moved by her beauty, and "all at once, as by the flooding of sunlight into a darkened labyrinth, his mind was clear to him. He knew what he wanted--nay what all the years had been leading him up to desire" (270). So Christian has again discovered "the thing worth doing,” and it will not save a society. He is 336

about to propose to Cressage— just hours after having

proposed to Frank— when his intentions are interupted by a

guest, Cora Bayard. She has come to tell Lady Cressage

that the Duke is dead and that Christian is missing.

Christian then steps forward: "Thoughts crowded in upon

him, he straightened his shoulders and lifted his chin.

'It is all right,' he said, with a reassuring wave of the

hand toward the women-folk of his family" (272).

These few words reflect the ideological transformation

that Christian has suffered on his most important night.

Through the double-voicing of the dialogue tag— "the women­

folk of his family"— the author conveys Christian's changed attitude and his changed perceptions of his place in the world. He is no longer an heir apparent without purpose in his life. He is no longer a philanthropic dreamer. He is the dominant male of a great family, and that, apparently,

is enough. In the last twenty hours— he has slept only about an hour, and that on Frank's office couch, having gone from one club to another or walked the streets throughout the night— Christian has momentarily dedicated his life to a number of things worth doing. He has decided upon--and then against--a hefty selection of good works: feeding the London poor, reforming prostitutes, and making life easier for the new working women. In each case, the given work seems the thing worth doing; but in each case, he drops his lightly held dedication for one reason or 337

another. Furthermore, he has decided on several separate

occasions to rebel against the life that has been cast upon

him, to leave England and lead a life of independence and

ease with all the "soul-satifying possibilities" of

wealth. He has proposed to one woman and tried to

proposing to another. Each of his little climaxes has been

presented as a real rebellion, and each has masqueraded as

a real time of change. Only a knowledge of Christian's

character and attention to Frederic's repetitive pattern of

goodness disillusioned signal that each of Christian's

crises has only a passing significance. When Christian appears in Part IV, however, he is acting the part of a duke.

Why does the author take us through the disillu­ sionment of Christian at Caermere, Somerset, and London, then through a final night of searching— a night of darkly comic indecision? Clearly Henry Adams was not the only

American who sensed the problems brewing beneath the surface of an optimistic age, and Christian's disillusioning education prophecies the modern temper as clearly and somewhat more accurately than that of Adams; for Frederic does not attempt to reduce the fragmentation to a single set of principles, old or new. Traditional goodness is shown untenable; Christian is continually thrown back upon his own resources, and finds that they— including his own goodness— do not meet the demands of his 338

age. Life is pointless. Christian does change, with an

ironic miraculousness, only when he becomes Duke, as if the

mythic motif were entering the narrative once again. But

Christian has not become a better man. As evidenced in the

dialogue tag above, he has simply fallen into his

relatively ineffectual paternal role, and he finds that it

fits both his personality and the possibilities of his

age. He will not be driven to depravity by the unchecked

power of his position, like the Torrs of Caermere; neither

will he be driven to the impossibilities of a compulsive

sense of duty, like the Torrs of Somerset; and he will not

be driven by a lust for pleasure and freedom to a life of

wandering the world— though all of these options are open

to him. In spite of his education into disillusionment, he

is not much changed from the pleasant but not particularly weighty fellow who supported himself as a private tutor.

If anything, his personality may be summarized by a terrible sameness. The only notable change, as it is

revealed in Part IV of the novel, is that he has been

forced to confront the limitations of a single human being, and has apparently come to a resolution. He has sought the great tasks, and attempted to align himself with the workings of some great universal purpose, but he has found no workable tasks and no universally dependable principle.

He is not particularly happy or sad; instead, as a proto­ modern stranger, he has trouble feeling anything. By 339

circumstance, he is resolved to hold the oldest title in

England, and the rest of the novel demonstrates the effects

of Christian's resolution. As it does so, Frederic's

prefiguring of the American writers of the 1920s becomes

increasingly apparent.

