American Romanticism Volume 1 From Cooper To Hawthorne

AMERICAN ROMANTICISM
Volume 1
From Cooper to Hawthorne
MACMILLAN STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Stephen Bygrave
COLERIDGE AND THE SELF
David Morse
AMERICAN ROMANTICISM Volume 1: From Cooper to
Hawthorne
AMERICAN ROMANTICISM Volume 2: From Melville to
James
John Turner
WORDSWORTH: PLAY AND POLITICS
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Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG212XS, England.
AMERICAN
ROMANTICISM
Volume 1
FROM COOPER TO HAWTHORNE
Excessive America
David Morse
M
MACMILLAN
©David Morse 1987
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1987 978-0-333-38873-0
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission
of this publication may be made without written permission.
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First published 1987
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Morse, David, 19~
American romanticism.- (Macmillan studies in romanticism)
I. American literature - 19th century - History and criticism
2. Romanticism- United States
I. Title
810.9'145 PS217.RS
ISBN 978-1-349-07897-4 ISBN 978-1-349-07895-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-07895-0
For Maxine
And, to this end, let us not aim at common degrees of merit.
Can we not leave, to such as love it, the virtue that glitters for
the commendation of society, and ourselves pierce the deep
solitudes of absolute ability and worth?
Emerson, Divinity School Address
Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All
action is of an infinite elasticity, and the least admits ofbeing
inflated with the celestial air until it eclipses the sun and the
moon.
Emerson, Spiritual Laws
I have been making war against the superlative degree in the

rhetoric of my fair visiter. She has no positive degree in her
description of characters & scenes. You would think she had
dwelt in a museum where all things were extreme &
extraordinary.
Emerson, Journals
Contents
List of Plates Vlll
Priface IX
Introduction: America and the Excessive
2 Fenimore Cooper: the Excessive Pathfinder 30
3 Brockden Brown and Poe: Inner Excesses 88
4 Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman: Transcendental

Supermen 119
5 Nathaniel Hawthorne: Excessive Interpretation 169
Notes 221
Index 226
List ofPlates
Thomas Cole's The Architect's Dream (by kind permission of the
Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio)
2 Old Hickory: a portrait of Andrew Jackson by John Vanderlyn
(by kind permission of the Art Commission of the City ofNew
York)
3a George Caleb Bingham's Stump Speaking (by kind permission
of the Boatman's National Bank ofSt Louis)
3b John C. Wild's Cincinnati: The Public Landing, 1835 (by kind
permission of the Cincinnati Historical Society)
4a Frontispiece to Hawthorne's Marble Faun, originally
published under the title Traniformation by Smith, Elder & Co
in 1865
4b 'On the Edge of a Precipice': an illustration from
Traniformation
Vlll
Preface
These studies in American Romanticism draw on the general
analysis of Romanticism presented in my Perspectives on
Romanticism and Romanticism: A Structural Anarysis and develop it in
another cultural context. Although America's classic literature
has not invariably been termed 'Romantic' there are not only
strong grounds for doing so, as I hope to show, but equally for
thinking that, of all societies, the United States is the one that has
been most deeply marked by the impact ofRomanticism. I should
like to thank Bob Gross, Peter Nicholls, Angus Ross, Douglas
Tallack and John Whitley for their helpfulness in reading and
responding to sections of the manuscript. I am conscious of a
particular debt to Bob Gross for the stimulus of his presence at
Sussex in 1982-3 and especially for the fascinating seminars he
gave as part of the 'Literature and Democracy' course. The texts I
have used are specified in the notes at the end, but for clarity and
convenience page references to the most copiously cited works are
given immediately after the appropriate quotation.
D.M.
lX
1 Introduction: America
and the Excessive
American literature is born of excessive hopes and excessive
claims, burdened from the start by an overblown national
rhetoric. It is imperiously summoned into existence, like a genie
out of a bottle, and expected to expand sensationally before the
spectator's very eyes. Looking back we may wonder why an
American literature could not have been allowed to develop
naturally, in the dark of a grateful obscurity, instead of being
subject to daily examination for signs ofajack and the Beanstalk
growth. But to envisage this even for a moment is to gloss over the
rancorous psychology of colonial status. The American people
felt, with justification, that they had been neglected and slighted
for far too long. Their objection to colonial taxes and restrictions
was not merely a financial one but one based on the clearsighted
recognition that, far from being the proud and independent
subjects they perceived themselves to be, they were viewed merely
as a convenient source of royal revenues, whose touchy feelings
could be cheerfully disregarded. Yet even after the fact of
independence Americans still lacked the recognition they
claimed. They were determined to reverse the terms of the
Europe-America opposition. America would not merely be
different from Europe; it would surpass and excel Europe in every
conceivable aspect. That there would be a great national
literature was so obvious that it almost went without saying -
though it must be said that America's need for such a literature
was far from evident, since as a still-puritan culture it was
disposed to regard literature as a perilous supplement to the Bible
and the reading of it as both a gratuitous exposure to immorality
and a frivolous waste oftime. Yet the literature was required as a
resplendent symbol of national greatness, as excessive and
magnificently superfluous as the flag-flying airline of today. It just
had to be there, even if no one particularly wanted it. So American
D. Morse, American Romanticism

© David Morse 1987
2 American Romanticism
literature is always an embarrassment and a liability, never able

to sustain large and unspecified expectations yet blighted by a
massive and comprehensive neglect. American literature in its
founding moment is made up ofbooks that everyone wanted to see
written but which nobody wants to read. All it can ever hope to
achieve is to prove its glowing prospectus a lie. American
literature from Brockden Brown, Cooper and Poe, and passing by
way ofTranscendentalism to Hawthorne, Melville and Twain, is
a mode of writing ever subject to anxiety, apprehension and
strain. In seeking to give the shadow substance it remains haunted
by the fear that it may never be other than a literature of shadows,
speaking, like William Wilson's double, in an imperious but
throaty whisper. It is crippled by uncertainty as to what audience
it is addressing and yet desperately wants to be heard. It seeks to
mobilise and mesmerise a vast audience by its commanding
rhetoric yet fears that that same power may be employed only to
stifle the oppressive sense of empty rows and to hold off the
unobtrusive departure of the few that remain. Above all, it would
like to be taken seriously. Yet, however hard American writers
may try, they never get the reassurance they need. They bear
within them the curse of the excessive- which is always and at
once to go too far and never to go far enough.
Doubtless nothing of itself is excessive. Excessiveness is in the
eye of the beholder. But in the nineteenth century both America
and Europe could find common ground in agreeing that the
United States was excessive when judged by European standards.
For transatlantic travellers from the Old World, then as now,
America was the site of untold reckless experiments, a perennial
source of the marvellous, the extravagant and the quaint. For
Americans it was their ambition and prerogative to surpass the
European norm, to raise new and exalted standards that would
put the old to shame. America would no longer be inhibited by
deference to tradition and reputation but would herself provide
the pattern for others to follow. Moreover, the American nation
was born into the era of the Sublime, when to undertake titanic
projects was a moral obligation and to exceed all limits quite a
customary state of affairs. America itself would be this Sublime.
Free of feudal shackles and restrictions it would soar as
dramatically into the empyrean as the bald-headed eagle itself.
Nevertheless, in the poker game with Europe the Americans
needed every ounce of bluff and bravado that they could muster,
Introduction: America and the Excessive 3
for they did not seem to have been dealt very much in the way of
cards. The United States had no great cathedrals, palaces or other
histor.ic places; it lacked sculptures and paintings; it had no
·acknowledged writers, philosophers or composers. There was no
distinct American language. So everything had to be staked on the
grandeur of the American landscape, which could serve as the
most potent symbol of everything that Amerca was and, more
importantly, could be.
The symbolic significance of American scenery for the
construction of an American identity emerges with particular
clarity from the life of Thomas Cole, the pioneering landscape
artist, who painted mountains, forests and rivers of the new
continent in the grand Romantic manner. Cole was born in
Lancashire in 1801 but moved with his family to Steubenville,
Ohio, when he was eighteen. Although he had already practised
engraving in England he did not begin to paint until after his
arrival. In 1829 he prepared to sail to Europe to study painting
more intensively there, but significantly he made a point of seeing
the grandest of native wonders before his departure:
I am very anxious to be on my voyage. Next Wednesday, I
intend setting off for the Falls of Niagara. I cannot think of
going to Europe without having seen them. I wish to take a 'last,
lingering look' at our wild scenery. I shall endeavour to press its
features so strongly on my mind that, in the midst of the fine
scenery of other countries, their grand and beautiful
peculiarities shall not be erased.'
As it happens Cole was initially disappointed with Niagara, yet
his motivation is crucial all the same; for by exposure to native
wildness he believes that he will be infused with the genius loci and
thus more able to retain his independence and originality in the
face of the masters of the European tradition. By implication, to be
American is to be like Niagara, sublime, tumultuous, excessive.
Yet such a determination is prompted by an underlying anxiety.
European art is a complex and all-engulfing cultural force and
even the talismatic powers of the American landscape may
scarcely be sufficient to protect him. Similar fears are voiced by
William Cullen Bryant in his famous sonnet:
Thine eyes shall see the light of distant skies:
Yet, Cole! thy heart shall bear to Europe's strand
A living image of thy native land,

Such as on thy own glorious canvas lies.
Lone lakes - savannas where the bison roves -
Rocks rich with summer garlands- solemn streams-
Skies, where the desert eagle wheels and screams -
Spring bloom and autumn blaze ofboundless groves.
Fair scenes shall greet thee where thou goest- fair,
But different- everywhere the trace of men,
Paths, homes, graves, ruins, from the lowest glen
To where life shrinks from the fierce Alpine air.
Gaze on them, till the tears shall dim thy sight,
But keep that earlier, wilder image bright.
The sentiments expressed by Bryant contain a hidden

contradiction. For, if the American landscape in its vastness,
picturesqueness and pristine freshness is so evidently superior to a
Europe depicted in terms of paths, graves and ruins, why the need
for solemn adjuration? Perhaps the American excessive is still not
excessive enough. A spontaneous appreciation of beauty must be
tempered by native loyalty. It is as if the 'living image' that Cole
must keep in his heart of his own country is also the source of his
deepest identity as a man and an artist. Nevertheless Cole did
believe that the American artist was privileged. For, instead of
following the footsteps of others and painting what others had
painted, he has the possibility of a pure, immediate and
spontaneous encounter with nature that will release in him an
increased sense of his own potential and powers:
Before us spread the virgin waters which the prow of the

sketcher had never yet curled, enfolded by the green woods,
whose venerable masses had never figured in annuals, and
overlooked by stern mountain peaks, never beheld by Claude or
Salvator, nor subjected to the canvas by innumerable dabblers
in paint of all past time. All nature here is new to art. No Tivolis,
Ternis, Mont Blancs, Plinlimmons, hackneyed and worn by the
daily pencils ofhundreds; but primeval forests, virgin lakes and
waterfalls, feasting his eye with new delights, and filling his
portfolio with their features of beauty and magnificence,
hallowed to his soul by their freshness from the creation, for his
own favoured pencil. 2
Nature undisturbed retains its divine aura. In its presence,

unrestrained and uninhibited by precedent, the American artist
can rise to its challenge and display a comparable sublimity.
Integral to the theory of the Sublime as developed by Kant and
Schiller was the belief that the gazing at the spectacular works of
nature would not overpower man with a sense of his own
insignificance, as Burke had believed, but become a revelatory
moment ofhis inner potentiality for greatness. In the development
of American culture, in the rhetoric that seeks to create a national
self-consciousness, the postulated symmetry between the vastness
of the American landscape and the unlimited potential of the
American character became an inescapable trope. Even those
who felt, like James Russell Lowell, that to argue American
greatness in these terms was reductive and simplistic were
nevertheless unable to escape from the influence of the analogy. In
his early poem 'L'Envoi' Lowell argued that the United States
should be defined not through the grandeur of its scenery but
through its people, its democratic institutions and its spirit of
freedom. He wrote,
Though loud Niagara were today struck dumb,

Yet would this cataract of boiling life
Rush plunging on and on to endless deeps,
And utter thunder till the world shall cease, -
A thunder worthy of the poet's song,
And which alone can fill it with true life.
It is the energy and the example of the American democratic

experiment that can make a noise in the world, and it is this rather
than nature alone that is truly the source of American pride, yet in
so saying Lowell insists as strongly on the analogy between
Niagara and man as the unnamed commentator cited by Perry
Miller in his The Life of the Mind of America, who wrote, somewhat
absurdly, 'Only an appreciation of the grandeur of such a fall as
that of Niagara could fit a man to construct the bridge that spans
its river. ' 3
The one American whose claims to world historical greatness
were unquestionable was, of course, George Washington, and it
became customary in commemorative addresses to link the man
with the almost illimitable spaces of the continent. Edward
Everett in an address which he delivered on the character of
Washington in order to raise funds for the purchase of Mount

Vernon as a national shrine eulogised as follows:
beyond the Ohio, beyond the Mississippi, along that

stupendous trail of immigration from East to West, which,
bursting into States as it moves westward, is already threading
the Western prairies, swarming through the portals of the
Rocky Mountains and winding down their slopes, the name
and memory of Washington on that gracious night [his
birthday] will travel with the silver queen of heaven through
sixty degrees of longitude, nor part company with her till she
walks in her brightness through the golden gate of California
and passes serenely on to hold midnight court with her
Australian stars. 4
In his own later celebration of Washington as national leader,

James Russell Lowell made still more explicit the connection
between the hero and the land: of nature he writes,
For him, her Old-World moulds aside she threw,

And choosing sweet clay from the breast
Of the unexhausted West,
With stuff untainted shaped a hero new,
Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.
Both Washington and America itself are to be defined in terms of

their inexhaustible potential and this in turn is linked with
freedom from the example of the European past.
It was Walt Whitman, above all, who made such rhetoric
inescapable. In Whitman the binary set becomes a triad and with
it the poet assumes a new importance as the figure who can truly
articulate the dimensions of an unprecedented American
largeness. If 'The United States themselves are essentially the
greatest poem', and if 'It awaits the gigantic and generous
treatment worthy of it', then correspondingly, 'The largeness of
nature or the nation were monstrous without a corresponding
largeness and generosity of the spirit of the citizen.' 5 A poet of
equal magnitude is called for:
The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is
the race of races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a
people .... His spirit responds to his country's spirit ... he

incarnates its geography, and natural life and rivers and lakes. 6
So, as Whitman continues his hyperbolic flight in his Preface to

the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, he speaks no longer of the poet
but of'the greatest poet'. Nothing else will do. And with Whitman
we no longer confront mere greatness but are dazzled and
bemused in an absolute orgy of the excessive. Of'the greatest poet'
Whitman writes, 'He exhibits the pinnacles that no man can tell
what they are there for or what beyond ... he glows a moment on
the extremest verge.' 7
Inevitably for the poet to give utterance to his patriotic
perceptions on this mind-spinning space odyssey he must have
access to the most extraordinary powers of language. But, says
Whitman, the English language is up to the task: 'It is the chosen
tongue to express growth faith self-esteem freedom justice
equality friendliness amplitude prudence decision and courage.
It is the medium that shall well nigh express the inexpressible.' 8
Indeed, after Whitman's own torrent of words in the Preface and
the poem, we are well-nigh astonished to find him impeding the
flow with such a small and mean-spirited phrase as 'well nigh'!
For in the spirit of'well nigh' 'A Song of Myself' could never have
been written.
Whitman, notoriously, celebrated himself, but America's
Romantic historians, William Prescott and Francis Parkman,
celebrated excessive heroes from the past, the pioneer discoverers
and explorers, who seemed to have ambitions and personalities
commensurate with the scale of these unchartered continents.
Prescott's heroes, Cortes and Pizarro, who respectively dominate
The Conquest of Mexico and The Conquest of Peru, are excessive in
every sense: insanely ambitious; violent, unscrupulous and
brutal, perversely attracted to risky and apparently impossible
enterprises. Prescott acknowledges and even stresses the
unattractive aspects ofboth conquistadors, yet he insinuates that
their vices and virtues are inextricably bound up together, that
their achievements would not have been possible without this
disposition to run to extremes. For Prescott, and for Parkman
also, history is page after page of glowing deeds, records of
individual achievement that can equal and even surpass the
legendary exploits of the past. Prescott even says as much. Of
Pizarro's quixotic and extraordinary decision to conquer Peru
while stuck on the remote island of Gallo near Panama he writes,
There is something striking to the imagination in the spectacle

of these few brave spirits thus consecrating themselves to a
daring enterprise, which seemed as far above their strength as
any recorded in the fabulous annals of knight-errantry. A
handful of men, without food, without clothing, almost without
arms, without knowledge of the land to which they were bound,
without vessel to transport them, were here left on a lonely rock
in the ocean with the avowed purpose of carrying on a crusade
against a powerful empire, staking their lives on its success.
What is there in the legends of chivalry that surpasses it?9
Cortes, with his ruthless and calculating spirit, is a less glamorous

personality, who offers more resistance to any presentation in
terms of the Romantic visionary, yet even his life yields its sublime
moments - moments which, for Prescott, are the essence of
history. Cortes deliberately destroys his fleet in order to force his
soldiers to commit themselves to the conquest of Mexico, and
Prescott stands amazed at the intrepidity and courage of the man:
'He had set fortune, fame, life itself upon the cast'; it was 'an act of
resolution that has few parallels in history'. 10 In Mexico Cortes
pioneered the principle of indirect rule by seizing Montezuma and
forcing him, on pain of imprisonment, torture or death, to comply
with his demands. Such a plan might seem merely Machiavellian,
his placing of Montezuma in fetters both humiliating and
unworthy, but to Prescott this is stirring stuff, the very essence of
Romantic heroism: 'The events recorded in this chapter are
certainly some of the most extraordinary on the page of history.' 11
He exults,
That a small body of men, like the Spaniards, should have

entered the palace of a mighty prince, have seized his person in
the midst of his vassals, have borne him off a captive to their
quarters- that they should have put to an ignominious death
before his face his high officers, for executing, probably his own
commands, and have crowned the whole by putting the
monarch in irons like a common malefactor ... that all this
should have been done by a mere handful of adventurers, is a
thing too extravagant, altogether too improbable, for the pages
of romance! It is nevertheless literally trueY
Such are the joys ofthe Romantic historian. For he can assure the
reader that such incredible events can be securely located in the
world of sober fact and thereby proclaim also that the age of
marvels is not yet past. Admittedly Prescott immediately follows
this passage by stating that the behaviour of Cortes should be
neither justified nor praised, so that it would seem that his
response is one of wholly dispassionate astonishment, without
moral implication. But such an attitude is integral to the
excessive. The reader is lifted to an aesthetic realm, beyond good
and evil, where he can only gasp in total and uncritical
amazement.
Francis Parkman was similarly fascinated with such daring and
flamboyant personalities, though his own exemplars were drawn
from the more familiar terrain of the United States and Canada.
In Montcalm and Wolfe he describes the war for Canada through the
complementary figures of Montcalm and Wolfe, the one French,
the other English, fighting to the death an opposite sides, yet
linked by their pertinacity, their resourcefulness and their
impetuous and daring spirit. But Parkman's archetypal excessive
hero is the French explorer La Salle, immortalised in his classic
study La Salle and the Discovery ofthe Great West. This work originally
appeared in 1869 but was restricted in scope because of
Parkman's inability to make use of a hoard of documents guarded
by the French archivist Pierre Margry. In his struggles to obtain
access to these manuscripts Parkman showed almost as much
pertinacity as his hero, La Salle, since he obtained a grant from
Congress to ensure their publication and was finally able to make
use of them in the revised edition of1879. La Salle was a man after
Parkman's own heart, an educated man, an intellectual, who
nevertheless showed, as Parkman himself showed by his journey
down the Oregon Trail, that such a training could be the moral
backbone of the excessive hero. Parkman wrote, in early rebuttal
of American anti-intellectualism,
Such was Cavelier de Ia Salle. In him, an unconquerable mind

held at its service a frame of iron, and tasked it to the utmost of
its endurance. The pioneer of western pioneers was no rude son
of toil, but a man of thought, trained amid arts and letters. 13
The emphasis was needed, for in his epic journeys across the
American continent La Salle did not have too much time for
reading. La Salle is chiefly to be remembered for a series of epic

journeys into the American interior from Fort Frontenac, in
Canada, on the eastern edge of Lake Ontario, a settlement which
he himself had founded. In the first he travelled across Lake Erie
and Lake Huron to the southernmost tip of Lake Michigan and
from thence to Fort Crevecoeur, a settlement which he founded on
the banks of the Illinois river. From there, because of a lack of
adequate supplies, La Salle was forced to return under conditions
of extreme cold and privation to Fort Frontenac. Yet despite the
ardours and disasters of the journey he setout almost immediately
for the interior, reaching Fort Miami on Lake Michigan before
being forced to return once again. La Salle's struggles were finally
crowned with success when, on his third attempt, he finally found
the route to the Mississippi and sailed all the way down the river to
its delta, at what is now New Orleans. There La Salle uttered a
proclamation, taking possession of a vast area of the American
continent in the name of Louis XIV, King of France:
On that day, the realm of France received on parchment a

stupendous accession. The fertile plains ofTexas; the vast basin
of the Mississippi, from its frozen northern springs to the sultry
borders of the Gulf; from the woody ridges of the Alleghanies to
the bare peaks of the Rocky Mountains- a region of savannahs
and forests, suncracked deserts, and grassy prairies, ranged by
a thousand warlike tribes, passed beneath the sceptre of the
Sultan of Versailles; and all by virtue of a feeble human voice,
inaudible at half a mile. 14
La Salle's invincible determination has finally been rewarded, but

Parkman's feelings are mixed. On the one hand there is something
almost presumptuous, almost impious, about Louis's attempt to
annexe by proxy the American Sublime, hence the feeble voice.
Yet, contrariwise, the excessive nature of La Salle's claims have a
certain nobility and appropriateness- indeed are proclaimed in a
'loud voice' 15 - when viewed against the background of his own
heroic and unrelenting efforts. For Parkman, La Salle was no
mere Frenchman but an exemplary American, whose indomitable
spirit showed all that was best in the American character as it
fronted the supreme challenge of the American continent:
To estimate aright the marvels ofhis patient fortitude, one must

follow on his track through the vast scene of his interminable

journeyings, those thousands of weary miles of forest, marsh,
and river, where, again and again, in the bitterness of baffied
striving, the untiring pilgrim pushed onward towards the goal
which he was never to attain. America owes him an enduring
memory; for, in this masculine figure, she sees the pioneer who
guided her to the possession of her richest heritage. 16
In their inordinate ambitions, their unremitting effort, their

iron-willed determination, the leading politicians of the
Jacksonian era, Andrew Jackson himself, John Calhoun, Henry
Clay and Daniel Webster, were spirits akin to La Salle but their
sights were fixed not on the unexplored interior but on the exalted
and unique office of the American presidency. Jackson was the
only one to succeed in the attempt, though Clay battled on for
twenty-two years, and it was he more than anyone who thwarted
the aspirations of the others, infecting his rivals with a sense of
frustration and failure which ate deeply into their souls and
stimulated them to yet more frantic and furious efforts. The
American Congress was the most violent of all verbal
battlegrounds. Of its spokesmen Fenimore Cooper wrote, 'These
people appear to me to have no fear of themselves, or of anybody
else, in matters that relate to government. They go on boldly,
systematically, and orderly without any visible restraint.' 17
And it did not always stop at words. Jackson was a celebrated
duellist who did not so much argue with people as threaten them.
Henry Clay fought a duel with john Randolph. Webster became
so incensed at being called an aristocrat that he challenged his
critics to a fight with bare fists. There were many insults and few
retractions. Those eminent statesmen achieved their eminence
through eloquence, melodramatic attitudinising and behaviour
that was arrogant and overbearing, as they endeavoured to sweep
the smaller fry from out of their triumphal path. Unlike the
Founding Fathers, who were seen as men of wisdom and
moderation, the second generation of American leaders had to
make a powerful and immediate impact if they were to command
their followers and impress the democratic electorate. Of Daniel
Webster James Parton wrote, 'Practical wisdom was not in this
man. He was not formed to guide, but to charm, impress, and
rouse mankind.' 18
The politics of the period could never have been other than
combative, but it was given a still fiercer edge by the intemperate

personality of Andrew Jackson. Jackson was a good hater and
bearer of grudges himself, and he had no difficulty in provoking a
similar reaction from others. As Parton wrote,
He was always so entirely certain that he, Andrew Jackson, was

in the right, his conviction on this point was so free from the
least quaver of doubt, that he could always convince other men
that he was right, and carry the multitude with him. His
honesty, courage and inflexible resolution, joined to his
ignorance, narrowness, intensity and liability to prejudice,
rendered him at once the idol ofhis countrymen and the plague
of all men with whom he had official connection. Drop an
Andrew Jackson from the clouds upon any spot of earth
inhabited by men, and he will have half a dozen deadly feuds
upon his hands in thirty days. 19
It was an era of conviction politics, yet if the sense of conviction

itself never wavered the tenets themselves often did. Jackson's
great rivals Clay, Webster and Calhoun could never agree on
anything except their dislike ofJackson, which drove them into a
temporary alliance, and they often clashed sharply. Of these
encounters H. von Holst wrote,
Each of the three great senators tried to demonstrate his own

consistency throughout his political career, and the
inconsistency that had marked that of his adversary; and each
of them was perfectly successful as to the latter task, and, in
spite of infinite ingenuity and eloquence, sadly failed as to the
former. 20
But in these struggles of a young democracy vehemence carried as

much conviction as anything else; it seemed to demonstrate that
its exponent was totally sincere- in the spirit of Patrick Henry's
'Give me liberty or give me death.'
Jackson had a formidable and imposing presence. In his victory
over the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 he was
described as
a tall, gaunt man, of very erect carriage, with a countenance full

of stern decision and fearless energy, but furrowed with care
and anxiety. His complexion was sallow and unhealthy; his hair
was iron grey, and his body thin and emaciated .... But the
fierce glare ofhis bright and hawk-like grey eye, betrayed a soul
and a spirit which triumphed over all infirmities ofthe body. 21
Although the claims ofJackson's rivals Webster and Calhoun to

be the prototype of Melville's Ca~tain Ahab in Moby-Dick have
been the more strongly pressed, 2 Jackson himself must surely
enter the picture, since Jackson and Ahab share significant
common traits: an overmastering will, the conquest of physical
infirmity, the paradox of their acting in such an intransigent and
domineering fashion as the leaders of democratic men. As John
William Ward has shown, Jackson was taken to epitomise the
Man of Iron, and no event showed this more vividly than
Jackson's duel with Charles Dickinson, an extremely proficient
marksman. Deciding that his best chance would be to allow
Dickinson to shoot first, Jackson wore a loosely fitting cloak to
disguise his figure and fatally wounded Dickinson, after having
first taken a shot in the chest himself. Of this occasion it was
reported, 'His astonishing self-command appeared almost
superhuman to his friends who witnessed the scene; to one of
whom he declared, that so fixed was his resolution, that he should
have killed his antagonist, had he himself been shot through the
brain' 23 - surely a worthy subject for a tale by Poe! Jackson
enjoyed personal conflict and the possibilities it offered for both
asserting his own superiority and shaming his antagonist. He
would deliberately engineer confrontations in the most public of
places and then exploit them to maximum effect. Jackson's
towering rages were famous, and perhaps the most celebrated of
all was after the election of 1824, when, after much manoeuvring
in the electoral college, John Quincy Adams became President,
although Jackson had won by far the largest share of the popular
vote. Jackson blamed Henry Clay. Robert Remini writes,
As soon as the President announced his intention of appointing

Clay his Secretary ofState,J ackson burst out in an impassioned
rage. 'So you see,' he roared, 'thejudas of the West has closed
the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver.'
Convinced beyond argument that Clay and Adams had
concluded a 'corrupt bargain' to steal the presidency from him,
the Hero poured out his wrath at them, cursing them for their
villainy. Of course this public frenzy was carefully staged in

order to create political capital, for the General's public
outbursts were never impulsive or uncontrolled (and it did
make extraordinarily effective propaganda); even so he
sincerely believed that a monumental fraud had been
perpetrated against the people and against himself. Predictably
the charge of a 'corrupt bargain' became the rallying cry for a
democratic crusade in 1828, at which time the vile corruptors,
thieves, aristocrats, and other assorted enemies of'J ackson and
the people' would be expelled from office. 24
An equally notorious occasion was the Jefferson memorial

dinner held by the Democratic Party in 1830 when Jackson
proposed the toast 'Our Federal Union: It must be preserved',
knowing that such a toast would be extremely unpalatable to his
Vice-President, john Calhoun, who had already secretly written
an exposition of the case for state rights and nullification for the
South Carolina legislative committee.] ackson obviously expected
Calhoun to choke on his glass, and it was his way of showing that,
while others (Calhoun, Clay, Adams and Webster) might be
devious and subtle, he, jackson, was completely open, honest and
above board. Jackson's showdown at this point had the effect of
excluding Calhoun from any future Democratic nomination in
favour of Martin van Buren. Thus excluded, but without
insincerity, Calhoun was thrown back on the Southern,
sectionalist cause, and himself sought confrontation after
confrontation in defence of slavery and state rights.
Jackson's way with Daniel Webster was equally devastating,
though less public. At the time ofjackson's fight against Nicholas
Biddle's Bank of the United States, which for Jackson and the
Democrats was a monster and a threat to liberty, Webster
believed that some sort of deal over the Bank would be possible
and that jackson would eventually be forced to compromise; but
Jackson, influenced by van Buren, refused to do any deal with
Webster. In his Daniel Webster and Jacksonian Democracy Sydney
Nathans comments,
The rejection ofWebster and fusion, if perhaps inevitable, was

nonetheless symbolic. jackson had chosen the Bank issue as the
test of Democratic loyalty and had turned down the no less
appealing but far more sectional issue of nullification. But
Jackson had done more - he had passed final judgment on

traditional politics. He had chosen, over a return to personal
negotiation and good feeling, to stay with his organization and
to pursue his goals through conflict. Jackson's choice cast the
mold of future Democratic leadership; all succeeding
Democratic presidents until the Civil War- van Buren, Polk,
Pierce, and Buchanan - were dedicated organization men.
None was the favorite of colleagues, a charismatic figure, a
sectional titan; none had exceptional polish, eloquence, or
could lay claim to the affections of his section- all hallmarks of a
traditional leader like Webster. 25
When Harrison was selected as the Whig candidate in the

presidential election of 1840 Jackson was relieved that a soldier
not an orator had been chosen. Jackson, the excessive hero to
eclipse all other excessive heroes, was also the man who brought
the era of titans to an end.
To achieve prominence in the time ofJacksonian democracy it
definitely helped to be a flamboyant and spectacular figure, while
today, as a rule, it pays to be solid, dark-suited and sober of
demeanour. Our own electronic age can have little conception of
the spectacular exhibitions of rhetoric, fervour, political or
ecclesiastical, so familiar to nineteenth-century Americans, where
the highest compliment was to compare the speaker to Niagara,
suggestive as this was of a relentless and ever-rolling flow of moral
thunder. That favourite son of Massachusetts Daniel Webster
made an unforgettable impression, a huge man, 'a gambolling
jocund leviathan', 26 habitually dressed in blue coat with shining
brass buttons, an expansive yellow waistcoat, black trousers and
gleaming white cravat, captivating his listeners with a flood of
spell-binding oratory. Yet, actor though he was, Webster always
ran the risk of being thought insincere, long before he finally
disillusioned the progressive minds ofNew England by voting for
the Fugitive Slave Act and thus confirming slavery as an intrinsic
part of the Constitution. Emerson long admired and revered
Webster but came to distrust him for his lack of conviction and
intellectual substance. When Webster appeared in Concord
County Court to defend William Wyman, a bank president
accused of embezzlement, Emerson noted in his journal,
There was Webster the great cannon loaded to the lips: he told
Cheney that ifhe should close by addressing the jury, he should

blow the roof off. As it was, he did nothing but pound. Choate
put in the nail & drove it; Webster came after & pounded. The
natural grandeur of his face & manners always satisfies; easily
great; there is no strut in his voice or behaviour as in the others.
Yet he is all wasted; he seems like the great actor who is not
supported on the boards, & Webster like the actor ought to go
to London. Ah if God had given to this Demosthenes a heart to
lead New England! what a life & death & glory for him. Now he
is a fine symbol and a mantel ornament- costly enough to those
who must keep it; for the great head aches, & the great trunk
must be curiously fed & comfortedY
From the South, John Randolph of Virginia made an equally

striking impression. A tall man with a small, oval yet dark-
skinned face, his black hair tied behind in a queue and wearing an
antique frock-coat in the style favoured by the plantation
aristocracy, Randolph was a master of the expressive gesture.
S. G. Goodrich remembered,
I never saw better acting, even in Kean. His look, his manner,
his long arm, his elvish forefinger, -like an exclamation point,
punctuating his bitter thought,- showed the skill of a master.
The effect of the whole was to startle everybody, as if a
pistol-shot had rung through the hall. 28
Yet Washington Irving, who also heard him speak, was altogether
too conscious of the element of performance. He wrote,
There is no speaker in either House that excites such universal

attention as Jack Randolph. But they listen to him more to be
delighted by his eloquence and entertained by his ingenuity and
eccentricity, than to be convinced by sound doctrine and close
argument. 29
Randolph was an entertainer. Such a view could scarcely be

advanced of Calhoun, the solitary volcano, the earnest and
insistent proponent of state rights, a man who had earned the
right to be considered an intellectual and who was acknowledged
as a master of close, if perverse, reasoning. Yet Calhoun, too,
riveted the gaze of Harriet Martineau when he appeared in the
Senate. She was impressed by 'the splendid eye, the straight

forehead, surmounted by a load of stiff, upright, dark hair, the
stern brow, the inflexible mouth', 30 and struck by the vehemence
with which he rejected accusations of harbouring the ambition to
be President:
While thus protesting, his eyes flashed, his brow seemed

charged with thunder, his voice became almost a bark, and his
sentences were abrupt, producing in the auditory a sort oflaugh
which is squeezed out of people, by the application of a very
sudden mental force. I believe he knew not what a revelation he
made in a few sentences. 31
Calhoun's theatrical emphasis is embarrassing because it

amounts to an overly transparent acknowledgement that the
charge is true. In private conversation Calhoun proved to be
equally insistent:
He meets men and harangues them, by the fire-side, as in the

Senate: he is wrought like a piece of machinery, set a-going
vehemently by a weight, and stops while you answer: he either
passes by what you say, or twists it into a suitability with what is
in his head, and begins to lecture again. 32
Calhoun typifies the refusal of dialogue and communication in

Jacksonian politics, where he who speaks longest, loudest and
most aggressively is the one who will carry the day. Yet Henry
Clay was perhaps the most consummate performer of them all,
even in his impersonation of moderation. As Parton points out,
like the other contenders ofhis day, he spared no effort to cultivate
his popularity:
Without ever being a hypocrite, he was habitually an actor; but

the part which he enacted was Henry Clay exaggerated. He was
naturally a most courteous man; but the consciousness of his
position made him more elaborately courteous than any man
ever was from mere good-nature. A man on the stage must
overdo his part, in order not to seem to underdo it. 33
But, if Clay's politeness was exaggerated, so too was his verbal

violence. He was capable of launching an impressive tirade of
vituperation on any pretext great or small, whether it was against

Jackson for exceeding his order in achieving the conquest of
Florida in 1819, or in 1838 when he spoke of the 'tremendous
consequences to the welfare and prosperity of the country, and so
perilous to the liberties of the people', 34 that would be attendant on
establishing a sub-treasury in New York. Such exaggeration, of
course, was not peculiar to Clay; it was merely typical of the
political discourse ofhis day. Yet to some this ferocious invective
had the very ring of truth, stemming as it did from the bluff,
natural and untutored frontier community. OfClay and Jackson
J. C. Baldwin, author of The Flush Times ofAlabama and Mississippi,
wrote,
The elaborate tricks and tinsel, the prettinesses of expression,

the balanced sentences and glittering periods of oratory, much
less the artful dodges and the slippery equivocations of a tricksy
politician, would find but a sorry audience, before the stern
countenances, and the keen, penetrating eyes of the hunters,
assembled around the rude rostrum, in 'coon caps and
Iinsey-woolsey garments, leaning on their rifles, their sun-burnt
visages bent upon the face of the speaker, with an expression
that indicated they were not to be trifled with. To come at once
to the point, to seize the bull by the horns, to lead out boldly and
roundly their propositions, to urge strong arguments in nervous
language, to storm the enemy's batteries, to attack him in his
stronghold, to hurl at his head merciless sarcasm, to cover him
with ridicule, to denounce him and his principles in terms of
fiery invective, to ply the warm appeal to the passions and
sensibilities; these were the weapons of a warfare which was
only effective, when it was known that the hand was ready to
wield, with the same alacrity, weapons of personal combat. 35
And, when all is said and done, despite the sceptics, Baldwin may
have been right. For there was great satisfaction to be had from
being partisan and there was great excitement in being caught up
in the personalised battles with such partisanship generated.
Excessiveness was the sign of truth.
Wild, reckless and unconstrained behaviour seemed to be a
characteristic feature of the life of Jacksonian democracy,
especially in the eyes of European visitors. But it required no
feudal or lordly eye to be somewhat aghast at the notorious events
that took place on the occasion of Jackson's inauguration. The

Capitol was awash in a mighty surging, chanting area of people,
and, as the pressure of the crowd seeking to shake the newly
sworn-in President's hand grew, Jackson was forced, for his own
safety, to escape to his lodgings at the nearby Gadsby's Hotel. The
frustrated mob turned their attention to questions of food and
drink, bowls of punch were spilled, crystal glasses were smashed,
mud was smeared on the damask chairs as people struggled to see
what was on offer. It all seemed a terrible portent, indeed more
significant than it actually was. But European visitors still
found much to be uneasy about. T. C. Grattan, who attended
the inaugural ball for President Harrison, found it rather a
motley occasion. The ladies present wore extremely flamboyant
clothing-
The hanging sleeves and flowing flounces in satin and gauze,

with rich embroidery and lace garnitures, were opposed to tight
muslin or cotton gowns made in defiance of all modern taste,
while flowers, feather, and the most fantastic combinations of
headgear, threw an air of inconceivable burlesque over the
whole display 36
- yet the men were scarcely any better: 'sprigs of dandyism from
the Atlantic cities were in amusing contact with rough western
men, or down-east delegates, in the glorious equality of semi-
civilisation'. 37 Presidential elections aside, Captain Marry at
found Independence Day itself hard enough to bear:
A staggering individual is a laughable and, sometimes a

disgusting spectacle; but the whole of a vast continent reeling,
offering a holocaust of its brains for mercies vouchsafed, is an
appropriate tribute of gratitude for the rights of equality and
the levelling spirit of their institutions. 38
But what made a particularly lasting impression on the

European visitors was the excessive and exaggerated language
used by the American people. For, although the Americans, in the
manner of Baldwin, prided themselves on being a plain, down-to-
earth and unaffected people they nevertheless seemed unable to
call a spade a spade. Marryat wrote, 'The Americans delight in
the hyperbole; in fact they hardly have a metaphor without it', 39
while Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic work Democracy in America

noted that American writers and orators, of which latter there
were not a few, were prone to use an inflated style: 'They then vent
their pomposity from one end of the harangue to the other; and to
hear them lavish imagery on every occasion, one might fancy that
they never spoke of anything with simplicity.' 40
But this extravagant language was not, as de Tocqueville
suggested, simply the result of contemplating the vastness of
society or mankind in general - though, in Whitman's case
perhaps, that might have been part of it; rather it marked the
writer's or speaker's attempt to attract attention in a welter of
competing voices and claims and to mobilise the loyalty of specific
interest groups. Harriet Martineau was shocked at the spirit of
factionalism she found and the level of intra-section abuse in what
was ostensibly a united country:
I question whether the enmity between British and the

Americans, at the most exasperating crisis of the war, could
ever have been more intense than some that I have seen flashing
in the eyes, and heard from the lips, of Americans against
fellow-citizens in distant sections of their country. I have
scarcely known whether to laugh or to mourn when I have been
told that the New England people are all pedlars or canting
priests; that the people of the south are all heathens; and those
of the west barbarians. 41
The emergent press was highly important since it was through

them that politicians could be advanced and promoted and local
interests focused and polarised. Newspapers did not hesitate to
employ the most virulent and defamatory abuse. Dickens felt that
the press had become too powerful and that the need to satisfy,
cajole and placate such influential organs on the part of those
seeking office completely destroyed the integrity of political life:
When any man, of any grade of desert in intellect or character,

can climb to any public distinction, no matter what, in
America, without first grovelling down upon the earth, and
bending the knee before this monster of depravity; when any
private excellence is safe from its attacks; when social
confidence is left unbroken by it, or any tie of social decency and
honour is held in the least regard; when any man in that free
country has freedom of opinion, and presumes to think for

himself, and speak for himself, without humble reference to a
censorship which, for its rampant ignorance and base
dishonesty, he utterly loathes and despises in his heart; when
those who most acutely feel its infamy and the reproach it casts
upon the nation, and who most denounce it to each other, dare
to set their heels upon, and crush it openly, in the sight of all
men: then, I will believe its influence is lessening, and the men are
returning to their manly senses. But while the Press has its evil
eye in every house, and its black hand in every appointment in
the state, from a president to a postman; with ribald slander for
its only stock in trade, it is the standard literature of an
enormous class, who must find their reading in a newspaper, or
they will not read at all; so long must its odium be on the
country's head, and so long must the evil it works, be plainly
visible in the Republic. 42
But there is no evidence that this invitation to purge the land of

diatribe was ever taken up. Extravagant language was not
confined to the newspapers. Captain Marryat found a great
disposition to enjoy exaggerated stories and to retell them despite
an evident recognition of their falsity:
It is strange how easily the American people are excited, and

when excited, they will hesitate at nothing. The coach ...
stopped at every town, large or small, everybody eager to tell
and receive news. I always got out to warm myself at the stoves
in the bar, and heard all the remarks made upon what I do
really believe were the most extravagant lies ever circulated-
lies which the very people who uttered them knew to be such,
but which produced the momentary effect intended. 43
This type of hyperbole had a rather different source: the tendency

of people in a still predominantly oral culture to spread tall stories,
especially of areas remote from the main centres of population and
communications - in other words, the frontier and the West.
There was both the Western tall tale that teased and mocked the
listener's gullibility, and the booster talk, discussed by Daniel
Boorstin, which attributed extraordinary virtues and
extraordinary levels of culture to places that were barely crosses
on a map. So the shrewdness of the American was curiously bound
up with this excessiveness. He had to know what importance to

attach to what he heard and how to estimate it. Language could be
symbolically true and factually false simultaneously. Indeed to lie
was scarcely a concept, since even the most preposterous of
allegations might be nothing more than a pious celebration of the
frontier spirit. Even the biggest liar might seem strangely sincere if
you travelled with him to his own visionary Shangri-La.
The man who seemed above all to epitomise the spirit of the times
- and who was certainly a liar on the grandest scale - was the
showman ex-newspaperman P. T. Barnum. Barnum offered a
grateful public all the fantastic and incredible things they yearned
for. He put on show a Feejee Mermaid; a negro woman over 150
years old; Tom Thumb, an extraordinary midget; and many
fabricated wonders of natural history. Barnum was shrewd
enough to recognise that his American Museum, which he opened
on Broadway in 1841, would go down better in a puritan culture if
it purported to be educational. Barnum's ridiculous fakes could
seem to demonstrate the miraculous and incalculable ways of
divine providence. But the public was drawn into the Museum by
the sheer spectacle that it made. Flags and streamers fluttered
from the windows, brilliant gas lights prophetically set Broadway
alight, while outside blasted the loudest and most raucous brass
band that Barnum could find. In a letter to Moses Kimball ofl843
Barnum wrote,
By the way, Peale wrote me the other day to ask ifl c[ ould] not
send him a Tom Thumb or a two-headed man or [something]
to create an excitement. I replied that I could furnish [him with a]
beast with 7 heads & 10 horns at short notice or any other [?]
item that he ordered. 44
In Barnum's day the impossible really did only take a little longer.
The three decades separating the election of Jackson in 1828
from the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 were a time of
extremely rapid and confusing social change. This was especially
true of New England, New York and Pennsylvania and the
emerging Western state of Ohio. Communications improved
rapidly, first through the construction of canals and then through
the 1840s with a steadily expanding network of railways. Towns
and cities grew with extraordinary speed. The United States
developed its own manufacturing industries and workshops
turned into factories. There were dramatic movements of
population as many farmers on the Eastern seaboard, dissatisfied
with the low incomes they were getting from working exhausted
soil, moved to richer pastures in the Ohio valley. The religious
and intellectual life of America was profoundly affected by these
changes. It now becamed more difficult for ministers in
traditional churches to exert the authority over their
congregations to which they were accustomed, for those who were
dissatisfied with the rigid discipline to which they were subjected
found they had the option of either moving away or even adopting
a more congenial faith. A suitable benchmark for assessing these
destabilising tendencies is Lyman Beecher, father of Harriet
Beecher Stowe. In the context of the Congregational Church
Beecher was a relatively progressive figure in that he was
prepared to soften the harshness of its teaching on human
depravity and on the restriction of salvation to only a small elect;
he was also prepared to adopt the melodramatic, revivalist style of
preaching which to many was an anathema. Yet at the same time
Beecher was utterly opposed to the more optimistic and
humanistic Unitarian faith, which, following its capture of
Harvard College in 1805, was becoming increasingly dominant
and which he was summoned to the Hanover Street church in
Boston to combat. Like his puritan predecessors, Beecher was
convinced that the United States had been singled out to play an
exemplary part in the working of divine providence. In a
pamphlet entitled The Memory ofour Fathers, published in 1826, the
year of his election, he enthused,
If it had been the design of Heaven to establish a powerful

nation in the full enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, where
all the energies of man might find full scope and excitement, on
purpose to show the world by one great successful experiment of
what man is capable, and to shed light on the darkness which
should awake the slumbering eye, and rouse, the torpid mind,
and nerve the palsied arm of millions - where could such an
experiment have been made but in this country! ... The light of
such a hemisphere shall go up to Heaven, it will throw its beams
beyond the waves; it will shine into the darkness there, and be
comprehended, -it will awaken desire, and hope, and effort,
and produce revolutions and overturnings until the world is
free .... Floods have been poured upon the rising flame, but
they can no more extinguish it than they can extinguish the fires
of Aetna. Still it burns, and still the mountain murmurs; and
soon it will explode with voices and thunderings, and great
earthquakes .... Then will the trumpet of jubilee sound, and
earth's debased millions will leap from the dust, and shake off
their chains, and cry, 'Hosanna to the Son ofDavid!' 45
What Beecher himself had in mind was another great religious

revival that would call sinners and backsliders to repentence,
re-establish the Congregational churches as a mighty power of the
land, and bring a whole continent under the sway of divine
guidance. What makes Beecher's call symptomatic of the time is
his insistence on the positive value of excitement, his stress on the
word 'experiment' and his insatiable Niagaran rhetoric. For, as he
himself admitted when criticised within his own Church, 'As to
my hyperboles and metaphors, alas! I despair of ever reducing
them to logical precision!' 46
What Beecher did not foresee was that this same concern with
excitement and experiment would produce a multiplicity of
creeds, causes and experimental communities that would leave
even a man such as he desperately floundering and wallowing in
their wake. Indeed, only two years later he was already rueing his
words, lamenting in a letter to Nathaniel Beman,
There is nothing to which the minds of good men, when once

passed the bounds of sound discretion, and launched on the
ocean of feeling and experiment, may not come ... nothing so
terrible and unmanageable as the fire and whirlwind ofhuman
passion, when once kindled by misguided zeal. ... For, in every
church, there is wood, hay and stubble which will be sure to
take fire on the wrong side .... New-England and the West
shall be burned over ... as in some parts ofNew-England it was
done 80 years ago. 47
The struggle for allegiance was fierce. Although Unitarians and

