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The reformation of the world: history, revelation, and reform in the antebellum American romance

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The reformation of the world: history, revelation, and reform in the antebellum American romance

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THE REFORMATION OF THE WORLD:

HISTORY, REVELATION, AND REFORM IN THE

ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN ROMANCE

by

Joel Matthew Gordon

________________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

December 2010

Copyright 2010 Joel Matthew Gordon

ii

Table of Contents

Abstract iii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: “A Border Life”: 26
Scott, Cooper, and Gothic Historicism in the American Romance

Chapter 2: “A Man of Plain Sense”: 75
Spiritual Narrative, Hypocrisy, and the Unitarian Reformation

Chapter 3: “The Hall of Fantasy”: 139
Transcendentalist Reform in Hawthorne’s Tales and Romances

Bibliography 204

iii

Abstract

The Reformation of the World examines the literature of an age that Lawrence
Buell has called America’s “history-conscious period,” which stretched from the
appearance of Walter Scott’s Waverly in 1817 to the decade before the Civil War. This
period, which saw the first commemorations of the Revolutionary War generation,
widespread resistance to Native American removal, and the growing push toward
abolitionism by religious partisans in the North, not only built memorials, such as the one
at Bunker Hill, but also revisited the early histories of the nation to condemn the first
crimes perpetrated by the first settlers. Between the 1820s and the 1850s, three major
trends merged in American culture: the self-conscious memorialization of these two
“founding” generations, the Puritan and the Revolutionary; an intra-Congregationalist
reformation that led to the establishment of a Unitarian church and, later, to the offshoot
of the Transcendentalists; and the massive popularity of the Waverly romance, realistic
narratives that combined historically accurate events, such as the Pequod War or the
Battle of Bunker Hill, and wholly fictionalized characters.
This study looks at three distinct types of historiography in the works of
America’s antebellum historical romancers: the non-sectarian lament for broken national
unity written by Scott’s first American heir, James Fenimore Cooper; the liberal-
Unitarian revisionism of the first authors to turn away from New England’s Orthodox
Calvinist traditions, such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Eliza Buckminster Lee, and
Lydia Maria Child; and the second-generation schism from Unitarianism that eventually
went by the name of Transcendentalism, best represented (though not wholly endorsed)

iv
in the romances and tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne. These romances fall into the same
form as those histories written by the first “history-conscious” age of America, the
second- and third-generation of Puritan settlers. On the one hand, conservative authors
such as Cooper saw a falling away from earlier perfection into disunity and declension.
On the other hand, liberal authors such as Sedgwick saw a move toward perfection, as
America repented for its older Calvinist sins. In either of these historiographical models,
the dispute over American history becomes a dispute over revelation that underlies all
post-reformation religious movements.

1

Introduction

“Strictly speaking,” Harriet Beecher Stowe informs us in her third novel, The
Minister’s Wooing, “it is necessary to begin with the creation of the world, in order to
give a full account of anything” (535). While this statement captures the difficulty of
writing historical romances, in which neither the raw historical materials nor the fictional
product belong to a discrete and quarantined past, it also alludes to the necessity of
historical romance, implying that every era evolves dynamically from previous eras, just
as the antebellum period of abolitionism and liberalized Congregationalism evolved from
the era of The Minister’s Wooing, which, in Stowe’s account, saw the abolition of the
transnational slave trade and the start of a pre-Unitarian reformation from within the
Congregationalist church. Even though re-creating the material conditions of a bygone
historical period might challenge the author, it is necessary at least to attempt such a re-
creation, so that readers can get a “full account” of their own time.
As Stowe implies, no romance of this period was set in a purely discrete past. The
Scarlet Letter begins in a present-day customs-house attic and ends with an allusion to
how “the story of the scarlet letter grew into a legend” (343). Cooper’s The Wept of the
Wish-ton-Wish includes, in its examination of cross-cultural myths, a commentary on the
Jackson-era desire for a “national literature,” while Lionel Lincoln asks us to imagine that
the current-day residents of the house of Lincoln are unaware of the previous occupants’
“secret history” (365).
1
The Minister’s Wooing, set in the first decade after the

1
Not coincidentally, both The Scarlet Letter and Lionel Lincoln end with a familiar trope of the nineteenth-
century historical romance, showing us the graves that their presumably fictional characters inhabit in the
reader’s present-day “reality.”

2
Revolution, functions more as the story of how Calvinist Congregationalism forged the
early American abolitionist movement than as its intended form, the Austenian marriage
comedy, while liberal authors such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Lydia Maria Child, and
Eliza Buckminster Lee wrote tales of anti-Calvinist reformation set in an era before
Calvinism had yet to be reformed. Even when the positive virtues of Puritanism were
vanishing into liberal Arminianism on one side and New Light Congregationalism on the
other,
2
the old obsession with genealogy, inter-generational decay, and religious
declension (often linked to a personal story of de-conversion) was persisting into the
antebellum period. And these old problems, along with a corresponding enthusiasm for
“reform,” found no better expression than in the Waverly-inspired historical romance.
Furthermore, when the liberal Congregationalists began their final great schism, between
the older generation—those who represent the “pale negations of Boston Unitarianism,”
as Emerson later wrote in the North American Review—and the younger
Transcendentalists and social reformers, Hawthorne would look back on these reform
movements, through the now-commonplace tropes of the Waverly romance, and satirize
these pale negations from within a refined and self-conscious adaptation of the form.
However, in order to write about the theology and historiography of antebellum romance,
one must first acknowledge two of the underlying presumption that have been most
challenged in the last thirty years of American studies: the presumptions that “Puritan

2
Or so it seemed at the time. Calvinism, in its “Old Light” form, always finds its way back into the
American Protestant church. In addition to “softer” Reformed sects that de-emphasize predestination and
limited atonement, the traditional Edwardsean theology has never really gone away. In the past forty years,
for example, postmillennial resconstructionist ideology has infected American politics and culture, mostly
at the level of local school boards, and the “neo-Calvinist” movement has recently been profiled in Time
(David Van Biema. “The New Calvinism.”12 March, 2009) and the New York Times Magazine (Molly
Worthen. “Who Would Jesus Smack Down?” 6 Jan. 2009: 20)

3
origins” underlie the era once known as the American Renaissance; and the presumption
that the Romance, as a separate and distinct genre from the Novel, was an exceptionally
American form of fictional narrative.
While it is hardly controversial now to view historical texts as a species of fiction,
such as Hayden White’s oft-cited contention, in Metahistory and elsewhere, that written
histories have more in common with literature than with science, it is probably just as
accurate to view fictional texts, especially the 19
th
-century romance, as a species of
history. In antebellum America, the historical romance, which often mingled real-life
characters with imagined characters, was not monolithic—it comprised a variety of
historical narratives with a variety of reformist (or anti-reformist) goals—but the broader
metahistorical narrative was always the same: either the narrative of divine supersession,
found in Bradford, Winthrop, and the rest of the first generation of settlers and historians;
or the post-Half-Way-Covenant counter-narrative of declension, found in some of Cotton
Mather’s histories (which actually comprise both types), the third generation of Puritan
histories of Edward Johnson and Joshua Scottow, and, in a later period, Jonathan
Edwards. At the risk of a facile binary distinction, I will call the former view utopian and
the latter view nostalgic. However, both conceptions of history stress the distance
between the present day and an idealized state of perfection, either in the past or in the
future.
In either the nostalgic or the utopian narratives, the Church of the New World can
achieve perfection only once. The metahistorical form, as delineated by Anthony Kemp,
started with the Reformation and continued into Puritan histories, where the goal was “a
complete severance from the historical past” (112). Instead of each generation

4
considering itself to be part of an unbroken chain that connected the founding of the
Roman Catholic Church to the Second Coming, “an image of syncretic unity and an
essential sameness of time,” the post-Reformation generations severed itself from the
authority of the immediately preceding generations; their goal, instead, was “to pass
through the stages of imperfect reformation in order finally to attain to ‘the primitive
patterne of the first churches’” (114). Quoting Bradford, Kemp shows that the
Reformation’s goal of reaching past the corruption of Rome to the purity of the
“primitive” churches would continue even from within the Reformation. Sometimes, as
in the New World, this purification would occur from within the same community, or
even the same congregation, “an odyssey of removal after removal by an ever-
diminishing company” (113). In the Puritan New World, we are either moving toward a
Utopian pinnacle of successful Reformation, overcoming corruption and hypocrisy on
our way toward the one true Church, or we are irrevocably moving away from perfection,
degrading as each new generation finds itself less likely to achieve complete purification,
nostalgically looking back on the previous beauty of a successful Reformation.
There is now a standard criticism for post-Bercovitch studies of American culture that
recognize formal elements of Puritan rhetoric in the literature of subsequent eras. While
Bercovtich saw a hegemonic dominance of the jeremiad, extending beyond its Calvinist
use to absorb even the dissenting post-Calvinist voices of the American Renaissance,
more recent critics accuse Bercovitch himself of perpetuating hegemony by failing to
recognize the authentic dissenting voices of minority, female, and other non-canonical
voices. Eric Cheyfitz calls Bercovitch’s “lament for the impossibility of dissent” a secret
celebration of the American system (Cheyfitz 543). An additional criticism is the

5
contention that American Puritanism was somehow distinct from its English predecessor,
that the New England Puritans were revolutionaries who broke from European tradition
and formed not only an exceptional nation, but also an exceptional body of thought. John
Carlos Rowe notes:
Often implicit in this nationalist approach to the study of U.S. culture was
the assumption that the United States constitutes a model for democratic
nationality that might be imitated or otherwise adapted by other nations in
varying stages of their ‘development’” (11).

In sum, Rowe objects to this exceptionalist approach to the American experience that
posited a direct narrative line between the Puritan mission and the democratic telos.
First of all, this objection may be valid in criticizing the uses of exceptionalism—
that is, exceptionalism as a justification for hemispheric dominance or unprovoked
invasions of sovereign countries—but it is factually wrong in describing how Americans,
especially those of the post-Revolutionary generations, saw the development of this
country, where the potential degradation of our Protestant or democratic principles
accompanied each new year’s distance from the original founding. America itself has
always been a revealed faith, at least in the epistemological sense—it began with the
recording of idea into text, by one generation of men, and the continuation of America as
a nation has depended upon future generations interpreting the motives and ideals of the
founding generation, deciding what needs to be interpreted literally (a fundamentalism
that is echoed by Scalia’s view of a “dead” Constitution
3
) and what needs to be filtered
through the reason of the present generation (a Unitarian-type of “living”

3
An interesting attempt to link two of the most prevalent “literalist” ideologies in contemporary
conservative politics, religious fundamentalism and Constitutional originalism, has been made by Vincent
Carapanzano, an anthropologist whose previous work dealt mainly with South Africa, in Serving the Word:
Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench. (New York: The New P, 2000).

6
Constitutionalism interpretation shared by the current liberal wing of the Supreme Court).
The political religion of America, codified in its written Constitution—the Gospel around
which revolve exegetical texts, such as the Federalist Papers, Supreme Court decisions,
and legislative transcripts—is still observed in the same way as its actual majority
religion, Protestant Christianity, has been observed, as a system of beliefs that began with
direct revelation, and that suffered as future generations moved away from that
perfection, temporally and otherwise. In a sense, the liberal and orthodox have been
strains in both the religious and political spheres of American life, with the former
believing that no generation has yet to achieve the pure ideals first voiced in either the
Protestant Reformation or the American Revolution, and the latter believing that only the
first generation managed to achieve this perfection, that America is forever falling away
from its Puritan or Federalist pinnacle.
While there may be a valid objection to using Puritan histories as an origin myth
for all of American culture, this criticism ignores its usefulness in studying the historical
romance of the early and the mid-19
th
-century. The Puritan intellect was necessarily
retrospective, scrupulously examining the self for either signs of sainthood, or, if one had
already achieved the status of living sainthood, signs of justification that would contradict
any potential signs of hypocrisy. Furthermore, these were always material signs. God
spoke through the things of the world, not through supernatural intervention. Therefore,
both the national history and the spiritual narrative became the most important forms of
literature in the Puritan New World, interrogating the material world for signs and
wonders, creating a temporal scheme that moved either the individual soul or the
collective nation from corruption to reformation to perfection, or from perfection to

7
corruption to decadence. Even without any transcendental theological implications, the
Puritan narrative fits the template of both the early English realistic novel and the later
Waverly-inspired historical romance.
4
Therefore, aside from when theological issues are
necessary for the explication of certain historical controversies, as in my chapter on
liberal Catharine Maria Sedgwick (Chapter 2), the importance of Puritan histories to this
study is what Larzer Ziff has called “the literary consequences of Puritanism.”
5

Even though Rowe and Cheyfitz are correct in worrying that literary
exceptionalism will somehow condone the application of political exceptionalism—a full
generation of conservatives have credited Ronald Reagan, not John Winthrop, as the
coiner of “a city on a hill”—the continued use of Puritan-origins analyses has a broader
purpose in recognizing that any constructed “myth” of a nation’s origins, regardless of its
basis in historical fact, is as much a part of that nation’s history as its “true” origins.
Lawrence Buell perhaps more accurately calls this the 19
th
-century “myth of Puritan
antecedence” (193). The origin of “Puritan origins,” in a sense, was a post-Revolutionary
desire to chart the nation's progress from its founding to the telos of Revolution and
Independence. In 1829, Cotton Mather’s Magnalia was re-published to widespread
popularity. Early histories of the major Indian wars, such as Hubbard’s Narrative of the
Indian Wars in New England and John Winthrop’s Journals (published as The History of
New England) were also republished in the 1820s, providing the source material for

4
This synchronicity of form is revealed in one amusing moment from Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, where
Winthrop’s famous anecdote about the mice who gnaw only prayer books rather than Bibles is repeated, as
if told to the characters that very morning—a case of providential signs and wonders, derived from a
providential history, inserted into a faux-providential romance. The weakly Puritan skeptic, Mrs. Grafton,
wonders of Winthrop why “a man of his commodity of sense should bamboozle himself with that story”
(221).

5
Ziff, Larzer. “The Literary Consequences of Puritanism.” ELH, 30 (3) (Sep. 1963): 293-305.

8
dozens of romances set during these conflicts. Founder’s Day and Fourth of July
celebrations, in the three decades before the Civil War, began to rely more and more on
this myth of Puritan antecedence (Buell 196-201). Whether or not Americans were right
to posit this myth is irrelevant. Instead, critics such as Philip Gould are correct to believe
in that the myth is important because each generation that attempts to re-invigorate this
myth ends up only revealing a belief in their own inherent potential for perfection or
failure—“for the 'spirit of Puritanism'...has only been recast time and again to serve
immediate interests." Gould ends his study, Covenant and Republic, with this
observation:
By telescoping Puritan history into a historical totality, we chart the
heavens in search of our own frustrations, vainly searching for answers in
a new form of metaphysics we call 'culture.' We look through the glass;
we cite ancestral delusions and bawl out 'Eureka!,' the image of our
eyeball barely reflecting in the glass. (216)
While the myth of Puritan origins found its way into the works of Jacksonian
historians, such as Bancroft and Trumbull, and into the rhetoric of Whig culture,
6
this
debate most popularly played out in antebellum fiction. The Puritan era, including King
Phillip’s and the Pequod Wars, and the Revolution were seen as the great epochs during
which an American Waverly might potentially be set, but the author then needed to make
a political decision regarding the continuity of his or her setting with the present day.
Pointing out the Puritan origins of the American Revolution, especially for an anti-
Yankee New Yorker such as Cooper, would have privileged both New England’s role in
the nation’s founding and the religious fragmentation that he saw continuing into the
1830s. Likewise, but from a liberal perspective, pointing out this continuity for Sedgwick

6
See Hammer, Dean C. “The Puritans as Founders: The Quest for Identity in Early Whig Rhetoric.”
Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 6 (2) (Summer, 1996): 161-194.

9
or Child would have spoiled their own Arminian versions of the American telos. Stowe
further complicated the continuity between these two eras by demonstrating that the
Puritan epoch had never really come to an end, but had actually metamorphosed into the
abolitionist, Hopkins-led wing of Congregationalism, whose rhetoric actually laid the
foundation for both the Revolution and the antebellum reform movements. In light of
revivalism’s subsequent influence on evangelicalism in the nineteenth, twentieth, and
twenty-first centuries, an influence that still betrays an Arminian-Calvinist split, but has
long ago left behind the possibility of salvation by works alone, Stowe’s historiography
was likely the most accurate. Unsurprisingly, given the Jacksonian period’s interest in the
dying Revolutionary generation and the frequent inter- and intrademoninational battles in
Protestant churches, the fights over the history of the Revolution and the history of the
Puritan-Indian wars were almost proxy battles for the fight over the country’s religious
origins.
Nonetheless, whether or not an author fell on the Calvinist or Arminian side of the
debate, and whether the latter fell on the old-generation Unitarian or the new-generation
Transcendental side of liberalism, he or she likely used the form of the Puritan history,
the pattern of corruption, purification, supersession, and possibly declension, in
constructing an historical romance partially made of material fact and partially of
invented fancy.
7
In fact, every side of each theological controversy in the mid-19
th
-

7
The adaptation of American history to the sectarian views of Protestants would of course continue past
the Civil War. However, these disputes lay beyond any study of the historical romance. The fragmentation
of the past century, and into the present day, the disputes between evangelical and mainline, fundamentalist
and non-fundamentalist, pre- and post-millennial, pre- and post-tribulationist, liberation theology and
prosperity gospel, tend to occur in the political realm or at least the non-fiction realm of popular culture,
such as self-help books, documentary films, and television talk shows. A contemporary author who remains
a prominent exception—a mainline liberal who has written apologetically of antebellum reformers, in both
the novel, Gilead, and the essays collected in The Death of Adam—is Marilynn Robinson.

10
century declared itself to be the true inheritor of the Puritan mission, just as the Puritans
themselves, along with competing Reformation sects, declared their movement to be the
true inheritor of the primitive Christian church.

The debate over Puritan origins in American history and literature, however
contested, pales in comparison next to the central dispute in the study of what is still
occasionally called the American Renaissance. In order to discuss historiography in
antebellum American fiction, is necessary, once again, to show that the distinction
between romance and novels even existed in the antebellum period, a well-rehearsed
debate that frequently overlooks historical reality in order to win contemporary debates.
Or, according to Ann Rigney:
Whatever the particular nature of their engagement with historiography,
the point about historical novels is that they are not autonomous works of
art (if such a thing exists at al). They are not ‘free-standing fictions.’
Although written under the aegis of the fictionality convention, they also
call upon prior historical knowledge, echoing and/or disputing other
discourses about the past. (19)

This relationship that Rigney describes can also be seen in the co-mingling of the
romance and the novel in the form of historical romance, a genealogy, regardless of the
ongoing debates, that is still worth reviewing.
Even today, too many critics of antebellum literature have limited themselves to
the same argument over genre that has persisted since the 1970s. Why bother
distinguishing between these words, romance and novel, yet again? Does any study that
calls a genre “uniquely American” run the risk of exceptionalism? One could study
several decades’ worth of American literary criticism by issuing a library search for the

11
word “romance,” and then sifting through the hundreds of manifestoes, theories, counter-
theories, apologias, and accusations that have sprung up around this otherwise apolitical
genre tag. From Chase and Trilling in the post-war years, who both argued that Romance
and Novel were genres that distinguished the American from the English tradition, to
Nina Baym’s historicist-feminist critique of this thesis in “Concepts of Romance in
Hawthorne’s America,” to works which seek to reconcile the two theories (Dekker, The
American Historical Romance), to those which seek to abolish the distinction between
genres altogether (Mills, American and English Fiction in the Nineteenth Century), the
Romance debates have laid the foundation for an entirely new kind of American studies,
one which left behind the standard American Renaissance canon and began to focus on
the more historically representative works by marginalized authors. At root, though, this
is still a debate over two genres—or, more specifically, over whether or not the novel and
the romance, by a certain definition, can even be called distinct genres.
On the one hand, no, there was never anything unique about the American
romance, as long as its definition is expanded to fit those texts that were actually called
romance in the antebellum period. However, the definition that critics have relied upon,
even critics such as Baym who then go on to attack its accuracy, has been the Chase-
Trilling-Frye version, which, in ignoring the actual definition of romance used the mid-
nineteenth-century, ends up favoring the more archaic (and not wholly relevant)
definition of romance formed in the prior century. Frye notes that “the hero of romance
moves in a world in which ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of
courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him” (31). Chase tries to
contextualize this genre within American fiction when he adds, “Romance does not plant

12
itself, like the novel, solidly in the midst of the actual. Nor when it is memorable, does it
escape into the purely imaginative” (19). For both critics, Hawthorne’s definition of
romance in his prefaces—a work that “may swerve aside from the truth of the human
heart”—is one that has defined a distinct, purely American tradition. Both also ignore
that Hawthorne wrote his romances nearly thirty years after the genre had taken shape in
America, and that his conception of the form was necessarily self-conscious, ironic, and
even parodic.
However, this romance/novel distinction comes closer to Samuel Johnson’s
attempt, in 1750, to distinguish the “new” form of fiction-making from the old popular
form of romance than it does to the distinction that was actually being made in
Hawthorne’s era. For Johnson, “The works of fiction, with which the present generation
seems more particularly delighted, are such as exhibit life in its true state, diversified only
by accidents that daily happen in the world” (12). Anticipating Chase, Johnson defines
the novel, as opposed to the romance, as a form that is more concerned with “the actual”
than the “purely imaginative.” Clara Reeve, who penned a definition in The Progress of
Romance, also summarizes the common distinction between the two genres that was
accepted in the late eighteenth-century: “The Romance is an heroic fable, which treats of
fabulous persons and things.--The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the
times in which it is written” (111). In Cooper’s preface to The Spy, which initiated the
historical-novel fad in America, he defends himself for writing a novel of manners when
the female reader, “whose smiles we most covet,” would instead prefer a “fancy,” which
the author defines as chivalric romance, with “certain moated castles, draw-bridges, and a
kind of classic nature” (3). Likewise, the definition in the Encyclopedia Britannica, from

13
the 1770s to 1817, hewed close to the Johnson-Reeve definition, noting that romances,
which exhibit “actions great, dangerous, and generally extravagant,” eventually
“exhausted the patience of the public” and led to the production of novels. These new
prose narratives, the entry relates, “quitted the unnatural incidents, the heroic projects, the
complicated and endless intrigues, and the exertion of noble patrons; heroes were not
now taken from the throne, they were sought for even amongst the lowest ranks of the
people” (115). This distinction between romance and novel, between fabulous and actual,
between stories set in an imprecisely located chivalric past and stories set in
contemporary society, seems to have been in place long before Hawthorne revived the
archaic Romance definition in his prefaces and novels.
Then why the dispute between New Americanists and New Critics over the use of
this word? Nina Baym summarizes the debate when she writes, “To look in literature for
the essence of ‘the American experience’ was necessarily to seek for something that
could be found in the literature of no other nation and, indeed, to identify nationality as
the basis of literary creation.” She then goes on to prove, using periodicals from 1822 to
1855, that the term romance was “deployed in the main simply as a synonym for the term
novel” (430). Along with Jane Tompkins, she sees in Hawthorne’s critical reception a
story of masculinist canon-building, an attempt by post-War American critics to purge
the sentimental novel from its place as the predominant literary form of antebellum
America and to replace it with what they saw as a style that distinctly represented this
country. A decade before Baym’s essay, Nicolaus Mills also questioned the political
implications of Chase’s exceptionalism. “What is unique about American fiction?” Mills
asks. “For their inflated view of its distinctiveness, their willingness to ignore qualities it

14
shares with other traditions, so often duplicate the habit of mind that has allowed
American political life to escape serious comparative judgment” (11).
As mentioned above, this attack on “exceptionalism,” remains just as ahistorical
and willfully ignorant as the idea of exceptionalism itself. For both proponents of the
novel/romance distinction and those who deny that such a distinction exists, the
definitions of both forms seem fixed in the late eighteenth-century, in the period of
Samuel Johnson and Clara Reeve. Fewer critics seem as interested in a genealogy of the
two genres as in using this generic distinction to argue for or against the inclusion of
certain authors into the American canon. A more ambivalent critic, Emily Budick, has
perhaps summed up this dispute best in “Sacvan Bercovitch, Stanley Cavell, and the
Romance Theory of American Fiction,” writing, “The largest target of the New
Americanists may not be the romance tradition (and its claim to be exceptional within
American literature), but rather New Criticism” (80). Lately, certain critics have been
trying to revert back to the Chase-Trilling distinction. In trying to reverse Baym’s claim
that Cooper was interchangeably called a novelist and romance writer, G.R. Thompson
and Eric Carl Link write:
When in 1822 the North American Review stated that Cooper ‘has laid the
foundations of American romance, and is really the first who has deserved
the appellation of a distinguished novel writer,’ there is no particular
difficulty in understanding that the reviewer means that, among novelists,
Cooper has distinguished himself as a romance writer. (61)

But why go back to fixing these genres into such rigid categories? Might the generic
indistinction that Baym saw from those 1822 periodicals, rather than being an
indistinction that had existed, in spite of Hawthorne’s prefaces, until Chase’s day, instead
have represented a shift in the usage of the words “novel” and “romance” between the

15
18
th
century and the 1820s? When Johnson used the word “romance” in 1750, he
certainly did not mean the same thing that Hawthorne meant in 1855; nor did critics who
used the word “novel” mean the same thing that Reeve and the Encyclopedia Britannica
meant a few decades after Johnson. How could Cooper, an author who wrote historical
adventure tales now indisputably labeled “romance,” begin his first popular success by
apologizing to female writers for not writing a romance? The answer, for both Cooper
and English-language literature at large, rests on the career of one man. In fact,
Britannica itself changed its definition in the 1820s, mostly because the author of the new
definition was the same person, Walter Scott, who changed the forms of both romance
and the novel in the Anglophonic world.
Scott is responsible for creating a genre that has been called “historical romance,”
which became the dominant form of prose narrative throughout the rest of the nineteenth-
century, but which also, following Henry James’s essay on Balzac, might be called
“realistic romance” (Literary Criticism 179). Scott’s use of the word “romance” to
describe his own work was as willfully naïve as Wordsworth’s use of the word “ballad,”
positioning himself as the proponent of a form that had long gone out of fashion, though
not in an ironic Cervantean mode. Instead, Scott told stories that would have been called
romance, in the traditional meaning of fabulous tales of chivalry, but he wrote them in a
style that employed contemporary manners, a fixed locale, and a particularity of detail
that would have earned the name “novel” from the likes of Johnson and Reeve—a
compromise summed up with a claim, at the start of Waverly, that its author has written
“neither a romance of chivalry, nor a tale of modern manners,” though his claim of
“neither” could just as easily be a claim for “both.” After Scott, romance was no longer

16
set in an abstracted era—in “the otherworldly solitudes of Romance,” as John
McWilliams has characterized the Chase thesis in “The Rational for ‘The American
Romance’” (73)—but located in a specific time and place. In 1821, muddying the generic
distinction of the past eighty years, Scott wrote, “Even Richardson’s novels are but a step
from the old romance… still dealing in improbable incidents, and in characters swelled
out beyond the ordinary limits of humanity” (On Novelists 52). And, when calling for a
legion of native romancers to write the history of this country, attorney and future
congressman Rufus Choate announced that an American Scott would “unroll a vast,
comprehensive, and vivid panorama of our old New England lifetimes, from its sublimest
moments to its minutest manners,” not bothering to note, as critics from the previous
century would have surely noted, that one of these categories belongs to the romance
(“sublimest moments”) while the other traditionally belongs to the novel (“minutest
manners”) (205).
During the course of his literary career, Scott did much to re-direct the history of
the novel, leading many of his contemporaries in America to start valuing the marvelous
and the romantic over the realistic (what was thought to be novelistic), but not in a way
that hearkened back to the old chivalric romances of the pre-Scott era. Instead, Waverly
became the model for nearly all prose fiction published in the United States after the
1820s, both those tales of romance and those tales of modern manners. That novel’s
relationship to its author’s local history—a novel both about history and written in as an
alternative history—appealed to American authors such as Cooper, Sedgwick, and
Stowe, and lent itself to parody by authors such as Hawthorne and Melville. If we take
Scott as the model for nearly two generations of American novelists, then we no longer

17
have to rely on the old definition of romance, nor on the old sense of that word’s
distinction from the term novel. While the novel certainly evolved out of the romance in
the mid-eighteenth-century, it just as quickly evolved back into the romance with Scott’s
influence. Baym rightly saw a generic indistinction in antebellum literary culture, but it
was an indistinction created by Scott and perpetuated by his heirs, such as Sedgwick,
Cooper, and Stowe, not an indistinction that had already existed. In other words, this
indistinction was new to literary culture in the 1820s, but quickly gained acceptance by
the time that reviewers and fiction writers were calling all novels romances, in the
decades that Baym explores. When Hawthorne brought a self-conscious insubstantiality
back to Romance, setting his Blithedale in an updated forest of Arden, he was reacting to
the Waverly model, portraying his Utopian bumblers as romancers of reform. He even
used the term Arcadia, conjuring a world of pastoral simplicity that was even more
unattainable than a mere Utopia.
The novel did not evolve out of the romance; both genres developed along tracks
that frequently intersected. What seemed to interest Scott, as well as his followers in
America, was the novel’s status as a false history, one that ironically (at least prior to
Scott) positioned itself in relation to a documentable past, in the form of a found
manuscript, a false confession, or a spiritual narrative. In spite of the Chase thesis, there
was nothing at all unique about the American romance—in Waverly Scott produced as
influential a sub-genre as any author since Cervantes, and “romantic realism,” to echo
James’s description of Balzac’s cycle, became the dominant literary form of the
nineteenth-century in all countries, not just England and America. Without Waverly, there
would have been no market for historical tales that mixed romantic elements with

18
examinations of social manners: no Middlemarch, no War and Peace, no Charterhouse of
Parma—for that matter, no Bostonians or Lost Illusions. While “romances,” as
misdefined by Chase in The American Tradition, or Hawthorne in his prefaces
(“otherworldly solitudes”), may have never existed outside of America—in fact, it may
have never existed until Hawthorne made the decision to break with the Waverly
tradition—romance as practiced by the majority of America’s post-Waverly antebellum
authors certainly did exist, as a default fictional form that far outnumbered any “novels”
that Johnson or Reeves would have recognized.
8

What made the American response to Waverly so vital—even, yes, so
exceptional—was that the romance in this country was being put to use in the service of
both writing the nation’s history, and sublimating this history into myth. While Cooper
was writing novels that promoted the idea of a conciliatory end to the conflicts upon
which America was founded—in spite of the fact that some of these conflicts, such as the
displacement of Cherokees from Georgia, were occurring at the time of publication—
other historical romancers, such as Sedgwick and Eliza Buckminster Lee, were
increasingly revising this history in order to draw attention to contemporary issues of
reform, both religious and social. These authors, mostly women, wrote about the origins
of their contemporary reform movements, such as Unitarianism and abolitionism, not just
re-created a departed era of local history, as Scott had done in depicting the Scottish
Highlands during the Jacobin revolt. The American Waverly novel was not only about

8
The precedent for Hawthorne’s romances may have been the romances of Charles Brockden Brown,
whose work falls outside the period explored in this study. For genre purposes, though, Brown’s fiction fell
into the Gothic fad explored at the start of Chapter 1. Nonetheless, Hawthorne’s fictions derived more from
their reaction to the realistic romances of his day than they did from any possible reading of Brown’s
fantastic Hogg-like satires of religious fanaticism.

19
history; it had the status as a work of history in its own right, just as the Puritan histories
are less valuable for their content than for the biblical typologies they mimic, or the
causal relationships they depict between the colony’s origins and the author’s present
day, or the warnings they sound for the current generation’s inevitable declension—that
is, they are less relevant for the history they depict than for the way that they depict
history. During the antebellum period, the American romance continued the practice of
constructing fictional narratives on not only the Puritan model—the national history as
spiritual narrative—but also on the personal narratives of the elect church members,
gothic literature, and the instructional “guide” literature brought over from the English
reformation. The American Waverlys were not only about the nation’s history, but also
about how the nation creates its history. As Cathy N. Davidson writes about
Revolutionary-era literature, “Ideology persists and is both less and more than history. It
is an attempt to sell history, to sell an interpretation of the time and place in which men
and woman live their lives to those same men and women” (103).
Although Scott’s re-romanticization of the novel was hardly a fad—in fact, it was
a generic innovation as inextricable from the contemporary novel as, say, realism and
chapter breaks—the vogue for the historical romance of reform went out of fashion by
the end of the Civil War. In this sense, James’s The Bostonians, in which northeastern
abolitionists wonder where to re-direct their enthusiasm for reform after the cause has
been won, was redundant as satire. James’ model, The Blithedale Romance, had already
noted a decline in enthusiasm for “the reformation of the world” in 1852. The
development of the historical romance in the middle of the nineteenth-century followed
this diminishing enthusiasm for reform, and it is the central purpose of this study to note

20
how the earlier historical romances that came out of Unitarian Boston, such as those
written by Sedgwick or Lee, expressed more zeal for the Reformation of American
religion and society, particularly the decline of Calvinism, than did the historical
romances written by that allegedly liberal Bostonian, Nathaniel Hawthorne, thirty years
later, in the darker years following the breakdown of the Transcendentalist movement
and the apparent failure of social reform movements, evidenced by the passage of the
Fugitive Slave Act.
Historical narrative has a complicated relationship to a population’s actual
historical experience, especially in a nation that relies so much upon the principles that
survived its founders only in written documents. In other words, political America and
religious America have always feared declension. As I show in Chapter 1, for some
authors, such as Cooper and Irving, Federalists who spent much of their early careers in
Europe, and then returned to a Jacksonian America that seemed to have failed its original
principles, the historical romance served much the same function as it did for Scott: an
antiquarian project that preserved the passing of extinct cultures. Nostalgia, as defined by
Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase, was the goal:
Nostalgia becomes possible at the same time as utopia. The counterpart to
the imagined future is the imagined past. But there is one crucial respect in
which the power of the past is different. It has generated objects, images,
and texts which can be seen as powerful talismans of how things used to
be. Certainly we are not short of such reminders for the volume of text and
image available seems to have grown at an almost exponential rate this
century. (9)

However, in the literature that followed the success of Scott and Cooper in the United
States, historical romance was used more for utopian purposes than for nostalgia. The fad

21
for romance arose at the same time as the fad for Reform, a Reform that embraced
everything from abolitionism to education to prohibition of liquor.
As I show in Chapter 2, the first major schism in the nineteenth-century
Congregationalist Church, the Unitarian Controversy, peaked at around the same time
that Cooper brought the Waverly romance into middle-class American homes. The first
generation of religious and social reformers who followed Channing, such as Catharine
Maria Sedgwick and Eliza Buckminster Lee, revised American history, particularly the
early Puritan history, as the prelude to future perfection. A New-England Tale and Hope
Leslie celebrate the decline of Calvinist predestinarianism with the same zeal that English
Gothic novels celebrated the end of Catholic superstition. However, the Unitarian
narrative was complicated not only by a residual theological Calvinism, but also by the
Calvinism of the narrative form. By closely adhering to the form of spiritual
autobiography, authors such as Sedgwick could not escape from the jeremiad-like
warning that the liberal faith was the truer and purer Protestant faith, and that Calvinism
in the present day was merely a corrupt ritualized degradation of true Christianity.
Likewise, Sedgwick’s own native Federalist sympathies complicate the pure democracy
that she espouses. Her narratives, which are ostensibly liberal in both politics and
religion, are actually conversion narratives in which the conversions do not successfully
take.
But the project of reformation grew bleaker by the mid-1840s, when the
subsequent Congregationalist schism, the Transcendentalist break within the Unitarian
church, further dissolved into ineffective social reform. In the three decades before the
Civil War, the word reformation was being intentionally muddied, with religious

22
sectarians using the word to decry corruption and promote a lost original ideal of
Christianity, and with social reformers using the word to describe, at various times, the
problems of Indian removal, slavery, wage-based labor, large banks, female inequality,
and education. A precursor to the mid-twentieth century, when the same vocabulary of
civil rights could be used to describe the fight against Jim Crow, anti-homosexuality
statutes, women’s inequality, or Native American apartheid, the decades between the War
of 1812 and the Civil War appeared to produce one massive movement, under the banner
of Reform, masquerading as a dozen or so smaller movements. As Hawthorne describes
“the noted reformers of the day” in his sketch, “The Hall of Fantasy,” “They are the
representatives of an unquiet period, when mankind is seeking to cast off the whole tissue
of ancient custom like a tattered garment” (740).
In Chapter 3, Hawthorne’s response to these sentimental romances of Catharine
Maria Sedgwick and others, The Blithdale Romance, remains skeptical of the very
possibility of Reform. As I show in this chapter, Hawthorne wrote from within the
Concord circle of lapsed Unitarians who briefly allied themselves under the banner of
Transcendentalism, and accepted the definition of revelation as an immediate experience
with the divine, a Kantian acceptance of the invisible through the mind’s reasoning
faculties. However, when dissecting the intra-sectarian struggle between reform as an
individual experience and reform as a collective dismantling of social systems—
represented in Orestes Brownson’s call for the abolition of hereditary property as the first
step in labor reform—Hawthorne remained a skeptic of Transcendentalism. He insisted
that history and tradition could not simply be eliminated through an act of “pure reason.”
Instead, these are problems that even an American must deal with, and the form of the

23
historical romance, which more often than not revolved around a “re-inheritance” plot,
was the vehicle by which Hawthorne could make these assertions. His late romances
remain more skeptical about Transcendentalist history and revelation than the earlier
sketches, allegories, and tales.
A couple of major topics have been passed over, for the most part, in The
Reformation of the World. Since this is a study of history and revelation in a specific
genre, historical romance, most of the era’s poetry, even those longer works written in the
vein of early Scott or Byron, fall outside the study’s boundaries.
9
More seriously, the
absence of Harriet Beecher Stowe needs to be addressed.
10
In any volume on antebellum
historical romance, Stowe, a child of the post-Edwards Calvinist orthodoxy, deserves her
own chapter. However, as Bronson Alcott obliquely insisted, in one of his “Orphic
Sayings” from The Dial, “Solidity is an illusion of the senses”—everything, including
faith, matter, and the human body, is “flux” (Fuller 94). Likewise, the solidity of history
and religious sectarianism is an illusion, and each profession of faith by the authors in the
following chapters should be viewed bilaterally, as an expression of the faith that the
author wishes to promote, and as a negation of the faith that the author wishes to
supplant. Cooper prized an Anglican Federalism that was pretty much out of favor before
the publication of his first romances, but advocated, just as strongly, for the defeat of the
vulgar democracy and fragmented sectarianism of Jacksonian America. Sedgwick, whom

9
Dickinson, of course, is the poet most examined according to contemporary debates over Calvinism and
Transcendentalism. Another relevant poet is the now-forgotten Elizabeth Oakes Smith, whose connection
to the Transcendentalist movement is explored in Barton Levi St. Armand’s “Veiled Ladies: Dickinson,
Bettine, and Transcendental Mediumship,” Studies in the American Renaissance, (1987): 1-51.

