America and the Perverse Shakespearean Imagination

1 AMERICA AND THE PERVERSE SHAKESPEAREAN IMAGINATION BY PAUL HAMILTON A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY School of English College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham May 2015 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. 2 ABSTRACT I argue that each of the five American authors in my study of the antebellum era in American literature had dissident responses to Shakespeare’s perverse sexual energies. These reader responses took the following forms, with significant consequences for American history: 1. Conversion As Perversion. This strategy, demonstrated by Emerson and Whitman, employs the structure of perversion by affirming, in Emerson, the healthy imagination, in Whitman, healthy sexuality. In doing so, it commits itself to a confident rhetoric of health that evades and so magnifies anxiety about perverse sexual disease. It attempts to “convert” the reader to its view of the healthy imagination as a way to ward off the perversion it sees everywhere. 2. Perversion As Conversion. This strategy, employed by Hawthorne and Melville, initiates a descent into the terrors of the perverse imagination as a means of exorcising it and reconciling the individual to the consolations of the hearth and home of middle-class American society. 3. Perversion As Subversion. This is the strategy employed by Dickinson in her tense, dramatic lyrics. It employs Augustinian non-being in order to subvert progressive American projections of meaning into the future through a form that I call “perverse reading.” It eschews all identities, and remains menacing, dangerous, and, in my view, profoundly ethical. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Rosemary Hamilton: for emotional and financial support. Rosalie Hamilton, Al Hamilton, and Virginia Hamilton: for financial and emotional support. Ewan Fernie: for support, encouragement, and incredible patience. Christopher Bradbury Robinson: for support, encouragement, and intellectual daring. Hunter Reeve: for intellectual discussions, moral and emotional support. Dave Paxton: for intellectual discussions and moral support. Erich Groat: for proofreading the second draft of the thesis. Arthur Lindley: for proofreading the first draft of the thesis. Richard Evans: for psychological support. Thea Buckley: for emotional, intellectual and moral support. In-Hwan Doh: for intellectual, emotional and spiritual support. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. AMERICA AND THE PERVERSE pg. 5 SHAKESPEAREAN IMAGINATION 2. EMERSON’S ENCHANTED ISLAND: pg. 45 AMERICA WITHOUT CALIBAN 3. WHITMAN: CALIBAN’S CURSE pg. 69 4. THE IMAGINATION DISEASED: pg. 101 HAWTHORNE, INCEST, AND THE RETURN OF THE SHAKESPEAREAN REPRESSED 5. HEROIC CUNNING: MELVILLE’S DOOMED pg. 160 QUEST TO CONQUER THE WHITENESS OF MACBETH 6. EMILY DICKINSON, AMERICAN IAGO: pg. 212 PERVERSE READING 7. CONCLUSION pg. 241 5 AMERICA AND THE PERVERSE SHAKESPEAREAN IMAGINATION THE SHADOW OF SHAKESPEARE The shadow of Shakespeare looms large over the American literary landscape. It is the shadow of a mythic figure, first forged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the American cultural imagination – and it became one of the central, defining symbols of American national identity. Another Shakespeare exists, though: furtive, dangerous, strange, diseased, and menacing: this figure and its conservative double are captured in the literature produced by America’s first great generation of writers. These two versions of Shakespeare, like Freud’s symbolic father of the Law and the perverse father of the “primal horde,” lived uneasily side-by-side in the American imagination. 1 But Freud’s myth offers too simple a dichotomy. A Shakespearean example is more apposite. For it is more true that Shakespeare exists as the ghost of King Hamlet and Claudius in the American imagination. Just as the ghost of King Hamlet and Claudius are not always easily and neatly separable, so the two Shakespeares, like twin brothers, are sometimes bewilderingly entangled with one another. The Shakespeare who is the symbolic founder of the American nation can suddenly reveal a volatile and disturbing interior and the perverse Shakespeare can prove to be profoundly ethical and humane. 1 Sigmund Freud, Totem And Taboo, Resemblances Betwen the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005), especially chapter 4, pp. 124-142. 6 Since F. O. Matthiessen’s founding book of American Studies, The American Renaissance, the scope and depth of Shakespeare’s influence on the major American literary figures of the mid-19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, has been clear. Emily Dickinson followed shortly after. Shakespeare’s influence on American literature is still a lively and constantly evolving topic. A new anthology entitled Shakespeare In America, edited by James Shapiro, published for the four hundred fiftieth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birthday, reveals Shakespeare’s influence on literature, poetry, short- fiction, satire, and historical documents, from 1776 to the present day. Its forward, by former American president Bill Clinton, places the volume squarely in the history of Shakespeare’s relationship to American national identity.2 The Shakespearean scholar Julian Markels anticipates my own work with his full-length reading of Moby-Dick and King Lear in Melville And The Politics Of Identity, From King Lear to Moby-Dick. Markels traces the split between Shakespeare, as the symbol of American national identity, and what he calls the “demonic” Shakespeare that awakened Melville’s creative powers. Where Markels sees these two Shakespeares as a confrontation between competing political philosophies, Locke’s and Hobbes’, I regard the Shakespearean underbelly as pathologically sexual, in ways that were reflected in emerging American discourses about sexuality and that exceeded these. I also find the struggle between the perverse Shakespeare and the Shakespeare of cultural mythology in five major American writers: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. 2 James Shapiro and Bill Clinton, Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now (New York: Library of America, 2014). 7 The term “struggle,” though, is misleading; for the perverse cannot be completely personalized in the way that the word “struggle” implies. It is my contention that the perverse is itself a structuring force in American history. It was an available tool in the formation of American identity; one derived, in part, from American millennialism, most significantly the Second Great Awakening in the early to mid nineteenth century. America’s messianic drive, which embodied a teleological view of history rooted, in part, in Augustinian and Thomistic theology, was translated readily into the unprecedented fervor of social reform movements across American society. This impulse towards reform included the construction of a psychiatric apparatus, with a newly professionalized psychiatric profession and asylums, intended for the humane treatment of the insane, in almost every major American city; it inspired sexual purity reform; it was evoked in the rhetoric of racial purity, rationalized by a Lamarckian theory of eugenics; and it was even evoked in the pseudo-science of phrenology and the free love movement. In order to articulate their response to perverse Shakespeare, American writers had a tapestry of available discourses. As I shall argue, Shakespearean perversity also exceeded all of these discourses, and produced an anarchic and dissident counter-discourse of its own, most clearly, through Emily Dickinson. I have ordered my study both according to the psychological strategy with which each author attempts to structure perverse Shakespeare and according to the degree to which the perverse Shakespearean imagination acts as a de-structuring and undermining force against the American myth. To summarize, I find three kinds of attempts to structure the American perverse: 8 1. Conversion As Perversion. This strategy, demonstrated by Emerson and Whitman, employs the structure of perversion by affirming, in Emerson, the healthy imagination, in Whitman, healthy sexuality. In doing so, it commits itself to a confident rhetoric of health that evades and so magnifies anxiety about perverse sexual disease. It attempts to “convert” the reader to its view of the healthy imagination as a way to ward off the perversion it sees everywhere. 2. Perversion As Conversion. This strategy, employed by Hawthorne and Melville, initiates a descent into the terrors of the perverse imagination as a means of exorcising it and reconciling the individual to the consolations of the hearth and home of middle-class American society. 3. Perversion As Subversion. This is the strategy employed by Dickinson in her tense, dramatic lyrics. It employs Augustinian non-being in order to subvert masculine projections of meaning into the future. It eschews all identities,

Load more