Congregationalists saw it primarily as a battle between them,
Anne C. Smith's findings suggest that in Boston between 1830 and
1850 the Methodist, Catholic and Episcopalian churches grew
more rapidly than either. 48 Moreover, within the Unitarian
Church itself was developing the still more radical
Transcendentalist tendency, which went beyond a sane and
reasonable emphasis on the inherent goodness of man to proclaim

the doctrine of'the divine man', an inexhaustible potentiality that
lay within the reach of everyone. More alarming still were the
institutional implications. Emerson resigned as a Unitarian
minister over the ritual of communion, and it was clear that the
emergent divine man would have little need for Church or
clergyman to set him on the right path - he would find that for
himself.
But there were also those who founded experimental
communities, either to maintain the cohesion of their own faith or
to live together without private property along broadly socialist
lines. Initially these tended to be established in remoter areas.
Robert Owen's short-lived New Harmony venture began in 1825
in Illinois. Joseph Smith moved with his Mormon followers to
Kirtland, Ohio, before travelling still further west, in 1830.
Between 1830 and 1850 the number ofShaker settlements in Ohio
and Kentucky had multiplied from six to 6000. But in the 1840s,
the heyday of American utopias, many were set up much nearer
the main centres of population. Massachusetts was the setting for
three notable ventures. In 1840 Aden Ballou founded the
Hopedale Community, dedicated to ideals of fraternal
communism. The following year George Ripley started the
famous Brook Farm experiment, which was along Fourierist lines,
and which included Hawthorne amongst the participants. In
1843 Bronson Alcott and Charles Land began the community of
Fruitlands, which involved a whole series of complex prohibitions
especially relating to animals: they could be used neither to labour
in the fields, nor to provide food or clothing. Most notorious of all
was John Humphrey Noyes's Oneida Creek Community,
established in New York State in 1848, where wives and husbands
were held in common, albeit subject to intra-community
regulations. Lyman Beecher, needless to say, deeply deplored all
these ventures, regarding them as sinks of depravity and
immorality, based on over-optimistic assumptions about human
nature. But this was not all. 'Excitement' and 'experiment'
became linked with a third word, 'reform', and the period saw a
whole host of reform movements, dedicated to improving the
position of women, reforming prisons, temperance, and the great
crusade against slavery, which finally eclipsed all others in the run
up to the Civil War. All of these many churches, projects, crusades
and causes struggled vigorously to gain support and converts not
simply because they were sincerely believed but because their

proponents believed that in an expanding, volatile and relatively
unformed society the very future of the nation was at stake.
America was out there waiting for the word. A mighty continent
was up for grabs.
There were those who deplored so much enthusiasm and
fervour. In 1840 the Revd Leonard Withington wrote, 'We love
excitement; the appetite is increasing upon us; we are a peculiar
nation. Some people ... have such a craving for anti-ism, for some
party to follow, or some object to oppose.' 49 But Lyman Beecher,
though no radical, was caught up in the national mood. In Boston
he was beginning to seem, and perhaps to feel, out of touch with
the new thinking, so in 1832 he made up his mind to go west, to
the flourishing city of Cincinnati. Thanks to improved
communications the frontier state of Ohio was being rapidly
developed, first through a network of canals and later, in the
1840s, by the construction of railway lines to StLouis and the east
coast. Cincinnati was an important meat-packing centre and had
an extensive trade with both the West and the South. It was also to
become a refuge from slavery, a vital part of the escape route for
runaway slaves from the Southern plantations and cities.
Cincinnati was at the stress point of all the contradictions in
American culture. Michel Chevalier, a European visitor,
described Cincinnati as it was only a year or so after Beecher's
arrival:
Cincinnati, approached from the water, has an imposing

appearance, still more so when it is viewed from one of the
neighbouring hills. The eye takes in the windings of the Ohio
and the course of the Licking which enters the former at right
angles, the steamboats that fill the port, the basin of the Maimi
Canal, with the warehouses that line it and the locks that
connect it with the river, the whitewashed spinning works of
Newport and Covington with their tall-chimnies, the Federal
arsenal, above which floats the starry banner, and numerous
wooden spires that crown the churches. On all sides the view is
terminated by ranges of hills, forming an amphitheatre still
covered with the vigorous growth of the primitive forest. 50
By 1850 Cincinnati had a population of 100,000. The growth of

the Ohio region can be estimated by the fact that in 1820 the
populations of Massachusetts and Ohio were roughly comparable
at rather more than half a million. But in 1840 the population of
Massachusetts had increased 40 per cent and was itself turning
over rapidly through westward migration, while that of Ohio had
virtually trebled. So Beecher went west with many others and
almost immediately published his famous 'Plea for the West'. The
West, he felt, was a vast expanse ready and waiting for the gospel.
But he was soon to be disillusioned. At Lane Seminary he found
himself overshadowed by Theodore Weld, who was revered by the
students and who was both a believer in anti-slavery and a
believer in the moral value ofmanuallabour. Beecher was just not
prepared to come out in opposition to slavery and he warned his
children against the anti-slavery cause. Yet his children were to
become its leading lights. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her
enormously influential novel Uncle Tom's Cabin to dramatise both
the justice and urgency of the cause. Her brother, Henry Ward
Beecher, was a leading campaigner against it, both in lecture halls
and from the pulpit. Yet Lyman Beecher was accused of heresy
within his own Church. To the saving remnant even Beecher was
excessive, but in a few decades the outlook of Boston in the 1820s
had been left so very far behind that it seemed as though
America marched forward on seven-league boots.
Amid all the alarums and excursions the American literature
discussed in this book has all the air of a small but forgotten
hamlet, caught up no doubt in the excitement of the moment, but
somehow perceived as marginal to the principal battlefields, the
lines of advance and retreat. To the majority of Americans
literature simply was not very important. For them literature spelt
diversion, and the things they had on their mind were much too
important for them to pause and refresh at a Hawthornean pump
or linger at the Spouter Inn. But Dickens underestimated the
extent of the problem when he wrote in his American Notes,
The love of trade is a reason why the literature of America is to

remain for ever unprotected; 'For we are a trading people, and
don't care for poetry' though we do, by the way, profess to be
very proud of our poets: while healthful amusements, cheerful
means of recreation, and wholesome fancies, must fade before
the stern utilitarian joys of trade. 51
There simply was no cultural space for literature. The separate

spheres of religion, politics and trade were so all-engrossing yet

exclusive that they seemed to map out and include every area of
significant activity. Whether judged in terms of moral earnestness
or of effective practical action, the indispensable criteria by which
a still-puritan culture weighed everything in the balance, it was all
but inevitable that the incipient literature would be found
wanting. Emerson was interested in turning everyday life iQ.to
poetry, but he was not much interested in reading fiction. At the
bottom the whole activity smacked of a dilettantism, triviality and
mendaciousness that constantly threatened to teeter over into
immorality and impiety. Under the aegis of Washington Irving
literature figured as a cosy cultural inglenook for the refined and
educated where gentlemen and perhaps a few gentlewomen could
withdraw from the hurly-burly of American life in order to engage
in a discourse that would be unfailingly benign. And, whether or
not such an audience actually existed, there was a pious
determination to go on as ifit actually did. Such a presumed reader
might well be imagined nodding his agreement with Brockden
Brown over the potential menace of foreigners, deploring with
Cooper the sad decline in the tone of public life, sagely picking up,
or pretending to pick up, Poe's more recondite allusions, relishing
Hawthorne's antiquarianism, and, it was to be hoped, raising a
quizzical eyebrow at Melville's impious hints and suggestions,
like some periwigged English lord chuckling over the footnotes in
Bayle in the serenity of his leather-bound library. Even Harriet
Beecher Stowe, who did more than anyone to shatter the
composure of this little world by frankly harnessing literature to
the cause of anti-slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin, thereby projecting
imaginative writing to a cultural importance that it had never
before enjoyed, paid due deference to these conventions. On the
very first page of Uncle Tom we learn that a genteel parlour in
Kentucky has been sullied by that most unseemly thing, a coarse
and common individual who is not a gentleman and who is trying
to make his way in the world, in fact a slave-trader. But it is
through the code of the gentleman that we must seek to discern the
evils of slavery. Inevitably it follows that a writer who feels bound
to appeal to such a code can hardly be expected to break it.
The excessive heroes of American Romanticism are not
spontaneously produced by their American cultural environment
but are local adaptations of European models. Nevertheless there
are significant shifts in emphasis. The heroic figures of British and
German Romantic literature are always the carriers of an implicit
social critique. They gesture in the direction of alternative worlds
that will offer more freedom, more scope for the imagination, more
autonomy, even more sexual pleasure, than the existing one. But
at the same time there is the risk that the protagonist may go too
far in an intransigent rejection of the laws of society or ofGod. In
American writing such limitations are effectively removed. In the
Transcendentalist celebration of the divine man the way was
opened towards the development of an unlimited human
potential, while in Jacksonian democracy the excessive hero,
instead of standing against the crowd, would most likely be
carried along on their shoulders. So it would seem that the
excessive hero can be taken to express everything that is present in
American society, instead of everything that is absent. And yet
there is a social critique in the American writers, even if it is often
somewhat obliquely expressed. By a strange irony the historical
novel, on the face of it the least amenable of European genres, lies
behind three great works of American fiction, The Deerslayer, The
Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn, in which images of a
romanticised past are depicted with such extraordinary vividness
that they seem to reproach the blurred and inauthentic present.
Ahab too stands for such a clarity: a man whose relentless striving
puts the shallowness of the age in perspective. Yet these heroes
and heroines share in the didacticism of American culture; they do
not represent everyday people with their faults and failings but are
the signs and portents of a transcendental human spirit that can
break through all limitations that thwart it or encompass it. They
belong to an American hagiography in which the reader with a
sharpened moral perception can apprehend their greatness more
vividly than the figures who surround them in the fictional world;
just as saints stand finally clear of the historical turmoil that
surrounds them. Such notable protagonists of American fiction as
Dupin, Natty Bumppo, Hester Prynne, Billy Budd and Huck Finn
are inescapably exemplary. They are also 'experimental' in the
sense in which that word was understood in the America of the
1840s and 1850s, in that they demonstrate by striking example
that our sense ofhuman possibility can be enlarged. The excessive
is a redefinition of the norm.
2 Fenimore Cooper: the
Excessive Pathfinder
Cooper is the most disconcerting of novelists. His fiction is
strident, hectoring and didactic, yet the reader is disarmed, not to
say anaesthetised, by his prolix, cumbersome and apparently
purposeless narration. His heroes strain credibility yet they are so
hemmed in by absurdly genteel characters that they have the air
of genies trapped not so much in a bottle as by the niceties of
luncheon or afternoon tea. It is the great virtue of D. H.
Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature that he so insists on
this oddity of American writing which we might otherwise be
tempted to pass over or ignore. For, of all the novelists of the
Romantic era, no one is more determinedly fantastic than Cooper.
For all his resentments and grievances against American
culture, which intensified as he grew older, Cooper was never less
than a fervent patriot and it is his concern to present the
American as superhuman that gives his work its distinctive
articulation. In European Romanticism the idea of the
superhuman is always beset by doubt. The hero who adheres to
his own distinctive ends, values and purposes may go too far in
setting his private judgement against the consensus of society;
there will always be the suspicion of arrogance, error or impiety.
But in Cooper's case Americanism settles all doubts. Cooper
opened his career with novels in which the heroic individual is
identified with the emergent American society. His later works
put that same society in question. Yet Cooper never doubted but
that somewhere in America there lay a transcendental and
excessive virtue that could persist against all odds.
In Cooper's early works centring on the revolutionary period,
The Spy, Lionel Lincoln and The Pilot, the undoubted patriotism
appears in a somewhat quixotic and unprepossessing guise, as
unexpected as Cooper's own hero, Harvey Birch. That The Spy
should be set in the neutral ground of Westchester county and
30
© David Morse 1987
Fenimore Cooper 31
depict worthy and gentlemanly figures on either side of the

revolutionary war comes hardly as a revelation in such a
newfound disciple of Scott, but what is decidedly odder is
Cooper's evident reluctance to strike the heartwarming and
familiar chords evocative of a self-confident national identity.
Scott himself would surely have woven into his narrative some of
the more signal American victories and introduced the more
prominent national leaders of the revolutionary epoch, if only to
fill out and complete the tapestry, as Hitchcock has it. Yet the
culminating military engagement of The Spy is one in which the
British forces break through the American lines before effecting a
tactical withdrawal, a battle in which Captain Lawton, perhaps
the only character in the novel to display an uncompromisingly
anti-British attitude, is slain, his 'angry frown' 'fixed even in
death' (p. 420). Washington indeed appears, but in a shadowy
and vestigial manner- his materialisation as 'Harper' in the novel
seems in part dictated by a sense of propriety afraid that any
too-definite representation of America's founding father must
border on the sacrilegious. Since the greater part of the action of
The Spy takes place in the home of a family that sides with the
British, and since even the strongly patriotic Frances Wharton
and her lover, Peyton Dunwoodie, are determined to save her
brother Harry from an ignominious death as a British spy, the
cumulative impact of such a plot must be to foreground the
possible injustice rather than justice of the American cause. Still
more paradoxically, the 'Skinners', the American irregular forces,
appear in a most unfavourable light, while their British
equivalents, the Cowboys, escape relatively untarnished. When
Caesar the black menial says at the outset of the novel, 'no
gem man who pray to God, tell of good son, come to see old fader-
Skinner do that- no Christian!' (p. 13), Cooper is at pains to
comment that the Cowboys have escaped his censure, and yet this
same inverted partisanship characterises the whole novel. So,
when WarrenS. Walker says, 'Here was the first major work to
burst the bonds of the "colonial complex" and appeal openly to
the patriotic sentiments of Americans', 1 the reader may well be
puzzled that The Spy seems to lack the transparency that such a
characterisation would seem to suggest.
Certainly Cooper leant over backwards to disarm a potential
British audience. He offers every encouragement to the belief that
the British presence in the United States was solely a matter of
royal wilfulness and Hessian soldiers, while he allows Betty

Flanagan to suggest that the issues on which the Boston
Tea-Party turned were largely trivial. While Cooper may well
have wished for British readers, a more significant factor in his
calculations may well have been the power of the British
quarterlies to confer prestige, as much in his own country as on the
other side of the Atlantic, for American tastes were more likely to
be made in Edinburgh or London than in Boston or New York. So
patriotic fervour needed to be muted and anti-British sentiments
curbed. Yet, on the evidence, Cooper didn't go nearly far enough.
The reviewer in the British Critic approved Cooper's depiction of
American ruffians but was aghast at the depiction of Colonel
Wellmere as a bigamist and a cad: 'to represent an English colonel
as a mere petty-larceny knave, deficient in common spirit, is a
ridiculous attempt'. 2 The War of Independence is still
'inflammable matter' 3 and even for the most scrupulous and
decorous of socialites it is still fatally easy to tread on the sensitive
British toe.
The awe-inspiring fate that overtook Major Andre, hanged by
the American forces as a spy, on Washington's direct orders, casts
a malign shadow over the whole action of the novel, so that it is the
gibbet and not 'Old Glory' that figures as the icon of the
Revolution. In a footnote Cooper is at pains to compare the case of
Andre with that of the American Hale, who was executed by the
British within the hour: 'Andre was executed amid the tears of his
enemies. Hale died unpitied, and with reproaches in his ears; and
yet one was the victim of ambition, and the other of devotion to his
country. Posterity will do justice between them' (The Spy, p. 330).
But the case of Andre evokes fear and anxiety throughout the book
and the reader is conscious that a similar fate awaits both Harry
Wharton and Harvey Birch, which would in either case be cruelly
undeserved, but for Birch especially would be a bitter and ironic
twist to his already tangled fortunes. That Birch should shudder
when he passes the gallows and brood over the handling of
the Skinner is, we may think, an obvious-enough intensification of
the predicament of the spy, who risks everything without even the
expectation ofhonour, recognition or glory, yet to see this is also to
see liberationist America in the role of terrorist and oppressor. If
such a portrait was welcomed by the reviewer of the British Critic,
its contribution to revolutionary hagiography seems more
equivocal.
Fenimore Cooper 33
Cooper's most significant device in the novel is the structured

parallelism he establishes between Henry Wharton and Harvey
Birch. Its importance on a symbolic level is the more crucial
because Cooper is willing to risk a certain confusion on the
narrative level, by making Harvey's most conspicuous deed the
rescue of his English double from the very forces that Harvey is
pledged to aid. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that for Cooper
and his imputed readership the opposition American-British is
less significant than the opposition genteel-plebeian.
Cooper's problem in The Spy, and one that he was subsequently
to confront with Natty Bumppo, is how to engage the reader's
sympathies on behalf of a character who does not belong in polite
society and who is neither well-dressed, handsome nor socially
adept. The problem is that such a character is not a conventional
point of identification for the average novel-reader and is more
likely to evoke embarrassment and unease than admiration. Henry
Wharton is thus truly a double for Harvey, and Cooper's task in
the novel, having once established the connection, is to establish a
transposition of their roles so that ultimately Henry Wharton
figures as the foil who only makes Harvey's virtues shine forth
more luminously. Wharton's rough-and-ready escape highlights
Harvey's greater ingenuity and resourcefulness. His modest part
in the war sets off the crucial nature of Harvey's role on the
American side, a debt so great that Washington himself must
acknowledge it. He is treated with respect by his captors, yet
Harvey is reviled and despised even by his own side. Each has his
family home set on fire, yet for Harvey the loss is far greater, since
with the loss of his cabin and the simultaneous death ofhis father
he must become a wanderer entirely bereft of refuge and moral
support. The concern which his family and friends all show for
Henry Wharton is in direct contrast to the experience of Harvey,
who not only lacks friends but becomes a complete outcast,
hunted 'like a beast of the forest' (p. 117).
A further irony is suggested by Lawton's patriotic avowal, 'the
time must arrive when America will learn to distinguish between a
patriot and a robber' (p. 293), for it would seem that during the
revolutionary period, the patriotic period par excellence, it is
plausible scoundrels who play the part of the patriot, while
Harvey Birch, the genuine patriot, must carry the secret of his
own fidelity to the grave. Cooper's motive, however, is not so much
to denigrate the Revolution as to intensify the contrast between
the mundane and the spiritual, to show how far the quotidian falls
short ofthe sublime. Against the homely background of Cooper's
canvas the visionary and unflinching fortitude of Harvey Birch
and Washington is thrown in even sharper relief, so that their brief
incursions into the narrative figure as visitations from some
transcendental world. 'Harper', on his early appearance, makes
manifest through his intense contemplation of the landscape that
he is no ordinary man but one singled out for the divine mission of
liberating his country, a project equally sublime:
'What a magnificent scene!' said Harper, in a low tone; 'how
grand! how awfully sublime!- may such a quiet speedily await
the struggle in which my country is engaged, and such a
glorious evening follow the day of her adversity.'
Frances, who stood next to him, alone heard the voice.
Turning in amazement from the view to the speaker, she saw
him standing bare-headed, erect, and with his eyes lifted to
Heaven. There was no longer the quiet which had seemed their
characteristic, but they were lighted into something like
enthusiasm, and a silent flush passed over his features.
There can be no danger apprehended from such a man,
thought Frances; such feelings belong only to the virtuous.
(p. 46)
Harper-Washington stands before nature as before an altar,
radiating such an intense spirituality that his destiny can scarcely
be disguised. The natural sublime as perceived through the eyes of
Frances also becomes a rhetorical device through which Cooper is
able to ennoble his pedlar hero. Frances's deeply felt response to
landscape actually becomes the means whereby she becomes
alerted both to the cottage where Birch and Harper rendezvous
and then to the presence of Harvey himself. While she is seated on
a rock to 'rest and admire', her eye is caught by a 'solitary gleam'
which strikes the mountain at which she is gazing and throws the
concealed hut into prominence:
With a feeling of awe at being thus unexpectedly admitted, as it
were into the secrets of that desert place, Frances gazed
intently, until, among the scattered trees and fantastic rocks,
something like a rude structure was seen. It was low, and so
obscured by the colour of the materials, that but for its roof, and
the glittering of a window, it must have escaped her notice.
Fenimore Cooper 35
While yet lost in the astonishment created by discovering a

habitation in such a spot, on moving her eyes she perceived
another object that increased her wonder. It apparently was
a human figure, but of singular mould and unusual
deformity. (p. 315)
It is thus as if Frances has been vouchsafed a vision and through

her receptivity is brought to a deeper understanding of the
revolutionary drama and Harvey's part in it. At the same time the
episode establishes a significant reversal of values - in ordinary
life Frances's social position is high while Birch's is low, yet here
those roles are symbolically reversed and in this new situation
Harvey's ungainly build figures not so much as unbeautiful but as
sublime, for it is as if his very stature is the mark of some peculiar
destiny. The visionary gleam perhaps does not disclose all, but it
discloses enough to endow Birch's actions with a more profound
and pervasive resonance.
Such is Cooper's hyperbole in The Spy that Harvey Birch, the
spy, and Washington, the revolutionary leader figure, are nothing
less than types of the suffering Christ and the omniscient God the
Father. Birch's sufferings are the sufferings of America. His home,
the only inhabited building on neutral ground, is burnt to the
ground and his father dies, yet he attains a new identity as a heroic
and dedicated patriot and enjoys a privileged relationship with
Washington, the father of his country. Like Christ, Harvey is
humiliated, persecuted and despised, and ifhe escapes a hanging
by a hair's breadth he lives in constant fear that he has been
forsaken and abandoned by God or Washington- the two are so
closely identified as to make any discrimination seem pedantic.
Although his father's dying benediction sheds 'a holy radiance'
(p. 135) over his darkest hours, he nevertheless feels totally
isolated, since his confidence that his ambiguous role will finally
be vindicated has been dealt a damaging blow:
'While my father lived', murmured Harvey, unable to smother

his feelings, 'there was one who read my heart; and oh! what a
consolation to return from my secret marches of danger, and the
insults and wrongs that I suffered, to receive his blessing and his
praise; but he is gone,' he continued, stopping and gazing
wildly toward the corner that used to hold the figure of his
parent, 'and who is there to do me justice?' (p. 186)
Harvey's commitment to the Revolution and to the figure of

Washington is total because his fate lies completely in
Washington's decree, his whole existence is bound up in their
mutual pledges. When he is threatened with death by Dunwoodie
he insists that 'Washington can see beyond the hollow views of
pretended patriots' (p. 207), and, while both he and Harvey are
finally vindicated, the role of the narrative is precisely to reassert
that confidence whilst appearing to undermine it. Like
Kierkegaard's religious hero, Harvey places himself totally in the
hands of God and Washington; in his existential terror he has no
other relationships: 'No- no, I am alone truly-none know me but
my God and Him' (p. 229). At such a moment God and
Washington are still separate, but in his darkest hour Cooper
deliberately makes them shade into one:
'Every thing seemed to have deserted me. I even thought that

HE had forgotten that I lived.'
'What! did you feel that God himself had forsaken you
Harvey!'
'God never forsakes his servants,' returned Birch, with
reverence, and exhibited naturally a devotion that hitherto he
had only assumed.
'And who did you mean by HE?' (p. 367)
Here, Cooper's control of obliquity and inference is masterly. On

the one hand the mysterious 'HE' that is invoked alerts the reader
to the fact that there exists an ultimate sanction for Harvey's
behaviour, which may well be Washington himself, and the
existence of such a possibility saves Birch's remark from the
imputation of vainglory, impiousness and blasphemy which it
might otherwise carry. Yet, at the same time the capitalised 'HE'
subtly invokes a complicity between the mysterious 'HE' and God,
so that both blend into one; and thus Birch's assertion, 'God never
forsakes his servants', becomes an act of piety as much to the one
as to the other. The United States is truly God's Country, and, as
Washington, who also moves in a mysterious way, performs
wonders and marks the fall of a sparrow, pronounces his
benediction over Harvey, 'to me, and to me only of all the world,
you seem to have acted with a strong attachment to the liberties of
America' (p. 425), any gap between the two is finally eliminated.
Harvey Birch is the first of a long line of Cooper heroes to be
Fenimore Cooper 37
possessed of exceptional powers. If his predilection for disguise

and his amazing ubiquitousness owe more than a little to the
example of Scott's Rob Roy, he is nevertheless marked out by
Cooper's determination to stress the miraculousness of his
interventions and the unlimited scope of his abilities. Harvey's
appearances are not confined to the furnishing of useful notes for
Lawton or Dunwoodie; they are strongly reminiscent of a figure in
a morality play, as when he makes an unexpected appearance at
the bigamous wedding of Colonel Wellmere, or when, in the
burning mansion, he crosses Lawton 'like a spectre' (p. 283). The
parallel is still more evident when he dresses up as a fanatical
puritan divine, for, although the portrayal is broadly comic, it
becomes curiously pertinent when he exclaims to Miss Peyton,
'Mercy is only for the elect ... and you are in the "valley of the
shadow of death"' (p. 350)- for Harvey himself is certainly one of
the elect. In the final escape of Harvey with Henry Wharton,
Cooper lays all modesty and verisimilitude aside in unfettered
celebration of his excessive hero. Not only does he possess
amazing power and strength-
He wound among the hills and vales, now keeping the highways
and now avoiding them, with a precision that seemed
instinctive. There was nothing elastic in his tread, but he glided
over the ground with enormous strides, and a body bent
forward, without appearing to use exertion, or know
weanness (p. 400)
- but they are complemented by equally extraordinary mental

powers:
Throughout the whole of this arduous flight, the pedlar had

manifested a coolness and a presence of mind that nothing
appeared to disturb. All his faculties seemed to be of more than
usual perfection, and the infirmities of nature to have no
domination over him. (p. 401)
Under the sway ofpatrioticfeeling it would seem men can become

like gods.
Ralph, the aged deus ex machina figure of Cooper's subsequent
novel of the revolutionary war, Lionel Lincoln ( 1825), is similarly
supercharged by an American nationalist vigour. On his first
appearance Cooper introduces him as a figure of great

venerability:
He was a man who would have seemed in the very extremity of

age, had not his quick, vigorous steps, and the glowing, rapid
glances from his eyes as he occasionally paced the deck
appeared to deny the usual indications of many years. His form
was bowed, and attenuated nearly to emaciation. His hair,
which fluttered a little wildly about his temples, was thin, and
silvered to the whiteness of at least eighty winters. Deep
furrows, like the lines of great age and long endured cares
united, wrinkled his hollow cheeks, and rendered the bold,
haughty outline of his prominent features still more
remarkable. (p. 3)
Since Ralph is gradually disclosed to be the tutelary spirit and

guiding presence of the American Revolution, he can scarcely be
expected to remain within the bounds of probability and Cooper is
presently disposed to suggest that such a cursory verdict must
considerably underestimate his longevity: '"Have I not often told
you," returned the old man, with a severity in his voice which was
even apparent in its suppressed tones, "that I have known Boston
near a hundred years" ' (p. 73)- a claim which, we may even infer,
verges on modesty. Ralph is the spirit of American liberty itself,
who in his very person embodies a consciousness ofhistoric rights
and the determination to assert them. Ralph is invariably
presented in such a way as to display his paranormal significance.
In an early encounter Lionel Lincoln sees that 'one of those
shadows, which extended along the wall, and bending against the
ceiling, exhibited the gigantic but certain outlines of the human
form' (p. 68), while his wedding to Cecil Dynevour is marked by
an equally strange visitation: 'a huge shadow rose upon the
gallery, and extended itself along the ceiling, until its gigantic
proportions were seen hovering, like an evil spectre, nearly above
them' (p. 281).
On another occasion Ralph materialises before Lionel in a
cloud of vapour and on Mrs Lechmere's deathbed he makes a
startling appearance that has the air of a visitation from beyond
the grave. Since Ralph possesses miraculous powers of prophecy,
and, since, according to Abigail, he possesses the power to read
the most secret thoughts, it is perhaps not surprising thatjob, the
Fenimore Cooper 39
half-witted changeling, should 'worship him as a god' (p. 100).

Yet he is also endowed with a preternatural energy that at times
makes him more than a little reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's
Father William. His 'noiseless step', 'in conjunction with his great
age and attenuated frame, sometimes gave to his movements and
aspect the character of a being superior to the attributes of
humanity' (p. 392). Ralph gives credence to this attribution by his
subsequent exploits behind the American lines:
But Ralph, whose unencumbered person and iron frame, which

seemed to mock the ravages of time, gave a vast superiority over
the impeded progress of the other, moved swiftly ahead, waving
his hand on high, as if to indicate his intention to join in the
flight, while he led the way into the fields adjacent to the
churchyard they had quitted. (p. 404)
Perhaps on an iconographical level this figures as 'Liberty

Leading the People', but regarded as anything other than
allegorical the personage of Ralph can only leave the reader
bemused. He is likely to be still more bemused by the
identification which Cooper presses on him at the end: when it is
revealed that Ralph is none other than Lionel's father, Sir Lionel
Lincoln, despite the fact that Lionel is made to state quite
explicitly that his father is under fifty. Although even Homer
nods, Cooper's lapses, after Mark Twain's infallible
demonstration, are still more notorious, but we should not
automatically convict him of negligence, despite his curious
failure to explain the discrepancy. Doubtless Sir Lionel's
appearance is the result of his incarceration in the private
madhouse and hence it is perhaps scarcely surprising that he
should be more vigorous than he looks. But there is still the puzzle
as to why Cooper should undermine his carefully cultivated
patriotic mystique by such a damaging peripeteia.
For the greater part of Lionel Lincoln there is much to suggest
that Cooper's ambition is to be the American Scott and to write a
novel which will be to the American revolutionary war that
Waverlry was to the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. The initial
engagements of the war at Concord and Bunker Hill figure
prominently in the narrative, while on the British side General
Howe appears, even though, on the American side, Washington
is quite deliberately excluded, as being virtually beyond
representation. Since Lionel Lincoln is a serving officer in the

British army, yet connected by ties of both kinship and sympathy
to the American cause, we might well expect that a closer
familiarity with the burdens and indignities imposed on the
American people would lead him to throw in his lot with theirs
under the crystallising influence of war. Yet Lionel, despite the
fact that he takes an American wife and that he has warmed to the
radical sentiments of his mercurial progenitor, is a wavering hero
who never wavers, and, far from espousing the rights of man, he
returns to England to assume a privileged position in the English
aristocracy.
It may therefore appear even odder that the American cause in
the novel is chiefly espoused by a madman and a simpleton. Part
of the explanation may be that Cooper was not entirely satisfied
with The Spy, which in parts is distinctly prosaic, and wished to
enrich the texture of Lionel Lincoln with more picturesque
elements. For certainly Lionel Lincoln is as much a Gothic as a
historical novel. Quite apart from the preternatural events
already mentioned, the novel is at least as much concerned with
the dark secret of Mrs Lechmere as with revolution. Moreover,
the melodramatic pivot of the plot - when Cecil Dynevour,
immediately after her marriage to Lionel with its strange omens
and the agonising death of Mrs Lechmere, faints to find her
husband gone and on reviving faints again - is firmly in the
tradition ofMrs Radcliffe. Within such a context the loss of reason
may well be a sign of prophetic or visionary powers, the mark not
so much of affliction as of a peculiar grace. It would seem that
Cooper wanted to have it both ways. On the one hand he is able to
ingratiate himself with the British reader by sympathetic portraits
of Lionel Lincoln, Polwarth and Howe, and by even commenting
favourably on the 'virtues and integrity' of George III (p. 234n.);
yet at the same time he can suggest that the American cause has a
sublimity that places it far beyond the prosaic reason of such
sensible individuals. But it is strange to find that Cooper is obliged
to speak with a forked tongue nearly half a century after the events
he describes, and without much confidence that the events of 1776
will evoke the same romantic empathy as those of 1745. For
Cooper the split between America and England runs deep and he
can only articulate it through the split between 'Ralph' and
Lincoln Senior, a device that suggests that the sublime madness of
revolutionary violence is the necessary consequence of earlier
Fenimore Cooper 41
wrongs. Lincoln and England pay for the wrongs they have done
America. The interweaving narratives produce the Revolution as
the tragic consequence of a guilt-ridden past. Ralph andjob speak
a truth that has been too long suppressed, which when spoken can
set men free. So that Cooper himself both speaks and does not
speak it.
At the opening of the novel a youth on board ship is questioned
about his background by an elderly man. He admits to being
American by birth but defines himself as English by habit and
education. At which his senior expostulates, 'Accursed be the
habits, and neglected the education, which would teach a child to
forget its parentage!' (p. 5). At that moment the significance of the
conversation is scarcely evident, since the young man is not
identified for a further twenty pages as Lionel Lincoln and the
revelation that this man is his father is delayed until the end of the
book. Yet it serves as a thematic announcement none the less. The
strangeness of the situation is that Lionel's Lincoln's relation to
his father exactly reverses the relationship between England and
young America. Ralph suggests that Lionel is guilty of filial
impiety in 'forgetting' both America and himself. But if Lionel is
to be blamed we can scarcely fail to be aware that his disloyalty
precisely counterpoints the rebellion of the American colonies.
In the struggle of sons against fathers the roles become
disconcertingly mixed, for in the American rejection of the father
the insurrection is instigated by the father and contested by the
son. Yet at the same time Lionel's benevolent overseeing of his
father's actions seems to cast him in a paternal role. It may be that
by this means Cooper, whose concern for authority is always
great, seeks to exculpate the American Revolution, which,
although evidently right, is also inexorably in the wrong. This is
because, for Cooper, the challenge to authority slides into
jacobinism and anarchy, in which no principles of authority can
be justified. The Declaration oflndependence carries within it the
seeds offurther declarations, as the secession of the South was to
prove. So that in Cooper's myth the American Revolution
becomes an untimely circumstance that everyone nevertheless
really wanted, where rebellious Americans can at the same time
be patriotic Englishmen and where in the exchange of sons and
fathers all can become bearers of their own legitimacy.
In the 1820s, following Precaution and The Spy, Cooper's
attention was otherwise divided between novels of the frontier set
in the pre-revolutionary period and novels of the sea. He followed

The Pioneers (1823) with The Pilot (1824). The Last of the Mohicans
(1826) and The Prairie (1827) were rapidly followed by The Red
Rover (1828). The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829), a brutal tale of
frontier struggles between vengeful puritans and Indians, was
succeeded by the ethereal, highly glamorised adventures of The
Water-Witch (1830). Susan Fenimore Cooper has suggested that
Cooper got the idea of writing a novel of the sea from Sir Walter
Scott's The Pirate, which had been recently published; but the
influences on Cooper were more extensive, and it must be doubted
if Cooper would have written this or any other piratical romance if
it had not been for the influence ofByron's The Corsair. For Cooper
managed completely to overlook Scott's struggle to set The Pirate
in a culture historically remote and very different from that of his
time, while the gloomy, brooding and enigmatic demeanour of the
Pilot marks him out as the Byronic hero. For an American writing
in the 1820sJohn PaulJones was a well-nigh inescapable subject
for such an enterprise, but Cooper chose to make him not the
flamboyant, swashbuckling hero oflegend (or, for that matter, of
Melville's Israel Potter) but a mysterious individual who conceals
far more than he discloses. Like Harvey Birch, his purposes are
veiled in the service of some higher national purpose, but unlike
him he seems to relish enigma and solitude for their own sake.
The novel is based on John Paul Jones's attempt to capture
Lord Selkirk as a hostage on his estates on the Scottish coast. In
The Pilot this military objective becomes interwoven with the
desire of two young naval officers, Griffiths and Barnstaple, to
liberate two young ladies whom they wish to marry, but who are
being held by Colonel Howard, who acts as their guardian. While
the novel centres on a conflict offamily and national loyalties, the
Pilot alone stands as an unswerving and indomitable symbol of
national rectitude against whom all the others are measured.
The Pilot's power is established in the opening section of the
novel, when he miraculously saves the Ariel from disaster on the
rocks, to which she has come dangerously close. The Pilot is
marked out from his fellow sailors by several remarkable
characteristics: not simply a voice of 'startling fierceness and
authority' (p. 30), but also a calmness 'bordering on the
supernatural' (p. 32) and a quick eye that can pierce the darkness
'with a keenness of vision that exceeded human power' (p. 48).
When they are captured and Griffiths, one of the naval officers, is
Fenimore Cooper 43
sunk into a deep sleep, the Pilot still remains awake, as if he is

virtually exempt from the frailties and limitations of man. In the
course of The Pilot various characters act in ways that reveal them
to be lacking in a full sense of duty and rectitude. Dillon, who has
already betrayed the American cause, violates his parole. Griffiths
and Barnstaple are more concerned with their own life than with
the success or failure of the expedition. Only the Pilot, whose
relationship with Alice Dunscombe leaves him finally alone with
the moral implications of his chosen profession, never forgets his
responsibilities even for a moment. When Griffiths has been
unable to compel Barnstaple to follow orders, the Pilot makes an
appearance:
The eye of the Pilot flashed with a terrible fire, while a fierce
glow seemed to be creeping over his whole frame which actually
quivered with passion. But suppressing this exhibition of his
feelings, by a sudden and powerful effort, he answered in an
emphatic manner,- 'One who has a right to order, and who will
be obeyed!' (pp. 356-7)
When Griffiths asks what has become of the main object of their
expedition the Pilot answers, ''Tis lost ... 'tis sacrificed to more
private feelings; 'tis like a hundred others, ended in
disappointment, and is forgotten, sir, forever' (p. 357). So
American military and naval setbacks can be attributed to a lack
of the altruism and fervour that the Pilot possesses. Instead of
achieving a lightning conquest he becomes a kind of wandering
pilot, searching the seas for a place where valour and heroism will
be pure and uncontaminated, where the revolutionary purpose
can be achieved. Revolutionary victory calls for the perfect human
being.
The Red Rover is one of the most tiresome of Cooper's novels,
partly because his persistent racialism is displayed with
conspicuous effect and partly because the revelations surrounding
the character of Wilder are more than a little laboured. Wilder
signs up with the Red Rover to pilot the Royal Caroline, a vessel the
Red Rover intends to attack, but it is subsequently revealed that
he is one Henry Ark, an agent of the Crown. Ark-Wilder is saved
from death at the hands of the pirates by the further revelation
that he is in reality Paul De Lacey, and thus the son of a widow
who is travelling on the same vessel. In appearance the romantic
figure of the Red Rover could not be more different from the
prosaic hero of the frontier, Natty Bumppo:
Within a few yards of the place he was permitted to occupy

himself stood the motionless form of the Rover. A second glance
was necessary, however to recognise, in the grim visage to
which the boarding-cap already mentioned lent a look of
artificial ferocity, the usually bland countenance of the man. As
the eye of Wilder roamed over the swelling, erect and
triumphant figure, it was difficult not to fancy that even the
stature had been suddenly and unaccountably increased. One
hand rested on the hilt of a yattagan, which, by the crimson
drops that flowed along its curved blade, had evidently done
fatal service in the fray; and one foot was placed, seemingly with
supernatural weight, on that national emblem which it had
been his pride to lower. (p. 261)
Nevertheless there are significant similarities. Both Natty and the

Rover move in a world where they are unrestricted by the confines
of law and where they are thrown back on their own resources;
both are solitary, isolated individuals and both belong to a
romantic world that is in the process of passing away. What is
particularly evident is Cooper's stress on the magical attributes of
his hero. It is not simply that the ship he sails in is identified with
the Flying Dutchman and described as a 'spectre ship' (p. 174), but
that so many aspects both of the boat or of its captain are
attributed to supernatural sources. The sailing-ability of the
Dolphin is such that to the experienced Wilder it 'really began to
assume, even to his intelligent eyes, the appearance of some
unaccountable agency' (p. 127), while the description of the
Rover himself is inevitably couched in terms of the excessive. He is
twice described as an 'extraordinary man' (pp. 296, 398), and also
as a 'singular being' (p. 372). Every detail of Cooper's description
suggests repressed or contained energy. Although 'his body is not
large it contains the spirit of a giant' (p. 402) and communicates
'his peculiar air of high and extraordinary authority' (p. 407), a
sign of his ability to wield 'despotic or rather magical power' (p.
321). The Red Rover is mysterious, omnipresent and it is perhaps
by these means that he obtains 'those secret sources of information
which the chief had so frequently proved he possessed, to an
extent that often seemed miraculous' (p. 361).
Fenimore Cooper 45
Although the Rover is accused by the chaplain of lawlessness

and impiety, he justifies himself with his dying breath, for his
apparently piratical deeds have been performed against England
in the name of the emergent United States:
With a supernatural effort, his form arose on the litter; and with
both hands elevated above his head, he let fall before him that
blazonry of intermingled stripes, with its blue field of rising
stars, a glow ofhigh exultation illuming every feature ofhis face,
as in his day of pride.
'Wilder!' he repeated, laughing, hysterically, 'we have
triumphed!'- He fell backward, without motion, the exulting
lineaments settling in the gloom of death, as shadows obscure
the smiling brightness of the sun. (p. 451)
All the Rover's apparent crimes and misdemeanours can be

justified because they have been performed in the name of a sacred
cause. It is fervent patriotism that infuses the Rover with such
preternatural energy and power.
Cooper's romantic Byronism reaches a climax with The Water-
Witch (1830) with a hero who is described as 'An outcast of society
-a man condemned in the opinion of the world- the outlaw- the
flagrant wanderer of the ocean- the lawless Skimmer of the Seas'
(p. 108). The novel is set in the reign of Queen Anne and piracy
appears as a morally justified response to excessive restrictions on
trade. Cooper's hero justifies himself with a speech that looks
prophetically forward to the founding of the United States:
When governments shall lay their foundations in natural

justice, when their object shall be to remove the temptations to
err, instead of creating them, and when bodies of men shall feel
and acknowledge the responsibilities of individuals- why, then
the Water-witch herself might become a revenue-cutter, and
her owner an officer of the customs!' (Ibid.)
In The Water-Witch, however, the patriotic theme is overlaid by

innumerable mysterious disappearances and escapes, and so
thick is the pall of mystery that Cooper casts over the narrative
that it belongs more to the supernatural than to the nautical. Yet,
to tell the truth, Cooper's fiction persists through its very
hyperbole, as he conjures up for the reader scenes of irresistible
freedom, innocence and glamour. In the Leatherstocking novels

Cooper is able to celebrate both the law and those who live beyond
it, but in his sea fiction there can be no doubt where his
sympathies lie. What Cooper relishes is space for the individual to
carve out his own destiny, as much for Natty Bumppo as for the
Skimmer of the Seas.
The Leatherstocking Tales occupy a peculiarly important
position in Cooper's work, for reasons that are at first sight
difficult to understand. Cooper wrote thirty novels, virtually all of
which have something to offer to the patient and attentive reader,
and it would seem that the preponderate emphasis on Cooper's
tales of the American forest constitutes some sort of deformation:
the product initially of the preferences and predilections of
non-adult readers but later reinforced by the facility with which
his hero could be appropriated by American cultural nationalism
- a process, of course, to which Cooper would be the very last to
object. That there is a certain arbitrariness in the fate of a novelist
who with five novels continues to enjoy an enormous success
worldwide, while most of the rest are consigned to oblivion, can
hardly be denied. And yet it has a certain justice. This is not
simply because it is possible to think of the Leatherstocking Tales
as superior or because the figure of Natty Bumppo has struck and
continues to strike certain peculiarly American cultural
resonances, but rather because ofCooper's unevenness as a writer.
Cooper is uneven not simply from work to work, an eventuality
which very few writers have found it possible to escape, but within
the pages of virtually every single novel. Over and over again we
find passages of a striking beauty and lyricism, scenes of great
power, dignity and imaginative complexity alternating with prolix
and cumbersome attempts at suspense and retardation, forced and
unconvincing humour and local colour, language that is tortuous,
sententious, often inappropriate in style, nearly buckling under
the weight of technicalities and literary cliches. Cooper's faults
are well known and it is hardly necessary to labour them; but the
principal conclusion we should draw is not so much that Cooper
was a bad writer, though he certainly committed to paper much
bad writing, but that he found the problem of sustaining a novel of
the length then conventional (in Cooper's case some 450 pages in
the Leatherstocking Edition) an almost insupportable burden.
For, while Scott delighted in a leisurely presentation of a
distinctive social milieu before gradually pulling together the
Fenimore Cooper 47
threads of his plot, Cooper was a novelist of a very different type.

Balzac's comment 'Leatherstocking is a statue' 4 is exceptionally
perceptive because it draws attention to the peculiarly static, even
rigid conception which Cooper has of his heroes. They do not
change, nor do we expect them to change; indeed, it is unthinkable
that they should be subject to any kind of transformation.
Cooper's task is simply to exhibit them in postures that will show
them in the noblest and most characteristic light, to immortalise
certain distinctive virtues of the scenic method of presentation,
but he failed to realise that, in his own case also, concentration,
condensation, a symbolic expressiveness and clarity were
indispensable. Or, at least, if he did realise it in certain scenes, he
dissipated their impact by not applying the same principles to the
construction of the novel as a whole. Although it is always
tempting to think of Cooper's novels as having either too much
(The Last of the Mohicans) or too little plot (The Pioneers), as Poe
rightly pointed out in his review of U)iandotte, 'the absence of plot
can never be critically regarded as a defect', 5 so that what one is
really referring to is a quality of redundancy- in both cases we
find a novel that has been protracted beyond and away from the
real interests of the novelist and reader alike. Only in the
Leatherstocking Tales does Cooper happen upon a mythic frame
within which he may dispose of all these materials as he likes, a
structure that can cope with redundancy and even begin to make
it look like a virtue.
The mythic backbone of the Leatherstocking Tales, the notion
that endows them with such distinctive echoes and
reverberations, has no American provenance, but was borrowed
by Cooper from Scott and European Romanticism: that of the
'anachronistic hero'. 6 Natty Bumppo is a man at odds with his
own time, a figure of honour, dignity and nobility, who embodies
the values of a bygone age, a time when a man could live both in
harmony with himself and the world. It would be wrong to assume
that such an idea was appropriate to American conditions; not
least because in this way the sheer difficulty Cooper had in
adapting it to his own purposes is lost sight of, as thereby is the
magnitude of his achievement. For in its European articulation
the idea of the 'anachronistic hero' is deeply and intricately
bound up with the values offeudal and pre-bourgeois culture. Yet
this was precisely the aspect of Europe that Americans from
Cooper to Twain most deeply deplored. Nothing was more
repugnant to their sensibility than that whole backlog of

aristocratic and traditional survivals and residues which, to
them, most essentially defined European culture and stood in the
way of the democratic, the modern, and, shall we say, the
American. So, in theory, that whole aspect of European
Romanticism that was concerned with recovering a lost past was
to the American a closed book. Moreover, the central dynamic of
the 'anachronistic hero' was a rejection of the values of bourgeois
culture- values to which America was, and is, deeply committed.
Indeed, part of the problem that Cooper himself had with the
figure ofNatty was that Natty served to dramatise values that, in
one important respect- the conjoint importance attached to law
and property- differed quite markedly from his own. So, in the
novels that followed The Pioneers Cooper suppressed this
significant component of the archetype and eliminated the conflict
associated with it. The transvaluation of values is most marked in
The Prairie, where Cooper puts into his hero's mouth certain
qualified words of praise concerning the Ia w and property, while
the trial by Ishmael Bush of his own son serves as a demonstration
of'naturaljustice'- a proof that wherever men live there must be
law.
After completing the Leatherstocking Tales Cooper attempted
simultaneously to fill a lacuna in his own work, and, as he saw it,
to cast the mote out of the eye of American society, by writing a
trilogy that would celebrate the values of property and the virtues
of the land-owning classes. But this project, despite certain
striking passages such as the drive on the ice in Satanstoe, was
largely a failure. In his figure of the Chainbearer Cooper
attempted to give the epic stature of a Hawkeye to a man who was
an upholder of the rights of property, but, at bottom, his
conception was a contradiction in terms. Chainbearer, like
Leatherstocking, is a statue, but Cooper has great difficulty in
finding the right postures in which to exhibit him- we do not even
see him skilfully and honourably wielding his chain of
demarcation. But the real obstacle is that, no matter how virtuous
and honourable the Chainbearer may be, he can never be
anything more than a hanger-on - the moral autonomy and
independence so crucial to the figure of Natty Bumppo is
ultimately lacking. Ironically, there are elements too in the
presentation of Chainbearer that suggest that he too is an
anachronistic hero- the last respecter of the big landowners; but
Fenimore Cooper 49
here the gap between Cooper and his readers becomes too wide;
for there can be few who will shed tears at the passing of the
Littlepages and what they represent, not simply because of the
lack of sympathy but because, even in Cooper's mythicised
representation, the notion of an American aristocracy lacks
historical substance and weight. Thus, the Littlepage trilogy
renders transparent what is implicit in the Leatherstocking Tales
and serves to demarcate Cooper from Scott: that Cooper
everywhere eschews social and historical analysis in favour of a
method that is essentially figurative, stylised and symbolic.
The Leatherstocking Tales are the history of Cooper's struggle
with a hero who is both anachronistic and excessive- too great for
the present. It is incorrect, in any but the most generalised sense,
to view the novels as a sequence, whether written to be read in
chronological or in reverse order. Even the most superficial
reading of the five novels makes it obvious that the world Cooper
presents in each, and the way in which he characterises his hero,
differs very significantly from novel to novel. The scene of The
Prairie and the values and attitudes associated with the West are
not those of The Pioneers. Hawkeye's grim espousal of violence is
far from congruent with the pacificism of Deerslayer. The
presentation of the Indians and of their culture is modified from
one book to another. Cooper's tales must be viewed not as a series
but as successive, alternative essays at symbolic and mythic
articulation, each of which has its own distinctive set of
preoccupations. For Cooper the aesthetic challenge was the
'anachronistic hero', to which he responded with five alternative
solutions. The notion of 'mythic articulation' renders these
differences more visible and makes it possible for us to register
more precisely the meaning of the variations, shifts and
modifications to which Cooper subjects his continual theme.
Nevertheless, before charting the progress ofCooper's mythic
restructurings in the Leatherstocking Tales, a further, indeed
crucial, paradox concerning Cooper's deployment of the
'anachronistic hero' figure, which does serve to give a consistency
to his presentation, must be noted. Scott continually presented a
world in the process of change, a world divided between opposing
forces: those which pointed back into the past and those which
pointed forward into the future. The 'anachronistic hero'
sharpened this division, showing that there could never be
complete or, indeed, any compatibility between different systems
of values. Yet the tendency in Cooper is to create a unified world, a

fictional universe that is scenically composite (unlike Scott's
dramatic contrasts between Highlands and Lowlands, between
country and court) and to set against this scenic background a
gallery of figures who, though diverse in terms ofbackground and
gifts, nevertheless blend together as part the composition. Natty
Bumppo is just as much at home in Templeton as he is on the
prairie or on Lake Ontario; the protests that he makes against the
encroachments of civilisation and the wanton destruction of
wildlife are not, in truth, really directed against the people with
whom he regularly mingles and fraternises; rather, they refer out
beyond the historical context ofthe work itself to the situation in
the America of Cooper's own day, where these tendencies, in
Cooper's view, were more acute and more potentially
catastrophic. But Cooper, at least after The Pioneers, is not really
concerned to show these changes, precisely because he has
identified change itself as the real enemy. The world of
Leatherstocking will be an image of stability in a changing world,
where the real objective is the suspension of temporality. Here,
the difference between Cooper's and Scott's treatment of the
historical is marked. In the Leatherstocking Tales the closest that
Cooper comes to a direct encounter with real historical events is in
The Last of the Mohicans, into which he incorporates 'the Massacre
ofWilliam Henry', precisely dated to 9 August 1757- and yet this
event is not particularly crucial as far as the plot structures ofthe
novel are concerned and could have been omitted without very
significantly changing the nature of the book. Yet who could
imagine a Waverley that omitted the Forty-Five rebellion, a Heart of
Midlothian without the Porteus riots? Cooper's Leatherstocking
Tales are myths in the terms defined by Levi-Strauss- that is to
say, they are 'machines for the suppression of time'; consequently
the introduction into them of the historical, the chronological, the
dynamic would, if consistently carried through, destabilise them
and undermine their purpose. Natty is not anachronistic in
relation to his own context; the values that he represents still find
acknowledgement among the people around him, and it is only
through reference to the real world that the idea of anachronism
acquires force and clarity. Which is also to say that, unlike Goethe
or Scott, Cooper was highly conscious that his fictions themselves
were anachronistic, standing out like worn and ancient wooden
breakers against the advancing historical tide. The heroism that
Fenimore Cooper 51
Cooper ascribes to Natty is, in truth, the heroism of Cooper

himself!
But when Cooper initiated the series with The Pioneers (1823),
Natty Bumppo, though an honourable veteran of the frontier and
the colonial wars, was not yet the exemplary figure he was to
become. For, although in The Pioneers Natty in his leather
breeches, deerskin coat, moccasins and fur cap, his appearance
further adorned with a distinctively long antique rifle and a huge
oxhorn slung over his shoulder, is already the picturesque
survivor from a bygone age, he is nevertheless envisaged as being
on the periphery of the narrative, in every sense of the word, rather
than at the centre. He is there to fill out the tapestry, and in
reading the Leatherstocking Tales it is always necessary to bear in
mind that it is the last two novels in the series, The Pathfinder and
The Deerslayer, that actually refer to him in the title.
Cooper's project in The Pioneers was to present a picture of
frontier manners and folk ways in the manner of early Scott,
somewhat incongruously introducing Scott's characteristic plot
device of the lost heir and developing a conflict between
wilderness and civilisation through the trial of Natty Bumppo.
This encounter between legal authority on the one hand and
moral authority on the other derives from the trial of the old
bedesman Edie Ochiltree in The Antiquary, just as one of the great
moments in the novel, the dying speech of Chingachgook, is
derived from a similar episode in The Legend of Montrose. Yet Natty
and Chingachgook are strangely dissonant within the frontier
world that Cooper evokes, in a way that Scott's characters never
are in their own world, so that even here they serve to present an
implicit critique of the trajectory of American culture. But with
the passing of time their importance becomes progressively
magnified, perhaps because in a restless and rapidly changing
American world stability can only be invoked imaginatively
through such highly charged mythicised representations. In his
postscript to Waverlty Scott writes, 'Like those who drift down the
stream of a deep and smooth river, we are not aware of the
progress we have made until we fix our eye on the now distant
point from which we have been drifted', 7 and it is precisely as such
a distant point that Leatherstocking functions. Scott's reference to
progress is certainly equivocal if not ironic, but with reference to
Cooper we can state more frankly that his hero becomes the
yardstick against which America is to be measured and found
wanting. So Cooper's presentation of Leatherstocking becomes

more and more excessive until he completely swamps the milieu in
which he figures. We feel that Natty Bumppo is ofGlimmerglass in
the same way that Bernadette is of Lourdes and that in such a
hagiographical presentation it is almost sacrilegious to attend to
details in the narrative that are not illustrative of moral greatness.
Cooper's genres eventually trade places. His originally
supercharged Byronic sea heroes are progressively diminished as
they are subjected to the inscrutable working of divine providence
and are forced to accept their own limited place in the scheme of
things, while the forest becomes the site of a transcendental
human greatness.
In The .Pioneers Natty Bumppo stands unswervingly for
moderation. The paradox of frontier life as Cooper presents it in
this novel is that it is a world infused with radiance, innocence and
plenitude, yet even here it is always under a cloud, always
potentially subject to erasure. One of the most picturesque
customs described by Cooper is the sport of shooting the
Christmas turkey, a contest won by Leatherstocking himself. Yet
before the contest Natty's discussion of the problem of obtaining a
suitable target suggests an impinging scarcity that the others,
without any historical background, cannot truly perceive or
measure: '"The bird must be had," said Natty, "by fair means or
foul. Heigh-ho! I've known the time, lad, when the wild turkeys
wasn' over scarce in the country; though you must go into the
Virginy gaps, if you want them now"' (p. 184).
Precisely because the settlement is so recent, its inhabitants
endeavour to create a sense of solidity and stability in their newly
built dwellings, to invoke a bygone age that in reality never was.
Although the houses themselves are of ad hoc and often ramshackle
construction they contain huge mirrors, massive, ponderous
tables, imposing stoves and such items as 'a heavy, old-fashioned,
brass-faced clock (p. 63), a settee that is nearly twenty feet long,
and 'a sideboard of mahogany, inlaid with ivory, and bearing
enormous handles of glittering brass, and groaning under the piles
of silver plate' (ibid.). The pioneer banquets, in all their
magnificence, symbolically cancel any possible suggestion or
implication that the frontier is a place of scarcity. They surpass
anything that could be displayed in a baronial hall or ducal
palace. At Marmaduke's the table is spread with prodigious
offerings of turkey, fish, venison, bear and squirrel, to which is
Fenimore Cooper 53
added a multiplicity of vegetables, cakes, sweetmeats and pies, so
that
Notwithstanding the size of the table, there was scarcely a spot

where the rich damask could be seen, so crowded were the
dishes, with their associated bottles, plates and saucers. The
object seemed to be profusion, and it was obtained entirely at
the expense of order and elegance. (p. 108)
The description demonstrates how Templeton, standing at the

intersection between nature and culture, partakes of the
advantages of both. Thequality of the table linen, the use of real
china and ivory-handled cutlery stresses how entirely, and
unexpectedly, civilised the occasion is, yet nature's bounty is such
that the rich damask is virtually eclipsed. Surely this is to have the
best of all worlds, yet if there is no spectre at the feast itself, it
subsequently makes its appearance in the prospect of future
scarcity. On every side there is a criminal wastefulness, from Billy
Kirby's destruction of the maple trees to the wanton massacre of
the pigeons and the extravagant and wasteful catches of fish.
Judge Temple believes that the problem can be resolved by the
use of economy and restraint and by the imposition of appropriate
game laws, but Leatherstocking sees it as the inevitable
consequence of civilisation. After the slaughter of the birds he
exclaims,
This comes of settling a country! ... here have I known the

pigeons to fly for forty long years, and, till you made your
clearings, there was nobody to fear or to hurt them. I loved to
see them come into the woods, for they were company to a body;
hurting nothing; being, as it was, as harmless as a garter-
snake. (p. 246)
Even the clearing is an anathema to Natty, let alone the town,

since he sees it as the thin end of the wedge. From that moment
onward the possibility of living in harmony with nature is
irretrievably lost. When Natty is arrested for shooting a deer out of
season, the hypocrisy of the indictment is evident, and at the
moment of his arrest on the smouldering ruins ofhis cabin his case
seems irrefutable:
What would ye with an old and helpless man? ... You've

driven God's creaters from the wilderness, where his provi-
dence had put them for his own pleasure: and you've
brought in the troubles and divilties of the law, where no man
was ever known to disturb another. You have driven me, that
have lived forty years of my appointed time in this very spot,
from my home and the shelter of my head, lest you should put
your wicked feet and wasty ways in my cabin. (p. 356)
Nevertheless, for Cooper the argument that civilisation for its

orderly functioning requires laws, laws that necessarily must be
universally obeyed, is not merely an alternative logic but offers a
decisive rebuttal to Natty, who somehow assumes that he is
exempt because of his long residence in the wilderness. The old
hunter cannot grasp that things can no longer be as they were
before. It is no good his simply railing against the settlements,
which are an inescapable fact of life. If he remains within them
then he must be bound by the rules that govern them.
It is at this moment that Leatherstocking becomes the excessive
hero, for he has become too large a problem for Templeton, or for
Cooper's narrative, to handle. He can be punished and the justice
of that punishment can even be insisted on, but the moral
argument that he represents can be neither silenced nor struck
out. Instead of feeling that the future of Templeton is more
significant than a single man, we cannot help feeling that Natty's
claim overrides that of a whole community. For Leatherstocking
himself embodies the frontier, so that in banishing him the citizens
of Templeton must forfeit their claim to be pioneers. For this
reason the premiss of the whole book is overturned in its final
paragraph. We might have expected Leatherstocking's departure
to be filled with pathos- an old man driven from his customary
haunts to die - but instead it is unexpectedly optimistic and
charged with energy:
Elizabeth raised her face and saw the old hunter standing,
looking back for a moment, on the verge of the wood. As he
caught their glances, he drew his hard hand hastily across his
eyes again, waved it on high for an adieu, and uttering a forced
cry to his dogs, who were crouching at his feet, he entered the
forest.
This was the last that they ever saw of Leatherstocking,
Fenimore Cooper 55
whose rapid movements preceded the pursuit which Judge