10
In New England Literary Culture, Lawrence Buell has an excellent discussion of The Minister’s Wooing,
contrasted with The Scarlet Letter. In the former, he sees a daring attempt to re-write the history of
Puritanism as a progression from Winthrop to Edwards to Hopkins, and to place the orthodox as founders
of contemporary reform movements, including abolitionism.

24
David S. Reynolds defines as a religious “borderer” rather than a committed Unitarian,
believed as much in dismantling the Calvinist orthodoxy of her birth as in converting her
middle-class readership to the comforts of liberal Congregationalism. And Hawthorne’s
Concord circle wished to negate the “pale negations” of Unitarianism with as much
fervor as they wished to put together a coherent American analogue to the European
idealism that had inspired their Transcendentalism. In this flux, the romances of Stowe
are both exceptional and redundant. A Calvinist by birth, a sympathetic ally of liberal
social movements, a skeptic of both her native sect and its Unitarian offshoot, including
both Channing’s conservative Unitarianism and the Transcendentalism that evolved after
the early 1830s, a late-in-life Episcopal convert who shared Cooper’s traditionalist
nostalgia—Stowe, as an exemplar of each movement, belongs in every chapter, and
therefore has no place in any one particular chapter.
Finally, a study of revelation, reform, and the conflicting sectarian views of
national history cannot avoid the present moment in American culture and politics. Even
though literary scholarship has tended to focus, with good reason, on the part of
antebellum American culture that actually produced novelists deserving of study, the
major sectarian developments of the period occurred outside of (or tangential to) the split
between Arminian and Calvinist, or Unitarian and Transcendentalist. While each side of
those two debates tended to denounce the other side with vitriol, all parties frequently
attempted to appeal to the larger crowds then being converted under the revival
movement, which reached its pinnacle in 1857 and 1858, the so-called “businessmen’s
revival.” Much of the alarmingly literal theology in contemporary society and politics—
the apocalyptic visions, the focus on Revelation and other prophetic books, the attempt

25
once again to re-write American history as the eschatological fulfillment of Christian
civilization—began its passage from the pulpits to the mainstream during this period of
revivalism. What came to be known as Fundamentalism in the 1920s has strong
intellectual roots during the period that I explore, an era that included Charles Finney, the
Plymouth Brethren (an Anglo-Irish contingent that included J.N. Darby, progenitor of
today’s premillennial dispensationalists, such as Tim LaHaye, who preach that the
Second Coming could occur at any time), and upstate New York’s “burnt-over district.”
11

However, there are few historical romances written about the Evangelical revivals, and
even fewer written about the Fundamentalist sects of the past eighty years. In reading the
following chapters, it is worth remembering that reform-minded Calvinist and Arminian
churches still exist throughout the country, but they now advocate for Republican
candidates, the prohibition of abortion and homosexual marriage, libertarian economic
policy, and some for a hawkish military presence in the Middle East. While Thomas
Jefferson, before his death in 1826, may have believed “there is not a young man now
living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian,” the liberal sects that preached a
salvation by good works alone have lost all but a negligible membership today, in
comparison with the many varieties, Fundamentalist and non-Fundamentalist, of
Evangelical Protestantism.

11
The most comprehensive study of American Fundamentalism remains Geroge Mardsen,
Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford: Oxford U P, 2006), in an edition that contains a lengthy
Afterwords bringing the study from 1970s, when it was originally published, to the present day. Also
valuable are: Whitney R. Cross, The Burnt-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of
Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1950); Kathryn Teresa Long,
The Revival of 1857-58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening (Oxford: Oxford U P, 1998); and
Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British & American Millenarianism, 1800-1930
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970).

26
Chapter 1
“A Border Life”:
Scott, Cooper, and Gothic Historicism in the American Romance

In a broad sense, all novels are historical novels. According to George Dekker,
“The world of all our vulgar communities is… the world of historical relation in which
characters are so engaged, embroiled, and encumbered that they think, feel, and act
differently than they would in some other conjunction of time and space” (25) By this
logic, the difference between, say, Moll Flanders and Waverly is the difference between
how particular Defoe and Scott choose to make each “conjunction of time and space”—
while every novel, by virtue of its temporal structure, is abstractly “historical,” only a
novel that draws attention to a particular period, implicitly offering a theory of its
nation’s history, is a “historical novel.” Likewise, all spiritual narratives are historical
narratives, because, as Leopold Damrosch writes, “The truth can only emerge from a
sustained scrutiny of behavior over a period of time, and thus the need for temporal
narrative is born” (4). Although the appeal of the historical narrative to religious partisans
in antebellum America rests on this similarity between the historical novel and the
spiritual narrative, the historical novel first took root in this country four decades prior to
the Civil War, following the 1814 publication of Waverly.
1

1
The major critical works on this specific genre, the post-Waverly romance, all owe their existence to
Georg Lukacs’ seminal The Historical Novel (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983), but only recently have
critics begun to look at American romance as a continuation of the tradition that Lukacs explored—the
tradition that derived from Walter Scott’s Waverly novels. These include: Buell’s New England Literary
Culture; Emily Budick, Fiction and Historical Consciousness: The American Romance Tradition; George
Dekker, The American Historical Romance; Edgar A. Dryden, The Form of American Romance
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1988); and Philip Gould, Covenant and Republic.

27
While it was the adaptation of Puritan metahistory to this literary form that made
the American historical romance so uniquely suited to messages of political and religious
reform, the first popular American author of historical romances, James Fenimore
Cooper, was also their least overtly religious practitioner. Instead, his novels of the
Puritan frontier (Wept of the Wish-ton-Wish), the Revolutionary-era frontier (The
Pioneers), and the Revolution itself (The Spy and Lionel Lincoln), took from Scott a
broader concern for how modernity forces the passage of certain folk-cultures into
legend, representing the historical space where this occurs as a literal borderland. This
chapter will not only look at these texts for their importation of Scott’s generic
innovations to American soil, but also at the historical ideas implicit in the historical
romance’s early development, starting with Walpole and the gothic narrative and
continuing into the allegedly more realistic romances of Scott. In preparing to discuss the
liberal-Unitarian authors who would eventually compete with Cooper (and earn his
admiration) in the next chapter, I will also examine how the gothic novel was, at root, not
a tale of the supernatural, but instead a affirmation of the anti-supernaturalism inherent in
early English Protestant novelists such as Defoe, which Scott and eventually Cooper re-
affirmed in tracing the origins of their modern nations to the decay of obsolete cultures.
As Emerson famously scolded at the start of Nature, “Our age is retrospective. It
builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The
foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes.” Aside
from prefacing the author’s plea for his contemporaries to return to “an original relation
to the universe,” Emerson also hopes to halt several decades of prodigious historical
introspection on the part of his fellow New Englanders (Essays 7). The first two post-

28
Revolutionary generations were, as Lawrence Buell notes, “history-conscious” (195). By
the 1820’s historical works comprised more than three-quarters of this country’s
bestsellers. Almost half the historical societies were New England-based. The bi-
centennial of the Plymouth landing represented the pinnacle of Forefather’s Day, a
celebration that had begun before the Revolution, but was not widely celebrated until
1820. In part, this history-consciousness was the outward manifestation of the theological
battles that had raged among post-Calvinist sects for more than a century—while the
nation’s Puritan ancestry began to be seen as our founding myth, Liberal and Orthodox
partisans chose to use this myth as a way of representing either our escape from Calvinist
repression or our declension from our original theological mission. The celebration of
New England’s Puritan origins was echoed, on a grander scale, by the celebration of the
dying Revolutionary generation in American culture at large, seen in both the
consecration of the Bunker Hill Monument and the near-simultaneous deaths of Adams
and Jefferson in 1826.
However, in a broader sense, this history consciousness—tied inextricably to a
Cervantean self-consciousness about storytelling, national-myth creation, and romance
itself—was a worldwide craze, with roots in the popularity of Scott’s Waverly novels.
Although Cooper underwent a theological conversion on par with Stowe—drifting
toward Episcopalianism as consolation for what they saw as the fragmentation of the
nation’s culture—his novels began to appear less than a decade after Waverly, and, at
such an early stage in the development of America’s historical romance, they appeared to
serve no partisan religious agenda. Cooper’s religious conversion, in fact, was part of a
larger nationalistic conversion, built on disillusionment with America’s lost Federalist

29
ideals. As he began to publish more political and historical tracts, including a history of
the American Navy, his barely fictionalized tour of the States in Notions of the
Americans, and his ambiguous examination of Jacksonian democracy in The American
Democrat, Cooper also began to idealize the Revolutionary generation in inverse
proportion to his disappointment over that generation’s tainted inheritance: an anxious
nostalgia that re-enacts Puritan metahistory. When he writes, in The American Democrat,
“This nation is sectarian rather than Christian,” a reader in the 1830s could interpret
Cooper’s bitterness with his country as stemming from either lost religious or political
ideals, but enacting the Reformation drama of supersession, purification, and declension
(180). In Cooper’s historical narrative, the nation went into declension after the first
Revolutionary generation died. In 1921, his grandson would preface his own chronicle of
the Coopers’ ancestral upstate New York home, The Legends and Traditions of a
Northern County, with a statement that could stand as the credo of either Cooper or his
mentor, Walter Scott: “The whole was written with the hope of preserving for future
generations of my family the life and the thoughts of people living under conditions
which are gone forever, and of creating in the minds of its readers the atmosphere in
which they lived, struggled, died, and were buried” (vii). The tone, whether in 1821 or
1921, is elegiac and antiquarian, preserving a culture rather than helping to sustain it.
As Scott’s first American successor, Cooper’s work also seemed to ignore the
incipient reform movements of the antebellum decades—perhaps because the author,
who prized national unity above all other virtues, was wary of mass democratic
movements, especially those that might tear apart what the Revolutionary generation had
fought so hard to join together in the late eighteenth century. In other words, if he

30
opposed abolition, for example, it was less because of an ideological bias and more
because of a fear of disunion. Instead, Cooper’s novels do have a broader historical
agenda, delineating the border between national history and legend, and in this sense his
work, much like Scott’s, owes a debt to the gothic novel’s theory of national history.
Rather than representing a form of romance from which the realistic novel evolved, the
gothic novel was instead a type of novelistic realism—a late part of the movement that
produced Defoe and Richardson, not a reaction to this movement.
In discussing The Spy’s position in American literary history, Emily Budick
writes:
An important swerve takes place that sets the American tradition off in a
different direction. This swerve is decidedly away from the real world that
the nineteenth-century British novel would eventually offer, and instead,
back to the gothic, the marvelous, supernatural, romantic universe where
fiction had originated and that had always seemed precisely the opposite
of history and realism. (Fiction 3-4)

Although there is some truth to this assessment, and although Cooper offers some
ambiguity about his intentions in The Spy’s preface, Budick’s analysis rests on a false
assumption about both the gothic and the romantic. If, as noted above, a “novel” can
aspire toward both the adventure plots of romance and the realistic depiction of manners,
then the term “gothic novel” can exist without paradox. In fact, Scott and later Cooper
derived not just their narrative strategies from Walpole, but also their theoretical
relationship to history itself. As an antiquarian in prose, Walpole helped to prepare for the
innovation of Scott’s first three Waverly novels, which run in roughly chronological order
from 1754 (“Sixty Years Hence”) to 1800. Taking its cue from Scott, the American

31
historical romance of the mid-19
th
-century evolved from a cross-fertilization of Puritan
spiritual narrative with the gothic tale.
The Castle of Otranto was the first modern historical novel, not Scott’s
Waverly—something that Scott, in his essays on both Walpole and Radcliffe, certainly
did not deny, even if he never admitted to being a member of their school. Wordsworth,
however, recognized the affinity between Scott and the Gothics immediately. He grouped
Guy Mannering, Scott’s second novel, with “modern novels of the Radcliffe school”
(Hayden 86). As Gothic-conditioned readers must have recognized, both this novel and
Waverly feature adventures among decayed ruins, gestures toward black magic or
superstition (Guy Mannering, in reference to its title character’s portentous hobby, is
subtitled “The Astrologer”), and the restoration of an heir to a usurped genetic line.
According to Fiona Robertson:
One must assume…that [Scott] had reasons for teasing the public with
titles like The Black Dwarf, The Monastery, and Castle Dangerous. In the
novels themselves, character-types, settings, and plots familiar from
Gothic vie for attention with others commonly regarded as truer to “the
temper of his imagination.” (4)

These were commercial decisions, of course, as were many of Scott’s innovations, but the
Gothic novel certainly appealed to Scott for other reasons. He had not only been writing
romances in verse already, but he had been a historian, as well, and a collector of
recovered medieval ballads. For Scott the antiquarian, the Gothic novel’s supernatural
elements are certainly its least appealing qualities. In truth, The Castle of Otranto
probably influenced Scott in its divergence from romance, in its “realism.”
As Robertson demonstrates, there was never an easy distinction between the
proper “novel” of Richardson and Defoe, and the “terrorist tale” of Walpole and

32
Radcliffe. Scott’s reputation as a successor to the former group came after his death,
when it was determined that his “‘faithful pen’ had rescued literature from excess and
perversity… Scott’s transformation into the Victorian icon of normality required that he
be set expressly in opposition to the experiments of the Gothic” (22). In part, he was
evaluated according to the Victorians’ definitional conventions, which leaned toward
Samuel Johnson’s distinction between romance and the novel—conventions, as noted
earlier, that continued into the late twentieth century. Hazlitt called Scott “the amanuensis
of truth and history,” which may have been how the Victorians eventually saw him
(Hayden 284). However, neither Scott nor his Gothic predecessors fell to one or another
side of the romance/novel divide, if only because there was no such thing as a “pure”
Gothic romance—something that would have been impossible, since, from Otranto
onward, the Gothic style included an ironic self-consciousness with regard to history and
storytelling.
As with Waverley, the gothic novel resists any romance/novel classification.
Traditional romances were so far removed from the contemporary society in which they
were published that the exoticism of their settings—the exhumed cultures that a reader
would otherwise only be able to glimpse in written histories or ruins—could only be
contrasted implicitly with the present day. As E.J Clery notes, most of the popular
romances in the century leading up to Otranto “contained no supernaturalism, but were
characterized by artificial diction, numerous coincidences, the promiscuous mixing of
history and fiction, absurd idealism, and over-the-top heroics” (22). While the realistic
novel was surely a reaction to this type of romance, the gothic novel was less a reversion
to the old-fashioned romance than a continued reaction; as with Scott, Walpole wanted to

33
expand upon the innovations noted by Johnson and Reeve. In his second preface to
Otranto, he may write that “the great resources of fancy have been damned up by a strict
adherence to common life,” but he goes on to explain that his own tale is “an attempt to
blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern,” combining “the boundless
realms of invention” with characters who “think, speak, and act as it might be supposed
were men and women would do in extraordinary positions.” Even in this second preface,
which has traditionally been regarded as a manifesto in favor of reactionary romanticism,
Walpole claims that his tale is “faithful to the manners of the time” (65).
In part, Walpole and later Scott needed the devices of realistic prose fiction to
maintain their pose as “historians” of their extraordinary tales, “biographers” of their
exceptional heroes. While Defoe used the trope of the found manuscript, presenting
himself as a mere editor of Crusoe’s journals or Moll Flanders’ memoir, Walpole took
this trope even further, presenting not just his story but the entire book as an artifact. He
historicized the found-manuscript trope, and its evolution into a found-artifact trope
likely appealed to the antiquarian in Scott. Describing the similarities between Scott’s
novels and gothic fictions, Robertson explains:
In nearly all Gothic fictions the narrative and architectural passages which
seem to lead to nowhere in fact lead to the secret past, whether that secret
past is personal (the discovery of a mother, a father, alive or in skeletal
form) or cultural (the barbarisms of feudal society, of “monkish
superstition”). (73)

What separates these tales from “romance,” aside from their explicitly supernatural
elements—something that Clery claims is not necessarily a feature of romance—is the
explicit acknowledgment of historical distance from the events of the narrative. The
Castle of Otranto does not necessarily exist in a world where the supernatural invades the

34
everyday lives of aristocratic families. However, it exists in a world where people believe
in such “monkish superstition”—and the fact that Walpole, as “editor” in his first preface,
claims to have found this Italian story in a Scottish crypt, encodes this entire story as an
anti-Catholic joke, conveniently written by the son of the man who, as the first English
Prime Minister, prosecuted the 1721 Jacobite rebellion. By turning the tale into an artifact
of a superstitious culture, the “romantic” aspects of the tale become ironized, and the
gothic novel itself becomes part of Defoe’s use of plausible fictions as a reaction to
“Popery” and “Romantick Religion” (McKeon 89). As satire, The Castle of Otranto bears
the same relation to medieval romance and superstition as Don Quixote does to tales of
knight-errantry. Walpole wanted to bring the “great resources of fancy” back to prose
fiction, but from the enlightened (and therefore ironic) perspective of eighteenth-century
Protestantism.
Scott, on the other hand, while no Jacobite himself, treated this same subject
without satire, in keeping with a Romantic antiquarian’s view of archaic storytelling
traditions and even the Romantic view of Don Quixote. His novels did not exist as
artifacts, nor did they employ the found-artifact trope of Walpole’s fiction. Instead,
Edward Waverley goes forth on his stint in the army with a head full of romance and a
genealogy that seems to promise a genetic predisposition toward chivalric adventure. He
inflames his “power of imagination and love of literature,” to the ire of his tutors, in the
family estate’s “large Gothic ” library (14). He imbibes not only imaginary tales, but also
the stories of his forbearers:
Family tradition and genealogical history, upon which much of [his
father’s] discourse turned, is the very reverse of amber, which, itself a
valuable substance, usually includes flies, straws, and other trifles;

35
whereas these studies, being themselves very insignificant and trifling, do
nevertheless serve to perpetuate a great deal of what is rare and valuable in
ancient manners, and to record many curious and minute facts, which
could have been preserved and conveyed through no other medium. (17)

While Waverley hopes to revive these familial adventures in the English army, and later
among the Highlander rebels, Scott makes clear that Waverley’s role as listener and even
as re-teller of family legend is a more noble career. Adventure may still exist in the
Scotland of 1745, but it involves the brave resistance of a dying culture, a death which
Scott simultaneously glorifies and accepts as inevitable.
According to Anthony Close, “There was a strong temptation for the Romantics
to suppose that Cervantes must have shared their interests” (56). He adds that Lockhardt
(Scott’s son-in-law), in admiring Don Quixote, claims that Cervantes was not satirizing
the likes of Amadis and Palmerin, which were “among the most interesting relics of the
rich, fanciful, and lofty genius of the Middle Ages” (57). Rather than satirizing the
illusions produced by romance, Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge (the latter two by
“reviving” the medieval lyrical ballad) eulogized the culture that produced these
romances, and often fetishized its antiquity. “My intention,” the narrator of Waverley
claims:
is not to follow the steps of that inimitable author [Cervantes], in
describing such a total perversion of the intellect as misconstrues the
objects actually presented to the senses, but that more common aberration
from sound judgment, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their
reality, but communicates to them a tincture of its own romantic tone and
colouring. (20)

In softening the Cervantean satire of its hero, Waverley romanticizes the pursuit of the
antiquarian, not the soldier. As with Cooper (and all of his American successors, aside
from Hawthorne), Scott made no attempt to pass off his novels as proper artifacts. He did

36
not pose as “editor,” presenting lost Catholic manuscripts to the enlightened Protestant
reader. In fact, he made no attempt to de-fictionalize his narratives at all, in the manner of
Defoe. Aside from copious notes that opened up the narrative to historical scrutiny, and
the inclusion of real-life historical figures, often flattened next to the livelier fictional
heroes they meet, Scott makes his characters themselves antiquarians. In Guy Mannering,
the hero Brown takes an “unusual track” into Scotland in order to view Hadrian’s Wall:
“‘And this is the Roman Wall,’ said he, scrambling up to a height which
commanded the course of that celebrated work of antiquity: ‘What a
people! Whose labours, even at this extremity of their empire,
comprehended such space, and were executed upon such a scale of
grandeur!’” (118)

Anachronism, for both the author of Waverley and its hero, was part of the past’s appeal.
In surveying a Scottish castle in that novel, the narrator points out that “it had been built
at a period when castles were no longer necessary, and when the Scottish architects had
not yet acquired the art of designing a domestic residence” (94). In some ways, this was
also part of the charm that Scott found in his recovered medieval ballads, or that the
public, sixty years earlier, had found in James Macpherson’s forged fourth-century
“Ossian epics,” Fingal and Temora. In fact, this strain of Anglo-American romanticism
still occurs in our own era’s musical antiquarianism, as the folk and blues revivals of the
1950s and 60s demonstrate.
2

From the Gothic novel, Scott learned to excavate a documentable past, one that
could be understood by visiting the ruins, picking up the decayed stones, and reading the

2
When the Rolling Stones play their Delta-blues riffs, derived from obscure 78s and purportedly
“authentic” American South field recordings, they can thank Scott for this precedent of reviving folk
culture for popular entertainment. In neither case, incidentally, does the present-day antiquarian
acknowledge that the folk art of the past was itself popular entertainment. Elijah Wald sums up this Scott-
like attitude best: “Popular entertainers were reborn as primitive voices from the dark and demonic Delta,
and a music notable for its professionalism and humor was recast as the heart-cry of a suffering people” (4).

37
journals that bore witness to the era. While prior romances had been set in a purely
symbolic past, an Arcadia that loosely signified “medieval”—and they continue to be
written now, in Tolkienian fantasy—Walpole’s novel, and later those of Radcliffe, Scott,
and the American historical-romancers, are all set in a specified time and place, among
what the authors now identify as ruins that the reader could still theoretically visit.
Dekker notes that Scott even influenced a subsequent generation of historians, among
them Macauley, Carlyle, and De Tocqueville, by actually visiting the sites where he set
his tales, by memorializing not only the records of kings, but also the “humble sources
and first-hand observations” of the people themselves (30). In writing about one of
Hogg’s anecdotes, in which a search by the author and Scott for relics leads to a dead
end, Fiona Robertson observes that this story “mocks the search for antique objects which
have been invested with intense spiritual or even mystical significance, and insists on a
commonsensical deflation of romantic images of the past” (2). While this is superficially
true, especially in comparison to Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” or Shelley’s
“Ozymandias,” Robertson’s conclusion ignores the possibility that the romantic image
could linger for Scott after the “commonsensical deflation” of myth. For Scott, in fact,
the romance of a dying culture came after the removal of myth. Antiquity itself was
romantic.
Having grown up in a border territory, and having advocated a kind of “border”
politics, Scott saw ghosts and familial curses in the simple transition of one culture to
another, without the need for Gothic supernaturalism. For Cooper, as well, the continued
plausibility of romance as a genre, even following the removal of the supernatural, rested
on its historical setting. The world of the Otsego county frontier—or the Connecticut

38
Valley of The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, or the loyalist’s Boston mansion in Lionel
Lincoln—is also a borderland. Subsequently, the “romance” of Cooper’s novels is the
“romance” of Scott’s first three Waverly novels: superficially “authentic” as history,
concerned with the material relics of the past, and intent on replacing the supernatural
black magic of the Gothic novel with the ostensibly more real (though no less exotic)
black magic of cultural obsolescence. Both Scott and Cooper depict these transitional
societies with the nostalgia of antiquarians. They accept the displacement of rude clans
with progress and civilization, and yet they also refuse to satirize the anachronistic
Jacobins.
In Waverley, the clan chief Fergus MacIvor asks the hero, “Is this your very
sober earnest… or are we in the land of romance and fiction?” (213). The answer, as the
story develops, is ambiguous: “we” are not in the land of romance, if only because
Edward Waverley straddles a border between that land and the real world, while Fergus
remains a romantic figure, even more so for being on the losing side of a cultural battle.
These two characters, by the novel’s last chapter, no longer even occupy the same
genre—Waverley, regardless of his romantic notions, belongs to the “tale of manners,”
choosing his moderate cousin Rose over the chief’s revolutionary sister, Flora, while
MacIvor belongs to “the romance of chivalry.”
3
Critics may employ a “neutral territory”
metaphor, elaborating on Hawthorne’s use of the term in the “Custom House” preface to
The Scarlet Letter, as a place where fact and fiction “may meet, and each imbue itself

3
When Waverly romances are written today, this final rejection of antiquity in favor of colonial “progress”
is usually avoided. The primivitist nostalgia of the 60s counter-culture has altered the form in two of the
most popular contemporary re-writings of Waverly: Kevin Costner’s adaptation of the novel Dances With
Wolves, and James Cameron’s Avatar, both of which present an AWOL colonial officer who falls in love
with the chief’s daughter (adopted in the case of Wolves) and helps the colonized tribe fight back against
his former military unit.

39
with the nature of the other” (149), but a more accurate metaphor, at least in the case of
Scott, would probably be “the border,” the shifting zone where progress and civilization
touch the stagnant folk cultures of the past—the Bradwardine castle rather than the clan-
ruled Highlands. Cooper, in addition to the word “border,” may use “frontier,”
“clearing,” or (in The Spy’s subtitle) “neutral ground,” but the metaphor persists.

As his preface to Lionel Lincoln demonstrates, Cooper understood the historical
tropes of gothic fiction, just as he understood Scott’s desire to get away from the faux-
antiquarianism of the “found manuscript.” Hawthorne, of course, would bring back this
trope in full irony—not just in The Scarlet Letter, but also Gothic stories such as
“Rapaccini’s Daughter,” which the author claims merely to have recovered, edited, and
published from a dusty old Catholic manuscript—but Cooper mocks the presumption that
a novelist is merely a step removed from the historian. “While he shrinks from directly
yielding his authorities,” he writes in Lionel Lincoln’s preface, “the author has no
hesitation in furnishing all the negative testimony in his power.” These sources on which
the author does not rely include: “no unknown man or woman [who] has ever died in his
vicinity,” no “illegible manuscript” from a “dark-looking stranger,” no materials
furnished from a landlord “in order that the profits might go to discharge the arrearages
of a certain consumptive lodger, who made his exit so unceremoniously as to leave the
last item in his account, his funeral charges.” The list continues for several more pages,
excluding “learned societies,” colleges, and “garrulous” tale-tellers from the author’s
sources, implying that the joke would likely not be lost on a reading public that had

40
already become inundated with the mock-histories in the post-Waverly literary market
(3).
But this awareness of his place in the Gothic tradition was not the only trope
imported from Scott’s Highlands to Cooper’s Hudson Valley, or Revolutionary Boston,
or the 17
th
-century Connecticut Valley. The Pioneers, The Spy, Lionel Lincoln, and The
Wept of Wish-ton-Wish demonstrate the same peculiar kind of conservatism found in
Waverley: a claim for the conciliation between warring factions that allegedly preceded
the formation of a unitary culture in America. Just as the Highlands Chieftan both accepts
his inevitable decline and insists on fighting valiantly against this decline—part of his
noble primitivism—the Indian, the Puritan, and the British soldier in America all fight
valiantly to preserve their place in a country that Cooper knows will no longer have use
for them. In Cooper’s case, however, he wrote from a nation that had already been
written into existence by the Puritans and their battling heirs, the liberal and orthodox
strains of post-Puritan Congregationalism. As laid out by these factions, the American
historical narrative, prior to the Revolution, had been one of continued fragmentation,
declension, and genealogical decay: a church forever falling away from its mission’s
original purity. After the Revolution, each faction battled to claim its own tradition as the
Revolution’s predecessor, either by asserting that the work of the Revolution had yet to
be achieved or that its greatest achievements had been quickly squandered.
The Romantic nostalgia in the tales of both Scott and Cooper have a
metahistorical relationship to the Puritan narrative: the stories are material relics,
connecting the fallen present to the sanctified past. In the Romantic-secular version,
however, the author is an antiquarian rather than a theologian, and the narrative is less a

41
jeremiad than an act of preservation. Writing about Puritan typologies, Anthony Kemp
note that “types were for Reformation what relics were for the medieval Church; they
linked the earthly present to the divine past, allowing men in their mundane lives,
separated from the divine, to possess a little bit of heaven” (123). In the sense that
typologies allowed a degraded contemporary to connect briefly with his sanctified
ancestor, histories in general should have done the same thing in post-Revolutionary
America. However, the history that Cooper was writing reverted back to the purpose
found in the original histories of the New World, in which the newly sanctified
congregation superceded the older corrupt one. This triumphalist spirit, though, is
obscured by a modern pining for the authenticity of obsolete cultures. This confusion
extends from the same anxiety that produced both historical romance and Puritan
histories of declension: a fear that the writer does not, in Emerson’s words, bear an
original relation to the universe, that the tradition in which they are working is now
purely formal, with no substantive reason for existence. The Puritan historian channels
this anxiety through the jeremiad. Perry Miller begins The New England Mind by quoting
the dire warning from Richard Mather’s jeremiad to the third generation of Puritan
settlers:
It is an easy thing in the middest of worldly business to lose the life and
power of Religion, that nothing thereof should be left but only the external
form, as it were the carcass or shell, worldliness having eaten out the
kernell, and having consumed the very soul and life of godliness. (4)

For the historical romancer, however, this anxiety is channeled into his
character’s relationship to romance itself—either by giving his hero an antiquarian
impulse to rescue the relics of a fallen civilization or by having his characters outgrow

42
their romantic illusions. Instead of narrating tales of declension, Cooper and the historical
romancers of his day maintained a nostalgia for obsolete folk-culture while still insisting
that modern culture had rightly overtaken its primitive ancestors. As a result, the extinct
race or culture survives only in the antiquarianism of the race or culture that defeated it,
in a victor that now possesses the relics and folk-tales of its victims. The romance of
Cooper, as with the romance of Scott, creates a national myth in which the country’s
dominant culture has reconciled with the defeated native (or, in the case of his
Revolutionary tales, Colonial) enemies in both a geographic and temporal borderland,
absorbing the minority cultures into a superficially heterogeneous national culture. In
America, however, unlike in Great Britain, the relationship between the “primitive” and
the modern was fraught with theological and historical complications that stemmed from
the Puritan metahistory that had seeped its way, often unconsciously, into 19
th
-century
national mythologizing. Even though Cooper disdained New England in general, and the
region’s Puritan origins in particular, he was still victim to the post-declension nostalgia
for the “primitive” found in the early Massachusetts Bay Colony historians, learning, as
Melville’s Pierre did, that “through long previous generations, whether of births or
thoughts, Fate strikes the present man” (182).
The Pioneers was perhaps Cooper’s most Waverly-like novel: in both tales, a
vanquished bloodline is restored to legitimacy, but the ancient cultures that have adopted
their respective heroes, Oliver Edwards (a.k.a. Effingham) and Edward Waverley, remain
vanquished. Waverley holds onto his station within the British empire through a lucky act
of heroism, and, more importantly, through his decision to marry Rose Bradwardine, an
heiress from the border rather than the highlands; while Oliver leaves “the Mohegan” and

43
Natty Bumpo in order to seize his rightful place as heir to the Effingham estate and chief
landowner in Templeton.
4
As with Waverly, The Pioneers was its author’s most
autobiographical work, in terms of locale and geography rather than personal incident.
Instead of documenting his own experience in his ancestral upstate New York home,
Cooper wrote of the previous generation, particularly his father’s post-Revolutionary
generation of Federalists, who had supplanted the old aristocracy while fighting off the
ascendant Jeffersonian Republicans. As Alan Taylor, author of a biography of Judge
William Cooper, writes about that generation:
The Federalists who dominated national and northern state politics during
the 1790s tended to be new men of the 1770s and 1780s who had accepted
the traditional expectation that power should accrue only to those who
proved their gentility to the satisfaction of the established families of old
status. (468)

The Revolution may have been a change in governmental authority, from crown to
representative leadership, but the social authority, particularly in the Northern states,
would endure a less traumatic change. The satire of certain aristocratic figures, along
with the reverence for Natty Bumpo, the displaced outsider, still does not change the
status of The Pioneers as a tribute to the generation of Cooper’s father.
Furthermore, Cooper was himself an active Democrat during the ‘20s and ‘30s,
joining the party after the dissolution of the Federalists.
5
This affiliation, though, in no
way complicates his devotion to the Federalism of the previous generation, if only

4
The name of the town, derived from its patriarch, Judge Temple, is perhaps an allusion to Laurence
Templeton, the fictional author of Ivanhoe’s “Dedicatory Epistle.”
5
Cooper’s real-life political affiliations are explored in Brook Thomas, “The Pioneers, or the Sources of
American Legal History: A Critical Tale,” American Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Spring, 1984), pp. 86-111,
which notes a connection between Judge Temple and Judge James Kent, a Whig contemporary of Cooper;
Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion (Stanford: Stanford U P, 1960), particularly the chapter, “The
Great Descent: On Cooper and the Age of Dodge and Bragg,” 57-100; and Dorothy Waples, The Whig
Myth of James Fenimore Cooper (New Haven: Yale U P, 1958).

44
because he maintained a peculiarly aristocratic type of Democratic politics, summed up
by his statement in A Letter to His Countrymen: “Here the democrat is the conservative,
and, thank God, he has something worth preserving” (99). The very structure that the
Federalists imposed on our country is, for Cooper, what keeps it a Union, what prevents a
dissolution and lack of cooperation between the states and regions, what he calls “the
adverse principles of democracy and aristocracy.” Instead, the Federalists of the first
generation, in the Constitution, put in place a system that “contemplates the co-existence
of these antagonist forces in our system, though the several states, and it fully admits of
their representation, for it leaves to each community the power to decide on the character
of its constituency” (63). This balance between union and local sovereignty led Cooper to
choose the one party, following the end of the Federalists, that would have seened to
repudiate his aristocratic pretensions. In The Jacksonian Persuasion, Marvin Meyers
makes a case for Cooper’s “Tory Democrat” position, which was not common in upstate
New York, but which made for uneasy alliance with the generally populist thrust of the
party under Jackson. In describing this position, Meyers does the best job possible of
reconciling Cooper’s practical affiliations with his actual beliefs, claiming that he joined
the Jacksonians “because he shared with them an angry sense of loss: the First American
Republic—the ‘Doric’ age, to apply his term for Washington’s character—was going
down before a raw company of the commercial nouveau riche” (59).
In spite of its autobiographical roots, Cooper, following Scott, does not assert a
purely triumphalist national myth. In fact, both Scott and Cooper mourn the passing of a
defeated folk culture, question the speed with which “progress” has transformed the long-
unchanged land, and portray the losers in each battle with considerable empathy. Their

45
“border” mythologies, on the other hand, are served by this generic confusion between
novel and romance. As the past gives way to each author’s present, the romantic
characters get left behind. According to Oliver Edwards, “They shall never imprison the
Leatherstocking!” (340). However, “they” can keep pushing him outward, from Otsego
County to “the prairie” and beyond—where the romantic legend remains by the time that
Cooper’s histories catch up to his own era. And neither the rugged frontier culture of
Natty Bumpo and the Mohegan nor the rough Highlander culture of Fergus Mac-Ivor
completely vanishes. Both authors portray their present-day national cultures as hybrids
of the modern and the ancient, of conquerors and conquered.
As with the Scottish castle in Waverley, which transfers the grandeur of Gothic
architecture to a period when it no longer has any purpose, the entirety of Cooper’s
Templeton is a pretentious folly, the buildings designed by the Judge’s cousin, Richard
Jones, for the sake of posterity rather than utility, which has led to the “hasty manner of
their construction” (41). Through the eyes of the Judge’s returning daughter, we see how
“five years had wrought greater changes than a century would produce in countries where
time and labor have given permanency to the works of men” (46). The Judge and his
cousin, regardless of their legal rights to the land, can only pretend to have any natural
rights to the property and its game. The Judge tries to buy a slain deer from the hunters
who have done the actual killing. Jones takes credit for Oliver’s act of physical heroism.
Even the fruit trees of Templeton take on the appearance of interlopers: “Some… had
been left by the Indians and began already to assume the moss and inclination of age,
therein forming a very marked contrast to the infant plantations that peered over most of
the picketed fences of the village” (42). While pre-Walpole romance requires the purity

46
of an antique culture—no overt reminder of historical distance, no fixed locale that would
even imply such a distance—the literature of Romanticism depends on cultural hybridity,
on transitional spaces. Judge Temple and Richard Jones are mocked for trying to
transplant a European urban culture into the soil of the wild American frontier. However,
Cooper would have sooner called for the uprooting of this new culture than Scott would
have called for the destruction of the monarchy and the implementation Highlander self-
rule. As we will see in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, a national culture requires more than
just wealth or ambition; it needs to be razed and re-built, transcribed into history and
passed orally into legend. It needs moss and second-growth vegetation.
Still, plenty of white characters regret the rapid progress of civilization in The
Pioneers, just as many of the Lowland or English characters in Scott’s novels, like Scott
himself, regret the encroachment of the British empire on people who had long sought to
remain unincorporated. Elizabeth Temple, soon to be the heir to her own father’s pilfered
estate through a marriage to the restored property owner, Oliver, laments the razing of
nature from her very first ride through the country on her way home from school. “The
enterprise of Judge Temple is taming the very forests!” she declares. “How rapidly is
civilization itself treading on the footsteps of nature!” (212). The Sheriff later makes a
similar complaint to Judge Temple, neatly summarizing the century to come (and, had
Cooper lived longer, the following century, as well):
First it’s the trees, then it’s the deer, after that it’s the maple sugar, and so
on to the end of the chapter. One day you talk of canals through a country
where there’s a river or a lake every half-mile, just because the water
won’t run the way you wish it to go; and the net, you say something about
mines of coal, though any man who has good eyes like myself—I say with
good eyes—can see more wood than would keep the city of London in
fuel for fifty years. (260)

47

The imaginations and ambitions of the settlers outpace the abundance of natural
resources, and Cooper, like Scott before him, makes a point of expressing this common-
sense objection to commercial progress and empire. However, the future (i.e. the present)
remains fixed throughout The Pioneers.
Characters with a stake in the future of their respective countries, Edward
Waverley and Oliver Edwards, argue passionately for the preservation of traditional
cultures in the Scottish Highlands and Ostego County. But they stand to inherit vast
estates—in fact, they both stand to ascend to their families’ rightful inheritances. On the
other hand, those who are truly left behind when this transition moves the border further
and further out into the country, when the expansion of the frontier itself turns
“possessors of hereditary landed estates” into “small country gentleman,” have no choice
but to accept the transition, fight a losing battle for its reversal, or drift off into the
figurative realm of romance. Some may do all three: “‘The game is becoming hard to find
indeed, Judge, with your clearings and betterments,’ said the old hunter, with a kind of
compelled resignation” (22). Compared to the fiery protest of Edwards, who attempts to
argue on his mentor’s behalf, Natty Bumpo speaks with “compelled resignation.” In late
middle age, he will still be pushed off into the “prairie,” into a misty place where
romance still has the chance to exist in the minds of readers in the 1820s.
The characters who exist on the border, who have romantic attachments to a dying
culture, yet still are privileged enough to inherit wealth and property in the new
settlements, are explicitly presented as cultural hybrids, as are their counterparts among
the savages (Cooper) and the clans (Scott). When Oliver Edwards comes to the Temples’

48
estate for the first time, in order to have his wounds treated, Elizabeth watches as he
removes his cap, essentially “revealing” himself as white:
On entering the apartment he had mechanically lifted his cap and exposed
a head covered with hair that rivaled in colour and gloss the locks of
Elizabeth. Nothing could have wrought a greater transformation than the
single act of removing the rough fox-skin cap. (67)

His entire appearance, as a matter of fact, “bespoke not only familiarity with a splendor
that in those new settlements was thought to be unequaled, but something very like
contempt also” (67). As with Fergus MacIvor, he possesses the manners of proper gentry,
unable to exist purely within the folk culture they hope to leave untainted. Scott notes:
Had Fergus MacIvor lived Sixty Years sooner than he did, he would, in all
probability have wanted the polished manner and knowledge of the world
which he now possessed; and had he lived Sixty Years later, his ambition
and love of rule would have lacked the fuel which his situation now
afforded. (98)

Likewise, Oliver leaves behind civilization to join the savages, and then leaves behind the
savages to take control of his inheritance, only because he lives in a period of significant
transition. With a shifting border (perpetually crawling outward, in only one direction),
the contrast between civilization and savagery, if it were ever more than a false binary,
grows hazier. Waverley, however, will come to occupy a place on the border, while
Oliver, at best, will only slow down the encroachment of progress. Neither author,
though, as Romantic antiquarians, cares much about the contemporary political
implications. They simply want to eulogize.
The Mohegan may wear a medallion that features a picture of George
Washington, Fergus MacIvor may offer his guests English manners along with strong
whiskey (the Baron of Bradwardine, a “border” eminence, does likewise), but both

49
characters, from their creators’ sixty-years-since vantage point, are destined to fight a
symbolic war of preservation. As George Dekker notes:
Because the Jacobite party and its chief are for perfectly comprehensible
reasons out of touch with the political sentiments of the country as a whole
and full century out of date in their aims and methods, they are doomed to
start and lose a gallant ‘chivalrous’ battle.’ (15)

In politics, the heroes of both The Pioneers and Waverley must choose a moderate path
along the “border,” not the frontier or the Highlands. Edward Waverley must even choose
a moderate path in selecting his wife. While his cousin, Rose, his eventual wife, “had not
precisely the sort of beauty or merit which captivates a romantic imagination in early
youth,” his other potential mate, Fergus’s sister Flora, “is precisely the character to
fascinate a youth of romantic imagination” (77). Coming several chapters apart, the
reference to romance in both meetings is no accident. Rose is the one who will draw
Waverley out of his romantic fantasies and into the world of “sober earnest.”
Unlike the authors examined in the next chapter—Catharine Maria Sedgwick,
Lydia Maria Child, and Eliza Buckminster Lee—Scott, as the first to combine romance
and the traditional novel without the historical irony of the Gothic writers, and Cooper, as
his first significant American successor, did not write about the past in order to draw
attention to contemporary political issues. The future, in both The Pioneers and Waverly,
remains fixed—that it is to say, the present remains fixed. Cooper asks the reader to
imagine “ten years after the event” (89), or still ten years further to the Revolutionary
War, just as Bradford alludes to the famines, plagues, and Indian attacks of the New
World even before his settlers have arrived. In The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, Cooper uses
the Preface preemptively to transform his historical narrative into eulogy and then into

50
legend, writing that his Indian characters “have become the heroes of song and legend,
while the descendents of those who laid waste their dominions, and destroyed their race,
are yielding a tardy tribute to the high daring and savage grandeur of their characters.”
While the inspiration for this novel, Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, is, like many of her novels,
about the need for religious reform in the present-day 1820s, Cooper’s novel carries on
the elegiac romance of The Pioneers, mourning the passing of not one but two cultures:
the Indian and the Puritan.