Post-WWI fragmention is a commonplace; less commonly

realized is that for Frederic, a true insider in terms of

the political situation of the world, the unpromising

capabilities of its leaders, and the lack of any agreed

upon center of values, the impossibility of a truly

positive course into the future was already evident. As I

explored in detail in Chapter II, Frederic's world was

fatherless one, a society fragmented; and his artistic

reaction to it was not unlike Hemingway's. Hemingway, as

much as or more than any writer of his day, revealed in his

works the reactions of his generation to the world they

perceived as crumbling around them. The result of such

perceptions was an approach to life— a practical world view-

-which found untenable the universals of past generations

and sought to carve out a life based on particulars. It is

a testament to Frederic's modernity that in Gloria Mundi,

the result of Christian's progressive disillusionment is

that he comes to hold a world view much like that of Jake

Barnes in The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway's understanding of human condition in

history plays an important role in the texture of The Sun

Also Rises; nowhere is this more clear than in the first

epigraph: "One generation passeth away, and another

generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. * * . The

sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to

the place where he arose. . . This statement from

Ecclesiastes does more than celebrate the eternality of the

earth; it simultaneously minimizes the telic significance

of humans and their societies, their civilizations. A

similar view of history is taken by Christian Tower in

Gloria Mundi, and it is not surprising that Frederic too draws upon certain fatalistic passages of Old Testament wisdom books. The tone set by the Old Testament writers first becomes dominant during the scene that features the elder Christian's funeral, during a day when Christian

Tower is beginning to realize his own position, its possibilites and its limits. Christian is not apparently paying much attention to the words of the young priest, but as the narrator tells us, the cleric’s words, a quote from that most disillusioned of men, Job, come forth "with a sudden outburst of high-pitched nasal tones which pierced the unexpectant ear." The priest reads, "Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. . . . He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one 341

stay" (Gloria Mundi 292; Job 14:1-2) . The words seem to

pass by Christian— he is more interested in trying to see

Frank Bailey out the chapel window. And yet the passage

shares the spirit of Christian's address to Frank later

that afternoon. Near the end of the novel, as Christian is

looking out across his dukedom, gazing across the ruins of

ancient Caermere, he reflects his own disillusionment: "We

look at the work of their [past generations'] hands, here, and we regard it with curiousity, as we might an ants'- nest. We do not know whether they made it as a tomb for their chief, or as a shelter for their cows. . . . We learn only one thing from all the numberless millions who have gone before us— that man is less important than he thinks he is" (334). Like Hemingway, Frederic here reflects the thinking of the The Preacher of Ecclesiastes, who similarly states, "What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? . . . There is no remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after"

(Eccl. 1:3,11). The Preacher, like Christian and like Jake

Barnes, perceived his temporality and realized the disillusioning reality that everything is vexation and vanity.

It is similarly worth noting that while such a view of man could well lead to license--as it does, temporarily, for The Preacher--the protagonists of both Hemingway and

Frederic appear as relatively rigorous moralists. In both 342

The Sun Also Rises and Gloria Mundi, the question suspended over the lives of both men is this: "How, given our disillusionment, should we live?" Christian voices a recurring longing to find something worth doing, but the

idea of a universal system is to him repulsive, a fact which becomes clear in his rejection of Emanuel's System, and in his progressive rejection of the great notions of philanthropy which he considers and puts aside one by one.

Finally he and his unlikely duchess do take part in some charities, but they make no pretense of an attempt to save the world oc even a dukedom. Likewise Jake holds no belief in universal systems. Universal systems have resulted in a war that killed off most of a generation of Europe's young men and transformed those still living into the walking dead of the lost generation. Jake's morality, like

Christian's, is a morality based upon the particulars of everyday life, as Jake states: "I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live it. Maybe if you found out how to live it you learned from that what it was all about" (148). The Sun Also Rises details such a finding out.