Temple both ordered and conducted. He had gone far towards
the setting sun - the foremost in that band of pioneers who are
opening the way for the march of the nation across the
continent. (p. 456)
Suddenly the venerable hunter is no longer an anachronistic hero,

the relic of a bygone age, but a pregnant symbol ofthe American
future, and an incarnation of its dauntless spirit. By an
unexpected reversal it is now Templeton itself that lies in the past!
The Last of the Mohicans ( 1826), which appeared after a relatively
short interval, is a novel of a very different type, even though
it ostensibly features the same protagonists, Natty and
Chingachgook. Cooper pushed the action back to the period of the
wars between Britain and France and their Indian allies in the
mid-eighteenth century in a manner fully consonant with the
recommendations ofW. H. Gardiner, who in his review of The Spy
observed that the American Indians were a particularly suitable
subject for fictional treatment. Gardiner's imagination glowed at
the thought of the 'savage warrior' who, tracking and stalking his
victim like a tiger, 'finally springing on the unsuspicious victim
with the warwhoop, which struck terror to the heart of the boldest
planter of New England in her early days, is no meant instrument
of the sublime and terrible of human agency' .8 This conception
Cooper faithfully followed. In his previous writings he had been
criticised for being long-winded and dull; in The Last of the
Mohicans he made up for his defects with a vengeance by supplying
his readers with an action-packed narrative, in which that
spine-tingling warwhoop was scarcely ever out of their ears.
Not surprisingly the debt to Scott in The Last of the Mohicans is
quite considerable. David Gamut, the hymn-singing puritan, is
an oddity owing much to Scott's gallery of eccentrics and his
portraits of Scottish Nonconformity, while Major Munro seems
equally to have strayed across the Atlantic from the Waverley
novels. Cooper's dialogue in The Last of the Mohicans seems
strangely based on Scott's medieval idiom, and even his
appellation ofNatty and Chingachgook as 'those brave and trusty
foresters' (p. 214) seems to place them as the successors of Robin
Hood and I van hoe. The use of masking and disguise is also
reminiscent of Scott. But, at the same time, The Last ofthe Mohicans
seems to mark the moment when Cooper won his literary
independence. In this tale of violence and of the forest he had

found a subject where it was no longer necessary for the novelist
self-consciously to raise his head. While the materials for a Scott
novel are all there, they remain obstinately at the margin of the
reader's attention; the real focus of interest lies elsewhere. The Last
of the Mohicans, first and foremost, is devoted to the presentation
not of civilisation, but of savagery.
In retrospect, this feature of The Last of the Mohicans appears
highly singular. The antithesis savagery-civilisation is one that
generally favours the notion of civilisation and would appear to
contradict both Cooper's general emphasis, so characteristic of
Romanticism, of the beneficial influence of a natural
environment, and, more specifically, the insinuation of The
Pioneers that the real golden age preceded the period of the
settlements. After The Pioneers and its poetic lyricism the brutality
of its successor comes as quite a shock- we can scarcely imagine
Hawkeye shedding many tears over a few dead fish or pigeons
when human life itself is so very, very cheap. Cooper's insistence
on the idea of savagery is quite pronounced. The word 'savage'
itself is used seventy times in The Last rifthe Mohicans. It would be
easy to jump to the conclusion that Cooper's nomenclature is
relatively innocent and that 'savage' is simply a synonym for
Indian. But we should note that, by contrast, the later Pathfinder
contains only a few scattered uses of the term; and, even more
significantly, the meaning of this terminology is reiterated and
reinforced by the fact that on approximately twenty further
occasions the 'savages' are actually described as being savage.
The belief that the Indian is habitually a person delighting in
cruelty and violence finds confirmation at numerous points in the
narrative. The notion that the white and red races have different
'gifts' plays a highly equivocal role: Hawkeye refrains from killing
Magua in cold blood since 'the gifts of my colour forbid it' (The
Last of the Mohicans, p. 355), while of an Indian attaching the
'reeking scalp' of a Frenchman to his belt he observes, ''Twould
have been a cruel and inhuman act for a whiteskin; but 'tis the gift
and natur' of an Indian, and I suppose it should not be denied'
(ibid.). Cooper fails to note that the practice of scalping was
inaugurated by the white man, and, instead of seeing it as a
historically situated institutionalisation of violence, instead
chooses to ascribe it to the character of the red man. In fact the
practices of the red man place him beyond culture: he eats raw
Fenimore Cooper 57
meat; he drinks human blood; he knows nothing of the Christian
doctrine that prohibits acts of vengeance and personal
retribution. In defence of the Indian, Hawkeye insists that 'even
the Mingo adores the true and living God' (p. 268), while 'he who
thinks that even a Mingo would ill-treat a woman, unless it be to
tomahawk her, knows nothing oflndian natur', or the law of the
woods' (p. 255). As far as the Indian usage of women is concerned
-and we are quite far from the 'softer interest' which Gardiner
thought might be 'extracted from their domestic life' 9 - the caveat
about tomahawking would go quite a long way towards
undermining Hawkeye's 'well-disposed remark', even were it not
for the fact that in the novel we quite consistently see white women
ill-treated by Indians- not simply in the tribulations of Alice and
Cora, but, more brutally, in the scene in which a Huron snatches a
baby from its mother's arms and dashes its head against a rock,
only to kill the mother herself when she protests. When such
incidents are described with such loving detail by Cooper- and he
goes on to describe the Indians giving way to utter bestiality (if
beast indeed could be so vile): 'the flow ofblood might be likened
to the out breaking of a torrent; and as the natives became heated
and maddened at the sight, many among them even kneeled to
earth, and drank freely, exultingly, hellishly, of the crimson tide'
(p. 206) -it is rather difficult for the reader to maintain in focus
the more balanced perspective provided by Hawkeye; or to resist
the conclusion that episodes of this sort simultaneously display
the Indian attitude to women and to religious ritual. It certainly
requires no great leap of the imagination to believe, as did
Cooper's puritan predecessors, that the Indians are agents of the
devil, for the Indians are repeatedly characterised in terms of the
demonic. They are 'demons of hell', (p. 70) 'Bloody-minded
hellhounds' (p. 76), whose laugh is 'a tauntingly exulting as if fifty
demons were uttering their blasphemies at the feet of some
Christian soul' (p. 83). If they are 'savage demons' (p. 401) this
manifests itself especially in their cries - 'the yell of a demon',
(p. 299) 'the hellish taunt of a demon' (p. 311). For David Gamut,
who becomes a sounding board for many such sentiments, Magua
'is possessed of an evil spirit that no power short ofomnipotence can
tame' (p. 264), while the scene in the Indian village, lit by burning
fires, 'resembled some unhallowed and supernatural arena, in
which malicious demons had assembled to act their bloody and
lawless rites' (p. 283). It is the very facility with which the Indians
lend themselves to the demonic and diabolical which gives the

book its distinctive frisson, enabling it to raise violence to new
levels of imaginative sublimity.
It should be emphasised that Natty Bumppo in his incarnation
as Hawkeye by no means stands apart from this world but stands
in complete congruity with it. While Natty's skill with a rifle, his
sharp eyesight and expertise in tracking can be seen as relatively
constant factors in the Leatherstocking Tales, in The Last of the
Mohicans he is most obviously characterised by his realistic and
determined espousal of violence - for Cooper insists that
squeamishness on this point is merely a sign that one does not
truly belong in the depths of the American forest. At an early point
in the novel Hawkeye suggests that to maim an Indian is justified
on the grounds that the knavery of an Iroquois can consistently be
relied upon. With equal realism he insists that a horse can be
taken no further and that it must be killed. This pragmatism has
another side. When Duncan implores Hawkeye, out of a sense of
mercy, to kill a wounded Indian who is in terrible pain, his request
is decisively refused: ' "Not a karnel!" exclaimed the obdurate
Hawkeye. "His death is certain and we have no powder to spare"'
(p. 81).
Hawkeye is inured to death; indeed, it is part of his
idiosyncratic machismo that he is so. He does not exult in the
slaying of his fellow human beings; but rather approaches it in a
mood of philosophical stoicism, as a necessary task to be
accomplished. If the Indians are hot, Hawkeye is cool:
'It may be well to go round and feel the vagabonds that are left,
or we may have another of them loping through the woods, and
screeching like a jay that has been winged.'
So saying, the honest but implacable scout made the circuit
of the dead, into whose senseless bosoms he thrust his long knife
with as much coolness as though they had been so many brute
carcasses. (pp. 130-1)
This follows, it should be added, a scene in which Hawkeye brains

three Indians to death with the butt of the celebrated longue
carabine. Thus, it cannot be said of The Last of the Mohicans, as it
most emphatically can be said of the other Leatherstocking
stories, that the figure of Natty represents a positive source of
moral value that is in some way set off by the background against
Fenimore Cooper 59
which he is seen. He is simply there to show that the white man

can give as good as he gets. Natty's experience manifests itself
above all in the sheer number of living creatures he has killed.
When Heywood observes, 'You have, then, seen much service on
the frontier?' Hawkeye answers as follows:
'I!' said the scout, erecting his tall person with an air of military
pride. 'There are not many echoes among these hills that
haven't rung with the crack of my rifle, nor is there the space of a
square mile atwixt Horican and the river, that "Kill-Deer"
hasn't dropped a living body on, be it an enemy or be it a brute
beast.' (pp. 156-7)
We cannot fail to note that Natty shows himself capable of fitting

into an authoritarian power structure in a way that would be
inconceivable from our reading of The Pioneers, and that, far from
deploring the destruction oflife, he positively prides himself upon
it.
The puzzle set by the position which Natty as Hawkeye
occupies in The Last of the Mohicans can be elucidated through
reference to the notion of the anachronistic hero. In this, of all the
Leatherstocking Tales, the function of anachronistic hero is
displaced onto the young Indian, U ncas, who is also the character
alluded to in the book's title. In U ncas, Cooper presents a stylised
portrait of the noble red man; he stands apart from his fellow
Indians in that he represents an ideal type which the white man,
or white woman, can unhesitatingly admire:
At a little distance in advance stood Uncas, his whole person

thrown powerfully into view. The travelers anxiously regarded
the upright, flexible figure of the young Mohican, graceful and
unrestrained in the attitudes and movements of nature. Though
his person was more than usually screened by a green and
fringed hunting shirt, like that of the white man, there was no
concealment to his dark, glancing, fearless eye, alike terrible
and calm; the bold outline of his high, haughty features, pure in
their native red; or to the dignified elevation of his receding
forehead, together with all the finest proportions of a noble
head, bared to the generous scalping tuft. It was the first
opportunity possessed by Duncan and his companions to view
the marked lineaments of either of their Indian attendants, and
each individual of the party felt relieved from a burden of doubt,

as the proud and determined, though wild expression of the
features of the young warrior forced itself on their notice. They
felt it might be a being partially benighted in the vale of
ignorance, but it could not be one who would willingly devote
his rich natural gifts to the purposes of wanton treachery. The
ingenious Alice gazed at his free air and proud carriage as she
would have looked upon some precious relic of the Grecian
chisel, to which life had been imparted by the intervention of
a miracle; while Heyward, though accustomed to see the
perfection of form which abounds among the uncorrupted
natives, openly expressed his admiration of such an
unblemished specimen of the noblest proportions of
man. (pp. 52-3)
Uncas's physical magnificence symbolically expresses the purity

of man's uncorrupted state. In part Uncas represents 'true'
Indian characteristics and virtues which are being lost as the
debased type of Indian, a Magua or a Renard subtil, comes to
predominate, relying not on openness and honesty but on
rhetoric, treachery and deceit. U ncas is the anachronistic hero, a
man who pursues higher values in a degraded world but who is
ultimately destroyed by it. Cooper thus confirms the truth of the
old saying that the only good Indian is a dead Indian; for with
Uncas's death the remaining representative of Indian virtue is
Chingachgook, who, with his espousal of the Christian religion, is
halfway towards being a white man. Although the contrast
Mingcr-Delaware, Mohican-Iroquois, is strongly emphasised in
the book, we must also recognise that the element of idealisation
that is connected to the figures of Uncas, and in a different way
Hawkeye, is that they represent a synthesis of white and Indian
traits. Hawkeye, to survive in the wilderness, needs Indian
stoicism, hunting and tracking skills, a knowledge of their
language and customs. But he still remains a white man. Uncas,
on the other hand, is significantly assimilated to the norms of
white culture. Since, in The Last of the Mohicans, lndianness
symbolically represents savagery, Uncas is presented in a light
that will sympathetically connect him with the idea of civilisation.
It is significant, in this opening description, that U ncas, although
described as going bare-chested at other times, appears in a green
hunting-shirt, like Hawkeye the white man. Moreover, in a novel
Fenimore Cooper 61
that focuses so intensely on the submission of white women to

erotic violence at the hands of the red man, Uncas is uniquely
distinguished by the reverence and respect with which he treats
women:
Uncas acted as attendant to the females, performing all the

little offices within his power, with a mixture of dignity and
anxious grace that served to amuse Heywood, who well knew
that it was an utter innovation on the Indian custom, which
forbids their warriors to descend to any menial employment,
especially in favor of their women. (p. 57)
In this way Uncas shows himself under the influence of a superior

moral code. A further detail that is symbolically suggestive is the
fact that Uncas uses a gun that has been given him by Hawkeye.
At one point in the narrative Natty identifies the rifle by its
characteristic sound: '"There goes Uncas!" said the scout. "The
boy bears a smart piece! I know its crack, as well as a father knows
the language ofhis child, for I carried the gun myself until a better
offered"' (p. 230). Indeed, on a symbolic level U ncas can be seen
as the child of both Chingachgook and Hawkeye, his constant
companions: he is the natural child of Chingachgook, but
connected with the idea of culture through his relationship with
Natty Bumppo of which the rifle is the token. The ideality of
Uncas is traceable to the paradox ofhis being, spiritually, a white
Indian.
In the context of the Leatherstocking Tales as a whole The Last
ofthe Mohicans can be seen as an aetiological myth, which can serve
to explain the situation presented in The Pioneers: how is it that a
white man and a red man can become friends? That such a situation
is perceived as inherently contradictory and paradoxical is
curiously and metaphorically touched on by Hawkeye himself
when he says, 'the love atwixt a Mohican and a Mingo is much
like the regard between a white man and a serpent' (p. 232)- since
his great friendship is with Chingachgook, whose names signifies
'Great Serpent'. In The Last of the Mohicans the enmity between the
races is grounded in a sexual taboo, the impossibility of even
thinking of a relationship between a red man and a white woman.
To moderate the sheer horror of having a white woman left
helpless in the hands of half-naked savages Cooper reduces the
starkness of the racial and epidermal contrast, by having as victim
Cora, the daughter of a white man, Major Munro, by a coloured

woman - a relation which is permitted, precisely because it
confirms and does not threaten, white mastery. When, at the close
of the novel, Cora cries out to Magua, 'I am thine! Do with me as
though seest best!' (p. 403), the scene, although still highly
shocking, even as a simulacrum of the threat of miscegenation, is
doubly moderated by the fact that Cora is not altogether white
and that her words can be taken as being directed towards God
rather than her captor. But the ending is symbolically fitting since
all the characters connected with the infringement, actual or
potential, of the sexual taboo, die. The novel thus takes the form of
a statement: a white man can be friends with a red man, but a red
man can never love a white woman. In this mythic articulation
Hawkeye is uniquely enhanced. Chingachgook, the Indian, has
lost his culture and stands alone, which puts him on an equal
footing with his white companion; but Natty has gained a culture,
since through his friendship with Chingachgook he ceases to be an
intruder and becomes one who truly belongs to the world of the
forest. Natty is transformed into an aboriginal.
In The Prairie (1827) Cooper cashes in the legacy of both The
Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans to create a Leatherstocking of
truly excessive proportions. The cantankerous hunter and the
trusty scout are supplanted by a character who seems to epitomise
the very spirit of the West, a man who is simultaneously
philosopher, prophet, ministering angel and sage. Significantly,
since this is the only Leatherstocking novel whose events postdate
those of The Pioneers and thus the only one in which Chingachgook
does not figure, Natty's moral stature is enhanced both by his
solitariness and, perhaps more significantly, by the fact that he
can thus appear as the custodian of 'true Indianness' even to
Indians themselves, since the Pawnees and Sioux who figure in
the tale can have no conception ofthe unfallen spiritual grandeur
of the Delaware people. So there is a strong element of patronage
in Natty's tone as Weucha, one of the Sioux Indians, goes in
pursuit of his lost animals:
But there goes the Teton after his horses as if he thought two
legs as good as four in such a race! And yet the imps will have
every hoof of them afore the day sets in, because it's reason ag'in
instinct. Poor reason, I allow; but still there is a great deal of the
man in the Indian. Ah's me! Your Delawares were the redskins
Fenimore Cooper 63
of which America might boast; but few and scattered is that

mighty people now. (The Prairie, p. 60)
Natty, though a white man, is in possession of the unchanged and

unchangeable Platonic idea of an Indian, of which the Indians
who figure in the narrative, even Hard Heart himself, can only
appear as degraded copies. Yet Hard Heart in his integrity and
courage comes close to being a second Uncas, and his relationship
with Natty in the book is most important. Once again we find
Cooper asserting Natty's claim to honorary paternity of the young
and noble Indian. The old trapper addresses Hard Heart as
follows:
'Young warrior,' he continued in a voice that was growing

tremulous, 'I have never been father or brother. The
Wahcondah made me to live alone. He never tied my heart to
house or field by the cords with which the men of my race are
bound to their lodges; if he had, I should not have journeyed so
far and seen so much. But I have tarried long among a people
who lived in the woods you mention, and much reason did I find
to imitate their courage and love their honesty. The Master of
Life has made us all, Pawnee, with a feeling for our kind. I never
was a father, but well do I know what is the love of one. You are
like a lad I valued, and I had even begun to fancy that some of
his blood might be in your veins. But what matters that? You
are a true man, as I know by the way in which you keep your
faith; and honesty is a gift too rare to be forgotten. My heart
yearns to you, boy, and gladly would I do you good.'
(pp. 328-9)
The most striking thing about this passage is the way in which it
insinuates Natty's lndianness. His religious sense, with his
invocation of 'the Master of Life' and 'the Wahcondah', is, by
implication, akin to that of the Indian - and we have seen
elsewhere how congenial to the old hunter was the notion of
'happy hunting grounds' - while he is like the Indians too, and
unlike the white man, in his lack of concern for the ownership of
land. Equally significantly, when we remember Cooper's
emphasis on the 'gifts' of the different races, Natty speaks of 'a
feeling for our kind'; but in his own case this has manifested itself
in a deep affection, first for U ncas, now for Hard Heart. And Hard
Heart acknowledges the claim that is made on him, by answering

'Father'. This is all the more striking because later in the novel the
old and distinguished Sioux warrior Le Balafre also claims Hard
Heart as his son, an intervention which could save his life, and yet
Hard Heart rejects him. While this is understandable in view of the
traditional hostility between Pawnee and Sioux, it does have the
effect of raising Natty's status and of implying that he is an
honorary lndian,just as, contrariwise, Hard Heart and Uncas are
honorary white men.
Natty no longer appears as a man who makes his living in the
wilderness; he is no longer even a figure on the borders of
civilisation: on his first appearance in The Prairie he manifests
himself as some mysterious tutelary spirit of the great plains. For
Ishmael Bush and his sons, as they plunge deeper and deeper into
the uncharted territories of the great West and as they begin to
lose all sense of measurable space and distance, so vast and
unvarymg is the latter, they are astonished by the following
spectacle:
The sun had fallen below the crest of the nearest wave of the
prairie, leaving the usual rich and glowing train on its track. In
the centre of this flood oflight a human form appeared, drawn
against the gilded background as distinctly, and seemingly as
palpable, as though it would come within the grasp of an
extended hand. The figure was colossal, the attitude musing
and melancholy, and the situation directly in the route of the
travellers. But embedded as it was in its setting of garish light, it
was impossible to distinguish its just proportions or true
character.
The effect of such a spectacle was instantaneous and
powerful. The man in front of the emigrants came to a stand
and remained gazing at the mysterious object with a dull
interest soon quickened into superstitious awe. His sons, so
soon as the first emotions of surprise had a little abated, drew
slowly around him, and as they who governed the teams
gradually followed their example, the whole party was soon
condensed into one silent and wondering group. (p. 8)
The shock is as severe as if Scott had found Amundsen waiting

to greet him at the North Pole. But it goes even further since the
man is symbolically merged with the landscape, as vast as the
Fenimore Cooper 65
wilderness he inhabits, while his posture, 'musing and

melancholy', prefigures Natty's (and Cooper's) own speculations
on the future of America.
To set his novel in the prairie, and not in the American forest,
was indeed a masterstroke on Cooper's part; for it serves to
intensify our sense of Natty as the anachronistic hero. Indeed
Natty is more than a man out of phase with his time: he becomes
that cognate typological figure, the outcast and wanderer- driven
even from his native forests, where he has flourished so long as a
hunter, by the ceaseless encroachment of the settlements, and
forced to make a humble living as a trapper in the barren wastes of
the American interior. The prairie is an image of what America
can and will become:
You may travel weeks and you will see it the same. I often think
the Lord has placed this barren belt of prairie behind the States
to warn men to what their folly may yet bring the land! Aye,
weeks, if not months, may you journey in these open fields, in
which there is neither dwelling nor habitation for man or beast.
Even the savage animals travel miles on miles to seek their dens;
and yet the wind seldom blows from the east, but I conceit the
sound of axes and the crash of falling trees are in my ears.
(p. 19)
In The Prairie Natty's sense of doom is actualised in a way that it

could never be in The Pioneers, for the old man is now forced to live
with the fact of which he formerly merely spoke, and a world of
real plentitude and abundance has been replaced by scarcity and
desolation, where Indian and white man fight over the meagre
spoils. In The Prairie Natty is stripped of all the social comforts and
supports that sustain him in the other novels, divested of the very
milieu that gave him life and meaning, and yet he becomes all the
more vivid- a token, anachronistic yet defiant, of a certain value
that America has created and which, in Cooper's eyes, it is in the
process of destroying.
lfNatty in The Prairie is Cooper's sublime, the ridiculous in the
shape ofDr Battius, a kind of Dominie Sampson translated to the
American interior, appears structurally necessary for his deeper
articulation. For, while it is undoubtedly true that the character of
Dr Battius, as the reviewer for Colburn's New Monthly Magazine
contemporaneously observed, 'proves abundantly that Mr
Cooper has not the least touch of the humorous in his genius', 10 he
does serve as a foil for Natty, enabling him to articulate his
opinions and beliefs more fully than in any earlier or later novel.
Natty in The Prairie appears as a kind of proto-Transcendentalist.
He insists on the importance of experience and of closeness to
nature as the only authentic guides to conduct and is
contemptuous in his rejection of book-learning, devastating in his
repudiation of the values of the Old World ofEurope; for when Dr
Battius complacently remarks, 'You speak of the dross of
ignorance, whereas my memory dwells on those precious jewels
which it was my happy fortune formerly to witness among the
treasured glories of the Old World' (p. 279), he receives the
following dusty answer:
'Old World!' retorted the trapper. 'That is the miserable cry of

all the half-starved miscreants that have come into this blessed
land since the days ofmy boyhood! They tell you ofthe OldWorld,
as if the Lord had not the power and the will to create the
universe in a day, or as if he had not bestowed his gifts with
an equal hand, though not with an equal mind or equal wisdom
have they been received and used. Were they to say a worn-out,
and an abused, and a sacrilegious world, they might not be so far
from the truth!' (Ibid.)
Natty's closeness to nature permits him to make discriminations

that the civilised are incapable of: he identifies the buffalo hide
that defeats Dr Battius, and, while Middleton and Inez are
admiring the beauty of the 'sunrise', it is Natty who sees that such
an aesthetic response is inappropriate- they are confronted by
the dangers of a forest fire, from which only his sagacity can save
them! The correct identification-and evaluation of phenomena is
not simply a facility: for Cooper it has all the moral force of truth
and such a gift belongs not to those who come to the natural world
from the outside but to those who genuinely belong to it, the only
successors to Adam.
'And I conclude that a hunter is a better judge of a beast and of

its name', he added, winking to the young soldier, 'than any
man who has turned over the leaves of a book instead of
travelling over the face of the 'arth in order to find out the
natur's of its inhabitants .... Who named the works of His
Fenimore Cooper 67
hand? Can you tell me that with your books and college
wisdom? Was it not the first man in the garden, and is it not a
plain consequence that his children inherit his gifts?' (p. 230)
Natty's oration carries all the more weight because of the care
with which Cooper has established him in the novel as 'first man'
in the West, a man who belongs in the wilderness as Battius does
not. Cooper's patriotic and anti-European bias was particularly
pronounced because he wrote the novel during his residence in
Europe, so that, when he eulogised the virtues of the buffalo hump
- 'So far as richness, delicacy and wildness of flavour, and
substantial nourishment were concerned, the viand might well
have claimed a decided superiority over the meretricious cookery
and laboured compounds of the most renowned artist' (p. 107)-
he was unquestionably writing from a perspective where he had a
greater familiarity with the 'laboured compounds' of Parisian
cuisine than with the 'culinary glory of the prairies' (ibid.).
Because in The Prairie Cooper decisively espouses the cause of
nature against culture, the conceptual grid of the novel is
markedly different from the savagery-civilisation antithesis of The
Last of the Mohicans. Even the one thing Cooper had formerly
denied the wilderness, justice and the law, is purposely supplied
it; for what could be more majestic or more just than the heroic
and honourable figure oflshmael Bush handing over Ellen Wade
to the man she loves, Paul Hover the bee-hunter, in preference to
his own son, and even condemning his own son to death, despite
multifarious considerations that might lead him to adopt some
other course. Closeness to nature develops the moral sense in man
and gives him both a greater self-reliance and a great humility: the
very qualities which Cooper sees paradoxically united in Natty
himself when he refers to
the singular mixture of decision and resignation that proceeded

from his habits and his humility, and which united to form a
character in which excessive energy and the most meek
submission to the will of Providence were oddly enough
combined. (The Prairie, p. 363)
In the world of nature man is closer to God. Natty says to

Mahtoree, the Sioux chief,
When man is shut up in towns and schools with his own follies,
it may be easy to believe himself greater than the Master of Life;
but a warrior who lives in a house with the clouds for its roof,
where he can at any moment look both at the heavens and at the
earth, and who daily sees the power of the Great Spirit should
be more humble. (p. 247)
Natty's (and Cooper's) systematic anticipation of

Transcendentalist positions even extends to the disparagement of
literature and art. The Bible, as the puritans had long believed, is
the only book worth reading; while, just as Emerson thought the
oak leaf, which was perfect, superior to human artistic
imperfection, so, for Natty, a noble tree stands as a reproach to the
sculptor: 'This is one ofyour genuine monuments, though made
by a very different power than such as belongs to your chiseling
masonry!' (p. 283). In The Prairie, nature, the work of God, is
everything; culture, the work of man, finally amounts to nothing.
Natty is anachronistic because he is natural man, being buried
under the irresistible and catastrophic advance of culture - a
position, of course, very different from that of The Pioneers.
In keeping with the mythic depiction of Natty as an honorary
Indian, the presentation of the Indians in The Prairie is
considerably more favourable than in earlier novels. IfMahtoree,
like Magua, is reminiscent of Milton's Satan, he appears more in
the guise offallen angel than devil. His death, as he throws himself
into the torrent to escape the indignity of being scalped by Hard
Heart, reveals his basic nobility, and Cooper observes, 'The
cunning and duplicity which had so long obscured the brighter
and nobler traits of his character were lost in the never-dying
sentiment of pride which he had imbibed in youth' (p. 395).
Although the miscegenation theme reappears in the plot
concerning the abduction of Middleton's wife, Inez, to the West-
since both Hard Heart and Mahtoree find her highly attractive
and Mahtoree wishes to make her his wife - its racialist
implications are toned down. Both Mahtoree and Hard Heart go
against the Indian grain by behaving towards Dona Inez in a
highly respectful fashion, while the sexual guilt is deflected onto a
white man, Abiram White, who kidnapped her. But once again
the abductor is punished- the reader is led to feel that Abiram
dies as much for this as for the murder of his brother. Out on the
prairie A biram is found out- significantly it is an environment he
Fenimore Cooper 69
does not like: his very first words are, 'the country will never do'
(p. 94).
Having described the death of Leatherstocking in The Prairie,
Cooper seems, for a while, to have regarded this novel as his last
word. But over ten years later, with The Pathfinder (1840), he
returned to his hero to fill yet another gap in his aetiology, by
showing Leatherstocking in love- since it was his unsuccessful
love for Miriam that led him to become the aged solitary and man
of the woods, with no permanent attachment either to people or to
things. The writing of The Pathfinder followed hard on the heels of
the so-called Three Mile Point affair, in which Cooper, by
insisting on his ownership ofland which had come to be regarded
as in the public domain, was held up to obloquy and ridicule in the
popular press. Under such trying circumstances the world of the
woods and the trusty and unswerving honesty and integrity of
Pathfinder exerted a very powerful imaginative appeal. Indeed,
what is most noticeable about Cooper's final contributions to the
legend is the way in which he places his character beyond the
sphere of normal human activity: both in his moral qualities and
in his accomplishments he is incontrovertibly excessive. A
concern with the superhuman, of course, was not new in Cooper's
work. It was bound up with the strong Byronic strain in his early
fiction: broached in The Spy and developed in a strongly rising
curve of assertion in The Pilot, The Red Rover and The Water- Witch.
In those novels Cooper habitually presents his protagonists as
extraordinary individuals and shows them performing acts that
seemed beyond the scope of normal mortals. They are seldom
portrayed from within, but are exhibited in picturesque and
striking poses, which emphasise the mysterious, the enigmatic,
the exotic. There is always an element of contradiction in their
behaviour and they are doomed to be misrepresented and
misunderstood. While they are extraordinarily cool and controlled
even in the most desperate and dangerous circumstances, this
manifests self-possession, since within they seethe with powerful
and turbulent emotions. In a representative passage, Cooper
describes the Pilot pacing restlessly up and down as a violent
storm rages outside, but 'the tempest in his own passions' rapidly
subsides to 'the desperate and still calmness that made him the
man he was' (The Pilot, p. 157). In The Red Rover and The
Water- Witch Cooper depicts two smuggler heroes possessed of
incredible powers of seamanship and whose boats are so beautiful,
so fast and so elusive that they turn into a mockery the attempts of
the British authorities to pursue them. The boats are as
mysterious and tormenting as the wiles of a beautiful woman, and
Cooper's descriptions of them border on an eroticism that he
never showed in his depiction offeminine characters:
'You are a seaman, Captain Ludlow, and have an eye for

comeliness in a craft, as well as in a woman. Look at those
harpings! There is no fall of a shoulder can equal that curve, in
grace or richness; this shear surpasses the justness and delicacy
of any waist; and there you see the transome, swelling and
rounded like the outlines of a Venus. Ah! she is a bewitching
creature; and no wonder that, floating as she does, on the seas,
they should have called her-'
'Water-Witch!' said Ludlow, finding that the other
paused. (The Water-Witch, p. 151)
The Red Rover and the Skimmer of the Seas are themselves a
bewildering mixture of male and female traits: they surround
themselves with an oriental sensuousness and luxury that seems
effeminate and yet they wield despotic authority over their crew
and show incredible coolness and resolution in the heat of battle.
When sweet music is heard the minute the Red Rover talks of
listening to 'sweet sounds', he smiles 'as if he exulted in this
prompt proof of the sort of despotic, or rather magical power he
wielded' (The Red Rover, p. 321).
The Red Rover seems to transcend the limits of ordinary
mortality and to laugh at normal limitations and constraints. This
idealisation is intensified still further in The Water-Witch, where
Cooper's hero is mantled in the full panoply of romantic
Byronism. He is able to flout the laws of nature as well as the laws
of man. The Water- Witch is rightly named, since 'her performances
on the wide ocean have been such as to exceed all natural means'
(p. 111). In the final sea battle the Skimmer reaches his
apotheosis:
The forms of the Skimmer and his assistants were visible, in the
midst of the gallant gear, perched on the giddy yards. Seen by
that light, with his peculiar attire, his firm and certain step, and
his resolute air, the freetrader resembled some fancied sea-god,
who, secure in his immortal immunities, had come to act his
Fenimore Cooper 71
part in that awful but exciting trial of hardihood and skill.

(p. 411)
The Skimmer is nothing less than a Superman, who, at the end of

the novel, enigmatically sails away never to be seen again,
wresting the beautiful Eudora from the arms of her father 'with
the strength of a giant' (p. 444). In every sense the Skimmer is a
man who leaves the limits of the ordinary world behind.
By contrast, Cooper long tried to maintain the representation of
Leatherstocking in a more subdued key, so that he remained
within the range of the humanly possible. In The Pioneers, although
Natty shows great skill with a gun, he is nevertheless humbled and
demoralised by his ordeal in the stocks. In The Last of the Mohicans
even the experienced Hawkeye is shown, on occasion, to give way
to fear. When a terrible and mysterious cry is heard, the scout
appears with 'a countenance whose firmness evidently began to
give way before a mystery that seemed to throoten some danger,
against which all his cunning and experience might prove of no
avail' (p. 64)- though within a short time the 'signs of unmanly
apprehension' disappear as he overcomes his 'momentary
weakness' (p. 68). Hawkeye actually loses his way in the forest
and his skill in tracking appears far inferior to that ofUncas. In
The Prairie, although Natty appears as a man of unrivalled
experience and colossal moral stature, he is nevertheless a frail old
man, whose failing eyesight precludes him from following his
former occupation of a hunter. Although he makes a trial of his
skill by shooting into a thicket, in order to convince Mahtoree, the
Sioux chief, that there is no one hiding there, as Cooper makes
clear, it is really a venture beyond his powers:
As he lowered his rifle, his eye, although greatly dimmed and

weakened by age, ran over the confused collection of objects
that lay embedded amid the parti-colored foliage of the thicket,
until it succeeded in catching a glimpse of the brown covering
the stem of a small tree. With this object in view, he raised the
piece to a level and fired. The bullet had no sooner glided from
the barrel than a tremor seized the hands of the trapper, which,
had it occurred a moment sooner, would have utterly
disqualified him for so hazardous an experiment. (p. 248)
Significantly, in Cooper's last two novels concernmg

Leatherstocking he is shown at an earlier age, at the height of his

powers. Indeed a notable change in Cooper's sea and forest tales
occurs after 1840. For Raoul Itard, the hero of The Wing-and-Wing
( 1842) and buccaneering successor to the invincible protagonists
of The Pilot, The Red Rover and The Water- Witch, is finally defeated
and dies with his face upturned, his eyes riveted on a particular
star - a sign that he recognises the existence of design in the
universe and therefore a presiding intelligence, the existence of
God. Raoul is the cosmic rebel brought to an acceptance of
providential design and of the limitations of man, and his fate
shows that Cooper's writing was in alignment with the spirit of
Carlyle's dictum 'Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.' For Cooper
the Superman cannot be a rebel against the universe but only a
man who lives in harmony with it: a Natty Bumppo!
In any reading of the Leatherstocking Tales The Pathfinder can
easily be overlooked. It lacks the variety of characterisation and
picturesque detail of The Prairie, the action-packed scenario of The
Last of the Mohicans, the dense and glowing depiction of frontier
manners in The Pioneers, the visionary freshness of The Deerslayer.
As a novel it is almost too simple and its matter seems
disproportionate to its length. The Pathfinder consists of three
episodes: the return through the forest to the fort; the expedition at
sea; the siege of the blockhouse. It has two linked stories:
Pathfinder's unrequited love for Mabel Dunham, and the
suspicion that falls on jasper, Pathfinder's rival for her affections,
of being a traitor. Pathfinder never believes these accusations.
The real traitor proves to be Captain Muir. To many a reader,
much ado about nothing. And yet The Pathfinder has a crucial
place in the Leatherstocking Tales and in Cooper's process of
conceiving his hero, as we can recognise by trying to think the
novel away: in its absence we have scarcely a cycle but a collection
of fragments, and many a discussion of the other novels in the
series unconsciously draws upon the image ofNatty that Cooper
so definitively delineated here. More than any other, The
Pathfinder draws the tales together, and, conversely, the reading of
it depends more heavily on a knowledge of the others. It is the
most heavily codified of the series. The Pathfinder will always
occupy a privileged place in the consciousness of those who know
the Leatherstocking Tales well; its greatness has been clearly
recognised by Cooper's most distinguished and perceptive critics,
Balzac and Belinsky. Balzac conceded, 'the subject of The
Fenimore Cooper 73
Pathfinder is excessively simple', but he saw this as a merit: 'I like
these simple subjects; they show great strength of conception and
are always full of riches.' 11 Balzac recognised that the peculiar
genius of the book was scenic- an effortless weaving of human
activity into a seamless web with the natural world:
Never did typographical language approach so closely to

painting. This is the school that literary landscape-painters
ought to study; all the secrets of the art are here. This magic
prose not only shows to the mind the river, its banks, the forests
and their trees, but it succeeds in giving us a sense of both the
slightest circumstance and the combined whole. 12
Both Balzac and Belinsky pointed to the peculiar importance of

the novel in the series. Belinsky wrote,
Cooper spent a long time preparing himselffor this novel, as for

a mighty exploit; many years elapsed from the first gleam of an
idea up to the moment of actually writing The Pathfinder- so
deeply aware was Cooper of the importance of the work he had
conceived. Consequently, of all famous novels one can scarcely
point to a single one which is distinguished by so profound an
idea, so daring a conception, such richness of life and such
nature genius! Many scenes from The Pathfinder would enhance
the beauty of any of Shakespeare's dramas. It is based on the
idea of one of the greatest and most enigmatic acts of the human
spirit: the act of self-abnegation, and in this respect the novel
represents the apotheosis of self-abnegation 13
while Balzac commented, 'Leatherstocking, under one name or

another, dominates all else, here as elsewhere, and more than
elsewhere. That figure, so profoundly melancholy, is here in part
explained.' 14 As these profound critics saw, The Pathfinder is the
key novel in the cycle.
The question of Pathfinder's superhuman powers is perhaps
best approached via the writer to object to them most strongly:
Mark Twain. In his celebrated essay for the North American Review
Quly 1895), 'Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences', Twain
objected to the lack of plausibility and verisimilitude in Cooper's
narratives, but, significantly, virtually all his examples were
drawn from The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer, the two novels of
Cooper in which he abandoned all pretence at realism, in his

concern to lay before the reader an untarnished instance of moral
probity and integrity. The shooting-match in The Pathfinder is a
contest to end all contests, which belongs truly to the domain of
the miraculous. Twain writes,
The nail was lightly driven, its head painted, and game called.
Then the Cooper miracles began. The bullet of the first
marksman chipped an edge of the nail head; the next man's
bullet drove a nail a little way into the target- and removed all
the paint. Haven't the miracles gone far enough now? Not to
suit Cooper; for the purpose of this whole scheme is to show offhis
prodigy, Deerslayer-Hawkeye-Long Rifle-Leather-Stocking-
Pathfinder-Bumppo before the ladies.
'Be all ready to clench it, boys!' cried out Pathfinder,

stepping into his friend's tracks the instant they were vacant.
'Never mind a new nail; I can see that, though the paint is
gone, and what I can see, I can hit at a hundred yards,
though it were only a mosquito's eye. Be ready to clench!'
The rifle cracked, the bullet sped its way and the head of
the nail was buried in the wood, covered by the piece of
flattened lead.
There, you see, is a man who could hunt flies with a rifle, and
command a ducal salary in a Wild West show to-day, if we had
him back with us.
The recorded feat is certainly surprising, just as it stands; but
it is not surprising enough for Cooper. Cooper adds a touch. He
has made Pathfinder do this miracle with another man's rifle,
and not only that, but Pathfinder did not even have the
advantage ofloading it himself. He had everything against him,
and yet he made that impossible shot, and not only made it, but
did it with absolute confidence, saying, 'Be ready to clench.'
Now a person like that would have undertaken that same feat
with a brickbat, and with Cooper's help he would have
achieved it, too. 15
As Twain rightly points out, Cooper is not satisfied with the

astonishing: he must pile miracle on miracle, the excessive upon
the excessive - so that Pathfinder covers two other bullets in the
Fenimore Cooper 75
centre of the target without even touching the wood; but what
Twain fails to mention is that, despite such incredible feats,
Pathfinder does not even win the prize, which goes to Jasper! For
in the play-off, when both men shoot at a potato thrown in the air,
Pathfinder deliberately shoots slightly wide, enabling Jasper to
win and thus make a favourable impression on Mabel. Thus,
technical excellence is subordinated to moral worth: Pathfinder
denies truth and his own gifts by appearing to be less good than he
is in a titanic act of moral self-abnegation, which prefigures the
conclusion to the tale. Pathfinder is truly a human being without
fault. He is courageous, truthful, modest, resourceful, self-reliant,
generous; he is incapable of deception, loyal and unwavering,
possessed of an openness that is almost quaint and childlike. His
faith in the integrity of Jasper shows his nobility, since he has
every reason to mistrust the youth, who is his rival and whose
conduct appears highly suspicious.
Cooper constantly harps upon the exceptional powers of
Pathfinder. He has 'extraordinary qualities' (The Pathfinder, p.
138) he has 'a beautiful and unerring sense ofjustice' (p. 139), he
is 'this extraordinary man' (p. 218). In the critical interview with
Mabel, in which she tells Pathfinder that, much as she respects
him, she can never love him, her words are such as to place him
beyond the sphere of normal human conduct. When Pathfinder
modestly refers to the delights he would feel at the thought that
Mabel might think more of him than of most other men, she
exclaims,
Better of you! I do indeed think better of you, Pathfinder, than

of most others- I am not certain that I do not think better of you
than any other, for your truth, honesty, simplicity, justice, and
courage, are scarcely equalled by any of earth (p. 286)
and she also says of him, 'You seem above, beyond, superior to all
infirmity, Pathfinder; I never yet met with a man who appeared to
be so little liable to the weaknesses of nature' (p. 282).
For this very reason, perhaps, Pathfinder has no pressing claim
on our sympathy and yet he etches himself on the imagination
through the very invisibleness ofhis superiority, concealed as it is
in the humble garments of the American forest. Perhaps the
greatest quality of Pathfinder is his stoicism, which enables him to
meet all eventualities with a certain inward calm - a stoicism
which Cooper attributes to his association with the Indians.

When Pathfinder is present, all difficulties and dangers disappear;
and yet his way of manifesting himself is often signally
unobtrusive- during the siege of the blockhouse a figure appears:
The form of a man was seen to enter, and both the females
rushed up the ladder, as if equally afraid of the consequences.
The stranger secured the door, and first examining the lower
room with great care, he cautiously ascended the ladder. June,
as soon as it became dark, had closed the loops of the principal
floor and lighted a candle. By means of this dim taper, then, the
two females stood in expectation, waiting to ascertain the
person of their visitor, whose wary ascent of the ladder was
distinctly audible, though sufficiently deliberate. It would not
be easy to say which was the most astonished on finding, when
the stranger had got through the trap, that Pathfinder stood
before them.
'God be praised!' Mabel exclaimed, for the idea that the
blockhouse would be impregnable with such a garrison at once
crossed her mind. (pp. 398-9)
Such is Cooper's Annunciation, and yet the Superman manifests

himself through only three modifiers - 'cautiously', 'wary' and
'deliberate': Pathfinder's greatness is moral, manifesting itself
through an incredible capacity for care. It is this attention to detail,
the persistent and systematic caution, that appears the most
salient characteristic of the frontiers man. During the siege of the
blockhouse the recklessness and foolhardiness of Cap is sharply
contrasted with the behaviour of Pathfinder:
The conduct ofPathfinder was very different. Everything he did

was regulated by the most exact calculation- the result oflong
experience and habitual thoughtfulness. His person was kept
carefully out of a line with the loops, and the spot that he
selected for his lookout was one that was quite removed from
danger. (pp. 424-5)
But Cooper is careful to explain that Pathfinder's behaviour is not

to be seen purely in the light of self-preservation or self-interest;
for it is Mabel who is uppermost in his thoughts, and he preserves
himself only because he knows how necessary it is that he be there
Fenimore Cooper 77
to protect her. If Pathfinder's altruism lacks the flamboyancy and

demonstrative character of a Red Rover or even a Raoul I tard,
this seems to render it all the more poignant, to exhibit the purity
of his actions the more vividly.
Of all the Leatherstocking novels it is The Pathfinder, with its
relative paucity of action, its deliberately frozen lyricism, that
comes closest to pastoral. Indeed Cooper wishes to insist that
pastoral is no poetic fiction but actual fact. In his third chapter he
quotes Bryant's lines
Before these fields were shorn and tilled,

Full to the brim our rivers flowed;
The melody of waters filled
The fresh and boundless wood;
And torrents dashed, and rivulets played,
And fountains spouted in the shade.
(p. 30)
continuing,
The picture which has been so beautifully described by our own

admirable poet, and which we have placed at the head of this
chapter as an epigraph, was here realized; the earth fattened by
the decayed vegetation of centuries and black with loam, the
stream that filled the banks nearly to overflowing, and the 'fresh
and boundless wood', being all as visible to the eye, as the pen of
Bryant has elsewhere vividly presented them to the
imagination. In short, the entire scene, was one of a rich and
benevolent nature, before it had been subjected to the uses and
desires of man; luxuriant, wild, full of promise and not without
the charm of the picturesque, even in its rudest state. (p. 32)
Like Adam's dream, the reader awakes and finds Bryant's

imaginative creation truth. This is an America unspoilt,
untroubled, immemorial, a natural and apparently inviolable
plenitude. This passage is doubly significant in that it introduces
some remarks made by Pathfinder himself that show him as a
figure on this Arcadian scene. As has already been noted, the
attempt to show a pristine earlier time in The Last of the Mohicans
was cancelled through the omnipresence of violence, but here, at
least, we have the notion of tranquillity:
'I sometimes wish for peace again,' said the Pathfinder, 'when
one can range the forest without s'arching for any other enemy
than the beasts and the fishes. Ah's me! Many is the day that the
Sarpent, there, and I have passed happily among the streams,
living on venison, salmon, and trout, without thought of a
Mingo or a scalp! I sometimes wish that them blessed days
might come back, for it is not my raal gift to slay my own
kind.' (p. 33)
So once again the principle ofinfinite regress takes over and we are
no sooner deposited in a veritable Arcady than we find that the
real 'blessed days' were even earlier!
Nevertheless Pathfinder is shown to be responsive to nature and
to live in harmony with it. The forest is a source of natural religion,
an endless fountain of divine meanings:
The woods are never silent, Mabel, to such as understand their

meaning. Days at a time have I travelled them alone, without
feeling the want of company; and, as for conversation, for such
as can comprehend their language, there is no want of rational
and instructive discourse. (p. 282)
His special feeling for the forest is brought out by Cooper as the
party sails toward Niagara in the Scud:
Although the scene had one feature of monotony, the outline of

unbroken forest, it was not without its interest and pleasures.
Various headlands presented themselves, and the cutter, in
running from one to another, stretched across bays so deep as
almost to deserve the name of gulfs, but nowhere did the eye
meet the evidence of civilization. . .. Of all on board, the
Pathfinder viewed the scene with the most unmingled delight.
His eye feasted on the endless line afforest, and more than once
that day - notwithstanding that he found it so grateful to be
near Mabel, listening to her pleasant voice, and echoing, in
feelings at least, her joyous laugh - did his soul pine to be
wandering beneath the high arches of the maples, oaks, and
lindens, where his habits had induced him to fancy lasting and
true joys were only to be found. (pp. 305-6)
Since continuous forest is not a picturesque category, we recognise