Cooper examined his own nostalgia for the “primitive” in his early Revolutionary
novels, The Spy and Lionel Lincoln, where American-born Rebels must educate
sympathetic Loyalist foreigners on freedom and democracy. In the former, however, the
hero is a folksy and seemingly traitorous Yankee peddler, while in the latter the voice of
the American Revolution is that of a stunted half-wit named Job Pray, who stands in for
both the primitive, who possesses a pure childlike understanding of liberty, and the
rabble, who fanatically cling to rebellion, even at grave cost to themselves and their
colonizers. These tales of the Revolution, published before Cooper’s one great Puritan
romance, The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, bridge the gap between the early colonist’s forging
of cultural myths and the late dying-out of primitive cultures in The Pioneers—a bridge
between the two major historical epochs most frequently portrayed in antebellum
romance.
The Federalists of Cooper’s second generation were perhaps best represented by
John Quincy Adams, the inheritor of an ideology that called for both radical severance
from the crown, but also cohesion between the states and territories following the

51
establishment of nationhood. As R. A. Yoder points out, “John Adams had toasted
‘Independence Forever’ on the day of his death; John Quincy Adams, at the close of his
[1831] oration, offered ‘Independence and Union Forever’” (494). Cooper’s religious
anti-sectarianism logically followed his political anti-sectarianism, a position that became
harder to maintain in the wake of a truly democratic national movement surrounding
Andrew Jackson’s candidacy and Presidency. How does one present his own political
beliefs as “unionist” when voters have overwhelmingly led to the nullification of those
beliefs. As with Cooper’s embrace of Native obsolescence as the inevitable dying of a
brave yet vanquished culture, his Revolutionary War novels commemorated a history
that, for Cooper, had begun to progress steadily downward. Instead of the Revolution
leading to an eventual unity between the disparate factions of the republic, the War really
pointed to the last true moment of political union in this country, the years in which the
generation that fought the British would eventually compromise and pull together the
newly independent land into a federal United States.
Both Revolutionary novels take place in a transitional space—The Spy in the
Hudson Valley neutral territory, Lionel Lincoln in the temporal space where British-rule
is being ceded to Americans—and both emphasize the myth of reconciliation between
Rebels and Loyalists in order to criticize what Cooper saw as the contemporary
fragmentation of democracy, religion, and culture under the Jackson administration. The
primitive understands the need for Revolution in a way that foreigners and historians of
the subsequent generation, all of whom experience the original conditions for Revolution
through ritual or antiquarianism, cannot. In Cooper’s Notions of the Americans, written
after an eight-year stay in Europe, the foreigner and the American of the 1820s are

52
essentially the same person, and both long to experience the conditions for Revolution,
and to escape from the degraded inheritance of Jackson-era American democracy, in the
same way that Scott longed to recreate the simple adventure of Romance or Jonathan
Edwards longed to return to the Church’s original American mission. Using Richard
Mather’s metaphor, Cooper had been left with only the “shell” of Revolution, and he
wished to recreate its “kernall” through the experience of his primitive characters. Or, as
his English “traveling bachelor” tells us in Notions of the Americans: “The institutions [of
America] are in some measure new and peculiar. The European, under such
circumstances, has a great deal to unlearn before he can begin to learn correctly” (ix).
This nostalgia for the lost “kernall” of authentic experience—the primitive
knowledge that remains after one has “unlearned” a suitable amount of pointless ritual
and sophistication—was central to Cooper’s late-in-life conversion to the Episcopal
Church. Aside from his American Democrat critique of American religion as being more
sectarian than Christian, he wrote an 1849 preface to his 1824 sea-adventure, The Pilot,
that skeptically examined the vogue for reform:
There is an uneasy desire among a vast many well-disposed persons to get
the fruits of the Christian Faith without troubling themselves about the
Faith itself. This is done under the sanction of Peace Societies,
Temperance, and Moral Reform Societies, in which the end is too often
mistaken for the means. When the Almighty sent His Son on earth it was
to point out the way in which all this was to be brought about by means of
the Church; but men have so frittered away that body of divine
organization, through their divisions and subdivisions, all arising from
human conceit, that it is no longer regarded as the agency it was so
obviously intended to be, and various contrivances are to be employed as
substitutes for that which proceeded directly from the Son of God. (8)

53
Cooper’s major works that deal with the “Revolutionary Mythos”
6
—The Spy, Lionel
Lincoln, The Pilot, and the La Fayette tour in Notions of the Americans—also deal
ambiguously with the importance of Old World ritual and creating an authentic historical
experience for the reader. Furthermore, an authentic historical experience via Romance,
he seemed to hope, would somehow promote the broken unity of Revolutionary
American culture, something that Cooper believed to have been hopelessly lost by the
time the Democrats had replaced the Federalists as not only political powers, but also as
shapers of the national-historical narrative.
How does one approach history from the remove of two or three generations? The
Puritans used providential histories and spiritual narratives. The citizens of Cooper’s
1820s and 1830s used the ritual of Founder’s and Independence Days, the consecration of
Bunker Hill, and the mourning of Jefferson and Adams (providentially dying on July 4,
1826); and, while everyone in the country appeared to celebrate the founding of the
country, the Era of Good Feeling had passed by the time that Cooper wrote his second
Revolutionary novel, and there were bitter disputes over the legacy of the Revolution. As
Frederic Jameson writes:
History is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but… as an
absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and… our
approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily pass through its prior
textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious. (35)

Cooper and the other authors of antebellum historical romance approached their
country’s past as much through their contemporary’s rituals, commemorations, and

6
This term is derived from James Franklin Beard, “Cooper and the Revolutionary Mythos,” Early
American Literature, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring, 1976), pp. 84-104.

54
secondary texts as through the actual primary evidence left by the passage of these
historical events.
As in the novels of Walpole or Charles Brocken Brown, the Gothicism of Lionel
Lincoln comes through our subjective experience of history—both the passive hero’s
observance, and the reader’s act of observing through Cooper’s prose—rather than
through the intrusion of the supernatural into an otherwise realistic narrative. The arrival
of Lionel on American soil, after a long absence in Europe, shows him observing “places
known and places forgotten… like phantoms of the imagination” (42). The most Gothic
of the novel’s characters, the old Rebel known as Ralph, who follows Lionel and many of
the other characters around, evinces an occasionally prophetic analysis of the
Revolutionary War, and later reveals himself (a fact readily obvious to anyone who has
read Walpole or Scott) as Lionel’s long-lost and deranged father, who has arrived in
America with Lionel in order to reveal to his son the truth about both his own family (the
Lincoln-Lechmeres) and his own country (the soon-to-be-liberated American Colonies).
As is the landscape, Ralph’s figure is phantom-like and frequently obscured, appearing
first “like a being of another world” (44), a phrase that Cooper later uses to describe Job
Pray (168). Later, Lionel sees Ralph “glide through the night with a facility that was
supernatural” (71). Another character describes Ralph as “one that seems to know all,” an
observation she speaks with “an expression of superstitious terror” (92). While this terror
is one that Lionel dismisses as “the traditional witchcraft of the country,” it is also the
Gothic terror of history itself, where the past alone is perceived as a superstition, absent
any element of the supernatural (97).

55
Not only is the harbor where Lionel lands seen as “phantoms of the imagination,”
but historical landmarks themselves are revealed slowly, as ghostly images taking shape
through Cooper’s diligent re-creation. The oft-commemorated Bunker Hill arrives in the
story as a “high, conical summit”—wholly inaccurate in terms of real-life topography,
but real in the sense of how the Hill, fifty years earlier, seemed to loom in the mythology
of 1820s America. Cooper writes, “It was the sudden appearance of this magical mound,
as the mists of the morning had dispersed” that arouses all of the sleeping soldiers around
the bay (171). Lionel’s position in this battle, unlike his position in the battles of
Lexington and Concord, is as a Waverly-like observer, not a commander, watching the
real-life historical figures, such as Generals Howe and Gage, as if Cooper could only
inject so much fancy into a treasured bit of Revolutionary Myth. Not only do Lionel and
the reader observe this battle from afar, but “the eyes of tens of thousands were fastened
on [Howe’s] movements, and the occasion demanded the richest display of the pageantry
of war” (180). Time slows down as hills and battlefields seem to expand: “In scenes like
these we are attempting to describe, hours appear to be minutes, and time flies as
imperceptibly as life slides from beneath the feet of age” (183).
Furthermore, Cooper links the present to the past through his scenes set in the
graveyard, a place where Lionel’s loyal friend (and eventually revealed half-brother), Job
Pray, enjoys taking both Lionel and the reader. And, just as The Spy ends with its hero’s
simultaneous death and exoneration, while clinging to the material object—a letter from
George Washington himself—that will clear his name and bridge the gap that separates
romance from “real” history, Lionel Lincoln ends with a view of the gravestone that is
laid at the end of the narrative. Not only does the narrator inform us that all the principle

56
characters have now died (as if they were real people in our collective past), but he
focuses on the material objects of the graves themselves: “The slate has long since
mouldered from the wall; the sod has covered the stone, and few are left who can
designate the spot where the families of Lechmere and Lincoln were want to inter their
dead” (362). The real and the romance are tightly entwined in this fictional grave.
7
Or
does Cooper intend it to be wholly fictional? Any Bostonian would have recognized the
name of Lechmere, as readily as they would have recognized the name of Coffin in The
Pilot, with plenty of graves on Copps Hill likely to bear that name in real life. At these
moments, Cooper’s Revolutionary War novels absorb the real figures of history more
completely than do Scott’s novels. While Washington remained disguised during The
Spy
8
, the names of Gage, Howe, and Lechmere are integral to Lionel Lincoln’s narrative.
The use of these names and figures, and the pointing out of their allegedly real graves,
serves the same function in Lionel as Walpole’s found manuscript serves in Otranto,
positing the work as not just a romance about history, or a hybrid of romance and history,
but as an alternative history in its own right, in which fact and romance are
indistinguishable—the name Lechmere might be familiar from graves, landmarks, and
local histories, but the character of Mrs. Lechmere exists in the same realm of Gothic
fancy as Ralph, recalling Scott’s Waverly postscript: “The most romantic parts of this
narrative are precisely those which have a foundation in fact” (367).

7
The most popular contemporary author of historical romances, Steven Spielberg, repeatedly uses this
trope to connect the present to the past—showing the actual gravestones of Normandy Beach in Saving
Private Ryan, the yahzreit ritual of actual Holocaust survivors’ families in Schindler’s List, and a shot of
the World Trade Center at the end of Munich as a bridge between “real” and “romance.”

8
The appearance of the “real” personage in historical romance, a trope exemplified by the character of
Winthrop in Hope Leslie and his eventual demise in The Scarlet Letter, was parodied effectively by
Stendhal in The Charterhouse of Parma, where our hero, while drunk, riding on a horse, and obscured by
hundreds of other soldiers, finally gets his long-delayed glimpse of Napoleon.

57
However, as with Scott’s use of Gothic tropes, the view of history as something
that begins as a phantom and ends, surviving to the present day, as a decayed gravestone,
does not serve to ridicule the primitive beliefs of those people that Cooper chronicles.
Unlike in Walpole’s novel, Gothicism is not solely ironic in Cooper’s Revolutionary
novels. Instead, as in The Pioneers and The Wept of the Wish-ton-Wish, Cooper uses
these primitive opinions nostalgically to bring the reader into some original relationship
to the context of the Revolution, and later to promote the myth of reconciliation-through-
obsolescence, a myth chosen to criticize the fragmentation of Jacksonian society.
“Primitive,” as Cooper’s narrators use the term, could mean simple (Job Pray),
Indian (the Mohegan), or just native to the land, as the European bachelor in Notions of
the Americans describes his traveling companion, the American-born Cadwallader. Just
as the educated Lionel cannot understand what the simple-minded Job intuits—that the
Rebels will persist even after multiple retreats, that they will raise the arms and summon
enough troops to drive off the British—so does the narrator of Notions not “see” the
landscape of America as Cadwallader sees it, and instead must observe his ship’s landing
through the American’s eye. After noting that “my first view was of that same
monotonous waste with which my eyes had been sated to weariness during the last three
weeks,” the narrator has Cadwallader point out the “little, cloud-like mound that rose
above the Western horizon in three or four undulating swells, and then fell away to the
north and to the south, losing itself in the water”—an image that almost lacks substance,
much like the “phantoms” of land that appear to Lionel (18). However, while historical
perception swells the landscape in Lionel Lincoln, imbuing the real-life knoll of Bunker
Hill with the dimensions of an insurmountable peak, so does the moist-eyed homecoming

58
of Cadwallader improve the land around Notion’s Boston harbor: “It appeared to me that
[his eye] penetrated far beyond those little hills of blue, and that it was gifted with power
to roam over the broad valleys, vast lakes, and thousand rivers of his native land” (19). In
a sense, Cadwallader sees beyond New England, a place that Cooper always regarded as
a “neutral territory” in its own right, a place as much English as American, and into the
interior that Cooper cherished, the Hudson Valley and the mythical “prairie” frontier
from which Leatherstocking would step into legend.
Both Job and Cadwallader have that Emersonian “original relation” to America
that Cooper longs to recreate, even while knowing, as with Scott’s affection for the
Highlands primitive, that this “original relation” in the 1820s can only be confined to
romance, the “reality” of the Revolutionary Mythos obscured to the third-generation
American by ritual, propaganda, and nostalgia.
9
In part, Job possesses an instinctive
understanding of liberty, and, even though he suffers the beatings of Loyalist soldiers,
most of the community regards him as his mother does, as “not one of God’s
accountables” (Lionel 154). While Cooper later implicates Job with the “rabble” of both
Revolutionary and Jackson-era America, he presents the character, in part, as the
primitive voice of the newly liberated country (280). And, just as the New Church, for
third-generation Puritan historians, was seen to last barely into their own lifetimes, so

9
Cooper’s geographical, political, and aesthetic neighbor was Washington Irving, who also moved from a
Federalist version of American conservatism to a Scott-like English Conservatism, returning after a long
period of living abroad with a book about America (The Sketch-Book) narrated by an Old World outsider,
Geoffrey Crayon, rather than his previous native-born narrator, Diedrich Knickerbocker. Crayon’s point of
view, in fact, is quite similar to that of Cooper’s traveling bachelor. Although a friend of Scott, and a peer
of Cooper, Irving was not a writer of historical romances, so he only needs to be acknowledged briefly, but
Allen Guttmann’s description of his conservatism is best: “If Irving lost interest in the quarrels of Hamilton
and Jefferson, it was at least in part because he discovered an aristocratic society based on continuity rather
than on revolution, on landed property rather than on national banks, funded debts, and capitalistic
enterprise.” Guttmann adds that in England and Scotland, Irving had found “a conservative society with a
sense of the past” (165-66).

59
does the pure Federalist America that Cooper consecrates in his early novels barely
outlive most of the founding fathers. Thus, it is not through Job, but through the wealthy
American returning home from Europe, Cadwallader in Notions and Cooper himself in
real life, that this “original relation” is established. And the event that best exemplifies
Cooper’s nostalgia for this first generation is the American tour of Lafayette, which
began in 1824 and was recorded at his request, a decade later, by his friend Cooper.
The “traveling bachelor,” whose letters back to Old World Europe (aristocratic
friends in England and Germany) constitute Notions, nearly suffers another anti-climax
with the arrival of La Fayette, who disembarks from the ship ahead of his own: “I was
disappointed, expecting little short of some revolution in the politics of the state.”
Additionally, he writes that “there was none of that noisy acclamation with which the
English seamen are apt to welcome any grateful intelligence, nor a single exaggerated
exclamation, like those which characterize the manners of most of the continental nations
of Europe, in their manifestations of pleasure.” However, the narrator’s confusion,
Cooper soon reveals, is wholly his own fault. The lack of ceremony or pomp
demonstrates an authentic patriotism that a European can only perceive once he has
“unlearned” his centuries of ritual. After hinting at his disappointment over spotting the
crowds surrounding La Fayette, the narrator revises his opinion: “The effect on most of
my companions was as remarkable as it was sudden. Cadwallader did not speak again for
many minutes. He walked apart; and I saw, by his elevated head and proud step, that the
man was full of lofty and patriotic recollections” (23).
The lack of ritual in America, in both this scene and in Lionel Lincoln’s
depictions of battle, belies a deeper feeling for what Cooper’s traveling bachelor calls

60
“the chivalry of nations” (24). Reflecting on the silence that greets La Fayette’s arrival,
he notes that “a similar reception for a public man in Europe would have been ominous of
a waning popularity” (45). But effusive celebrations lack authenticity for men such as
Cadwallader, which the narrator acknowledges:
You probably know that we in Europe are apt to charge the Americans
with being cold of temperament, and little sensible of lively impressions of
any sort. I have learnt enough to know, that in return, they charge us in
gross with living in a constant state of exaggerations, and with affecting
sentiments we do not feel. (35)

Likewise, Lionel chides his superior officer for certain flippant remarks made while
viewing the battle of Bunker Hill with the rest of the spectators. Lionel’s seriousness,
Cooper asserts, comes as a birthright. Having been born in America, he watches the battle
in terror of the potential carnage, not as a spectacle.
However, Cooper wrote Notions not only to explain the manners of his native
country to Europeans, and celebrate his friend La Fayette’s tour of America, but also to
express how it felt to return to American after an eight-year absence. Cooper wrote as if
he had once been Cadwallader, but now felt more like a traveling European upon his
return, finding a democracy stripped of pomp and ritual, thoroughly degraded by the
Jacksonian rabble, all of whom had squandered the lofty Federalist ideals of the first
post-Revolutionary generation. While ritual may stand in the way of authenticity, while
phony enthusiasm may obscure true patriotism, Cooper also sees the essential benefit of
ritual, especially in religion: as a unifying force that keeps sectarianism at bay. Most of
the religious movements since the revelation have decried the loss of Christian substance
in the same doctrinal forms. For Cooper, though, there were no such things as empty

61
forms and ritual; the forms and ritual, to some extent, contained the substance of
Christian worship.
As with his criticism of reformed religious sects in his preface to The Pilot,
Cooper burlesques clerics at every opportunity in his Revolutionary romances. Harvey
Birch, in The Spy, disguises himself as a dour Congregationalist minister in order to
rescue Henry Wharton, spouting Calvinist gloom as he fakes his way past the guards. In
Lionel, an Anglican priest ridicules “the puritanical and dissenting idea that religion has
anything forbidding or gloomy in its nature” (240). While Cooper, in turn, ridicules the
priest’s complacency, he also writes with sensitivity about the rituals of the
Anglican/Episcopalian wedding. Lionel’s bride, Cecil, will only get married within these
rituals; she had “been educated in the bosom of the English Church, and she clung to its
forms and ceremonies with an affection that may easily be accounted for in their
solemnity and beauty.” In the next sentence, Cooper then criticizes “the rage of reform,”
which has excluded proper altars from New England temples. The virtuous Cecil insists,
“My vows must be offered at the altar” (227).
Later, this altar becomes the site of a Gothic premonition, a looming shadow that
not only frightens the newlyweds, but inadvertently delays the marriage’s consummation.
In the Gothic tradition, however, the shadow is not a supernatural intervention at all; in
fact, the shadow is, if anything, a temptation for the otherwise rational characters to
imagine supernatural interventions (242). In the novel’s final scenes, Ralph’s dying
visage reflects the figure of the altar shadow, a projection of Lionel’s lunatic-puritanical
ancestry, something which needs to be first purged from the narrative before Lionel and
his bride can return to England and re-commence the family’s bloodline. As Cecil admits

62
at the end, having not seen the shadow’s premonitions come to pass: “I have no longer
faith in omens, Lincoln” (328).
If ritual can stand in the way of authentic feeling, it can also cleanse religion of
superstition, or democracy of its inherent danger, mob rule. What “the chivalry of
nations” requires, as it does in Waverly and The Pioneers, is for both the victor and the
thwarted foe to be honorable in the latter’s defeat. As Robert Clark writes in History,
Ideology, and Myth in American Fiction, “Myth resembles ideology in that it… leave us
with a timeless image of concord where there was once work, economy, history, politics,
and struggle” (13). In the context of Cooper’s fiction, myth is synonymous with
Romance. The entwined fates of both wealthy native-born Americans (a Federalist
royalty akin to Mather’s church founders) and the defeated aristocratic British officers are
separate from the gains of America’s rabble. In The Spy, Harvey Birch and Henry
Wharton end up fighting together, while Skinners and Cowboys merely pillage and
scavenge through the Neutral Territory. In Lionel, there is honor on both sides of the
fight, but the contentious mob of Irish mercenaries fails to listen to reason when they
have cause to lynch Job. In this sense, the American victory is only a victory for the
rabble; for the well-born American, it is a Pyrrhic victory at best, one that will fade by the
time that Jackson is elected, when too much of the Old World pomp and ritual have
receded. Clark observes how the entwined fate of apparent enemies underscores this
myth of concord:
Where is historical reality we know that blacks and Indians were exploited
and expropriated by the whites in the mythic representation we are offered
the famous couples—Natty and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg,
Huck and Nigger Jim—in which the innocent white man is symbolically

63
allied with his victim in opposition to the advance of white civilization.
(12)

As Cooper tells the story in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, this symbolic alignment was in
place from the very start of white civilization’s westward expansion into the 17
th
-century
Connecticut Valley frontier.

Although the “romance ferment”
10
of the 1820s and 30s has long been a popular
academic subject, a novel such as The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish demonstrates that the goal
of this movement’s authors was hardly a coherent one. Cooper may have been a member
of this post-Waverley generation, but he was theoretically more aligned with Scott’s
antiquarianism than with the American “reform” novelists who followed. While Cooper
strove to preserve dying cultures by romanticizing the very fact of their demise, a novelist
such as Sedgwick instead focused on the growing importance of religious reform (the
perception that Unitarianism would replace Calvinist Congregationalism as the New
England religion) and political reform (Garrison founded the Anti-Slavery Society in
1833, radicalizing a movement that had long been the domain of evangelical preachers
and Quakers). Regardless of their different goals, however, Cooper and Sedgwick still
wrote in the same genre—historical romance—and even one time on the same subject:
Indian raids on the Connecticut frontier. Cooper’s sympathy for two vanquished cultures
makes it seem as if he wrote with contemporary reform in mind; however, as a

10
Predating the indispensible work of George Dekker by forty years, G. Harrison Orians recognized “The
Romance Ferment after Waverley” in 1932 (American Literature, Vol. 3, No. 4 [Jan., 1932], pp. 408-431).
Both authors recognize the widespread fad for what the authors, readers, and critics of the time all referred
to as “romance,” regardless of what was called romance either in the decades before or the decades after
Waverly’s 1817 debut.

64
comparison with writers such as Sedgwick and Child in the next chapter demonstrates,
they were already writing different versions of the historical romance.
According to George Dekker, the success of the historical romance in America,
during the 1820s, led immediately to a renewed interest in local histories, especially the
histories of New England’s first pioneers and their Indian neighbors, usually the
Wampanoag and Narragansett who allied to fight the white men in King Philip’s War
(Romance 64). Irving re-printed two Indian tales in his 1820 Sketch Book. Inspired by
Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale, Lydia Maria Child published Hobomok in 1824, which
likely influenced Sedgwick herself to examine the early chapters of New England history
in Hope Leslie. The success of these two novels, along with several romances and plays,
led Cooper to the same material in Wept. Even a single local legend found its way into a
variety of stories. Edward Whalley, one of the Parliamentary judges who had sentenced
Charles to death, fled to New England following the Restoration, eventually hiding out in
a mountain-side cave near Hadley, Massachusetts. According to Scott, who calls him
“Richard Whalley the Regicide”
11
in Peveril of the Peak, and Cooper, who refers to him
as “Submission,” Whalley left his hermitage only to warn settlers of an impending Indian
attack and to help organize the village’s defense. The elderly warrior seems to be
receding into myth before death, another legend-passing-into-history, alongside
Chingachgook, Natty Bumpo, Fergus MacIvor, and other heroes from an obsolete
culture. In several romances of the period, Whalley appears as a near-supernatural
eminence: “the angel of Hadley,” according to Ezra Stiles, the author who George

11
Perhaps confusing him with his father, Richard, another Puritan military officer who washed up on
American shores after the Restoration.

65
Dekker claims had kept the legend alive in the previous century (“Scott” 213). For
Cooper, Whalley is an example of how Puritan legend, pre-Enlightenment superstition,
and Indian lore were all part of the same disappearing frontier culture. Following Scott’s
example, Cooper perhaps had no choice but to eulogize.
His contemporaries, however, especially the critics at the North American Review,
would have preferred a more forward-looking literature, one that mined the annals of
local histories in order to build a coherent national identity. After the War of 1812, and
into the Era of Good Feeling, there was certainly a movement toward establishing a
national literature, even though many commentators found their native materials lacking
in the proper rust and mold of antiquity, perhaps best summed up by W.H. Gardiner:
We are told that there is among us a cold uniformity and sobriety of
character; a sad reality and utility in our manners and institutions; that our
citizens are downright, plain-dealing, inflexible, matter-of-fact people; in
short that our country and our inhabitants are equally and utterly destitute
of all sorts of romantic association. (Dekker and Williams 55)

But this opinion, spurred along by the success of Cooper’s The Spy, was beginning to
change. George Dekker quotes another critic, writing in the same issue of the North
American Review as Gardiner, who repeats the demand for a national literature, in spite
of the obstacles that stand in a native author’s way, noting that “there seem to be three
great epochs in American history which are peculiarly well fitted for historical romance,”
all of them transitional epochs: the period after the first Puritan settlement, the period of
the colonial-Indian wars, and the Revolution (Romance 107). The success of Cooper’s
The Spy helped critics overcome their opinion that America was too green to produce the
material for great Waverly novels.

66
But, unlike the bicentennial celebrations that sprang up to commemorate the
Mayflower’s landing in 1620, or the establishment of Forefather’s Day for this same
purpose, or the continued re-writing of a national history that began with the Pilgrims
rather than the more commercial mid-Atlantic states—a spirit that Lawrence Buell calls
“the myth of Puritan antecedence”—the romances about Indian wars could not be so
triumphant. Most importantly, the “losers” of this battle had not disappeared from
America, as the English had. In fact, the late 1820s and early 1830s featured some of the
nation’s most heated debate over Indian-white relations since King Philip’s War. Ending
in the Indian Removal Act of 1830, many of the same groups who would soon jump-start
the abolitionist cause in the North—religious groups, especially—had spoken out against
absorbing the Cherokee land into Georgia. As demonstrated by John Augustus Stone’s
popular tragedy, Metamora; or The Last of the Wampanoags, there were plenty of
Northerners ready to sympathize with the Native Americans over the issue of
dispossession, and to support such causes as Cherokee nationhood. However, Cooper’s
Wept of the Wish-ton-Wish, while appealing to this sympathy, had as little to do with
contemporary issues of Indian displacement as Scott’s novels did with contemporary
British imperialism. Unlike Sedgwick or Child, Cooper made no explicit pleas against the
continuation of these Indian wars. He took the fact of Indian obsolescence for granted,
much as he took the de-Puritanization of white culture for granted. Both the Indian and
the Puritan are haunted by tribal legends of the Other, fearing curses from without while
they slowly succumb to genetic curses within. Wept is as much about how national myths
are created as it is an attempt to assert a new national myth.

67
As John McWilliams points out, in New England’s Crises and Cultural Memory:
Literature, Politics, History, Religion 1620-1860, the demythologization of King Philip’s
War began in the mid-19
th
-century, not coincidentally in the decades after the “romance
ferment” began in American literature. In its sympathetic portrayal of the vanquished
Native tribes, the American-Waverly novel provided a less triumphant view of white
military victories, and this retrospective sympathy for the Native Americans probably
owed something to contemporary sympathy for those who were being dispossessed by
the Jackson administration. McWilliams claims that “it was George Bancroft… who first
forcibly argued that the underlying cause of King Philip’s War had been the economic
pressures caused by land dispossession,” and he points out that the first unapologetic
eulogy for Metacom was delivered in 1836, by a Pequot descendent named Reverend
William Apess, who spoke his sermon in a spirit of contemporary political agitation as
well as historical correction (110). Guilt over dispossession had already seeped into white
American culture, as noted by Cooper in the Wept preface (where he calls himself a
descendent of those that “destroyed their race”) and in the characters of Oliver and
Elizabeth in The Pioneers, who feel that they do not deserve ownership, in the Western
sense, over lands that other people already possess. For Cooper, the guilty characters,
because they are so ready to renounce ownership, are paradoxically more deserving of
this land than Judge Temple or Richard Jones, who have seized the land by virtue of a
false sense of entitlement. In Wept, this guilt surfaces in local superstitions, often
presented with a Gothic attention to ghosts and shadows in the valley’s clearings, and in
the national superstition of providential Calvinism, through which Cooper transposes the

68
Gothic view of obsolete cultures subsumed by their own unwieldy superstitions, but
neatly swaps out Medieval Catholicism for Puritanical Protestantism.
The reform novelists of Cooper’s generation are proto-Progressive historians,
inspired by the generally optimistic call for a national literature—for them, the errors of
the past, the bondage of women and African-Americans, make up a dark but necessary
prologue in the national narrative, a Fall before a Redemption. After all, the North
American Review was entirely made up of this Boston-Unitarian establishment. Cooper,
on the other hand, is retrospect, focused more on the side of the border that has faded into
obsolescence than on the side that promises to evolve into a liberal-Arminian nation.
Phillip Gould claims that Cooper is staging a conservative reaction to this early era of
reform, and that he “invoked New England as a premodern antidote to liberal America”
(137). While this interpretation underestimates Cooper’s well-known contempt for the
Yankee character, and this particular novel’s clear anti-Calvinist position, Gould is right
to note that “Wept exposes the true agenda of New England filiopiety, pointing out its
inconsistencies, disentangling the meanings of its language where others actually thrived
on its convenient ambiguities” (136). In an era where the “myth of Puritan antecedence”
had been taken as a convenient premise for a literature of national greatness, Cooper was
skeptical about our founders’ collective character. Both the Indians and the Puritans
suffer from the same disillusioning effects of dynastic succession, of entrusting the
survival of a fragile and increasingly anachronistic culture from Massassiot to Metacom,
Miantonimoh to Conanchet, Increase to Cotton, and so on. As Wept’s introduction notes,
“In very many instances, the child was seen to occupy the station formerly filled by the
father” (viii). Later, King Philip will cry out, “They are always here. Metacom has no

69
soul but the spirit of his fathers!” (380). Cooper recognizes the trade-off necessary in the
creation of a national literature, in the sanctification of ritual into tradition, in the curse
that a national myth brings to its population along with a sense of pride. Wept simply
removes the irony of the Gothic novel’s frequent trans-generational curses in the same
way that Waverly removed the irony from Walpole’s fetishization of antiquity.
Before history or codified tradition, Cooper asserts, a nation only has myth with
which to fill the unpopulated border landscape. In the case of Wept’s Connecticut Valley,
that border landscape is “the clearing”: “They who dwell in the older districts of
America”—meaning those in the present-day who live in an old-guard city such as
Boston—“can form but little idea of the thousand objects that may exist in a clearing, to
startle the imagination of one who has admitted alarm, when seen in the doubtful light of
even a cloudless moon” (49). Indian and Puritan share the isolation of the border along
with a hatred of the English crown, bringing the two endangered cultures closer together,
even as they prepare to battle each other. For the Puritan scouts, “Long experience hath
shown that… when placed in situations to acquire such knowledge, [they] readily become
the master of most of that peculiar skill for which the North American Indian is so
remarkable” (81). Likewise, Leatherstocking in The Pioneers (known as “the scout” in
Last of the Mohicans) recognizes that the white man on the border and the Native
American have been “brought... near each other” by the circumstances of their isolation,
their common enemy, and their imminent extinction.
The two cultures are known to each other through the legends of their respective
tribes—where myth and fact meet is on the borders or clearings where the lands of their
tribes meet. In this sense, Cooper’s tale is as much about the creation of a national

70
romance as it is about the creation of a national history, a not-quite-supernatural, but not-
quite-realistic prelude to the present era. Like Walpole, Cooper stretches plausibility only
because his characters believe in superstition. For this reason, Wept is a far more Gothic
tale than any of the early Cooper tales set closer to the nineteenth-century. To his reader,
he says:
We hope for a more interesting account of the incidents of a legend that
may prove too homely for the tastes of those whose imaginations seek the
excitement of scenes more stirring, or of a condition of life less natural.
(11)

But, while his readers may accept a realistic romance in the manner of Waverly, his
Puritan characters are prone to believing in those “moving legends of the border” that
parents pass along to children: fright tales of Indian raids. When Ruth first spies
Conanchet, the scene is presented as a Gothic vision. “’Tis not a dream,” she says. “I
have seen the glowing eye-balls of a savage” (45). The fact that her Gothic vision
happens to be true does not validate her superstition. As with the Indian tribes, such as
the Pequot and Mohican, who fight alongside the white man in order to defeat their long-
term enemies in King Phillip’s War, Ruth sees the Native threat as a Gothic vision, while
never recognizing that the even greater threat, the English government, walks in plain
sight. When the attack by Metacom’s forces occurs, Cooper chooses a quotation from
Hamlet as his epigraph—“There need no ghost, my lord, come from the grave to tell us
this”—which demonstrates how supernatural visions precede the material threats that
history, not legend, soon delivers (143).

71
As with Scott’s border, Cooper’s clearing is a transitional space, serving as an
advanced guard to civilization’s army, but also as a site from which the white man can
monitor the valley for the savage’s encroachment:
A double object had been gained by removing most of the vestiges of the
forest from the vicinity of the buildings: the necessary improvements were
executed with greater facility, and, a consideration of no small importance,
the cover, which the American savage is known to seek in his attacks, was
thrown to a distance that greatly diminished the danger of a surprise (54).