No universal moral statements can be made, but that does not mean that Jake is silent upon how one lives one's life with one's fellows. In keeping with this emphasis, a considerable part of the life that Jake finds himself living is dedicated to not being alone. With "society" a 343

meaningless concept, friendship— that is, society on a

level small enough to try to handle— plays a key moral role

in his practical world view, and in this Hemingway shows

himself typical of modern novelists. As David Daiches has

pointed out, for moderns

"the great society" is meaningless; at best, only "the little society" can have any validity. The carefully pursued friendship of the small group may produce the only working society that is possible. He can see the same theme pursued by American novelists, notably by Ernest Hemingway. . . . (9)

In The Sun Also Rises the relational emphasis is constantly

upon the inner workings of groups of friends. Any

gratification the members feel and share is derived from

the acknowledgement of shared experiences and attitudes

which work together to form a haven from the fragmentation

perceived in the world at large. For example, with Count

Mippipopolous and Brett, Jake takes part in the society of

the wounded; with Montoya, the matadors and the better

bullfight reporters, Jake acts his part as an aficionado;

most significant is this pattern as it is repeated on a

fishing trip that he takes with an old friend Bill Gorton

and their new friend, the Englishman Harris. During their

excursion into the Spanish countryside, friendship takes up

a religious significance. The three share an escape from civilization's corruption, and they share a pure

friendship, a true bond, a holy communion. This is highlighted at the trip's end, when the three tour the 344

Roncesville monastery. After coming out, they agree that

it is all right, but "it isn’t the same as fishing";

immediately they cross the street and enter a pub, where

their final communion takes place *'.28), This is no

orthodox Christian communion, obviously, but it is

nevertheless in keeping with the thought of The Preacher, as he states, "Behold, what I have seen to be good and to be fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment . . . in all toil with which one toils under the sun for the few days of life which God has given him" (Eccl. 5:18). This closely follows the idea of Bill’s earlier blessing of the chicken and wine, also influenced by The Preacher: "Our stay on earth is not for long. Let us rejoice and give thanks." It is in these acts that Hemingway’s wanderers seek a truly moral way of life.

The same feeling is foreshadowed in Christian Tower's longing for friendship of a similar kind, even as he suffers the alienation of a meaningless English society.

At the beginning of his night of crisis, he shares his loneliness with Dickie Westland, who then asks Christian just what it is he wants out of life. His answer:

"You yourself said it. . .to see only my true friends. That is my idea of life: To have a small circle of people whom I love very much, and to make constant opportunities to be with some of them--talking as we like to talk, going about together making life happy for one another as we go along.u (169) 345

Having cast off traditional trappings as unsuitable for

life as they know it, both Christian and Jake seek a

different way of life, and the loneliness they suffer and

which they attempt to appease is a part of it.

Another rule that Christian and Jake live by is the

idea that at least in the realm of particulars, you pay for

everything you get— an every day kind of truth which both

protagonists elevate to philosophical significance. As a part of their philosophy, the principle seems like a cross between a secular version of Christian retribution— one that does not imply traditional moral judgement— and an

inversion of Emersonian compensation. Whatever one wishes to call this aspect of the world view that the two authors present, it is nevertheless important. Indeed, it is one of the most constant motifs of The Sun Also Rises. Count

Mippipopolous, for example, is revealed as a man who knows

"the values" (60), and if only to keep the concept in the reader's mind. Bill Gorton drunkenly refers to the purchase of a stuffed dog as a "simple exchange of values" (72).

But the concept of paying for what you get is most thoroughly worked out in and by Jake. As he explains the concept, it is "no idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good" (148). And most importantly, Jake realizes that he has been having Lady 346

Brett for a friend without making love to her, and has

therefore been "getting something for nothing." But, he

assures the reader, "the bill always [comes]." Jake

finally pays his bill in full to Brett— he has to pimp her

to Romero.

Frederic works out a similar kind of moral system in

Christian Tower. Christian does not in any way feel bound by traditional morality to carry on any philanthropic task associated with his class, and yet, like Jake, he is a modern moralist when it comes to paying for what he gets.

The clearest example of this is stated not in Gloria Mundi but in the final scene of The Market-Place, which serves as the intertextual conclusion of both novels. His conversation with Joel Thorpe is key. Thorpe has suggested that rich men, like Christian and himself, do not have to pay for their ride around the world. Christian responds,

"Ah, you think we do not pay? . . . My dear sir, we pay more than anyone else. Our life-fares are graduated, just as our death-fares are. . . . You, for example, are a man of large wealth. I for my sins, carry upon my back the burden of a prodigious fortune. Could we not go out now, and walk down the road to your nearest village, and find in the pub there a dozen day-labourers happier than we are? . . . We are the tired people; the load is never lifted from our backs. Ah, do we not pay indeed I" "Oh-ho!" ejaculated Thorpe. He had been listening with growing astonishment to the other's confession. . . . "You are unhappy, tool" (345-6) 347

Of course he is not happy; modern heroes cannot be.