Fenimore Cooper 79
that the forest has a particular moral significance for Pathfinder as

a pure and unfallen world, a conception that points forward to the
end of the novel, where Pathfinder, having known disappointment
and sorrow in the human world, returns to the forest for
sustenance and solace. The conclusion to The Pathfinder is one of
the most extraordinary and powerful in all literature- not least
because Cooper has prepared it so carefully - for what is the
function of the boat and the entire nautical plot if not to make
possible this moment, when Mabel and the rest of the party sail
away, to leave him standing in solitary isolation on the fringe of
the illimitable forest? Indeed Cooper's own description provides
the terms of Balzac's analysis: 'When, last in view, the sinewy
frame of this extraordinary man was as motionless as if it were a
statue set up in that solitary place to commemorate the scenes of
which it had so lately been the witness' (p. 493).
This tableau has a double function: to impress on the reader the
moral grandeur of Leatherstocking and the way in which this
moral grandeur reflects the grandeur of his surroundings; more
significantly still, to dramatise this moment of self-consciousness
on Pathfinder's part- when he is not simply solitary but forcibly
made aware of what the meaning and implication of that
solitariness is.
Pathfinder was accustomed to solitude, but, when the Scud had

actually disappeared, he was almost overcome with a sense of
his loneliness. Never before had he been conscious of his
isolated condition in the world, for his feelings had been
gradually accustoming themselves to the blandishments and
wants of social life, particularly as the last were connected with
the domestic affections. Now, all had vanished, as it might be,
in one moment, and he was left equally without companions
and without hope. (p. 494)
At this moment Pathfinder is not the Superman unalloyed, since

he is conscious of a lack- it is through this sensitivity to absence
that he becomes human and not the impassive waxwork he might
otherwise have been. And yet we also recognise that for Pathfinder
to be who he is and what he is it is necessary that he return to the
world of the forest, that he should step back into the frame. But, if
Pathfinder is forced to abdicate the simplicity which is not
consistent with such acute and painful moments of consciousness,
he nevertheless grows in moral stature; for this is surely the

greatest trial of his celebrated stoicism, 'that stoicism which
formed so large a part of his character and which he had probably
imbibed from long association with the Indians' (p. 294).
Pathfinder, we feel, is too great for civilisation, which could only
diminish and depress his nobility of character. So there is a
moment of pathos for the reader too: the realisation that in a
civilised world Pathfinder is an anachronism- it has grown too
small to accommodate him. He is an excessive hero.
In the final appearance ofNatty Bumppo, as a young man in his
early twenties, Cooper displayed him to the reader perfect and
free from all mortal weakness, in every respect the Superman. The
idea that his hero could ever have fallen in love with a being
morally inferior to himself and even mourned over his rejection is
here totally contraverted: it isj udith Hutter who loves Deerslayer
and finds her passion unreciprocated. In The Deerslayer the
superhumanity of Natty is unequivocally asserted: his only defect
is the fact that he is not particularly handsome, but, since good
looks are shown to be a source of false pride and moral confusion,
the reader can only rejoice that Cooper's hero was not so afflicted.
The Deerslayer is in every sense a final work. It is hard to see how
Cooper could have taken his process of mythologisation any
further; but it is also a set of comprehensive corrections,
marginalia and corrigenda to the legend as a whole, as Cooper
vigorously red pencils his own laborious creation, ruthlessly
expunging from it anything that might fall short of perfect
sainthood. In particular, Cooper may well have felt that, in The
Pathfinder at least, he had gone too far in endowing his hero with
Indian traits; consequently in The Deerslayer it is his white and
Christian characteristics that are foregrounded: his very name,
'Deerslayer', indicates his distance from Indian customs, his
reluctance to take human life and his abhorrence of violence,
which is truly in the spirit ofChrist's teaching, if alien to the spirit
ofindian culture. Deerslayer's presentation as an excessive hero is
doubly motivated: on the one hand because he represents a
synthesis of all that is finest in the ethical code of red and white
man alike, on the other because, since the Christian moral code is
so demanding that it in practice frequently leads to hypocrisy, a
moral superman is necessitated to validate the code itself: to show
that Christianity is indeed a higher code, but that it does not
merely consist of empty words. Hawkeye-Deerslayer is every bit
Fenimore Cooper 81
as good an Indian as the Indians themselves: he is superlative at

tracking and hunting; he consistently speaks the truth and does
not, like most white men, have a 'forked tongue'; he can honour a
pledge to return to an Indian tribe even though this may mean
death; he has the courage to withstand extreme physical torture
without flinching. Yet at the same time he rejects the Indian moral
imperative to revenge; he is gentle and peaceable by nature, he
consistently behaves in a Christian manner and returns good for
evil.
But Deerslayer's Christianity is not just the natural religion of
Pathfinder: Cooper insists on its doctrinal purity. Indeed The
Deerslayer appears to inaugurate the final phase of Cooper's
fiction, which is both more explicitly religious and also more
obviously didactic than his earlier work. Cooper's project is to
develop a notion of religion that will appear to stem directly from
the world of nature and the forest, so that Natty will require no
cultural mediations at all. He will find his sermons in stones and
running brooks. It will be as ifhe speaks on behalf of nature itself,
as if the whole of the New Testament were somehow inscribed in
trees, rocks and waterfalls. Yet, since there are obvious problems
in this, Cooper stresses Natty's exposure to the teachings of the
Moravian Church, which, as it were, his hero can then find
confirmed by the world in which he moves, in a double movement
of revelation. This world is, in itself, undoubtedly more innocent
than that of The Last ofthe Mohicans. In that novel Cooper describes
how Natty and his party come upon the ruins of Fort William
Henry and frightful vestiges of the massacre there; it is as if the
world itself is deeply stained by human violence. Yet in The
Deerslayer the world is a kind of colossal natural temple, and,
though there are still brutal encounters, it seems as if the forest is
untouched by them, as if it is perennially rinsed clean.
Yet the problem of relating doctrine to nature remains an
intractable one, especially when space must be made for the red
man as well. Cooper's method of resolving the problem of cultural
difference is to suggest that each race has its own distinctive gifts
and that each will be judged according to the use that it makes of
them, yet this becomes awkward when Natty says, 'Revenge is an
lnjin gift, and forgiveness a white man's. That's all' (The
Deerslayer, p. 79). For it is all too apparent that the recognition of
the cultural identity of the red man is bought at the price of
assigning him to an inferior cultural level. In other ways Cooper is
much more severe and censorious about Indian customs than he

was in the earlier novels. Whereas the older Leatherstocking in
The Pioneers was sympathetic to the Indian belief in 'happy
hunting grounds', the younger 'missionary' Natty Bumppo will
have no truck with this pagan belief:
I can't fall into these notions, seeing that they appear to be ag'in
reason .... Now I find it hard to suppose that blessed spirits
can be put to chasing game without an object, tormenting the
dumb animals just for the pleasure and agreeableness of their
own amusements. (The Deerslayer, p. 456)
Natty is subsequently perplexed by the notion of two distinct

afterlives, and with good reason: for, if such an idea seems
inconceivable and all races come together, then how can the red
man secure admission to heaven, when his gifts are for revenge?
Cooper seems to imply that Natty's well-meaning tolerance
actually belies his own moral superiority, which can in no way be
reduced to the common level. Deerslayer, though moving in a red
man's world and moved by moral obligations which only they
recognise, nevertheless makes it 'a point of honour to reason and
feel like white men, rather than as an Indian' (p. 492).
The spirituality of Christianity is such that it is not an honour
code, and not based on public reputation. Deerslayer's
uprightness and purity require no audience, only a reader- so
that, when Deerslayer saves Hist and Chingachgook, at possible
risk to his own life, Cooper is impelled to observe,
With a generosity that would have rendered a Roman

illustrious throughout all time, but which, in the career of one so
simple and humble, would have been forever lost to the world,
but for this unpretending legend- Deerslayer threw all his force
into a desperate effort. . . . (p. 297)
With an Indian tensed like a panther on his back, Deerslayer's

predicament is perilous indeed, but it is not sufficient for Cooper
merely to create excitement; he must focus on the moral
significance of the episode and create an aura of sanctity about it.
With an equally desperate, yet exceedingly subtle, paronomasia
on the word 'unpretending', Cooper seems both to concede that
his narrative is indeed fiction and does not pretend to be
Fenimore Cooper 83
otherwise, and obliquely to insinuate that Deerslayer's actions

have an autonomous reality and spiritual grandeur which the
author's humble narrative cannot adequately convey. At such
moments, as Blake Nevius has suggested, Cooper's melancholy
reflections on the transitory and ephemeral nature of human
greatness can seem reminiscent of the spirit of Thomas Cole's
heroic sequence The Course of Empire. 16 But Cooper's devoted
hagiography seeks to rescue such exemplary actions from the
omnipresent threat of oblivion. Anxious lest Deerslayer's
Christlike humility cause the reader to underestimate him and fail
to grasp his role as the perfect human being who can stand as the
pattern for others, Cooper constructs a higher level of discourse
that can foreground the significance that is seemingly dissipated
in the more sullied human world in which Deerslayer moves.
Like Pathfinder, Deerslayer has allowed the serenity of the
woods to slide unobtrusively into his soul. This harmony with
nature permits him to apprehend it still more deeply as a source of
moral education and enlightenment. Deerslayer is a
Transcendentalist. He is the voice of nature unalloyed. We are
asked to think of him not simply as a hunter but also as a poet, for
the only true poet is a man attuned to nature. Deerslayer has not
needed to turn from the world oflearning to the natural world as
with Emerson; he has been instructed by nature from the first:
My edication has been altogether in the woods; the only book I

read, or care about reading, is the one which God has opened
afore all his creatur's in the noble forests, broad lakes, rolling
rivers, blue skies, and the winds, the tempests, and sunshine,
and other glorious marvels of the land! This book I can read,
and I find it full of wisdom and knowledge.
(The Deerslayer, p. 435)
It is Deerslayer's deep responsiveness to nature, which he

perceives as the sign of an omnipresent divine power, that is the
source both of his natural and unaffected piety and of his inner
fortitude:
We have written much, but in vain, concerning this

extraordinary being, if the reader requires now to be told that,
untutored as he was in the learning ofthe world, and simple as
he ever showed himself to be in all matters touching the
subtleties of conventional taste, he was a man of strong, native,

poetical feeling. He loved the woods for their freshness, their
sublime solitudes, their vastness, and the impress that they
everywhere bore of the divine hand of their Creator. He rarely
moved through them without pausing to dwell on some peculiar
beauty that gave him pleasure, though seldom attempting to
investigate the causes, and never did a day pass without his
communing in spirit, and this, too, without the aid offorms or
language, with the infinite source of all he saw, felt, and beheld.
Thus constituted in a moral sense, and of a steadiness that no
danger could appal or any crisis disturb, it is not surprising that
the hunter felt a pleasure at looking on the scene he now beheld
that momentarily caused him to forget the object of his
visit. (p. 285)
Before nature, truly seen, the pragmatic is suspended. The

moment must be savoured in and for itself. The narrative must
wait until Deerslayer is ready to return to it with his spiritual
batteries recharged. In Nature Emerson speaks of 'the poet, the
orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been nourished by
their fair and appeasing changes, year after year, without design
and without heed', 17 and such a man is Deerslayer. But it must be
stressed that for Cooper such virtue is not automatically produced
by a natural environment. Thomas Hutter and Hurry Harry have
passed their lives among the same lakes and forests as Deerslayer,
yet they continue to be callow, self-regarding, vengeful and
violent. It is as if they have deliberately turned aside from nature
and refused to accept the illumination and serenity which it
unceasingly offers. At one point after a lyrical description of
approaching dawn and the (The Deerslayer, p. 334), 'returning
light' Cooper remarks on the utter failure of this moment to make
any impact on Hutter and Hurry Harry. It is as if they not only
lack any sense of poetry or beauty but have thus actually hardened
their hearts against God:
All this, however, Hutter and Hurry witnessed without

experiencing any of that calm delight which the spectacle is
wont to bring when the thoughts are just and the aspirations
pure. They not only witnessed it, but they witnessed it under
circumstances that had a tendency to increase its power and to
heighten its charms. Only one solitary object became visible, in
Fenimore Cooper 85
the returning light, that had received its form or uses from
human taste or human desires, which as often deform as
beautify a landscape. This was the castle, all the rest being
native and fresh from the hand of God. That singular residence,
too, was in keeping with the natural objects of the view, starting
out from the gloom, quaint, picturesque and ornamental.
Nevertheless, the whole was lost on the observers, who knew no
feeling of poetry, had lost their sense of natural devotion in lives
of obdurate and narrow selfishness, and had little other
sympathy with nature than that which originated with her
lowest wants. (p. 335)
From Cooper's point of view they could not be more deeply

alienated. By contrast Deerslayer instinctively places himself in
harmony with nature and with the working of the divine will. In
his later fiction Cooper lays great emphasis on the importance of a
spirit of humility and self-abnegation in which the individual
freely places himself in the hands of providence in the belief that
all will ultimately be for the best. Whereas in The Sealions, a novel
about a voyage to the Arctic, the protagonists persist in struggling
against providence in their greed, selfishness and folly, Deerslayer
stoically accepts it: 'Well, well - everything is in the hands of
Providence; this affair as well as another; I'll trust to that for
getting my desarts in all things' (The Deerslayer, p. 122). At this
particular moment Deerslayer has tried but failed to kill an
Indian, an act apparently necessary but against his own pacifist
convictions. Yet he neither blames himself here or wishes to take
the credit elsewhere, for to do so would be to manifest vanity and
impiety. The pattern underlying events is part of a providential
design that resists the scrutiny of man and which demands an
implicit and unquestioning faith.
Nevertheless, Deerslayer is an excessive hero because he
pursues virtuousness to the point where it becomes almost
intolerable to normal human eyes. Not content with risking his life
to rescue both the worthless Thomas Hutter and Hurry Harry,
and Hist Hist, the betrothed of Chingachgook, he goes even
further by insisting on returning to almost certain death at the
hands of the Huron Indians, because he has given his word that he
will do so. Cooper deliberately places his hero in a position where,
like Christ, he will be tortured, humiliated and reviled, yet gives
this suffering an extraordinary quality by making it entirely
voluntary. He thereby also shows that he will be governed by the

red man's code as much as by the white man's. Deerslayer never
ever tries to evade an obligation or a moral duty. Deerslayer is the
final answer to the charge that the Christian religion
automatically produces hypocrisy because it is a creed too
strenuous and exalted for ordinary men to live by. Like Melville's
Pierre, he proclaims the possibility of living by Absolute
Chronometrical standards. But to others this can seem mere folly.
Judith Hutter asks, 'Is it possible you mean to do this act of
extraordinary self-destruction and recklessness?' (p. 399); and
Hurry Harry exclaims, ''Twould be the act of a madman or a
fool!' (p. 421). Deerslayer's actions seem excessive because they
go so far beyond what the average person would contemplate, yet
by his own lights such saintliness is simply a natural and
inescapable obligation. It is as if the excessiveness ofDeerslayer is
needed to counterbalance the more negative aspects ofhuman life;
gleamings of a pure spirit that shine with a preternatural
luminosity through the gloom.
The example of Cooper's fiction is particularly instructive
because it points to what is to be a recurring dilemma for the
American writer, who so often begins in joy and gladness, writing
out of a deep-seated conviction that he can confidently express the
values of his native culture, and ends in a disillusioned recognition
that he is fundamentally out of phase with it and hence doubtful
about the validity of his utterance and the representative role he
has been tempted to assume. Cooper begins by celebrating in the
figure of Harvey Birch the archetypal patriotic hero, yet Harvey's
very obscurity seems oddly prophetic, given that Cooper's later
heroes are men on the margins of society, distancing themselves
from the vagaries of the democratic tide. Unlike Daniel Webster,
Cooper was not unwilling to think of himself as an aristocrat, and
the manifest passing of deference filled him with feelings of
disquiet. His evident lack of faith in the American mission was
manifested in his late allegorical novel The Crater (1847), where a
Utopian experiment on a South Sea island that miraculously
emerges from the sea is destroyed by anarchic tenants who seem
unable to maintain a due appreciation of their proper station in
life. Their temerity meets with divine retribution and the island
sinks once more beneath the waves. Cooper's dismal perception is
reminiscent of Thomas Cole's cycle of paintings The Course of the
Empire in its unflinching progression from brave beginnings to
Fenimore Cooper 87
irreversible decline, but it is the more alarming because Cooper

compresses the whole phenomenon into a far briefer time-span
than Cole could ever have envisioned. The excessive hero ceases
to be demonstrative of America pure and simple but becomes
rather a weapon wielded with a didactic purpose, pointing not in
the direction that the nation is actually going but along a path that
she may never take. Natty Bumppo is the only man in step.
3 Brockden Brown and Poe:
Inner Excesses
In the writings ofCharles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe
an analysis of the workings of the human mind is the authors'
unremitting concern. They seek, in a manner which Godwin had
pioneered, to follow the processes of consciousness in minute and
intricate detail. In some sense this is a rationalist project, since it
involves an attempt to chart unexplored areas of consciousness;
yet the result is more equivocal, rather disconcertingly suggesting
that there is little basis for assuming that mental activity is
necessarily reasonable. Moreover, if the irrational is precisely that
which is not amenable to reason, it would seem that the irrational
is by definition excessive and therefore dictates that what is
needed, if anything, is yet more strenuous efforts to control it.
Brockden Brown's Gothic novels, published between 1798 and
1900, mark a curious historical conjuncture. On the one hand,
they appear, as Poe might have said, only a lustrum after
Godwin's publication of Political justice ( 1793) and Caleb Williams
( 1 794), yet, on the other, it must be remembered that the Reign of
Terror has already intervened. As a result the general direction
taken by Brown is to modify Godwinian ideas so that they are
brought into conformity with the conservative mood of American
culture, and the thrust of Godwin's attack on social hypocrisy and
repressive political power is totally redirected. Godwin's critique
of society in Caleb Williams is supplanted by a pervasive moralising
on human nature and the treachery of appearances. In Arthur
Merr!Jn, for example, we are told, 'It is a lesson on the principles of
human nature; on the delusiveness of appearances; on the
perviousness of fraud; on the power with which nature has
invested human beings over the thoughts and actions of each
other.'' For Brockden Brown it is not society that produces evil, it
is mind.
Brown's political conservatism and his aversion to political
88
© David Morse 1987
Brockden Brown and Poe 89
developments in Europe emerge most clearly in Ormond, the

second of his published novels. Ormond, the wealthy dilettante,
who first employs a minion, Craig, to ruin Constantia's father and
then is responsible for the death both of her father and Craig
before attempting to seduce Constantia herself, is despite his
purposive pursuit of evil a convinced Godwinian:
No one could entertain loftier conceptions of human capacity

than Ormond. But he carefully distinguished between men in
the abstract and men as they are .... A mortal poison pervaded
the whole system, by means of which everything was converted
into bane and virulence. Efforts designed to ameliorate the
condition of an individual were sure of answering a contrary
purpose. 2
His ostensibly exalted ideals produce cymctsm and

unscrupulousness in relation to the world as it presently exists. He
feels justified in using any methods to achieve his aims. In
Brown's fiction, for a character to refer to principles is an infallible
indication that he is a ruthless and shameless villain. The portrait
is completed by further touches. Ormond boasts of his sincerity
and his aversion to duplicity. He dislikes the manners of polite
society. He believes in necessity and free love. He is an unbeliever.
He is also a political subversive, who, in Berlin, has associated
with those who have plotted to overthrow all that is most
fundamental in human society. As Sophia Westwyn comments, 'I
had seen too much of innovation and imposture, in France and
Italy, not to regard a man like this with aversion and fear.' 3
Brockden Brown's writing implacably promotes the belief that
only the United States is a relatively secure place of refuge from
such malign forces, yet even here there is lurking danger from the
suspicious foreigner! Brown's sense of evil is shaped by a national
paranoia. In Wieland the sources of malignity include Germany,
the birthplace of the fanatical Wieland family, France, the source
of Wieland's religious ideas; and Spain, the dubious background
of Carwin. Ormond's own character seems to have been formed
during his period of service in the Imperial Russian army. In
Edgar Huntly Clithero, who has recently arrived from Ireland, is
the obvious person to suspect of the murder of Waldegrave
precisely because he is a foreigner:
I did not, till now, advert to the recentness of his appearance

among us, and to the obscurity that hung over his origin and
past life. But now these considerations appeared so highly
momentous as almost to decide the question of his guilt. 4
The European, by definition, always has a 'past'. Clithero has

indeed murdered a man, though not Waldegrave, whose death is
to be laid at the door of yet another alien group, the native Indian
population. In the same novel a minor character, the younger
Selby, is led through residence in Europe to depart from the pious
ways of his father; while, to add to the catalogue of European
misery, Weymouth describes in detail the misfortunes he suffers in
Portugal. In Arthur Mervyn decadence has a British flavour.
W elbeck is the son of a Liverpool sea captain, and even before this
disclosure his cultural identity is signalled by his soubriquet of
'the nabob'. His foreign birth, the ostentatious display of silver,
china and books, his lack of gainful employment- all these suggest
that he can be up to no good. Other doubtful Britons include
Craig in Ormond, in reality the son of Mary Mansfield and a native
of Portsmouth, and the deceitful and sensual Maxwell of Wieland.
Of course, the enigmatic foreigner is a legitimate device for
Brockden Brown to use, but through the force of repetition foreign
birth and criminality become virtually synonymous. The
foreigner is a hypocrite and a deceiver who acts out his tortuous
role before trusting Americans who have scarcely encountered
anything but honesty, simplicity and transparency. In Brown's
system of transformations every villain is convertible into another.
In each case the reader is offered a choice, Wieland or Carwin,
Clithero or the red Indian, Craig or Ormond, yet in some sense
the final outcome does not really matter. Carwin could have been
the murderer in Wieland and does bear some moral responsibility,
just as Clithero, a murderer and a maniac, is justly an object of
suspicion in Edgar Huntly. The problem is not one of finding the
person who committed the crime so much as finding the correct
crime to assign to someone who is always already a criminal.
Brockden Brown's moralising fables constantly harp on the
dangers of misconstruction and of drawing false conclusions on
the basis of insufficient evidence, yet paradoxically they support
such intuitive reactions; for, in the puritan nightmare of deceptive
appearances, it is always better to be safe than sorry, and, since, as
Godwin suggested, certain knowledge is difficult if not impossible
to achieve, then prudence may recommend suspicion and distrust

as representing the most pragmatic attitude.
Although Brockden Brown's novels are tortuously plotted,
arbitrariness is crucial to their convoluted structures. It is the
sudden irruption of pure contingency that creates the fantastic
and the inexplicable, which renders puzzling events that might
otherwise seem quite straightforward. All of Brown's novels have
a detective element and the problem which they present is not, as
with the conventional detective story, one of subsuming all the
events in the narrative under one single and consistent
explanation, but rather of separating out different narrative
strands, each of which has its own distinct explanation. Wieland,
for example contains a number of extraordinary events, but to be
truly comprehended it must be broken down into parts:
( 1) the death of Wieland Senior through spontaneous

combustion, which has no connection with anything else;
(2) a whole series of events which are explicable through the
intervention of Garwin and his use of ventriloquism, i.e.
the occurrences in the closet, the conversation heard by
Pleyel, some of the voices heard by Wieland;
(3) Clara Wieland's dream, which has a purely contingent
connection with an exclamation uttered by Garwin;
( 4) the madness ofWieland, which leads him to believe that he
has been instructed by God to murder his wife and
children.
In the same way, Edgar Huntly has at least five plot components
that have to be distinguished:
( l) the death ofWaldegrave (brought about by an Indian, who

deliberately does not scalp him in order to create
confusion);
(2) the sleepwalking and guilt of Clithero, who has killed
Arthur Wiatte and who believes himself to be responsible
for the death of Mrs Lorimer;
(3) the disappearance of Waldegrave's papers (caused by
Edgar Huntly's own sleepwalking);
(4) The mystery ofWeymouth's money and its disappearance
(connected with the death ofWaldegrave, to whom he sent
it);
(5) the madness of Clithero - an unexpected denouement,

since he is innocent ofWaldegrave's death and in the case
ofWiatte acted in self-defence.
Although Arthur Merl!Jin is not a fantastic tale the principles of its

construction are very similar. The plot hinges on the
disappearance of two large sums of money, one belonging to
Clemenza Lodi, the other to the Maurice family, who have
entrusted it to a man named Watson. The sinister Welbeck is the
character who links the two strands: he has indeed mishandled
funds belonging to the I tali an girl, but the disappearance of the
second sum is the result of a purely fortuitous turn of events:
Watson, determined to revenge himself on Welbeck for the
disgrace he has brought on his sister and, with the money on his
person, challenges Welbeck to a duel and dies. Additionally, three
leading characters mysteriously disappear. Wallace dies of yellow
fever. Watson is killed in the duel. Welbeck's death is feigned.
Wallace's disappearance is indeed perplexing but is peripheral to
the plot. Godwin points out that 'The resolution of objects into
their simple elements is an operation of science and improvement;
but it is altogether foreign to our first and original conceptions'. 5
Brockden Brown's fiction moves invariably towards such a
reduction of the narrative into quite separate and autonomous
parts.
Brown's writing is extremely rationalistic, yet at the same time
it continually focuses on states of mind where feelings or irrational
compulsions are dominant. Indeed, it is part of his moral purpose
to show the value of reason in such situations. For, if we would
only quietly attend to the task of sorting out our impressions, we
should find that they do not offer the grounds for emotional
disturbance that we might have originally supposed. A classic
instance of the way in which confusion and alarm give way to
more sober processes of reflection occurs in Arthur Mervyn:
In the confusion of my mind, I still held my burthen uplifted. To

have placed it on the floor, and encountered this visitant
without this equivocal token about me, was the obvious
proceeding. Indeed, time only could decide whether these
footsteps tended to this, or to some other, apartment.
My doubts were quickly dispelled. The door opened, and a
figure glided in. The portmanteau dropped from my arms, and
my heart's-blood was chilled. If an apparition ofthe dead were

possible, and that possibility I could not deny, this was such an
apparition. A hue, yellowish and livid; bones uncovered with
flesh; eyes, ghastly, hollow, woe-begone, and fixed in an agony
of wonder upon me; and locks, matted and negligent,
constituted the image which I now beheld. My belief of
somewhat preternatural in this appearance, was confirmed by
recollection of resemblances between these features and those of
one who was dead. In this shape and visage, shadowy and
death-like as they were, the lineaments ofWallace, of him who
had misled my rustic simplicity on my first visit to this city, and
whose death I had conceived to be incontestably ascertained,
were forcibly recognised.
This recognition, which at first alarmed my superstition,
speedily led to more rational inferences. Wallace had been
dragged to the hospital. Nothing was less to be suspected than
that he would return alive from that hideous receptacle, but this
was by no means impossible. The figure that stood before me
had just risen from the bed of sickness, and from the brink of the
grave. The crisis of his malady had passed, and he was once
more entitled to be ranked among the living.
This event and the consequences which my imagination
connected with it, filled me with the liveliest joy. I thought not
ofhis ignorance of the causes of my satisfaction, of the doubts to
which the circumstances of our interview would give birth,
respecting the integrity of my purpose. I forgot the artifices by
which I had been formerly betrayed, and the embarrassments
which a meeting with the victim of his artifice would excite in
him; I thought only of the happiness which his recovery would
confer upon his uncle and his cousins. 6
In fact this meeting with Wallace has been long awaited, since it is
the reason for Arthur Mervyn's journey to the city of
Philadelphia, but it occurs in a manner that is totally unexpected.
Despite Wallace's alarming appearance, Brockden Brown
forcibly insists on the powers of mind that can bring the emotions
it provokes under control. Arthur Mervyn, like other Brownian
heroes, gets a very positive satisfaction out of data-processing.
Nevertheless, in Edgar Huntly Brockden Brown does present
disturbing evidence of the instability of mind and of the
discontinuity of consciousness. This does not cast doubt on the
veracity of introspection itself. Brown does not question that the

mind is truly aware of its own processes. Rather reason appears as
a powerful motor which can become subject to disfunctions and
interruptions. Such a phenomenon occurs when Clithero is telling
his story to Edgar Huntly:
At this period of his narrative, Clithero stopped. His

complexion varied from one degree of paleness to another. His
brain appeared to suffer some severe constriction. He desired to
be excused, for a few minutes, from proceeding. In a short time
he was relieved from this paroxysm, and resumed his tale with
an accent tremulous at first, but acquiring stability and force as
he went on. 7
By this parenthesis Brockden Brown suggests the onset of tension

in Clithero's mind, but his language is such as to present it
primarily in physiological terms. The 'constriction' the brain
suffers from prevents it from working smoothly, just as the
blockage of an artery hinders the flow of blood. Consciousness is a
stream, a river, which is subject to temporary obstructions, but
which is able to reassert its power and flow smoothly on. But
Brown also considers a variety of actions in which conscious
volition is suspended. Sleepwalking is an obvious case of this.
Both Edgar Huntly and Clithero perform actions without being
aware of them. The subtitle of Edgar Huntly, 'Memoirs of a
Sleepwalker', seems deliberately paradoxical, since it seems to
involve a contradiction in terms. Sleepwalking refutes Godwin's
assumption that walking is a volitional activity, but it also
furnishes astonishing evidence of the powers of the unconscious
mind. Clithero asleep is able to descend the most difficult and
irregular paths: 'to pierce into the deepest thickets, to plunge into
the darkest cavities, to ascend the most difficult heights, and
approach the slippery and tremulous verge of the dizziest
precipices'. 8 The mind offers more than prose reason; it is a
theatre of the marvellous.
There are many moments in Edgar Huntly where characters lose
conscious control over their actions. This happens to Edgar
Huntly himself, but it most crucially affects Clithero, who at two
moments in the narrative is aware that he has killed Arthur
Wiatte and that he is on the point ofkilling Clarice, but who seems
quite unable to affect the course of events, despite the clarity of his
perceptions. On the second occasion, when Huntly, believes that

he is actually killing Mrs Lorimer, Brockden Brown writes,
I lifted the weapon. Its point was aimed at the bosom of the
sleeper. The impulse was given.
At the instant a piercing shriek was heard behind me, and a
stretched-out hand, grasping the blade, made it swerve widely
from its aim. It descended but without inflicting a wound. Its
force was spent on the bed.
Oh, for words to paint that stormy transition! I loosed my
hold of the dagger. 9
Although the scene is violent, Clithero is presented by Brown in

an entirely passive role. The sight of the dagger itself produces
action almost as a conditioned reflex (as it has on a previous
occasion) and the way in which the dagger sinks into the bed
suggests an impotent event without any definite instigator.
Symptomatically Clithero acts under the influence of a fixed idea
from which he cannot deviate. On his journey to Mrs Lorimer's
room he acts as if automatically. He mistakes one level for
another, yet acts with a curious boldness, takes no precautions
and passes the bed of a sleeping girl without any apprehension.
On his return to his room Clithero is further distressed to find that
he expresses his thoughts without being aware that he is doing so
and that he has also been walking without knowing it. All this is
possible because of the dissociation of action from cognition,
which is not necessarily a precondition for it. But it seems
probable that Brockden Brown intends such instances to enforce
the reader's sense of the value and reliability of reason. For
Brown's criminals are invariably deranged.
It is often the case in Brockden Brown's fiction that evil acts are
committed from ostensibly benevolent motives. Ormond, the
arch-deceiver and self-deceiver, even has the effrontery to claim to
Constantia that he has arranged her father's death out of the best
possible motives, since the murder clears the way for their own
happiness and spares her father a painful and lingering death. At
a certain point even the trusting and impressionable Constantia is
forced to recognise that she is no longer dealing with a rational
person, since all of his thought processes have become warped
beyond recognition: 'Considerations of justice and pity were
made, by a fatal perverseness of reasoning, champions and

bulwarks of his most atrocious mistakes.' 10
Similar flaws affect other protagonists of Brown. Wieland is
gripped by the fatal delusion that God has ordered the murder of
his family. He acts in a manner that is outwardly sane and
rational, but really he is in the grip of a dangerous idee fixe. At the
moment when Clithero determines on killing Mrs Lorimer, he
believes that he is acting from altruistic motives, but in reality he
has become unbalanced and has broken contact with normal
human emotions and sympathies. There is even an element of
derangement about Welbeck, in general the most favourably
presented ofBrown's villains. In his final hours in prison Welbeck
becomes a deceiver who has lost his capacity to deceive. He is no
longer able to 'cover his secret torments and insidious purposes,
beneath a veil of benevolence and cheerfulness'. 11 Arthur Mervyn
shudders when he sees in W elbeck's eye unmistakable signs that 'his
reverie was not that of grief, but of madness'Y Welbeck is a
somewhat different case since his erratic and violent behaviour is
occasioned by the guilt and remorse that he feels owing to his
unscrupulous treatment of Clemenza Lodi, but his insanity
nevertheless seems to follow from an original lack of coherence
and consistency in his personality. The discrepancy between what
W elbeck puports to be and what he actually is, between inner and
outer, creates the intolerable pressures that lead to madness. For
Brockden Brown the deception of others is linked to self-
deception. The mind can lose its transparency and become
opaque to the consciousness that would inspect it. Without
complete sincerity and constant vigilance the individual may lose
control of his own mental processes. Powerful as reason is, even
reason has its limits. Beyond it, lurking in the innermost recesses
of the mind, is evil. That is the nightmare of Brockden Brown.
Brown's villains have another striking characteristic: they
manipulate others; they try to play God. In Wieland Wieland
himself believes that he must assume the task of divine vengeance
and almost seems to believe that he is God, yet, by an ironic twist,
he is halted in his purpose of murdering Clara Wieland by the
sinister Carwin, who actually does impersonate God by uttering
the word 'Hold'. Carwin uses his ventriloquist powers to deceive
and manipulate. He is described as
the most incomprehensible and formidable among men; as

engaged in schemes reasonably suspected to be in the highest
degree criminal, but such as no human intelligence is able to
unravel; that his ends are pursued by means which leave it in
doubt whether he is not in league with some infernal spirit; that
his crimes have hitherto been perpetrated with the aid of some
unknown but desperate accomplices; that he wages a perpetual
war against the happiness of mankind, and sets his engines of
destruction against every object that presents itself. 13
Garwin, like Ormond, seems to possess superhuman powers.

W elbeck too is a supreme manipulator of others, and Arthur
Mervyn is led to reflect, 'This W elbeck must have powers above
the common rate of mortals' . 14 For Brockden Brown the
manipulator in his Godlike pretensions becomes alienated from
humanity and normal feeling. He becomes lost in labyrinths ofhis
own construction. At the end of this road lies madness. For once
he has left the customary paths of the human spirit there can be no
going back.
With Poe the general portrait of the mind as discursively
adumbrated by Brockden Brown is condensed into a series of
fictional images of intense and concentrated power. Interiority
itself offers a theatre so compelling that the external world figures
either as a torn papyrus on which the traces of mind are inscribed
or else as an extension ofthat mind itself. Unreason and madness
are pervasive themes and traditional accounts ofhuman activity
in terms of will and intention disintegrate. The criminal murderer
appears as much the victim of his unaccountable passions as the
more or less arbitrary object of his mania. For Poe madness is seen
very much in the eighteenth-century tradition as an obsession
with fixed ideas from which the mind is unable to break free. In a
fascination with the particular the individual loses all sense of
proportion; his consciousness brims to overflowing with a single
preoccupation until finally the dykes are burst and it is impelled
outward in a boiling, swirling torrent of action. Action is by
definition excessive. Poe's heroes are otherwise strangely passive,
and we are left with the feeling that they never do anything at all
but remain endlessly wrapped in a gloomy reverie like their
Byronic precursors. Faced with the excessiveness of unreason, the
task of reason itself becomes correspondingly magnified. The
traditional and relatively benign metaphor of the rider controlling
a team of horses can no longer convey the frenzied and always
disproportionate nature of the struggle, the uncertainty of the

outcome. Rationality is tested to the very limit and beyond. It
must itself become superhuman. The individual, as he confronts
the uncanny disturbances within his own consciousness, assumes
the guise of a heroic lion-tamer, endeavouring to control
dangerous, perennially restless, unpredictable beasts with a few
skilfully aimed and carefully calculated cracks of the whip. It is a
struggle that can never be ended, except in death.
Dupin, the French detective in 'The Murders in the Rue
Morgue', is such a Titan of reason, though, in a tradition that Poe
established, he is no policeman but a gentlemanly amateur. This
amateur status is actually quite crucial to Poe's conception ofthe
rationalist superhero, since he cannot be expected to waste his
time and intelligence on mere run-of-the-mill, workaday crimes
which would bore him and insult his intelligence. His mind is only
challenged by the apparently inexplicable; hence the epigraph
from Sir Thomas Browne: 'What song the Syrens sang, or what
name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women,
although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture' (Poe,
Collected Works, II, 527). 15
Dupin functions at the very limits of reason itself. Perhaps
surprisingly, Dupin is not calm, sensible and matter-of-fact but
follows a way of life that is quite eccentric; indeed, he has
numerous affinities with those characters of Poe who are frankly
deranged. Dupin and the narrator shut themselves away from the
world in a derelict and haunted mansion and only venture forth at
night. Like such German Romantic poets as Navalis and
Holderlin, Dupin is enamoured of the night, symbolically the
most receptive environment for the creative imagination, and it is
then that he and his companion roam the streets 'seeking, amid
the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of
excitement which quiet observation can afford' (II, 533).
Dupin has a craving for the most bizarre experiences that this
novel urban world can offer, but they must always be experienced
passively and vicariously. He is scarcely normal and the narrator
himself attributes his symptomatic behaviour to an excited or
even diseased intelligence. But this is because Poe, as he makes
explicit in his opening disquisition, is engaged in a project of
redefining the rational in terms of the imaginative: 'It will be
found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly
imaginative never otherwise than analytic' (II, 531). More
fundamentally, Poe suggests that there is actually a deep-seated

affinity between the rationalist superhero and the irrational
phenomena against which he pits himself. Opposites attract.
Reason is fascinated with that which is most peculiar, baffiing and
bizarre precisely because it is in this way that it can most
triumphantly display its mastery: 'As the strong man exults in his
physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles
into play, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which
disentangles' (n, 528).
Here the word 'moral' may seem a trifle odd, but for Poe the
struggle of reason against enigma is also the struggle of good
versus evil; whatever holds reason in chains is necessarily
malevolent. Like Roderick Usher, Dupin has an extraordinary
receptivity to the multiplicity of the world but in addition he has
the power to decipher the most invisible and impenetrable of
signs. It is in this way that he is able to follow unerringly the
narrator's thought processes. Dupin, though French, is the
characteristic product of a puritan culture that sets enormous
store by the proper reading of signs; he shares in the faith that
every conceivable thing in the universe is significant. Dupin
demonstrates that the book of the world really can be deciphered if
only we have the imagination and the patience to read it
correctly.
'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' presents one of the most
severe challenges to human reason that it would be possible to
devise. Two women are found to have been brutally murdered
inside a locked room and the body of one of them has been thrust
up the chimney. Bags of gold coins are found lying on the floor. In
the words of the newspaper report, 'To this horrible mystery there
is not as yet, we believe, the slightest clew' (n, 538). The police are
baffied simultaneously by the extraordinary violence displayed
and by the lack of any obvious motive, since robbery, otherwise
the most obvious explanation, appears to be ruled out. But Dupin
stresses that the police go astray through their obsession with a
single fixed idea; the imagination must be allowed to play over a
whole range of possibilities instead ofharping obsessively on one.
What seems most inexplicable about the crime, its excessive
nature, is precisely that which can guide the way to a solution:
It appears to me that this mystery is considered insoluble, for

the very reason which should cause it to be regarded as easy of
solution- I mean for the outre character of its features. The

police are confounded by the seeming absence of motive - not
for the murder itself- but for the atrocity of the murder.
(n, 54 7)
Irrationality, almost by definition, seems to place insurmountable

obstacles in the path of reason, since that which is not produced by
reason would not admit of decipherment in rational terms.
However, Dupin demonstrates that such is not the case. The
excessive, the irrational, is itself a clue. Reason can arrive at its
goal through a meticulous analysis of all such deviations from the
ordinary. Dupin's solution to the crime, which miraculously he
proclaims he has reached at the very outset, is produced through a
process of imaginative mediation on all the excessive features of
the crime:
Keeping now steadily in mind the points to which I have drawn

your attention- that peculiar voice, that unusual agility, and
that startling absence of motive in a murder so singularly
atrocious as this -let us glance at the butchery itself. Here is a
woman strangled to death by manual strength, and thrust up a
chimney, head downward. Ordinary assassins employ no such
modes of murder as this. Least of all, do they thus dispose of the
murdered. In a manner of thrusting the corpse up the chimney,
you will admit that there was something excessively outre -
something altogether irreconcilable with our common notions
of human action, even when we suppose the actors to be the
most depraved of men. Think, too, how great must have been
that strength which could have thrust the body up such an
aperture so forcibly that the united vigor of several persons was
found barely sufficiently to drag it down! (n, 556-7)
To solve the crime Dupin's imagination must be equally

excessive, taking the 'foreignness' of the crime to the point where
he is led to look beyond humanity itself, to an entry in Cuvier on
the orang-outang! If the crime itself involved superhuman
strength, it also requires superhuman intellectual powers to solve
it. For the crime is in some sense a crime against reason itself, not
merely for its incomprehensibility and senseless violence but
because symbolically the thrusting of the woman's body up the
chimney with the head down signifies that the place of reason in the
world has been overturned. On an imaginative level, what Dupin

does is to turn things the right way up and thus restore the
supremacy of reason. Finally, the extraordinary direct physical
power of the orang-outang is counterbalanced by Dupin's magical
rational power which operates at a distance. He solves the crime
largely from newspaper reports; makes abstruse connections
between the case, other newspaper items and biological treatises;
he summons as if by magic the owner of the animal to his
apartment. In Dupin's wizardry the power of the irrational is
cancelled.
'The Purloined Letter', in which Dupin again features is a
mystery which is deliberately enunciated in a lower key, but the
principles of detection are the same. Ostensibly, however, it
presents quite a different problem, since it is marked not so much
by the extraordinary as by the ordinary in that it is 'a little too
plain'; but it is precisely its being 'too plain' that makes it
'excessively odd' (m, 975). In this case the problem does not
concern the identity of the person who has committed the crime,
which is already known. A minister steals a compromising letter
from the Queen by switching it for a letter of his own, but the
Queen can do nothing since the King is present at the time. The
question is: where is the letter now, since both the minister's
person and his apartment have been exhaustively searched?
Dupin detects that the puzzle is based on a paradox, which is that
the minister in his search for the most outre place of concealment is
driven to the most obvious - a letter rack:
He must have foreseen, I reflected, the secret investigation of

his premises .... It would imperatively lead him to despise all
the ordinary nooks of concealment. He could not, I reflected, be
so weak as not to see that the most intricate and remote recess of
his hotel would be as open as the commonest closets to the eyes,
to the probes, to the gimlets, and to the microscopes of the
Prefect. I saw, in fine, that he would be driven, as a matter of
course, to simplicity, if not deliberately induced to it as a matter
of choice. (m, 988-9)
Nevertheless, despite the skill and cunning with which the letter
has been concealed, once the principle of inconspicuousness
through ordinariness has been grasped, it positively shrieks out its
identity through the very excessiveness with which it proclaims its

difference from the important document that it actually is:
No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to be

that of which I was in search. To be sure, it was, to all
appearances, radically different from the one of which the
Prefect had read us so minute a description. Here the seal was
large and black, with the D-- cipher; there it was small and
red, with the ducal arms of the S-family. Here, the address,
to the Minister, was diminutive and feminine; there the
superscription, to a certain royal personage, was markedly bold
and decided; the size alone formed a point of correspondence.
But, then the radicalness of those differences, which was
excessive; the dirt; the soiled and torn condition of the paper, so
inconsistent with the true methodical habits of D--, and so
suggestive of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the
worthlessness of the document; these things, together with the
hyperobtrusive situation of this document, full in view of every
visiter, and thus exactly in accordance with the conclusions to
which I had previously arrived; these things, I say, were
strongly corroborative of suspicion, in one who came with the
intention to suspect. (m, 991)
To Dupin's more penetrating eye the inconspicuousness of

conspicuousness IS too much insisted on. Even the minutest
discrepancies can be detected. Moreover, in stressing the
difference between the torn letter and the actual letter the minister
has failed to realise that this points to yet another difference
between the appearance of the letter and his own scrupulous
habits. Nothing escapes Dupin's comprehensive and Godlike
observation. Although the events in 'The Purloined Letter' do not
have the disturbing irrationality of 'The Murders in the Rue
Morgue', they nevertheless do involve a struggle against malign
powers, since the minister is 'that monstrum horrendum, an
unprincipled man of genius' (m, 993) and a man quite capable of
murder. As such it requires a principled man of genius, Dupin, to
overcome him. The notion of restoring a topsy-turvy world,
evident in 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', is repeated in 'The
Purloined Letter', since Dupin's ingenious substitution repeats
and cancels the action which initiated the affair in the first place.
Significantly Dupin achieves this end through an apparently
irrational action, a shot fired by a pretended lunatic in the street,

which is a carefully calculated distraction. Thus behind even the
craziest events a deeper rational purpose lurks. In this also Dupin
seems Godlike.
In 'The Goldbug' the deep complicity between rational and
irrational is most subtly represented, and for the greater part of
the narrative Legrand, the hero of reason, figures as a deluded and
obsessional character who is in danger of losing his sanity
altogether. Every aspect of Legrand's behaviour is immoderate
and excessive. Even initially he is a moody and reclusive
misanthrope whom his relatives believe to be 'unsettled in
intellect' (m, 807), but the narrator finds that after his discovery of
the large, brilliantly coloured 'goldbug' his behaviour takes an
even stranger turn. After his attempt to draw the goldbug on a
scrap of paper he becomes subject to sudden and unpredictable
changes of mood; his face becomes violently red, then excessively
pale; he becomes strangely abstracted. He is subsequently taken
ill and Jupiter's tale that Legrand has been literally and not
merely metaphorically bitten by the goldbug seems even
plausible. The narrator is puzzled by Legrand's claim that he has
business of the highest importance and wonders 'what new
crotchet possessed his excitable brain' (m, 813-14). His
suspicions are aroused, on seeing Legrand again, by his tremulous
handshake, glaring eyes and face 'pale even to ghastliness' (m,
814). He is provoked by Legrand's perplexing statement about
the gold bug- 'I have only to use it properly and I shall arrive at
the gold of which it is the index' (m, 815)- and becomes positively
indignant when Legrand answers his question, 'do you mean to
say that this infernal beetle has any connection with your
expedition into the hills' (m, 816), in the affirmative. The narrator
accompanies Legrand andJ up iter primarily to humour his friend,
but ultimately with a view to restraining him from some darker
insanity, an eventuality thatjupiter fears also. The excessive and
irrational nature of Legrand's quest becomes all too evident.
Passing through a tract of country that is itself 'excessively wild
and desolate' (m, 817), they are brought to a part of the island that
is yet more remote:
In this manner we journeyed for about two hours, and the sun
was just setting when we entered a region infinitely more dreary
than any yet seen. It was a species of table land, near the
summit of an almost inaccessible hill, densely wooded from

base to pinnacle and interspersed with huge crags that
appeared to lie loosely upon the soil, and in many cases were
prevented from precipitating themselves into the valleys below,
merely by the support of the trees against which they reclined.
Deep ravines, in various directions gave an air of still sterner
solemnity to the scene. (Ibid.)
Legrand now takes eccentricity to the point of madness by

insisting thatjupiter climb an extraordinarily high tulip tree and
then, after he has worked his way dangerously far out on one of the
branches, he orders him to drop the gold bug through the eye of a
skull that has been nailed there. This first attempt is unsuccessful,
but the second leads to the discovery of an extraordinary
profusion ofgold and jewellery. It is as if such an excess is a reward
for the very excessiveness of the enterprise, which has involved the
actual risk of madness.
In reality, of course, it is the narrator, and through him the
reader, who has been misled by appearances. Legrand has been a
hero of reason all along. Legrand is able to master the secret of the
treasure by strictly excluding the accidental, the arbitrary and the
irrational from his calculations, very much in the manner of
Brockden Brown. In fact the goldbug, though a very powerful
symbol of the duality of their discovery, in which skeletons are
found alongside the pirate hoards, has only a contingent
connection with it. So Legrand's rationality is demonstrated by
the very scrupulousness which eliminates it from every aspect of
his inquiry. The gold bug is in every way excessive. On the scrap of
paper its representation as a death's-head is a surplus and
deceptive simulacrum of the real thing, just as its use in
discovering the treasure is also superfluous, since any lead or
heavy weight would have done the trick. Indeed the nature ofthe
goldbug is such as to distract attention from its most essential
feature as far as Legrand is concerned, for its weight is far less
conspicuous than its colour and striking markings. The intensity
of Jupiter's anguished struggle up the tree has masked the fact
that Legrand has already reached this very point through a
process of ratiocination. His glimpsing of the skull through the
telescope demonstrates the power of reason to function as magic at
a distance. But for all this Legrand still has genuinely to master
the irrational by grasping that the reason for their initial failure is the
inability to tell his left from his right eye patronisingly attributed
to Jupiter. The ability of Legrand to perplex and mystify the
narrator through the agency of the goldbug, symbolised by the
way he 'twirled it to and fro, with the air of a conjuror' (m, 817), is
convincing evidence of the way in which reason can obtain total
power over the irrational, despite the darkest omens and
apparently conclusive evidence to the contrary. It has the
capacity to exceed even the excessive.
In 'The Goldbug' Legrand is able to maintain his speculative
freedom and his sanity because he does not allow his reason to
become mesmerised by the single object, the gold bug, that makes
the most imperious claims upon it. But the majority of Poe's
heroes are not so fortunate. Their emotions are so powerful and
overwhelming that they are brought completely under the sway of
a fixed obsession and become quite incapable of thinking of
anything else or offreeing themselves from its influence. As such
they are precluded from living anything remotely resembling a
normal life. They traverse the borderlands between lucidity and
madness without ever being conscious of the difference between
the two, since even their most deranged moments are
characterised by an appalling clarity of perception. Their thought
processes represent a demonic power of the ideal, which, in its
refusal to come to terms with the actual, endeavours to restructure
the world in terms of desire, and which can scarcely recognise just
how aberrant and excessive that desire has become. Such, in
particular, are the protagonists of 'Berenice', 'Morella' and
'Ligeia'.
Berenice, the subject of earliest and most grotesque of these
stories, is presented as having a most powerful, all-pervading
influence over the personality of the narrator, who becomes
completely preoccupied with her 'not as an object oflove, but as
the theme of the most abstruse though desultory speculation' (n,
214). As in the succeeding tales there is more than an element of
aggression in the narrator's obsession; it is as ifhe seeks to control
the feminine other by liquidating its autonomy, re-creating it in a
form in which it becomes pliable and no longer threatening. Yet in
this deathly form it is more frightening than before. In Berenice
what the narrator desires are her ideas, of which her teeth, pure,
brilliant and white, are the Platonic symbols, but in his mania the
narrator blurs the material and the spiritual, thought and action,
dream and reality. He comes to his senses conscious of a missing
episode in his memory but with no clear idea of what has occurred,
only to discover that he violently pulled all Berenice's teeth out
while she was still alive. In effect the story plays with paradoxes of
disproportion. The narrator's obsession with Berenice has been
excessive, yet its specific focus serves to diminish both her and him
in a grotesquely repulsive way. His excessive crime unconsciously
exposes his own inferiority.
As a presence Morella is even more engulfing. Once more the
narrator symptomatically refuses the very idea oflove. Although
he admits to a deep yet singular affection, its singularity consists
in the fact that the relationship involves neither love nor the fires
of Eros. He is a mere acolyte who yields to her immense erudition
and her colossal powers of mind. That he is oppressed with his
own sense of inferiority is apparent to Morella herself, who
recognises that this is the deep-seated cause of his hostility
towards her and hence his lack of love:
But, indeed, the time had now arrived when my wife's society
oppressed me as a spell. I could no longer bear the touch of her
wan fingers, not the low tone of her musical language, nor the
lustre of her eyes. And she knew all this, but did not upbraid;
she seemed conscious of my weakness or my folly, and, smiling,
called it - Fate. Yet was she woman, and pined away
daily. (n, 227)
His resentment of her is so great that even when she is sick and
dying he grows impatient when the moment of her death is
postponed. In dying Morella gives birth to a child for whom the
narrator is now able to show genuine care, since she presents no
threat to him: 'and I loved her with a love more fervent than I had
believed it possible to feel for any denizen of the earth' (n, 233).
Even this formulation is strangely revealing, since it suggests that
the narrator is only able to love people freely when they are finally
dead. However, his feelings are rapidly transformed, 'the heaven
of this pure affection' (ibid.) is darkened by the extraordinarily
rapid growth of the child, who all too soon appears as a
simulacrum of Morella.
Why is it that the narrator finds this similarity so demoralising?
It is because the child seems to be such a perfect replica of her
mother that it casts doubt on the assumption that every being has
its own separate, unique and autonomous existence, and therefore
implies that the narrator, no less than the daughter, is Morella's

double. In a very real sense the child could have no resemblance to
him, since he has no distinctive quality in which such resemblance
might be traced. But it also suggests that his cherished hopes of
freedom and release after the death of his wife are doomed to be
thwarted. The narrator destroys the child and Morella by uttering
the deadly word ofher name at a baptismal ceremony. To name is
to fix, specify and isolate a particular person, and in doing so the
narrator is finally able to separate his existence from hers- though
the irony of a baptismal ceremony that becomes a moment of
death is patent. Yet this is a moment of baptism. The narrator
through his wilful and excessive action finally kills the person who
has been destroying him through the obsession that he has for her,
and thereby achieves an identity of his own.
Ligeia is the most romantically presented of these dominant
women but it is also here that Poe makes it explicit that it is the
weakness and inadequacy of the narrator himself that produces
this sense of excessive power and his own subordination to it. After
quoting joseph Glanville- 'For God is but a great will pervading
all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield him to the
angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of
his will' (n, 310) -he immediately goes on to attribute such a
Godlike intensity to Ligeia:
Length of years, and subsequent reflection, have enabled me to

trace, indeed, some remote connection between this passage in
the English moralist and a portion of the character ofLigeia. An
intensity in thought, action, or speech, was possibly, in her, a
result, or at least an index, of that gigantic volition which,
during our long intercourse, failed to give other and more
immediate evidence of its existence. Of all the women whom I
have ever known, she, the outwardly calm, the ever-placid
Ligeia, was the most violently a prey to the tumultuous vultures
of stern passion. (n, 315)
However, the narrator feels no antagonism towards Ligeia but, on

the contrary, respects her vast knowledge and is happy to respect
her and learn from her, to submit to her superior wisdom: 'I was
sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself, with
a child-like confidence, to her guidance' (n, 316). Ligeia's
presence is as all-pervading as that of Morella, and her unnoticed
arrivals and departures suggest a ubiquitous divine spirit, but

instead of demoralising him it figures rather as an amniotic fluid
that sustains his very existence. Ligeia is necessary to him and
with her death a tremendous void opens up.
Stricken with grief the narrator is driven to extremities. It is as if
he endeavours to re-create and restore the excessiveness ofLigeia
by indulging in the excessive himself. He buys a desolate English
abbey and after furnishing it in the most extravagant and ornate
style allows himself to become 'a bounden slave in the trammels of
opium' (n, 320). One of the most significant features of this
decoration is that it represents an attempt to animate the
inanimate. The abbey is festooned and wreathed in an absolute
riot of pattern which is suggestive of energy and movement. The
ceiling is 'elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque
specimens of a semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device' (n, 321), and
hanging from it there is a huge censor that is filled with
perforations 'so contrived that there writhed in and out of them, as
if endued with a serpent vitality, a continual succession of
parti-colored fires' (ibid.). Most significant of all, the lofty walls
surrounding the ebony bed are draped in voluminous tapestries
whose design appears to change according to the position from
which the bed is viewed. Moreover, 'The phantasmagoric effect
was vastly heightened by the artificial introduction of a strong
continual current of wind behind the draperies- giving a hideous
and uneasy animation to the whole' (n, 322).
To this monstrous sarcophagus he brings his new bride, Lady
Rowena Travanion ofTremaine, who is identified only by her blue
eyes and fair hair; in other words solely by those features which
differentiate her from Ligeia, who had raven-black hair and
equally dark eyes. In the light of the subsequent denouement it is
difficult not to think of her as a kind of human equivalent of the
purlioned letter- signifying an excessive difference that will prove
to be illusory. Now the narrator is free to acknowledge his love for
Ligeia as never before: 'Now, then, did my spirit fully and freely
burn with more than all the fires of her own' (n, 323). It is as if he
has become imbued with her own intensity. Over and over again
he calls upon her by name, a naming that signifies not death, as in
Morella, but the possibility of restoration to life. Ifonly the desire is
passionate-enough reality, even death itself may bend to the
imperious demands of the ideal. If death is, as Glanville suggests,
only a weakness of the will, then there are still grounds for hope.
It is important here to note the excessive powers of the hero. For

Ligeia herself did not want to die and desperately struggled
against it. Yet she was forced to succumb nevertheless. But Poe
now stresses that his fervour is greater than hers and it is therefore
his will that can work the transformation. As Rowena lies in a
state of suspended animation, as the result of swallowing four
brilliantly coloured drops of liquid, the narrator is brought to
thinking not of her but of his far greater love for Ligeia. As the
body finally bears the unmistakable symptoms of death he
indulges in 'passionate waking visions ofLigeia' (n, 327). After an
hour the body is momentarily and miraculously restored to life
but them abruptly loses animation again. Once more he gives
himself up to visions of Ligeia and this time the intensity of his
emotion is such that the corpse rises up to proclaim its re-creation
as Ligeia in an image of startling plenitude:
She let fall from her head the ghastly cerements which had
confined it, and there streamed forth, into the rushing
atmosphere of the chamber, huge masses of long dishevelled
hair; it was blacker than the wings of the midnight. (n, 330)
The evident horror of this moment is psychologically intensified

by the narrator's realisation that the consummation he has
dreamed of is in reality frightening. So long as he longs for her and
loves her as a lost object his feeling is creative, forceful and
energetic and it is as if a stream of power has flowed out of her into
him, but the paradox that each lives at the expense of the other
cannot be evaded. When she returns, she returns not as Ligeia but
as an emblem of death. Ligeia's presence is inescapably excessive.
By contrast, 'Eleonora', the last of these tales named after a
woman with whom the narrator is obsessed ends happily. The
narrator is released from his fixation on Eleonora, his lost love,
and is finally able to love another. What may seem puzzling in this
story are his references to his madness, since there seems no
special reason why he should mistrust his lyrical memoirs of the
Valley of the Many-Colored Grass. But, of course, the fear is that
his emotion has been excessive and will thus indefinitely bind him
to the past in what is nothing less than a living death. The tears
that he sheds at the feet ofErmengade are tears ofjoy that he is still
able to live.
In addition to being the most celebrated, 'The Fall of the House
ofUsher' is the most subtle, dramatic and intricately constructed

of Poe's tales, and, although it contains many motifs that occur
elsewhere, they are significantly reworked and transposed in the
composition of a portrait ofRoderick Usher, the aesthetic hero. A
particularly important feature of the tale is the emphasis that Poe
gives to landscape. A traveller on horseback approaching the
melancholy House of Usher is disturbed by the extraordinary
impression which the whole environment makes upon him and for
which he is quite unable to give any rational explanation:
I looked upon the scene before me- upon the mere house, and
the simple landscape features of the domain- upon the bleak
walls- upon the vacant eye-like windows- upon a few rank
sedges- and upon a few white trunks of decaying trees- with an
utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly
sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller
upon opium - the bitter lapse into everyday life- the hideous
dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a
sickening of the heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought
which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of
the sublime. What was it- I paused to think- what was it that
so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House ofUsher? It
was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the
shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered, I was
forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that
while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple
natural objects which have the power of this affecting us, still
the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our
depth. (n, 397-8)
Thus, unlike in 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', which displays

the irresistible triumph of reason and in which Dupin gives early
notice ofhis ability by analysing the narrator's thought processes,
at the very outset we are presented with overwhelming morbid
sensations that are inescapably irrational and resistant to reason.
Unlike the true Sublime that in colossal mountains and turbulent
seas creates an irresistible sense of power and presence, the world'
of Usher is an anti-Sublime characterised by vacancy and
absence. There is an appalling lifelessness in the landscape and
the eye is given no secure anchorage or point of rest. The whitened
tree trunks and few sedges seem mere inert fragments of nature.
1 Thomas Cole's The Architect's Dream.
2 Old Hickory: portrait of Andrew Jackson by John Vanderlyn.
3a George Caleb Bingham's Stump Speaking.
3b John C, Wild's Cincinnati: The Public Landing, 1835.