However, the clearing also reveals to Mark Heathcote the failure of civilization to take
root in the valley. Stripped parcels of land dot the area, places where wild vegetation has
just started to re-assert itself as “second growth” (14). In addition, the clearing in front of
the Heathcote house is where the family eventually surrenders to Metacom and
Conanchet, offering them less protection, admitting “of closer and more deadly conflict
than that on which the other portions of the combat had occurred” (229). The fear of the
Connecticut Valley settler, a fear that King Philip’s War confirmed with almost
nightmarish accuracy, was that the clearing itself would either fall back into wilderness
within a generation or fail to provide protection when the Indians came to re-take the
land. Cooper’s representation of that fear undermines the sense of inevitability that any
narrative of national greatness requires.
Perhaps this sense that the clearing may not evolve into the village, which will
subsequently not evolve into the larger city, but will instead fade back into the wild
landscape, is the reason why so many of the Puritan romances from this period feature
miscegenation subplots. The Indian-Puritan marriages in Hope Leslie and Hobomok
highlight the progressive ideas of their respective authors, but the marriage between
young Ruth and Conanchet in Cooper’s novel shows the Puritan anxiety of inter-

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generational declension. The curse between generations is not the decadent persistence of
Catholic superstition found in The Castle of Otranto, but, instead, the worry that each
new set of children will bring less faith, less chance for sanctification, and an eventual
end to the solely religious mission of the colonies. When found, young Ruth is described
as “one who is neither white nor red,” impure yet not totally heathen (324). Like Witthal
Ring, her co-captive, she suffers the same Stockholm syndrome that all white captives,
yet no Native characters suffer in the Puritan romance. “If the Great Sprit made her skin a
different color,” Cooper writes of young Ruth, “he made her heart the same. Narra-
mattah [Ruth’s adopted name] will not listen to the lying language; she shuts her ears, for
there is deceit in its sounds. She tries to forget it” (329). Witthal has also chosen to
“forget” his whiteness, but his method is to absorb his personal history into tribal lore. He
tells the story of the novel’s first major battle as if he were not only absent, but as if he
were always on the Indian’s side. “’Tis of the Wish-ton-wish thou speakest,” his sister
corrects him. “But thou wast a sufferer, and not an actor, brother, in that heartless
burning” (255).
According to George Dekker, there is a standard interpretation of Wept’s inter-
generational structure, divided neatly into two battles, the latter fought mainly by the
children of those who fought in the former: “In Cooper’s colonial New England version
of this historical transition, a heroic age of apostolic faith gives way to a secular age of
material well-being and clerical despotism” (Romance 68). However, just as Walpole’s
novel can be seen as less a reversion to romance than a chance to mock the romantic
tendencies of obsolete belief systems, so too can Cooper’s novel be seen as less a portrait
of inter-generational declension than a representation of this anxiety in Puritan and even

73
Indian culture. The Indians, in fact, seem to resist the brainwashing of their captors
because they have prepared themselves for just this possibility. They have their own
legends of the border—for example, a post-captivity Witthal asks, “Didst ever hear the
tradition, how that wicked race got into the hunting-grounds, and robbed the warrior of
the country?” (154). The white man’s God has also become a kind of Gothic curse to the
Indians. One fear of captivity, they assert, is that “they had heard strange sayings of the
power of the Deity of their invaders” (191). Conanchet, in turn, is prepared to resist the
lure of his captors’ religion, while Witthal and Ruth readily adopt the legends and
superstitions of the Narragansett tribe.
Although Wept, along with the early Waverly novels, tells a gothic tale without
the irony that was integral to Gothicism, it still points to an obsolete belief system and
culture buried in the ruins. To romanticize a dead culture, the author may celebrate or
memorialize its members, but that author still must acknowledge that culture’s
obsolescence. In Wept, Calvinism is as much a religion of spirits, curses, and hauntings as
the Catholicism of Walpole. The ineffectual yet dangerous minister (appropriately named
Meek Wolfe) speaks in “the mysterious and allegorical allusions then so much in vogue,”
which, later in the novel, will seem very similar to Metacom’s figurative language. In
fact, the Puritan leaders have no trouble understanding Metacom because they speak in a
similarly plain yet allegorical language. The speech of both the Puritans and the Indians
recalls Scott’s advertisement to The Antiquary. Speaking of “the peasantry of my own
country,” he writes, “The antique force and simplicity of their language, often tinctured
with the Oriental eloquence of Scripture, in the mouths of those of an elevated
understanding, give pathos to their grief, and dignity to their resentment” (3). Ignoring

74
the theological complexities of Calvinism, as well as its development into a softer and
less legalistic Congregationalism by the 1830s, Cooper romanticizes the religious sect as
yet another lost tribe that exerts little influence on the present day. In Wept, he writes,
“Enough of their forms and of their substance has been transmitted to us, to render both
manner and doctrine familiar to most of our readers,” but his readers can still view the
Puritans with the detachment of anthropologists or antiquarians (280).
This historical rupture in both Scott and Cooper does not exist in the works of
later sentimental romancers, such as Sedgwick and Child. Liberal-Arminian authors,
Unitarian in the cases of these two women, portray a progressive continuity between the
closing Calvinist era of their heroines and the triumphant Unitarian era of their readers.
Unlike Cooper’s novels, these other romances of the 1820s and 30s anticipate the reform
movements that would soon gain popularity in the same New England circles as the
North American Review, complicating the idea of what political beliefs might guide an
author when he or she turns to romantic narrative in order to commemorate the nation.
Even though liberal authors appropriated many of the same Gothic historical tropes of the
Waverly romance, the perspective flipped from one of nostalgic retrospection to one of
forward-looking Utopianism. Instead of regretting the passage of a founding
generation—the Revolutionary generation, in Cooper’s case—the liberal authors
regretted the failure of the founding generation to fulfill its noble intentions, and
promoted a vision, based on domestic harmony and education, that would reform the
social problems that stood between America and Paradise.

75
Chapter 2

“A Man of Plain Sense”:
Spiritual Narrative, Hypocrisy, and the Unitarian Reformation

Mrs. Wilson, the Calvinist villain of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s first novel, A
New-England Tale, is a hypocrite who “had fancied herself one of the subjects of an
awakening at an early period of her life,” and had “thus assumed the form of godliness,
without feeling its power.” Because she takes on the appearance of sanctification,
practicing the right rituals and intoning the right prayers, her sect cares little about the
actual state of her soul, and Mrs. Wilson continues to “delude [herself] with vain forms of
words, and professions of faith” (24). As a reprobate living openly as a saint, she
embodies the fear of Richard Mather, quoted in the previous chapter, that religion itself
would be reduced to ritual, “nothing thereof should be left but only the external form.”
By contrast, Jane Elton, the heroine and proto-Unitarian saint who gets her counsel from
a Methodist domestic and finds love with an older Quaker man, puts little stock in the
rites and ritual of Christianity. Instead, she lives the faith, developing an “unfailing habit
of regulating her daily life by the sacred rules of our blessed Lord” (40). Jane embodies
the authentic Christianity, which would survive the inevitable purge of corruption,
obscurantism, and tired ritual that follows any Reformation—in this case, the Unitarian
reformation that occurred in the New England Congregationalist church in the first half
of the 19
th
century.
Although David S. Reynolds makes a case for labeling Sedgwick, along with
Lydia Maria Child, as “borderers” (Faith 52) rather than sectarian Unitarians, I will

76
continue to presume their allegiance to liberal Congregationalism. First of all, skepticism
was by no means an obstruction to joining the Unitarian church—in fact, for many of the
converts from Calvinist orthodoxy, skepticism was the reason for adopting the sect in the
first place. In other words, plenty of Unitarian ministers, such as Theodore Parker in
Chapter 3, could go through their professional lives without ever settling into a
comfortable relationship to the church, but still continue to preach to large congregations.
Even Child’s brother, Convers Francis, is alternately known as a radical Unitarian and as
a conservative Transcendentalist. Living on sectarian borders was a privilege of the age,
particularly for the children of New England’s political and religious elite. It was a
privilege that the non-sectarian Cooper, in Chapter 1, lamented as a path toward disunion.
Lastly, all of the authors explored in this study were “borderers” in some ways. While I
consider Hawthorne as a product of Transcendentalist Concord, in Chapter 3, I do not
make any attempt to claim that he was himself a doctrinaire Transcendentalist (if such a
thing was even possible). Likewise, Sedgwick and Child remain non-doctrinaire
Unitarians—that is to say, typical Unitarians—throughout their literary careers, with the
latter recognizing the skeptical impulse behind her church in a letter to her brother, the
Transcendentalist Francis, regarding the Calvinism practiced in Northampton, where she
was staying, and the controversy still surrounding Emerson’s “Divinity School Address”
in Boston. She writes, “I by no means charge the Unitarians with being the only ones that
strive to stretch out old formulas; but it is more observable in them, because so
inconsistent with their own free theories” (Letters 35).
In both religion and politics, Americans have always thirsted for novelty and
authenticity, a combination satisfied by the nostalgia of Reformation Protestantism, if not

77
the nostalgia built into all revealed religion—one that envies the “wise old thrush” of the
Browning poem, who “sings each song twice over / lest you should think he never could
recapture / the first fine careless rapture” (239). Reform movements yearn for that
Emersonian “original relation to the universe” that purportedly existed, without self-
consciousness, among the first generation of Apostles that beheld God face-to-face. As
noted in the previous chapter, this nostalgia was prevalent in the Romantic era, from
Wordsworth’s recreations of Medieval lyrical ballads to Scott’s antiquarianism to
Cooper’s longing for the spirit that fought at Bunker Hill rather than the spirit that turned
Bunker Hill into a shrine. However, since this nostalgia is essentially religious, the
religious partisans of antebellum America frequently encoded it into their own historical
romances. Latter-day adherents must cope with belonging to the descendent line of the
Apostles, relying on Scripture, artifacts, and prayer to approximate that original
relationship to the divine. What else is the experience of Grace, in Calvinist typology, but
a sudden return to the revelatory experience of Abraham or the Apostles? Or Channing’s
alteration of Grace into something available to all worshippers who possess the rational
capacity to believe: “Say what we may, God has given us a rational nature, and will call
us to account for it... Revelation is addressed to us as rational beings” (370).
The surrounding theology, though, and the church government, are prone to rapid
deterioration. Following any first generation of Reform, the threats are numerous: earthly
corruption, needlessly complex theology, rote attendance, and, worst of all, the
declension of religious faith into mere ritual. Religious authority, in the myriad of sects
that rose to replace mainline Protestantism in the middle of the 19
th
-century, came from
emotionalism, spontaneity, and anti-intellectualism—the hallmarks of the revival

78
movements that composed the Second Great Awakening. As recorded by Rodney Stark
and Roger Fink, churches, after establishing any sort of permanent authority,
“compromise their ‘errand in the wilderness’ and then... lose their organizational vigor,
eventually to be replaced by less worldly groups, whereupon the process is repeated”
(236). This follows the path found in the career of the American clergyman, “from office
to profession,” as Donald M. Scott labels the progression. We see the fear of this path
from almost the moment when the Puritans first landed, with Richard Mather’s panic
confirmed by the approval of the Half-Way Covenant—a new generation converting not
through their own primary experience, but through the experience of the preceding
generation, a copy of a copy, revelation twice-removed from the divine. Hence, in all
Reform movements, the need for ever-renewed Christian sects, for purging the
corruption, for simplifying the theology, and for reviving church attendance. Luther and
Calvin believed themselves to be the true Catholics, just as Roger Williams and Anne
Hutchinson believed themselves to be the true Puritans. Motivated by this same nostalgia
for “real” Christianity, “real” Protestantism, and even “real” Puritanism, the liberal wing
of the nineteenth-century Congregationalist Church actually worked under a similar
banner of radical Reformation as did the Calvinist sects that had settled New England, the
New Lights who split into a liberal wing of the Orthodoxy, and the revivalists who were
competing (and winning) the drive to convert antebellum America.
While the last chapter concerned the Federalist nostalgia of Cooper, an American
strain of Scott’s romantic conservatism that took for granted the dying of obsolete
cultures, including the semi-aristocratic culture of the Federalist founders, this chapter
finds the inversion of such nostalgia in the liberal-Unitarian utopianism of Catharine

79
Maria Sedgwick. As noted in the introduction, Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase
draw an apt distinction between nostalgia and utopianism: “The counterpart to the
imagined future is the imagined past” (9). Sedgwick, along with Lydia Maria Child, Eliza
Buckminster Lee, and other liberal-Unitarian authors of historical romances, saw the
project of Protestant Reformation and American liberty as something that had always
been promised but never fulfilled. In her introduction to the 1824 Redwood, she
advocates a careful balance between preserving the past and discarding stale traditions for
the sake of reviving an earlier truth, but cautions against a “narrow-minded patriotism
which claims honors that are not yet merited” (xiv). By contrast, the Transcendentalists
discussed in the next chapter believed, for the most part, in a spontaneous and perpetual
regeneration, focused on the individual and his or her reasoning faculties. Sedgwick
hesitates to declare the successful achievement of her Utopian ideals:
Our republicanism is founded on a broad and general principle, which is
opposed to all coronations… but we have a deep and heart-felt pride—
thank Heaven a just pride—in the increasing intelligence, the improving
virtue, and the rising greatness of our country.” (xiv)

While Stowe, as a liberal New Light Calvinist, lamented the end of an intellectual
tradition in which her own family had flourished, Sedgwick wrote as a booster for the
side that had triumphed in Boston and at Harvard following the Unitarian Controversy—
someone who could recognize the promised liberal achievements that waited further
along the historical path. She wrote as a convert, the end of a Calvinist/Federalist line that
was as tied to Jonathan Edwards and the Orthodox culture of the Connecticut frontier as
was the Beechers.

80
This conversion, however, was only partial. Sedgwick’s liberalism betrays an
inherent Calvinism, if only because she appropriates Calvinistic literary forms in her
novels—the Puritan spiritual autobiography, which Bunyan had codified, Defoe
fictionalized, and sentimental female novelists of the antebellum years integrated with the
Waverly romance; and the providential national history, descended from those written by
the first Puritan settlers, spiritual autobiographies writ large. While focus shifted from
accidental grace to domestic perfection as the pilgrim’s path to Heaven—a shift from
God the inscrutable Father to the care and education of an earthly Mother—the narratives
remained essentially predestinarian. One cannot choose his or her parents, after all, just as
one cannot choose grace. And the sins of our nation that the liberal Unitarians tasked
themselves to reform were equally beyond its control: slavery, marital oppression, and
Indian dislocation all stained the country’s history from the very beginning. Although
employed through Calvinistic narrative tropes, the theme of domestic utopianism, of
“home” as a literal place that trumps the metaphorical “home” desired by Puritans in the
City of God, was used by Sedgwick to point to the consummation of the Reformation
errand, not in re-capturing the first-generation perfection envisioned by Richard Mather.
This was a view shared by other social reformers, even those who never officially
converted from orthodox to liberal faith, such as Catharine Beecher, who wrote, “The
family state then, is the aptest earthly illustration of the heavenly kingdom” (19).
This chapter will begin by exploring the development of nostalgia, with regard to
the metaphysics of “revelation,” in the Puritan spiritual autobiography, and then proceed
to show how the Unitarians bypassed this long-established American Puritan nostalgia by
proposing a radical reversion to original Reformation principles. With a theological

81
foundation laid, I will then explore the use of domestic metaphors in Sedgwick’s “tract,”
A New-England Tale, and how “home” and liberal parenthood, in that novel’s version of
the pilgrim’s progress, replaces predestinarian grace in the typology of spiritual
biography. Finally, I will explore the Puritan romances of this group of liberal authors,
primarily Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie and Eliza Buckminster Lee’s Naomi, where the tropes
of the spiritual autobiography are expanded to narrate a nation’s providential history—a
utopianism, as explained by Shaw and Chase above, that inverts the nostalgia of Scott,
Cooper, and the Orthodox Calvinists who lost to the Unitarians in their battle for the soul
of Congregationalist Boston. By placing Sedgwick’s fiction in the context of the first
generation after the successful Unitarian takeover of New England Congregationalism, I
also hope to set up the exploration of Hawthorne’s fiction in the context of the next great
Congregationalist schism, the Transcendentalism controversy two decades later. Both
schisms, however, play out according to the dramas of supersession and declension,
utopianism and nostalgia.

To understand the reformation in which Sedgwick participated requires an
understanding of the reformation that she disdained. Unitarian Christianity was anti-
Calvinist in the particulars of its theology, but still a reformed sect in the Calvinist mold,
one that hoped to “return” Christianity to its initial simplicity. Or, as William Ellery
Channing remarks in “The Evidences of Revealed Religion,” Unitarianism wants to strip
away the falseness of the intervening centuries’ reform movements, to uncover the
“reality” of Christianity that has long been hidden: “Christ’s history bears all the marks of
reality; a more frank, simple, unlabored, unostentatious narrative was never penned”

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(229). Using the terminology from Shaw and Chase, the beginnings of any reform
movement are utopian, while the inevitable destination of these movements is nostalgia.
In the case of Calvinism, the Orthodox followers of the early nineteenth-century, along
with their ancestors from Mather onward, believe in a perfection that had already passed
them by. For Unitarians, that very perfection had not yet been achieved.
All reform movements draw as much intellectual force from the reality they reject
as from the new, as-yet-unrealized world they hope to implement. The Protestant
Reformation began as a movement to purge the papacy, supernaturalism, and the Roman
Church from Christianity, but led to degeneration centuries later—in particular, to the
destruction of American Puritanism by the very forces that gave rise to it. In other words,
an attempt to purge the earthly corruption of the Church led reformers to see corruption
in every earthly system that they established. Perfection was impossible from the very
inception of reform. For the early Protestant reformers, according to Anthony Kemp:
Only the earliest and latest churches represent the true Church... The
structure attempts a unity of the present with a distant past, the primitive
church, combined with a rejection of the immediate past, the great
parenthesis that divides the two ages of truth. (87)

Edward Johnson, in his early history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, claims that it “is
His mind to have purity in religion preferred above all dignity in the world.” In this case,
“purity” means a purging of the false system of authority created by the Church of Rome:
“Let the matter and form of your churches be such as were in the primitive times (before
the Antichrist’s kingdom prevailed)” (25).
However, by the third generation of American Puritanism, Kemp notes, this
historiography turned inward: “The fear of the reformed church-state was the fear of a

83
prince who has gained his throne by assassination: he has himself seeded his dominion
with the precedence of his destruction” (148). This fear was already in the minds of
American Puritans, before they had even arrived on the New World’s shores. In their
initial Dutch settlement, Bradford noted that his community was “drawn away by evil
examples into extravagant and dangerous courses,” and they removed themselves to the
New World because “they saw their posterity would be in danger to degenerate and be
corrupted” (25). The New World did not solve these problems of corruption and
degeneracy. Cotton Mather sounded an alarm that at first looks like a hopeful call for
perfection: “I do not say that the churches of New England are the most regular that can
be, yet I do say, and am sure, that they are very like unto those that were in the first ages
of Christianity” (27). However, by the time that the Half-Way Covenant was adopted, the
primary conversion experience was compromised by earthly corruption and legalistic
doctrine. The jeremiad became the instrument by which clergymen began to call for a
return to the prior perfection of the reformed church. By the middle of the seventeenth-
century, in the calm before the storm of the first Great Awakening, an unquestioned
reform spirit had metamorphosed into a nostalgia for the reformed spirit—or, at worst,
into rote practice, an empty hull of religion without the kernel of true faith. In a sense, the
Calvinists who stood on the other side of the Half-Way Covenant, comparing their own
conversions to the ones made a century earlier, in a religious community that had been
more sure of its own election, would always fear that their sanctification was instead the
false foundation for their own hypocrisy.
The nostalgia of later Calvinists for their forbearers—a nostalgia for a people who
did not need to feel nostalgia—ignored the truth of the English Puritan experience, which

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bequeathed the spiritual autobiography, and, in general, a template of the conversion
narrative to its New World offspring. In Bunyan’s Grace Abounding, we can see how an
individualistic, anti-supernatural view of the conversion experience would lead to the
resistance of Grace. Channing believed that the cure for Protestant corruption was a focus
on individual reason. However, as the Puritan spiritual autobiography demonstrates,
individual reason, absent any kind of supernatural intervention, had long been one of only
two methods for the elect to recognize his or her own salvation. The other method was
narrative. First, a church member needed to discern the signs of election from the
material world that surrounded him. Second, that church member needed to temporalize
this pattern of sign recognition, create a pattern, and match that pattern with those of
others who had experienced grace. As Leopold Damrosch notes, “The point of
identifying stages of conversion was not really to trace a temporal sequence for its own
sake, but rather to be assured of typicality” (38). This led to a paradox: a true conversion
was one that was, in some ways, original, because it was a sensual reaction to an
immediate divine presence, a primary experience that happened only to a single
individual; but one could only recognize the originality of the experience by confirming
its typicality, by de-emphasizing its individuality.
There is a direct line between the self-examining realism of the Puritan spiritual
autobiography and the development of realistic prose narratives during the eighteenth
century. The post-Reformation epistemological shift from supernaturalism to theological
realism—a perceived shift, maybe, recognized as such only by Protestants in retrospect—
played as much of a role in the popularity of this new genre as did the novelty of a culture
reading about itself rather than about errant knights and fair maidens. Writing about

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“Puritan iconoclasm,” Michael McKeon notes, “[This] central phenomenon is not a
hostility to ‘art’ but a suspicion of traditional methods of mediating truth that also
pervades much of early modern culture” (75). This suspicion required post-Reformation
English writers to depict their scenes more literally, with less reliance on the
supernatural, with fewer gestures to the invisible world. However, the supernatural still
acted through the natural, and works of so-called realism, especially the novels of Defoe
and Richardson, were primarily written and read as allegories. As Angus Fletcher
explains, “The whole point of allegory is that it does not need to be read exegetically; it
often has a literal level that makes good enough sense all by itself” (7). In studies of the
novel and realism as genres, this “literal level” is often treated as an innovation in the
works of Defoe and Richardson. However, both authors were surely writing “to be read
exegetically,” first and foremost.
In this sense, both the Bunyan of Grace Abounding and Robinson Crusoe can be
taken as exemplars of the fully internalized Puritan conversion narrative. For both fiction
and non-fiction authors, realism was a byproduct of post-Reformation theology,
individualized rather than collective, material rather than supernatural, and in the end
allegorical because allegory was the only mode that could communicate a pilgrim’s
recognition of the signs and wonders around him—or, as Defoe noted, “We can Form no
Idea of any Thing that we know not and have not seen but in the Form of something that
we have seen” (Merret 91). In Calvinist theology, God has withdrawn from the world as a
literal presence, but has left hieroglyphics in either the Bible or generally in providential
signs to the elect. As Perry Miller notes, “Direct revelation had come to an end with the
completion of the Bible, and though God continues to indicate His wishes through the

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providential management of the world, no mortal can pretend that he or she receives
commands in so many words” (American Puritans 347). This epistemology, in both
England and America, was easily adapted to the narrativized realism of the Puritan
spiritual autobiography
The post-Reformation culture in which Bunyan wrote, and from which Sedgwick
and later writers incompletely severed themselves, was one that had purged the
supernatural from religious experience. The reason, in all its fallibility, was now the only
instrument by which the convert could recognize the signs of regeneration. Even worse,
the signs were neutral, material, of-this-world, and might appear to both the saved and the
reprobate, so the potential convert also needed to turn his reason inward, self-
consciously, to examine his own self-examinations. As John Stachniewski writes about
Grace Abounding, “Just as the evidence of reprobation could produce a despairing
narrative, which was then subsumed to an elect teleology, so later experience could case a
reprobate retrospect over the narrative, re-expressing it as a delusion (which collapses
into hypocrisy)” (138). Robinson Crusoe constantly fails to see the signs of his election in
the world around him, having been trained to wait until God speaks to him through
miracles or obvious divine intervention. His entire twenty-three years on the island
constitute the slow but continuous process of this deliverance. God does not intervene
after a period of crisis; his intervention is constant, unwavering, and wholly mundane—
after all, the growth of the barley may have natural causes, but natural causes themselves
are part of God’s creation. Robinson comes to understand how miraculous these
“common” events are:

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I was as one who Heaven thought no worthy to be numbered among the
living, or to appear among the rest of His creatures; that to have seen one
of my own species would have seemed to me a raising from death to life,
and the greatest blessing that Heaven it self, next to the supreme blessing
of salvation, could bestow. (164)

The material world, with no direct guidance from a supernatural source, becomes a
collection of signs and wonders, an encoded text that the pilgrim needs to interpret. How
different is Robinson’s eventual recognition of the miracle in that barley shoot from
Cotton Mather’s recognition that the only proof which an elect Christian has “is of the
sort that assures him, The Fire is indeed the fire, even a self-evidencing and scarce
utterable demonstration” (Miller New England 20)?
Bunyan also fails to understand God’s self-evidencing signs, over and over again,
as he lapses from sin to despair and back again. At first, he is moved by a Sabbath
sermon, but forgets about these feelings once he has dined and rested “and my heart
returned to its old course” (10). And then, as is common in the Puritan spiritual narrative,
he begins to project the appearance of one who has converted—“our Neighbors did take
me to be a very godly man”—even though “I was nothing but a poor pained Hypocrite”
(13). After all, the elect man gets an infinite number of tries in which to accept God’s
grace; in the predestinarian scheme, one who fails to convert before his death was never
meant for conversion, was irredeemably reprobate, from the very dawn of Creation.
Halfway through his conversion narrative, he writes, “Now I grow worse and worse, now
am I further from conversion than ever before” (24). The type that Bunyan hopes to
emulate is Peter, who was saved after denying God. Bunyan receives visions in his
dreams, hears voices in his head, but neither intervention by God is wholly outside the
realm of what we would now accept as human reason. He never sees the visions made

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flesh. God never appears materially with words to assure Bunyan. In the end, when grace
finally lands on his soul for good, the conversion is hardly more supernatural than
Defoe’s barley shoot, and its assurances hardly more permanent: “Now was my heart full
of comfort,” Bunyan reflects, “for I hoped it was sincere” (92).
By purging supernatural elements from the conversion experience, by leaving the
convert to his own reason and senses in order to judge when a conversion has occurred,
post-Reformation Protestantism was a less reassuring form of Christianity. How does one
transcend individual desires and experience, giving oneself wholly to God, when the only
way to find God in the first place is by searching one’s own heart? At root, the Puritan
conversion narrative is a nostalgic longing for the sureness of revelation, for the self-
evidencing fact that Paul bore witness to in the Epistles. Following Bunyan, this nostalgia
was removed to yet another level of longing. According to Robert Bell, “what we
recognize as the modernity of most autobiographies after Bunyan is, typically, their
secular premises and empirical inclinations.” Recognizing that Bunyan himself had
envied the Augustinian spirit, Bell adds that this spirit “deteriorated, leaving prominent
vestiges and nostalgic aspirations.” The lives of the Medieval Christians “had instead a
metaphoric quality, as did Homer’s heroic world for Augustan poets and novelists: a
splendid set of ideals no longer feasible but implicitly measuring contemporary realities”
(119).
In Some Gospel-Truths Opened, Bunyan’s Calvinism—and the Calvinism of the
New World Puritans—favors the experience of conversion over the mere “notional”
understanding of Christ, the latter being a form of hypocrisy in which one knows the
scripture only “in the notion, and hast not the power of the same in [his] heart,” a heart

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that is “empty of sanctifying grace” (15). As Thomas H. Luxon sums up this distinction:
“Once the allegorical shell of bodily experience has been cracked by hermeneutic
contemplation, it must be resolutely tossed away” (901). Luxon points out that Calvinism
otherwise purged the supernatural elements of Catholicism completely from its theology,
eliminating contemporary miracles, Eucharistic “real presence,” and anything else that
could be classified as papist superstition (902). Instead, the conversion experience
“replaces” the self with the self of the absent Christ—at best with the mere Word of
Christ—and leaves the self in doubt until death finally comes to confirm sanctification. A
religion that so fully separates the divine from the material, that defers the non-material
until one can witness it, post-death, with his own eyes, provides little reassurance to
saved and reprobate alike.
In William Ellery Channing’s reformation of the Congregationalist church, and
the attempts by his followers, such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, to re-write the national
history according to a liberal-Unitarian teleology, there is still an emphasis on the terrors
of “notionalist” hypocrisy, on the primacy of human reason, and on the need to purge
corrupt elements from the earthly church in order to achieve the lost perfection of the first
church. However, instead of nostalgically looking back on the first-generation Puritans as
the ones who had achieved that perfection, only for their ancestors to degenerate into rote
hypocrite-professors, Channing and Sedgwick instead envisioned the renewed perfection
of the earthly church as something not yet achieved. First, reform, starting in the home
and working its way through every facet of society, was needed to re-write the destiny of
America—without this reform, the history of America would be that of a reprobate who
suffered delusions rather than that of a converted saint who merely cast aside doubt.

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Although Hope Leslie and The Linwoods were both successful early Waverly-
romances, the former influencing Cooper’s own take on the Puritan historical novel,
Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s first fictional work, A New-England Tale, betrayed little of
Scott’s influence. Originally conceived as a non-fiction Unitarian tract, the novel’s
historical setting is alluded to in an oblique manner at the start of Chapter VI. Reflecting
on the fine tradition of town schools in New England, the narrator praises “these wise
institutions of our pious ancestors,” and then, in the next paragraph, notes the opening of
one of these schools that the young characters in the novel will attend, presumably
locating the story during the era “of our pious ancestors.” Unlike the historical settings in
Scott, Cooper, or Sedgwick’s later romances, the time (near past) and place (likely
Western New England, in the village of “____”) of A New-England Tale remain
purposely vague. What is clear, however, is that the story is set in a time before
Unitarianism was a viable option for the liberal yet pious New Englander. And, since the
novel clearly posits Calvinism as the problem, a contemporary reader would likely infer
Unitarianism, not just liberal New Light Calvinism, as the solution. This would continue
to be the form of anti-Calvinist sentimental romances. For example, Eliza Buckminster
Lee’s Naomi would convert her heroine to a Unitarian-like Quakerism—hinting to the
modern reader that certain theological preferences would save her from Calvinism, but
setting her novel before Unitarianism was an explicit option. As demonstrated below,
Unitarian propagandists tried to avoid sectarian distinction, because, in a sense, they
believed their religion to be mere “Christianity,” not “Unitarianism.”

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Lawrence Buell, in exploring “the politics of historiography” in the era
surrounding the Unitarian Controversy (roughly the 1790s through the 1820s) recognizes
that Channing, Ware, et al. did not intend to dismantle the structure of Calvinism
completely—the same theological narrative, either relating to individual conversion or to
national destiny, remained intact. The difference, however, was in the attitude toward
declension. “The Unitarians,” Buell writes, “agreed with orthodox complaints about the
declension of New England piety. But Unitarians, taking late seventeenth-century Puritan
jeremiads at their word, placed the declensionary period at an earlier date” (221). For
Buell, that date was around 1700, during the lifetime of Cotton Mather, whose life story
was being written and re-written according to religious partisanship at the turn of the
nineteenth century. However, there is no need to fix the date so firmly, since the reform
impulse cares less about retaining the church’s status before declension and more about a
complete purge of false church governance and theology from an even earlier date. Even
if Buell were correct to fix the date at 1700, the Unitarians, despite their professed
sympathy for the Pilgrims, wanted to re-start the Reformation completely, reaching back
to the earliest Christian church rather than Winthrop’s province.
The first act of reformation that Channing called for in replacing predestinarian
Calvinism with Arminian Unitarianism was to purge the remaining metaphysical
elements in the individualized conversion experience—that is, to remove from
prominence the one “invisible” salvation still left in the Puritan narrative, the City of God
as destination for sanctified souls. Unitarianism, and the women and men who made up
the great reform movements in antebellum America, sought to replace this otherworldly
perfection with a paradise on earth, beginning with the institution closest to the hearts of

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the women who made up the most vital part of the liberal church, and, not coincidentally,
the most vital segment of the romance-writing and –reading public: the home. However,
as can be seen in both Channing’s sermons, which led the Unitarian movement to
maintain control of New England’s Congregationalist churches, and Sedgwick’s
romances, which constituted a propaganda effort on Channing’s behalf, this liberal wing
of what Sydney Ahlstrom called “an American Reformation” was actually fighting for
control of America’s spiritual life on three fronts: using the individualized,
epistemologically materialist conversion narrative against the remnants of Puritan
Calvinism; using its Arminianism and appeal to universal reason against the populist
revival movement; and using sentimental romances, such as A New-England Tale, to
gently mock the artifice and frivolity of sentimental romances.
As with most reform movements, the takeover of Congregationalist New England
by the Unitarian Church, in the first three decades of the 19th-century, was not done
under its own name. Channing and his supporters would never have claimed victory for
any particular sect. Instead, in “Against Calvinism,” he stresses that his hostility to that
sect is doctrinal, and that it “does not extend to is advocates” (460). In her memoirs of her
brother, the Reverend Joseph Buckminster, Eliza Buckminster Lee portrays the
reformation as “a gradual relaxation from the strict Calvinism of our fathers,” a relaxation
that she claims has taken nearly a century to complete. Congregations, not just radical
ministers, chose to let go of a now-irrelevant set of doctrines:
This change was gradual, and almost imperceptible. It did not amount at
once to the adoption of distinct anti-trinitarian conceptions, but the tenets
of strict Calvinism lost their hold upon the minds of ministers and people,
and the orthodox creed was embraced with great reservations. (Memoirs
321)

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Although Lee was writing from decades later, in 1849, she still stresses an early defense
that had been made by the first generation of established Boston Unitarians—the doctrine
was anti-Calvinist, not anti-trinitarian, and the latter was only a logical result of a rational
study of Scripture. Lee then quotes a long letter from her brother, written in 1799, that
insists that ministers “had ceased to preach the humiliating doctrines” a couple of decades
before the Unitarian Controversy (324). She would focus on this question in her own
fiction—how much of Unitarianism is positive philosophy, and how much is merely a
concession to the will of the people, who had ceased to find inspiration in a doctrine,
Calvinism, that limited divine revelation as one of its core beliefs?
For Channing, as for Buckminster, their Arminian revolt was a restoration of
authentic Christianity, authentic Reformed Protestantism, and even, in some of his
sermons, for authentic Puritanism. However, the theological partisanship had been clear
from as far back as 1805, when Unitarians put up Henry Ware as the Hollis Professorship
of Divinity at Harvard, and Samuel Webber as president of the college a year later. By
1822, Yale, once a stronghold for Edwardsean Calvinism, had also gone Unitarian; and,
even though Orthodox forces on both sides of New England soon decamped to less
prestigious institutions, such as Andover and Hartford Theological Seminaries, the
Unitarians controlled the actual land, buildings, and congregations that had been founded
by the Puritan settlers. Perhaps there were legal reasons to underplay the drastic
theological overhaul, since departing congregations often fought for control of the
churches, and just as often failed, as in the “Dedham Case.” There, the court heard,
“When a majority of the members of a Congregational Church separate from the majority

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of the parish, the members who remain, although a minority, constitute the church in such
parish, and retain the rights and property belonging thereto.” As someone born into a
family left behind in this schism, Harriet Beecher Stowe notes that her father, upon
arriving in Boston in 1826, saw that:
Calvinism or orthodoxy was the despised and persecuted form of faith. It
was the dethroned royal family wandering like a permitted mendicant in
the city where once it had held court, and Unitarianism reigned in its
stead... The judges on the bench were Unitarian, giving decisions by
which the peculiar features of church organization, so carefully ordained
by the Pilgrim fathers, had been nullified. The Church, as consisting,
according to their belief, in regenerate people, had been ignored, and all
the power had passed into the hands of the congregation. (Kelley 85)

However, aside from legal evasions, Channing’s refusal to cite his reformation as
specifically Unitarian was part of an older Reformation strategy. Instead of asserting the
novelty of his sect, Channing asserts that the “old system,” Calvinism, is the novel sect,
one that diverged from the Christianity of the first churches: “We object... to that system
which arrogates to itself the name of Orthodoxy, and which is now industriously
propagated through our country” (377). His Christianity is the Christianity of the Bible,
of the original apostles, hearkening back to the revelation detailed in the Epistles,
something which every reformed sect had envied since Luther and Calvin first struck
against the Catholic Church:
This remarkable infusion of the spirit of the first age into the Christian
records cannot easily be explained but by the fact, that they were written
in that age by the real and zealous propagators of Christianity, and that
they are records of real convictions and of actual events. (232)

Channing asks his listener to “let the truth of this religion be the strongest conviction of
your understandings; let its motives and precepts sway with an absolute power your
characters and lives.” Otherwise, the misled congregant might follow this newer and

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corrupted form of religious faith that insists on calling itself Christian—fighting against
Calvinism is itself “a vindication of Christianity from the gross errors which Calvinism
ha labored to identify with this system” (232). As recognition of Channing’s strategy—
identifying his ostensibly newer system (Unitarianism) with the original, and the
ostensibly older system (Calvinism) with faddish novelty—the strongest opponent of
liberalism, Jedidiah Morse, wrote a book linking American Unitarianism with its more
radical English predecessor, and asking, “Shall we have the Boston religion, or the
Christian religion?” Morse’s greatest fear, voiced in 1793, a decade before the Unitarian
controversy bloomed, was that New England would “liberalize away all true religion”
(Forman 17).
This older reform strategy employed by Channing, substituting hopeful
utopianism for regretful nostalgia, required him to strip away the artifice of the modern
Calvinist church to reach back to the revelation achieved in the Epistles—most
importantly, to re-assert that God is One, that Christ is not also God, and that centuries of
theological controversy can be reduced to the observation that powerful church leaders
simply wanted to delude their flocks. “To us,” Channing writes, “as to the Apostle and
the primitive Christians, there is one God, even the Father.” Furthermore, even the lay
congregation understands the truth of this assertion when they seek confirmation in
Scripture: “We conceive that these words could have conveyed no other meaning to the
simple and uncultivated people who were set apart to be the depositaries of this great
truth.” The trinitarian obfuscations of the Catholic and Calvinist church leaders are just
“hair-breadth distinctions between being and person which the sagacity of later ages has
discovered” (371). Even worse, the leaders themselves knew trinitarianism to be false,

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but refused to make clear how God was not literally three, and instead presented
metaphor as fact to their uneducated congregations. In fact, the church has always been
Unitarian:
We are persuaded that, had three divine persons been announced by the
first preachers of Christianity, all equal and all infinite, one of whom was
the very Jesus who had lately died on a cross, this peculiarity of
Christianity would have almost absorbed every other, and the great labour
of the Apostles would have been to repel the continual assaults which it
would have awakened. But the fact is, that not a whisper of objection to
Christianity on that account reaches our ears from the apolostic age. In the
Epistles, we see not a trace of controversy called forth by the Trinity.
(372)

On the one hand, there appears to be a deliberate effort by the earthly church to obscure
the simple truth about God and Christ. On the other hand, these priests were not
calculating, but merely unskilled at communication, and the purpose of Channing’s
reformation is not so much to draw attention to the evils of Calvinism, but to teach
ministers how to present true Christianity in a simple way that appeals to universal reason
and salvation.
In her novels, Sedgwick dramatizes the anti-intellectualism of Channing’s
sermons—the ones who understand Christianity best are the children, the poor, the
uneducated, and even the mad. Channing, though, tries to appeal to a middle intellect,
someone who is neither steeped in the complexities of Calvinist trinitarianism nor prone
to the emotion-over-reason spirit of the evangelical revivals. In his “Moral Argument
Against Calvinism,” Channing writes for “a man of plain sense, whose spirit has not been
broken to this creed by education or terror” (461). And, in appealing to “plain sense,” a
minister should adopt a plainer style, “to write as they speak,” to recognize that “common
words are common, precisely because most fitted to express real feeling and strong

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conception.” The style that Channing prizes, and that Emerson would push beyond the
theological constraints of his precursor’s liberal rationalism, is a style that “seems a free
and natural expression of thought, and gives to us with power the workings of the
author’s mind” (460). The Unitarian church offers unity on all levels of faith and
worship, not just the unity of God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit. The mind of the preacher
and the mind of the parishioner are joined. The fates of everyone in the congregation, not
just the elite who proclaim themselves already saved, are joined. The simplicity of
language avoids the Calvinist habit of “dividing and distracting the mind,” so that even
the individual self is unified and whole (372). Most importantly, by recovering the sense
of revelation from the Epistles, man and God are unified.
In Grace Abounding, and in other Puritan spiritual narratives, both despair and
salvation flowed from the sect’s privileging of reason over revelation. A man could never
know the fate of his own soul without analyzing his life’s narrative through the prism of
his mind—a tricky process that discouraged a convert from ever really being sure of his
own conversion—but, in Channing’s Christianity, reason never deceives. By stripping
away the artifice of religion that confuses reason, and thereby obscures one’s direct
relationship to the divine, the Unitarian church ends up fulfilling the principles of
Puritanism. As with the pre-reformation Catholic Church, the pre-Unitarian Calvinist
church is depicted as one steeped in superstition, obscurity, and idolatry. The latter, in
fact, is used as justification for Channing’s founding principle, anti-trinitarianism,
because by raising Christ to the level of God, the church risks drawing worship away
from God, much as the Catholics risked diverting worship to the figure of the Virgin
Mary:

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That Jesus Christ, if exalted into the infinite Divinity, should be more
interesting than the Father, is precisely what might be expected from
history, and from the principles of human nature. Men want an object of
worship like themselves, and the great secret of idolatry lies in this
propensity. (373)

Finally, the reformation of the Congregationalist church was an attempt to fulfill
the promise of Puritanism rather than to nostalgically look back on some pre-Halfway-
Covenant church as the earthly embodiment of God’s Word. In a collection of
biographies, sponsored by the Unitarian church at the turn of the twentieth century,
Samuel Atkins Eliot notes, “The movement was the logical development of Puritan
idealism, and was nourished by the initiative and decision of the men whose careers are
described in this book” (1). Channing also reaches back and imagines the sympathy of
those ancestors who, in spite of his seeming enmity toward their doctrines, would have
otherwise sympathized with the liberal project:
If the stern reformer of Geneva could lift up his head and hear the
mitigated tone in which some of his professed followers dispense his
fearful doctrines, we fear that he could not lie down in peace until he had
poured out his displeasure on their cowardice and degeneracy. (461)

Although its Arminianism has led historians to view Unitarianism as a radical break from
the Calvinist Congregationalism, Channing saw himself as a descendent of this unbroken
line of Boston clergymen from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the present, much as
Luther and Calvin saw themselves as leaders of the true Catholic Church.