Christian does not feel guilty about his wealth; but like

Jake Barnes, he realizes that payment is required for all

good things. It is their common rule of life.

It is in this same conversation that Christian evinces

the same mood of disillusionment with man's place in the

universe that Jake Barnes voices; but for all of their

common modernity, both consciously echo The Preacher of

Ecclesiastes, whose ancient mix of fatalism and carpe diem catches the mood of the lost generation. "People," Thorpe states, are "the only tools we've got to work with to make the world go round.*' "But," Christian objects,

if you leave the world alone. . . it goes round of itself. And if you don't leave it alone it goes round just the same, without any reference whatever to your exertions...... He cannot treat anything as final--except that the world goes round. He appear out of the darkness at one edge of it; we are carried across and flung off into the darkness at the other edge of it. He are certain of nothing else. (345)

That is, I think, Harold Frederic's final statement, or his final prophecy, on the subject of man in the modern world.

As The Preacher states it, "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity."

There is a difference, however, between the words of the aged King Solomon and those of the modern fictional preachers. Solomon's statements are commonly considered as the expression of one man's lowness of spirit, and must be considered as such. On the other hand, Hemingway's story, 348

which was received as the document most characteristic of

its age, details a nihlism and despair that is far more

pervasive— so pervasive that Jake may be considered heroic

even for his failed attempts at belief. Gloria Mundi,

though not quite as dark as The Sun Also Rises, shares its

despair--the perceived purposelessness so representative of

the modern era. Thus Frederic's most philosophical novel

stands at an anterior point along the same moral trajectory

taken by Jake Barnes's lost generation. Ernest Hemingway

chronicled his troubled age; thirty years before, Harold

Frederic had prophecied its coming.

Harold Frederic's generation suffered the disentrench- ment of the absolutes which had held Western civilization

together for millennia. And Frederic, one of the most

sensitive and insightful people of his generation, saw early on the implications of the loss. It is this insight that set him apart from many other men and women of his generation, and that made him an important transitional

figure in American literary history. Frederic's realist contemporaries were saved from the weight of the implications by their precognitive memory of a Judeo-

Christian world view, which, in spite of its anachronicity, granted a telic significance to their view of humanity.

His naturalist contemporaries, on the other hand, anxiously faced the reduction of man, but pushed that reduction 349

further than it needed to go; their fideistic claims for

human dignity as well as their atavistic tendencies were

extremes as illogical as the realists' foundationless near-

relig ion.

Harold Frederic steered a different course. He

realized the loss; he realized the difference between

existence as the children of a god and existence as a

highly evolved species. But concurrently, he perceived the

truth that humans are nevertheless responsible to live as best they know, for their own sakes and for the sake of the community. And he perceived that humans do know a little something. His affirmation of humanity, then, is the carefully weighted affirmation of the modern, who realizing that we are only higher animals, still celebrates the fact that we are, at least, higher. We may no longer have universal moral principles to cotint upon, but nevertheless we can take the responsibility mandated by the height to which we have risen. And we must do so, even if our responsibility consists of little more than saving the particulars of daily life. 350

NOTES

^Hemingway's and Frederic's use of Ecclesiastes will be expounded upon later in this chapter. The influence upon Fitzgerald is of a more general kind, but one should note that he does recommend Ecclesiastes to his daughter Scottie (Letters 64-7), and along with Job, to his "student" Sheilah Graham (College of One 113-4) . 2 Most writers who have written on the novel have noted this, and many have seen it as negative. Stanton Garner, both in his dissertation (219-30) and the Minnesota Pamphlet (40-1), makes short work of the novel; and Jean Frantz Blackall notes the failed melding of form and theme as the novel's "primary weakness" (45).

^Christopher Simoni's dissertation deals with Frederic's "social vision," and he treats Emanuel's System in some depth, comparing it to the system demonstrated in The Return of the O'Mahoney (see especially his Chapters 2 and 5). 351

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