. ·~ · ~ · ~...
·~ I-I , ELoER . &;Co 6"5 CoRNH IL L·

~ . ·18b5.
4a Frontispiece to Hawthorne's Marble 4b 'On the Edge of a Precipice' : an

Faun, originally published under the title illustration from Transformation.
Transformation by Smith, Elder & Co. in
1865.
Everything has been drained of vividness and colour. Grey, the

colour of colourlessness, is repeatedly mentioned, but so also is
black. The world lies silent and menacingly still. Even the house
itself is a nullity. In Poe's description of the exterior what is
foregrounded is its 'excessive antiquity' (n, 400), reflected above
all in a layer offungi that completely covers the building, so it as if
all that exists of the house is that which conceals, corrodes and
fissures it. Within the mansion itself it is hard to discern particular
objects in the feeble gleams oflight, and the overriding impression
is of confusion, darkness and gloom. Usher's own works reflect
this environment. 'The Haunted Palace' describes the loss of an
idyllic world of harmony and plenitude and ends on a note of
dissonance and vacancy as a hideous throng rushes 'like a rapid
ghastly river I Through the pale door' (n, 407). One of his
paintings depicts an enormously long 'vault or tunnel' - the
uncertainty extends even as to what it is - that has 'low walls,
smooth, white, without interruption or device' (n, 405). Yet it is as
if only art can master this absence and vacancy and endeavour to
give beauty and meaning to the world.
Roderick Usher is the extreme aesthete, the excessive hero par
excellence, who in his determination to live exclusively on his own
terms and in accordance with his own sensibility constructs his
entire existence in opposition to the banality of the ordinary
world. If Roderick Usher has not actually built his own world, as
Emerson recommended, he nevertheless leads a more majestically
exclusive life than any the sage of Concord could have envisaged.
Usher is utterly indifferent to everyday obligations and
expectations. Everything passes him by as if he were in a trance.
His bemused and fragmented consciousness always seems to lack
an adequate object except in those rare and brief moments when
his imagination is aroused. Absolutely everything about Roderick
Usher is characterised by disproportion. As a child the narrator
remembers his excessive reserve, yet when Usher greets him he
feels that his friendliness, though perfectly genuine, is
nevertheless overdone. But what above all is distinctive about him
is his 'excessive nervous agitation' (n, 402), which manifests itself
in rapid and unpredictable changes of mood, and in an aversion to
sounds, odours, textures, flavours and brightness of light, which
are rendered intolerable to him by his 'morbid acuteness of the
senses' (n, 403). He is only uninhibited and spontaneous when he
gives himself up to the raptures of musical or poetic improvisation
and his mental powers are brought momentarily into focus:
But the fervidfacility of his impromptus could not be accounted

for. They must have been, and were, in the notes, as well as in
the words of his wild fantasias (for he not infrequently
accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the
result of the intense mental collectedness and concentration to
which I have previously alluded as observable only in
particular moments of the highest artificial excitement.
(n, 406)
Usher is only fully himself as an artist, indeed only truly lives as an

artist, yet even in these exalted moments there is evidence of'the
tottering ofhis lofty reason' (ibid.). His sensibility is so acute, his
awareness and sensibility are so great, that existence even in the
most carefully controlled environment becomes a torment. He
experiences so much that he can scarcely live at all.
The atmosphere of the House of Usher is so unreal and
dreamlike that even the narrator becomes confused. He has to try
and throw off a disturbing fancy in his mind that some strange
miasma hovers over the mansion, the decayed trees, the grey wall
and the still, mysterious tarn: 'Shaking off from my spirit what
must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect
of the building' (n, 400); yet even this 'real aspect' scarcely yields
anything very tangible. But for Roderick Usher the division
between dream and reality, objective and subjective, has been
completely obliterated. In his strangely confused and disordered
state of mind he believes in 'the sentience of all vegetable things'
(n, 408), yet at the same time he is incapable of recognising that
the faint blush on his sister Madeleine's face and bosom, her
lingering smile, are actually signs of life. It is this disorder in
Usher's mind that gives the ending of 'The Fall of the House of
Usher' a distinctive poignancy. The narrator endeavours to
distract him from the agitation in his mind, which has apparently
been provoked by the tumult of a violent whirlwind, by reading
him the 'Mad Trist' of Sir Launcelot Canning in the hope that 'the
excitement which now agitated the hypochondria, might find
relief (for the history of mental disorder is full of similar
anomalies) even in the extremeness of the folly I should read' (n,
413).
But the excessiveness of the tale within a tale is overpowered by
the excessiveness of the tale itself. The shrieks and ringing sounds
of the narrative are echoed within the castle, but their reference is
actually displaced and has a significance still more terrifying: the
attempts of Madeleine to escape from a living death in her coffin.
And Usher is finally forced to distinguish fact from fiction, the
reality from the ideal, in an effort that actually destroys him:
And now- to-night- Ethelred- hal hal- the breaking of the

hermit's door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangor
of the shield!- say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the
grating of the iron hinges ofher prison, and her struggles within
the coppered archway of the vault! Oh whither shall I fly? Will
she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my
haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not
distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart?
Madman!' - here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked
out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul-
'Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!' (n, 416)
For Roderick Usher a recall to reality can only take the form of
death! His immersion in an imaginative world has been
purchased at an intolerable price, for his sister as for himself. 'The
Fall ofthe House ofUsher', like 'The Masque ofthe Red Death',
represents the failure of all such attempts to create a self-sufficient
aesthetic domain, though for Poe this was a deeply cherished
dream none the less, as 'The Domain of Arnheim' testifies.
For all his eccentricity there is a strange nobility in Roderick
Usher, but the same can scarcely be said of the narrator who styles
himself William Wilson, whom Poe quite explicitly conceives as
being thoroughly depraved because ofhis ungovernable passions.
'William Wilson' is the prototype of a whole series of Poe
narratives in which the protagonist is presented as being
completely under the sway of irrational forces and thus totally
unable to hold back from the commission of the most frightful
crimes. Such a formulation also points the way in which the
traditional dominance of reason or conscience is subverted in
Poe's writing, since such destructive compulsions are always
already there in the excessive hero, so that what he lacks above all
is some restraining power in the mind that can bring him up with a
jerk in the midst of his obsession or otherwise deflect him from his
course.
Poe's wicked characters proclaim themselves by their

possession of a preternatural dynamism. In 'The Man of the
Crowd' the narrator, patrolling the London streets, is struck by a
decrepit old man whose appearance paradoxically suggests 'the
ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of
avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of
merriment, of excessive terror, of intense- of supreme- despair'
(n, 511). The narrator's suspicions are apparently confirmed by
contradictions in the man's appearance, the superb quality of his
linen despite its scruffiness, the glimpse of a diamond and a
dagger, and he decides to follow him. The narrator is a good
gumshoe and he follows the old man all through the night across
the most desolate and dilapidated parts of London, yet he never
actually sees him do anything. If the narrator believes that he is
'the type and genius of deep crime' this is as much because ofhis
'mad energy' as because of his continual immersion in the crowd
(n, 515). Energy is always potential crime, unless reason is there
to apply the brake.
In William Wilson's case what is ominous is that even as a
young child he is 'self-willed, addicted to the wildest caprices, and
a prey to the most ungovernable passions' (n, 427), so that he
completely dominates his own parents and makes his own will the
law. William Wilson, of course, is the archetypal split personality,
divided between his own irrational and compulsive nature and a
double, a better half, who seeks to restrain him. At an early point
in the story Poe suggests the prevalence of such discrepancies in
identity by describing how the apparently benign vicar would
neverthless beat children in the most brutal fashion: 'Oh gigantic
paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution!' (n, 429).
Poe lays great emphasis on the vast, rambling and
indecipherable nature of the old schoolhouse: 'Then the lateral
branches were innumerable- inconceivable- and so returning in
upon themselves, that our most exact ideas in regard to the whole
mansion were not very far different from those which we pondered
upon infinity' (ibid.) Symbolically the complexity of the building
is the complexity of the human mind itself, and it is as ifWilliam
Wilson actually loses his rational and responsible side in all these
labyrinthine passages. The labyrinth signifies both the pathos of
loss and the pathos of his loss of mastery: it is his inability to
maintain a rational control over his actions that leads him with
increasing rapidity down a destructive path: 'From comparatively
trivial wickedness I passed, with the stride of a giant, into more

than the enormities of an Elah-Gabalus' (n, 426-7), yet at the
same time his irrational self is irked beyond measure by the
phantasmagorical admonitions he continues to receive as iffrom a
ghost, delivered in a very low whisper. Indeed, an ironic light is
cast on the whole tale by Poe's statement, 'To the moralist it will
be unnecessary to say, in addition, that Wilson and myselfwere
the most inseparable of companions' (n, 433). The problem, of
course, is that they are both inseparable and not inseparable
enough.
In all respects, William Wilson's behaviour is excessive. He
gives himself up to a variety of dissipations and, not content with
recklessly spending his own wealth, insists on ruining others by
cheating them at cards. These episodes are triggered by his flight
from himself, when, having stolen through the 'wilderness of
narrow passages' (n, 437) in the school to the other Wilson's
room, he is so startled by the unmistakable and hitherto
unrecognised resemblance to himself that he leaves the school
abruptly. Of his subsequent life at Eton he then relates,
The vortex of thoughtless folly into which I there so

immediately and so recklessly plunged, washed away all but the
froth of my past hours, ingulfed at once every solid or serious
impression, and left to memory only the veriest levities of a
former existence. (n, 438)
It is as if William Wilson's identity has virtually dissolved and

much of the pathos of the latter part of the story comes from the
fact that it is as if the other ghostly Wilson is endeavouring to
recall him to an existence that is now utterly and inescapably lost
beyond recall. The symbolic culmination of William Wilson's
excessiveness is the 'exceedingly luxurious cloak of rare furs' in a
style of his own 'fantastic invention' which he wears to the card
game, at which he ruins Glendinning, a wealthy young ·parvenu
nobleman (n, 444). The cloak is not merely excessive in itself it is
also a marker of the criminal excessiveness that has led to the
concealment of a number of packs of prepared cards in the
capacious pockets of his embroidered morning wrapper. This
excessiveness is itself doubled when Wilson is forced to leave in
disgrace with two such extravagant cloaks, in all respects
identical, after he has been exposed by his double, who leaves a
similar one behind. Wilson's personality, apparently so rich,

profuse and overpowering, is, in reality, hollow. The sumptuous,
unforeseen multiplication of the cloaks only demonstrates how
this pursuit of the excessive can never cover up his inner
emptiness. Significantly he leaves with both of them on his arm, as
if the fact ofhis exposure cannot be denied on a sartorial level and
therefore his spiritual nakedness must be displayed for all to see-
'a perfect agony ofhorror and of shame' (ibid.).
Finally Wilson can bear his double no longer, for he continues
to rebuke him and assert authority over him. Despite the violence
of his passions he is oppressed by the 'apparent omnipresence and
omnipotence' of the other Wilson, which forces upon him a sense
of his own 'utter weakness and helplessness' (n, 446). The
problem is that he can never act freely and with genuine
spontaneity so long as his thoughts are sullied by moral reminders
from the whispered voice. He is the victim of a dissociation
between rational and irrational that seems incapable of
resolution. Yet it must be resolved, for the double constitutes a
sense oflimit which he cannot bear and which it is his very nature
to challenge. In a paroxysm of energy the other William Wilson is
slain:
The contest was brief indeed. I was frantic with every species of
wild excitement, and felt within my single arm the energy and
power of a multitude. In a few seconds I forced him by sheer
strength against the wainscoting, and thus, getting him at
mercy, plunged my sword, with brute ferocity, repeatedly
through and through his bosom. (n, 447)
Poe ingeniously concludes the story by linking the recognition

that Wilson has in fact murdered himself with his sense that he is
looking at his own pale and blood-spattered image in the mirror,
for until now he has refused to acknowledge and accept the other
Wilson. After this final excessive act there is nothing left to
destroy.
With such tales as 'The Black Cat' and 'The Tell-tale Heart'
the distinction between reason and the irrational, still clearly
drawn in 'William Wilson', is finally obliterated. Even the very
possibility of a rational explanation for apparently irrational
phenomena, so confidently asserted in 'The Murders in the Rue
Morgue', is put in question. For in 'The Black Cat' and 'The
Tell-tale Heart' the very sequential exposition of Poe's narrative

mode, with its general air of progressively reaching the heart of the
matter, is itself parodied and mocked. In each case there is an
initial denial of madness which the tale progressively contradicts,
so that the reader is never within the perspective of the narrative
articulation but forced outside it through the manifest
disproportion it exhibits. Moreover, it is evident that irrationality
is not without its own reasons, so that each narrator is able to
explain himself with a certain lucidity. In 'The Black Cat' and
'The Imp of the Perverse' a theory of perversity is developed
whereby the individual attacks someone precisely because he has
given him no offence, but such an explanation still fails to explain
and is, in any event, contaminated, since it is proffered by the
murderers themselves. The narrator of'The Black Cat' in offering
his own version of the matter nevertheless concedes that 'some
intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my
own' will be able to detect 'an ordinary succession of very natural
causes and effects' (m, 850). But the point is that the causes and
provocations described in the tales are so very far from being
ordinary that the narrator's suggestion that they could be so
reduced may rather be constructed as evidence of how far his
derangement has gone.
In 'The Black Cat' many of the strangest features of the
narrator's behaviour are not registered in his own account of it.
His vicious treatment of the cat, first cutting an eye out in a
'gin-nurtured' (m, 851) mood of malevolence and then hanging it,
is certainly to be deplored. But what is far stranger is that,
whereas after the death of the cat he weeps bitter tears of remorse,
after burying an axe in the brain of his wife when she has
endeavoured to restrain him a second time he sleeps soundly and
tranquilly, and, in the absence of the cat, 'the guilt of my dark
deed disturbed me but little' (m, 858). The nature of his obsession
is such that the black cat becomes the signifier of violence and
criminality and he cannot even feel remorse unless the cat is
symbolically implicated. His response to the black cat is so
excessive that it completely swallows up everything else.
In the same way the madness of the narrator of'The Tell-tale
Heart' is reflected in his ability never to perceive the old man
whom he murders as a person, but to see him only metonymically
as a 'vulture eye' (m, 794) and a 'tell-tale heart'. His response to
the world is structured in terms of strange analogies and aversions
which are self-validating and against which there can be no

argument or appeal. Of all his motives fear is the most prominent.
In both tales the narrator feels a pathological anxiety and hostility
in the face of the other. Like William Wilson, each feels
profoundly threatened. Running through these tales and others is
the implicit suggestion that such existential anxiety is produced
by a too-powerful, an excessive imagination that causes the
individual to feel that his very identity is being invaded and
threatened. So in 'The Tell-tale Heart' there is an inexorable
culmination; the 'hellish tattoo' (m, 795) in the old man's heart
becomes indistinguishable from the narrator's own and persists
even after the old man has died. Poe's characters cannot but be
excessive- and if they were not excessive they could not exist. It is
a form of psychic defence.
4 Emerson, Thoreau and
Whitman: Transcendental
Supermen
In his classic analysis of Emerson's thought George Santayana
writes, 'His constant refrain is the omnipotence of imaginative
thought; its power first to make the world, then to understand it,
and finally to rise above it.' 1 With Emerson it is always morning.
In an endless unfolding of prospects, yesterday always pales into
insignificance in the dawn of today, just as tomorrow will be
immeasurably greater still. What is most characteristic of
American Trancendentalism, what marks it as a bundle of
attitudes rather than as a system of ideas is the indignant rejection
of any kind of restraint. The idea of a limit is unthinkable and
unacceptable. In the act of unthinking it, the limit itself
disappears. Indeed, thought itself is a work of demolition, a
mighty hammer taken to all the edifices and obstacles that shackle
the human spirit. Transcendentalism is always implicitly beyond
good and evil, since it reverences an interior psychic energy that
must simply be unleashed upon the world in the conviction that
this can only be for the best.
In 'Circles' Emerson writes, 'Beware when the great God lets
loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as
when a conflagration breaks out in a great city, and no man knows
what is safe, or where it will end,' (ECWn, 183). 2 The world cannot
presume to judge genius, since it is genius itself that values and
transvalues the world. For the Superman that Emerson sketches,
the soul is the only conceivable authority or court of appeal and
before it all notions of the hierarchical, the institutional, the
conventional or the exemplary dissolve. Even the perception of
Jesus as the 'divine man', as representing a potentiality available
to all men, which once had seemed so shocking, was soon left
behind by Emerson. Soon after delivering the Divinity School
119
© David Morse 1987
Address at Harvard College, an event that traumatised New

England for a long time afterward, Emerson noted in his journal,
The best experience is beggarly when compared with the

immense possibilities of man. Divine as the life ofjesus is, what
an outrage to rep resent it as tantamount to the Universe! To seize
one accidental good man that happened to exist somewhere at
some time and say to the new born soul Behold thy pattern; aim
no longer to possess entire Nature, to fill the horizon; to fill the
infinite amplitude of being with great life, to be in sympathy &
relation with all creatures, to lose all privateness by sharing all
natural action, shining with the day, undulating with the sea,
growing with the tree, instinctive with the animals, entranced in
beatific with the human reason. Renounce a life so broad and
deep as a pretty dream & go in the harness of that past
individual, assume his manners, speak his speech,- this is the
madness of christendom. The little bigots of each town and
neighbourhood seek thus to subdue the manly and freeborn.
But for this poor dependent fraction of life they breave me of
that magnificent destiny which the young soul has embraced
with auguries of immeasurable hope. I turn my back on these
insane usurpers. The soul always believes in itself. 3
The traditional and exalted aspiration of the imitation of Christ,

as outlined by Thomas a Kempis, suddenly seems unworthy. For
there can be nothing that is already given in the world of
experience that can correspond to or match the potentiality that
lies within, and which is all the more powerful for being
unarticulated and unformulated. To propose a pattern is to
violate the principle of creativity and to strike at the very root of
identity itself. When Christianity is rewritten in accordance with
Romantic aesthetics the recognition of individual uniqueness
must be paramount. Not even Christ can serve as a model for
others. Each person must submit to the inscrutable laws of his
own inner being: 'The Instinct is resistless & and knows the way, &
is melodious, & at all points a god.' 4 Emerson's
Transcendentalism is a theory of the demonic.
For Emerson the appeal of such a doctrine lies in its bipolarity.
For it permits an incredible emphasis on the cascading
potentiality of the individual soul yet can also represent this as no
more than a particular manifestation of omnipresent divine
Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman 121
pulsations. It can endow the most radical and anarchic gestures

with a curious humility, since, although they are expressive of the
person who makes them, they nevertheless are born of an act of
submission to mysterious inner powers whose ultimate trajectory
lies beyond rational and immediate comprehension. The
individual is most potent when he can open himself up to become
a human volcano for the release of stupendous cosmic forces, so
that at such moments all personal specificity is eclipsed: 'Beside
his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public
power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human
doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through
him.' 5 Control is a vain and unworthy ambition since it represents
not merely the suppression and dissipation of vital energy but a
false presumption that the shallow socialised self knows better
than the god within. The highest wisdom is simply to accept the
dictates and instinctive promptings of the soul as the
manifestation of an inescapable necessity, in the belief that this
will always be for the best: 'As the traveller who has lost his way,
throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the
animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who
carries us through the world.' 6
Yet even the Romantics had feared the consequences of
submitting to such an inner nemesis. In Gothic fiction especially
there is the ever-present risk of liberating malign and
unpredictable forces, which in some sense are malign precisely
because they are unpredictable. But Emerson is without anxiety.
It is the self that will be judge over good and evil rather than
submit to their imposition as moral criteria. In 'Self-Reliance'
Emerson relates how he was unmoved by the nervous suggestion
of a conservative friend that his rejection of Church tradition
might be inspired by the Devil:
I replied, 'They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the

Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil.' No law can be
sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but
names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is
what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against
it. (ECW, II, 30)
me~son has the confidence to resist his friend's suggestion not

simply because the power ofNew England Calvinism is waning,
but because he believes he has arguments from within the

Christian tradition to dispute it. Each person must hearken to his
own inner sources of spiritual illumination if he is to find the truth,
and distrust all conventional wisdom, which may well be a
corruption of the Christian message and a mere rationalisation for
torpor and moral backsliding. The soul must subject everything
which it encounters to a phenomenological bracketing: (world)
(society) (the Church) - all must be suspended before the
imperious interrogation of that authentic centre. And of all
concepts 'the Devil' is one that can be bracketed with the utmost
confidence. Emerson clearly recognised that religious ideas were
being deployed to ideological ends. Conscious of the moral and
institutional bankruptcy of theN ew England churches, he felt that
they had to be sloughed off, like a snakeskin, to make way for the
emergence of the pristine, glistening individual. Moreover, since
it is the cumulative weight of the past and tradition that oppresses
the contemporary generation and inhibits men and women from a
full development of their own potentialities, there is really no
point in being either half-hearted or meticulous about what it is
that one wants to reject. To pick and choose among the relics of
the past is still to be bound by the past itself when what is called for
is the sense of psychological release that comes from recognising
no reference but oneself. All notions of social and cultural
conditioning must be cast aside. In 'The Transcendentalist'
Emerson writes,
You think me the child of my circumstances: I make my

circumstance. Let any thought or motive of mine be different
from that they are, the difference will transform my condition
and economy. I- this thought which is called I- is the mould
into which the world is poured like melted wax. The mould is
invisible, but the world betrays the shape of the mould. You call
it the power of circumstance but it is the power of me.
(ECW, I, 204)
If this is the case then it is out of an imperious sense of inner

necessity that the world must be remade.
Still the world figures as a limit on an individuality that must
remain unbounded, it follows that the Transcendentalist spirit
will always be one of excess: 'Shall we say then that
Transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or excess of Faith; the
presentiment of a faith proper to man in his integrity, excessive

only when his imperfect obedience hinders the satisfaction of his
wish?' (1, 206). So the very meaning of 'excessive' is transvalued.
It is no longer a question of going too far, but of being unable to
live up to an exultant, excessive creed. For Emerson the sin lies in
the omnipresent experience of limitation, not in the
Transcendentalist spirit, which summons man to an awakening
more profound than any contemplated by revivalist preachers.
Yet even Emerson's heady rhetoric could not have seemed
altogether excessive to his contemporaries, since it is uttered in a
context where inflationary discourse is the norm. So Emerson's
problem is actually less that he is likely to shock and offend and
more that his words will be automatically discounted as just
another hyperbolic sign of the times. The real question is whether
anything he has to say has practical consequences. If it leads men
to leave the Church or break the law, it is to be distrusted. If it
leaves things as they are, then it can be seen as adding just one
more euphonious voice to an American litany of self-praise. The
question of how rhetoric relates to a real world was one that
Emerson, like most of his fellow countrymen, was prepared to
postpone to the Greek Kalends. For, if his purpose is primarily
inspirational, then all that matters is that his language should
have the requisite psychological effect. Emerson is only one of
many - though he is undoubtedly the most conspicuous - who
believe that, if a rallying-cry is uttered with enough conviction and
the banner held high enough, then the cohorts will start lining up
behind. As Emerson sees it, once he has shattered the silence with
his imperious reveille, the question of what response seems most
appropriate is one that must be left in the hands of others. Indeed,
Emerson's doctrine of the self requires it.
For the New England of the 1830s and 1840s the doctrine of the
'divine man' was an intellectual time-bomb, primarily because it
was inherently unstable and because there could be no easy
consensus on what intellectual commitment to it might imply.
There was a whole range of positions, from the minimal to the
maximal, in which the controversy became intricately bound up
with the question ofhow much, if any, of the intellectual baggage
of historical Christianity should be retained. The triumphal
advance of Transcendentalism in the late 1830s resembles
nothing so much as the giddy ascent of a gas-filled balloon, in
which Channing, respected pastor of the Federal Street Church in
Boston and one of the first to throw ballast over the side, is later
reduced to the role of anxious and distraught witness as the young
Emerson energetically hurls overboard the remaining cargo of
American Protestantism and sends the light craft swaying and
frantically rocking on its unknown journey into the empyrean.
The debate was inaugurated by Channing in his address
'Likeness to God' of 1828, in which he was concerned to combat
the traditional Calvinist distinction between the elect and the
damned, a doctrine which, he believed, simply encouraged a sense
of fatalism and despair. Against this Channing insisted on the
weight of Christian testimony that lent support to ideas of divinity
in human nature. But Channing's discourse itself was to be read in
the context of an ongoing debate about the nature of the Christian
message, in which Channing, though stressing its more hopeful
side, never for one moment doubted that man's moral nature
manifested itself in his capacity to choose between good and evil.
He recognised that to insist on the human capacity for
development and self-realisation could have disruptive
consequences if it were to be at the expense of normal social
existence. In words that acquire an oddly prophetic cast from the
direction subsequently taken by Transcendentalism, he warned
that 'To resemble our Creator we need not fly from society' and
that to do so mi9ht lead to 'disproportion, distortion, and
sickliness of mind'.
Sampson Reed, a disciple ofSwedenborg and, like Channing, a
significant influence on Emerson in his formative years, was more
radical. Reed inverted the terms of the whole of the discussion.
The great sin was not to proclaim man's divinity but to deny it.
Moreover, this was not a greatness by proxy but an actual
indwelling divine presence in which the distinction between man
and God is obliterated. Although man must acknowledge the
ultimate source of his power, his sense of himself is nevertheless
transfigured by the consciousness of himself as a divine vessel:
'Know then that genius is divine not when man thinks that he is
God, but when he acknowledges that his powers are from God.
Here is the link of the finite with the infinite, of the divine with the
human: this is the humility which exalts.' 8
But Reed's message was ultimately less inspiriting than it
appeared to be, since its uplift was purchased at a heavy price. By
attributing so much in human activity to the workings of the
divine, he effectively denied man any autonomous significance in
the universe. Man cannot display any independence or creativity

whether in the arts or in the development of science since to do so
is to attempt to go beyond nature. Reed insists, 'Fiction in poetry
must fall with theory in science, for they depend equally on works
of creation', 9 and by 'fiction' he means 'whatever is not in exact
agreement with the creative spirit ofGod'. 10 Man's thoughts can
correspond with a God-created universe, but any infusion of a spirit
of independence will be heresy.
This sinister creed undoubtedly left its mark on Emerson and
offered a safety valve whereby the pressure from any dangerous
head of intellectual steam could be safely and prudently reduced.
Emerson himself put forward a correspondence theory of
language, and, despite his interest in the arts and his grandiose
conception of the poet, nevertheless saw them as always
potentially limited and falling short of the natural perfection of the
oak leaf. Since what Reed gave bountifully with one hand he took
away with the other, the problem for his contemporaries was to
reformulate the issue in more acceptable terms. But Sampson
Reed gave the notion of the 'divine man' a capacity for violent
oscillation that it was fated never to lose. When George Ripley, the
subsequent instigator of the Brook Farm community experiment,
composed his 'Discourses on the Philosophy of Religion' in 1836
he was already conscious of the necessity for judicious
formulation:
When it is said that man may become a partaker of the divine

nature, let us be careful to understand what is meant by the
assertion. We shall otherwise fall into the region of
extravagance and mysticism. To be a partaker of the divine
nature is to possess, in some degree, the qualities we attribute to
the Supreme Divinity. Now it is plain that man possesses many
qualities of an opposite character. With regard to this fact there
can be no doubt, and there is no controversy.''
But of course there was a controversy, and Ripley, conscious that

the debate was being carried forward into unknown territory, was
giving notice that he would not be following the 'divine man'
will-o' -the-wisp into some disastrous quagmire.
The response of Bronson Alcott, whose 'Doctrine and
Discipline ofHuman Culture' belongs to the same year, was very
different. For Alcott the idea of man's divinity was not something
that should be left in the hands of ministers and theologians but a

goal which could actually be realised through a progressive
programme of education. 'Genius', wrote Alcott, is 'the free and
harmonious play of all the faculties of a human being':
It draws its life from within. It is self-subsistent. It feeds on

holiness, lives in the open vision of truth, enrobes itself in the
light of beauty, and bathes its powers in the fount of
temperance. It aspires after the perfect. It loves freedom. It
dwells in unity. All men have it, yet it does not appear in all
men. It is obscured by ignorance, quenched by evil; discipline
does not reach it, nor opportunity cherish it. Yet there it is- an
original indestructable element of every spirit; -and sooner or
later, in this corporeal, or in the spiritual era- at some point of
the soul's development- it shall be tempted forth, and assert its
claims in the life of the spirit. It is the province of education to
wake it and discipline it into perfection which is its end and for
which it ever thirsts. 12
Although this may appear to be perfectly straightforward nco-

Platonism of a kind that has long been familiar within the
Christian tradition, its significance is transposed by the very
confidence with which Alcott adopts it as a guide to action and the
foundation of an experimental programme. Alcott's journal of
1837 sheds a facinating light on the temper of the times. In May
he conversed with Emerson and found him in almost total
agreement with his beliefs, yet an earlier discussion with
Channing left the elder statesman ofTranscendentalism aghast:
I spent Tuesday evening with Dr Channing. We conversed

mostly on the connection of the Divine and Human Nature. I
attempted to show the identity of the human soul, in its diviner
action, with God. At this he expressed great dislike, even
horror. He felt that doctrines of this character undermined the
very foundations of virtue, confounded the nature of good and
evil, destroyed human responsibility, and demolished free
willY
Alcott and Channing had come rapidly to a parting of the ways.

Channing had originally sponsored the experimental school
which Alcott and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody had opened at the
Masonic Temple in Boston in 1834, but when, on its publication

in 1836, a scandal broke out over Alcott's Conversations with
Children on the Gospel, based on his work at the school, Channing
felt unable to support him further, and in 1839 Alcott was
eventually forced to close his school for lack of support.
Channing's carefully weighted doctrinal emphasis had become
the single tenet of an enraptured faith that sought to sweep all
before it.
Emerson's own first steps were more circumspect. By
comparison with some of the more reckless formulations that were
to become so definitive ofTranscendentalism in its optative mood,
and which Emerson himself did so much to encourage, 'Nature',
his first intellectual foray of 1836, seems a relatively cautious
document, which only discards its tone of measured sobriety in its
closing pages, themselves assigned to an Orphic muse. Although
much of the argument of the essay is conventional, it acquires a
concentrated force and energy by its aphoristic and elliptical
mode of presentation, which seeks to dazzle and entrance the
reader by its rapid succession of instances and poetic analogies. At
the time ofwriting Emerson had deeply immersed himself in the
mystical writings of Sweden borg, whom he invokes as an example
of the unfolding of the divine spirit in man, and Jacob Boehme,
whose Aurora or Morgenlicht enters the argument through the
time-honoured distinction on which it is based: 'The difference
between the actual and the ideal force of man is happily figured by
the schoolmen, in saying, that the knowledge of man is an evening
knowledge, vespertina cognitio, but that of God is a morning
knowledge, matutina cognitio' (ECW, 1, 43).
In the spirit of the mystical tradition Emerson insists on man's
access to higher sources of illumination, but instead of mapping
out an arduous path of ascent he stresses rather the veritable ease
with which people can tap the sources of divine power and
harmony, which, in some sense, are in nature, but which, more
truly, are in man's apprehension of nature, which is both himself
and within him the presence of God. Given the powerful lock
which this triadic identification establishes, the problem is no
longer one of explaining how man could have this power but
rather one of accounting for a situation in which he appears to
have lost it. Here, as with Sampson Reed, language occupies a
crucial stage in the argument. In accordance with eighteenth-
century arguments on the connection between early moments in a
culture and the existence of genius, Emerson suggests that at one

time man was wedded to nature through a teeming and
spontaneous metaphoricity that was at once poetic and true, and
that it is through a progressive debasement of language that this
alienation has come about. But, if man can only reconnect himself
with nature and restore purity of speech, he can at the same time
remedy the rent in his own being. It is at this point that more
subversive implications that he will subsequently develop more
fully work their way into Emerson's argument. For on the
completion of the circle joining God, humanity and nature there
will be no need at all for intermediaries. All speech will be
authoritative and true. Everyone will be wise. When Emerson
writes,
All things with which we deal, preach to us. What is a farm but
a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants,
blight, rain, insects, sun,- it is a sacred emblem from the first
furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter
overtakes in the fields (1, 26)
he is suggesting that the era of the book, sacred as well as profane,

is now drawing to a close. Instead of deriving their wisdom from
the Bible or from sacred parables, men and women will be able to
consult the oracle of nature directly. Even Jesus will be
unnecessary.
In 'The American Scholar', the Phi Beta Kappa address
delivered at Harvard College in 1837, the hypothetical unity-of-
being sketched out in 'Nature' becomes the basis of an unshakable
personal autonomy. On the face of it, in Emerson's terms the
scholar is not the most likely of heroes, since his lifelong
commitment to the study of books and to the past must be utterly
disabling. So 'the American Scholar' is not quite the
straightforward declaration of cultural independence that it has
often been represented as being, and the case that Emerson wants
to make involved him in some complex argumentation. Emerson's
way with books is to treat them as if they were nature. All books
are the product of universal mind, and, in so far as one recognises
one's own thoughts in them, well and good. But books must not be
allowed to inhibit us in any way, since what was written in the past
can never answer to present or future needs. The reason for this is
that no book can ever entirely free itself from the contingent
circumstances that produce it.
Emerson's thinking on this matter was stimulated by his
reading of Madame de Stael. In a notebook entry of 1835 Emerson
quotes from Madame de Stael's De la littirature considerie dans ses
rapports avec les institutions sociales a passage in which she reproves
Voltaire for being too preoccupied with the particular
circumstances of his own day, circumstances that have already
been superseded: 'A writer ... who searches only into the
immutable nature of man, into those thoughts & sentiments
which must enlighten the mind in every age, is independent of
events; they can never change the order of those truths, which
such a writer unfolds ~ But the conclusion that Emerson
subsequently draws is that such a goal is impossible and it is that
impossibility that creates space for subsequent generations:
As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so

neither can any artist exclude the conventional, the local, the
perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that
shall be as efficient, in all respects, to remote posterity, as to
contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is
found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for
the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit
this. (ECW, r, 55-6)
By this rhetorical trope the books of the past can be seen not as an
ageless repository of wisdom but as part of an endless process of
unfolding revelation in which they become progressively, but
never entirely, superseded. We need never be in awe of the past,
since it is we ourselves who stand at the present peak of an
ever-rising curve and so can look back not in a spirit of regret but
infused with a triumphal and exhilarating gladness: 'The books
which once we valued more than the apple of the eye, we have
quite exhausted. What is that but saying that we have come up
with the point of view which the universal mind took through the
eyes of one scribe; we have been that man, and passed on' (r, 66).
But it still remains to be explained why it is that the scholar
occupies a privileged position in society: the position of truth. At
his best the scholar represents a unity-of-being that other men in
their immersion in their specific occupations have lost. As 'Man
Thinking' (r, 62) the scholar alone can stand apart from the
fashions and vagaries of the day in a commitment to ultimate

truths. Emerson's espousal of such an argument is faintly
disconcerting since he has already suggested the impossibility of
this, but it is validated by a determination to work the models of
progress and degeneration simultaneously. While the world is
always in a process of deterioration, the scholar resists this in a
movement of human consciousness that is nevertheless upward:
He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart. He is to resist the

vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by
preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble
biographies, melodious verse, and all the conclusions ofhistory.
Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in all
solemn hours, has uttered as it commentary on the world of
actions, - these he shall receive and impart, and whatsoever
new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the
passmg men and events of to-day, - this he shall hear and
promulgate. (I, 62-3)
In his isolation he may feel that he is out of step with the world,
but, since that designates mere transitory appearance, the reverse
is true: 'He and he only knows the world' (I, 63). The scholar must
have confidence in himself. Sooner or later the world will come
round to his point of view. In speaking for himselfhe can speak for
everybody. To the 'worrieds' of Cambridge and Boston this
revelation must have come as a great relief. Sooner or later even
the 'huge world' (I, 69) ofJacksonian democracy would have to
submit!
'The American Scholar', though outwardly forceful and
optimistic, is nevertheless permeated by a spirit of philosophical
resignation, but with the Divinity School Address of 1838
Emerson goes over to the attack. The recluse in his monastery
suddenly storms back into the world as a turbulent wandering
friar. The Divinity School Address is the boldest of Emerson's
utterances not simply because of the frankness ofhis attack on the
institutionalised Church- 'The Church seems to totter to its fall,
almost all life extinct' (I, 84)- but because he allows no possibility
of change or renewal from within and because he takes it for
granted that all significant activity must take place outside it. The
notion of 'outside' is in all respects crucial to the sophisticated
rhetoric of Emerson's lecture, since it begins outside in the
teemingful beautiful world of nature, to contrast this negatively

with the church, where such uplifting feelings are seldom to be
had:
In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man

made sensible that he is an infinite soul; that the earth and
heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever
the soul of God? ... The faith should blend with the light of
rising and setting suns, with the flying cloud, the singing bird,
and the breath of flowers. But now the priest's Sabbath has lost
the splendour ofNature; it is unlovely. . . . (I, 85)
So the burden Emerson's discourse assumes is to convey

demonstrably to his audience an inspirational spirit, which will
demonstrate conclusively to them as they listen that they have
indeed been burdened by an intolerable and habitual absence.
The very idea of preaching must be renewed so that those who
hear his message will feel encouraged to venture forth outside the
church, bound by no imperative other than to speak their own
truth:
What hinders that now, everywhere, in pulpits, in lecture-

rooms, in houses, in fields, wherever the invitation of men or
your own occasions lead you, you speak the very truth, as your
life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, faint hearts
of men, with new hope and new revelation? (I, 92)
Preaching in the open air they will be closer both to nature and to
their fellow men. The simplicity of the original gospel message will
be restored. They will no longer be dry-as-dust ministers, cloaked
in dreary robes with bundles of pious tomes under their arm, but
will themselves be prophets, speaking frankly and openly their
glowing words.
For Emerson's own message to be convincing it is therefore
necessary that he himself should display the confidence to assume
the prophetic role. So he begins, not with some scriptural or other
text, nor with low-key introductory remarks, but by calling on
nature as a witness, and launches into a veritable blaze of poetic
language that announces the address itself as a centre of power:
In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the

breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is
spotted with fire and gold in the tint offlowers. The air is full of
birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-
Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart
with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the
stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a
young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the
world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the
crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed
more happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt to
all creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the old
bounty goes forward has not yielded one word of explanation.
One is constrained to respect the perfection of this world in
which our senses converse. (I, 76)
It is in nature, Emerson suggests, not in church, that man finds

himself most completely in communion with God, so his theme is
announced at the very outset. If his style of address seems
excessive, this simply marks it as bearing its own prophetic word
rather than constituting marginalia to some other authoritative
utterance. Moreover, in a Christian setting Emerson does not
hesitate to place a pagan maxim at the centre of his address:
That is always best which gives me to myself. The sublime is

excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself. That
which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God
out of me, makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a
necessary reason for my being. (I, 82-3)
He also makes his doctrine unequivocally psychological. Beliefs

are to be judged by the consequences they have for those who
enter into them. So Calvinism is bad because it demoralises and
paralyses the individual. The creed of the divine man is good
because it produces in each person a magnified sense of his own
worth, an enhancement of the feeling of power. Historical
Christianity has subjected the figure of Christ to a Byzantine
deformation and turned him into a remote and alien figure instead
of acknowledging him as the type of what everyone can be. If there
is no possibility of continuous revelation, then God himself is
dead, since God's presence must be manifested in continuous
pulsations of divine energy. No one should flinch from assuming
the exemplary role of excessive hero, since the only true security
lies in having faith in one's own limitless possibilites and in
rejecting all conformities that stand in their way:
Yourself a newborn bard ofthe Holy Ghost, cast behind you all
conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to
it first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and
money, are nothing to you,- are not bandages over your eyes,
that you cannot see, - but live with the privileges of
immeasurable mind. (1, 90)
Emerson's millennium manifests itself as a breaching of walls and

a bursting of barriers, in which everything that separates man
from man, man from nature, and man from the divine within
himself will be finally cast aside. The new revelation will involve
casting aside the Church itself as the biggest obstacle that still
stands in the way of this final, tumultuous overflowing of the
spirit.
The hostile reception given to the Divinity School Address by
the Harvard authorities intensified Emerson's alienation from
society and his animus against it. He could not fail to be conscious
of the pressures to conform, but, having nailed his colours to the
mast, he was unshakably determined to resist them. Having
already made his break with the Unitarian Church, he was not
now disposed to make any compromises or to bow to the storm.
Now came the hardest part: actually to try to live out the heroic
role that he had only described. As he was thrust back on the
defensive, the consolations of'The American Scholar' returned to
his mind. Shortly after delivering the Divinity School Address,
Emerson returned to Harvard for the Phi Beta Kappa anniversary
and wrote in his diary,
Steady, steady. I am convinced that if a man will be a true

scholar, he shall have perfect freedom. The young people and
the mature hint at odium, & aversion of faces to be presently
encountered in society. I say no: I fear it not. No scholar need
fear it. For if it be true that he is merely an observer, a
dispassionate reporter, no partisan, a singer merely for the love
of music, his is a position of perfect immunity: to him no
disgusts can attach; he is invulnerable. The vulgar think he
would found a sect & would be installed & made much of. He
knows better & much prefers his melons & his woods. Society
has no bribe for me, neither in politics, nor church, nor college,
nor city. 15
For the moment he abjures the role of swaying others and insists
that at least he himself will not be swayed. Society is nothing more
than an unstable and unreliable vortex of shifting opinions. The
scholar can become the centre by his integrity and intellectual
clarity in holding fast to his own position. Although in the
previous year Emerson had observed, 'Society is needed to the
generation of Man', 16 after the Harvard trauma he no longer saw
the necessity. His journals are filled with deprecatory and
disparaging remarks about the vanity and emptiness of the social
world. He described society as a 'Concatenation of errors'. 17 He
rejected Margaret Fuller's lofty and idealistic conception of
society and insisted against it that the social was a theatre of
negativity, a debased public forum rather than the possibility of
exultant communion that he had adumbrated in the Divinity
School Address: 'It seems to me that almost all people descend into
society. All association must be a compromise, &, what is worst,
the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful
natures disappears as they approach each other.' 18 Emerson is
now clear that it is social existence itself that obscures the light
that every man bears in his own heart. Society is implacably
opposed to truth. It is always and necessarily the domain of
Platonic shadows: 'For society is always secondary not primary &
delights in secondaries .... Absolute truths, previous questions,
primary natures, society loathes the sound of & the name of.' 19
Emerson now sees that society is not simply something to be
resisted by a something that resists. Society is a fraying-away of the
authentic.
Emerson's conviction that the individual must resist society
introduced the possibility of dissonance into the harmonious
universe of Transcendentalism. It had been all too easy to posit a
progressive unfolding of the human spirit as it was developed by a
multiplicity of benign influences that were themselves simply the
action of the divine will, manifesting itself in an endless series of
revelations. But it was no longer possible for Emerson to posit a
complementarity between nature and society in the manner of
Sampson Reed:
As the philosophy connected with the natural world is that in

which the mind may take root, by which it may possess an
independence worthy of being whose eternal destiny is in his
own hands - so the moral and civil institutions, the actual
condition of society, is the atmosphere which surrounds and
protects it, in which it sends forth its branches and bears fruit. 20
For Emerson this 'actual condition of society' was an anathema,

its influence on the developing soul noxious and malevolent. So
his task in the Essays: First Series was to create a new synthesis: to
show how the absolute autonomy and self-reliance of the
individual could nevertheless be reconciled with the other
Transcendentalist values of growth and relatedness. These essays
are not simply agglomerated bundles of observations and
reflections drawn from the journals, but, on the contrary, a
carefully structured continuous discourse, in which certain
strategic emphases in one place are modified by counter-stresses
elsewhere, in which the circling movement of the argument
calculatedly reflects what Emerson believed to be the actual
governing principle of the universe. For Emerson the adoption of
clear-cut alternatives, the marking-out of new terrain for
argumentation, was at all costs to be avoided. He sought a
reconciliation of all aspects of experience, now adopting a realist,
now a nominalist, position; now stressing the activity, now the
passivity, of mind; now stressing the artist as a transcendentalist
example, now turning away from the actual limitations of art as he
saw it, with something very like disdain. Emerson used his
position as a lay preacher, an inspired witness outside any
hierarchical structure, to address any issue that seemed to him
pertinent. But, since Emerson's relation to any intellectual or
religious tradition is calculatedly oblique, his writing becomes
correspondingly and disconcertingly troubled, although on the
surface it seems so limpid. The table overleaf may serve to clarify
the overall pattern of the Essays: First Series.
The care with which Emerson structured his series of essays is
evident from his journal, in which he contemplated a variety of
alternatives, but in every case placed 'History' first. This was
because, to Emerson's mind, history had become the great
obstacle, a massive pile of bric-a-brac and unsiftable debris,
barring the way to truth. Past revelation oppressed the present
and prevented it from arriving at new revelations of its own.
Relatedness Spiritual growth Autonomy

'History' 'History'
'Self-Reliance' 'Self-Reliance'
'Compensation' 'Compensation' 'Compensation'
'Spiritual Laws' 'Spiritual Laws' 'Spiritual Laws'
'Love'
'Friendship' 'Friendship'
'Prudence' 'Prudence'
'Heroism'
'The Over-Soul' 'The Over-Soul' 'The Over-Soul'
'Circles' 'Circles' 'Circles'
'Intellect'
Art and Transcendence
Excessive homage is paid to great figures from the past and it

becomes hard if not impossible to believe that another greatness
can be realised in the here and now. Really the issue is simple. It is
whether men are to master history or whether they are to be
mastered by it. To this end it is essential to stop the clock and to
deny that it either can or does exert any actual pressure on the
present. History, like nature, is made to serve. We must deal with
it on terms of our own choosing and see it rather as an
inexhaustible treasure house of correspondences, a hall of mirrors
in which we can catch our own reflection from innumerable
angles. Such a recognition always involves a denial of difference,
and this doctrine turned on its head could have alarming
consequences for Emerson, since it would undermine the
imperious present that he sets so much store upon. If such a
consideration does not weigh heavily, it is because the power of
the present is precisely that of derealising the past, of insisting that
it can never be other than a world of shadows. Emerson, therefore,
does not hesitate to take the step of denying any objective
significance to history, for, if it lives only in the latter-day
perceptions of remote generations who seek in it only whatever
answers to their own exemplary or analogical sense, then history
can never be other than mythological. The only fact is the
subservience of facts:
He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied

by kings and empires, but know that he is greater than all the
geography and all the government of the world; he must
transfer the point of view from which history is commonly read,
from Rome and Athens and London to himself, and not deny
his conviction that he is the Court, and if England or Egypt
have any thing to say to him, he will try the case; if not, let them
forever be silent. He must attain and maintain that lofty sight
where facts yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals are
alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature betrays
itself in the use we make of the signal narrations ofhistory. Time
dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No
anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon,
Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome, have passed or are
passing into fiction. (ECW, n, 6)
Since the question above all is whether we find the stories of the
past interesting, their truth is of slender importance. Emerson
suggests that facts gradually become fictions, but on his view there
is no reason for ever thinking them anything else, since his only
criterion is that they should minister to the needs of the spirit.
Malory's Morte d'Arthur may serve as well as, if not better than,
Thucydides.
Yet Emerson had a strange distrust of fiction which could
hardly be deduced from the above passage. He will allow fiction
on the same terms that he allows history as a boundless realm in
which to find affinities to oneself, discovering 'that the poet was no
odd fellow who described strange and impossible situations, but
that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true for one and
all' (n, 17). But this lurch back into universalism is nevertheless
disconcerting, since, if nothing human is alien, then we should
never need or wish to reject anything. If the past is precisely what
we make it, then why the apparently compelling need to diminish
it and reduce it? And why should Emerson conclude this crucial
introductory essay by privileging those who know nothing of
either history or science: 'The idiot, the Indian, the child, and
unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by which
nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary' (n, 23).
What is undoubtedly at the back of Emerson's argument is his
sense that European history is not a sacred history and that
therefore it does not count as revelation in the way that the New
Testament still obviously would. Emerson brings to history the

same confidence as his puritan predecessors, who had scant
interest in the history of the world but a great concern for the
unfolding of God's design in the world, which was, of course, a
very different thing. So, just as the puritans judged the world by
their own lights, so will Emerson and his fellow democrats judge
in the latest dispensation. They will no longer use the Bible as
their guide, but will turn to nature as the yardstick by which
everything is to be measured, which explains why it is that the
unlettered have access to truth. In this way America's somewhat
belated and peripheral position in relation to world history can be
transvalued. For other nations, in so far as they proclaim history
and their position within it, are thereby captured by the
delusional system which history represents. They purchase
grandeur at the price of their own impoverishment. But
Americans have no vested interest in history. They are therefore
fortunate. Freedom is their birthright. For Emerson, history and
literature, though necessary and even admirable as
supplementary sources of wisdom, are nevertheless irremediably
secondary when set against nature herself as a direct and primary
source of illumination. They are, like the Old Testament,
incomparable sources of interest and anecdote, but they are
hardly indispensible to salvation. If you have nature do you really
need anything else?
'History', however, is but a murky and convoluted prelude to
the portentous announcement of the main theme, that of 'Self-
Reliance'. So it would be foolish to look for too much in the way of
continuity. But the careful reader of Emerson, whether or not
Emerson welcomes careful readers, might well have expected to
find a greater emphasis on nature here than actually is the case.
Nature is now less educative than exemplary. Nature is simply
what man himself should be. In a deliberate reminiscence of the
words ofjesus, Emerson writes,
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares

not say 'I think', 'I am', but quotes some saint or sage. He is
ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These
roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to
better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God
to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is
perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has
burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower, there is no

more; in the leafless root, there is no less. Its nature is satisfied,
and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. But man postpones
or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted
eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround
him, stands on tiptoes to foresee the future. He cannot be happy
and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above
time. (n, 38-9)
In this paean to a self-regarding narcissism Emerson's declaration

of independence embraces nature as much as history, even if he
does his best to imply the contrary elsewhere. In any case, when
the individual is himself nature no contradiction really exists. In
so far as man is not nature, this is because he is affiicted with the
unhappy consciousness of history. By living joyously and unself-
consciously in the present, he will be infused with power and
strength. So long as he is looking back over his shoulder, the centre
of life and the source of being is always elsewhere. He becomes
acutely conscious of a lack that in reality, and despite Schiller, can
never be overcome. By announcing himself as the centre, the
contemporary individual constitutes unity where once there was
only division.
Identity is simultaneously truth, dynamism, power. Indeed,
identity is the will to grasp this identity. Ostensibly Emerson's
self-reliance is the Romantic alertness of genius to its own
manifestations, but, where even the Romantics looked for checks
and balances, Emerson insists that it is useless to search for
positions outside it from which it can be assessed or judged. To
criticise one's interior demands by the criteria of rationality or
consistency is to abdicate the very principle that gives the soul its
authority. When Emerson writes, 'A foolish consistency is the
hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and
philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has
simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his
shadow on the wall' (n, 33), he radically formulates and subverts
the whole force of Plato's metaphor of the cave. In Plato the
shadows are cast by the true and eternal forms, but Emerson's
image makes his relativism quite explicit: it is the Superman who
casts the shadow, and for him to examine it would be to create a
gap between knowing and being which his very existence denies.
The soul simply is and from the fact of that existence determines
its own truth, its own sense of relevance, its own destiny. The call
from within is as peremptory and absolute as that ofj esus when he
called on the disciples to follow him. But equally the soul is
without capstan or anchorage. Since it is in an endless process of
becoming, it cannot be consistent, since this would both violate its
spontaneous creativity and impose an arbitrary and irrational
limit. Stability in the personality would be mere inertia; it is by
virtue of its changeability that the soul announces itself as a pure
and undiluted source of power: 'Power ceases in the instant of
repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new
state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one
fact the world hates; that the soul becomes' (n, 40). In this
compelling definition it almost becomes unnecessary for the soul
to struggle against the past, since the past figures as a
phenomenon that is simply produced by a ceaseless and relentless
movement of consciousness, which, in so far as it recedes into the
distance, merely serves as index and benchmark of that
dynamism. Society thinks it can resist even when it is already
outworn, yet society itself is silently changing and reforming as it
moves irresistibly behind the leading edge of the wave. Everything
is caught up in this relentless whirlwind of subjectivity. In the fury
of Emerson's rhetoric, self-reliance ceases to be a maxim and
becomes a truism. There simply is no other reality.
Emerson undoubtedly believes that his doctrine of self-reliance
needs to be set in a wider context, but it is by no means certain that
the remaining essays solely to qualify his original emphasis. In
every case Emerson seems somewhat equivocal: on the one hand
somewhat disposed to soften the edges and to offer concessions,
yet on the other simultaneously strengthening and reasserting his
case. At once talking peace and preparing for war. In
'Compensation' Emerson reasserts what seems to have been
passed by, the interrelatedness of all phenomena. Everything that
operates in the universe will find something that will
counterbalance it, correct it or restrain it. Every single action will
have its consequences. For every benefit there is a price to be paid.
But the corollary is not that self-reliance is just another tendency
that will be cancelled out by something else. On the contrary,
'There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to, wit, its
own nature. The soul is not Compensation, but a life' (n, 70).
While not denying that the world is a network of relations in
which the soul figures, as he himself says in 'History'- 'A man is a
bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is

the world' (u, 20)- Emerson nevertheless uses the argument from
compensation in a paradoxical way, to reassert the importance of
independence. Since there are compensatory tendencies at work
in the universe in any case, it follows that every man should assert
most strenuously the principles in which he believes and leave
moderation to take care of itself. What Emerson is really urging is
that those who encounter opposition in their prophetic mission to
the world should be philosophical about it, since a reaction is to be
expected in the nature of things. Instead ofbeing dismayed by the
uncomfortable nature of the position they find themselves in, they
should see that they are not altogether bereft, because their
intellectual isolation will only be temporary and they will soon
find themselves joined by others of a like mind:
the man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden

flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its
head, by the falling of walls and the neglect of the gardener, is
made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide
neighborhoods ofmen. (u, 73)
Compensation does not reduce experience to stasis, but repairs

the rent in being that opens up through the implacable process of
becoming. The soul is in some sense always at odds with the
world, yet it is always coming back into harmony with it through
compensation, which like a spider endlessly reweaves the broken
web. Compensation does not modify the doctrine of self-reliance.
What it does is make it more acceptable by suggesting that such
an absolute principle need not have harmful or destructive
consequences.
'Spiritual Laws' effectively recapitulates the argument so far
and assembles salient points from the three preceding essays. But
its real thrust, like that of'Self-Reliance', is directed against the in-
authenticity of social existence. Yet it stands in relation to 'Self-
Reliance' as 'The American Scholar' does the Divinity School
Address, and,just as the latter pieces envisage a transformation of
the world, so do the former seek rather to stand out against it.
Emerson's messages may often seem the same, but they are
altered by their constantly varying sense of the degree of
resistance that they are likely to run up against. They are for the
scholar's more hopeful or darker days. For even prophets can have
their moods. 'Spiritual Laws' insists that the movement and

dynamic of the individual's spiritual development must be laid
down by an inner necessity and must not be swayed by external
circumstances. He should not be influenced by the estimates of
others or deflected from his own path, but be guided by a wholly
intuitive sense of affinity:
A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting

principle, gathering his like to him, wherever he goes. He takes
only his own, out of the multiplicity that sweeps and circles
around him. He is like one of those booms which are set out
from the shore on rivers to catch drift-wood, or like the
loadstone amongst splinters of steel. ... What your heart thinks
great, is great. The soul's emphasis is always right. (n, 84)
The great mistake is to be deflected from this developing sense of

self into a deference to established opinion, to confuse reputation
with action. Reputation is a static principle that is maintained by
deploying existing values; actions can never acquire the same
respectability, because they challenge the existing network of
assumptions:
'What has he done?' is the divine question which searches men,

and transpierces every false reputation. A fop may sit in any
chair of the world, nor be distinguished for his hour from
Homer and Washington; but there need never be any doubt
concerning the respective ability of human beings. Pretension
may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of
real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nor drove back
Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished
slavery. (n, 91-2)
Yet Emerson's twists and turns here are difficult to follow, since he
follows this almost immediately by writing,
We are full of these superstitions of sense, the worship of

magnitude. We call the poet inactive, because he is not a
president, a merchant, or a porter. We adorn an institution, and
do not see that it is founded on a thought which we have. But
real action is in silent moments. (n, 93)
Emerson has recognised the danger implicit in his argument,

which is to slight the great thinkers of history, whom he admires
because they are not men of action. So he responds to this by
suggesting that action that is tied to existing institutions has no
real value and that thought is the truest action, since it will
ultimately lead to changes in society. Thought masters the world
by determining what aspects of that world can be deemed real. It
sifts the world of experience and discovers in its searches what is
the base metal and what is indisputably authentic: 'We are the
photometers, we the irritable goldleaf and tinfoil that measure the
accumulations of the subtle element. We know the authentic
effects of the true fire through every one of its millions disguises'
(n, 96). The problem of course is, who are 'we'? And the answer,
predictably, is that 'we' are surrogates for the Emersonian 'I'. Or,
to put it another way, it is a 'we' that is not to be identified with
the world, the 'we' of an increasingly self-confident
Transcendentalism, that Emerson, by invoking, creates. The
assumption of consensus is but one facet of the will to power.
The next group of essays can be seen as an attempt by Emerson
to work out more fully the implications of the doctrine of the divine
man and to stabilise it within a network of concepts. In 'Love'
Emerson reiterates the primary importance of spiritual growth
and development, but by translating love into neo-Platonic terms
Emerson removes it from conventional, everyday connotations
and is thereby able to assert what might otherwise seem
preposterous, that love is not being for others but being for oneself:
'He does not appertain to his family and society; he is the
somewhat; he is a person; he is a soul' (n, 104).
A corresponding emphasis is to be found in 'Friendship'.
Although Emerson lays great stress on the value and importance
of friendship, he nevertheless warns against it as a seductive and
always dangerous undertaking. We may wish to be friends with
another, but in so wishing we may be tempted into compromising
our own positions and lured into false and treacherous alliances.
The crux of the matter for Emerson is that 'We must be our own
before we can be another's (n, 124), and the unspoken corollary is
that in the confidence of our own opinion we should not
necessarily need friendship anyway. Friendship is a kind of bonus.
It must never be self-betrayal.
'Prudence' also deals with the apparent necessity of coming to
terms with the world, but once again Emerson turns the argument
upside down, first by conceding that he has no prudence anyway

and then by denying that there is any merit in 'base prudence' (n,
132), which is prudence as it is commonly understood. The higher
prudence according to Emerson consists in practising what he
himself practises. Instead ofbeing overtly combative, the prophet
will prove the truth of what he already believes, which is that all
men already agree with him, if they did but know it:
Though your views are in straight antagonism to theirs, assume

an identity of sentiment. Assume that you are saying precisely
that which all think, and in the flow of wit and love, roll out your
paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a doubt ...
assume a consent, and it shall presently be granted, since,
really, and underneath their external diversities, all men are of
one mind. (n, 140--1)
In 'Prudence' the mechanisms ofEmerson's rhetoric stand clearly

exposed. Emerson realised that nothing was more important than
creating belief, and that belief could be created by being
predicated. He was simply spelling out his own tactics in the wars
over Transcendentalism. For Emerson always acted as if there
were no wars. He never spelled out the precise nature of his
disagreements with Channing or other important
contemporaries. He proffered his views directly and
uncontentiously in a lyrical vacuum, as if they carried no
combative thrust. By assuming a consensus Emerson could never
break it; and in broaching the idea of the divine man could
nevertheless move it irresistably forward, as the leading edge of
the wave.
After reaffirming his intellectual commitment to the principle of
self-reliance in 'Heroism'- 'Self-trust is the essence ofheroism' (n,
147), Emerson embarks on the complex intellectual endeavour of
once more trying to bring his three values of relatedness,
autonomy and growth into some sort of unity. The essential step is
to oppose all dualisms, whether of God and man, or man and
nature, to suggest that a common energy sweeps through all of
them. From a certain point ofview it might seem that it is 'The
Over-Soul' that serves as a corrective to the restless self-assertion
of 'Self-Reliance', since this essay comes closer than any to
speaking the traditional language of the pulpit and it is
reassuringly full of direct references to God and Jesus. The
bipolarity in the doctrine of the divine man resurfaces. Emerson is

even prepared to criticise mere individualism that is separated
from the sources of divine power: 'The weakness of the will begins
when the individual would be something of himself' (n, 161). So
for Emerson a sense of the relatedness and interconnectedness of
experience is actually a precondition for individual autonomy,
since what gives the individual power and authority is the sense
that there is no division between him and the world, so that he can
represent it and speak for it in his own person: 'A wise old proverb
says, "God comes to see us without bell": that is, as there is no
screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so
there is no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and
God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away' (ibid.).
If the general contours of the argument in 'The Over-Soul' are
familiar, this is because Emerson is rearticulating the Protestant
insistence on the primacy offaith, in which what is at stake is not
faith in God as some external agency in the universe but faith in an
omnipresent source of divine power and in one's own connection
to it: 'not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere
in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly, an endless
circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea,
and, truly seen, its tide is one' (n, 173-4). This emphasis on faith is
crucial for Emerson because it provides the answer to those who
would question the certainty he predicates in 'Spiritual Laws'.
Truth is self-certainty, and the only guarantee we have of truth is
in that psychological feeling of certainty: 'We know truth when we
see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are
awake' (u, 166). Emerson distrusts intellectual knowledge, since
he sees it as produced by a doubt that represents a flaw in being in
the first place. The Socratic dialectic functions by specifying,
defining and delimiting and thereby implies that truth lies in the
constricted and the specific, and not, as Emerson believes, in a
sense of oneness with the cosmic flow:
Happy is the hearing man: unhappy the speaking man. As long

as I hear truth, I am bathed by a beautiful element, and am not
conscious of any limits to my nature. The suggestions are
thousandfold that I hear and see. The waters of the great deep
have ingress and egress to the soul. But if I speak, I define, I
confine, and am less. (n, 202)
There is a strong democratic thrust to Emerson's argument.