In a sense, what Channing advises in his sermons and articles, and Catharine
Maria Sedgwick dramatizes in A New-England Tale, is the very opposite of reason: a call
to strip away doctrinal jargon, to uncover the instinct available to any “man of plain

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sense.” Therefore, the passage of Jane Elton, in Sedgwick’s Unitarian spiritual narrative,
is from instinctual goodness to self-aware goodness, and the narrative deprives the
hypocrite Mrs. Wilson of the self-doubt and potential conversion that hypocrisy implies
in, say, Bunyan’s autobiography. The fates of saint and reprobate alike are fixed in the
Unitarian conversion narrative. Nor does Jane enjoy the years of self-doubt and potential
backsliding that Bunyan and Robinson Crusoe pass through. Instead, Jane is instinctually
good because she has been raised well. Furthermore, she receives confirmation of this
goodness not by entering the kingdom of heaven, but by returning to a very literal home
at the novel’s end. Unitarian reformation hopes to bring the kingdom of heaven into the
hearths and homes of good Republican mothers. In fact, the 1835 novel that Sedgwick
contributed to Henry Ware, Jr.’s series, Scenes and Characters Illustrating Christian
Truths, was called Home.
The problem with Mrs. Wilson’s hypocrisy is that it prizes ritual over substance
(“assumes the form of godliness”), the approval of the pious community over genuine
goodness, and the adherence to a pattern of behavior that seems arbitrary and even
narcissistic next to the simplicity of “good works.” The rigid conversion experience
encourages those who have “assumed” an outward form, regardless of their actual
hypocrisy, to parade their moral superiority over those who have behaved in a genuinely
decent way, but without the outward appearance of sanctification. In Mrs. Wilson’s case,
she harshly condemns Jane’s mother for not apparently dying a saved woman, asking the
orphaned girl “if she was sure her mother had gone where the worm dieth not and the fire
is not quenched.” Both the fate of Jane and Jane’s mother are decided because Mrs.
Wilson finds that the girl “did not reply one word, or give the least symptom of a

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gracious understanding” (19). However, as we are soon told, the opposite transformation
had occurred. Rather than demonstrating her sanctification through the arcane dogma of
church leaders, Jane’s mother justified her grace through simple yet devout parenthood:
“Jane had been gently led in the bands of love. She had been taught even more by the
example than the precepts of her mother.” And, by passing along “Christian principles,”
the mother “sowed the seed, and looked with undoubting faith for the promised blessing”
(24).
The woman who, for Sedgwick’s didactic purposes, is an Arminian in spirit,
possesses an “undoubting faith,” while the seemingly fanatical Calvinists are forever in
doubt regarding the fate of their souls. The “reason” prized by Sedgwick’s Unitarianism
is an unusually sure instrument. One either is a Christian, in which case self-doubt is
minimal, behavior is so good and simple that even a child can imitate it, or one is not a
Christian, in which case self-doubt consumes the reprobate to a degree that she spends
much of her life inwardly contemplating her life’s narrative. At its most fanatical, as in
James Hogg’s satirical Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Calvinism excuses murder; at its
most tormenting, Calvinism becomes something more benign, yet more insidiously
widespread, as in Sedgwick’s novel: “If Mrs. Wilson had not been blinded by self-love,
she might have learnt an invaluable lesson from the melancholy results of her own mal-
government.” There, a focus on the self leads to bad parenting that surpasses all the more
frivolous sins in the novel, which “nothing will more certainly taint every thing that is
pure in the character” (47). Jane’s first suitor, Edward Erskine, who is decent yet lacks
true Christian conviction, is labeled as “habitually under the dominion of self-love,” his

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yearning for status linked to the indulgence of Calvinist parents who believe him to be a
saved member of their church, if only because he assumes the form of godliness (131).
As an antidote to this explicitly Calvinistic “self-love,” Sedgwick offers Jane’s
“disinterestedness” (116), an appropriation of the term from the liberal Orthodoxy, led by
Samuel Hopkins, that went by the name of New Light Calvinism at the end of the
eighteenth century. Jane, Sedgwick writes, “had a rare habit of putting self aside: of
deferring her own inclinations to the will, and interests, and inclinations of others” (112).
Even as a child, she has stopped worrying about the outward appearance of her soul, at
least according to the standards of her Calvinist community, and instead she just lives the
Christian principles that her mother taught to her by example. No better example of
Calvinistic self-love exists, for Sedgwick, than in the Puritan obsession with a proper
death. Mrs. Wilson judges Jane’s mother according to her behavior on the deathbed. Jane
also worries about the fate of Mary, the girl impregnated by Mrs. Wilson’s son, David,
who dies after reaching the town and contacting Jane, along with the saintly hermit
named John Mountain. After Mary dies, the girl asks, “Did she... express any penitence—
any hope?” (93). John replies, “Ah, Miss, the great thing is how we live, not how we die”
and adds, “for my party, I don’t place much dependence on what people say on a death-
bed” (94).
In a sense, the Calvinist obsession with death betrays a false conviction about the
afterlife, a sureness of the invisible world beyond the sensible one—in sum, a
metaphysical certainty bordering on papist superstition, which Unitarians want to replace
with earthly perfection. John Mountain lectures Jane on the unimportance of death
because “it is the life—it is the life, we must look to.” After all, he notes, “We are poor

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ignorant creatures; it is all a mystery after this world; we know nothing about it” (94).
Mrs. Wilson’s own death is the culmination of her spiritual failure, a disease “attended
with delirium; and she had no rational communication with any one from the beginning
of her illness.” Such a delirium was feared by a sect that put such credence on one’s
behavior on a deathbed. The kindly Quaker, Mr. Lloyd, mourns Mrs. Wilson by blaming
her religious upbringing, the “self-love” fostered by Calvinism, for the horrors of both
her life and her unsatisfying death (156).
This focus on death, on the abusive effects of a predestinarian upbringing, bring
into focus Channing’s central criticism of the Orthodoxy: “Calvinism owes its perpetuity
to the influence of fear in palsying the moral nature” (371). In Sedgwick’s own life, the
toll of the religion was apparent in her younger sister, Eliza, who “suffered from the
horrors of Calvinism... She was so true, so practical, that she could not evade its realities;
she believed its monstrous doctrines, and they made her gloomy” (Letters 68). As
Channing asserts while claiming that Calvinist ministers knew, through reason, that the
trinity was not literally true, yet were unable to make this fact clear to the simple plain
folk in their congregations, Sedgwick believed that her sister was too practical not to take
the predestinarian preaching at face value. In A New-England Tale, the Calvinists are
depicted as “a hard race” (12), afraid to express sympathy for the orphaned Jane, and
eager to tell children of their inherent depravity: “Do not think my children are worse
than others,” Mrs. Wilson tells the girl, “you, Jane, are as much a child of wrath, and so is
every son and daughter of Adam, as he is—all totally depraved—totally corrupt” (149).
With her moral instincts so palsied, a lack of self-awareness at death is tragically apt for
Mrs. Wilson, and Mr. Lloyd sums up the living death that a literal belief in such a

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theology will yield: “Her mind no human comfort could reach; no earthy skill touch its
secret springs” (156). The entire community suffers from this gloom, even during school-
led festivities. One student jokingly wonders why the deacons “did not stop the birds
from singing, and the sun from shining, and all such gay sounds and sights” (52).
This latter observation, however amusingly Sedgwick presents it, leads her to a
more serious point about how the severity of Calvinism passes to the next generation,
how hypocrisy begets hypocrisy, self-love begets “a willful spoilt child” (122), and a
serious application of church doctrine begets, for children such as Sedgwick’s sister, an
irredeemable gloom. “Oh,” she laments, “that those, who throw a pall over the innocent
pleasures of life, and give, in the eye of the young, to religion a dark and gloomy aspect,
would learn some lessons of theology from the joyous light of the sun, and the merry
carol of the birds!” (52). Such “lessons,” though, are impossible when a sect believes in
the inherent depravity of man, passed down from Adam, and considers this depravity to
be the most important lesson for children to learn.
Just as gloom is passed easily from one generation to the next, hypocrisy becomes
a malignant disease that children communicate from their parents. Mrs. Wilson’s
hypocrisy is so deep that she is not only lying to her community, but also lying to herself:
“It was not to the world alone that Mrs. Wilson played the hypocrite, but before the
tribunal of her own conscience she appeared with hollow arguments and false presences”
(104). As an elder, she has given those in the younger generation a belief that one’s own
conversion experience should never be questioned, that outward righteousness will give
one the excuse to behave in ways that contradict the true spirit of Christianity. Edward
Erskine, a “spoilt” member of the faith, a moral mediocrity who has achieved his high

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standing in the community, it is assumed, by being born into the church elect, falls prey
to “self-love.” “Flattery,” Sedgwick writes, “and unlimited indulgence made him vain,
selfish, and indolent.” While not evil, he is lazy in his religion and education, possessing
“an extraordinary facility at appropriating to himself the results of the labours of others.”
Summing up his character, the authors writes, “He belonged to that large class of persons
who are generous, but not just; affectionate, but not constant; and often kind, though it
would puzzle a casuist to assign to their motives their just proportions of vanity and
benevolence” (71). If the latter-generation Puritans nostalgically lamented the Half-Way
Covenant, which they believed failed to pass along the true faith of one generation to the
merely legalistic faith of the next, then Sedgwick strips away this nostalgia, pointing out
that what got passed along was not some ersatz faith in the Covenant of Grace, but the
very hypocrisy that allowed a church member to outwardly obey the covenant, and easily
reject grace from his own heart.
Following Channing’s Puritanical purge of the Congregationalist church,
Sedgwick presents a fairly Calvinistic moral universe, one in which only a handful of
souls are chosen to be saved. Edward, it is shown, belongs to a “large class of persons.”
The benevolent characters are outsiders, such as the Quaker Mr. Lloyd, the hermit John
Mountain, the Methodist servant Mary Hull, and the mad hanger-on Bet. The true
Christianity, unrelated to sect or doctrine, belongs to people such as Jane and her mother,
both of whom are rare birds: “How few there are among those whom we believe to be
Christians, who govern their daily conduct by Christian principles, and regulate their
temporal duties by the strict Christian rule. Truly, narrow is the way of perfect integrity,
and few there are that walk therein” (11). The difference between this pronouncement,

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and the Calvinist doctrine of double predesintation is that Sedgwick does not cite
scripture as justification. Instead, she just shows us the depravity of our religious leaders,
the corruptions of predestinarian Calvinism, and the inevitability of hypocritical parents
passing their self-love onto their hypocritical children—and any rationally minded liberal
would both reject the elitist doctrine that chooses a select few for salvation and
understand that, in principle, only a select few probably would end up being saved.
The major doctrinal difference, however, is that Sedgwick rolls back the teleology
of Calvinist conversion. She does not present the unsaved soul of Mrs. Wilson as one
bound for a reprobate’s eternity in hell; nor does she present the eventual destination of
Jane, Mr. Lloyd and the rest as heavenly paradise. Because these characters understand
the need for a more materialistic, less metaphysical religion, they also understand that
earthly paradise suffices, including the beautiful light of the son and the merry carolings
of the birds. Mr. Lloyd’s first wife, Rebecca, dies in a beautiful valley, amid gardens that
“enclose a sanctuary, a temple, from which the brightness of His presence is never
withdrawn.” Her husband then chooses “a country life; not supinely to dream away
existence, but... to cultivate and employ a ‘talent for doing good’” (33). A turn to nature,
or a turn to the needs of others, is an antidote to self-love. Furthermore, Sedgwick wants
the ambivalent Congregationalist to understand that the rewards and punishment of a
Christian life are here on earth, that heaven is actually a perfect home, and that the fixed
destiny of the saved and reprobate alike are inscribed in childhood by bad parents, not at
the dawn of time by an indifferent Creator.
As a parent, Mrs. Wilson is toxic, but, absent some genuinely Christian influence
to counteract her gloomy hypocrisy, no child will achieve a conversion to true faith. Even

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worse, Sedgwick hints that her influence is hereditary rather than taught. Her son, David,
is “utterly depraved,” in the narrator’s words, and:
that he began with a nature more inclined to evil than to good, that his
mother’s mismangement had increased every thing that was bad in him,
and extinguished everything that was good—that the continual
contradictions of his mother’s professions and life, had led him to an
entire disbelief of the truths of religion, as well as a contempt of its
restraints. (92)

But he is not completely unaware of the lessons taught by his mother. He continues to lie
and steal because he knows that he is a reprobate, and he knows that further crimes will
have no impact on the fate of his soul. A depraved human being (“more inclined to evil
than to good”) is nudged toward sin by an evil tempter (his mother), leading him to
ignore the good of this world and accept his fate of eternal damnation. By the standards
of romance, this is unremarkable, as Sedgwick requires villains who unrelentingly
torment her pure heroine. By the standards of liberal Arminianism, though, the lack of
self-awareness in Mrs. Wilson and David are terribly gloomy. The frivolous Wilson
child, Elvira, goes to her doom howling at her mother, “If you taught me truly, I have
only acted out the nature totally depraved, (your own words), that He gave to me, and I
am not to blame for it” (155). Even though Jane is also raised in Mrs. Wilson’s faith and
church, she is spared David’s fate for three reasons: she is not “spoilt” and claimed for
salvation merely because her mother is one of the church-elect; her own mother taught
her true Christianity by example; and she is somehow pure from inception, a soul chosen
by God from the start of creation.
This moral palsying may be genetic, but the liberal influence on the New England
church, for Sedgwick, can save both country and family. In Hope Leslie, “Home can

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never be transferred; never repeated in the experience of an individual” (18). Unlike the
Bradstreet poem, where a beloved house is only a pale anticipatory projection of the
“real” home to come in the next world, a home to Sedgwick is a literal rather than
symbolic paradise. This language of singular original experience—“never repeated”—
gives the home a status in Unitarian theology akin to the status of revelation. A good
Christian needs to have experienced a loving home, and needs to spend her life trying to
re-create, however imperfectly, the experience of that home for her children, who, of
course, will view the latter experience as the primary Eden. In Derridean terms, the
domestic experience replaces the experience of revelation as the center of liberal
Christianity’s “metaphysics of presence.” For Calvinists, the experience of religion,
passed along through copies of copies, from the Epistles on down, is deferred until death,
achieved in this lifetime only by approximation. For Unitarians, the domestic experience
may only be achieved once in a person’s lifetime, but she can re-create it for the next
generation, thereby recapturing, in a way, the “first fine careless rapture” of Browning’s
bird. Jane, in the end, marries Mr. Lloyd and returns to the home where she was raised, a
home that her husband had providentially bought years earlier. In Sedgwick’s aptly
named Home, a simple tale revolves around the hero’s “homesickness for the old
parsonage.” At one point, he says, “Shifted about as I have been from pillar to post, I
scarcely know what home is, from experience; but it is a word, that to my mind expresses
every motive and aid to virtue, and indicates almost every source of happiness” (5).
By replacing the metaphysics of paradise with the materiality of the perfect home,
Sedgwick is following Channing’s call for simplicity in religious instruction. Every
mother can understand that poor parenting leads to morally suspect children, so mothers

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would more likely reform their religion to purge the doctrines that lead to such poor
parenting. Likewise, mothers understand the pain of a broken family, so Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s placement of the abolition debate in the domestic nucleus of a kindly slave
family appeals to the same plain simplicity. As explored in the next section, the Indian-
Puritan wars and the Revolution itself are viewed as they warp or strengthen the family
unit. But Sedgwick never dramatizes the importance of education as a positive virtue.
Instead, she demonstrates the potential damage of a poor education. Mrs. Elton teaches
by example rather than words. Regardless of how well-educated our “pious ancestors”
were, they still fall prey to the falsity of doctrine at church and home (48). Education, at
best, should not disturb what is inherently good and pure in the uncorrupted child: “There
is an instinct in childhood, that discerns affection wherever it exists, and shrinks from the
coldness of calculating selfishness” (14). Jane, when John Mountain teaches her about the
unimportance of death to salvation, proclaims that she is “so teachable a make” (94).
Similarly, the madwoman Bet is incorruptible because her reason never developed
beyond childhood, and she is seen crying and praying at Jane’s bed when the latter
suffers at the hands of her aunt. Mrs. Wilson, of course, believes that “children have no
reason” (36).
The simplicity of Sedgwick’s theology—a covenant of works, from which the
earthly reward of a home-paradise is granted—extends to the simplicity of her language.
The predominant metaphors in the novel are taken from gardening, as if in parody of the
moral lessons put out by contemporaneous “tract societies.” No literate Christian, at least
no literate middle-class Christian mother, would fail to understand the figurative
language of A New-England Tale. Bet’s instinctual goodness, her ability to find goodness

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underneath the harsh Calvinism of her village and upbringing, is seen in her gardening:
“She would plant rose bushes and lilies there, and when they bloomed, pluck them up,
because she said their purity and brightness mocked the decay below” (17). As if
unsatisfied with the directness of the metaphor, Sedgwick has Bet tell Jane, a few pages
later, in response to Mrs. Wilson, “All the good seed that fell on that ground was choked
by thorns long ago” (19). Later, foreshadowing Jane’s return to her rightful home, Mr.
Lloyd remarks that the “beautiful honeysuckle... which thy tasteful hand has so carefully
trained about the window, is still thine” (41). And, when Jane hears valuable advice from
Mary Hull, her Methodist servant, those words “bear fruit” in her heart. Even when the
perfection of home replace the metaphysics of paradise, the imagery remains Edenic.
Nothing is more domestic and less sophisticated than the language of a garden’s
cultivation.
As shown in the next chapter, the Unitarians avoided confrontation with their
most successful rival, the revivalist sects that converted more souls during the mid-19th-
century than either the liberal or orthodox Congregationalists combined; and, for this
belief that their appeal to reason would somehow trump the populism of the revivals, they
were mocked as impotent reformers by Hawthorne. However, Sedgwick tried to confront
another rival for the souls of middle-class women, not just the Calvinist wing of her own
denomination. In A New-England Tale, she begins to confront the idea of romance,
adopting its form, mocking its artifice and frivolity, and absorbing its narrative tropes as
opportunistically as she had absorbed the narrative tropes of the Calvinist spiritual
biography. But, in mocking the romance, she merely imitated the form of the Waverly
romance itself, which already burlesqued the tales of knight errantry that Edward

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Waverly, like Don Quixote before him, read too avidly. When Sedgwick begins to write
historical romances, she extends this self-consciousness to history in general, adopting
the Puritan providential narrative in order to re-write the religious destiny of America.
Unlike the self-conscious historical revisions in Cooper or Scott, the general tone in Hope
Leslie and of Eliza Buckminster Lee’s Naomi is one of utopian optimism in the reform
efforts of future generations, not the nostalgic grief of an author longing for the world his
characters inhabit.

True romance, the kind mocked in hundreds of more realistic narratives from
Cervantes onward, is the story of travels to foreign lands, of exotic maidens, of a past that
resembles nothing from the actual past of the historians. By contrast, the Waverly
romance is the romance of restored bloodlines, of rightful heirs seizing control of the
family estate, of novelty extinguished and usurpers vanquished. Edward Waverly is
tempted by the Highland chieftan’s sister, but settles instead for the plainer cousin who
lives on the border. Oliver Edwards eventually marries the enlightened daughter of his
family’s usurper, restoring the Edwards family to Templeton’s control. This “restoration”
trope, which Scott employed as both a conservative philosophical device (maintaining the
past even though the native has been exterminated) and a narrative device (carrying the
characters’ lineage into the reader’s present day), becomes the liberal-Unitarian author’s
way of appealing to the romance readers of her age while still pushing a religious agenda
that would have clashed with the authors of more traditional Waverly romances. As
mentioned above, this trope becomes the spiritual and earthly union of paradise that goes
by the name of “home.” The characters in Hope Leslie, and in Eliza Buckminster Lee’s

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Naomi, hope to purge the unchristian elements that have polluted the New World’s
church by the end of Winthrop’s generation, and also hope to bring paradise to earth,
divine revelation to each individual, and eventually to purge the sins of the present day:
slavery, women’s marital subjugation to men, and Indian removal.
Both Hope Leslie and Naomi, romances of young dissenting women in the
transitional period between the first and second generations of Boston’s settlement, look
outside of Calvinism for spiritual precursors to the authors’ present-day liberal
Unitarianism. In Hope Leslie, the heroine attends the trial of the antinomian Samuel
Gorton, and the primitivism-turned-Catholicism of the Indian heroine, Magawisca,
expresses an Arminian mysticism closer to Sedgwick’s actual Unitarianism than to either
the Calvinism of the mid-seventeenth-century, or to the Catholicism of that period. In
Naomi, Quakerism is shown as the future of American religion, as the surviving faith
after the imminent implosion of Calvinistic hypocrisy, legalism, and corruption. Both
proto-Arminian faiths are seen as the goal of the Puritan settlement, a project which
Sedgwick and Lee both approve, and a goal that was squandered after the first generation
began to corrupt.
Lee’s novel appeared almost twenty years after Hope Leslie, but presents a more
simplistic revision of New-England Calvinist providential history. As with Sedgwick,
Lee was descended from an Orthodox Connecticut family that converted to “the Boston
religion” of Unitarianism. Her brother, Joseph Buckminster, was one of the intellectual
founders of American Unitarianism, bringing German theology into his scholarly work as
minister of the Brattle Street Church. Following J.D. Michaelis’s New Testament
introductions, Buckminster believed, as did Channing, that there is no religious authority

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outside of scripture, and that scripture itself was not written by God or wholly infallible.
Rather, he preached, according to Charles F. Forman, “that the New Testament books
were canonized not because they were inspired but because they were written by inspired
men, by the Apostles... In short, the Bible is not God’s word, but is the vehicle by which
that word comes to us” (Forman 15). According to Lawrence Buell, Naomi follows Lee’s
Memoirs as an attempt “to replicate and further, in the literary sphere, the liberation from
the dark night of Puritanism that she sees as the meaning of her family odyssey” (249).
However, even though this assertion is broadly accurate, Buell glosses over the form that
Lee chooses, the Waverly romance as providential history, and ignores the fact that Lee is
not presenting her family odyssey as one that sent each new liberalized generation away
from the ideals of the founders, but as one which liberalism brought closer to those
founders’ original ideals.
Naomi begins at the start of the second generation, after “one generation of the
emigrants had passed away.” Lee seems to idealize the first generation, as do partisans on
each side of the Unitarian Controversy, citing “the honored Winthrop, the Puritan saint,
Cotton, the humble-minded Shepherd of Cambridge, the strong-hearted Hooker, had all
passed away,--they and those noble women, their wives,--and had carried them much that
had formed the peculiar character, the grace and charm, of the first colonization of
Boston Bay.” She then claims that “the next generation were sterner and harsher men”
(3). The entire novel, according to the preface, will “present the bigoted age, the limited
views, the deep provocation, and the stern justice of our forefathers in their dealings with
the Quakers” (iii), but Lee does not imply that the first generation would have dealt less
harshly with outside elements because it was somehow theologically justified. Instead,

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she faults this first generation, Winthrop’s generation, for uprooting themselves from
England in the first place, a self-imposed exile that led to intolerance and misery when
the next generation took over, when “life was stripped at once, as with an iron hand, of all
gayety” (5). The world of Lee’s second-generation Boston is one that lacks gayety,
magnifies distinctions of rank, and oppresses its servant class, both white and black. But
the fault is still with the emigrants, not with their children.
At one point, Lee examines the differences between Winthrop’s journals, which
would form the providential narrative for the next generation of Puritans in Boston, and
his “chivalrous” letters to his wife. The latter, she writes, demonstrate an honorable link
to the home country:
The manners and sentiments of the best of our forefathers bore the stamp
of the best of English society in that age of luxury and far-advanced
civilization. To their high religious and moral qualities, they added
learning and accomplishments. They came from among the nobility and
the church, and although Puritans, those who first came to Boston had not
thrown of their allegiance to the church, and were not at that time the rigid
non-conformists that they afterwards became. (59-60)

Even the second generation, which was either brought to Boston in infancy or born on the
new continent, feels a diminishing link to the old world: “Home, as England was then
called, although with no expectation of ever returning there as to a home, was the place to
which all referred, as to the supreme umpire in opinion” (61). But this link, as each
generation moves further from its ancestral cradle, disturbs the more somber heirs: “The
chain that attached them to the mother country remained bright as ever; but they knew
that they should find their graves, as well as their homes in this.... the heart of England,
with every beat, sent the warm blood tingling to the very extremities of these colonies”
(9-10). Instead of creating a perfect new world for their children to thrive in, the founders

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created a theocracy that still clung to its English roots. Lee implies that the second
generation fails because it is neither English nor American; and a Calvinistic rather than
Arminian government will never move out of this limbo, in order to lead the New World
toward perfection, until it accepts the potential of universal salvation and paradise-on-
earth.
Unlike the second-generation Puritans, Naomi herself has a sense of “home” that
is tied to familial bonds rather than geography. After her father’s death, her mother leaves
Naomi with relatives in England while she travels to Boston with her new husband, the
wealthy merchant Aldersey. Ten years later, she sends for Naomi, who arrives to find that
her mother has died, her step-father wants to control the late mother’s estate, and a
younger sister has been entrusted to Naomi’s care. Before landing to find her mother
dead, Lee writes, “Naomi had always yearned for her mother, and had at length obtained
leave from her guardians to come to the New World, to meet once more the mother from
whom she had been separated nearly ten years” (16). From the boat, she sees a less
“savage” Boston than she had anticipated, “‘and this earthly paradise,’ she thought, ‘and
my mother! These are to be my home’” (17). When she receives the letter from her late
mother, giving custody of her sister to Naomi, the letter says, “Let her home be thy home,
her country thy country” (21-22). The tragedy of Puritanism, in this novel, is the tragedy
of a people who willfully sever their bonds to home, who fracture families in the name of
doctrine or greed. Because Naomi has a strong sense of home, she defends her beloved
Quaker servant, drawing the suspicion and eventual persecution of the community.
However, the major flaw of the Boston Puritans, according to both Lee and Sedgwick, is

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that their doctrine too easily allows hypocrites to pass through and earn the respect of the
otherwise moral divines.
Aldersey, the novel makes clear, is a hypocrite in both the Calvinist and the
liberal senses of the term. For the liberal, he is too concerned with money and status, too
dismissive of the bonds that turn a family manse into a home, too eager to disinherit his
stepdaughter. Lee allows no dramatic ambiguity, telling the reader that Aldersey “was a
man of outward forms, not genuine feeling” (77). But she adds that “he was not,
however, an unmitigated hypocrite,” if only because his hypocrisy never thrive in a
community that did not encourage the elevation of men of outward forms. The fault, Lee
writes, is with the upright in the community who “deceive him” because “they know he is
the toad ugly and venomous, but they are dazzled by the jewel borne on his front. All this
makes the true heart, the discerning spirit, weep, and fear that they great day of justice is
yet afar off” (23). And, drawing a distinction between the Calvinists of old New-England
and the Calvinists of her own day, she addes, “Such society, whether it be Puritan or
orthodox, can never be Christian” (24). The reason that hypocrisy is so easily admitted
can be inferred from the rigorous adhesion to the conversion narrative, on taking a man’s
word regarding his own salvation rather than relying on his good works.
The distinction between the approved hypocrite, Adersey, and the good-hearted
outcast, Naomi, is remarkably similar to the distinction between Mrs. Wilson and Jane
Elton in A New-England Tale. While Mrs. Wilson only assumes the outward forms of
faith, Jane has an “unfailing habit of regulating her daily life by the sacred rules of our
blessed Lord.” Likewise, compared to her hypocrite stepfather, Naomi “was eminently
formed to inspire love.” She has no need to examine the narrative of her own life, to

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decide whether or not righteous Biblical characters typify her experience, to point to her
good works as justification rather than just let the good works be an end unto themselves.
Unlike the hypocrite, she does not have to narrativize her own life, or to self-consciously
move between the scriptural and the actual: “With transparent truth on every feature, she
stood there in her pure upright self, and those who could appreciate the worth of her
character would alone adhere to her” (80). Because salvation is no longer a hermeneutic
process of comparing sensual data to scripture to a life-narrative, it begins to resemble a
mystical revelation, exactly the type of revelation that the Protestant Reformers hoped to
eliminate along with other supernatural Catholic elements.
From the start of the novel, Naomi is less a dissenter, or even just a mischievous
Hope-Leslie-like force for liberal good, than she is a saint who Lee keeps threatening to
martyr. Her soul is literally pure—it has been formed and maintained without any outside
influence, from birth to adulthood: “There had been few incidents in the life of Naomi.
Her character had not been formed by external circumstances. Hers was one of those pure
poetical souls, that had as yet had found no manifestation.” The world corrupts the pure
soul, as Sedgwick implied in demonstrating the innocence of children and the Calvinist
insistence on children’s deep depravity. Calvinists want to educate children out of the
corruption that they are born into, while Lee and Sedgwick want to preserve the inherent
goodness for as long as possible—hence the insistence on a strong sense of home, on an
insular childhood environment, on constant and universal education from liberal teachers.
Naomi is not just a Protestant saint, but a saint that hearkens back to the Catholic
church—“painting has succeeded in representing characters of this kind, in the early

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Madonnas”—and points to a wholly reformed future
1
. These “poetical souls” are pure
potential goodness, which “seem made for an age of perfection that does not yet exist.”
They are, in sum, “divine” (29). Because she is so completely bereft of Calvinist
ideology, Naomi is purely disinterested martyr, as well. Although Lee admires
Hutchinson, she still complains that the antinomian exile was cursed with “inordinate
self-esteem,” and that “the slimy trail of spiritual pride had sullied the white robes of her
martyrdom” (31-32). In other words, as Sedgwick noted, “Calvinist” and “self-love” are
inextricable.
The potential goodness, and divine innocence, of the uncorrupted soul was the
basis for the Unitarian argument against predestination. In particular, the liberal
dissenters pointed to the cruel Calvinist policy of condemning unbaptized babies to
eternal damnation, as Edwards famously did in his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry
God” sermon. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ambivalent romance of the early New Light
period, The Minister’s Wooing, depicts the anguish of mothers who are told that their
outwardly un-sanctified children will go to Hell. Naomi, which occasionally seems to be
more tract than narrative, explicitly makes this case against the Orthodox doctrine:
From one of these stern Calvinists is taken the tender blossom, the last that
had expanded upon the rough plant—an infant, unbaptized and
unconverted. The parent’s creed condemns that child to eternal flames; but
in the family it is remembered as the angel visitant, short in its tarry, but
leaving behind the fragrance of heaven. Its little birthplace, it cradle, is a
shrine where are gathered all tender memories; and to the other children,
this is the little saint who blessed the dwelling, and to meet whom in
heaven is the reward of exertion and of goodness. (301)

1
By the 1850s, as Jenny Franchot argues, American writers had begun to visit the Catholic countries of
Europe more frequently, and to lament the loss of certain aesthetic, if not spiritual, values. Lee’s analogy is
similar to the one made by Hawthorne a few years earlier, comparing Hester Prynne to “that sacred image
of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world” (Novels 63).

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In this environment, the fairly obvious goodness of Naomi can become suspect to the
church authorities, while the fairly obvious hypocrisy of Adersey can evade notice. The
baby is an emanation of a divine and holy light, one that will inevitably be dulled as the
child grows into a world of corruption. The liberal project is to create a world that will
maintain the uncorrupted innocence of children.
The Boston of Naomi is one where the Puritan mission, a noble one in the
abstract, has been corrupted by intolerance. In a providential scheme, the Fall turns out to
be the subject of the novel, what Lee calls “the Quaker irruption” (72). Her ministers
understand that something has degraded between the first generation and the second one,
but their sermons only hint at the problem, while their diagnoses are wildly wrong. For
example, the Reverend Norton
lamented the coldness and corruption of the age, the idleness and frivolity
of the young men, and the selfishness and degeneracy of their fathers; the
vanity and arts of seduction of the women; the long hair of the men, the
hoods and veils of the women. (52)

The problem of corruption inspires this jeremiad, but Norton fails to understand that
hypocrisy has actually preceded the corruption, not vice versa. Lee, of course, lets this
observation fall on his heroine:
Accustomed as Naomi was to regard outward simplicity as the expression
of inward purity and integrity, this insisting upon external conformity to a
mere sumptuary law seemed like the polishing of the rind and husk of the
fruit, when the kernal was absent or worthless. (53)

Whether or not Lee is familiar with Mather’s jeremiad—the metaphor of a kernal may
have just been a cliché—she still inverts the normal complaint of hypocrisy, blaming the
formalistic insistence on the proper Calvinist narrative for the allowance of corruption in
the Puritan community.

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This hypocrisy leads the second generation into intolerance, which further
degrades the community, which further diverts New England from its providential
mission. However, with divines such as Norton misdiagnosing the problem, intolerance
will only persevere. Lamenting the passage of Winthrop’s generation, Lee writes, “No
sooner did the occasion present itself than they became persecutors in their turn;
tolerance for their own opinions was the only tolerance admitted.” She adds that
“tolerance itself implies intolerance was an idea which had never dawned upon the
religious mind of the period” (18-19). The trouble with intolerance, though, is not its
obvious immorality, but also the willful ignorance of those who practice it. Following
Channing’s complaint that Calvinistic legalisms divert the mind from the comparative
simplicity of Christian scripture, Lee marvels that “it had never dawned upon their minds
that toleration could ever be the means of reformation for so dark a culprit [i.e. the
Quaker]” (11).
The Quakerism of the novel is not actually Quakerism as it existed in either the
seventeenth- or nineteenth-centuries. Instead, it is an Arminian rebuke to the
predestinarian cruelties of total depravity and limited atonement—or, as Lawrence Buell
writes, “a stick with which to beat the Puritans.” Buell adds that “Quakerism attracts
Naomi for the same reason that it attracts [historian George] Bancroft—its valuation of
natural piety above religious forms and dogma” (250). Furthermore, Lee’s Quakerism is a
challenge to the idea that revelation can only occur through a mind’s experience of the
material world, through constant self-examination and Bible study, through identification
with generations further and further removed from the actual experience of apostlistic
revelation. This issue, central to the liberal split from orthodox Congregationalism,

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doubled back on itself in the following decade, explored in the next chapter, when radical
Unitarianism began to yearn for this direct experience of revelation, transformed from
Calvinism into something less material In Lydia Maria Child’s 1824 romance, Hobomok,
the Unitarian author portrays Calvinist revelation as something closer to
Transcendentalism than to the experience recorded by Bunyan in Grace Abounding. In
the first chapter, the first-person narrator recounts the experience of the fanatical
dissenter, Mr. Conant, as he suddenly drops the Church of England for the Church of
Calvin:
It was then the spirit of God moved on the dark, troubled waters of his
mind... One by one all the associations connected with the religion of his
fathers, were rent away, till kneeling became an abomination, and the
prayers of his church a loathing. (9)

In this very same chapter, the narrator then recounts his own experience: “At that
moment, forgetful of forms, I knelt to pray that my heart might be kept from the snares of
the world” (15). Written in 1824, this is by no means a proto-Transcendentalist tract,
since Child, sympathetic to her Puritan ancestors, still wants to condemn their fanaticism.
This experience of revelation, however profound it seems, comes to the reader through as
many epistemological filters as an eighteenth-century Gothic novel: Child wrote under a
pseudonym, a “Frederic” who receives the manuscript from his nameless friend, who in
turn reveals that that manuscript is written by a second-level narrator, who then recounts
the lives of Hobomok, Mary, and all the other characters one whom he spies.
In Lee’s novel, the rebuke of Calvinist revelation is much simpler. For Naomi,
Quaker revelation is immediate, direct, and wholly individual; the experience of hearing
George Fox, in England, stays with Naomi on the boat to Boston, where “she felt that the

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soul was alone with God; that he was near to her, and that it needed no intervention of
church or priest, or even the Bible, to make her feel that he held her, and all things, in the
hollow of his hand” (37-38). Perhaps this is because Fox understands the necessary
simplicity of Christian doctrine, and his doctrine “presented only what the humblest mind
could comprehend, and yet its sublimity could fill the most expanded soul” (33).
Contrasting the Calvinistic noise of contradictory doctrine, the confusion of the trinity,
and the toleration of hypocrisy, Fox’s Quakerism is merely “the precious doctrine of the
inward light” (36). And, even though the new faith opens Naomi to the wonders of direct
revelation, it also alienates her from the intolerant community. To “mingle” with the
corrupt Puritans would somehow prevent her from being able “to purify my affections.”
Naomi is alone, but alone as a martyr, “alone in the world and alone in her religious
faith” (75).
According to the typology, though, her loneliness is not that of an outcast who
serves as the precursor to declension, not the Hutchinson or Williams or Gorton as they
appear in the histories of Winthrop and Edward Johnson. Naomi is more like a John the
Baptist, someone who recognizes holiness long before the rest of the world sees the light.
She is a liberal apostle. By ignoring the Calvinism of her ostensible home, Boston, she
casts off a doctrine that is “at this day revolting to common sense.” Instead, she clings to
her “inspirations of a higher power,” which, “to her uniformed spirit, took the form of
revelations from God” (300-301). As with the romances of Scott and Cooper, the author
brings the story into the present day, traversing fictional narrative into historical fact, by
pointing to a future which of course comprises the reader’s present day. Cooper directs
our attention to the graves of Lionel Lincoln’s family, or he inserts the story of his titular

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spy into the founding mythology of George Washington. Regarding the eventual reunion
between Naomi and her love, Herbert Walton, and their return from exile, Lee writes:
That this reunion of the two young hearts that have formed the principal
point of interest in my story did take place, at no very distant day, we are
assured by the family records and the government archives of a
neighbouring State. (323)

Additionally, the story of Naomi’s conversion to Quakerism is the story of a country’s
rejection of Calvinism in the present, and its conversion to Unitarianism in the future.
However, as with Sedgwick and Channing, Lee does not want to identify this faith by
name. Instead, it is merely “Christian.” Naomi, the book concludes, “looked back... upon
this infancy of her religious life, as though she had been but a babe in knowledge” (323-
4).