Intellectual discourse is bullying, authoritarian and elitist. Since
it seeks to impose itself on others in an aggressive manner, the
knowledge it offers cannot truly be wisdom, for if it were it would
not have to strive so hard. We cannot defer to others or scant our
own sources of illumination. If 'We are wiser than we know' (n,
166), this is because receptivity not knowledge is the truest
wisdom and the higher wisdom is to see that one is wise already.
'Spiritual Laws' consolidates only to enable Emerson to thrust
forward once more. It prepares the way for the daring forays of
'Circles', just as 'History' made space for the clear and
unwavering announcements of'Self-Reliance'. But 'Circles' is the
boldest of the essays in its refusal to hedge its bets or to make any
concessions. 'Self-Reliance' seems conservative by comparison.
For 'Self-Reliance' by its very language effectively stabilised all
that Emerson was disposed to throw into doubt. In speaking of the
self and of principles, Emerson seemed to invoke a bedrock of
unshakable certainty within the subject by which the world could
be measured. Whereas Emerson really believes that such a static
identity in so far as it exists is merely a cowardly product of social
conditioning and concern for the opinion of others, and what
really matters in the untrammelled, unmeasurable pulsations of
power and energy that flow through the individual and always
go beyond even the most temporary of suspensions. Self-trust
rightly considered is really a harmonisation of being
produced in complete spontaneity, where it is not so much that
there is a 'self' to trust as that there is simply no position from
which to doubt.
'Circles' rejects such stability and positively exults in the
changeable and transitory nature of things. Emerson rejoices in
the very flux and motion ofJacksonian America, as much in the
speed of technological change as in the unpredictable shifts of
public opinion. To look for security is like trying to chain men
down with bubbles: 'Nothing is secure but life, transition, the
energising spirit' (n, 189). It is not the material world that is solid
and spirit that is evanescent but rather the reverse. As he wrote in
'The Over-Soul',
The landscape, the figures, Boston, London, are facts as

fugitive as an institution past, or any whiff of mist or smoke, and
so is society, and so is the world. The soul looketh steadily
forward, creating a world before her, leaving worlds behind

her. (n, 163)
In the endless reweaving of the world, the world is, as it were,

always lagging behind itself as it struggles to catch up with the
forward march of spirit, so that it is always unreal, always
superannuated. In 'Circles' the refusal to think a limit that had
always been crucial to Emerson's thought is not merely
enunciated- 'The only sin is limitation' (n, 182)- but becomes its
overriding principle. Emerson's deepest dedication is not to the
selfbut to the excessive, and only to the self in so far as it is excessive.
The difference between 'The Over-Soul' and 'Circles' is the
difference between a circle and the dynamism of circles in the
plural. 'The Over-Soul' suggests a circularity of God, man and
nature in which each runs into the other. Like 'Compensation' it
gestures in the direction of a serene, perpetual, self-regulating
universe which, at bottom, Emerson detests, precisely because it
seems to leave no room for endless unpredictable prophetic
revelation. The world becomes a closed system and all
exhilarating sense of an unlimited openness to the future is lost.
The idea of the circle is transvalued, just as the geometrical figure
can seem merely a physical boundary and limit rather than as a
sign of motion and energy. So the notion of circles becomes the
perfect figure through which Emerson can express simultaneously
his sense of relatedness, autonomy and growth, the refusal of a
limit, the excessive:
The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring

imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and
larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this
generation of circles, wheel without wheel will go, depends on
the force or truth of the individual soul. For, it is the inert effort
of each thought having formed itself into a circular wave of
circumstance, - as for instance, an empire, rules of an art, a
local usage, a religious rite,- to heap itself on that ridge, and to
solidify, and hem in the life. But if the soul is quick and strong, it
bursts over that boundary on all sides, and expands another
orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave,
with attempt again to stop and bind. But the heart refuses to be
imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses, it already tends
outwards with vast force, and to immense and innumerable

expansiOns. (n, 180-1)
The excessive is truth. It is when we feel ourselves in the presence

of a vast energy and force that we recognise it, because we cannot
doubt it. Genius has no answers: it unsettles and unfixes, it presses
onward without asking where, when or why. History is nothing
other a path scorched by its fiery progress, where its authenticity
can be assessed by the sheer havoc it leaves in its wake. The
untrammelled spirit has an astonishing power to destroy and
create, in what is, itself, the burning circle of circles.
Through the essays art has been for Emerson what Virgil was
for Dante in the Divine Comedy- a guide that will lead him in the
direction of higher things. But, with this new revelation, art itself
is superseded. Art can stand as a sign of the excessive and the
unbounded, but art itself is always limited, best seen as a trace of
movement of thought rather than something fixed, final and
ultimately dead. Artworks are 'signs of power' (n, 215), but they
are equivocal signs because they freeze a movement of the spirit
that should be unceasing. Art should 'throw down the walls of
circumstance on every side', but, since 'true art is never fixed, but
always flowing' (n. 216), it is always betraying its own best self,
since its potential dynamism is cancelled by the very fact that it is
art and not just the overflowing of spiritual energy. So Emerson
looks for a transfiguration of the world in which we shall find art in
the sheer energy and dynamism of existence. The excessive,
Emerson suggests, is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
It is the only value, because it is the only value that can validate
itself.
So enraptured a prophet could scarcely fail to find disciples, but
in Thoreau Emerson found more than this: a man who would
translate Emersonian principles into a practical programme of
action. Thoreau acted out the doctrine of self-reliance by refusing
to pay his taxes and by advocation civil disobedience. In his
retreat by Walden pond, Thoreau seemingly embarked on a more
comprehensive abjuration of society than Emerson had ever
envisaged. Yet the contrast between idealist and philosopher on
the one hand, pragmatist and empiricist on the other, can be
overdone, since Thoreau was a good deal more of the alienated
intellectual than he was altogether ready to admit to being, and
Emerson was canny enough to know where rhetoric ends and
where dollars and cents begin. What the two men do share,
though, is a commitment to the ideal of the Transcendental
Superman, to awakening the greatness inherent in everyone. As
Thoreau noted in his journal, 'Speak to men as to gods and you
will not be insincere.' 1
Emerson's belief that the individual must make himself the
centre of existence justifies going to Walden pond, for under this
dispensation it is no longer on the periphery. Thoreau's own
consciousness can make it into the axis of the world. Indeed, in the
very busyness of the world people can become forgetful of
themselves and lose sight of their own greatness, so those who
speak ofloneliness have simply misconceived the whole issue:
What sort of space is that which separates a man from his

fellows and makes him solitary? I have found than no exertion
of the legs can bring minds much nearer to one another. What
do we most want to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the
depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the
school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, where most men
congregate, but to the perennial sources of our life, whence in all
our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands
near the water and sends out its roots in that direction.
(VW, p. 121) 22
This figure is the figure of Walden itself, since, although it is by

Walden pond that Thoreau spends many hours, the pond itself
does not replenish but rather symbolically represents the
possibility of replenishment from within. Not least of the blessings
of nature is that it offers an abundant source of tropes. Nature
offers a context in which man can discover himself both actively
and reflectively, but this does not occur automatically. Two
characters whom Thoreau encounters during his sojourn in the
woods serve to point the difference: John Field, who spends his
futile days in 'bogging', is a man who has lost his spiritual identity,
yet the Canadian woodchopper is a 'prince in disguise' (p. 132).
Walden itself is not just the experience of nature, but a reflection on
that experience, and, furthermore, it claims a transcendent,
exemplary role for Thoreau himself as a spiritual pioneer. It
demands that the reader should recognise Thoreau not as a man
who has dallied in some rustic backwater, but one who has boldly
struck out ahead of the rest to point the way that others may
follow. Thoreau sees himself as the contemporary hero.
In truth Walden is a self-dramatising, self-advertising and
deeply duplicitous book that seeks to mask its excessive ambitions
behing a fac;ade of commonsense and practicality. In the epigraph
which he selected for the book Thoreau frankly admitted that he
intended 'to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing
on his roost, if only to wake my neighbours up' (p. 5), yet the
opening of Walden is one of the most artfully calculated and
misleading beginnings in the whole ofworld literature, intended
to throw the reader off the scent and disarm him from the start.
Thoreau states,
When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I

lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house
which I had built myself on the shore of Walden Pond, in
Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of
my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At
present I am a sojourner in civilized life again. (p. 25)
Here, it seems, we have a careful, modest and precise statement

that reflects a careful, modest and precise man. Moreover, what is
particularly noticeable is that such an introduction seems,
thereby, to disclaim any literary ambitions. Ostensibly the book
in the reader's hands is simply a by-product of that particular
episode and one, moreover, which has been virtually dragged
forth from a reluctant author simply as a way of satisfying the
importunate inquiries of friends and neighbours. From these
sentences it would be difficult to infer that Thoreau actually has a
positive aversion to hard work, which elsewhere he is happy to
admit, or that in the woods he like, nothing better than those 'days
when idleness was the most attractive and productive industry'
(p. 164). The unprepossessing tone does not merely withhold
Thoreau's unshakable conviction that his book is the record of an
earth-shattering experiment; if further conceals the fact that it is
the book itself that matters, both as a bid for literary celebrity, as
distinct from mere notoriety, and as a sign that he belongs to the
select band of artists and writers. It is Thoreau himself, in the
pages of Walden, who lays down as an axiom that 'authors are a
natural and irresistable aristocracy in every society, and, more than
kings and emperors, exert an influence on mankind' (p. 99), and it is
Thoreau who draws a sharp dis tinction between the spiritual wealth
of the poet who takes imaginative possession of the natural world,
and the farmer who, like Emerson's Miller, Locke and Manning,
merely owns it:
But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried

off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. With respect to
landscapes, -
I am monarch of all I survey,

My right there is not to dispute.
I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the

most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed
that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not
know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme,
the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly
impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and
left the farmer only the skimmed milk. (p. 83)
It is hard not to imagine that Thoreau felt the same about his own
time in the woods and equally hard not to believe that his
triumphal return as a man ofletters was not implicit from the very
start. Walden is, above all, a chance to take time out from the
current of ordinary life, a moment to think, dream and meditate,
with nature as an omnipresent stimulus.
When Thoreau extenuates his literary crime of writing so much
about himself, on the grounds that he is 'confined to this theme by
the narrowness of my experience' (p. 25), he is being equally
disingenuous, since he thinks it not restricting at all but
positively liberating, and in any event the only possible basis for
authentic and truthful utterance. His own experience is the very
last that could be considered narrow, since he alone has cast off
the shackles of habitual existence and explicitly rejected the way
of life that is mean, petty and quietly desperate. To go to the
woods is to answer an inner call to greatness that is within the
reach of every man. It is to embark on a project of self-realisation
without thinking of consequences. It is to follow the path of
spontaneity, prodigality and excess instead of remaining cabined,
cribbed and confined by customary usage. It is to refuse habitual
definitions of oneself that can obstruct interior development, to
remain open to every inner impulse and monition: 'I was not
anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my
genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment' (p. 63).
So, despite Thoreau's achievement of building his own house,
which he trumpets at the outset, he has deliberately led his readers
astray; for really he distrusts houses and possessions, because they
serve literally and symbolically as limits, because they all too often
block off the responsiveness and receptivity to experience that he
cherishes. Symptomatically, he argues that in the American
climate permanent dwellings are unnecessary for much of the
year, implying that it is only from weakness of spirit that men are
led to resort to houses and to see them as indispensable:
But, probably, man did not live long on the earth without
discovering the convenience which there is in a house, the
domestic comforts, which phrase may have originally signified
the satisfactions of the house more than of the family; though
these may be extremely partial and occasional in those climates
where the house is associated in our thoughts with winter or the
rainy season chiefly, and two thirds of the year, except for a
parasol, is unnecessary. In our climate, in the summer, it was
formerly almost solely a covering at night. In the Indian
gazettes a wigwam was the symbol of a day's march, and a row
of them cut or painted on the bark of a tree signified that so
many times they had camped. Man was not made so large
limbed and robust but that he must seek to narrow his world,
and wall in a space such as fitted him. (p. 42)
The house is humanity's first great failure of nerve. The impulse to

civilisation itself is from weakness, but once established it proves
further disabling, because men and women confirm themselves in
their inadequacies and never fully discover their own capacities or
their strength. Rightly considered, we should see that only the self
is real and that we need nothing else; all else is merely symbolic
food for the spirit! Man moves in a universe of signifiers that can
reveal to him his own greatness. Those who remain caught in a
way of life and who remain convinced of its worth though they
have neither chosen it or experienced any alternative must be
deeply inauthentic, not just because of the way they live, but
because they have never experienced freedom.
The hidden thrust of Walden is to articulate the heresy, more
openly proclaimed in 'Civil Disobedience' and 'Life without

Principle', that Americans, for all their talk about freedom, really
care very little for it, and manifest a deep indifference when
fundamental issues are at stake. Thoreau was struck by the gulf
between rhetoric and reality, not just because of the massive,
uncomfortable fact of slavery, but because of the actual inability of
people to live by the values they proclaimed:
When I converse with the freest of my neighbors, I perceive

that, whatever they may say about the magnitude and
seriousness of the question, and their regard for public
tranquillity, the long and short of the matter is, that they cannot
spare the protection of the exsting government, and they dread
the consequence to their property and families of disobedience
to it. 23
Since individuals in modern society have never sounded out their

own spiritual depths or asked what it is that they really believe in,
they have no firm foundation for their identity. To go into the
woods and live in a world of one's own making is not simply to be
self-sufficient, since there are many who will make this claim, but
to become conversant with one's own powers- to be intellectually
and morally self-sufficient, which is a very different thing. When
Thoreau writes ironically of his beans,
I came to love my rows, my beans, through so many more than I

wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength
like Antaeus. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven
knows. This was my curious labour all summer,- to make this
portion of the earth's surface, which had yielded only
cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort and the like before, sweet
wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse.
(VW,p.l37)
seriousness and whimsicality become intricately intertwined. For

he is at pains to stress the preposterousness bordering on
absurdity of his decision to grow beans, and even goes so far as to
imply - heresy indeed in puritan America! - that the patch of
earth he is cultivating might better be left to grow wild and
beautiful than be rigorously devoted to the humdrum pulse. But
at the same time Thoreau's whimsicality is of the very essence,
since he has freely chosen to grow the beans and to devote his time
and attention to them, so that his consciousness of the
arbitrariness and subjectiveness of that decision imbues his
elected activity with a distinct and preposterous sense of
exhiliration. He has the strength that comes from being a free man
and thus able to fly in the face of the conventional wisdom, even in
such adventitious details.
But to be free is to seem excessive and unconstrained in the eyes
of the passive majority. Thoreau indicates his own priorities by
quoting these lines of Thomas Carew:
We do not require the dull society

Ofyour necessitated temperance,
Or that unnatural stupidity
That knows nor joy nor sorrow; nor your forc'd
Falsely exalted passive fortitude
Above the active. This low abject brood,
That fix their seats in mediocrity,
Become your servile mind; but we advance
Such virtues only as admit excess,
Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence,
All-seeing, prudence, magnanimity
That knows no bound ....
(p.81)
Walden is action transformed into gesture through the intervention

of the written word. Thoreau, like the antique heroes invoked by
Carew, will have an exemplary significance. His actions will be
the pattern for others, or rather a pattern that is no pattern, that
can be followed without being copied. With Walden the slate is
wiped clean for himself- and others. By attempting something
that is simultaneously simple and very difficult, Thoreau seeks to
shatter once and for all the mould of civilised existence, creating a
new and vastly expanded sense of what life is, of what possibilities
and opportunities it offers. It is multum in parvo. When Thoreau
writes,
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to

front only the essential facts oflife, and to see ifl could not learn
what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that
I had not lived. I did 'not wish to live what was not life, living is
so dear, nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was

quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the
marrow oflife, to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to
rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to
drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it
proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine
meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it
were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a
true account of it in my next excursion (p. 89)
he knows that in reality his venture is so extraordinary in its very

clarity and lucidity that it creates value in itself. The gesture of
resolving the problem of existence by making all hinge on the play
of a single card is so sublime as completely to nullify the possibility
of meanness. Yet, when Thoreau's enterprise is pondered in the
context of his time, when schemes and experiments were legion, it
does appear deeply quixotic. It presumes that he stands alone
upon the stage before a silent, tense and expectant house that will
erupt into applause at the slightest pretext. Unpretentious as it
claims to be, it does not expect to go unnoticed. And, just as
Cervantes's hero sought to revive a whole tradition of Knight-
errantry and noble deeds in a most unpropitious age, so Thoreau
seeks to restore the moral grandeur of the antique and dominate
the marketplace like Diogenes in his barrel. It is thus integral to
his achievement that he can endow his actions with a theatrical
and excessive character, communicating to others his personal
sense ofhaving broken through the quotidian to the sublime: 'The
morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is
uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but
the outside of the earth everywhere' (p. 85). What matters above
all is to be supremely confident in assuming the exemplary role
and to convince one's readers that a small departure is truly a
giant step if only it signifies a revolution in the mind. For Thoreau
every action can be excessive- and that is the beauty of it.
In nature Thoreau finds his devotion to the excessive
everywhere confirmed. Nature, seen truly, is never little but an
inexhaustible store of wonders. Even to witness astruggle among
ants is to be exposed to scenes of extraordinary heroism. As
Emerson says in 'The American Scholar', 'A drop is a small
ocean' (ECW, I, 68). In what might seem to be the most unlikely
and unpropitious spot for the observations of a naturalist, the
steep banks of a railway line, Thoreau, watching the frozen sand

thaw, is struck by the way in which a multiplicity of tiny streams
flowing down become interwoven in intricate patterns and
assume the form of vegetable leaves. It becomes a striking emblem
ofthe luxuriant, polymorphic creativeness of nature bringing the
divinity within and the divinity without man abruptly and
dramatically face to face:
When I see on the one side the inert bank, -for the sun acts on
one side first, - and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the
creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood
in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me, -
had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank,
and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs
about. (VW,p.247)
There are still revelations in store. The flowing, dynamic

movement of sand represents a principle of energy at work in the
universe which demonstrates that nothing is ever frozen or
permanently stabilised but can be astonishingly and
instantaneously transformed into something else. If sand can
become rippling, burgeoning vegetation and effortlessly make the
transition to a higher evolutionary level, how much greater must
be the potentiality for growth and development in man himself.
To immerse oneself in the natural world is to be everywhere
surrounded by signs ofpotency and intimations of greatness. For
Thoreau nature is everywhere excessive, everywhere sublime. If
he can respond with enthusiasm to the most obvious symbols of
sublimity in nature, to gigantic mountain peaks and tumultuous,
turbulent seas, he can also find this power in nature displayed in
less exalted circumstances. But everywhere the great lesson that
nature teaches is the impossibility of thinking the limit; and the
mind is reinvigorated and refreshed by the ceaseless, miraculous
transgression of all assumed boundaries:
We can never have enough ofNature. We must be refreshed by

the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the
seacoast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and
decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts
three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own
limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we

never wander. (p. 225)
Thoreau does not hesitate to harp on what may seem to be some of

the most brutal aspects oflife as a struggle for existence, because
they demonstrate nature's almost ungraspable capacity for
self-renewal and regeneration, a pulsating source of power and
energy that man can both wonder at and share.
So Thoreau's Transcendental wager is confirmed. His belief
that life need be neither mean, petty nor constricted is supported
by his discovery in nature of unlimited power. The beliefthat the
individual must be dominated by external regulations and
conventions is replaced by the conviction that the truly free person
will generate a new world and constitute from himself laws that
are in accordance with his own being. A sense oflife will flow from
him and not be imposed upon him. Thoreau writes,
I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances

confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to
live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success
unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind,
will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more
liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and
within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his
favor in a more liberal sense, and he willli've with the license of a
higher order of beings. (pp. 259-60)
To live excessively is to live freely and vice versa.

With the accrued wisdom ofhisjourney through nature behind
him, Thoreau can now cast off the mask of diffidence and
deference that he had assumed at the outset. The compact
between author and reader that assumes that the reader should be
addressed on his own terms is ridiculous and constitutes a
betrayal of the prophetic mission. The prophet cannot leave his
readers slumbering in their intellectual and moral darkness;
Thoreau's task, as announced in his epigraph, is precisely that of
awakening them to higher things, and to that end being
unwaveringly excessive and extravagant:
I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough,

may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my
daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I

have been convinced. Extra-vagance! it depends on how you are
yarded .... I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a
man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for
I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the
foundation of true expression. (p. 260)
The prophet brings truth, and, though his words may seem harsh,
hyperbolic and extreme, they must be heard. In the violent
cracking of ice, nature announces a moment of rupture with the
old and outworn. That moment also announces, in Walden, the
coming of the Superman.
Nevertheless, the pretensions of Emerson and Thoreau seem
relatively modest by comparison with those of Walt Whitman,
who was the only American writer to assume that he was the
literary Messiah his country had been calling for. With the 1855
version of 'A Song of Myself' the fledgling poet exposed himself
before the public with a frankness and bravura that has seldom
been equalled. Whitman entered the sacred portals of verse not in
a spirit of humility and trepidation, like initiates of old, but like
some showy gunfighter, who bounds through the swing doors of
some Western saloon, his guns spinning glittering silver arcs in
their miraculous passage from holster to hand, ready to take on
anything and anybody. In sounding his 'barbaric yawp over the
roofs of the world', Whitman gives notice that he will not be
dissuaded from his mission, but will continue to speak at the top of
his poetic voice until the world grudgingly comes to a stop and is
compelled to listen. Instead of remaining within the genteel salon,
he takes poetry to the streets, brandishing his verbal snake oil
before the crowds like any quack doctor and prepared to stir up his
audience as energetically as any hell-fire preacher. Whitman will
be nothing if not excessive. In language that would have blanched
the cheeks of even the most anarchic Boston radical he boasted,
Magnifying and applying come I,

Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,
The most they offer for mankind and eternity less than a spirt
of my seminal wet
though he repented of it enough to delete the last line from

subsequent editions. Not so very long afterwards, in 'As I Ebb'd
with the Ocean of Life', he was to stand amazed at his own

effrontery and be recalled to a sense of his insignificance in the face
of nature:
As the ocean so mysteriously rolls toward me closer and closer,

I too but signify at the utmost a little wash'd-up drift,
A few sands and dead leaves to gather,
Gather, and merge myself as part ofthe sands and drift.
0 baffled, balk'd, bent to the very earth,

Oppress'd with myself that I have dared to open my mouth,
Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil me I
have not once had the least idea who or what I am,
But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet
untouch'd, untold, altogether unreach'd,
Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs
and bows ....
He could no longer grasp the self-confidence and overwhelming

manner that he had once almost unthinkingly been able to assume
or even think the self that he had been able to project with such
astonishing forcefulness, The enigma of 'A Song of Myself' lies
precisely in its excessiveness, which cannot altogether be
explained by Whitman's ostensible purpose of celebrating himself
and the United States. If America is all that Whitman says it is,
and if it has already been abundantly praised, and if this is
anyway what Americans believe it to be, then it remains difficult
to account for Whitman's very insistence, for his exhaustiveness
and exhaustingness of iteration, which seems to go far beyond the
mere congratulatory, or for Whitman's presentation ofhimselfas
a radiant and life-transforming centre of power. The magnificence
of the American fact would seem to render 'A Song ofMyself', as
Whitman conceives it, unnecessary.
In fact Whitman's poetry begins not in joy and gladness but in
experiences of negativity. In his earliest writing, life is always
under threat. Whitman is disturbed by the always looming
prospect of death and by the shallowness and meretriciousness of
the world. In 'The Play-Ground' he describes the happiness that
he feels when he sees children playing:
When painfully athwart my brain

Dark thoughts come crowding on,
And sick of worldly hollowness,
My heart feels sad or lone -
Then out upon the green I walk,

Just ere the close of day,
And swift I ween the sight I view
Clears all my gloom away.
For there I see young children -

the cheeriest thing on earth-
I see them play - I hear their tones
Of loud and reckless mirth.
Yet even this moment is overcast, for Whitman becomes anxious

when he considers how the children themselves might be harmed,
and the poem ends,
0, angels! guard these children!

Keep grief and guilt away:
From earthly harm - from evil thoughts
0, shield them night and day.
All this is very far from the mood of'A Song of Myself'. Whitman
far from rejoicing with the children in the sheer plentitude of the
world and the vividness of existence, is haunted by the belief that
this can only be a transitory illusion, a momentary averting of the
gaze from malign and threatening forces.
As a young journalist working for New York newspapers
Whitman was deeply demoralised by the political corruption and
duplicity which he witnessed at first hand. In his 'Song for Certain
Congressmen' he attacked those Northern politicians, such as
Daniel Webster, who were using their influence to support and
maintain Southern slavery through their advocacy of
compromise. It was precisely because of the failure of American
politics and its representative men to express the highest values of
a democratic society that Whitman felt it was incumbent on him,
as a poet, to recall America to an awareness of its moral and
spiritual greatness. Yet this mission is more paradoxical and
contradictory than one might be disposed to imagine. For
Whitman must simultaneously delight and wonder at the

diversity of American life and, at the same time, be completely
and utterly candid. If he is not he will be failing in his duty to
confront existence honestly, the task he shares with Thoreau. He
will be no better than the politicians. Literalness and hyperbole
will have to go hand in hand. It is just because of the existence of
'the swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics,
planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices
or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the
presidency', 24 because of a web of intrigue that reaches even the
highest office in the land, that the poet's ability to speak the
unvarnished truth has an incalculable importance:
The great poets are also to be known by the absence in them of

tricks and by the justification of perfect personal candor. Then
folks echo a new cheap joy and a divine voice leaping from their
brains: How beautiful is candor! All faults may be forgiven of
him who has perfect candor. Henceforth let no man of us lie, for
we have seen that openness wins the inner and outer world and
that there is no single exception, and that never since our earth
gathered itself into a mass have deceit or subterfuge or
prevarication attracted its smallest particle or the faintest tinge
of a shade- and that through the enveloping wealth and rank of
a state or the whole republic of states a sneak or sly person shall
be discovered and despised .... 25
Perhaps this is no more than a pious hope, but it is nevertheless

crucial for Whitman to be able to believe that corruption can be
swept away,just as jackson had believed that the day would come
when the people would pronounce judgement on those who made
deals designed to thwart their clearly expressed desires. But, ifhe
knows full well the extent of political corruption, how can he
suggest in the same breath that it can never succeed? Whitman
must believe that such a warping of a democratic society is but a
deflection from the norm of openness and purity. His lying truth
will produce the truth that can finally disperse the lies. The
Preface to Leaves of Grass ( 1855) disconcertingly exposes the gap
between real and ideal that the poem itself seeks to blur or close by
its own extraordinary dynamism.
If Whitman defines himself as the 'caresser of life', this is
because he wishes to revel in the physicality and tangibility of the
world in such a way as to banish all anxiety and anticipatory

moralism. Whitman believes that, if the world seems discordant
and out ofjoint, this is only because thinking makes it so. He will
restore the world to the sense of its innocence and pristine
freshness by abolishing the fearful and unhappy consciousness
that itself creates shadows and flinches away from dingy corners-
'the dirt receding before my prophetic screams'. The need to
celebrate himself and the world stems from the initial
apprehension of a lack. For to be an individual is always to be
effectively defined and delimited by the experiences that one has
already had. Since many of these may have been of an unhappy or
negative kind, a person may feel continually imperilled at the very
deepest centre of his being, the self progressively eroded by
cumulatively non-cumulative frustrations and failures. So
Whitman will refuse to define himself in terms of what he has
actually experienced but will rather assert an unbounded capacity
for experience that will far outstrip all humdrum, adverse
contingencies:
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,

The sickness of one of my folks- or of myself ... or ill-doing ...
or loss or lack of money ... or depressions or exaltations,
They come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,

Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, bends an arm on an impalpable certain
rest,
Looks with its sidecurved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it.
So his integrity will remain untouched and unstained no matter

what he experiences. He will be the conduit for a bubbling,
rippling stream of psychic events. By his very determination to
resist all blockage and limitation he will be set free from the
limitations of fixity in order to exult in the experience of pure
potentiality. Instead of thinking himself the sum total of a series of
past moments, he will construct himself as an infinite possibility of
sensation, whereby both hypothetically and imaginatively he can
encompass everything, and whereby the relentless chain of
contingencies he names in the poem is itself only a kind of

shorthand for an abundance in himself and the world- just as 1T
can be express in as many digits as you like. So in a very real sense
Whitman has to surrender his identity in order to get it back. He
has to see the lack and limit in himself as only the product of a
fearful consciousness that draws back in anguish from the brink of
the excessive. But, if he can once immerse himself in the tide of
nature and be swept along with its flow, he can then recognise that
this excessiveness is himself. As Emerson puts it,
At the call of a noble sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines
murmur, the river rolls and shines, and the cattle low upon the
mountains, as he saw and heard them in his infancy, and with
these forms, the spells of persuasion, the keys ofpower are put
into his hands. (ECW, 1, 21)
Then he no longer needs to ask what the grass is, for he knows
already that the grass is himself. But Whitman is more radical
than Emerson, since, whereas for Emerson the world is always to
be experienced analogically and in terms of affinities, Whitman's
relation to the world is not a processing of it intellectually through
eye and mind but a direct physical encounter, a veritable orgy of
sensory contact. The individual becomes the intersection point of
a multiplicity of differences in which there no longer seems to be
any purpose in discriminating between the internal and the
external when that distinction is abolished in the act of breathing,
which is life itself:
The smoke of my own breath,

Echos, ripples, and buzzed whispers ... loveroot, silkthread,
crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration ... the beating of my heart ...
the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and
darkcolored searocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belched words of my voice ... words loosed to
the eddies of the wind.
No distinction can be made between the acute sense of one's own

bodily plenitude- 'I dote on myself ... there is that lot of me, and
all so luscious' - and the experiences that provoke it. They are
inextricably intertwined in 'the puzzle of puzzles' I And that we

call Being'.
But there is one step further. In assuming the role of the poet in
a democratic society, Whitman becomes a representative man,
endowed with plenipotentiary powers, who, in speaking of
himself, can, at one and the same time, liberate all the bottled-in
thoughts, feelings and desires of oppressed and downtrodden
social groups, and so articulate them as iffor the very first time. So
his poetry will have the singular richness of conveying not just the
experience of one man but that of many many men and women.
For all its vagaries and extravagance it is endowed with a
weightiness which precisely authorises it to be so extravagant,
since it has the power of a universal collective behind it. There is
simply no way in which Whitman's message can be slighted,
diminished, rejected or quibbled over. The poet is as solid and
unshakable as a rock:
Through me the afflatus surging and surging ... through me

the current and the index.
I speak the password primeval ... I give the sign of democracy;
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their
counterpart on the same terms.
Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of slaves,
Voices of prostitutes and of deformed persons,
Voices of the diseased and despairing, and of thieves and
dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars-and of wombs, and of
the fatherstuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the trivial and flat and foolish and despised,
Offog in the air and beetles rolling balls of dung.
Through me forbidden voices,

Voices of sexes and and lusts ... voices veiled, and I remove the
veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured.
The staggering complexity of the world finally erupts in poetry

like a long rumbling volcano that finally throws out a cascade of
fire, smoke and molten rock. And it is purposeless to argue with it.
To write in this conviction is to believe that one's words are
irrefutable, and what might once have seemed merely subjective
and arbitrary now becomes the bearer of an apodeictic certainty.
Whitman appears before a startled Parnassus as the first poetic
trade unionist, presenting a series of non-negotiable demands and
brusquely determined to carry the day. Although it was Emerson
who suggested the links that were to bind nature to the poet, and
the poet to his fellow men and women, it is Whitman who turns
poet-reader-world into an unbreakable, unshakeable circuit of
power. For in the immense interconnectedness of experience there
can never be any possibility of being outside it, so that there is no
position from which Whitman's utterance can be questioned. But
Whitman only appeals to the self-evident fact of existence. It rests
on the foundation of being:
A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full

hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more
than he.
Being is the one thing in the world that cannot be questioned, and
the fact that the child's query cannot be answered only proves that
the query itself is redundant, or rather contains its own answer. So
Whitman's poetry correspondingly contains its own validation- 'I
carry the plenum of proof' - and the polyphony of many voices
that blend together in one voice becomes overwhelming and
unanswerable: 'My own voice, orotund sweeping final'. In the
excessiveness of 'Song of Myself' lies its truth.
Imbued with this confidence Whitman can soar aloft and
enumerate the marvels of America with a loquaciousness of which
Emerson never dreamed. In the spirit of Audubon's Birds of
America Whitman offers a seemingly endless parade of unknown
wonders to which the only conceivable response is dazzlement,
intoxication and delight. As unfamiliar and unexplored territory
America can bemuse in a way that stale and world-weary Europe
never can. Yet in a tortuous dialectic of enthusiasm and
indifference Whitman's catalogue can also serve to banish all
sense of negativity from the universe, since in the apprehension of
an all-pervasive cosmic flow this negativity figures always as a
moment that is quickly passed, so speedily engulfed as to be
virtually unnoticeable. For Emerson evil was simply limitation,

and in the excessive vision it can be simply eliminated by refusing
to rest upon it. Significantly Emerson closed 'Nature' by
suggesting that menacing appearances will necessarily yield
before the onward march of the spirit:
Build therefore your own world. As fast as you conform your life
to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great
proportions. A correspondent revolution on things will attend
the influx of spirit. So fast will disagreeable appearances, swine,
spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons, enemies, vanish;
they are temporary and shall no more be seen. The sordor and
filths of nature, the sun shall dry up and the wind
exhale. (ECW, 1, 45)
To his credit, Whitman never suggests that negativity is merely

illusory, but he does remorselessly temporalise it. Before his
continually shifting and intoxicated gaze even the most
distressing aspects of life, as in
The malformed limbs are tied to the anatomist's table,

What is removed drops horribly in a pail
and 'Him in the poorhouse tubercled by rum and the bad

disorder', will seem insignificant as the mind reels before a
sublimity of enumeration and may actually become part of that
sublimity themselves. But, in any event, just to speak of things
that cannot normally be spoken of is a liberating act which has the
power to banish that timorous consciousness which can never be
other than anxiously neurotic through its very determination to
exclude. For Whitman, naming itself endows the object with a
certain purity. Once a person is able to grasp the way in which
specificity is always caught up in a vortex of experience, where
everything shades into everything else, then such 'fixations'
hardly matter:
What blurt is it about virtue and about vice?

Evil propels me, and reform of evil propels me .... I
stand indifferent,
My gait is no faultfinder's or rejector's gait,
I moisten the roots of all that has grown.
To quibble with life is an impertinence. By exposing himself to

every aspect of experience the individual is expanded, enhanced
and strengthened. By allying himself with the universe he can
become complete.
Nevertheless Whitman's role as educator is somewhat
ambiguous. For it does not tell that which is known already but
that which is liberatingly unfamiliar, even if it should have been
known all along. It demands and compels a correspondent cry of
recognition. Whitman's celebration of life in all its manifold
complexity should awaken the reader to a miraculous sense of his
own possibility and to a newfound awareness of the world about
him:
Long enough have you dreamed contemptible dreams,

Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habituate yourself to the dazzle of the light and
of every moment of your life.
Long have you timidly waded, holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, and rise again, and nod
to me and shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.
But already the poem begins to be invaded by the prospect of a

silence that rhetoric has so long held at bay. As Whitman more
self-consciously addresses the reader in the closing sections of the
poem and considers what effect it should have upon him, the gap
between the world and the poem, a gap that the poem itself has
tried to close, begins to open again. For to be complete Whitman's
poem requires an assent from the reader that can never be
incorporated within the poem but must always remain outside it.
Beginning in a spirit of supreme confidence, the poem now begins
to vibrate to the possibility of doubt. For, having earlier assumed
that his lines were as unquestionable as Euclidian axioms,
Whitman is bound to ask himself whether there is actually anyone
out there listening, and, if so, to wonder how it is likely to be
received. Will his auditors accept his claim to speak on their
behalf? So at this point Whitman now conceded the possibility
that he may not have been understood and that even the
best-intentioned reader may have lagged behind, even though in

theory this is impossible:
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fiber your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
Finally the poet cannot deny that the poem is an act offaith and
that he is waiting as desperately for the reader as he hopes the
reader is desperately searching for him. No other possibility can
be envisaged. The ultimate completion of the poem is preserved
by allowing that moment to be infinitely and indefinitely
postponed. For without that recognition from the reader the poet
ceases to be a Superman.
5 Nathaniel Hawthorne:
Excessive Interpretation
No American writer is more preoccupied with the excessive than
Hawthorne, and yet, ifHawthorne himself is to be believed, there
is no one less qualified than he to write about it. Excessive,
exaggerated, lurid and fanciful characters haunt the pages of
Hawthorne's work, yet Hawthorne, if not exactly disclaiming
responsibility for them, is so anxious to protest his inability to rise
to the levels of excessiveness that his subjects seem to call for that
it seems that he has rather been chosen by them than chosen them,
the reluctant amanuensis of the bizarre. In the age of the Romantic
personality and the cult of the creative artist Hawthorne
positively trumpets his lack of imagination, preferring to figure,
like Hilda in The Marble Faun, as the humble recorder of things
disturbingly vivid in themselves.
The moment when Hawthorne in the Custom House unwraps
the old, worn, faded yet still deeply flamboyant Scarlet Letter and
places it on his breast is intentionally symbolic: 'it seemed to me,
then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet
almost so, as of burning heat; and as if the letter were not of red
cloth, but red-hot iron. I shuddered and involuntary let it fall
upon the floor' (The Scarlet Letter, p. 32). Hawthorne is not
adequate either to the moral burden that the letter represents or to
the weight of signification that the letter carries, so that The Scarlet
Letter both picks up a theme and at the same time drops it, for, as,
in some paradoxical sense, the excessive cannot be represented
except through a lack, so it is through the lack that the excessive
figures as excessively as it does. The apparent failure of
imagination that Hawthorne so pertinaciously insists on -
My imagination was a tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or

only with miserable dimness, the figures with which I did my
best to people it .... The page oflife that was spread out before
169
© David Morse 1987
me seemed dull and commonplace, only because I have not

fathomed its deeper import (pp. 34, 37)
-may be less disabling than it seems. For whatever is excessive in

The Scarlet Letter can be neither Hawthorne nor his style, but some
other thing that stands the more sharply exposed by the halting
sobriety of its presentation. The Scarlet Letter is a message in a bottle
of which Hawthorne is both the sender and receiver, yet he
nevertheless claims to be unable to decipher what he himself has
written. The pantomime nevertheless does have a meaning: which
is that an alien culture invariably appears as excessive, since its
iconography is powerful precisely because it appears so opaque
and forbidding. Its indecipherability seems thereby to contain
some implicit interdiction or warning. It signals danger. To
decode the text fully would be to negate the very excessiveness
which drew our attention in the first place.
Yet decipherment is a project in which Hawthorne is deeply
implicated. Unlike Emerson, who energetically tries to sweep
away all the cobwebs and festoons of the Calvinist past,
Hawthorne wants to come to terms with the New England
tradition and make sense of it. As Michael Davitt Bell has
suggested, 'Hawthorne sets out to return petrified forms to
imaginative life.' 1 The contrast between the two men emerges
with particular clarity in Hawthorne's prefatory essay to Mosses
from an Old Manse. When all around him speak of the new,
Hawthorne, even in his title, insists on the old. In the selfsame
place where Emerson composed 'Nature', a clarion call to young
America to reject all stultifying and oppressive influences,
Hawthorne is to be found rummaging through mouldy old books.
The search is typically fruitless and Hawthorne is unable to
discover anything of any unexpected interest or value:
The rain pattered upon the roof and the sky gloomed through
the dusty garret windows while I burrowed among these
venerable books in search of any living thought which should
burn like a coal of fire or glow like an inextinguishable gem
beneath the dead trumpery that had long hidden it. But I found
no such treasure- all was dead alike; and I could not but muse
deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact that the
works of man's intellect decay like those ofhis hands. Thought
grows mouldy. (Mosses, p. 19)
Nathaniel Hawthorne 171
But what is significant is not so much that Hawthorne found

nothing as that he should even have been looking in the first place.
While Emerson is calling on his contemporaries to cultivate the
gleam of inspiration in their own minds, Hawthorne is apparently
still looking hopefully and deferentially elsewhere, still reverent
before literature and the word:
Lightly as I have spoken of these old books, there yet lingers

with me a superstitious reverence for literature of all kinds. A
bound volume has a charm in my eyes similar to what scraps of
manuscript possess for the good Mussulman; he imagines that
those wind-wafted records are perhaps hallowed by some
sacred verse and I that every new book or antique one may
contain the 'Open, sesame!' - the spell to disclose treasures
hidden in some unsuspecting cave of truth. (p. 21)
By contrast, Emerson had a particular animus against the

pretensions of bound volumes. Emerson resented the old puritan
obsession with the word because he felt that it was inherently
subservient; because it generated neurosis, suspicion and
insecurity before the world; because it privileged received wisdom
over action, feeling and personal authenticity. In a mood that
both duplicates and suggestively contrasts with Hawthorne's
reflections on the past, Emerson writes in his journal,
We are sure that we have all in us. We go to Europe or we

pursue persons or we read books in the instinctive faith that
they will call it out & reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all. The
persons are such as we; the Europe an old faded garment of
dead persons; the books their ghosts. Let us drop this idolatry. 2
When the true transcendental apperception of cosmic unity has

once been glimpsed, the questing, devious Calvinist obsession
with the sign stands revealed as a fetishising of the partial and the
fragmentary, a frantic grasping at clues that precludes the very
possibility of harmoniousness. It is also hierarchical, as
Hawthorne acknowledges in The Scarlet Letter. For Emerson and
Carlyle nothing is ever privileged; everything in the universe is a
window on the infinite. But the puritan world that forces Hester
Prynne to wear the Scarlet Letter 'A' on her breast as a sign that
she is an adulteress is also a society that is highly stratified
and one that uses clothing as a way of marking its divisions. The
split between puritanism and Transcendentalism can be seen as
dividing on their respective commitments to a marked and
unmarked world. For Emerson the world is legible precisely
because it is unmarked, everything in it is expressive of the
totality. But for the puritans, and, by his own admission,
Hawthorne as well, the world cannot function unless it is clearly
marked, unless certain worlds, certain signs, certain gestures are
conspicuously underlined. Meaning is not on the surface but has
the character of depth. It requires searching, sifting, excessive
interpretation. It calls for such unremitting effort as to be
indubitably demoralising. Moreover, the assumptions that
underlie it seem puzzling, because the world is somehow both
legible and illegible at the same time. Yet it would be wrong to
conclude therefore that Hawthorne's writing is ambiguous. On
the contrary, to attribute ambiguity to his texts is precisely to
nullify Hawthorne's determined struggle for meaning, his attempt
to work out an intellectual position that can acknowledge both
Emerson's concern with personal authenticity and the Calvinist
awareness of the sign.
To understand Hawthorne fully it is necessary to place his work
against the somewhat recondite backcloth of late-seventeenth-
century and early-eighteenth-century puritan thought, for, while
this background is necessarily discrepant with the figures in the
foreground, it nevertheless can serve to elucidate many puzzles.
Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) in particular
can serve as a crucial reference point, both because of its general
cultural importance and because it makes explicit the pre-modern
character of the American literary tradition. In The Order of Things
Foucault describes how a mode of perceiving the world through
an endless system of analogy and resemblance is replaced in the
seventeenth century by a classical episteme based on comparison,
measurement, difference and order. Mathematics is crucial to the
new episteme because it is a model of what language should
ideally be: an arbitrary system of signs which enables things to be
broken down and analysed into their constituent parts. But
Cotton Mather's work is completely untouched by these
European developments. His writing is figural and typological,
deploying precisely the pre-classical network of resemblances, but
it should not therefore be assumed that it is intellectually
unsophisticated. On its own terms - to make, admittedly, a
substantial concession- it is a complex and internally coherent

way oflooking at the world.
Crucial to Cotton Mather's history of the Church in New
England is his recognition that his whole account is saturated with
evaluative assumptions. We are a long way from scientific history.
Cotton Mather is convinced of the importance of his story -
indeed we must constantly bear in mind that this is not simply a
narrative of events but very much a story: the unfolding of God's
purpose in the American wilderness. It is precisely through the
careful structuring of Mather's recital that the working of the
divine will can be made explicit, so that he writes, 'But whether
New England may live any where else or no, it must live in our
History.' 3
Such is Mather's ambitious textualisation of the world. A
thorough and purportedly objective history of the settlement
would record may disparate, insignificant phenomena, but it
would signally fail to mark the quick from the dead, the tokens of a
flourishing religious life that serve to set it apart from the
irreligious, the secular or satanic. Whatever may have been the
moral state of New England at the time of writing- and Mather
himself is in no doubt that it is at a pretty low ebb- it is the work
itself that will offer the surest sense of the progressive and
cumulative character of the puritan project inN ew England, what
Sacvan Bercovich has characterised as 'an effort to establish a
callosal dike against the flow of events, to raise a figural wall of fire
that would make their New Israel impervious to time'. 4
History as read by Mather can only embrace events of the
utmost significance: he relates 'Considerable Matters' and
presents 'examples worthy of everlasting remembrance' together
with 'amazing Judgements and Mercies'. 5 Throughout his
controlling assumption is the priority of the Church over the
world. True to Protestant tradition and that ofthe Fathers of the
early Church, Mather insists that the Church is everything, the
world nothing. The world is simply a theatre in which the drama
of the Church is played out, a place often hostile and resistant to
the work of God, a snare, a vanity and an illusion. For this reason
the history of the Church must take precedence over any other
history: 'the Church wherein the service of God is performed, is
much more precious than the world, which was indeed created for
the sake and the use of the Church' .6 Mather would have been
greatly puzzled by Ranke's famous definition of history as 'Wie
eigentlich gewesen ist', since to undertake to describe in a spirit of

complete objectivity events as they really happened would, in
effect, be to take the standpoint of the world against the Church, to
suppress the unique historical mission of Christianity to the same
level as everything else. So Mather is openly and honestly
partisan. He asks, 'But how can the lives of the commendable be
written without commending them?' 7 To act otherwise would
involve a complete abdication of moral responsibility and would,
in fact, render pointless his self-assigned task of writing the
Magnalia Christi Americana in the first place.
Insofar as the Puritans can use a notion of 'objectivity' it
designates, as in medieval theology, the standpoint of God. In the
world God distributes many signs, indicators and portents,
which, when rightly interpreted, can enable man to understand
his unfolding design. Although man may err in his understanding
of these signs, the risk of misinterpretation is limited by the fact
that the course of events will serve to confirm which view is right,
and this will, in any event, be confirmed by further providential
disclosures. This is no static view of truth but one which is driven
by its own internal dynamism, and in a very real sense truth is
history and vice versa, though not in any Rankean definition. In a
curious way this notion of truth by confirmation resembles that of
modern scientific inquiry. While R. W. B. Lewis is essentially
justified in insisting on the objectivity of the types, quoting
Samuel Mather as saying,
Men must not indulge their own Fancies, as the Popish Writers
used to do, with their Allegorical Senses, as they call them;
except we have some Scripture ground for it. It is not safe to
make any thing a Type meerly upon our own fansies and
imaginations; it is Gods Prerogative to make Types 8
such an emphasis, if unqualified, can be highly misleading. In the

first place, Samuel Mather is only insisting, in true Protestant
fashion, that the only valid basis for typological thinking is the
Bible, so that his implication is that the use of true types derived
from the Bible would preclude subjective errors in interpretation-
undoubtedly a very odd assumption. But we must also distinguish
how typological thinking was supposed to work from the way it
actually did work. While, on the one hand, the use of types is a
guide to God's purpose, it is also, on the other, a metaphorical
system by which particular sets ofvalues can be insisted on by a

social group, a method of promoting solidarity and an (always
flexible) guide to action.
A classic instance of this is the 'golden candlesticks' figure
in the Magnalia Christi Americana (from the Book of Revelations),
which Cotton Mather employs in rebuttal of negative criticisms
that have been made of the American experiment:
In short, the first Age was the golden Age: to return unto that, will
make a man a protestant, and, I may add, a Puritan. 'Tis
possible that our Lord Jesus Christ carried some thousands of
Reformers into the retirements of an American desart, on
purpose that, with an opportunity granted unto many of their
faithful servants, to enjoy the precious liberty of their Ministry,
though in the midst of many temptations all their days, He
might there, to them first, and then by them, give a specimen of
many good things, which He would have His Churches
elsewhere aspire and arise to; and this being done, he knows not
whether there be not all done, that New-England was planted
for; and whether the Plantation may not soon after this, come to
nothing. Upon that expression in the sacred Scripture, 'cast the
unprofitable servant into outer darkness', it hath been
imagined by some, that the Regiones exterae of America, are
the Tenebrae exteriores which the unprofitable are there
condemned unto. No doubt, the authors of those Ecclesiastical
impositions and severities, which drove the English Christians
into the dark regions of America, esteemed those Christians to
be a very unprofitable sort of creature. But behold, ye European
Churches, there are golden candlesticks (more than twice seven
times seven!) in the midst of this 'outer darkness' unto the
upright children of Abraham, here hath arisen light in darkness.
And, let us humble speak it, it shall be profitable for you to
consider the light which, from the midst of this 'outer darkness'
is now to be darted over unto the outer side of the Atlantic
Ocean. But we must ask your Prayers, that these 'golden
Candlesticks' may not be quickly 'removed out of their place'. 9
The question that immediately arises is, who is right- those who
see America as a irremediable place of 'outer darkness' for the
'unprofitable servant', or those who see it as a region filled with
the illumination of more than seven times seven 'golden
Candlesticks' - and how might such a controversy be resolved?

No doubt one could argue that a rigorous study of biblical
typology would yield the answer or that it would sooner or later
become clear whether or not the settlement ofNew England was
to be a force for good or evil in the world, but really such replies are
beside the point, especially when the partisan and unyielding
character of the debate is clearly laid out by Cotton Mather
himself. For the Puritans were spiritual gamblers, embarking on
wagers far more hazardous and perplexing than any in Pascal.
They could never be absolutely certain that what they were doing
was right or in accordance with God's will, even though they
might be irresistibly convinced that such was the case. They had
to take their chances. The curious boldness of radical Protestants,
despite their epistemological uncertainties, was the inevitable
consequence of their own predicament. They had no alternative
but to act fearlessly and decisively according to their lights, since
nothing less than salvation turned on the consequence, yet always
facing the possibility that they might have seriously misread the
situation and even have become the unwitting instrument of
satanic deceptions. The impossibility of certainty made boldness
more necessary rather than less, for, although private judgement
might be uncertain, it was certainly to be preferred to unjustified
papal authority. So Cotton Mather, his predecessors and his
contemporaries, while ultimately uncertain whether the New
England churches really were 'golden Candlesticks', nevertheless
had to go on thinking and acting as if they were.
The figure of the golden candlesticks is repeated and
rhetorically amplified throughout the Magnalia Christi Americana.
The planting of churches in the New World as golden candlesticks
signifies both their mission to return spiritual illumination
ultimately to the sources whence it came, and by symbolic
analogy, the prospect of a return to the golden age. The candles
placed in the candlesticks are the ministers of the gospel who
provide the light. Mather includes a lecture on the history of
Boston, which states,
Here are several 'golden candlesticks' in the town. 'Shining and

burning lights' have illuminated them. There are gone to shine
in a higher orb seven divines that were once the stars of this town,
in the pastoral change of it; besides many others that for some
years gave us transient influences. Churches flourishing with
much love, and peace, and many 'comforts of the Holy Spirit'
have hitherto been our greatest glory. I wish that some sad
eclipse do not come ere long upon this glory! 10
Here one can see how the figure operates as an assertion of value.
The fragility of the tradition is recognised and there is an uneasy
sense of foreboding, but the metaphor celebrates a glorious past
and the inspired preachers who kept the tradition alive. The
'golden candlesticks' - the churches themselves- are still there,
and so is the promise that they symbolically represent, but that
can only be realised if new ministers, possessed of equal fervour
and commitment, come forward to pass on the flame. In his life of
Jonathan Burr, Cotton Mather notes that Burr came to New
England at a time when 'there was not so much want of lights as of
golden candlesticks where in to place the lights', 11 thereby
implying, of course, that the contemporary problem is the reverse.
Discussing the question of a college for the training of ministers,
he writes,
Nor are the churches like to continue 'pure golden candle-

sticks', if the College which should supply them prove apostate.
If the fountain be corrupted, how should the streams be pure,
which should 'make glad the city of God'? How should 'plants
of renown' spring up from thence, if the College it selfbecome a
degenerate plant? 12
These repetitions function rhetorically and create their own truth.

Not only can there be no doubt but that the churches are golden
candlesticks, but this 'fact' can be invoked both against European
denigators and against any tendency towards spiritual
backsliding in New England itself. But already it is evident that
the association of the churches with doctrinal purity through the
figure of the golden candlesticks now does not altogether rely on
the future for its validation, but is necessarily presumed as a
reality that the congregations are in danger of forgetting and of
falling away from. Cotton Mather's notion that the churches are
golden candlesticks is an inescapable wager which serves to
generate value and meaning and to restore hope.
As Foucault suggests in his analysis of the pre-classical world of
resemblance, the whole system would inchoate if there were not
some way of signalling correspondences to man:
Conventia, aemulatio, analogy, and sympathy tell us how the world

must fold in upon itself, duplicate itself, reflect itself, or form a
chain with itself so that things can resemble one another. They
tell us what the paths of similitude are and the directions they
take; but not where it is, how one sees it, or by what mark it may
be recognised. Now there is a possibility that we might make
our way through all this marvellous teeming abundance of
resemblances without ever suspecting that it has long been
prepared by the order of the world, for our greater benefit. In
order that we may know that aconite will cure our eye disease,
or that ground walnut mixed with spirits of wine will ease a
headache, there must be, of course, some mark that will make
us aware of these things: otherwise, the secret would remain
infinitely dormant. 13
Foucault adds, 'There are no resemblances without signatures.' 14

Cotton Mather undoubtedly believed in the existence of such
marks and signatures and the Magnalia Christi Americana contains
many curious instances of this belief. John Norton's name, for
example, serves to mark him as one of the elect, while a sermon he
preaches is a pointer both to his own fate and to that of his
congregation:
In the spring before his going for England, he preached an

excellent sermon unto the representatives of the whole colony,
assembled at the Court of Election, wherein I take particular
note of this passage: 'Moses was the meekest man on earth, yet
it went ill with Moses, 'tis said, for their sakes. How long did
Moses live at Meribah? Sure I am, it killed him in a short time; a
man of as good a temper as could be expected from a meer man;
I tell you, it will not only kill the people, but it will quickly kill
Moses too!' And in the spring after his return to England, he
found his own observation in himself too much exemplified. It
was commonly judged that the smothered griefs of his mind, upon
the unkind resentments which he thought many people had of his
faithful and sincere endeavours to serve them, did more than
hasten his end; an end whereat JOHN NORTON went, according to
the anagram ofhis name INTO HONNOR! 15
Norton's fate, in this world or the next, is incribed already by

certain signs or marks, which an observer such as Cotton Mather
can interpret as evidence of God's intentions. Although the

making of such types, marks and resemblances is the prerogative
of God, in practice it is often necessary for the puritan to assume
the task himself. We find that Mather does this in the case of
Roger Williams, whom he perceives as guilty of Corahism:
It is remarkable, that in the sacred annals of that matchless and

blessed church-history, which our God has given us in our
Bible, there is a special mark often set upon the first persons that
were eminent in this or that way of sinning, and were upon that
score, 'the chief of sinners': and they who have observed this
remarkable, have particularly marked the infamous Corah, the
first rebel against the divine church-order established in the
wilderness, as one instance to confirm the observation. There
are some, not thoughtless persons, who, in numerating the
troublesome and scandalous things that have disturbed us in
our New-England wilderness, have complained of a crime,
which they have distinguished by the name ofcoRAHISM; or that
litigious and levelling spirit, with which the separation has been
leavened. Now, tho' I could chuse rather to leave a veil than a
scar upon the memory of any person, that by his miscarriage hath
made himself too memorable; yet our church-history will be but
an unfinished piece, if we do not set a mark upon that man who was
one of the first that made themselves notable by their opposition
to the church-order of these plantations; and this we may the
more freely do, because of an injunction upon us, 'to mark them
that cause divisions'. 16
It is interesting to consider the controlling assumptions that not

merely permit Cotton Mather to do this but positively require him
to do so. In some sense the history of the world may be seen as a
series of rebellions against the authority of God, beginning with
the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and with the
murder of Abel by Cain. Cain is the first rebel on whom God
places his mark and is thus the type of all future rebels, including
Corah, who is more specifically a rebel against a Church order in
the wilderness. So an awareness of the Bible, which Cotton
Mather views as a continuous history of a Church, rather than as
the annals of various prophets, can guide one's sense of
contemporary history through a firm grasp of what has proved
disruptive in the past. Moreover, Cotton Mather's own work as

Church history can be seen as a latterday continuation of the
history of God's Church initiated in the Bible, and therefore it is
reasonable to assume that he likewise received divine inspiration
in the writing of it. And it is precisely because he is writing a
Church history that he is under a powerful obligation not to pass
over the exemplary significance of Roger Williams as a divisive
individual, however much in his private capacity he might prefer
to forget him, since by so castigating Williams he is contributing
to the preservation of the Church in New England and guarding
against the repetition of such types in the future. Although the
marking ofWilliams is Mather's own work, it seems not to be so
but rather to be a response to biblical injunction and, at the same
time, merely a recognition that Corahism will inevitably recur.
The Church historian has a special responsibility for recognising
these types. In so doing he also demonstrates a felt continuity with
the biblical past. At the same time we cannot but be aware that
Cotton Mather is not simply pointing to resemblances already
inscribed in the world but that his pointing the finger at Roger
Williams has a theatrically demonstrative and admonitory
character. He seeks to enforce by an oblique and stylised
repetition the acquiescence of his readers in the belief that
Williams, as the type ofCorah, is an example to be shunned. So
Roger Williams himselfbecomes a type. But the method by which
this is achieved is by the introduction of unnamed, but
presumably weighty, 'not thoughtless', persons who are used to
create the assumption that it is well known that there is such a
thing as Corahism and that Williams, if anyone, is its
embodiment. Worse still, to question Cotton Mather's confident
belief would involve being implicated in the sin of Corahism
oneself. Of course, Cotton Mather himself knows that such a
resemblance is not finally provable, which is why he must insist so
much upon it. Assertion and reassertion, reiteration and
repetition, the use of types, figures and metaphors as a method of
generating and controlling belief- such is the puritan way. The
puritan does not perceive truth as in some way mirroring the
world, which indeed would be a contradiction in terms and which
would simply involve an immersion in falsity and treacherous
appearances; instead he imposes his conceptions upon it, based on
his own inner convictions and on his understanding of biblical
typology as the only possible guide through a maze. A structure is
imposed upon the world which can never be known to be true for
certain, but which does provide a basis for action.
The symbolic, for the puritan mind, is a way of mastering
reality, a means of domination, yet it is fraught with hazard
because of the instability and insecurity of the sign. One can never
be absolutely sure of the validity of one's interpretation, since
devils 'propose by things that are true to betray men into some fatal
misbelief and miscarriage about those that are false' . 17 Acquiring
knowledge is rather like crossing a marsh in which firmly
grounded tufts of grass that seem to offer some sense of security
are set in a deeply treacherous and uncertain morass.
An alarming instance of the problem of confirmation of
disconfirmation is provided by the case of Edward Hopkins,
Governor of Massachusetts who, after tearfully exclaiming, 'Oh!
pray for me, for I am in extreme darkness', 18 becomes suddenly
convinced that he is after all to be saved. He rejoices that the
darkness has vanished and rapturously exclaims, 'Oh! Lord, thou
hast kept the best wine until the last. Oh! friends, could you
believe this? I shall be blessed for ever; I shall quickly be in eternal
glory.' 19 But after Hopkins's death 'it was found that his heart had
been unaccountably, as it were boiled and wasted in water, until it
was become a little brittle skin, which being touched, presently
dropped in pieces'. 20 Mather draws no overt conclusion from this
ominous token; but it clearly implies the possibility that Hopkins
may have been mistaken about his salvation - the signs that he
received may either have been false or have been falsely
interpreted.
Thunder and lightning are equally uncertain signs of the divine
will. In general terms thunder should be taken as a sign of God's
might and power, yet Mather had himself noted that the houses of
ministers seemed peculiarly liable to storm damage, which would
seem to call for rather different terms of analysis. In the Magnalia
he includes a sermon preached by a minister of the gospel, 'the
voice of the Glorious God in Thunder', which was occasioned by
the outbreak of a thunderstorm while the service was going on.
The preacher took advantage of the occasion to impose on his
auditors a sense of the power and majesty of God, but he
prudently, if somewhat surprisingly, concluded by pointing out
that 'daemons have a peculiar spite at houses that are set a-part for
the peculiar service of God'. 21 Yet, given the intellectual
assumptions of the time, such a proviso was inevitable. Not to
recognise that every phenomenon could be transposed into its

diametrical opposite would be to show a dangerous innocence
about the intensity of the struggle being waged between good and
evil on earth. The only certainty is that God alone possesses it.
The undecidability of the puritan world is strikingly confirmed
in the Magnalia Christi Americana by the fact that Cotton Mather
was himselfled to doubt whether the New England churches were
indeed golden candlesticks of spiritual regeneration as he had
assumed. In the progressive eclipse of theocracy and church
government the story of New England seems to be turning out
rather differently; which in turn suggests that Mather's project of
a Church history is undermined by the lack of suitable signs and
portents by which to validate it. So really it has to validate itself,
though deeply self-doubting. Mather writes,
'Tis to our Lord jesus Christ that we offer up our hallelujahs!-

But it must, after all, be confessed, that we have had one enemy
more pernicious to us than all the rest, and that is 'our own
backsliding heart', which has plunged the whole country into so
wonderful a degeneracy, that I have sometimes been discouraged
from writing the church-history of the country, lest 'Mulier
Formosa, superne Desinat in Piscem' [Venus above, a reptile's
form below]. 22
Mather can only write according to his lights and hope that
everything will eventually work out for the best. Finally the
mystery remains unfathomable and hidden from the eyes of men-
so Mather appropriately ends with 'God knows what will be the
END!' 23 Only the end of history can disclose what the meaning of
events has really been. So until then, in ignorance, darkness and
obscurity, men must continue in their chosen path, devoutly
hoping and praying that it is the right one. In the silence of God
there is no alternative but to play one's hunches and look for signs
that may seem to confirm them.
Hawthorne was deeply fascinated by the shifting and
treacherous nature of the puritan experience, and he recognised
that this was produced by the instability of the sign. For the
puritans, being was effaced before the relentless, unappeasable
interrogation of signs. Clothing, gesture, behaviour, language-
all these things had their meaning which must be deciphered, yet
they were always at the service of an interpretative scheme, which
is as shaky as the evidence it gets to work upon. The struggle for

truth is a superhuman one, since it is never possible to remain on
the human level, which is always trivial, shortsighted and
potentially impious. In the attempt to maintain a trust in God,
while perennially doubting the world, it becomes hard to know
which is which. In Hawthorne's story 'Young Goodman Brown'
his hero sets off on a doubtful night-time journey through forest,
leaving his young wife Faith behind. In some sense this is a
Bunyanesque spiritual pilgrimage, representative of the perils
and perplexities that can assail the Christian soul in the absence of
an unquestioning and perfect trust in God, yet what the tale rather
demonstrates is that any recognition of the possibility of evil
bubbling under the surfaces of the world can generate a
hallucinatory nightmare of doubt and uncertainty. Faith cannot
really banish this nightmare, since it is faith in Calvinist doctrine
that actually induces this distrust by making salvation a mystery
to all but God alone and by insisting on the pervasiveness of evil as
perhaps the only certainty. Young Goodman Brown finds himself
a participant at a Black Mass, in which he is surprised to discover
that he has been joined by all the most august and respectable
members of the Church. To the assembled crowd a dark figure
announces, 'Depending on one another's hearts, ye had still
hoped that virtue was not a dream. Now ye are undeceived. Evil is
the nature of mankind' (Mosses, p. 88).
This blurring of pious assembly with satanic creed is
symbolically apt, since only the slightest deformation ofCalvinist
tenets is needed to produce it. The story suggests that such is the
struggle of maintaining the theoretical possibility of virtue and
salvation within a creed that insists so implacably on the
omnipresence of sin and wickedness that it is all to easy to give up
the hopeless struggle and simply accept that goodness is
impossible. The Black Mass offers relief since it offers an essential
familiar doctrine without the notion of a saving remnant that
makes it so intolerable. Faith, the very thing that Calvinism insists
on as an absolute, is stretched to breaking-point and beyond by
the unreadability of the world in which it is supposed to function.
Faith is against the sinful world so absolutely that it seems like
Redburn's guide to Liverpool, quite unrelated to any material
facts. Faith would indeed solve all problems if only it were possible
to possess it. The problem is possessing it in the first place. For,
once vistas of doubt are opened up, there is no way in which the
secure and unanxious consciousness can be restored. Hawthorne

closes the tale by insisting on this. OfYoung Goodman Brown he
says, 'A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not
desperate man, did he become from the night of that fearful
dream' (p. 89).
lfHawthorne could not altogether disavow this puritan distrust
in the world, it was because the rapidly changing American
society of his time could seem equally disconcerting - a place
where even the most illustrious and powerful individual might
suddenly find the rug pulled from under his feet through the
vagaries of public sentiment and where even long-influential
families could find themselves consigned to an unwonted
obscurity. Reputation was indeed a bubble. Hawthorne's
definitive fable of the new America is 'My Kinsman Major
Molyneaux'. What is significant is the way in which in this
instance the connotations of urban and rural are reversed. In
'Young Goodman Brown' and other pieces by Hawthorne it is the
town that is a place of relative clarity, tranquillity and order, the
forest that is laden with implications of obscurity and danger. In
'My Kinsman Major Molyneaux' Robin is a simple country youth
who comes from an environment that is natural and unaffected to a
deceptive urban world, where nothing is what it seems and where
all his expectations are to be overturned. The story looks both
backwards and forewards, since the tumult and 'temporary
inflammation of the public mind' (The Snow Image and Uncollected
Tales, p. 209) that is raised against colonial governors prefigures
the disorders ofJ acksonian democracy; while, if Robin greets 'the
little metropolis of a new England colony' with 'as eager an eye'
(p. 210) as if he were entering London, this is because it already
epitomises the complex and riddling allure of the emergent city.
Since his kinsman Major Molyneaux is a person of some standing,
Robin feels entitled to expect that his inquiries as to his
whereabouts will be greeted with instant recognition and
deference, so he is somewhat surprised to find that his overbearing
social overtures are either indignantly repulsed or received with a
sniggering humour. Significantly, the action of the tale takes place
at night. Robin finds that the metropolis, instead ofbeing a clearly
laid-out space adorned with conspicuous landmarks and with the
residence of his kinsman amongst the most prominent, is quite
baffiingly obscure, with many streets unexpectedly darkened and
deserted. In his innocence he fails to realise that an attractive
young girl whom he takes to be Major Molyneaux's housekeeper,

is in fact a prostitute. His midnight vigil is finally terminated
when, in a shocking reversal of his expectations, he is confronted
with the humiliating spectacle of his kinsman tarred and
feathered, the woe-begone target of public ridicule. For Robin,
Major Molyneux has been less a person than a signifier of power
and status. He could never have foreseen that all the value
attached to his kinsman would suddenly evaporate. But he learns
that in this new world of the city nothing is stable, nothing can be
taken for granted. To preserve his own safety the individual must
learn not to rely on others but to look to himself and respond with
alacrity to changes in the public mood.
This perception of the city is presented more allegorically in
Hawthorne's sketch 'The New Adam and Eve'. Hawthorne
speculates on the mood of'hopeless perplexity' that would fill the
minds of a new Adam and Eve planted on the pavements of the
city, there to be bemused by the 'unintelligible hieroglyphics' of
the street signs and baffied by traces of'the artificial system which
is implied in every lamp-post and each brick of the houses'
(Mosses, p. 249). Such a world exists precisely to be read -
everywhere there are indicators of wealth and penury, privilege
and class. The world is no longer straightforward but is saturated
with obscure meanings and infinite possibilities of decipherment.
In the prison which they visit Adam and Eve see
Inscriptions ... appear on the wall, scribbled with a pencil, or

scratched with a rusty nail; brief words of agony, perhaps, or
guilt's desperate defiance to the world, or merely a record of a
date, by which the writer strove to keep up with the march of
life. There is not a living eye that could now decipher these
memorials. (p. 254)
This urgent desire to create meaning and significance was never

there in Paradise. It is as if, the less meaning there is in the world,
the greater is the need to create it through frantic verbal
constructions - mere vain attempts to ward off the emptiness -
that themselves become illegible. Later Hawthorne has Adam
examining books in a library:
He stands poring over the regular columns of mystic characters,

seemingly in studious mood; for the unintelligible thought upon
the page has a mysterious relation to his mind, and makes itself
felt, as if it were a burthen flung upon him. He is even painfully
perplexed, and grasps vainly at he knows not what. Oh, Adam,
it is too soon, too soon by at least five thousand years, to put on
spectacles, and busy yourself in the alcove of a library.
(p. 264)
After two centuries of puritan culture it seems that the real burden
that man assumed after the Fall was not sin but interpretation,
and that man lost his innocence when the book interposed
between him and nature. Emerson certainly felt this, and
Sampson Reed actually suggested that in Paradise Adam and Eve
would have had no need for language. The Garden of Eden
possessed a transparency from which we are now forever barred.
The paradoxical relationship between nature and culture, and
the troubling question as to whether art is truly second nature are
explored by Hawthorne in his story 'Rappaccini's Daughter.' In a
beautiful garden below his window in Padua, Giovanni sees a
lovely girl tending the plants. She is Beatrice Rappaccini, the
daughter of a reclusive scholar, who seeks to make medicinal
preparations from shrubs that are inherently poisonous. The
garden, though a work of art, nevertheless represents a false and
impious second nature. When Giovanni looks out over the garden
Hawthorne writes,
The aspect of one and all of them dissatisfied him; their

gorgeousness seemed fierce, passionate, and even unnatural.
There was hardly an individual shrub which a wanderer,
straying by himself through a forest, would not have been
startled to find growing wild, as if an unearthly face had glared
at him out of the thicket. Several, also, would have shocked a
delicate instinct by an appearance of artificialness, indicating
that there had been such a commixture, and, as it were,
adultery of various vegetable species, that the production was
no longer of God's making, but the monstrous offspring of
man's depraved fancy, growing with only an evil mockery of
beauty. (p. 110)
Beatrice feels a peculiar affinity with one particularly gorgeous

shrub and strengthens the similarity by wearing a dress that
resembles it both in colour and in shape. Giovanni is conscious of
the homology between them and assumes that Beatrice is herself

as malignant as the plants, especially since her breath is sufficient
to kill small insects: 'Flower and maiden were different and yet the
same, and fraught with some strange peril in either shape' (p. 98).
Although Beatrice loves him, Giovanni begins to fear and
distrust her. He gives her an 'antidote' to Rappaccini's poison
prepared by the complacent and resentful Professor Baglioni.
Giovanni has failed to grasp that beneath the second nature of the
garden Beatrice herself is essentially pure and innocent, but he
cannot grasp this because he has lost his own natural spontaneity
and been corrupted by the cynicism and scepticism of culture.
Hawthorne insists that the primary virtues of nature will always
be present even if they are obscured and overlaid by secondary
appearances. Giovanni's distrust of Beatrice only repeats
Rappaccini's distrust of the world, which is what led him to
construct the garden in the first place. What has been envisaged as
a prophylactic against secondariness creates a secondariness of its
own. In some sense the story represents both the possibility and
impossibility ofEden, since it is decipherment itself that blocks off
all our paradisal hopes. The natural is the only thing that has
become unthinkable.
That the puritan mind creates a semiotic wilderness is
suggested in one of Hawthorne's most subtle stories, 'The
Minister's Black Veil'. The moment Parson Hooper decides to
conceal his face with two folds of crape as a 'mysterious emblem'
(Twice-told Tales, p. 39), he makes an irrevocable commitment to
the sign. He thereby sets himself apart from his fellow men and
women and proclaims on his very face that life is to be lived not on
a day-to-day basis but always under the shadow of eternity and
the skill darker shadow of the Last Judgement. Moreover, by
wearing the veil he also demonstrates that he genuinely does
believe that life on earth is nothing other than a period of trial. He
endeavours to reassure his fiancee Elizabeth that it can ultimately
be no bar to their relationship by saying 'It is but a mortal veil- it
is not for eternity!' (p. 4 7).
Parson Hooper is willing to put his face where his mouth is. The
paradox of the veil is that, whereas in some sense life continues as
before, since the parson is still his mild-mannered, gentle self, at
the same time all his relations with the world are altered. He
believes that the veil is an eternal type and symbol, yet its
significance proves strangely fluctuating and elusive. Some
believe that it is a sign that he has committed some secret sin-

perhaps the most reassuring possibility, since it thereby seems to
restore him to humanity; some think that he has the power to read
their thoughts; while others are intimidated by the veil's general
aura of menace. Hawthorne suggests a further implication: 'With
self-shudderings and outward terrors, he walked continually in its
shadow, groping darkly within his own soul, or gazing through a
medium that saddened the whole world' (p. 48).
In other words, Parson Hooper cannot remain a sign for others
only but is himself deeply affected by the experience. In Christian
terms the significance of this might be that in life we see only
through a glass darkly, and in death face to face. But Hawthorne
hints that Parson Hooper in proclaiming meaning is in desperate
danger of losing it altogether. Even on his deathbed he is
indecorous. When Parson Clark seeks to draw back the veil from
Hooper's face when he is at the very point of death, Hooper
nevertheless desperately struggles to maintain it in position, thus
seeming to confirm that he has committed some terrible crime. It
is only now that he reveals the symbolic intention behind the veil:
What, but the mystery which it obscurely typifies, has made

this piece of crape so awful? When the friend shows his inmost
heart to his friend; the lover to his best-beloved; when man does
not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathesomely
treasuring up the secret of his sin; then deem me a monster, for
the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die! I look around
me, and lo! on every visage a Black Veil! (p. 52)
But this 'final' utterance only opens up a further series of Chinese

boxes. For through the very wearing of the black veil Parson
Hooper has sought to impose his interpretation on the world.
Inevitably he finds the world lacking in transparency when it has
been his life's endeavour to deny it. In launching the black veil as a
sign, he simultaneously unleashes processes of interpretation
which he can neither arrest nor control. Consequently it comes to
acquire supplementary meanings, which wholly overlay and
supplant those he intends. By asserting the primacy of the sign he
relegates his own existence to secondariness. There is something
paradoxical about his attempt to reassert his ownership of the
sign, for, in a very real sense, the living man has disappeared. The
minister and his black veil are there to be interpreted and they can
be nothing other than what people perceive them to be. Their

hermeneutics have supplanted his own.
Wakefield, in the story of that name, is a still more pathetic
instance of the interpretative obsession. Hawthorne proposes an
axiom with which Nietzsche could certainly have concurred: that
the will to interpretation is bound up with a desire for
psychological dominance. Wakefield, having lived together with
his wife for many years, pretends to go away on a briefjourney but
in fact takes up lodgings in a nearby street and there continues to
watch her secretly for many years. Wakefield is the unlikeliest
type of excessive hero, as Hawthorne himself concedes:
With a cold but not depraved nor wandering heart, and a mind
never feverish with riotous thoughts, nor perplexed with
originality, who could have anticipated that our friend would
entitle himself to a foremost place among the doers of eccentric
deeds? (Twice-told Tales, p. 131)
With Wakefield the passion for interpretation exceeds his love of

life. Wakefield is seeking some total, vivid and unimpeachable
sign that his wife is genuinely affected by his unexpected and
strangely protracted departure. If only he is vouchsafed this
revelation he will gladly return home. But such a moment of truth
never comes. Mrs Wakefield becomes stoically resigned to the
departure of her husband as the time passes, and it is the
continually and desperately scrutinising Wakefield who is driven
to desperation by the frustration of it all. Wakefield seeks to be a
master of signs. It is his endeavour to manipulate existence
symbolically and to place his wife under the subjection of his
interpretative gaze, but all that this activity produces is an
attenuation to zero of his own existence. As Hawthorne comments,
'Poor Wakefield! Little knowest thou thine own insignificance in
this great world! No mortal eye but mine has traced thee' (p. 133).
But even as Hawthorne ironises Wakefield so 'Wakefield'
ironises Hawthorne. For, as the reader watches Hawthorne
watching Wakefield watch, the homologies become inescapable.
Wakefield seems like a parody of the American writer in the era of
Jacksonian democracy, who withdraws from the world in the hope
of discovering some imperishable truth but finds not only that the
looked-for revelation never comes but that the world could not
care less about his ambitions anyway. So, in some sense,
Wakefield is a parody of the artist with a mission - who stays

with it if only to furnish some confirmation of his own existence.
The writer, too, is a person who loses his place in the world and
who endeavours to supplement his all too meagre existence with a
hermeneutic excess. From this point of view it may well be the
writer himself who plays the role of demonic manipulator as
envisaged by Brockden Brown and who commits the
'Unpardonable Sin' of'Ethan Brand':
He was no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers or the

dungeon of our common nature by the keys of holy sympathy,
which gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was now the
cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his
experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be
his puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such
degrees as were demanded for his study.
(The Snow Image, etc., p. 99)
For Hawthorne writing is always a Faustian contract, in which

the worthy desire to explore and understand human experience
more deeply can all too easily go awry as the heart is sacrificed to
the head, so that the literary Faust all too easily risks becoming
another Mephistopheles, his greater comprehension producing
only cynicism and contempt.
It is this that sets up more complex reverberations in
Hawthorne's classic narrative of the Romantic quest, 'The
Birthmark'. Aylmer is the exploratory scientist in the tradition of
Frankenstein. His attempts to extend the boundaries of human
power and knowledge go terribly awry when an otherwise
successful attempt to remove a small birthmark from the face of
his beautiful wife, Georgiana, leads to her death at the very
moment when the mark disappears. The preoccupation with the
mark as a 'mysterious symbol' (Mosses, p. 54) reinflects the tale
with distinctively American meanings. From one point of view
Aylmer can be seen as representative of a puritan obsession with
the sign. He cannot disregard the birthmark, seeing it either as a
minor blemish or as an additional charm, because he is
preoccupied with its symbolic significance as 'the visible mark of
earthly imperfection' (p. 3 7). He becomes fixated with the mark to
the point at which he can scarcely anymore perceive his wife as the
bearer of it, so that she becomes yet another walking allegory. Yet
equally Aylmer can be linked with the alternate American

polarity ofTranscendentalism, since like the Transcendentalists
he can in no way live with or come to terms with the idea that
human nature could ever be thought to be confined or less than
potentially perfect. Aylmer, like Emerson, refuses to think the
limit. Moreover, in endeavouring to expunge the birthmark he
seeks a self-created, pristine beginning, in which all traces of
origin will have been erased. 'The Birthmark' can be seen as a
symbolic transposition of Hawthorne's own fictional method,
which also begins with signs, symbols and cultural marks, yet
ultimately seeks to erase them in the name of a common
humanity. In the struggle between art and nature the art of fiction
must become a counter-art, exerting all of its powers on behalf of
the natural and spontaneous. Art's highest vocation can be to
erase itself. For in this way art can truly become a second nature.
In Hawthorne's fiction the puritan insistence both on the
priority of the soul over the world and the priority of the sign over
representation render the assumptions in English novels of the
period about the existence of a compl~tely legible objective world
quite problematic. Moreover, Hawthorne's awareness of the
problem of interpretation also distances him from the
Transcendentalist faith in the complete transparency of
experience - as Emerson writes, 'There is no such thing as
concealment: Every element hangs out its flag.' 24 Although
Hawthorne's Preface to The House of the Seven Gables is often taken
as an apologetic fending-off of transatlantic examples it states its
case in a remarkably assertive and incisive fashion:
When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be

observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its
fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself
entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel. The
latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute
fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and
ordinary course of man's experience. The former- while, as a
work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins
unpardonably, so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of
the human heart- has fairly a right to present that truth under
circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or
creation. (p. 1)
The representational, with its concern for detail, the typical, the
ordinary, is only one possible mode. Coming from a culture where
'wonders' and 'remarkable occurrences' were of the essence,
Hawthorne was not totally overawed by the European masters.
What is more, he suggests that the Romance may offer superior
insight into human behaviour, since its special concern is with 'the
truth of the human heart'. The depiction of a public world of
institutions and manners may deflect attention to relatively trivial
aspects of human life and fail to focus on the more crucial inner
life. People do not invariably parade their feelings in obvious ways
or wear their hearts on their sleeve, and a fiction that fails to
recognise this or offers knowledge of human behaviour without
considering how such knowledge is to be obtained is being less
than candid. In the English novel there are mechanisms of
complication and disentanglement. There is a propulsive
narrative movement that itself produces meaning and that
purports to lay bare the facts through a sequence of actions. The
parody culmination of all this is in the TV detective series, where
an initial 'mystery' is suddenly resolved by the precipitous flight of
a generally suspicious looking character in a car, so that the car
chase itself is the solution to the problem. For Hawthorne there is
no necessity at all that truth will out. By contrast, there is an
orientation to the sign rather than to the event. By Dickensian or
Trollopean standards the movement of his fiction is strangely
jerky and elliptical, as it focusses on discontinuous and barely
perceptible moments, endeavouring to register the muffled
thrusts of the authentic as they are felt through heavily occulted
layers. It is this activity of interpretation that produces truth.
The dream of lucidity is undermined at the very start of The
Scarlet Letter. For what gives the novel its deliberately baffling and
teasing character is precisely the preternatural clarity and
vividness of its opening scene. Hawthorne does not simply set his
narrative running: he presents it in terms of sharp contrasts and
inescapable structural oppositions that announce a heavily
inflected conflict of values. On the one hand, we have the stained
and ponderous oak door of the prison, massively studded with
iron spikes; on the other, the delicate profusion of the wild rose
bush. Here the sombrely clad puritan spectators; there Hester
Prynne - the named person - wearing a fantastically decorated
red gown, which seems to express 'the attitude of her spirit, the
desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque
peculiarity' (p. 53), and which signals its excessiveness so

flagrantly, Hawthorne suggests, as to infringe the sumptuary
regulations of the colony. The scene is one that will disclose the
truth of a puritan society that expresses its identity through the
hard, merciless and unrelenting punishment of sin, making a
public spectacle of the sinner. For all the participants this form of
punishment has an exemplary value, and not the least part of its
communal significance is that naming and justice are combined.
That Hester is an adulteress no one can deny, for the baby she
carries in her arms is the clearest evidence of it, but by the wearing
of the letter 'A' she becomes a marked woman, the ideal type of
what sinfulness is and thus an instrument of moral education for
the entire group. What makes the scene disturbing is that it is so
utterly legible, that the significance of it all cannot possibly be
evaded. The 'grim and grisly presence' of the town-beadle
demonstrates by his very appearance 'the whole dismal severity of
the Puritan code oflaw' (p. 52). The pillory is not simply a place of
punishment: it is a mechanism of exemplification, since it
produces the individual as a pure sign by firmly gripping the
offender's head in position and thus fixing him or her as a moral
subject for the public gaze. Hence 'The very ideal of ignominy was
embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and
iron' (p. 55).
The nightmarish aspect of the spectacle is that in this moment
religion and law, scripture and statute book, punishment and
instruction are completely fused. What we are presented with is a
society that has no place for doubt or for the discrimination of fine
shades of meaning or of moral action. All offences are equally
heinous and terrible in the eyes of the puritans. Yet,
paradoxically, it is not so much that the world is truly legible
under the puritan gaze, for if it were they would not need to insist
so ferociously on the need of inscription. It is precisely because evil
is slippery, elusive and veiled that it must, on occasion, be
blazoned forth for all to see. The puritan need is for a world in
captions that will turn it into an exemplary text; where even the
humblest and simplest of events will betray their significance
under the aegis of scripture. In the case of Hester the presence of
the leading dignitaries of the society at the event - the Governor,
his counsellors, a judge and a general - demonstrates how
seriously it is all to be taken. Unlike a public execution in London
or Paris, where the victim himself is mocked in a turbulent and
anarchic carnival, Hester exists only as a message for others, and

becomes a mode of discourse directed at the entire assembly:
When such personages could constitute a part of the spectacle,
without risking the majesty or reverence or rank or office, it was
safely to be inferred that the infliction of a legal sentence would
have an earnest and effectual meaning. Accordingly the crowd
was sombre and grave. (p. 56)
Puritan punishment is to be experienced as just as infallible and
eternal as that of God himself at the Last Judgement, so that
Hester wearing the letter 'A' for the rest of her life becomes the
type of the inflexibility ofhis grace, which is reserved for the elect
and inexorably denied to the rest. From the example ofHester it is
only too patent that every single person living is marked and
inscribed from the very moment of birth, a fate they can neither
evade, struggle against, nor deny. Chillingworth would have the
letter incised on Hester's gravestone. And Pearl is similarly
branded. The terror of the marketplace is not so much that of the
cruelty and severity of the moment itself- though cruel and severe
it is- as of the terrifyingly inhuman finality it represents.
Hawthorne's understanding of the past as we encounter it in
The Scarlet Letter and elsewhere is significantly shaped by the
example of Scott. Hawthorne's very ability to set the scene with
such crystalline sharpness depends on Scott's articulation in his
novels of conflicts between social groups that are not only opposed
on general matters of principle, but also set apart by marked
differences of style, appearance and tone. Scott sets this out quite
explicitly in his presentation of Roundheads and Cavaliers in
Peveril of the Peak:
The two parties were strongly contrasted; for, during that

period of civil dissention, the manners of the different factions
distinguished them as completely as separate uniforms might
have done. If the Puritan was affectedly plain in his dress and
ridiculously precise in his manners, the Cavalier often carried
his love of ornament into tawdry finery, and his contempt of
hypocrisy into licentious profligacy. 25
Moreover, the one thing the two groups do have in common,

despite their differences, is precisely their excess. Peveril has a
particular pertinence for The Scarlet Letter, partly because
Hawthorne's fantastic and fanciful depiction of Pearl owes more

than a little to Scott's Fennela, and partly because the puritans
that figure in The Scarlet Letter could have walked straight out of the
pages of that novel:
Their dress was m general studiously simple and

unostentatious, or only remarkable by the contradictory
affectation of extreme simplicity or carelessness. The dark
colour of their cloaks, varying from absolute black to what was
called sad-coloured, - their steeple-crowned hats, with their
broad shadowy brims, - their long swords, suspended by a
simple strap around the loins, without shoulder-belt, sword-
knot, plate, buckles or any of the other decorations with which
the Cavaliers loved to adorn their trusty rapiers,- the shortness
of their hair, which made their ears appear of disproportionate
size,- above all, the stern and gloomy gravity of their looks. 26
More importantly, Hawthorn follows Scott in his belief that what

above all characterises the past is its excess. For Scott all historical
periods prior to the modern have been marked by fierce
enthusiasm; deep and unquestioning loyalty to a particular
group, clan or cause; great energy and commitment, coupled with
a mixture of suspicion, incomprehension and hostility directed
towards all who differ. For Scott this offers a great deal to admire,
yet in the end progress means greater moderation and tolerance of
others. If there is a loss of passion or vigour, there is nevertheless
the inestimable prize of peace and social harmony, the willingness
to live and let live. Hawthorne shares this general perspective but
with this symptomatic difference, that for him the excessiveness of
the past cannot simply be left behind, since it will persist as an
unmistakable excess even in the present, casting long and
ominous shadows.
The House of the Seven Gables is, of course, the novel in which
Hawthorne expressed that sense of the past most explicitly. His
belief that the present involves some diminishment is more
equivocal in its relation to a vanishing tradition. The mighty
Pyncheon line peters out in the pathetic old figure of Hepzibah.
Overmastering ambitions that once took the form of building a
house with seven towering gables have shrunk to the opening of a
village shop. Mighty schemes have given way to gingerbread
elephants, and Clifford is as diminished and crack-brained as
Chanticleer and the hens. Life is shrunk to a 'paltry rivulet' (p.

153). lflife is becoming more genteel, by the same token a certain
brutal vigour has been lost. The original puritan
so, at least, says chimney-corner tradition, which often

preserves traits of character with marvellous fidelity- was bold,
imperious, relentless, crafty; laying his purposes deep, and
following them out with an inveteracy of pursuit that knew
neither rest nor conscience; trampling on the weak, and, when
essential to his ends, doing his utmost to beat down the
strong. (p. 123)
Such a portrait can hardly fail to repel- and yet this clarity and
determination of purpose, Hawthorne believes, is what the
modern era profoundly lacks. Yet the puritan ancestors were
excessive and the Pyncheons pay symbolically for their insatiable
acquisitiveness with the uncheckable flow of blood that becomes
the family curse. Hawthorne's understanding is itself relentlessly
typological. Holgrave's daguerrotype reveals the 'secret
character' (p. 91) of Jaffrey and thereby exposes him as a
repetition from the past. Jaffrey's benevolent demeanour is
infinitely more ingratiating than that of his more forceful
predecessors, but beneath this false exterior the old traits persist.
In many of Hawthorne's fictions we are forced to ponder the
hidden homologies between past and present. In The Scarlet Letter
we can scarcely fail to think of Dimmesdale returning from the
forest as Emerson returning from the woods, or to see Hester as a
prophetic anticipation of the modern spirit. And is not
Hawthorne's martyrdom as the Custom-House as much a shadow
of Hester's as Hester herself is a type of 'the sainted Ann
Hutchinson' (p. 48)? In The Blithedale Romance Hollingsworth
preaches from the very pulpit that Eliot was supposed to have
used in converting the Indians; measured against Eliot he appears
as a diminished and morally corrupted shadow of a once-noble
sense of purpose. So a 'sunny glimpse' (p. 3 7) of a future state of
society may appear rather as a distorted echo from the past.
Hawthorne never fails to deplore excessiveness, yet its appearance
in his novels has a peculiar fascination, creating around it a
forcefield that simultaneously attracts and repels.
The excess of the letter in the marketplace scene has two faces:
that of the puritan moralism which imposes it and, at the same
time, that of the rebellious spirit that transfigures it with 'an

elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread' (The
Scarlet Letter, p. 53). The clash of values is unmistakable yet
strangely indecipherable, since they are both woven together in a
single figure. So that even at the outset the letter is an enigma. Yet
from this public space, where all is overt and beyond concealment,
Hawthorne plunges us into the enclosed space of the prison, where
all the signs suddenly become illegible. The known-unknown
man Hester encounters- her husband- is not dressed in garments
that proclaim him for what he is, as she is, but 'in a strange
disarray of civilised and savage costume'. Hester has no way of
knowing whether the medicinal draught he offers her child is
restorative or poisonous. The man's gestures, expressions and
implications are fraught with menace, heavy with an ill-defined
insinuation. From the glare of day we are now in darkness. For
Hawthorne such unnatural clarity is not merely illusory: it serves
positively to mislead and betray, a spotlight that draws attention
away from the shadows. The 'truth' it seeks to impose upon us is
doubly false, as much in what it obscures as in what it purports to
reveal. With authentic puritan scepticism Hawthorne writes in
The Blithedale Romance.
Bewitching to my fancy are all those nooks and crannies, where

Nature, like a stray partridge, hides her head among the
long-established haunts of men! It is likewise to be remarked, as
a general rule, that there is far more of the picturesque, more
truth to native and characteristic tendencies, and vastly greater
suggestiveness, in the back view of a residence, whether in town
or country, than in its front. The latter is always artificial; it is
meant for the world's eye, and it is therefore a veil and a
concealment. Realities keep in the rear, and put forward an
advance guard of show and humbug. (p. 149)
Hawthorne reinforces this inversion of priorities by a syntactical

reversal that turns the fa<;ade into a 'latter' rather than a 'former'.
To rest in the appearance is always to be mistaken. In The Scarlet
Letter only one thing is known- Hester's sin- and only one person
is on display. The identities of both her husband and her lover
remain unknown. Hester does not disclose them to the community
at large, nor does she reveal each to the other. Hester's is a sin
without a plot, and the strange trajectory of the novel, which both
advances and seems unable to advance, becomes a kind of circling

around circumstances which, although known, nevertheless
cannot be brought to light. The effort that is called for to propel
the truth into the open becomes, for Hawthorne, an index of the
complexity of human motivations and the difficulty of knowing
them for what they are. Knowledge is public, motives are private-
across this asymmetry the narrative moves.
In the midst of obscurity the excessive breaks through the mask
of appearances and shatters the torpor of the everyday with
unimpeachable signs of authenticity and truth. Just as the strange
crumbling of Edward Hopkin's heart seems, as much by its
excessiveness as by its symbolic appropriateness, to throw doubt
on his prospects of salvation, so, for Hawthorne, the excessive
necessarily betrays and reveals. In this way the true is always
excessive and the excessive is always true. Here Andrew Jackson
and the reclusive author see eye to eye. We come to know
Hawthorne's leech not through his calm, impassive and watchful
demeanour as he continually keeps up his guard, but in those
fragmentary intervals when his face darkens with powerful
emotion or when his rapture becomes 'riotously manifest by the
extravagant gestures with which he threw his arms towards the
ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor' (The Scarlet Letter, p.
138). The complexity of appearances that we are obliged to
decipher is well brought out by Hawthorne's depiction of
Chillingworth as he presents her through Hester's eyes:
But the former aspect of an intellectual and studious man, calm

and quiet, which was what she best remembered in him, had
altogether vanished, and been succeeded by an eager,
searching, almost fierce, yet carefully guarded look. It seemed
to be his wish and purpose to mask this expression with a smile;
but the latter played him false, and flickered over his visage so
derisively, that the spectator could see his blackness all the
better for it. Ever and anon, too, there came a glare of red light
out of his eyes; as if the old man's soul were on fire, and kept
smouldering duskily within his breast, until by some casual puff
of passion it was blown into a momentary flame. This he
repressed as speedily as possible, and strove to look as if nothing
of the kind had happened. (p. 169)
If the eye is a window on the soul it fulfils this function for