By recasting the start of the Puritan declension from the Half-Way Covenant to
the original Calvinist adoption of the Covenant of Grace, liberal novelists such as Lee
and Sedgwick invert the complaints that Reformation theologians made against the
Catholic Church. Revelation should be simple. The Word of God should make sense to
all rational men. Anything else falls under the category of “artifice” and “self-love.” But
Sedgwick found artifice in places other than Calvinist doctrine. Her novels create a
romantic history by ridiculing an older form of romance, linking the dangers of
ahistorical romance to the dangers posed by Calvinistic superstition. The simplicity of
“home” and “family,” for Sedgwick, is the kernel that lies underneath the cast-off hull of
religious obfuscation and ornamentation.

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While Lydia Maria Child did not explicitly condemn romance, she offered the
alterative to her readers in the form of an educational dialogue between a mother and a
daughter, in The First Settlers of New England, which tells the story that Sedgwick tells
in Hope Leslie. This text, even more so than Hobomok, demonstrates the mindset of late
1820s liberal culture toward the issue of the day, Cherokee displacement, which directly
preceded abolitionism as the major reform movement of antebellum northeastern
liberalism, and also provided authors of historical romance, such Cooper, Sedgwick, and
Child with a justification for the telling the story of the two major Colonial bloodbaths,
the Pequod and King Philip’s Wars. Child’s text may have been one of the first
revisionist histories that appeared as non-fiction, stating its goal, in the introduction:
to prove, from the most authentic records, that the treatment [the Indians]
have met with from the usurpers of their soil has been, and continues to
be, in direct violation of the religious and civil institutions which we have
heretofore so nobly defended, and by which we profess to be governed.
(iii)

Instead of soliciting the sympathy of her female middle-class audience through tales of
thwarted passion and daring chivalry, Child aims for the younger girls, the ones for
whom an innate sense of morality encourages sympathy for the Pequods and
Narragansets of the past, and therefore the Cherokees of the present. She also tries to use
compassion for the white oppressors as a Christian way to understand their crimes. In
Hobomok, she admits:
In this enlightened and liberal age, it is perhaps too fashionable to look
back upon those early sufferers in the cause of the Reformation as a band
of dark, discontented bigots. Without doubt, there were many broad, deep
shadows in their characters, but there was likewise bold and beautiful
light. (6)

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In First Settlers, she explains to one of the girls that the white man did not slander the
Indians as savages because the latter deserved the appellation, but because the white man
felt terribly guilty about his crimes against the Indians. She writes, “People seldom
forgive those whom they have wronged, and the first settlers appear to have fostered a
mortal aversion to the Indians, whom they had barbarously destroyed” (13).
Although writing fiction, Sedgwick also hesitates to remove her narrative from
the educational form that Child uses. In fact, Sedgwick condemns romance on the same
grounds that Defoe and other Puritans condemned the form, as a species of papist
falsehoods set apart from the realism that Protestant authors favored. Even worse,
romances encourage young women to lie. Elvira, Mrs. Wilson’s daughter in A New-
England Tale, says, “I always fancy, when I read a novel, that I am the heroine, and the
hero is one of my favourites; and then I realize it all, and it appears so natural.” It is no
surprise that she cannot comprehend Jane’s resistance to her fibs, “that it never occurred
to her, that the falsehood was the difficult part of the errand to Jane” (40). She is not evil
like her brother, nor hypocritical like her mother, but merely untethered from reality,
unable to examine her own actions and to draw the proper conclusions that even a simple
child would be able to comprehend. After one deception, “Elvira felt some shame at her
own meanness; but levity and selfishness always prevailed in her mind, and she soon lost
all consciousness of realities, and visions of dances and music and moonlight floated in
her brain” (47). By the novel’s end, Elvira allows herself to be seduced by the school’s
dancing-master because of the man’s French accent. Whether she is duped or merely
delusional, she tells Jane, “Lavoisier is a Count in disguise. Oh! If you could only hear
him speak French; it is soft as an Eolian harp” (140).

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However, unlike the Orthodox divines who more or less agreed with this
assessment of romance, Sedgwick believes that romance does not necessarily produce
lies, Catholic superstition, and European hedonism, but acts an instrument that might
soften an already Calvinism-softened mind. In other words, Elvira does not float into the
clouds of romance because the books overpower her otherwise-inherent reason, but
because she has been primed for deception by her religious education, taught by the
Calvinist community to stifle her reason and to obscure her behavior from the judging
eyes of her neighbors. When she complains that “nobody feels for me,” Jane replies, “It is
impossible... to feel for those who have no feeling for themselves” (140). While romance
encourages “well-concerned artifices,” requiring of its characters only beauty for the
women and chivalry for the men, Calvinism demands a similar adherence to form at the
expense of substance. For Sedgwick, romance is not to blame for Elvira’s amorality.
Instead, “it is enough to make any body deceitful to live with such a stern, churlish
woman, as Mrs. Wilson. The girl has infinite ingenuity in cheating her mother, and her
pretty face covers a multitude of faults” (55). Romance attracts Elvira because she has
been raised in the doctrine of self-love, withheld compassion, and near-superstitious
formalism. As with the “spoiled” girl who falls for David Wilson’s empty proclamations
of romance, Elvira never “testified that love by deferring her will to [her parents], or
suffering their wisdom to govern her childish inclinations” (90). Romance appeals to
those who lack the reason and compassion to evade self-love. For Defoe, Popery may
have been “a Romantick Religion,” but for Sedgwick the romantic religion is Calvinism.
Therefore, the author assures us that A New-England Tale is an “unromantic tale”
(112). Likewise, Hope Leslie “is no romantic fiction,” but an adaptation of historical

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truth, regardless of the Indian raids, destroyed families and villages, and violent
excitement in its narrative (12). In fact, Sedgwick reminds us that her tale is unromantic
in spite of these episodes:
We hope our readers will not think we have wantonly sported with their
feelings, by drawing a picture of calamity that only exists in the fictitious
tale. No—such events, as have feebly related, were common in our early
annals, and attended by horrors that it would be impossible for the
imagination to exaggerate. (72)

For Sedgwick, romance lacks seriousness, moral conviction, and a connection to the
material fact of human experience, and she makes sure to portray her heroine as
mischievous only in the cause of justice, her villain “a vagrant knight” (178), her flawed
first generation of Puritan settlers as a slightly deluded cadre that nonetheless undertook
their mission with the best of intentions. Unlike the crusaders of romance, the first
generation of New-England settlers pursued their cause without any “romantic
attractions. It was not assisted by the illusions of chivalry, nor magnified by the spiritual
power and renown of the crusades” (12). This generation, including the Winthrops, who
appear in this tale, as they do in Naomi, as exemplary leaders of a flawed mission, “were
not needy adventurers, nor ruined exiles.” Sedgwick credits them for making a
“voluntary” trip to found their utopian city on the hill (144). The anti-romantic language
here is Arminian. On the one hand, this first generation freely chose its own path to the
New World, something that its offspring and the subsequently corrupted generations
could never do. On the other hand, this generation did not pursue mere financial reward,
unlike Mr. Adersey and certainly unlike Sedgwick’s “vagrant knight,” Philip Gardiner,
who is revealed to be a seducer, a Catholic, and a hypocrite in knight’s clothing, someone
full of “self-love” (316).

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Even worse, the romantic Gardiner has no respect for the home or family, his
adventurous spirit leads him to fantasies of abducting Hope and vanquishing her true
love, Everall:
Would it not be a worthy act to tear this scion of a loyal stock from these
crabs of the wilderness and set her in our garden of England? And would it
not be a knightly feat to win the prize against a young gallant, a pink of
courtesy, while the unfledged boy is dreaming of love’s Elysium? (199)

Furthermore, he can barely disguise his contempt for Hope’s religious convictions,
turning disgust, under his hypocrite’s guise, into wan praise for a “blessed” era “when
youthful beauties, instead of listening to the idle songs of troubadours, or the fantastic
flatteries of vagrant knights, or announcing with their ruby lips the rewards of chivalry,
are exploring the mines of divinity” (211). This old type of romance is dangerous, unlike
the light irony of Edward Waverly infatuation with tales of chivalry. Eliza and Gardiner
are both diverted from reality—romance distracts the youthful mind, much a Channing
believed that Trinitarian doctrine distracted the Christian mind.
Although her Puritans regard romance in the same way that the author does, they
also recognize the possibility of declension from the very outset of their mission, and, as
with the Reverend Norton in Naomi, they do not understand that a fundamental flaw in
their theology has opened their communities to hypocrisy and intolerance. At the start of
Hope Leslie, what Anthony Kemp calls “the odyssey of removal” has already begun. The
frontier impulse, which leads, in both American history and in this novel, to the sin of
Indian removal, a sin on par in Sedgwick’s providential narrative with Lee’s “Quaker
irruption,” has led the Orthodox to Connecticut and Western Massachusetts, the very
place where they could coalesce around the time of the Unitarian Controversy, and the

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very place, not coincidentally, where Sedgwick’s own family presided as ministers and
politicians since the seventeenth century. William Fletcher, the father of Everall and
uncle of Hope, has gone to Springfield: “He was shocked when a religious republic,
which he fancied to be founded on the basis of established truth, was disturbed by the
out-break of heresies” (16). Even Springfield is too close to the heresies of Boston,
requiring Fletcher to move his family into the less-populated town of Bethel, where the
promise of righteousness outweighs the vulnerability to inevitable Indian raids.
The first-generation heretics that offend Fletcher are the antinomians such as
Hutchinson, Williams, and Gorton. However, the real corruptions, as Sedgwick makes
clear, are hypocrisy and superstition, neither of which is unique to this one novelist’s
view of American history. As seen above, Eliza Buckminster Lee throws the hypocrisy
charge back into the faces of those most willing to lob the accusation in the first place.
Superstition was the Unitarian’s explanation for the witch trials, for the intolerance of
alleged heretics, and for the impulsive destruction of Indian tribes—an explanation that
found its way into the competing biographies of Cotton Mather that appeared in the
decades after the Unitarian Controversy, biographies that compromised a sub-species of
the history books where liberal and Orthodox fought over America’s founding myth.
Here, the witchcraft superstitions emerge in an episode where Nelema heals a sick child
with Indian medicine, gets thrown into jail, and escapes back to her tribe with the help of
Hope Leslie. According to the letter that Hope writes to Everall, recounting this episode,
her fanatical servant, Jennet, “took up her testimony against ‘the old heathen witch,’”
rejected the claim that Nelema had saved a life by saying “it were better... to die, than to
live by the devil’s help,” and generally resisting the rational impulse that guides a good

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Christian, such as Hope. While Jennet has a “zeal” that “is not always according to
knowledge” (103), Hope, in spite of the alleged smell of sulphur and scorch-marks on the
ground of the prison, “was the only person present whose belief in her witchcraft was not,
as it were, converted into sight” (112).
As an enlightened proto-Unitarian, Hope must betray the form of Calvinism in
order to preserve the substance of Christianity. In short, she must play a hypocrite in front
of her superstitious and intolerant brethren, including the otherwise idealized Winthrop.
After Nelema’s escape, Hope “had now a part to play to which she unused—to mask her
feelings, affect ignorance, and take part in the consternation of the assembled village”
(120). Later, she obeys the best Christian intentions by secretly meeting the Indian
woman, Magawisca, who had saved Everall’s life, in order to visit with her sister, Faith
Leslie, who had been abducted during a raid at Bethel, raised in an Indian village, and
happily married to the Indian chief’s son, Oneco. The task of judging Hope’s secret
excursion falls to Winthrop, who ignores the obvious goodness of the girl’s mission by
claiming, “We should take heed, my worthy friend, not to lay too much stress on doing or
not doing—not to rest unduly on duties and performances, for they be unsound ground”
(177). In this sense, Hope is a hypocrite, proclaiming her righteousness in spite of the fact
that her behavior fails to conform to the proper typology. However, she conforms to a
nineteenth-century sense of anti-Calvinist righteousness, since “she was not addicted to
fear” (186), which Channing thought a morally palsying element of Calvinism, and she
lives according to the credo of “disinterestedness” (213).
What makes Hope so immune to the prejudices that even her most noble brethren,
such the Winthrops and their niece, Esther, fall prey to? What keeps her instinct for good

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pure and uncorrupted by the cruel ideology of her community, in the same way that
Naomi stays pure amid the Quaker irruption? First of all, she is blessed with the same gift
that was bestowed upon Jane Elton: a kind and conscientious upbringing by loving adults.
In explaining Hope Leslie’s character, Sedgwick points out: “It must be remembered that
she lived in an atmosphere of favour and indulgence, which permits the natural qualities
to shoot forth in unrepressed luxuriance” (122). Although this type of upbringing may
produce spoiled and hypocritical children, if the parents themselves are as dogmatic as
Mrs. Wilson, Hope’s “religion was pure and disinterested—no one, therefore, should
doubt its intrinsic value, though it had not been coined into a particular form, or received
the current impress” (123). And, even though Esther is a devoted student of Calvinism,
her adopted parents, the Winthrops, have provided her with the necessary love and
independence to overcome eventually the delusions of their theology. After all, “no one
excelled her in the practical part of the religion,” which is the novel’s code for her
inadvertent devotion to the covenant of works (135). Without the kindness of her
upbringing, she would be unable to reject the stern society of her elders at the end of the
novel, to admit to Hope that she has been a spoiled and indulged child, to remain single
and recognize “that marriage is not essential to the contentment, the dignity, or the
happiness of woman” (350). Here, unlike in A New-England Tale, the young generation
is wholly good, full of potential reformist zeal, beginning to wake up to the need for
tolerance, gender equality, and compassion for the Indians and enslaved Africans of the
mid-nineteenth-century.
Furthermore, Hope possesses what Jane, in A New-England Tale, possesses: a
simple yet pure yearning for “home.” What becomes a fatal inborn flaw in Hawthorne’s

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romances—his “Custom House” introduction to The Scarlet Letter laments that a
homeward yearning “is not love, but instinct” (128)—is instead, for Sedgwick, a material
representation of the abstract and unobtainable heaven that Calvinists hope to achieve.
Just as Robinson Crusoe waits for a supernatural intervention before realizing that the
simple presence of a barley shoot accounts for a miracle, the young women of Sedgwick
and Lee seem to harbor far humbler ambitions than their Puritan neighbors do. The
marriage plot that puts together Hope and Everall is really the second half of a plot that
begins with Hope’s mother and Everall’s father, who love each other but marry other
spouses. At first, Hope denies her feelings for Everall, believing them to be a form of
nostalgia: “Hope often spoke of Everall, for he was associated with all the most
interesting recollections of her childhood, and probably with her visions of the future; for
what girl of seventeen has not a lord for her air-built castles?” (139). But her rival,
Esther, has also made these associations, having fallen in love with Everall after the latter
tended to her sick bed at her beloved home in England. Hope’s advantage, though, lays in
the fact that her love for her cousin is a continuation her late mother’s love for Everall’s
father.
The utopian notion that a love two generations’ deep should come to fruition in
order to create a perfect home, where the future generations of an enlightened nation
might be conceived, demonstrates a tricky distinction, for Sedgwick between the
competing doctrines of the Calvinist and Arminian sects. Mr. Fletcher believes himself to
be passively gripped by his nation’s providential destiny, instructing his son on why he
must marry Esther: “We have laid the foundation of an edifice, and our children must be
so coupled together, as to secure its progress and stability when the present builders are

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laid low” (161). In an earlier chapter, though, he had admitted to Winthrop that he wished
Hope and Everall to marry, but only because it fulfilled his fantasy of marrying Hope’s
mother: “It has been the thought that came unbidden to my nightly meditations, and my
daily reveries, that I might live to see these children of two saints in heaven united”
(152). The very simplicity of this idea—love as a pure force that draws us to our
childhood homes—is rejected as fantasy by the Puritan community, corrupted and
uncorrupted alike. At first, Hope dismisses the idea as childish. Winthrop assures
Fletcher that “the affections of youth are flexible, and may be turned from their natural
bent by a skillfull hand. It is our known duty to direct them heavenward” (153). For all
their self-proclaimed realism, for all their scrutiny of this world for an absent God’s signs
and wonders, for all the careful type-analysis of their biographies, Sedgwick’s Puritans
ignore the plainest revelations. They want to fight nature, which, in the liberal-
sentimental world of the Unitarian romance, means fighting the instincts of childhood.
From the early chapters, Hope and Everall are fated: “Two young plants that have sprung
up in close neighbourhood, may be separated while young; but if disjoined after their
fibres are all intertwined, one, or perchance both, may perish” (33). By the final chapters,
the pull of home has become the pull of fate, and Everall hubristically resists his destiny
of marrying Hope and re-creating both the pre-war idyll of his Bethel youth and the
never-achieved bliss of his Fletcher’s marriage to Hope mother. Everall wants to separate
himself from Hope completely, “to break the chain of affection wrought in youth, and
riveted in manhood, and whose links seemed to him, to encompass and sustain his very
life.” In sum, he wants “to forget the past,” which he realizes cannot be done, asking,
“Who can convert to Lethe the sweetest draughts of memory?” (280).

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This simple theological foundation, drawn from Channing, leads to a revision of
national history, starting with then-current debates over the Puritan treatment of the
Indians during the period of the Pequod and King Phillip’s Wars. For liberal Arminians,
as well for New Light Calvinists who remained apart from the harsher Calvinism of older
New-England churches, the major political issue of the day, before the abolitionist
movement gained prominence, was the protest of Indian removal, particularly the
Cherokee dispossession of their tribal lands in Georgia. By the time of the second
Seminole War, in 1835, the causes of the Indian and the slave were intertwined in the
liberal mind. David Lee Child wrote:
There needs to be cited no other proof that the moral sense of this nation is
dead... than the knell which the voice of a Northern Senator lately sounded
in our ears, by proposing an appropriation of half a million dollars for
slaughtering the persecuted and helpless children of the forest.

David Child also cited those “provisions, which now degrade and crush the unhappy
descendants of Africa among us” (Kerber 277). Many opponents of the Seminole War
noted the presence of freed slaves among the tribe. Northern politicians speculated that
the entire procedure was a land grab by the Southern states, who hoped to establish
slavery there (278). Catharine Beecher, in 1829, published an open letter to “the
Benevolent Ladies of the United States,” and an Ohio paper, in that same year, succinctly
summarized how an otherwise providentially minded liberal might view the destruction
of the native population, claiming that the Indians were “the living monuments of the
white man’s wrongs” (Hershberger 21). Slavery was also cast into this very same
language, as a projection of the white man’s depravity, as a sin that fit the type of other
past persecutions, such as the Quaker irruption and the antinomian exiles.

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Even worse, both slavery and Indian removal were sins against the pure notion of
Home. Lee sentimentalizes the fate of Sambo, the black servant in Naomi, who embodies
the white man’s sin of removing people from their native homes in Africa. She de-
humanizes him in order to sanctify him:
Even the full, expressive eye of the dog, melting as it often is, is denied to
the African, as we see him in his degraded form. Ah! The time will come
when he will wear the form of a seraph, and put on his robes of beauty.
(47)

Lydia Child, in An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, laments
the discontinued international slave trade and its power to break up families, as well as
the existent slave trade in the southern states: “The power to separate mothers and
children, husbands and wives, is exercised only in the British West Indies, and the
republic of the United States!” (45). Harriet Beecher Stowe also portrayed slavery as a
sin against Family and Home, with Tom’s suffering due not just to his cruel treatment by
Simon Legree, but his separation from his family. As Stowe wrote in The Key to Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, “The worst abuse of the system of slavery is its outrage upon the family;
and, as the writer views the subject, it is one which is more notorious and undeniable than
any other” (133).
2
Certain critics, such as Ann Douglas, once characterized this domestic
allegory as the simultaneous sentimentalization and feminization of American culture, a
charge which rarely gets made anymore, now that the female-centered sentimental novel
has become a popular field of study for scholars of antebellum American literature.

2
The connection between abolitionist novels, especially Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and domestic ideology is
made in the first chapter of Gillian Brown’s Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century
America, Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

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In this cultural atmosphere, Sedgwick cleverly retains the providential narrative of
her Puritan ancestors in Hope Leslie, just as she retained the spiritual narrative in A New-
England Tale, but casts the Calvinists as hypocrites, their actions as the corruptions that
must be overcome, and the Indians themselves as sanctified followers of a still-unnamed
liberal theology. Perhaps because she is a Catholic convert, Magawisca is familiar
enough with Christianity to recognize the hypocrisy of her opponents:
[Her] reflecting mind suggested the most serious obstacle to the progress
of the Christian religion, in all ages and under all circumstances; the
contrariety between its divine principles and the conduct of its professors
which, instead of always being a medium for the light that emanates from
our holy law, is too often the darkest cloud that obstructs the passage of its
rays to the hearts of heathen men. (51)

Unlike Winthrop, she recognizes that plain goodness requires no formal justification, as
when she warns Hope that Faith no longer can speak English, but is nonetheless able
communicate: “Your sister hath a face that speaketh plainly, what the tongue should
never speak, her own goodness” (192).
Whether or not the Indians in Hope Leslie are the perfect Arminian Christians that
the novel’s heroine represents does not, in the end, matter. What matters is that the
Indians characters have the same strong sense of home and family, and that their actions
are not motivated by savage cruelty, nor the abstract sense of warrior honor that Cooper
imagines, but by the simple need to retain the structure of their families. Magawisca’s
father, Monomotto, initiates the massacre at Bethel in order to save his daughter, which,
inadvertently, results in the destruction of Fletcher’s family. “In this extremity,”
Sedgwick writes, “he determined on the rescue of his children, and the infliction of some
signal deed of vengeance, by which he hoped to revive the spirit of the natives, and

136
reinstate himself as the head of his broken and dispersed people” (57). And, when Hope
wants to take her sister back Boston from a love marriage to Monomotto’s son,
Magawisca objects on the grounds that the separation would be not just cruel, but also
unnatural: “I cannot send back the bird that has mated to its parent nest; the stream that
has mingled with other waters to its fountain” (187). The logic here is as simple and
inarguable as the logic of pairing Hope and Everall, the two plants that share the same
soil.
In this providential narrative, the competing theology that will triumph over
Calvinism in the nineteenth century is never referred to by name. Unlike in the
ambiguously set A New-England Tale, though, the author cannot credit a Unitarianism
that does not yet exist in the 1640s. Here, her two precursors to present-day Unitarianism,
the Antimonian heresy of Samuel Gorton and the mystical-animist Catholicism of her
Indians, have about as much to do with their real-life antecedents as Lee’s Quakerism
did. According to Philip Gura, Gorton’s theology was, in fact, closely tied to the English
originators of the Quaker faith: “He argued for an essential divinity in all human beings, a
divinity that was defined by the Holy Spirit’s presence and that precluded any arbitrary
distinctions (be they religious or politics) between saints and sinners” (“Radical” 86).
Although Unitarians denied the literal presence of a Holy Spirit, Sedgwick would have
been sympathetic to the Arminian logic of Gorton’s sect, to the believe that an individual
was capable of recognizing his or her own revelation. In particular, as Gura quotes
Gorton, the latter tried to de-temporalize the narrative of sin, conversion, and
regeneration, writing:

137
That doctrine which ties the death of Christ to one particular man in one
time and age of the world, as being the scope and intent of God’s will
concerninge the death of his son in the salvation of the world, that doctrine
falsifies the death of Jesus Christ, and sets men upon the law of workes in
the ground and matter of their salvation, by which law no man is justified.
(88)

Worse for both Gorton and Sedgwick, the temporalization of Christ’s deliverance of
mankind prohibits the establishment of paradise on earth, since man, full of self-love and
constantly scrutinizing his own biography, will only be working toward his reward of
paradise after death. As summarized by George Arthur Johnson, who lumped Gorton
together with similar thinkers:
The Finders felt that it was the Sprit, descending upon Jesus at baptism,
which raised him above ordinary men and made him immortal. They
believed that like him, true Christians possessed of the Holy Spirit could
reach perfection on earth and attain immortality after death. (302)

The past heretics are the present-day saviors of both the country and the American
church. Sedgwick offers readers the second-to-last step in her providential narrative, the
groundwork laid for the final work of reform. With true Christianity presented as so
simple a goal, as long as the artifices of Calvinism and romance can be first stripped
away, and the objects of past sin, Indian removal and slavery, so precisely named, the
intended reader of these romances, the middle-class liberal New England woman, would
be forgiven in her belief that the opponents to her righteous cause had been vanquished.
However, a more self-conscious strain of romance emerged closer to the Civil War, one
which took into account another rival to both liberal Unitarianism and Orthodox
Calvinism: the attempt by those called (and eventually calling themselves)
Transcendentalists to return the experience of revelation to the individual, and therefore
to de-historicized revelation. This further reformation of the Congregationalist church

138
occurred during a period of radicalized reform, beyond even the abolitionism and Indian
rights movements that occupied Sedgwick and Child. Hawthorne, who wrote his full-
length romances nearly three decades after the fad for the Waverly romance had taken
hold in America, would de-historicize the genre in order to satirize the push for reform.

139
Chapter 3

“The Hall of Fantasy”:
Transcendentalist Reform in Hawthorne’s Tales and Romances

Based on most available evidence, Nathaniel Hawthorne, aside from an
abbreviated stay at Brook Farm, had only a familial relationship with the
Transcendentalists. Even his Brook Farm journals and letters, full of self-gratified
descriptions of his daily labor, report little ideological affinity with the project.
1
In Henry
James’s biography, the mention of Transcendentalists comes with a disclaimer: “always
putting Hawthorne aside, as a contemporary but not a sharer” (65). F.O. Matthiessen, in
American Renaissance, draws attention to the mutual antipathy that Emerson and
Hawthorne had for each other’s works, with the former saying, in 1842, “Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good
for anything, and this is a tribute to the man,” and the latter mocking Emerson’s lofty
persona as “the mystic, stretching his hand out of cloud-land, in vain search for
something real” (194). In his journals, Hawthorne twice mentions reading The Dial only
as a “soporific,” and once how he disapproves of a particular article by Alcott, which “is
not very satisfactory, and... has not taught me much” (Notebooks 374). For many literary
scholars, Hawthorne’s associations with the Transcendentalists constitute an accident of
geography and timing, a social obligation that he abandoned when he returned to Salem

1
In only a few short months, he passed from “I feel the original Adam reviving within me” to “oh, labour is
the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutified!”
Although he was a hard, enthusiastic worker, he eventually found himself asking, in a letter to Sophia, “Is it
a praiseworthy matter that I have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and horses?” He
then provided the answer that he would provide in Blithedale, “It is not so” (Francis 49).

140
and began working at the Customs House. He may have married into the circle—his
wife’s sister, Elizabeth Peabody, was a committed educational reformer, sold the newest
German philosophy at her Boston bookshop, and hosted Margaret Fuller’s
“Conversations”—but he kept out of the controversies, both in private and in print.
On the other hand, Hawthorne’s many departures from the group may only
strengthen his claims to membership. He may have not been a full-throated admirer of
“the club,” but the old academic question of “who was really a Transcendentalist?” is
usually followed by the question, “Was anyone really a Transcendentalist?” According to
various commentators, Ripley was just a Fourierist labor reformer, Alcott a schoolteacher
with pretension to the ministry, Brownson an incipient Catholic Marxist, Parker just
biding time until returning to the Unitarian pulpit and leading the abolitionist movement.
Of course, Emerson’s disputes with the group he essentially founded are as extensive as
his disputes with the group that he had left, the Boston Unitarian church. Fuller’s greatest
work is seen as her post-Brook-Farm journalistic excursions overseas. So, whether or not
Hawthorne identified himself as a Transcendentalist is irrelevant to the effect that his
association with the group left on his writing, particularly the early tales, which betray a
deep familiarity with the group’s radical take on Revelation, such as Brownson’s view of
the atonement as a final meeting of the Spiritual and the Material, and Emerson’s view of
history as perpetual regeneration. Even contemporaries outside of the Concord saw fit to
include Hawthorne in that coterie. In a review of the second edition of Twice-Told Tales,
Poe regrets Hawthorne’s allegiances, blaming certain tendencies toward allegory on “the
phalanx and phalanstery atmosphere in which he has been so long struggling to breath,”
an allusion to the Fourieriest commune system that Ripley adapted into the Brook Form

141
experiment. Poe finishes his review with a thorough repudiation of the Concord circle:
“Let him mend his pen, get a bottle of visible ink, come out from the Old Manse, cut Mr.
Alcott, hang (if possible) the editor of The Dial, and throw out to the pigs all his odd
numbers of The North American Review.” This passage, the conclusion to an otherwise
admiring review, goes on to assures Hawthorne that his works in the volume are not
“transparent,” and insists that the solution is for Hawthorne to cut himself out of
Concord, something that he did in 1846 (587).
2

Transcendentalism, as a movement, began in much the same way that
Unitarianism or Puritan Calvinism or the antinomian heresies all began. Just as the lapsed
Calvinists of Unitarianism, led by Channing, sought to replace the otherworldly City of
God with the worldly perfections of Home, so did the lapsed Unitarians of
Transcendentalism, led by Emerson, seek to replace the otherworldly revelation of God to
man with the comparatively immediate revelations of transcendental human reason.
However, while Channing adhered to the form of Reformation historiography,
substituting utopian promises of perfection for the nostalgic garment-rending of Orthodox
Calvinism, assuring his followers that he only sought to dismantle the theology of
Calvinism, while retaining the Puritan spirit of reviving the true Christianity of the early
church, Emerson and his followers advocated the destruction of old forms as the very
goal of their philosophy. For the Transcendentalists, reform was not merely the way to
achieve a prior perfection, or to cure America of its social ills; reform, instead, was the

2
Hawthorne likely had this review in mind, nine years after the original publication of Twice-Told Tales,
when he wrote a self-deprecating preface for the re-print: “even in what purport to be pictures of actual life,
we have allegory,” and “the book… if opened in the sunshine, is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of
blank pages” (Tales 1152).

142
birthright of each new generation. De Tocqueville saw the Reformation roots of what he
called “the American philosophical tradition.” According to this genealogy, Luther
forged the skepticism that Descartes, in science, would eventually wield, and which the
Americans, even those who had never read Descartes, would adopt as hyper-rationalistic
individualism. “So the Americans,” de Tocqueville wrote, “have needed no books to
teach them philosophic method, having found it in themselves” (236). But the Americans
who claimed to “have needed no books” did, in fact, need books. Emerson’s philosophy
bore the negative heft of all that he had read and rejected, starting with Unitarian
theology; and the historical view of his contemporaries, including Hawthorne,
emphasized the necessity of rejecting the past while still remaining exceptionally well-
versed and their local and national histories.
By the time that Hawthorne wrote his longer romances in the early 1850s, the
failure of early Transcendentalism’s radical historiography was plain to anyone who fell
within the Concord intelligentsia. The Transcendentalism of Emerson, which actually
disdained practical reform, led to isolation, solipsism, and the insubstantial comfort of
romantic fantasies. The philosophy of the more mainstream Transcendentalists, who were
dedicated to practical reform, led to violence and dissention—for example, Parker was
revealed to be one of the sources of financing for John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry raid. In
both cases, man lacks the ability to “re-form” his world, either in the transcendent reason
of the mind, or in the practical experiments built by such men as Alcott (education) or
Ripley (labor). Nor can history, as shown in the early tales and The Scarlet Letter, be
revised to serve the purposes of contemporary reform, a movement that was leading
slowly toward Civil War. The attitude of Hawthorne, an abstractly liberal yet politically

143
gradualist abolitionist, toward all types of reform, is best summed up by how he stated
Hester Prynne’s predicament in The Scarlet Letter: “She could no longer borrow form the
future to help her through the present grief” (185). Surrounding the author, however,
were fanatics and radical reformers who instead resembled Catharine, the Quaker mother
of “The Gentle Boy,” who “had as evidently violated the duties of the present life and the
future, by fixing her attention wholly on the latter” (Tales 122). This chapter looks at the
changes that Hawthorne made to the antebellum historical romance, incorporating the
widespread belief (at least in Concord) of immediate and direct revelation, the mania for
reform in all areas of society, and the tension between those who would borrow from the
future for the sake of the present, and those who would borrow from the present for the
sake of the future.
In order to write about Hawthorne’s participation in the historical revisionism of
the years between Scott’s Waverly was published and the Civil War, we must re-visit the
discussion of the Novel, the Romance, and their apparent indistinctiveness—a battle
recounted in the Introduction. Reviewing the impact of The American Novel and Its
Traditions, John McWilliams notes that Richard Chase allowed American scholars to
ignore the fact that the word romance, in mid-nineteenth-century criticism, referred to
Scott’s “historical romance,” and then “elevated [romance] into a universal, fictional type
with a particular American application” (“Rationale” 74). The title of Richard Poirier’s
book, A World Elsewhere, sums up the attempt by a generation of New Critics to impute
an angry, asocial, nearly savage character onto writers as cosmopolitan as Cooper or as
wrapped up in the Concord intelligentsia as Hawthorne. In fact, this conception of the
American romancer, derived from Lawrence’s influential Studies, may have been

144
designed to fit only one author, Melville, the sole member of the American Renaissance
canon who wrote ahistorical romances.
3
In the last two decades, though, the New Critical
conception of the American romance as an isolated howl from the wilderness of a new
country, a country that lacked the history and caste structure inherent in the realistic
novels of “the great tradition,” has been revealed as a fantasy of the mid-twentieth
century academic, steeped in Freud and disgusted by totalitarianism and bloodshed of his
century. In fact, the Romance was a very different genre, one that shared the same
progenitor as the novels of “the great tradition,” Walter Scott, and paid minute attention
to historical details and manners. One aspect of Chase’s thesis, though, remains relevant:
Hawthorne, even though he was conscious of his genre’s tropes and forbearers, still
remains a unique case, at least compared to the authors of historical romance that were
explored in the previous chapters.
By the 1850s, when Hawthorne wrote and published his three America-set novels,
the historical romance, as invented by Scott, and adapted by authors such as Cooper,
Sedgwick, and Stowe, had gone from literary fad to predominant literary form. When
Hawthorne took up the historical romance, he not only used the form as a self-conscious
exploration of history, as Cooper and Sedgwick had done, but also as a self-conscious
exploration of fiction itself, and of the destructive relationship between the subjectivity of

3
There are plenty of obvious exceptions, such as Billy Budd, and especially Pierre, which focus
extensively on its hero’s Revolutionary lineage before completely perverting the sentimental romance’s re-
inheritance plot. Although Melville wrote Pierre as either a parody of the sentimental historical romances
discussed in the previous chapter, or as a genuine (and failed) exemplar of the form, he was still trying to
benefit from the fad. To Sophia Hawthorne, he promised “a rural bowl of milk” rather than his usual “bowl
of salt water” (Parker 75). To a potential London publisher, he promised a tale “calculated for popularity”
(107). Even though this novel fits the genre explored in this study, the historical romance, Melville’s
religious views were shaped by an idiosyncratic New York Dutch Calvinism, not the liberal-turned-
Transcendentalist theology of the present chapter. Hershel Parker notes Melville’s personal familiarity with
the Sedgwicks, particular Catharine, and speculates that Pierre’s Isabel is introduced “with a needle in her
hands, sewing” in order to mock Sedgwick’s view of poverty as a moral vice (65).