Hawthorne in a very elusive and oblique manner. The real

Chillingworth is somewhere at the back of many layers of
physiognomic varnish. To people in the puritan community at
large, Chillingworth is indeed a calm and studious man. It is only
Hester, who remembers him as he was, that can perceive the more
passionate glint in his eye. The smile with which Chillingworth
seeks to deceive others simultaneously betrays him, and
unmistakable proof of his duplicity is furnished by glimpses of
powerful emotion that he is not altogether able to repress. The
true and the false are blended in a complex chiaroscuro that calls
for the most thorough interrogation.
At the same time Hawthorne sees the excessive as having a
definite momentum. For the puritans human nature was
essentially fixed, petrified at birth as a distinctive and closed
fatality. For Hawthorne's Transcendentalist contemporaries,
though capable of growth, it could never be other than wholly
good. But Hawthorne sees human nature as endowed with a
distinctive dynamism that can work its way dialectically through
the moral categories, from evil to good. Many years later, in The
Marble Faun, Hawthorne was to make quite explicit his belief that
sin has within it its own redemptive capabilities, but even in The
Scarlet Letter we see such a transformative process being worked
out along the path of excess. Hester's initial transgression meets
with an extreme reaction from the puritan community, yet she
transvalues the sign that is imposed upon her and turns it into a
symbol of extravagance, freedom and independence. Her
needlework wins cultural acceptance even when she herself is
rejected and condemned. Of course, the puritans themselves
would recognise the codification of her sin in terms of excess and
independence, so the meaning of the letter 'A' is continuous even if
the evaluation of it differs. But, since Hester's skills are recognised
on an aesthetic level, she also figures as the pioneer artist,
endeavouring to carve out within American culture a space within
which writers such as Hawthorne himself will eventually try (not
very successfully) to function. If Hawthorne shows more than a
little nostalgia for Hester's desperate case, it is because,
paradoxically, Hester's assertion of identity has far-reaching
consequences. At that time the actions of a single person could
have momentous significance and figure amongst the greatest
affairs of state. Contrariwise, we may note, in the turmoil and
confusion of democratic America the individual's protest could
easily pass unnoticed. So that the puritans in denying and

repressing the individual are forced to take the fate of the
individual soul and the moral education of a tiny baby with the
utmost seriousness. The letter works a complex and unforeseen
dialectic both in Hester and her world. By degrees the puritan
community learns to live with Hester, for, as Hawthorne
comments, 'Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will ever be
transformed to love (p. 161).
Hester's lowly social position aids her in her task of ministering
to the sick, and the letter 'A' is reinscribed within a new context of
human relationships:
Her breast, with its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow for
the head that needed one. She was self-ordained a Sister of
Mercy; or, we may rather say, the world's heavy hand has so
ordained her, when neither the world nor she looked forward to
this result. The letter was the symbol of her calling. Such
helpfulness was found in her,- so much power to do, and power
to sympathise, - that many people refused to interpret the
scarlet A by its original signification. They said it meant Able;
so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman's strength.
(p. 161)
The letter becomes demonstrative evidence ofhow negativity can

be inexorably converted into a positive and how a discrepancy
between reality and the sign will be resolved in favour of the
former. A stern, harsh and judicial community that lacks, of
necessity, tenderness and compassion creates the very power it
lacks through the severity of the penalties which it inflicts. It is
against that very harshness that Hester acquires the strength to
withstand it and thereby is able to assume a social role which
hitherto did not exist. By wearing the letter Hester gains a clarity
of self that Arthur Dimmesdale, tormented by inner demons, can
never achieve, and it is only through Hester's influence that
Dimmesdale can summon up, in one final desperate effort, the
courage and strength to speak the truth publicly.
So closely does Hawthorne join being with truth that he sees
Dimmesdale, who remains committed to untruth through his
failure to confess, as a bare vestige of a human being. Through this
failure all his moral earnestness, dedication and spiritual fervour
are nullified. He is fatally split between his public role as minister
and his secret identity as the father of Hester's child. The name of
Arthur Dimmesdale is as decisively marked as that of John
Norton, both because it anagrammatically incorporates the word
'Adulterer' and because it points toward his occluded existence:
It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration

tortured him! It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and
to reckon all things shadow-like, and utterly devoid of weight or
value, that had not its divine essence as the life within their life.
Then, what was he? - a substance? or the dimmest of
shadows? (p. 143)
The moral significance of truth-telling is far greater than any

practical or prudential wisdom, summed up in such a phrase as
'Honesty is the best policy.' For Dimmesdale to have failed to
make this disclosure is almost for him to have lost his soul already.
He inhabits a world of shadows where everything is in peril and
from which he has no other escape or recourse. Yet Dimmesdale
can find, if not salvation, at least some partial redemption through
the way of excess. If the letter itself burns, sears and scorches, this
is because it epitomises the excessiveness of a truth that is too
powerful to be smothered or repressed. For Dimmesdale to
reclaim himself from the negativity that envelops him it is
necessary for him to become daring. Instead of being a man so
timorous that he shrinks from the burrs which his daughter Pearl
hurls at him, after she has used them to adorn the scarlet letter in
Hester's breast, he must become bold enough to force his offence
into the light of day and make a full public confession, the more
awkward because ofhis prolonged silence. Dimmesdale's private
torment is itself marked by excessiveness. He lacerates his very
body with the fatal letter, but, since no one sees it (at least until
Chillingworth), it is unable to assume the status of a sign. It can
only be a strange form of private language. Similarly, the fasts,
vigils and flagellations to which he submits himself bring no relief.
For, although these things in medieval and monastic tradition
may have a purificatory value for Hawthorne, whose 'theology'
owes much more to 'Monk' Lewis and Godwin, they will never be
able to redeem him from the fatal crime of hypocrisy. The
midnight vigil on the scaffold is a pivotal episode, placed at the
exact centre of the book. The minister shrieks aloud in a 'vain
show of expiation' (p. 148). He makes a display of penitence that
appears to communicate his guilt to the world, 'as if the universe

were gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast, right over his
heart' (ibid.) and as if in recognition it appears that a scarlet letter
is seen in the sky.
How is it that this extreme and desperate act on Dimmesdale's
part can be seen by Hawthorne as lacking moral significance,
despite its undoubted sincerity? In part this is because it is not
public. It figures as a false and empty antitype. Hester's public
shaming, which opens the book, must be symbolically answered by
a corresponding scene, such as actually closes the book, in which
Dimmesdale, his wife and daughter will finally stand together
before the assembled community. But it is also the case that
Dimmesdale, for all his parade of excessiveness, has not been
excessive enough. Hawthorne writes,
Why, then, had he come thither? Was it but the mockery of

penitence? A mockery indeed, but in which his soul trifled with
itself! A mockery at which angels blushed and wept, while
fiends rejoiced, with jeering laughter! He had been driven
hither by the impulse of that Remorse which had dogged him
everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked
companion was that cowardice which invariably drew him
back, with her tremulous grip, just where the other impulse
hurried him to the verge of a disclosure. Poor, miserable man!
What right had infirmity like his to burden itself with crime?
Crime is for the iron-nerved, who have their choice either to
endure it, or, if it press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage
strength for a good purpose, and fling it off at once! This feeble
and most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet continually
did one thing or another, which intertwined, in the same
inextricable knot, the agony of heaven-defying guilt and vain
repentance. (Ibid.)
As so often, Hawthorne's rhetoric presses towards a paradox:

that those who have committed a crime and feel genuinely
ashamed are as a consequence unable to face the possibility of
disclosure, which would be the only way in which they could free
themselves from their intolerable psychological burden. It is
actually better to be shameless, as Hester is when she brazenly
flaunts the letter fantastically embroidered with gold thread, than
it is to be psychologically paralysed. To have the courage to be a
great sinner is already to be on the path to atonement and

redemption, but to be diffident, anxious, feeble and retiring, as
Dimmesdale is, is to be condemned to inauthenticity, to lose touch
with the deepest sources of one's identity, to be completely and
utterly lost. Dimmesdale can only save himself by becoming as
shameless as Hester!
The Scarlet Letter is a novel profoundly influenced by Godwin's
Caleb Williams and by the conviction, expressed in that novel, that
any departure from a life of complete sincerity and openess will
lead not simply to the torments of hypocrisy and of an ineluctably
split identity, but to an estrangement from all of mankind. What
Caleb Williams says of himself in Godwin's novel is true of
Dimmesdale also:
The greatest aggravation of my present lot, was, that I was cut

off from the friendship of mankind .... To me the whole world
was as unhearing as the tempest, and as cold as the torpedo.
Sympathy, the magnetic virtue, the hidden essence of our life,
was extinct. ... From time to time I was prompted to unfold the
affections of my soul, only to be repelled with the greater
anguish, and to be baffied in a way the most intolerably
mortifying. 27
Dimmesdale has become unable to communicate with others,

except through the desperately oblique disclosure of his sermons.
His role as minister ensures that there is an unbridgeable gulf
between his august presence and Hester, the fallen woman. He is
forced into a false intimacy with a man who wishes him nothing
but harm and to whom he dare not reveal his past. His cries of
anguish from the scaffold, as much as his self-accusations from the
pulpit, cannot escape the inauthentic. He is as thoroughly
imprisoned within his own consciousness as ever Hester was by
any door studded with iron spikes.
If Dimmesdale's meeting with Hester in the forest marks the
moment when he begins to be restored to humanity, this is
because, for the very first time in many years, he can speak
without pretence and evasion: 'Here, seen only by her eyes,
Arthur Dimmesdale, false to God and man, might be, for one
moment, true!' (The Scarlet Letter, p. 196).1t is the unblocking of the
channels of communication between them and the sympathy
expressed through the clasping of hands, as much as any advice
that Hester can actually give him, that revives the minister's spirits
so forcefully, that can raise 'a spirit so shattered and subdued' (p.
197). Dimmesdale is infused with Hester's boldness, courage and
strength. He is even brought to share in her inimitable spirit of
defiance. If for Hester 'The scarlet letter was her passport into
regions where other women dared not tread' (p. 199),
Dimmesdale feels similarly liberated from the moral constraints
and constrictions of his office: 'It was the exhilarating effect -
upon a prisoner just escaped from the dungeon of his own heart-
of breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an unredeemed,
unchristianized, lawless region' (p. 201). It is certainly apt that
the context for such a description should be the American
wilderness, but it seems none the less surprising that Hawthorne
should present Dimmesdale in such an anarchic way. But we shall
never arrive at a true estimation of the climax of Hawthorne's
novel unless we recognise that Dimmesdale's behaviour is
shocking, scandalous and beyond the bounds of moderation.
On his return from the wilderness Dimmesdale is filled with a
mood of wild abandon, which prompts him , to perform or
contemplate performing a variety of irreverent and sacrilegious
acts. Such thoughts on his part are undoubtedly sinful and give
credence to the view of Mistress Hibbens that he is in league with
the forces of darkness. Indeed Hawthorne presents his excesses in
the most censorious terms:
Tempted by a dream of happiness, he had yielded himself with

deliberate choice, as he had never done before, to what he knew
as deadly sin. And the infectious poison of that sin had been
thus rapidly diffused throughout his moral system. It had
stupified all bless impulses, and awakened into vivid life the
whole brotherhood of bad ones. (p. 222)
Dimmesdale is so intoxicated with his newfound feelings of

independence that it manifests itself in the most disruptive and
subversive forms ofbehaviour. Significantly Dimmesdale is linked
with a drunken sailor from a pirate ship and momentarily feels
such a fellow feeling for him that he longs, 'at least, to shake hands
with the tarry blackguard and recreate himself with a few
improper jests, such as dissolute sailors abound with' (p. 220).
Dimmesdale's behaviour is riddled with contradictions and
Hawthorne suggests that his path from sin to confession cannot be
a simple one, but must involve a dialectical switching from one

mode of excess to another. Dimmesdale is spiritually reborn, not
out of flagellation and prayer, but out of a spirit of misrule.
In Hawthorne's tale 'The Maypole of the Merry Mount' the
joyous spirit of Merrie England that has somehow managed to
linger on in the life of the newfound colonies is symbolically
destroyed when the stern puritan Endicott hacks down the
maypole with his sword. The masquers are scattered; the revels
are ended; leaves and rosebuds are showered on 'the remorseless
enthusiast' (Twice-told Tales, p. 63). In The Scarlet Letter, on the
other hand, it is just this spirit of liberty and revelry that is
victorious. If, in the opening scene, the crowd that has assembled
is uniformly dressed and consistently sombre, the audience for
Dimmesdale's parting sermon is far more diversified. There are
rough frontiersmen in buckskins, Indians in embroidered
deerskin robes and red and yellow bodypaint, bearded nautical
desperadoes in wide, short trousers and broad-brimmed palm-
leafhats. By contrast with the scene ofHester's punishment, there
is an atmosphere of infectious freedom and riotous excess, in
which a disregard for authority is openly displayed. The captain
of the buccaneers appears in flamboyant clothing which, under
other circumstances, would have merited severe punishment. His
sailors 'transgressed, without fear or scruple, the rules of
behaviour that were binding on all others' (p. 232) by smoking
and drinking in the most conspicuous fashion. There is even an
outbreak of the old manly sports, in the form ofbouts of wrestling,
fencing and quarterstaff, before they are broken up by the familiar
figure of the town beadle.
On the face of it Dimmesdale is an improbable fellow traveller
in such company. But in fully registering the moral significance of
the confession for Dimmesdale himself, and the therapeutic
gesture that unites him with the family he has so long denied, we
must not fail to perceive the subversiveness of his actions. As
Hawthorne repeatedly stresses, the minister always had an
exalted position in the hierarchy of the New England puritan
community. Further, Dimmesdale, by his apparently exemplary
piety and by the extraordinary eloquence of his election sermon,
has placed himself at the very head of 'the Governor and
magistrates, the old and wise men, the holy ministers, and all that
were eminent and renowned' (p. 250). Despite the shortness of its
history, New England society is firmly grounded in deference and
elaborately coded status distinctions. Dimmesdale stands at the

apogee of this system: 'Never, on New England soil, had stood the
man so honoured by his mortal brethren as the preacher!' (ibid.).
By calling Hester and Pearl onto the platform of the scaffold
with him, Dimmesdale simultaneously acts with the greatest
moral integrity and the greatest moral impropriety. The power
structure imposes itself on the people by purporting to be beyond
recrimination or reproach, by demonstrating in the most
conspicuous manner its will and power to punish, and by making
ofHester a scapegoat, on whom all the sins of the community can
be laid. By his confession Dimmesdale destroys this binary logic
and shows that the distinction between high and low, elect and
reprobate, is utterly without substance and beyond all possible
justification. The sham is itself completely manifest. The
hypocrisy of the initial spectacle is now laid bare. Dimmesdale's
dying gesture strikes at the very heart of puritan culture. It is
nothing if not excessive.
Unlike most of Hawthorne's other writings, The Blithedale
Romance not only seems to have little connection with the past but
appears unequivocably as a novel of the present day - a
contemporaneousness that is intensified by the fact that it deals
with that most fashionable of subjects, the Utopian community.
To this can be attributed the relative success that the novel
enjoyed on its first appearance. Read simply as a social and
political discourse on the type of social experiment represented by
its real-life exemplar, Brook Farm, it is hard to mistake the general
drift. The Utopian project overestimates human nature and fails
to reckon with the complexity ofhuman motivations. Brook Farm
fails and Blithedale fails also. It almost seems as if there is nothing
more to be said. Yet, when read in the light of The Scarlet Letter, its
asymmetrical precursor, the novel assumes a much more
inscrutable guise.
The Blithedale Romance seems, above all, to be a warning against
excessiveness. The mysterious figure of old Moodie, subsequently
identified by Hawthorne as the father of both Zenobia and
Priscilla, is deliberately conceived as the antitype to Blithedale in
his very colourlessness and inconspicuousness:
Methought it would be profitable for us, projectors of a happy

life, to welcome this old gray shadow, and cherish him as one of
us, and let him creep about our domain, in order that he might
be a little merrier for our sakes, and we, sometimes, a little

sadder for his. Human destinies look ominous, without some
perceptible intermixture of the sable or the gray. (p. 87)
This serves as one of many deliberate nudges to the reader of an

impending tragic conclusion and specifically as a warning that it
is precisely the excessive characters, Zenobia and Hollingsworth-
both too colourful and too strong - who are most at risk. By
contrast with Priscilla, Moodie and Coverdale, the narrator, who
are patently lacking and insufficient, they appear all the more
overpowering. Coverdale's lack of vital force is underlined by the
illness which seizes him on his arrival in the community, and
which he is only able to overcome through the ministrations of the
stronger characters. Yet Coverdale's very lack ofpotency debars
him from a tragic status within the novel and forces on him the
role of spectator of the lives of others. His final confession to the
reader, 'I - I myself- was in love- with PRISCILLA!' (p. 247),
figures as an anticlimax, which all the hesitations in the world
cannot infuse with energy.
Zenobia and Hollingsworth, on the other hand, seem marked
for disaster from the outset: 'Or, if in earnest, it might chance,
between Zenobia's passionate force and his dark, self-delusive
egotism, to turn out such earnest as would develop itself in some
sufficiently tragic catastrophe, though the dagger and the bowl
should go for nothing in it' (p. 79). The clash between them is seen
by Hawthorne as a mighty clash of opposites, a case of an
irresistible force meeting an immovable object, where even the
question as to which is force, which the object, is hard to
determine. Zenobia has such an extraordinary physical presence,
such a profound erotic fascination, that it would seem that no man
could resist her- no man, at least, but Hollingsworth: 'Zenobia,
with a rich glow on her cheeks, and her eyes softened from their
ordinary brightness, looked so beautiful, that, had her companion
been ten times a philanthropist, it seemed impossible but that one
glance should melt him back into a man' (ibid.). From this point
of view Blithedale is only the setting for the mismatch between
Zenobia's excessive passion for Hollingsworth and
Hollingsworth's overpowering need to cultivate a financial
sponsor for his many reformatory schemes. Blithedale is the
emotional pressure cooker where disaster, instead of being merely
possible, finally figures as inevitable.
What is puzzling about The Blithedale Romance is that the

excessive does not manifest itself solely as the breaking-through of
authentic feeling that, as in The Scarlet Letter, flickers fleetingly
behind the screen of appearances, but becomes a sign of the
inauthentic also. The very moments when the characters seem to
be most powerfully driven by their emotions are also those where
they appear as actors playing a part. The reader of The Blithedale
Romance is placed in very much the same position as a spectator of
Hamlet's 'The Mousetrap', where genuine passions must be
glimpsed through extravagant posturing and verbal bluster.
Zenobia, the tragic queen of Blithedale, seems cast in a role that
she herself has chosen, yet the role becomes a reality beyond her
capacity to sustain or endure. The flower that Zenobia wears in
her hair becomes for Hawthorne a marker of all the discrepancies
that weave their way through the novel and which are to be
dramatically unravelled. The flower is the gap between Zenobia's
otherwise simple and unaffected appearance and the wealth, as
much as the complexity, which lies behind it. The flower is the
discrepancy between the community as an ongoing enterprise to
which all the participants are deeply committed, and its effective
function as a temporary stopgap and release from the everyday
world. It is the difference between reality and playing a part.
Moreover, it marks Zenobia as surely as the letter 'A' marks
Hester as one who stands apart from the common order of things,
and progressively functions as a sign of doom- an indication that
Zenobia cannot and will not come to terms wth a world that resists
the terms in which she wishes to construct it. As such it is also a
sign placed on the whole community. As Zenobia casts her
magnificent bloom aside Hawthorne observes,
Nevertheless - it was a singular, but irresistible effect - the

presence of Zenobia caused our heroic enterprise to show like
an illusion, a masquerade, a pastoral, a counterfeit Arcadia, in
which we grown-up men and women were making a playday of
the years that were given us to live in. (p. 21)
The sham and the excessive are one in their disruption of the
commonplace with its many shades of grey.
Blithedale is perceived the more readily as theatre because of its
separation from the constraints of workaday American life, its
small number of actors, and because all are obliged to follow
through a particular scenario. To see the characters away from

Blithedale therefore offers the possibility of perceiving them in a
truer light, to view them in the light of their actual circumstances
rather than under the blazing stage lights ofBlithedale. Of course,
to present the issue in this way is to subvert fairly radically the way
in which we are disposed to think of such Utopian communities,
as being very much a return to a natural order of things, where the
artifice of society is utterly thrown off. Coverdale's view of
Zenobia, on his return to the city, seems to have the character of
truth, but, by yet another inversion, Coverdale no longer seeks the
real Zenobia beneath the cover of appearances, but finds the
luxurious appearances speak the truth:
In the gorgeousness with which she had surrounded herself- in

the redundancy of personal ornament, which the largeness of
her physical nature and the rich type of her beauty caused to
seem so suitable- I malevolently beheld the true character of
the woman, passionate, luxurious, lacking in simplicity, not
deeply refined, incapable of pure and perfect taste.
(pp. 164-5)
But the truth of this impression, which is that Zenobia

unquestionably is luxurious and excessive, is instantaneously
bracketed by reflections that present this excessiveness in another
guise:
But, the next instant, she was too powerful for all my opposing
struggles. I saw how fit it was that she should make herself as
gorgeous as she pleased, and should do a thousand things that
would have been ridiculous in the poor, thin, weakly characters
of other women. To this day, however, I hardly know whether I
then beheld Zenobia in her truest attitude, or whether that was
the truer one in which she had presented herself at Blithedale.
In both, there was something like the illusion which a great
actress flings around her. (p. 165)
The richness of the impression that Zenobia makes is not so much

the truth as one potential manifestation of her richness and
complexity as a person, but this in turn may only be a reflection of
her powers as an actress, which baffle all attempts to grasp the
essence that apparently lies behind such diverse manifestations.
What is actually at stake here is the Transcendentalist belief in the

many-sidedness of every individual and the deliberate attempt, by
many of the Transcendentalists, to try out different aspects of
their personality. So what to one person may be play-acting and
make-believe to another may be growth, development and
self-discovery. Zenobia's self-exculpatory remarks to Coverdale-
'Why should we be content with our homely life of a few months
past, to the exclusion of all other modes? I twas good, but there are
other lives as good or better' (ibid.)- are strangely reminiscent of
Thoreau's justification in Walden, which was published just two
years later, of his decision to leave Walden pond as exemplary of
only one possible mode of existence. Hawthorne plainly distrusts
such an argument, and the contrast between the experimentalists
of Brook Farm and Blithedale and the grim but determined
figures who founded the New England settlements can never have
been very far from his mind. Zenobia's transcendental claims, as
Coverdale questions her about Hollingsworth, are revealed to be
more of a masquerade than she intends: 'Zenobia's eyes darted
lightning: her cheeks flushed; the vividness of her expression was
like the effect of a powerful light, flaming up suddenly within her'
(The Blithedale Romance, p. 166). Coverdale's determination to
force from her 'a glimpse of something true' (p. 165) has, after all,
succeeded.
The truth that is thus fragmentarily disclosed will finally be laid
bare. The Blithedale Romance follows the pattern of The Scarlet Letter
in that it consists of a series of tableaux, each one more decisive and
clarificatory than the last. Zenobia's passion for Hollingsworth is
such that for her there can be no simple leaving of Blithedale for
other scenes. It is there that her destiny must be played out,just as
Hester must work out her penance before the puritan community.
Coverdale's return to Blithedale amidst scenes of tumult and
misrule recalls the closing scene of The Scarlet Letter. But
Hawthorne is once again at pains to stress that at Blithedale
things are not necessarily as they seem. The festivities lack the
spontaneity which Hawthorne would have associated with Merrie
England and have a discordant and unnatural air. At a remote
distance the 'merriment and riot' seems something other- 'Its
fainter tones assumed a kind of mournfulness' (p. 211) - so
presaging the catastrophe that is to come. For Hawthorne this
denouement is the price that the participants in Blithedale must
pay for the inauthenticity of their motivations. The festivities
figure as a dance of death. The complex blurring of reality and

pageant is epitomised by the tableau of Zenobia with Priscilla and
Hollingsworth:
But Zenobia (whose part among the masquers, as may be

supposed, was no inferior one) appeared in a costume offanciful
magnificence, with her jewelled flower as the central ornament
of what resembled a leafy crown, or coronet. She represented
the Oriental princess, by whose name we were accustomed to
know her. Her attitude was free and noble, yet, if a queen's, it
was not that of a queen triumphant, but dethroned, on trial for
her life, or perchance condemned already. The spirit of the
conflict seemed, nevertheless, to be alive in her. Her eyes were
on fire; her cheeks each had a crimson spot, so exceedingly
vivid, and marked with so definite an outline, that I at first
doubted whether it were not artificial. In a very brief space,
however, this idea was shamed by the paleness that ensued, as
the blood suddenly sank away. Zenobia now looked like
marble. (p. 213)
Hollingsworth, in his ordinary working-clothes, and Priscilla, in a

simple dress, occupy the plane of reality, while Zenobia in her
resplendent costume seems entirely theatrical. Yet the aspects of
her appearance that seem most counterfeit are paradoxically
produced by the excessiveness of her emotions. Zenobia continues
to play out her part and tries, so long as Hollingsworth and Priscilla
are there, to maintain at least the appearance of composure, but
once they are gone she sobs nakedly and unashamedly. Her grief,
because involuntary, can only be completely genuine and
unfeigned, in what is perhaps the only such moment in the history
ofthe community itself. For in the intensity of the moment she is
completely oblivious of the watching presence of Coverdale. By
removing the flower from her hair and giving Coverdale her hand,
she performs gestures which echo her behaviour at the inaugural
moment of the community. Each is genuine but in a different way,
and the pathos of the repetition demonstrates how time and
circumstance have altered their meaning. Zenobia is no longer at
the centre and she acts out her role before an audience of one. The
flower, now, is jewelled. Zenobia genuinely did represent a sense
of possibility for the Blithedale community in a way that
Hollingsworth with his self-interested motives never did, so her
collapse IS a fitting sign for the failure of the whole social

experiment.
The final tableau is to come. The discovery ofZenobia's body in
the pool is a frozen moment of allegory that fixes Hollingsworth
and Zenobia, the excessive characters, in a posture that will
represent them for all time, like Piero and Francesca in Dante's
Inferno. Hollingsworth in finding her body has literally wounded
her in the heart. Zenobia is caught in a sculptural attitude whose
intersecting gestures both disclose and fail to disclose what she is.
Zenobia's decision to drown herself is marked by inauthenticity,
since she imagines that this can confer on her actions the naive
simplicity of'village-maidens wronged in their first love' (p. 236),
which, of course, Zenobia could never be. Yet the stiffened
violence of her actual posture testifies to a deeper authenticity and
manifests the excessiveness by which she has lived and died.
Frozen though her body is, its emblematic significance remains
obscure. The knees bent in prayer signify humility and
repentance, the clenched fingers and outstretched hands a spirit of
rebellion and defiance. In this frozen moment temporality is
supended and it is impossible to structure the gestures in a
sequence that would show whether or not she is truly reconciled.
So the argument of sincerity, transparency and truth is given a
further twist. For, though the violence of Zenobia's death agony
can serve as a portrait of her deepest emotions in which all
pretence and masquerade is left behind, the final meaning of the
allegory is withheld. Hawthorne leaves the reader in as much
perplexity as Cotton Mather brooding over the auguries in the
case of Governor Hopkins.
However, the funeral does offer a clue. Westervelt is linked in
the novel with a spirit of theatricality, both through his Veiled
Lady illusion and his hypnotic power over others. Westervelt thus
embodies in an unconcealed form the vices that are hidden and
obscured at Blithedale. By praising Zenobia as an actress he
arouses Coverdale's indignation: 'You seem to intend a eulogy,
yet leave out whatever was noblest in her, and blacken, while you
mean to praise' (p. 240). The violence of the attempted
appropriation serves by a contrary logic to restore the clear
recognition that, if Zenobia had been no more than this, she could
never have lived as she did. Zenobia is a woman of genuine and
spontaneous feeling. It is Hollingsworth who is Westervelt's
kindred spirit, since his overblown and over-intellectualised
schemes of reformation are simply a cover for his desire to master

and manipulate others. Hollingsworth exceeds the scale of
ordinary human values, which is also to fall short of them, and it is
only through the love of Priscilla and his remorse at Zenobia's
fate that he is restored to humanity. Hawthorne may deplore the
excessive but without it there would be no truth and no sincerity.
It is Zenobia's passion, not Coverdale's that is the heart of the
story!
The Blithedale Romance is a complex fiction which, through its
autobiographical connection, can be used all too readily as a
master key that will effortlessly open the locks in Hawthorne's
work, presenting him, behind all the much-trumpeted ambiguity,
as a writer who will stand for no nonsense and who can unerringly
put his finger on the error of the Utopians, their neglect of the
grand old doctrine of Original Sin. But in remembering the
Hawthorne who left Brook Farm it is easy to lose sight of the
Hawthorne who went, and to gloss over the extent to which he
shared in the aims and aspirations of Transcendentalism. It is
especially important to keep this in mind when reading
Hawthorne's last romance, The Marble Faun, since it is a genuine
and serious-minded attempt to work through and synthesise the
contradictory values of New England culture. After the
publication, in rapid succession, of The Scarlet Letter (1850), The
House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852),
there is a distinct hiatus, verging on suspension, in Hawthorne's
fictional career, with The Marble Faun making its appearance eight
years later, in 1860, as an almost self-confessed swansong. In The
Marble Faun we are more than usually conscious of a tension
between writer and reader, and this is for the obvious reason that
Hawthorne, very much like Melville, is forced into duplicity by
the subversive nature ofhis theme. Enigma is imposed rather than
positively chosen. In the Preface he concedes that the mythical
sympathetic reader, whom he had once presumed upon, no longer
exists:
Unquestionably, this Gentle, Kind, Benevolent, Indulgent and

most Beloved and Honoured Reader, did once exist for me, and
(in spite of the infinite chances against a letter's reaching its
destination, without a definite address) duly received the scrolls
which I flung upon whatever wind was blowing, in the faith that
they would find him out. But, is he extant now? In these many
years, since he last heard from me, may he not have deemed his
earthly task accomplished? ... If I find him at all, it will
probably be under some mossy grave-stone, inscribed with a
half-obliterated name, which I shall never recognize. (p. 2)
The Marble Faun is a curious combination of timorousness and

boldness. On the one hand, Hawthorne recognises that he is really
writing for no one but himself and therefore feels entitled to write
in as free, discursive and fanciful a manner as he pleases; on the
other, he is apprehensive about possible adverse reactions to the
book's argument and therefore presents it in as elliptical a manner
as possible. To read The Marble Faun can be a deeply frustrating
experience, even if one recognises that this erratic and whimsical
manner is now the only way in which Hawthorne can be serious.
At the heart of the provocation offered to the reader of The Faun
is the matter ofDonatello's ears. Of the four principal characters
in the romance, three are artists. Hilda and Kenyon, respectively
a sensitive copyist of Old Master paintings and a sculptor, are
Americans abroad. Miriam, who is perhaps the most emotional
and expressive artist of the three, is of a somewhat murky
European background, very possibly Jewish. So far, it might
seem, so good. But the fourth is a young Italian, Donatello, who is,
as we subsequently learn, the Count of Monte Beni and who bears
a striking resemblance to a stature of a faun:
The Faun is the marble image of a young man, leaning his right
arm on the trunk or stump of a tree; one hand hangs carelessly
by his side; in the other, he holds the fragments of a pipe, or
some sylvan instrument of music. His only garment- a lion's
skin, with the claw upon his shoulder- falls half-way down his
back, leaving the limbs and entire front of the figure nude .
. . . The animal nature, indeed, is a most essential part of the
Faun's composition; for the characteristics of the brute creation
meet and combine with those of humanity, in this strange, yet
true and natural conception of antique poetry and art.
Praxiteles has subtly diffused, throughout his work, that mute
mystery which so hopelessly perplexes us, whenever we attempt
to gain an intellectual or sympathetic knowledge of the lower
orders of creation. The riddle is indicated, however, only by two
definite signs; these are the two ears of the Faun, which are
leaf-shaped, terminating in little peaks, like those of some

species of animals. (pp. 9-1 0)
But Hawthorne, not content with suggesting that Donatello may

represent similar qualities of spontaneity, naturalness and good
humour, must insinuate that there are strong grounds for thinking
that Donatello actually possesses the ears as well. The attribution
of such ears to Donatello seems excessive, not merely on a
representational level, but on a psychological level as well, since it
seems to assign a positive value to animality and to question the
vaunted superiority of civilisation over 'brute creation'. What
makes Donatello as the Faun disturbing is that he is clearly
intended by Hawthorne to epitomise pagan values.
To clarify the argument of The Marble Faun it is helpful to refer
back once again to 'The Maypole of the Merry Mount', where the
disruption of the maypole ceremonies announces the eclipse of one
cultural form by another. The theme was suggested to Hawthorne
by a similar episode in Scott's The Abbot, where Sir Halbert
Glendinning reproves the participants in a Festival of Misrule,
but in Hawthorne's reworking the moment is given a wider
significance, as an event which is both inescapable and sad. For,
although there is something distinctly unappealing about the
joyless puritans -
When they met in conclave, it was never to keep up the old

English mirth, but to hear sermons three hours long, or to
proclaim bounties on the heads of wolves and the scalps of
Indians. Their festivals were fast-days, and their chief pastime
the singing of psalms (Twice-told Tales, pp. 60--1)
-by implication, the founding of the United States is too serious a

matter to be left in frivolous hands. Where puritan strenuousness
and dedication are required, the moment of the maypole must
necessarily pass. The symbolic language of the story is
significantly recapitulated in The Marble Faun some twenty-five
years later. In both narratives the idea of the golden age as a period
of harmony between man and nature is invoked, and it is
presented through creatures that combine human with animal
traits. In 'The Maypole of the Merry Mount' the chain between
man and nature is complete, since, in addition to masquers
dressed as stag, wolf, goat and bear, there is actually a real bear
who takes part in the dance. Hawthorne remarks,
Had a wanderer, bewildered in the melancholy forest, heard

their mirth and stolen a half-affrighted glance, he might have
fancied them the crew of Comus, some already transformed to
brutes, some midway between man and beast, and others
rioting in the flow oftipsey jollity that foreran the change. But a
band of Puritans, who watched the scene, invisible themselves,
compared the masques to those devils and ruined souls, with
whom their superstition peopled the black wilderness.
(Twice-told Tales, p. 56)
But, if, in the earlier tale, Hawthorne was disposed, albeit

reluctantly, to align himself with the traditional Protestant
distrust of paganism, in The Marble Faun he takes frivolity
altogether more seriously.
The Marble Faun grew out ofHawthorne's wanderings in Europe
and out of the speculative sense that Rome, in particular, as the
historical site both of the Papacy and the Roman Empire,
exemplified the massive burden which the past imposes on the
human spirit. For Hawthorne there is an absolute distinction to be
made between the Greek and Roman worlds: the one, as
represented by Praxiteles's Faun, is joyful, timeless and innocent;
the other is an inordinate accumulation through time of violence,
barbarism and guilt. Hawthorne evokes the historic sites as
follows:
This was the time, perhaps, when Kenyon became sensible

what a dreary city is Rome, and what a terrible weight is there
imposed on human life, when any gloom within the heart
corresponds to the spell of ruin, that has been thrown over the
site of ancient empire. He wandered, as it were, and stumbled
over fallen columns, and among the tombs, and groped his way
into the sepulchral darkness of the catacombs, and found no
path emerging from them. The happy may well enough
continue to be such, beneath the brilliant sky of Rome. But, if
you go thither in melancholy mood - if you go with a ruin in
your heart, or with a vacant site there, where once stood the airy
fabric of happiness, now vanished- all the ponderous gloom of
the Roman past will pile itself upon that spot, and crush you
down as with the heaped-up marble and granite, the earth-

mounds, and multitudinous bricks, of its material decay.
(pp. 409-10)
Kenyon's inability to find a way out is symptomatic. Rome is a

place of ruins, of the ruins of ruins, and of the ruin of counterfeit
ruins. It is the place where all human hopes are extinguished and
buried in a morass of other hopes and where only a retrospective
glance seems possible. As such it is the antithesis of the way in
which the United States is perceived - though, of course, for
Hawthorne the cases are by no means so dissimilar. More
significantly, Rome is the place where all difference is abolished.
The crimes of the Roman emperors shade into one another, and
they in turn merge with the criminality of the Renaissance popes
and continue into the iniquities of the present. Monuments of the
past are appropriated and given new uses, but it is as if nothing
really changes. Rome always has been and always will be both
belated and decadent. History is nothing more than the relentless
working of the principle of repetition. Rome crystallises the
nightmare of a one-time human fall from a lost world of unclouded
and untroubled pleasure into the despair of the diachronic, where
there can be no suspension or going back. But 'Rome' is also a
convenient and elliptical shorthand with which Hawthorne can
designate the miseries of Christianity, confident, like 'Monk'
Lewis or Maturin before him, that most readers will be disposed
to assume that Catholicism is the only designated target.
The one substantive event in The Marble Faun is the moment
when Donatello, incensed beyond measure by the perennial
presence of a strange old man who has been incessantly following
Miriam, hurls him from the Tarpeian rock, thus transforming
their hitherto innocent love into a guilty one. Since Hilda
witnesses the fatal struggle she becomes implicated in their guilt.
The precise symbolic significance of the mysterious old man is as
elusive as many of the portents in The Scarlet Letter. In his cloak of
buffalo hide and goatskin breeches he resembles a satyr and
Hawthorne suggests that he is the antitype ofDonatello, since he
represents the loss of all that Donatello has miraculously retained,
as 'the last survivor of that vanished race, hiding himself in
sepulchral gloom, and mourning over his lost life of woods and
streams' (p. 30). However he is also linked with the legend of
Memnius, an early persecutor of the Christians, who refuses the
opportunity of redemption and who, in his defiance of time, seems

reminiscent of the Wandering Jew. Since he particularly follows
Miriam, whose beauty is of aJ ewish cast and whose art centres on
Old Testament subjects, he seems to embody the psychological
blight cast over Western culture by the Judaeo-Christian
obsession with guilt and sin. In death he becomes curiously
identified with the body of a Capuchin monk, and the connection
is enforced by a flow ofblood from the body- signifying, as in Scott's
The Fair Maid of Perth, the presence of the murderer. In this
chapter Hawthorne's gruesome description of the monastic
cemetery suggests that in practice the Christian faith is deeply
imbued with a spirit of morbid negativity: 'Not here can we feel
ourselves immortal, where the very altars, in these chapels of
horrible consecration, are heaps of human bones' (p. 194).
Hawthorne suggests that only Donatello with his faun-like ears
is free of the spell of this historic curse, since he belongs to the
moment that predates it. Only the excessiveness ofDonatello can
cancel the excessiveness ofMiriam's malignant persecutor, as one
who knew how to live in harmony with nature before 'sin, care,
and self-consciousness have set the human portion of the world
askew' (pp. 239-40). But, paradoxically, the consequence of
Donatello's action is to pull him into the Christian orbit of sin and
pain and compel him to yield up his priceless innocence. It seems
as though in this single act Donatello's exemplary significance is
finally cancelled. As Miriam says regretfully,
I accept my own misery ... my own guilt, if guilt it be - and

whether guilt or misery, I shall know how to deal with it. But
you dearest friend, that were the rarest creature in all this
world, and seemed a being to whom sorrow could not cling!
You, whom I half fancied to belong to a race that had vanished
forever, you only surviving to show mankind how genial and
how joyous life used to be, in some long-gone age. What had you
to do with grief or crime? (p. 197)
Nevertheless Hawthorne does see grounds for optimism, since, as

the result of his experience, Donatello may become stronger and
wiser than before. Kenyon insists that his love for Miriam is now
even greater: 'he not only loves you still, but with a force and
depth, proportioned to the stronger grasp of his faculties, in their
new development' (p. 281). He will be born anew: 'After his recent
profound experience, he will re-create the world by the new eye

with which he will regard it. He will escape, I hope, out or a
morbid life, and find his way into a healthy one' (p. 284). In The
Marble Faun Hawthorne offers space for the reader to view
Donatello, if he so desires, as a type of the Christian Fortunate
Fall, but his deeper implication is considerably more subversive.
Donatello will transcend the world of Christian morbidity. He will
become a laughing lion!
At an earlier point in the novel Miriam speaks of this
'melancholy and sickly Rome' which is 'stealing away the rich,
joyous life that belongs to you' (p. 149) but in the final pages the
gloom that lingers over Rome is swept away by the tumult of the
Carnival. Hawthorne is at pains to stress that the Carnival is no
trivial occasion, but an event that can release a potential, for
conviviality and mirth, that is all too often suppressed:
Kenyon, though young, had care enough within his breast to

render the Carnival the emptiest of mockeries. Contrasting the
stern anxiety of his present mood with the frolic spirit of the
preceding year, he fancied that so much trouble had, at all
events, brought wisdom in its train. But there is a Wisdom that
looks grave, and sneers at merriment; and again a deeper
Wisdom, that stoops to be gay as occasion serves, and oftenest
avails itself of shallow and trifling grounds ofmirth; because, if
we wait for more substantial ones, we seldom can be gay at all.
Therefore, had it been possible, Kenyon would have done well
to mask himself in some wild, hairy visage, and plunge into the
throng of other masquers, as at the Carnival before. Then,
Donatello had danced along the Corso in all the equipment of a
Faun, doing the part with wonderful felicity of execution, and
revealing furry ears which looked absolutely real; and Miriam
had been, alternately, a lady of the antique regime, in power
and brocade, and the prettiest peasant-girl in the Campagna, in
the gayest of costumes; while Hilda, sitting demurely in a
balcony, had hit the sculptor with a single rosebud- so sweet
and fresh a bud that he knew at once whose hand had flung
it. (pp. 437-8)
The Carnival is symbolically important, serving both as the

resolution and the culmination of The Marble Faum, and with it
Hawthorne impetuously sweeps away all the plot-manoeuvring
that has preceded it. The Carnival is an exemplary image oflife as

free, spontaneous, bubbling with joy and excitement, just as the
old man who earlier followed Miriam is the type of J udaeo-
Christian despondency and gloom. All that remains is for
Hawthorne to apologise for such subversive implications in the
novel as may have given cause for offence. Donatello is excessive-
and not just because he has furry ears!
Notes
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: AMERICA AND THE
EXCESSIVE
1. Louis Legrand Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, ed. E. S. Vesell
(Cambridge, Mass., 1964) p. 72.
2. Ibid., p. 148.
3. Quoted in Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America (New York, 1965) p.
302.
4. Daniel]. Boors tin, The Americans: The National Experience (London, 1966) p.
352.
5. Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems, ed. F. Murphy (London, 1975) pp.
741-2.
6. Ibid., pp. 742-3.
7. Ibid., p. 749.
8. Ibid., p. 760.
9. William H. Prescott, The History of the Conquest of Peru, ed. J. F. Kirk
(London, 1886) p. 126.
10. William H. Prescott, The History of the Conquest of Mexico, ed. J. F. Kirk
(London, 1886) p. 178.
11. Ibid., p. 313.
12. Ibid., pp. 313-14.
13. Francis Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (New York,
1956) p. 146.
14. Ibid., pp. 226--7.
15. Ibid., p. 225.
16. Ibid., p. 319.
17. James Fenimore Cooper, Notions of the Americans (New York, 1963) n, 44.
18. James Parton, Famous Americans of Recent Times (New York, 1967), p. 88.
19. Ibid., pp. 138--9.
20. H. von Holst,john C. Calhoun (Boston, 1882), p. 199.
21. John William Ward, Andrew jackson- Symbol for an Age (New York, 1955)
p. 159.
22. See Alan Heimert, 'Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism',
American Quarterly, 15 (Winter 1963) 498--534.
23. Ward, Andrew jackson, pp. 164-5.
24. Robert V. Remini, Andrew jackson (New York, 1969) pp. 97-8.
25. Sydney Nathans, Daniel Webster and jacksonian Democracy (Baltimore and
London, 1973) p. 70.
26. Parton, Famous Americans, p. 58.
221
222 Notes
27. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, Ix;
~ ed. R. H. Orth and A. R. Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp.
250--1.
29. Ibid., p. 203.
30. Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel (London, 1838) I, 179.
31. Ibid., I, 182.
32. Ibid., I, 148.
34. Ibid., p. 45.
35. The Happy Republic, ed. G. E. Probst (New York, 1962) p. 125.
36. American Social History, ed. A. Nevins (New York, 1923) p. 261.
37. Ibid.
38. Captain Frederick Marryat, A Diary in America, ed. Sydney Jackman (New
York, 1962) p. 62.
39. Ibid., p. 26.
40. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and abridged R. D.
Heffner (New York, 1956) p. 184.
41. Harriet Martineau, Sociery in America (New York, 1966), p. 185.
42. Charles Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy, with intro. and notes
by Andrew Lang (New York, 1898) pp. 295-6.
43. Marryat, Diary, p. 140.
44. Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum, ed. A. H. Saxon (New York, 1983) p. 15.
45. Quoted in Constance Rourke, Trumpets ofjubilee (New York, 1963) p. 24.
46. Quoted ibid., p. 33.
47. Quoted in Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District (New York, 1965) p.
210.
48. See Anne C. Rose, Transcendentalism as a Social Movement 1830-1850 (New
Haven, Conn., and London, 1981) Appendix B, p. 233.
49. Quoted in Alice Felt Tyler, Freedom's Ferment (New York, 1962) p. 337.
50. Michael Chevalier, Sociery, Manners and Politics in the United States, ed.J. W.
Ward (Gloucester, Mass., 1967), p. 167.
51. Dickens, American Notes, p. 294.
CHAPTER 2. FENIMORE COOPER: THE EXCESSIVE

PATHFINDER
Page references to works by Cooper are given in the text. For most novels, the
edition cited is the Leatherstocking Edition (London, 1867-9). The exceptions
are The Red Rover (London, 1834) and The Pioneers, ed.J. F. Beard, L. Schachterle
and K. M. Andersen,Jr (Albany, N.Y., 1980).
1. WarrenS. Walker, Introduction to James Fenimore Cooper, The Spy (New

York, 1960) p. 1.
2. Fenimore Cooper: The Critical Heritage, ed. G. Dekker andJ. P. McWilliams
(London, 1973) p.68.
3. Ibid.
Notes 223
4. Ibid., p. 196.
5. Ibid., p. 210.
6. See David Morse, Romanticism: A Structural Anarysis (London, 1982) pp.
121-2.
7. Sir Walter Scott, Waverll!)l, Border Edition (London, 1900) p. 648.
8. Fenimore Cooper: The Critical Heritage, p. 62.
9. Ibid., p. 62.
10. Ibid., p. 123.
II. Ibid., p. 197.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., pp. 192-3.
14. Ibid., p. 198.
15. Ibid., pp. 282-3.
16. See Blake Nevius, Cooper's Landscapes: An Essay on the Picturesque Vision
(Berkeley, Calif., Los Angeles and London, 1976) p. 94.
17. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Works I, ed. R. E. Spiller and A. R.
Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass., 1971) p. 21.
CHAPTER 3. BROCKDEN BROWN AND POE: INNER

EXCESSES
I. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn, ed. S. J. Krause and S. W. Reid
(Kent, Ohio, 1980) p. 137.
2. Charles Brockden Brown, Ormond, ed. S.J. Krause and S. W. Reid (Kent,
Ohio, 1982) p. 112.
3. Ibid., p. 252.
4. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntry, ed. D. Stineback (New Haven,
Conn., 1973) p. 39.
5. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political justice, ed. I. Kramnick
(London, 1978) p. 367.
6. Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn, pp. 166-7.
7. Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntry, p. 79.
8. Ibid., p. 46.
9. Ibid., p. 94.
10. Brockden Brown, Ormond, p. 283.
II. Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn, p. 335.
12. Ibid., p. 336.
13. Charles Brockden Brown, Weiland, ed. S.J. Krause and S. W. Reid (Kent,
Ohio, 1980) p. 130.
14. Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn, p. 228.
15. All quotations from Poe cite Edgar Allan Poe, Collected Works, ed. T. 0.
Mabbott with E. D. Kewer and M. C. Mabbott (Cambridge, Mass., an_d
London, 1978). References, by volume and page, are given in the text.
CHAPTER 4. EMERSON, THOREAU AND WHITMAN:

TRANSCENDENTAL SUPERMEN
I. George Santayana, Selected Critical Writings, ed. N. Henfrey (London, 1968)
I, 119.
224 Notes
2. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Emerson cite Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Collected Works (abbreviated ECW), I, ed. R. E. Spiller and A. R.
Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), and n, ed. A. R. Ferguson,]. F. Carr and
J. Slater (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1979). References, by volume and
page, are given in the text.
3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, vn: 1838-42,
ed. A. W. Plumstead and H. Hayford (Cambridge, Mass., 1969) p. 254.
4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, IX: ~
ed. R. H. Orth and A. R. Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass., 1971) p. 269.
5. The Portable Emerson, ed. C. Bode and M. Cowley (New York, 1981) p. 255.
6. Ibid., pp. 255-6.
7. Selected Writings of the American Transcendentalists, ed. G. Hochfield (New
York, 1966) p. 65.
8. Ibid., p. 68.
9. Ibid., p. 82.
10. Ibid., pp. 82-3.
II. Ibid., p. 183.
12. Ibid., pp. 137-8.
13. Ibid., p. 101.
14. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, v: 1835--8,
ed. M. M. Sealts,Jr (Cambridge, Mass., 1965) p. 92.
15. Emerson,Joumals, VII, 60.
16. Ibid., v, 374.
17. Ibid., VII, 270.
18. Ibid., VII, 106.
19. Ibid., VII, 353.
20. American Transcendentalists, p. 86.
21. Henry D. Thoreau, Journal, I: 1837-1844, ed. E. H. Witherell, W. L.
Howarth, R. Sattelmeyer and T. Blanding (Princeton, NJ, 1981) p. 309.
22. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Thoreau cite Henry D.
Thoreau, The Variorum Walden (abbreviated VW), ed. W. Harding (New
York, 1962). Page references are given in the text.
23. Henry D. Thoreau, Reform Papers, ed. W. Gluck (Princeton, NJ, 1973) p.
78.
24. Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems, ed. F. Murphy (London, 1975) p. 753.
25. Ibid., p. 775.
CHAPTER 5: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: EXCESSIVE

INTERPRETATION
Quotations from Hawthorne cite the Centenary Edition (Columbus, Ohio) and
page references are given in the text. The individual volumes cited are The
Blithedale Romance (1964), The House of the Seven Gables (1965), The Marble Faun
( 1968), The Scarlet Letter ( 1972), Mosses from an Old Manse ( 1972), The Snow Image
and Uncollected Tales ( 1972) and Twice-told Tales ( 1974).
I. Michael Davitt Bell, The Development of American Romance (Chicago and

London, 1980) p. 180.
Notes 225
2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, VII: 1838-42,
ed. A. W. Plumstead and A. R. Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass., 1969) pp. 493-4.
3. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (New York, 1967) I, 27.
4. Sacvan Bercovich, The American jeremiad (Madison, Wis., 1978) p. 92.
5. Mather, Magnalia, I, 25.
6. Ibid., I, 28.
7. Ibid., I, 30. Admittedly Cotton Mather earlier pays lip service to the idea of
the 'impartial historian' (p. 29), but since he then goes on to assert his right both
to censure and to defend and speak out on behalf of the Church as he sees it, he
once more becomes confessedly partisan. The tmth of his history is finally bound
up with its implicit claim to be written under divine guidance, as when he writes
(II, 448), 'For my own part, I would be as exceedingly afraid of writing afalse
thing, as of doing an ill thing: but have my pen always move in thefearofGod.'
8. Quoted in Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago,
1953) p. 89.
9. Mather, Magnalia, n, 27.
10. Ibid., I, 93.
II. Ibid., I, 372.
12. Ibid., II, 77.
13. Michel Foucault, The OrderojThings (London, 1970) pp. 25-6.
14. Ibid., p. 26.
15. Mather, Magnalia, I, 297.
16. Ibid., II, 495.
17. Ibid., I, 223.
18. Ibid., I, 147.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., I, 148.
21. Ibid., II, 372.
22. Ibid., II, 579.
23. Ibid., II, 580.
24. Emerson,Joumals, VII, 197.
25. Sir Walter Scott, Peveril of the Peak, Border Edition (London, 1900) p. 47.
26. Ibid., pp. 44-5. In his British Influence on the Birth of American Literature
(London, 1982) Linden Peach draws attention to this influence of Scott's novel
on The Scarlet Letter and especially to the affinity between the characters of Pearl
and Fenella (pp. 117-22).
27. William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. D. McCracken (London, 1970).
Index
Adams, john Quincy, 13-14 Clay, Henry, 11-12
Alcott, Bronson, 25, 125-7 Cole, Thomas, 3-4, 86--7
Amundsen, Roald Engelbregt Cooper, james Fenimore, 2, 11, 28,
Gravning, 64 30-87
Audubon,Johnjames, 165 The Crater, 86
The Deerslayer, 73, 80-6
Baldwin,]. C., 18--19 The Last of the Mohicans, 42, 47, 50,
Ballou, Aden, 25 55-62, 71
Balzac, Honore, de, 47, 72-3, 79 Lionel Lincoln, 30, 37-41
Barnum, P. T., 22 Littlepage Trilogy, 48--9
Beecher, Henry Ward, 27 The Pathfinder, 56, 72-80
Beecher, Lyman, 23-7 The Pilot, 42-3, 69, 72
Belinsky, Vissarion Grigorievich, 72- The Pioneers, 42, 47, 48, 49, 50,
3 51-5,56,59-61,62,65,68,
Bell, Michael Davitt, 170 71, 82
Beman, Nathaniel, 24 The Prairie, 42, 48, 49, 62-9, 71
Bercovich, Sacvan, I 73 Precaution, 41
Biddle, Nicholas, 14 The Red Rover, 42, 43-5, 69-70, 72
Boehme, Jacob, 127 Satanstoe, 48
Boorstin, Daniel]., 21 The Sealions, 85
Brockden Brown, Charles, 2, 28, 88-- The Spy, 30-7, 40, 41, 69
97, 104, 190 The Water-witch, 42, 45-6, 69-71,
Arthur Mervyn, 88, 90, 92-3, 96 72
Edgar Huntly, 89-96 The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, 42
Ormond,89,90,95-6 The Wing-and-wing, 42
Wieland, 89, 90-1, 96--7 U7andotte, 4 7
Browne, Sir Thomas, 98 Cooper, Susan Fenimore, 42
Bryant, William Cullen, 3-4, 77 Cortes, Hernando, 7-9
Burr,Jonathan, 177
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 72 Dante, Alighieri, 148, 212
The Corsair, 42 De Stae1, Madame de, 1"29
Dickens, Charles, 20-1, 27
Calhoun, john C., 11-14, 16--17 Dickinson, Charles, 13
Carew, Thomas, 154 Diogenes, 155
Carlyle, Thomas, 72, 171
Cervantes, Miguel de, 155 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 15-16, 25,
Channing, William Ellery, 123-4, 28, 68, 84, 119-149, 151, 158,
126--7, 144 163, 166, 170-2, 186, 191
Chevalier, Michel, 26 Everett, Edward, 5
226
Index 227
Foucault, Michel, 172, 177-8 Lawrence, David Herbert, 30
Fuller, Margaret, 134 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 50
Lewis, Matthew, 201, 217
Gardiner, W. H., 55 Lewis, R. W. B., 174
Glanville,Joseph, 107-8 Louis XIV, I 0
Godwin, William, 20 I Lowell, James Russell, 5-6
Political Justice, 89
Caleb Williams, 88, 203 Malory, Sir Thomas, 137
Goethe, johann Wolfgang von, 72 Margry, Pierre, 9
Goodrich, S. G., 16 Marryat, Frederick, 19, 21
Grattan, T. C., 19 Martineau, Harriet, 16-17, 20
Mather, Cotton, 212
Harrison, William Henry, 15, 19 Magnalia Christi Americana, I 72-82
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 2, 25, 28, Mather, Samuel, 174
169--220 Maturin, Charles, 21 7
'The Birthmark', 190-1 Melville, Herman, 2, 28, 213
The Blithedale Romance, 196, 197, Israel Potter, 42
206-13 Moby-Dick, 13
'Ethan Brand', 190 Pierre, 86
The House of the Seven Gables, 191, Redburn, 183
195-6,213 Miller, Perry, 5
The Marble Faun, 199, 213-20 Montcalm, Louisjoseph, Marquis
'The Maypole of the de,9
Merrymount', 205, 215-16 Montezuma, 8
'The Minister's Black Veil', 187-8
'My Kinsman Major Molyneux', Nathans, Sydney, 14
184-5 Nevius, Blake, 83
'The New Adam and Eve', 185-6 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 189
'Rappaccini's Daughter', 186-7 Norton,John, 178,201
The Scarlet Letter, 169--72, 192-206, Novalis, 98
210, 213 Noyes, john Humphrey, 25
'Wakefield', 189--90
'Young Goodman Brown', 183-4 Owen, Robert, 25
Henry, Patrick, 12
Hitchcock, Alfred, 31 Parkman, Francis, 7, 9--11
Holderlin, Friedrich, 98 Parton,James, 11-12, 17
Hopkins, Edward, 181, 198, 212 Pascal, Blaise de, I 76
Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 126
Irving, Washington, 16, 28 Pizarre, Francisco, 7-8
Plato, 139
Jackson, Andrew, 11-15, 19, 22, 161, Poe, Edgar Allan, 2, 13, 28, 88, 97-
198 118
'Berenice', 105-6
Kant, Immanuel, 5 'The Black Cat', 116-1 7
Kierkegaard, S0ren, 36 'The Domain of Arnheim', 113
Kimball, Moses, 22 'Eleonora', 109
'The Fall of the House of Usher',
Land, Charles, 25 109-13
La Salle, Robert Cavalier, 10 'The Gold bug', I 03-5
228 Index
Poe, Edgar Allan - continued The Pirate, 42

'The Imp of the Perverse', 11 7 Rob Roy, 37
'Ligeia', 105, 107-9 Waverlry, 39, 50, 51
'The Man of the Crowd', 114 Smith, Anne C., 24
'The Masque of the Red Death', Smith, joseph, 25
113 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 23, 27-8
'Morella', 105, 106--7, 108 Swedenborg, Immanuel, 124, 127
'The Murders in the Rue Morgue'
98-101, 102, 110-13 Thomas a Kempis, 120
'The Purloined Letter', 101-3 Thoreau, Henry David
'The Tell-tale Heart', 116--18 Walden, 148-58, 161, 210
'William Wilson', 113-16, 118 Thucydides, 137
Praxiteles, 216 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 20
Prescott, William, 7-9 Twain, Mark, 2, 39, 47, 73-4
Randolph, John, II, 16
Ranke, Leopold von, 173-4 van Buren, Martin, 14
Reed, Sampson, 124-5, 127, 134, 186 Virgil, 148
Remini, Robert V., 13 von Holst, H., 12
Ripley, George, 25, 125
Walker, WarrenS., 31
Santayana, George, 119 Ward, john William, 13
Schiller, Friedrich von, 5, 139 Washington, George, 5-6, 31-6, 39
Scott, Robert Falcon, 64 Webster, Daniel, 11-16, 86, 160
Scott, Sir Walter, 46, 47, 50, 55 Weld, Theodore, 27
The Abbot, 215 Whitman, Walt, 6--7
The Antiquary, 51 A Song of Myself, 158-68
The Fair Maid of Perth, 218 Williams, Roger, I 79--80
The Heart of Midlothian, 50 Withington, Revd Leonard, 26
The Legend of Montrose, 51 Wolfe,James, 9
Peveril of the Peak, 194-5 Wyman, William, 15

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AMERICAN ROMANTICISM

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First published 1987

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

I have been making war against the superlative degree in the

Introduction: America and the Excessive

2 Fenimore Cooper: the Excessive Pathfinder 30

3 Brockden Brown and Poe: Inner Excesses 88

4 Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman: Transcendental

5 Nathaniel Hawthorne: Excessive Interpretation 169

D. Morse, American Romanticism

literature is always an embarrassment and a liability, never able

A living image of thy native land,

The sentiments expressed by Bryant contain a hidden

Before us spread the virgin waters which the prow of the

Nature undisturbed retains its divine aura. In its presence,

Though loud Niagara were today struck dumb,

It is the energy and the example of the American democratic

Washington in order to raise funds for the purchase of Mount

beyond the Ohio, beyond the Mississippi, along that

In his own later celebration of Washington as national leader,

For him, her Old-World moulds aside she threw,

Both Washington and America itself are to be defined in terms of

people .... His spirit responds to his country's spirit ... he

So, as Whitman continues his hyperbolic flight in his Preface to

while stuck on the remote island of Gallo near Panama he writes,

There is something striking to the imagination in the spectacle

Cortes, with his ruthless and calculating spirit, is a less glamorous

That a small body of men, like the Spaniards, should have

Such was Cavelier de Ia Salle. In him, an unconquerable mind

reading. La Salle is chiefly to be remembered for a series of epic

On that day, the realm of France received on parchment a

La Salle's invincible determination has finally been rewarded, but

To estimate aright the marvels ofhis patient fortitude, one must

follow on his track through the vast scene of his interminable

In their inordinate ambitions, their unremitting effort, their

combative, but it was given a still fiercer edge by the intemperate

He was always so entirely certain that he, Andrew Jackson, was

It was an era of conviction politics, yet if the sense of conviction

Each of the three great senators tried to demonstrate his own

But in these struggles of a young democracy vehemence carried as

a tall, gaunt man, of very erect carriage, with a countenance full

Although the claims ofJackson's rivals Webster and Calhoun to

As soon as the President announced his intention of appointing

villainy. Of course this public frenzy was carefully staged in

An equally notorious occasion was the Jefferson memorial

The rejection ofWebster and fusion, if perhaps inevitable, was

Jackson had done more - he had passed final judgment on

When Harrison was selected as the Whig candidate in the

Cheney that ifhe should close by addressing the jury, he should

From the South, John Randolph of Virginia made an equally

There is no speaker in either House that excites such universal

Randolph was an entertainer. Such a view could scarcely be

Senate. She was impressed by 'the splendid eye, the straight

While thus protesting, his eyes flashed, his brow seemed

Calhoun's theatrical emphasis is embarrassing because it

He meets men and harangues them, by the fire-side, as in the

Calhoun typifies the refusal of dialogue and communication in

Without ever being a hypocrite, he was habitually an actor; but

But, if Clay's politeness was exaggerated, so too was his verbal

vituperation on any pretext great or small, whether it was against