145
the Transcendentalist revelation experience, the inevitable solipsism of utopian reform
movements, and the severance of American theology from all of its traditions, including
its tradition of lamenting the loss of tradition. For Hawthorne, the final phase of
antebellum liberal-Congregationalist reform was not one where reformers wanted to
improve upon the failed experiments of the past. Instead, the era was one in which the
reformers, many Unitarian, many Transcendentalist, all members of a high New England
caste, wanted to rescue “true religion” from vulgar revivalist enthusiasm, but instead
promoted an individualistic mode of revelation that could not be adequately reconciled
with the challenges of large-scale reform. By the end of the 1840s, when the
Transcendental Club had broken up, and many of its members had gone back to the
Unitarian pulpit in order to preach social reform, the failure of this latest movement crept
into Hawthorne’s full-length romances: on one side lay the further solipsism and
abstraction of Emerson’s philosophy, while on the other side lay the vulgarity,
controversy, and national self-destruction of the radical social reformers, particularly the
abolitionism that Theodore Parker preached in a congregation that included men such as
William Lloyd Garrison. What Richard Chase and others consider the unique “American
romance” is instead unique only to Hawthorne himself—a refinement of the more
traditional Waverly romance that the author had attempted years earlier, in Fanshawe.
Hawthorne’s association with the world of Transcendentalist theology and liberal reform
movements directly led to his de-historicization of the historical romance.
As with the previous chapter, I will first explore the theological controversy that
gave rise to this particular form of post-Waverly romance: the second-generation
Unitarian schism that became the Transcendentalist controversy, here tied together with

146
the radical social reform movements that became Transcendentalism’s practical extension
in the world. I will examine the old dramas of supersession and declension, as played out
in Emerson’s essays and sermons, and how the celebration of youth, novelty, and
universal revelation that he preached in the 30s and 40s took on a darker aspect in the
later writings and sermons of his brethren, particularly Theodore Parker, who returned to
the Unitarian pulpit as a radical social reformer. In placing Hawthorne in this context, I
will first look at his critique of Transcendentalism’s destructive philosophy, examining
the tales that Hawthorne wrote while still embedded with the Concord coterie. Then I will
discuss Hawthorne’s adoption of the Waverly romance as a conservative, though still
Emersonian, response to the reform movements in his midst, both from the Unitarian
Church and from Transcendentalists such as Orestes Brownson, who advocated for the
total abolition of inherited wealth. In The Scarlet Letter and Seven Gables, home and
inheritance are unavoidable fixtures of earthly existence, not the foundations of utopia
that appear in Sedgwick’s novels. However, there is no sentimentalization of origins,
either, no lost perfection, and certainly no Emersonian sense of “perpetual youth” (Essays
10). The liberal Waverly romance is satirized by Hawthorne in order to question the
reform impulse in general—reform at the level of family, society, or church governance.
Finally, Hawthorne’s last America-set novel, The Blithedale Romance, posits that all
reform, in the worldly sense of remaking social institutions, in the theological sense of
conversion, or the artistic sense of mimetic narrative representation, ends with
insubstantial ideas that refine away into nothingness. By this point, the mid 1850s, a
former Transcendentalist such as Theodore Parker could complain that his coterie’s
philosophy had essentially gotten in the way of their social goals, that the liberals could

147
now only draw people away from the revelations offered through evangelical revivals by
working toward a utopian paradise on earth. Hawthorne, though, in his conception of
romance, had always mocked the very notion of a philosophy built on “pale negations”
could defeat the enthusiasm of revivalist evangelicalism.

For all the literary and cultural significance of Transcendentalism, the origins of
the movement lay in the issue of revelation that had been so inelegantly “solved” by
rationalist Unitarianism. The founders of the movement were Unitarian ministers who
seemed dissatisfied with their sect’s diminishing spiritual rewards, and found a way to
retain the rationalism of modern religion while still opening up the mind to what had
once been thought, in more supernatural times, as the invisible presence of the divine,
which the Transcendentalists now sought in the idealism of Kant, as well as in Kant’s
English-language disciples, Coleridge and Carlyle. Responding to skeptics, many of
whom took issue with the philosophy’s German origins, Charles Mayo Ellis wrote a
defense, six years after the movement’s first published tracts, yet still in the thick of its
controversial early period, called An Essay on Transcendentalism. Ellis offered a simple
explanation for how Transcendentalism hoped to take revelation beyond its empirical and
rationalistic Unitarian roots: “man has ideas, that come not through the five senses, or the
powers of reasoning; but are either the result of direct revelation from God, his
immediate inspiration, or his immanent presence in the spiritual world.” Various
Transcendentalist thinkers had advocated one or more of those theories—Parker had

148
spoken of inspiration, Emerson of an immanent presence in nature—but Ellis synthesized
the allied strains into one coherent description (Gura Transcendentalism 10).
4

Above all, Transcendentalism was a religious movement,
5
and post-Reformation
religious movements all gesture toward the same historiographical form. As with
Calvinist Orthodoxy and Unitarian Liberalism, the Transcendentalists’ common
theology—putting aside their voluminous disputes—was based on the relationship
between history and individual revelation. Starting with Ann Hutchinson, the heretical
line of New England thought has always concerned the immediacy of individual
revelation.
6
By the end of the eighteenth century, the Orthodox had settled on a pattern,
outlined in Chapter 2’s discussion of Bunyan and Defoe, of introspective narrativization,
of finding Biblical resonances and common typological affinities in the temporal
exploration of one’s own life—in short, reading one’s own history in order to assure
sanctification. The Unitarians of the nineteenth-century placed revelation in the
exploration of Scriptural history itself—revelation as the end-product of the reason’s

4
This excerpt from Ellis’ difficult-to-find tract comes from Philip A. Gura’s indispensable American
Transcendentalism, a general discussion of the origins, practice, and dissolution of the core group. Other
works which explore “the club” in a more comprehensive way include:

5
While this should be a less controversial statement, a half-century of critical work on Transcendentalism
has tended to de-emphasize the religious roots of the movement in favor of its aesthetic products, following
the once-accepted thesis, advanced by Perry Miller, Ann Douglas, and others that considered the decline of
orthodox Congregationalist Calvinism to be a decline in “rigorous” American theology. Gura has done
excellent work on Transcendentalism’s primarily theological roots. David F. Holland has called for
scholars “to place the issue of revelation at the center of the Transcendentalist story,” recommending Dean
Grodzins’ study of Theodore Parker, American Heretic: Theodore Parker and American
Transcendentalism, Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002, as an admirable example (189).

6
For studies of the antinomian controversy that focus, in part, on the issue of revelation, look at
Winthrop’s Journals, as well as his Short Story of the Rife, Reign, and Ruine of the Aninomians, Familists,
& Libertines, that infected the Churches of New England; Edward Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence
of Scion’s Saviour. For modern scholarship, see David D. Hall, The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A
Documentary History, Durham: Duke University Press, 1990; or Eve LaPlante’s recent biography of
Hutchinson, American Jezebal: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, The Woman who Defied the
Puritans, New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

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engagement with the works of inspired men. According to the proponents of
Transcendentalism, along with their earliest critics, this final heretical dispute within the
liberal Congregationalist church rejected the empirico-historical view of revelation. The
Transcendentalists, following Kantian Idealism, found in the individual Reason an
instrument that could open oneself to personal revelation.
The history of Reformation, in Europe as well as America, has been a history of
dismantling the forms of ostensibly Christian doctrine in order to free the imprisoned
Christian spirit underneath. In the decades after the Unitarian controversy, there were two
paths that could be taken by those who wanted to reject the formalism of the mainline
churches: revivalism or Transcendentalism. Both of these ideologies spoke to what its
preachers identified as the youthfulness of their adherents, the pure aspect of the self that
could accept revelation without the intermediary of educated clergy and complex
doctrine, even those plainspoken ministers of Boston Unitarianism. While revivalism
converted far more souls, spread across the entire country, and continues to guide the
spirit of today’s evangelical Protestantism, the Unitarian establishment originally
considered Transcendentalism to be the larger threat, if only because it had derived
directly from their own ministers, many of whom, alarmingly, were groomed successors
to their family’s pulpits in the established Boston churches.
In 1836, a year that saw publication of many of the movement’s founding
documents,
7
along with the establishment of the Transcendentalist Club, Bronson Alcott

7
Bronson Alcott, Conversations with Children on the Gospels (particularly its long explanatory preface).
Orestes Brownson, New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature.
Convers Francis, Christianity as a Purely Internal Principle. George Ripley, Discourses on the Philosophy
of Religion: Addressed to Doubters who Wish to Believe.

150
proclaimed, “It is the mission of this Age, to revive [Christ’s] Idea, give it currency, and
reinstate it in the faith of men... It is to reproduce Perfect Men. The faded Image of
Humanity is to be restored, and man reappear in his original brightness” (xxxiii). This is
Reformation historiography at its simplest and most refined—asking Christians to strip
away the corruptions of the previous age, restore the prior perfection that came from an
uncorrupted understanding of the Divine, bring man closer to a direct revelation. But the
Transcendentalist movement also resisted the historical materialism of both the Calvinist
and Unitarian wings of the Congregationalist church. Instead of locating revelation at the
beginning of Christian history, at the presence of Christ to the Apostles, at the first
inspired recording of the Scriptures, this movement followed European Idealist
philosophy in placing the seat of revelation within each man, in the Reason that sat
adjacent to the Lockean Understanding, always primed for a revelation as full as the one
delivered to the apostles. As Ripley explained in another document from 1836, “The
word reason is used... not as the power of reasoning, of evolving derivative truth from
admitted premises; but in its highest philosophical sense, as the faculty of perceiving
primitive, spiritual truth” (Discourses 11). This Kantian conception in Reason provided
the movement with its defining heresy—in the eyes of the Unitarian Church, the
submission of Understanding to some pseudo-mystical inward divinity was a denial of
Scripture’s importance because it de-historicized revelation. Additionally, by yoking
together Idealist philosophy with older Protestant disputes about revelation, the
Transcendentalists, more than any other sect in two hundred years of New England
worship, took its followers outside of the historiographical model of supersession and
declension.

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As with the previous liberal-orthodox schism, the Transcendentalist controversy
began with the perceived stagnation and corruption of the established church—Boston
Unitarianism—at the end of its first generation. Previously, ministers such as Channing
had complained that Calvinism maintained formal church doctrines at the expense of the
true spirit of Christianity. Within two decades, similar complaints were being made about
Channing’s Unitarians. While still under attack from their usurped Orthodox
predecessors for being the religion of the socially prominent, of those complacent office
holders who owed their allegiances to the church structure rather than the theology
preached inside, the Unitarians began to make these same criticisms about themselves. In
1835, two years before Emerson inaugurated the Transcendentalist movement with his
Harvard Divinity School address, Henry Ware, Jr., a founding intellectual of first-
generation Unitarianism, complained that some of his congregants “maintain a pew in
church for the same reason that the worldly minded merchant asks his minister to say
grace when he has company to dine. It is decent, and is expected of him” (Cayton 93).
For dissenters, though, the trouble was with the wan formalism of the faith itself, the
project of providing a rational alternative to predestinarian Calvinism, while
simultaneously discouraging the emotionalism of the revival movement. Ministers such
as Ware wanted to encourage more than just rote church attendance, but at the same time
wanted to discourage vulgar enthusiasm. However, as Emerson warned in “The Over-
Soul,” “The history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm” (Essays 393). His
Divinity School address claims that “the need was never greater for new revelation than
now” (71), a sentiment echoed nearly verbatim in Hawthorne’s notebooks after a stay at
Emerson’s Old Manse in Concord: “We certainly do need a new revelation—a new

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system—for there seems to be no life in the old one” (352). Unitarianism had provided
new life to the Congregationalist church by showing that reason, through examination of
scripture, could arrive at the type of revelation experienced by followers of the early
church. As a refinement of the idea that reason alone led to revelation, Transcendentalism
fused materialism and mysticism: revelation, following Kant and the Coleridge of Aids to
Reflection, as a thoroughly in-born phenomenon, a result of the mind’s ability not just to
imagine the beauty of the world through the senses, but to it intuit Truth with faculties
that belong to every consciousness. In fact, Brownson foresaw the perfection of man,
uniting with the Divine, in the fusion of Materialist and Spiritualist.
The nature of revelation was the key doctrinal point of dispute between Unitarians
and Transcendentalists. The most commonly accepted post-Unitarian truism was that the
Bible, in the words of one Emerson sermon, is not “the revelation but the record of the
Revelation” (Sermons 82). As David F. Holland points out, a fad for learning Hebrew and
Greek, and for books teaching the common reader to understand “Jewish antiquity” had
quickly followed the Unitarian Controversy. In order to achieve the emprico-rational
form of revelation promoted by Channing, Ware, and Norton:
American readers were more aware than they had ever been of the
intricate processes by means of which their parlor Bible had come into
existence and of the linguistic, geographical, cultural, and historical
barriers that separated them from God’s original revelation. (185)

Holland convincingly depicts how Transcendentalism emerged from a culture where “the
only accepted revelation [was pushed] ever farther into the Hebraic past” (189).
However, the transcendentalists did not seek to avoid the Materialism of the late
Congregationalist Church.

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For Brownson, this fusion of two distinct strands of Anglo-European
epistemology actually represented the atonement. As with other reformation movements,
this soon-to-be Catholic convert saw a direct line between the earliest church and what
others saw as his current heresy. Protestantism “is, in fact, only Catholicism continued”
(Vol. III 130). The corruption of the recent Protestant church has come from its drift
toward Materialism: “what we call the Reformation is really a Revolution in favor of the
material order” (124). As with his Transcendentalist cohorts, though, who saw the
Reason as very much a part of the material order—not, Ripley contended, a “visionary”
or “mystical” philosophy—Brownson did not preach against Materialism in general. He
complains about men who travel to Europe, see the rites, architecture, and symbols, and
then “come back half Catholics.” He warns against the loss of direct experience that
comes from latter-generation rituals, where “Protestantism passes into the condition of a
reminiscence” (136). With the dynamic nature of history, the impossibility of going
backward, “We are to reconcile spirit and matter; that is, we must realize the
atonement… We must go forward, but we can take not a step forward, but on the
condition of uniting these two hitherto hostile principles” (139).
For the dissenting Unitarians, the Transcendentalists offered a method of
revelation which, in rejecting Channing’s appeal to the “man of plain sense,” necessarily
denied the historical reality of Christianity. The most famous attack, centered on the
Transcendentalists’ alleged rejection of biblical miracles, was Andrews Norton’s “A
Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity,” an essay that decried the “phantoms” that
Transcendentalists have “substituted for the realities of revelation” (239). For Norton and
the older Unitarian generation, following Channing’s claim that “this remarkable infusion

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of the spirit of the first age into the Christian records cannot easily be explained but by
the fact... that they are records of real convictions and of actual events,” the rational study
of history brings revelation. None of the popular Transcendentalist sermons or texts, at
the point where Norton issued his criticism (1839), had attacked the factual nature of
those Biblical passages that the Unitarians had chosen to confirm their own faith. But
Norton concluded, from the Transcendentalists’ elevation of the reason to the seat of
revelation, that they had therefore come to reject historical scholarship and empirical
examinations of the Christian “evidences” as the basis for revelation. He equates “the
rejection of Christianity” with “the rejection of historical Christianity,” and claims that
this rejection “is accompanied by the rejection of all that mass of evidence, which, in the
view of a Christian, establishes the truth of his religion” (259-260).
However, the “rejection of historical Christianity,” at least for Ripley and
Brownson, was only partial. The latter, in proclaiming the “atonement” or spirit and
matter, wrote that “progress is our law and our first step is Union,” but there was still a
telos, a moment where spirit and matter would join, and therefore a sense of Christian
history. Emerson, on the other hand, did offer a complete rejection of the Unitarian
conception of history (Vol. III 139). He had little use for scriptural analysis, a sentiment
echoed by Hawthorne’s description of the “dead” folios in the Old Manse, but the rest of
the Transcendentalist Club still employed the same view of history that previous
Reformation sects had used: reaching back to an older uncorrupted perfection,
regenerating the whole of Christiandom via the simplicity of their new doctrine and the
direct path that this doctrine opens up to revelation. Ripley did not believe in the inerrant
divine authority of the Bible—it “presents a history of the inspired men, to whom early

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revelations of God were made, but it is not, itself, the revelation, nor the immediate result
of that revelation” (Discourses 55). However, many Unitarians, including Channing and
Ware, did not believe in inerrant scriptural authority, as well. They tasked Christians to
use what they called Reason, but Transcendentalists recognized as merely Understanding,
to sort out what was imperfectly transcribed history, and what was the actual Word of
God. But Ripley went further. Nothing in the Bible, even perfectly understood, could lead
to revelation. The Word, from the lips of the divine, was deposited into “earthen vessels.”
These vessels were imperfect not because they were flawed, or because future
generations would harden their words into inflexible doctrine and oppressive church
governance, but because they had Reason: “All that was external, the whole costume in
which the divine truth was arrayed, partook of the peculiarities of the individuals to
whom it was committed; but the truth itself—the pure spirit of Christianity was
essentially separate and distinct.” The Apostles were individuals, and the Divine can only
reveal itself to them in the same way that the Divine can reveal itself to men two
millennia later. Christ was filled with God, but even he was an imperfect vessel,
imparting words to his disciples that only approximated the feeling of “constant
communion with his Spirit.” For Ripley, it is not the empirical Understanding that gets to
the divinity of Christ; rather, “it is the inward eye that beholds the glory of Christ”
(Discourses 16). And, because the Reason has no trouble perceiving the invisible, it the
Reason which naturally will commune with God’s Spirit, via Christ’s communion with
that Spirit. This revelation, for Ripley as well as Brownson, seems to fall either outside of
history or as the present-day fulfillment of history.

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Aside from claiming that they rejected “historical Christianity,” Norton and the
conservative Unitarians claimed that the Transcendentalist conception of revelation had
created a solipsistic conversion experience based pure Idealism. This philosophy, derived
from what Norton saw as German falsehoods, delivered to America via Coleridge’s Aids
to Reflection, was a “confusion of thought and unmeaning language, connected with the
theory, that Christian faith has its origin in the mind itself, independently of the Christian
revelation, and with the denial of the truths of religion” (277). By Norton’s rhetoric, the
Transcendentalists had converted to an insubstantial ideology, relying on “phantoms”
rather than “reality.” He contrasts his own sect of loyal Unitarians, which wants
“certainty,” with these new infidels, “the dwellers in the region of shadows” who
“complain that the solid earth is not stable enough for them to rest on. They have firm
footing on the clouds” (260). An in-born experience of God in nature, a purely subjective
relationship to the divine—an experience that prompts Emerson to say that “the
foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit” (Essays 45)—contradicts the empirical
basis for revelation that Channing and his followers had argued. Henry Ware, in the
Christian Examiner, supported Norton’s criticism, scoffing at this “set of newly broached
fancies” that the Transcendentalists think might actually “quicken and reform the world”
(Faust 323). The criticism is equally pointed at the practical reformers, such as Alcott and
Hawthorne’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth Peabody, who wanted to reform education, or to
Emerson himself, who preached a more elemental kind of reform in Nature, where “the
beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new
creation” (Selected Writings 12)

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Although their own words confirmed the fear that they were rejecting the
historical Christianity, and that they did propound a Kantian Idealism with regard to
revelation, Brownson and Ripley downplayed their sect’s radicalism. Ripley claimed to
have carefully avoided “the region of extravagance and mysticism,” and insisted that “no
one who has read my article understandingly can suppose that I intended to cast any
doubt on the reality of the Christian miracles” (Discourses 34).
8
Just as the Unitarians
accused the Calvinists of propagating a theological system that Calvin himself would
have deplored, and just as the earliest reformers accused the Roman Catholic Church of
propagating a Christianity that would have disgusted Christ, the lapsed Unitarians of the
Transcendental Club accused the Unitarian church of hypocritically betraying its own
appeal to simplicity, democracy, and reason. While reviewing Norton’s Evidences of the
Genuineness of the Four Gospels, but likely responding to the earlier attack on “the latest
form of infidelity,” Brownson accused Norton of believing that “Christianity is an
historical fact, to be established by historical evidence alone” (Vol. IV 193). To the
Calvinists who had created a complex narrative pattern to account for an individual’s
revelation, the Unitarians had proposed a simpler answer: just look, with an open yet
skeptical reason, at the historical validity of the Gospels, and once the words and deeds of
Christ have been satisfactorily confirmed, then that confirmation alone is itself a

8
The dispute over miracles provided a coherent through-line for the entire Transcendentalist controversy,
but the wider dispute was over revelation. Ripley was only partially honest about his intentions here. While
he does not dispute the possibility that miracles happened, as described in the Gospels, he does dispute
whether or not their existence, and the acceptance of their existence by future generations removed from
first-hand witness, should be used to affirm a Christian’s faith. Instead, he considered it unnecessary “to
rest a system of spiritual truth, addressed to the soul, upon the evidence of miracles addressed to the
senses.” In other words, revelation did not come through the senses, so the demonstration of a miracle was
merely a sideshow to true revelation.

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revelation. To these Unitarians, then, Brownson believes in an even simpler, a-historical,
individualized form of revelation:
There are persons who believe that the truths of Christianity bear on their
face a certain stamp of divinity, which the soul is capable of recognizing...
To these persons the question of the genuineness of the Four Gospels is a
matter of comparative indifference. (193)

While Norton and Ware attacked Transcendentalism for its immateriality, and therefore
its lack of certainty, Brownson returns with the same accusation, that “it is not the
probable truth of Christianity we want made out, but its certain truth” (194).
For the religious reformer, the ideal sect is one that both reaches back to earlier
perfection, bypassing the corrupt present church, and one that carries forth the present
church’s stated mission more successfully, so that Unitarians reject Calvinism, yet still
claim to be inheritors of the Puritan mission, while Puritans reject Catholicism, yet claim
to have inherited the mission of such early Roman founders as Augustine. Ripley rejected
sectarianism outright. The members of the Transcendental Club, he writes, have an
“attachment to liberal Christianity; they value this, because it connects the enjoyment of
religion, with independence of mind, and enables them to search for truth, free from
human dictation.” Although Channing hoped to appeal to the “man of plain sense” by
removing centuries of second-hand doctrine, pale copies-of-copies, and other way
stations between man and Christ, Ripley and Brownson want to remove the final barrier:
Biblical text, which becomes mere “human dictation.” In a statement that could have
been issued by the founding member of any reform sect of the past three hundred years,
Ripley notes his club’s interest in “the diffusion of the essential spirit of Christianity,”

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while the dominant church only wants “the inculcation of the doctrines of a sect” (“Latest
Form” 6). Brownson, a Unitarian minister at the time opened his 1836 tract by claiming:
I am not the organ of a sect. I do not speak by authority, nor under
tutelage. I speak for myself and from my own convictions. And in this
way, better than I would in any other, do I prove my sympathy with the
body of which I am a member, and establish my right to be called a
Unitarian. (109)

Five years later, in “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity,” Theodore Parker
went through the same rhetorical motions. His sect only wants a faith that is “fixed and
certain,” to which he looks back to the words of Christ, to “real Christianity.” Even
though Norton and Ware claim to offer certainty, they are merely prolonging a
formalistic and rigid doctrine of their own, passing down yet another stale substitute for
revelation: “The difference between what is called Christianity by the Unitarians in our
times, and that of some ages past, is greater than the difference between Mahomet and the
Messiah.” When Richard A. Grusin, in his thorough study of Transcendentalist
Hermeneutics contends that Emerson resigned his ministry not as “a wholesale rejection
of the authority of religious institutions but as a continuation of the goals of his ministry
set forth in his professional dedication,” he somewhat misses the point of Reformation
historiography: the rejection of tradition is always done in the name of that tradition’s
allegedly deeper purpose (10).
As theology, these complaints by the Transcendentalists were hardly new, and
none of these critics took a lasting radical stance on the church: Parker would come back
to the Unitarian pulpit, Ripley would withdraw from his Brook Farm, and Brownson
would become a vocal convert to Catholicism. In their initial break with the Unitarian
mainstream, though, certain pronouncements by Transcendentalists hinted at a truly

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radical sense of historical inheritance, in which every generation destroys the previous
generation and builds anew, not to achieve perfection, but because regeneration itself is
every man’s birthright—in other words, the state of perfection is one that involves
periodic regeneration. For Parker, in 1841, Christianity only remains “true” so long as it
endures permanent reformation: “since the fourth century the true Christian life has been
out of the established church, and not in it, but rather in the ranks of dissenters” (18).
Parker does not reject the Church of Rome, or the Church of Calvin, or the Church of
Boston—he rejects “the Christianity of sects, of the pulpit, of society,” calling such forms
“ephemeral—a transitory fly.” He accepts that Christians will always attempt to form
earthly church governments, or worship in communities in accordance with agreed-upon
doctrines, but such forms will never fully satisfy the religious spirit: “Each with represent
something of truth, but no one the whole” (33). Emerson, as usual, skips from lament to
celebration, finding joy in the human dissatisfaction with fixed forms:
In that protest which each considerate person makes against the
superstition of his times, he repeats step for step the part of old
reformers... How many times in the history of the world has the Luther of
the day had to lament the decay of piety in his own household! (Essays
250)

For Emerson, though, the re-appearance of Luthers throughout history does not signal a
great deficiency, one which each new Luther needs to rectify, but a natural impulse in
every developing intellect, an individual skepticism, writ large, in which “all history
becomes subjective.” We all begin life as Luthers.
Therefore, youth takes on a different kind of idealism in Transcendentalism than
it does in more mainstream conservative Unitarianism. The first issue of The Dial, in
1840, began with a lament for “the rigor our conventions of religion and education....

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which looks only backwards, which asks only such a future as the past, which suspects
improvement, and holds nothing so much in horror as new views and the dreams of
youth.” These “dreams of youth,” in New England social history, had evolved
considerably in the century before The Dial’s publication. In Calvinist family life, youth
is seen as as-yet-unconverted depravity, a horror that needs to be extinguished as quickly
as religious instruction will permit. In the Unitarian novels of Sedgwick and Lee, youth is
an as-yet-uncorrupted goodness, which can be led toward moral perfection by careful
education, loving parenthood, and Arminian religious instruction—but which also, as in
Mrs. Wilson’s reprobate children in A New-England Tale, can lead to the natural
damnation of any child unlucky enough to be born to hypocritical Orthodox parent. For
the Transcendentalists, though, youth itself, not just its potential sinlessness, is the
strived-for virtue. In 1858, Parker professed that “religion grows not old. Like God, it
flourishes in perpetual youth” (391). Emerson, in “History,” admits that age and tradition,
in and of themselves, are to blame for the problems of his era, and he envies the
comparative lack of history enjoyed by the ancient Greeks, where “adults acted with the
simplicity and grace of children” (Essays 248). If Calvinists believed that youth carried
the unspoiled germ of depravity, and Unitarians believed that youth instead carried an
unspoiled germ of innate goodness, then the Transcendentalists believed that youth was
an enviable state because it was unspoiled by time. The only ones without tradition are
the young. Therefore, the only way to achieve a society that might casually throw off
traditions with each generation was to return, philosophically, to that youthful stage.
For Parker, the dynamic nature of history and matter create an opportunity for
figurative youth, for an Emersonian “original relation to the universe” rather than a one-

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time revelation. Adults receive the divine through their reason, even though God “is
revealed without search to babes and sucklings.” Unlike Bunyan, who needed to grow
older and sin before he could tentatively accept the most cautious type of revelation—a
revelation that threatened to reveal itself as hypocritical delusion even by the end of his
memoir—the Transcendentalists promised their followers a constant stream of
revelations. In the first issue of The Dial, Parker writes about “the divine energy [that]
never slumbers nor sleeps: it flows forth an eternal stream, endless and without
beginning, which doth encompass and embrace the all of things.” As with post-
reformation history, “The material world is perpetual growth, renewal which never
ceases, because God, who flows in it, is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Fuller
59). Constant change, envisioned as “flux” in one of Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings,” creates
both a more dynamic history and a de-historicized revelation. If the spirit of an ever-
flowing God is always with man—“the spirit of God, his energy, and substance have
flowed into the soul, as the rain falls in all lands”—then the central revelation of
Christian history, God revealed to the Apostles through Jesus, who recorded (however
imperfectly) this revelation in Scriptures, is just the first of a constant stream of
revelations (62). Even Christ himself was not divine as a result of supernatural
intervention. Instead, he “possessed the highest degree and greatest measure of
Inspiration ever possessed by man” (64). Every man is capable of receiving Inspiration
(Parker’s name for revelation), but will only receive God to the degree that his character
has prepared himself for the divine. All revelation is individual: “infallible and creative
inspiration... is moulded by his own character, and produces various results” (66).

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For the reform-minded Transcendentalists, such as Alcott and Elizabeth Palmer
Peabody, the idealistic celebration of youth could only be expressed through the practice
of educational reform. Compared to Unitarian educational reformers, such as Lydia
Maria Child, or liberal New Lights, such as Catharine Beecher, Alcott and Peabody
preached a purely theoretical, and thoroughly Transcendentalist, type of education, one
which initially avoids mention of curriculum. Alcott attributes the qualities that we look
for in Jesus to the qualities that we find in children: although we search for divinity in
scripture and religious practice, “this privilege God ever vouchsafes to the pure and
undefiled in heart; for he ever sends it upon the earth in the form of the Child” (1). In
praising Alcott, Peabody asserts that teachers must strip away the corruptions of age in
order to “meet children just where they are,” to meet them in a mental space where “the
perception of the finite seems with them to be followed immediately by a plunge into the
infinite.” This re-conditioned teacher is “a deep reasoned,” “a wise observer” who
recognizes the pure transcendental reason uncorrupted in children, “even through the
broken language of infancy, and often through its voiceless silence” (100).
For Emerson, though, all education stands between man and the direct revelation
of divinity. Any worldly achievement for which the schools prepare children will be
corrupted by the expectations of his society, or by the very fact of aging. For example, in
order to thrive in commerce, a young man “must sacrifice all the brilliant dreams of
boyhood and youth as dreams; he must forget the prayers of his childhood; and must take
on him the harness of routine and obsequiousness” (Essays 137). Emerson complains
about the bookworm, the “meek young men” of his 1837 lecture on “The American
Scholar,” who not only achieve their knowledge second-hand, but who rely on the

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second-hand knowledge of other meek young men, such as Cicero and Locke. The
bookworm is the opposite of “Man Thinking” (57). One cannot achieve revelation
through scriptural analysis, as Norton and Channing had insisted. In his “Divinity School
Address,” he called on the graduating ministers “to go it alone; to refuse the good
models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God
without mediator or veil” (89). In “The American Scholar,” he writes that “books are for
the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too previous to be
wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings” (58).
While reflecting on his time in the Old Manse that he rented from the Emerson
family, Hawthorne develops an Emersonian disdain for the dust of old libraries,
especially those on religious subjects, “a vast folio body of divinity—too corpulent a
body, it might be feared, to comprehend the spiritual element of religion.” Books on
divinity merely replicate the ritual and form of the established churches, and the ideal
state for revelation is either youth or Emerson’s youth-like adult, lacking the corrosive
effects of education. Upon rejecting the folio of divinity, Hawthorne concludes, “So long
as an unlettered soul can attain to saving grace there would seem to be no deadly error in
holding theological libraries to be accumulations of, for the most part, stupendous
impertinence” (Tales 1136). In his journals, recorded during the 1842 stay at the Old
Manse, Hawthorne notes, “My life, at this time, is more like that of a boy, externally,
than it has been since I was really a boy... It is as if the original relation between Man and
Nature were restored in my case.” In his tale, “Earth’s Holocaust,” which operates as
both a parody of the Transcendentalist call-to-arms and an effective demonstration of the

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form, one of the sad figures crying out for the vast bonfire to cease, the one protesting the
burning of all books containing old knowledge, is “the book-worm” (Tales 901)
Where both Emerson and Hawthorne split from the other Transcendentalists was
on the issue of practical reform. Emerson could praise the reformers themselves, as long
as they spontaneously generated their own ideas and did not simply copy the work of
older reformers. For example, in “New England Reformers,” a lecture from 1844, he
notes that a reform project is “very dull and suspicious when adopted from another”
(Essays 593). Emerson could also praise the reform impulse, the notion that an individual
mind created the world anew with each perception, that “the beauty of nature reforms
itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation” (18). Actual
reform, however, the collective action that built schools, legislated against slavery, and
protested social institutions, was not only different, but also hindered the more abstract,
individualistic Emersonian reform. In practice, reform led to long-term stability, to
change that was initiated once, then adopted and applied to future generations. Because
perfection was an achievable goal of reform, it stood in the way of the historiographical
ideal set forth in Emerson’s essays, the constant regeneration of the world in each
individual mind. By contrast, Ripley believed in the reform impulse as the central
impulse in Transcendentalist thought: “Man has the power of conceiving of a perfection
higher than he has ever reached. Not only so. He can make this perfection a distinct
object of pursuit.” This is an impulse shared by the artist, who “sees this vision of
perfection in his mind, and attempts to embody it in the materials that are subject to his
skill,” or the Christian reformer, who “sees this vision of perfection, when he compares
himself with what he ought to be, with the unspotted virtue, which he can conceive, but

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which was never realized, except in him ‘who possessed the Spirit of the Father without
measure’” (Discourses 39). By 1858, on the eve of the Civil War, abolitionism had taken
over the liberalized class of New Englanders who had once found common cause in airier
debates over Kant and schoolhouse reform, and the former Transcendentalists, Theodore
Parker, still preached the same call for historical regeneration, for a religion that
“flourishes in perpetual youth” (391), and still praised Emerson’s influence, but now
aligned his mission more closely with the Unitarian reformers of the previous chapter,
saying, “It is the minister’s business... to diffuse the ideas which shall mold society, so
that it can rear noble men, with all their natural powers developed well” (402).

Hawthorne as “a contemporary but not a sharer” may seem like an apt description
of the author’s social relationship to Transcendentalist Concord, but he did, in fact, share
some of the philosophical assumptions examined in the movement’s founding
documents, such as Emerson’s Nature, Ripley’s Discourses, and Brownson’s New Views
of Christianity, Society, and the Church. After 1836, intellectual New England, as shown
above, was primarily concerned with trying to locate the seat of revelation in a material
place of Reason, trying to fuse European Idealism with Reformation historiography. As
many scholars have examined, Hawthorne mocks the orthodox view of revelation as a
combination of inward typological examination and external providential signs and
wonders. The Puritans of The Scarlet Letter see Hester as “a living sermon against sin”
(171), and she believes that through the entire ordeal of her ostracization, she “came to
have a part to perform” (190). The young, possibly Calvinist traveler of “Passages from a
Relinquished Work”—the narrator identifies him, half-jokingly, as “an unfledged divine

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from Andover”—searches for Providence in the mundane events of his travels, solemnly
answering the questions of “how is your road to be pointed out,” with the confused
response, “Perhaps by an inward conviction… perhaps by an outward sign” (180).
Hawthorne’s fondness for allegory parodies the distance that some believers will go to
project divine signals onto material things. However, the Transcendentalist process of
revelation does not provide a suitable alternative.
In Hawthorne early tales, especially those that take the form of journal-like essays
or convoluted parables rather than realist narratives, the mind operates according to
Transcendentalism’s Kantian idealism rather than Unitarianism’s Lockean empiricism.
The fantasizing consciousness idealizes matter, materializes ideas, and holds the power to
destroy and regenerate reality through sheer internal will rather than laborious interaction
with the real world. However, unlike Ripley, Parker, and Brownson, Hawthorne does not
portray the mind’s idealistic power as a the first step toward divine revelation, toward the
fusing of Matter and Spirit in the Atonement; rather, the insubstantiality of ideas,
combined with the malleability of the human mind, leads to the temptations of those who
would control others, through mesmerism or revivalism. This adaptation of
Transcendentalist idealism—the creation of material, yet almost insubstantial phantoms
in the mind, ideas that are a half-step removed from pure spirit—is one reason why
Hawthorne’s tales, in their “otherworldly solitudes,” have been considered by post-Chase
scholars to be a special class of Romance.
The rhetoric of Transcendentalist perception involves veil-like metaphors of light
and substance, of intervening shadows and fog that both cloud the senses but also
spiritualize matter, bringing the True substance of reality into the mind. Our introduction

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to “the Old Manse” comes through “the glimmering shadows that lay half asleep between
the door of the house and the public highway,” shadows that “were a kind of spiritual
medium, seen through which the edifice had not quite the aspect of belonging to the
material world” (1123). Introducing us to a new village that the itinerant storyteller of
“Passages from a Relinquished Work” visits, the narrator shows us “the white spire of the
meeting house ascended out of the densest heap of vapor.” He points out that “a thin
vapor being still diffused through the atmosphere, the wreaths and pillars of fog, whether
hung in air or based on earth, appeared not less substantial than the edifices, and gave
their own indistinctness to the whole” (178). The famous scene at the center of The
Scarlet Letter, in which Hester, returning from Governor Winthrop’s deathbed, finds
Dimmesdale waiting on the scaffolding, is illuminated through the winking light of a
meteor shower (252-253). In his notebooks, Hawthorne suggests “scene of a story or
sketch to be laid within the light of a street-lantern; the time, when the lamp is near going
out; and the catastrophe to be simultaneous with the last flickering gleam” (11). Matter
and perception are ephemeral because the substance of perception is always seen through
ephemeral media.
Whether in the creation of romance or memory, the mind re-creates reality the
same fashion, with equally insubstantial results. Hawthorne’s narrators often conjure
images of their pasts, with the same flourish that the magician uses to conjure illusions on
the stage. When he narrates his arrival at Blithedale, Miles Coverdale draws us into the
farm-house’s parlor, “Vividly does that fireside re-create itself, as I rake away the ashes
from the embers in my memory, and blow them up with a sigh, for lack of more inspiring
breath” (639). When he introduces the doomed Zenobia, he writes that “I can now

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summon her up like a ghost, a little wanner than the life, but otherwise identical with it”
(644). Memory is like a fantasy, like a romance, in the instrument used to conjure the
images. Unlike his Transcendentalist brethren, Hawthorne sensitively questions the
strength and accuracy of the instrument. In the first issue of The Dial, Parker warned that
inspiration might feel “shadowy, dream-like, and unreal,” which men who experience it
might “count… a dream of their inexperience; a vision of a sickly fancy, and cease to
believe in inspiration.” Hawthorne’s tales and romances, especially Blithedale, are full of
such self-questioning, even though they rarely recount a transcendental experience.
Before leaving the commune, Coverdale notes that he was “beginning to lose the sense of
what kind of a world it was” outside of Blithedale (755). After departing for only a few
days, he doubts whether the place had ever existed at all: “a question might be raised
whether the whole affair had been anything more than the thoughts of a speculative man.
I had never before experienced a mood that so robbed the actual world of its solidity”
(760).
9
For the authors of Scott’s generation, romance had been synonymous with fantasy
and lies; for Hawthorne, romance was synonymous with insubstantiality, a Brownson-
like realm where Spirit and Matter converge.
With fog and shadow as the medium for recollection, Hawthorne evokes “the
moonlight of romance” as the medium through which the mind perceives his tales. The
phrase, first used as the introduction to “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” famously recurs in the
“Custom House” preface to The Scarlet Letter as “a medium the most suitable for a

9
The impressions that Coverdale after his departure appear to be transposed almost directly from
Hawthorne’s notebooks. In the latter, he writes, “It already looks like a dream behind me. The real Me was
never an associate of the community; there has been a spectral Appearance there, sounding the horn at
daybreak, and milking the cows, and hoeing potatoes, and raking hay, toiling in the sun, and doing me the
honour to assume my name. But this spectre was not myself” (207).

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romance writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests” (149). Unlike Sedgwick, who
can scold Elvira for her airy romances because the author believes in a substantial
novelistic alternative to the traditional romance, Hawthorne’s tales all point out their own
lack of substance. In House of the Seven Gables, Hepzibah’s “castles in the air,” her
chivalric fantasies of rescue, find no counterbalance in another character’s comparative
solidity (560). Holgrave is preoccupied with easily discarded Emersonian visions of
perpetual regeneration. Phoebe, notwithstanding her “gift for practical arrangement”
(413), is still an airy creature, the self-conscious echo of those sentimental-novel heroines
that Melville would parody more viciously in Pierre, a Sedgwick heroine indulging
fantasies of making this cursed manor her home. Even worse for Hepzibah, her closest
relation, Clifford, continually “faded away out of his place,” his daydreams “leaving his
wasted, gray, and melancholy figure—a substantial emptiness, a material ghost—to
occupy his seat at table.” In the same novel, Hawthorne has already descripted the “sad
confusion” when memory takes hold, “where the body remains to guide itself, as best it
may, with little more than the mechanism of animal life.” This seizure is “like death,
without death’s quiet privilege, its freedom from mortal care” (442). In fact, the entire
book, as outlined in the Preface, is constructed by an Author who, like Hepzibah, spends
all his time “constructing castles in the air” (353), whether in Romance or in memory.
Moments of nearly involuntary recollection occur throughout the other romances, as well,
beginning with Hester’s drift into memory while positioned on the scaffolding at the start
of The Scarlet Letter (167). Blithedale occasionally seems like a book-length drift into
memory, where both the subject and the objects of memory begin to evanesce.

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The image of “a substantial emptiness, a material ghost” is far from the
Brownson-like image of atonement between spiritual and material. In fact, just as
Hawthorne portrays his romances, and the recollections of his characters, through the
dematerializing medium of Transcendentalist reason, he frequently portrays the
characters themselves as insubstantial. Wakefield, as much a material ghost as Clifford,
“had contrived, or rather he had happened, to dissever himself from the world—to
vanish—to give up his place and privileges with the living men, without being admitted
to the dead.” Coverdale, his “customary levity” (668) at war with his “masculine
grossness” (672), recognizes a lighter spirit in Priscilla, one that the men of the novel will
find easy to manipulate. While struggling through the “mist of fever,” an obscuring
medium that further removes the reader from Blithedale, even further than the mists of
memory, romance, and Utopian idealism, Coverdale additionally notes “a slight mist of
uncertainty [that] still floated about Priscilla, and kept her, as yet, from taking a very
decided place among creatures of flesh and blood” (674). As discussed below, Reform is
a tool that removes its proponent from the world, even as it promises to re-make that
world, but the vagaries of individual perception also isolate the individual. Coverdale,
already fulfilling his Arcadian fantasies, frequently removes himself to a treetop
hermitage, from which he spies on his fellow communards. Wakefield’s scheme takes
him into a similar hiding place—a hidden nook from which he can see but not be seen.
Hester’s grace and beauty “had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary
relations with humanity and inclosing her in a sphere by herself” (164)—by the time that
Pearl reaches adolescence, Hester has become a nurse and confidant to the town, a
servant who can observe of all, but is rarely noticed anymore. In a sense, these

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witnessing-but-not-witnessed characters become Emerson’s transparent eyeball: the
perceiving mind that nonetheless occupies no space, a “substantial emptiness.”
The method of introspection, in the creation of memories, romances, or idealistic
visions, is certainly Transcendentalist—without the movement toward European
Idealism, without Coleridge’s influence, without the lapsed Unitarians who issued their
tracts in 1836, an author without any prior interest in keeping up with philosophical
disputes from overseas would not likely have portrayed consciousness in Hawthorne’s
fashion. However, these “material ghosts,” while seeming to join Ideal and Material, do
not seem to enjoy moments of Transcendentalist revelation to complement their
Transcendentalist perception. Aside from Hester on the scaffolding, who remains touched
by an inscrutable grace, none of these characters appear to use the Reason as a path
toward the Divine revelation that the Transcendentalists insist can be available to
everyone, at any moment in history. By comparison, the heroine of an avowedly
Transcendentalist historical romance, Sylvester Judd’s Margaret, possesses fully
Transcendentalist faculties. While chasing birds in the forest, she feels a kinship with the
animals that comes from intuition rather than reasoning: “a new sense aroused, or active
within her, an unconscious instinct, a hidden prompting of duty.” From birth, Margaret
has better developed her character for the reception of Divine revelation, summed up in
the metaphor of a pond that “was commonly reported to have no bottom.” Margaret, a
being “too young to feel,” “took manifest delight in skimming across that dark, deep
mystery.” This follows Parker’s contention that God is “revealed without search to babes
and sucklings,” or Alcott’s belief that the young already possess a Christ-like closeness to
the Divine, and education is merely a process of helping children retain this capacity.

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Likewise, the impish Pearl is also “too young to feel,” and expresses this amorality
freely, lucky to avoid the coarser children who play at killing Indians and Quakers (198).
But her spell is broken by the revelation of the scarlet letter, by her re-acceptance into the
line of Old-New World inheritance, by the renewed flow of history at the end of The
Scarlet Letter, where Hawthorne’s newer Transcendentalist romance converges with the
form of older the Waverly romance.
Although Hawthorne limits the moments of Transcendental revelation, he
frequently exposes the dangers of fusing the material and spiritual worlds. A mind that
can control its impressions and re-make the world through its own reason can
subsequently be manipulated by outside forces, charismatic revivalists or evil mesmerists,
or can otherwise suffer internally and devolve into solipsistic insanity. Miles Coverdale is
an example of the latter, a man so lost in his own recollections, lost in the moonshine of
romance, that he can barely communicate with the people he nonetheless only sees as
insubstantial forms. He spies on women through the windows of his hotel, or from his
treetop hermitage. By the end of his own story, he admits that “I have made but a poor
and dim figure in my own narrative, establishing no separate interest, and suffering my
colorless life to take its hue from other lives” (846). Although Parker warns that “all men
by nature are capable of the same degree of inspiration,” a man such as Coverdale, a
minor poet modeled on Ellery Channing, a sensitive instrument attuned to the feel of
agricultural labor and nature’s beauty, should be one of these men capable of receiving
this inspiration in a greater measure than, say, the provincial Silas or the drearily practical
Hollingsworth or even the cosmopolitan sophisticate Zenobia. However, he ends up
retreating not just from the life of Blithedale—first into his treetop, then into the real

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world—but also from the very narrative that he is still creating. Similarly, though less
subtly, the protagonist of “P.’s Correspondence,” a sketch from Mosses, has a mind that
freely mixes fantasy, memory, and fact, which the narrator sums up as “a world of
moonshine.” He describes real-life figures, such as Byron and Scott, and lives the life of
“a great traveller,” while sitting in what appears to be an asylum (1006).
A more dangerous possibility than this “world of moonshine” is the threat of
charismatic control over a seemingly autonomous mind. Much has been written about
Hawthorne’s fascination with mesmerism, which is practiced by characters in both Seven
Gables and Blithedale, and this fascination was quite literal, appearing in the author’s
notebooks and letters to his wife, not just in his tales. More broadly, though, the era
produced a threat to rationalist New England Unitarians and ex-Unitarians that could
have been depicted through the metaphor of mesmerism. The seemingly possessed
attendees on the revivalist circuit also had their minds controlled by charismatic outside
forces. Parker, in the late 50s, recognized the appeal of revivals—a wildfire-spread of
piety, appealing to the mob mentality, since “men like to follow the multitude.” On the
one hand, he warned that “piety is not delirium” (388). On the other hand, he mocked the
Unitarians who believed themselves up to the challenge of revivalist ministers: “Those
men, who undertook to make a hot-house of religion and force Christians under the
Unitarian glass, were so cold in their religious temperament that any one of them would
chill a whole garden of cucumbers in dog days” (384). Hawthorne also recognizes the
specter of irrational fanaticism, in his Quaker heretic, Catharine, who succumbs to her
own “enthusiasm” in “The Gentle Boy” (Tales 118). He also saw the secular version of
this manipulation, as science in this period appeared to discover control over matter that

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bordered on the supernatural. Both Rapaccini and Aylmer, in the Gothic tales that open
Mosses, achieve a dangerous level of control over areas of creation that seemingly belong
to the Divine, only to fail disastrously moments later.
While Ripley insisted that his group did not advocate a “visionary” philosophy,
and that Transcendentalism, along with German idealism, was as substantial an
epistemology as Lockean empiricism, Hawthorne also recognized the possible drift into
involuntary (for the subject) spiritualism. Just as his characters drift uncontrollably into
recollection, the airier spirits among them also fall prey to the manipulations of
charismatic men. In spite of the freedoms that he claimed romance made available to him,
including a detachment from the contemporary world, Hawthorne was a writer very much
interested in the novelties and fads of his day—a reader of his newspapers, if “The Old
Manse” is to be believed, who found as much inspiration in the contents of the papers as
he did in the works allegedly written for posterity (1137-38, and would have recognized a
craze for spiritualism that seemed almost like a vulgarized Transcendentalism. In 1854,
Brownson satirically portrayed it with The Spirit-Rapper: An Autobiography, which
echoed his call, nearly twenty years earlier, for a more spiritually inclined theology, an
appropriate reaction to the hard empiricism of Norton and Ware, but not necessarily a
Spiritualism untethered from realities of the world. Alcott tried to temper the association
between Transcendentalism and spiritualism in one of his “Orphic Sayings” from the first
issue of The Dial, pointing out that “piety is not scientific; yet embosoms the facts that
reason develops in scientific order to the understanding” (86). Hawthorne, though,
recognized the Transcendentalist roots of the craze, and saw the that the downside to

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investing the mind with so much creative potential was the weakening of the mind’s
reasoning faculty, leaving it open to manipulation by unscrupulous operators.
10

Hawthorne accepted the claims of mesmerism, even though he disapproved of its
uses, and this disapproval is reflected in the fates of Alice Pyncheon, Blithedale’s “veiled
lady” Priscilla, and even, obliquely, Arthur Dimmesdale. In a letter to his wife, Sophia,
Hawthorne warns her away from mesmerism: “it seems to me that the sacredness of an
individual is violated by it... What delusion can be more lamentable and mischievous than
to mistake the physical and material for the spiritual?” Although he had once sent her to
the care of a Swedenborgian holistic physician, another letter cautioned Sophia against
spiritualist who claimed to communicate with the dead. His objection was not based on
skepticism, or “by no want of faith in mysteries” (308). Instead, his objections seemed to
be based on a Transcendentalist faith in the delicate union of matter and spirit. Brownson,
after all, did not satirize spirit rapping from an empiricist perspective. Rather, he
considered the fad to be a trivialization of an otherwise serious topic. Hawthorne, in his
letter to Sophia, reacted similarly, protesting “a deep reverence of the soul, and of the
mysteries which it knows within itself, but never transmits to the earthly eye and ear”
(309). Here, he demonstrates little conflict with the prevailing Transcendentalist view,
propounded by Ripley, that Reason has no trouble perceiving the invisible. On the other

10
See Barton Levi St. Armand, “Veiled Ladies: Dickinson, Bettine, and Transcendental Mediumship.”
Studies in the American Renaissance (1987): 1-51. This helpful discussion focuses mainly on poetry, but
touches upon the link between Transcendentalism, English romanticism, and other faddish philosophies,
such Swedenborgism and Neoplatonism. This article also explores the fad for spiritualism the in the works
of Poe and Dickinson, two of the usual American Renaissance suspects that have unfortunately not been
included in this study. Other excellent studies of Hawthorne and Mesmerism include: “Hawthorne and
Mesmerism,” by Taylor Stoehr, and “The Romance of Mesmerism: Hawthorne’s Medium of Romance,” by
Samuel Coale;

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hand, Reason should not waste itself on the lowlier forms of the invisible—spirit-rapping,
mesmerist parlor tricks, and quack healers.
Hawthorne shared an opinion of mesmerism voiced by Emerson, who, in
“Historic Notes on Life and Letters in New England,” noted that the practice came “on
the heels” of “an eagerness for reform,” and “attempted the explanation of miracle and
prophecy, as well as of creation. What could be more revolting to the contemplative
philosopher!” (Selected 827). This comment, more so than Hawthorne’s disapproval,
seems half in jest, teasing the philosopher’s proprietary relationship to Truth as much as
mesmerism’s vulgar adherents. Still, though, Emerson points to an objection that
Hawthorne would take more seriously in his novels, depicting the practice of mesmerism
as a greedy materialist’s desire for the invisible mysteries that he then mistakes for
divine. While Blithedale and Seven Gables show the practice of mesmerism itself, The
Scarlet Letter obliquely portrays Chillingsworth mesmerist-like control of Dimmesdale,
two hundred years before the practice would have a name. However, a “physician”
frequently played a role in feats of mesmerism during the mid-nineteenth century. The
American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, which Hawthorne joined as
an editor in 1835, published an article on Animal Magnetism during this period,
described an experiment in which a doctor puts a sick woman under a spell, and carries
on an intelligible conversation with her from a distance. Men of science, men such as
Aylmer and Rapaccini, were thought to be on the path of detecting once-invisible
knowledge in the material world—revelation, in the Transcendentalist sense—and
Hawthorne merely projects that belief/fear into the seventeenth century. Chillingsworth
claims that “in the invisible sphere of thought, few things are hidden from the man who

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devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a mystery” (182).
Physicians, in The Scarlet Letter, are seen as men whose “subtle faculties… were
materialized,” and who “lost the spiritual view of existence” (220). Or they have finally
achieved a dark version of Brownson’s atonement, where matter and spirit are
indistinguishable. To uncover the mystery, the physician must destroy the soul of his
patient, which is “flow forth in a dark but transparent stream” (224). As in his letters to
Sophia, these passages show Hawthorne as someone who feared rather than doubted the
promises of scientists, mesmerists, and other people who claimed to manipulate what was
once thought to be invisible.
Mesmerism and animal magnetism, in Hawthorne’s novels, consist of the control
of one human being’s mind by another, usually from a distance, materializing the once-
insubstantial faculties of the will and soul. A victim, frequently, will be one who appears
to lack substance from the start, such as Alice Pyncheon, or Dimmesdale, who is “at a
loss in the pathway of human existence” and first appears in the novel with “an
apprehensive, a startled, a half-frightened look” (174). Priscilla, in The Blithedale
Romance, is susceptible to mesmerism, and becomes an attraction on the lecture circuit of
the day, because of her insubstantiality, a quality that makes her lighter than air and
therefore more attuned to the spirit world. The Professor, her handler, insists that she is
beholding the Absolute in her trances, spiritualizing the material, but Coverdale sees the
very opposite in the Professor’s routine: “It was eloquent, ingenious, plausible, with a
delusive show of spirituality, yet really imbued throughout with a cold and dead
materialism” (806). Spirit becomes matter in his hands, and matter becomes malleable,
like “soft wax,” until “the individual soul was virtually annihilated, and all that is sweet

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and pure in our present life, debased” (805). No good can emerge when spirit is treated
like substance, even outside of mesmerism, in the practice of spirit rappings. While
Clifford, in Seven Gables, believes in the promise of spirit rappings, “the messengers of
the spiritual world, knocking at the door of substance” (578), Coverdale, perhaps
speaking for the Hawthorne who warned his wife away from esoteric dealings, despises
the very idea of making contact with the dead, either because the routine is a cruel
humbug on the viewer, or because the spirits themselves are “refuse” that have not been
granted access to the eternal world, and therefore unworthy of man’s spiritual yearnings.
While the Professor—or Chillingworth, or the scientists of the Gothic tales—might
believe that they have materializing the spirit, they have only, in fact, found a way to
control a barely spiritualized and gross form of matter. As Hawthorne wrote in a letter to
Sophia, “Without distrusting that the phenomena which thou tellest me of, and others are
remarkable, have really occurred, I think that they are to be accounted for as the result of
a physical and material, not of a spiritual, influence.” He adds, “They are dreams, my
love.”
In dreams, not in mesmerist possessions or spirit rappings, Hawthorne finds a
higher though no less dangerous place where matter is spiritualized. As in the moonlight
of romance, the world of dreams—while asleep or while awake—is one seen by an
inward Reason, not by the five senses of Understanding. Just as the mesmerist annihilates
the spirit with matter, the romance writer spiritualizes the matter of the world with his
imagination. In this world, Hawthorne de-historicizes the romance of the post-Waverly
era, writing about the past in order to mock the pretensions of those who live for the
future, and writing about the individual’s re-formation of the world in his own mind in

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order to mock the futility of those hoping to reform the world collectively in reality. In
The House of the Seven Gables, the reformer, Holgrave, makes this point by using
Hawthorne’s favorite image “Moonlight, and the sentiment in man’s heart responsive to
it, are the greatest of renovators and reformers. And all other reform and renovation, I
suppose, will prove to be no better than moonshine!” (536).

While most members of the Transcendentalist circle favored complete and
immediate abolition of slavery, arguments emerged over other types of reform,
particularly the reform of labor in the wake of the 1837 depression. The radical
provocations by Brownson and Ripley confronted the once-abstract Emersonian idea of
historical regeneration, and asked whether one should want to re-make society entirely
anew with each new generation, not just whether each individual man should want to
achieve complete freedom from the past. Hawthorne absorbs this discourse into his tales
and romances. Holgrave, the young reformer of Seven Gables, echoes Brownson’s call
for the destruction of hereditary property; two allegories, “Earth’s Holocaust” and “The
New Adam and Eve” satirically explore the actuality of total cultural regeneration; and
the very form of the Waverly romance, the saga of dis- and re-inheritance, gets enacted in
all three of Hawthorne’s America-set ‘50s romances. For Brownson and Ripley, actual
reform required the reformers to shift focus from the individual to the collective, but, for
Hawthorne, individual and collective reform are equally fantastical. In his self-
deprecating “Old Manse” preface, he what could have been the credo of his radical
contemporaries: “The hand that renovates is always more sacrilegious than that which
destroys” (1148). Hawthorne’s own view reform, however, was more complex. He

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recognized that tradition provided much more stubborn solidity than the mind could
dismantle.
The radical reformers of the Transcendentalist movement, Brownson for labor
and Parker for abolition, were not necessarily the movement’s most popular voices. For
his part, Emerson saw reform as yet another instance of man’s individual capacity to re-
make the world in his mind. In “History,” he writes, “Every reform was once a private
opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age”
(Essays 238). Private opinions, personal contacts with the divine, make up the goal of
early Transcendentalist thought. Alcott and Peabody want to educate each child to retain
the individual capacity to see the world as Christ saw the world. Ripley believed that a
personal connection between a man and the labor that brought him the most pleasure
would fix the country’s oppression of its workers. Parker saw divine inspiration as an
individual process, molded by individual character. Even later objections to slavery could
be channeled through individual morality, with the Fugitive Slave Act requiring the
complicity of each Northerner in the crimes of the South. Thoreau, of course, refused to
pay income taxes to support (however negligibly) a war with Mexico, objecting as much
to his unwilling participation in an evil as in the evil itself. As Emerson wrote in another
essay, “God enters by a private door into every individual,” where he also makes clear
that the reformer who focuses, first and foremost, on his own consciousness, is the better
reformer than the one who focuses monomaniacally on a particular aspect of society
(Essays 418). In a description that could have been applied to Hawthorne’s prison
reformer, the Ripley stand-in who starts his commune in order to turn it eventually into a
half-way house for criminals, but eventually resigns himself to trying and failing to

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reform just one single criminal, Emerson writes, “How wearisome the grammarian, the
phrenologist, the political or religious fanatic, or indeed any possessed mortal whose
balance is lost by the exaggeration of a single topic. It is incipient insanity” (424). For
example, the reformation of labor should begin with the focus on the individual pleasure
one takes in work, since “manual labor is the study of the external world” (140). When it
came time to apply these theories to practice, though, Emerson politely turned down
Ripley’s invitation to join Brook Farm, later joking to Carlyle that “not a reading man but
has the draft of a new community in his pocket” (Richardson 341).
However, even among the men who earnestly pursued reform, there was
disagreement, first raised by Emerson, over whether this reform began at the level of
individual consciousness or whether radical systemic change was the only type of
workable change available. In the preface to his campaign biography of Franklin Pierce,
an old friend and classmate from Bowdoin, Hawthorne laid out his objection to large-
scale social reform. In terms of his “Old Manse” essay, this statement puts its author on
the side of those who do not consider mere renovation to be more sacrilegious than
outright destruction. In introducing the candidate Pierce, Hawthorne writes:
There is no instance, in all history, of the human will and intellect having
perfected any great moral reform by methods which it adapted to that end;
but the progress of the world, at every step, leaves some evil or wrong on
the path behind it, which the wisest of mankind, of their own set purpose,
could never have found the way to rectify. (114)

This belief that wrong would eventually be righted, but that the process could not be
achieved immediately, through gradual change, perhaps at the individual level over a
period of time, was violently rejected by Brownson, Ripley, and Parker. By focusing on
the self before society, a radical yet simple change becomes as arduous as waiting for

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God to reveal himself to man in supernatural form. In an 1858 warning against
evangelical revivalism, Parker asserts that the necessary revival “will not come by
miracles. God does his part by creating us with faculties fit for this glorious destination;
by providing us in the material world the best means to achieve that destination” (419).
There should be no waiting, no mediation by an aristocratic class that the otherwise well-
meaning Unitarian reformers took for granted.
Brownson saw this promotion of “self-culture,” which he attributed to Channing
but likely also saw in Emerson, as yet another attempt by an elite priesthood to control
the lives of the powerless by placing another filter between man and the Divine.
Although Brownson speaks in the language of social reform, his argument boils down to
another dispute over revelation—is it immediate or incremental? First of all, individual
reform, such as providing the poor with better education or converting them to
Christianity, does nothing to fill their stomachs. Reformers who want to shape the mind
of the workers before taking care of their cruder needs “would have all men wise, good,
and happy; but in order to make them so, they tell us that we want not external changes,
but internal” (Reader 50). This is impossible because, he asserts, wage labor is a form of
slavery, and the evils that flow from wage labor will not be cured until the dependence of
the worker on the parasitic property holder can be cured. The “priests and pedagogues,”
such as Channing, Emerson, and Alcott will “always league with the people’s masters,
and seek to reform without disturbing the social arrangements which render reform
necessary” (51). As other Transcendentalists had advocated at the level of the individual,
calling for an original relation to the universe, Brownson calls for at the level of an entire
generation—his plan for destruction and reformation is quite literally a re-generation.

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First, Brownson calls for an end to the priesthood caste. However, he assures the
reader, “We are not mere destructives. We delight not in pulling down; but the bad must
be removed before the good can be introduced. Conviction and repentance precede
regeneration” (318). Unlike others, he wants to affect permanent rather than perpetual
change. Emerson, in “The Transcendentalist,” confesses, “I do not wish to do one thing
but once. I do not love routine. Once possessed of the principle, it is equally easy to make
four or forty thousand applications of it” (Essays 204). Brownson, though, just wants to
remove the bad and make way for the good. Unlike the Unitarians, however, he does not
want to acquiesce first to the desires of the rich and the priest caste, to re-mold the minds
of the poor so that they can achieve the success available from birth to others. He does
not want to re-make the middle-class home, to build a foundation for the next generation
of good-hearted Christian reformers who will then treat the workers a little bit better than
their fathers had treated the slaves. Brownson wants to re-institute the first principles of
the Christian church “in calling all men to be kinds and priests” (345), abolishing “all
formal worship,” and, most importantly, dismantling the monopoly of privilege. This
latter blight includes not only the powers of government and the banks, but also the
central institution in Anglo-American society: hereditary property. “A man shall have all
he honestly acquires,” Brownson insists, “so long as he himself belongs to the world in
which he acquires it. But his power over his property must cease with his life, and his
property must then become the property of the state, to be disposed of by some equitable
law for the use of the generation which takes his place.” Not surprisingly, this ended up
being the article’s most notorious assertion, necessitating a clarifying preface when the
article was removed from the Boston Quarterly Review and published separately.

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Although the author was “pleased that he has alarmed our staunch conservatives,” he re-
assures us that the article’s scheme calls only for the abolition of inherited property, not
individual property rights in general. As with the other Transcendentalists, who tried to
downplay radical ideas about revelation by claiming a truer allegiance to the principles of
Unitarianism and Christianity, Brownson downplays his radicalism by claiming a truer
sense of democracy.
Hawthorne followed Emerson’s lead in viewing history as a progression of failed
collective reforms. The individual reformer might succeed, but the movement would
ultimately collapse. In the end, the only possible reform was the reformation of the world
in the mind of the romantic artist—a notion, in Hawthorne’s later full-length romances,
that leads to the divergence of Hawthorne’s idea of romance from the mainstream of
historical Waverly narratives. In his campaign biography of Franklin Pierce, he had
warned against reforms adopted with their own ends in mind. In general, though, he
portrays reform as a thankless task, undertaken over the course of single generation,
which must not only remake society, but also push their reforms onto future generations.
His sketch of a “modern reformer,” in a notebook entry from 1835, ends with the
eloquent speaker, who is winning converts for his abolitionist cause, being taken back to
the mad house that he has escaped from. “Much may be made of this idea,” Hawthorne
notes at the end of the paragraph, and, indeed, he did make much of the idea, in several
sketches published in Mosses, as well as in The Blithedale Romance (10-11). Another
notebook entry imagines the reformer, who may have such success on the streets of
Boston, instead calling out to the birds and trees, passing out pamphlets in the forest,
isolated from the world that he wants to reform.

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In the earlier tales, reformation, in all senses of the word, belongs in the realm of
fantasy. As discussed above, the moonlight of romance, and the foggy perception of
memory, are two imperfect mechanisms by which the mind synthesizes matter and spirit.
Reform, especially in the allegorical tales, belongs with these higher yet insubstantial
creations of the mind. In a volume, Mosses from the Old Manse, that will “afford no solid
basis for a literary reputation,” that follows his failure to produce a novel that possess
“physical substance enough to stand alone,” Hawthorne continues to assert the
insubstantiality of not only his creations, but of the types of people that they represent
and the types of equally weightless ideas that they produce in the real world and that
mostly fail to make an impression (1149). In “A Select Party,” which describes an
extended daydream, “a pleasure party to Nowhere” (958), he muddies the distinction
between Platonic idealization and outright delusion: “the dominions which the spirit
conquers for itself among unrealities become a thousand times more real than the earth
whereon they stamp their feet” (945). Among those “creatures of imagination” attending
the party, Hawthorne includes, in a list of comically impossible figures, such as “a
Scholar without pedantry,” the “Reformer untrammelled by his theory” (951). In the
similar parable, “The Hall of Fantasy,” other creatures of the imagination are joined by
“the noted reformers of the day.” Of these men, Hawthorne tells us that “there is no surer
way of arriving at the Hall of Fantasy than to throw one’s self into the current of a
theory” (740).
While the creator of romances, or the mere daydreamer, carries around the guilty
knowledge that he has forsaken the solid earth for these realms of fantasy, the reformers
has deluded himself into thinking that his “theory” is just another version of the world,

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one that can be easily molded from the soft wax of available materials. He does this by
freely substituting the future for the present, by promising himself, as in “The Hall of
Fantasy,” that “the fantasies of one day are the deepest realities of a future one” (740).
Brownson faults Emerson for airy pronouncements about the betterment of the
individual, scoffing at the belief that one should feed the soul before feeding the stomach,
but then posits a “simple” answer to the problem: destroying the priesthood, and then
eliminating hereditary wealth! A fictionalized version of this type of argument, two
fantasists who fight over whose scheme is more fantastical, plays out in Blithedale’s
dispute between Hollingsworth and Coverdale. Hollingsworth wants to devote the
commune’s energies “to the reform and mental culture of our criminal brethren,” a
scheme that Coverdale labels “his visionary edifice” and, echoing the romantic
daydreams of Hepzibah, a “castle in the air” (680). Just prior Coverdale’s departure, he
rants to Hollingsworth about the romantic plans that the group should undertake, and the
latter only accuses him of “trying how much nonsense you can pour out in a breath”
(746). For Hollingsworth, the original plan of the commune is “a wretched, unsubstantial
scheme,” and he asks, “Do you seriously imagine that any such realities as you, and many
others here, have dreamed of, will ever be brought to pass?” On the other hand,
Coverdale tells the reader that prison reform was a “rigid and unconquerable idea” that
may have “looked plausible” in theory, but would inevitably fail (747).
No only does Hollingsworth’s scheme fail, but it fails according to the logic of “A
Select Party”—any reformer who remains untrammeled by his theory can only exist
“Nowhere.” In the real world, which Blithedale inhabits, regardless of the author’s claims
to romantic “neutral ground, the most seemingly plausible schemes either succumb to

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their dreamer’s monomania, or the impracticality of that scheme drives the dreamer to
monomania. In either case, Hollingsworth gets trammeled by his theory. A secular priest,
who talks to his “disciples” in the clearing that the communitarians call “Eliot’s pulpit,”
after the famous Puritan converter of Indians, Hollingsworth is “not altogether human.
There was something else in Hollingsworth, besides flesh and blood and sympathies and
affections, and celestial spirit.” Coverdale then tells us that this description “is always
true of those men who have surrendered themselves to an over-ruling purpose.” He warns
that fanatics like Hollingsworth “will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse
under good, all the more readily, if you take the first step with them, and cannot take the
second, and the third, and every other step of their terribly straight path!” (693). This
warning, incidentally, comes sixty or so pages before the character of Miles realizes what
the narrator Miles has already proclaimed: just because two or more people agree on a
roughly sketched scheme does not mean that they will continue to agree every step of the
way, especially when discussing the practical applications of the scheme.
Collective labor reform, leading the world by example, is a doomed idea from the
start. Even from a once-sympathetic participant, Coverdale, the scheme barely holds any
promise. He describes the communitarians as rich men and women playing dress-up in
the fields, embracing a “gentility in tatters,” drinking tea out of earthen cups one day,
when they could easily spend the next day back at their Boston homes, eating off
porcelain with silverware. They are individually relinquishing their wealth “for the sake
of showing mankind the example of a life governed by other than the false and cruel
principles, on which human society has all along been based” (687). Re-making the
world by example, with only “the earnest toils of our bodies, as a prayer, no less than an

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effort, for the advancement of our race” (648). As far as delusional notions go,
Hawthorne recognizes that this one goes back to the start of the Reformation. He names
his hero, Miles Coverdale, after a founder of the English Reformation, the first man to
bring an English translation of the Bible to the common man, and he puts Winthropian
words into Hollingsworth’s earnest speech: “I offer my edifice as a spectacle to the
world... that it may take example and build many another like it. Therefore I mean to set
it on the open hill-side” (702). Of course, the simple “toil of our bodies” remains harder
to accomplish in practice than in theory. Coverdale falls ill after only a few days. He
scorns the “flimsy and flaccid,” the weekend tourists who come visit intermittently to try
their hands at agriculture (703). He advocates for domestic reform, telling Zenobia that
woman’s labor is “artificial life—the life of degenerated mortals from the life of
Paradise” (646). Field work, by contrast, is natural and somehow Edenic. In his “Old
Manse” preface, though, Hawthorne recognizes the absurdity of this Emersonian claim of
proprietorship over one’s own labor, if only because man’s fall from Eden consisted of
being cursed with labor. Contradicting the truism that “toil sweetens the bread it earns,”
Hawthorne admits, “I relish best the free gifts of Providence” (1131).
However, collective reform is not the only doomed fantasy. Individual reform,
when Hollingsworth begins to limit his schemes to more practical ends, fares no better.
Emerson would have advocated individual reform, one man at a time, avoiding the tired
imitations that come from all “disciples” to reform movements. As Coverdale discovers,
this very plan, at the end of the novel, does nothing to lesson Hollingsworth’s
monomania. When asked how many criminals, months later, he has actually reformed, he
responds, “Not one!” Coverdale then gives his moral: Philanthropy “is perilous to the

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individual, whose ruling passion, in one exclusive channel, it thus becomes” (844). In
other words, the collective fantasy of Blithedale is an Arcadia, a Winthrop-like dream of
leading society by example while still “estranging ourselves from the world,” but the
more practical, individually focused effort at prison reform is just as insubstantial,
isolating the reformer, who allegedly wants to engage with the world, inside his own
philanthropic fantasies (679). The process of the reformer therefore echoes the process of
the romancer: mold the material of the world in a way that seems so real, that seems to
have literally re-formed the world, but that finally sends the reformer deeper into his own
imagination.
Transcendentalist regeneration depends on youth, either literally, in the form of
those second-generation liberals who eschew the dusty folios of their scholarly Unitarian
parents, or figuratively, in the form of the mind that can re-make the world anew with
each radical theory. At the start of “The Minister’s Black Veil,” the Sabbath scene
contains an image of trans-generational indoctrination that would have frightened both
Sedgwick and Alcott: “children, with bright faces, tript merrily beside their parents, or
mimicked a graver gait, in the conscious dignity of their Sunday clothes” (371). The
orthodox view of history, where youth must be quickly shamed with the knowledge of
their innate depravity instead of being allowed to pursue their every amoral instinct, is
being passed down to these Puritan children, but elsewhere Hawthorne does not prize
youth in the same way that either his Unitarian or Transcendentalist contemporaries did.
While Hester may cry “begin all anew!” to Dimmesdale, neither lover will eventually
choose that path (288). Pearl may refrain from play-acting the murder of Quakers and
Indians with the other Puritan children, but she is famously impish, the “elf child” who

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roams the woods and possibly colludes with “the black man.” Priscilla, the medium of
Blithedale, is helplessly youthful. While her “smile, like a baby’s first one, was a
wondrous novelty” (695), Coverdale questions her gayety, asking, “What kind of a world
you imagine this to be, which you are so merry in?” (697). Real youth is an idealization,
ill-suited to the real world, even to the world such as Blithedale, with its merely
theoretical connection to reality. While Holgrave, in Seven Gables, may pronounce our
first youth “of no value,” and advocate for the second youth, which comes “gushing out
of the heart’s joy at being in love,” Coverdale recognizes the relative value of all youth,
which is really just an ignorance of history, decay, and death (537). He dismisses the
value of either age or youth in the construction of Blithedale, because the latter “would
behold the morning radiance of its own spirit beaming over the very same spots of
withered grass and barren sand, whence most of us had seen it vanish” (685).
Brownson’s disinheritance scheme was an attempt to sever the present generation
from the hold of its ancestors. Emerson, who had no interest in proletariat revolution,
asserted a similar scheme in “Man the Reformer,” but scheme that looked at the
individual’s relationship to his own property, not the entire system of property earning
and retention. Emerson notes that he original owner enjoys his property without fear,
since “the advantages of riches remain with him who procured them, not with the heir,”
while the inheritor “finds his hands full—not to use these things—but to look after them
and defend them from their natural enemies. To him they are not means, but masters”
(Essays 140). By contrast, Sedgwick and the older Unitarian generation privileged
inheritance. As long as conscientious parents produced conscientious children, then
history would lead to perfection—inheritance was the tool by which liberal culture would

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succeed, the tool by which liberals would reform the attitudes of the next generation,
producing eventual political change. Fantasies of youth and destruction are perfectly
natural, from an ideological standpoint, but Hawthorne, in his re-making of the Waverly
romance, understands that death and tradition often come uninvited into the Arcadian
worlds of idealists, and they cannot simply be phased out by an agreed-upon set of
beliefs.
Hawthorne combined the Emersonian and Brownsonian, this sense that every
generation destroys its inheritance and starts anew, in a portrayal of his own half-hearted
reformer-Transcendentalist, Holgrave, in The House of the Seven Gables:
It seemed to Holgrave... that in this age, more than ever before, the moss-
grown and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be
thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to
begin anew. (506)

Furthermore, Holgrave mocks any kind of inheritance, from passing down homes, which
he believes should be burned down and built anew with each generation, to the siring of
children to whom a parent wants to pass along that home: “To plant a family! The idea is
at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do” (511). In Holgrave’s
attitudes, in his rejection of Home as the literal embodiment of divine perfection, there is
an obvious resistance to the first-generation Unitarians, to the sentimental domestic
ideology of Sedgwick. He speaks of the individual corruption that might overtake
someone who lacks a direct connection to the creation of his own wealth, but also follows
Brownson in blaming societal ills on the aggregation of this individual mistake—“the
wrong and mischief which men do.” He spouts Emersonian adages, such as “man’s youth
is the world’s youth,” without any practical goal of perfection (506)—an attitude that

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lacks the Unitarian’s more substantial utopian ambition. In fact, one Unitarian reformer in
particular loathed Seven Gables. Sedgwick, in spite of her general admiration for
Hawthorne’s work and their long-time friendship, was displease with the novel’s sharp
divergence from the liberal assurances of the sentimental romance format. Aside from the
heroine, Phoebe, “there is not essential dignity in the characters to make them worth the
labor spent on them.” While Sedgwick may have appreciated the presence of Phoebe—
“the purifying influence, scattered throughout the atmosphere of the household the
presence of one youthful, fresh, and thoroughly wholesome heart”—Hawthorne may
have only intended her as a joke on the form of the sentimental novel. In fact, Phoebe is a
remarkable facsimile of the more effective utopian schemers in Sedgwick’s fiction, such
as Jane Elton and Hope Leslie.
When history asserts itself in the otherwise ahistorical romances of Hawthorne, it
is usually as a negation of the Transcendentalist idealists in the novel. Holgrave drops
this resistance when he inherits the titular house, restoring the Maule property to its
rightful lineage, joining with the Pyncheons, usurper and usurped entwined as
harmoniously as they are at the conclusion of The Pioneers. For all the assertions about
Hawthorne’s divergence from the forms of nineteenth-century fiction, his three America-
set romances all end with a marital union that settles disputes relating to property,
inheritance, and the legitimacy of future heirs. All three romances make sure that the
legacy of the romantic heroine—the sentimental waif, following Sedgwick’s Jane Elton,
embodied by the no-longer-impish Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, Phoebe in The House of
the Seven Gables, and Priscilla in The Blithedale Romance—is restored at the end of each
novel, even for the one, Pearl, who would have been legally disqualified without a will

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from inheriting her cuckholded father’s estate. However, despite Hawthorne’s formal
adherence to the Waverly romance, the ideology behind his adoption of this trope differs
in substance from the novels Cooper, Sedgwick, and Lee. Following Emerson’s lament
for the second owners of property, Hawthorne portrays the inheritance as a failure—in
Pearl, the failure of Hester to keep her offspring rooted in either old or new world;
11
in
his marriage to Phoebe, the failure of Holgrave to retain his fleeting convictions; and, in
Priscilla, the overall failure of her new husband’s prisoner reform, which Coverdale
believes will squander her inheritance completely.
The pull of tradition has nothing to do with ideology, something that Hawthorne
recognized after a decade living among the Arcadians from Concord, either on Brook
Farm or in his honeymoon rental of the Old Manse, where Emerson periodically visited
for fire-side discourses, Thoreau dropped by for nature walks and canoe rides, and nearly
every reformer and adherent to “the new view” seemed to congregate. After life in
Concord, he moved to his Custom House position in Salem, the place of his birth and
boyhood, where “even the old Inspector was desirable, as a change of diet, to a man who
had known Alcott.” One of the major epiphanies recorded in “The Custom House”
preface is this unironic (for Hawthorne) realization that the pull of tradition cannot be
resisted with a strong will. History cannot be instantly regenerated by an impassioned
Reason. “This long connection of a family with one spot,” Hawthorne writes of Salem,
“as its place of both and burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the
locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or moral circumstances that

11
Her destination, at the end of the novel, is ambiguous. While she may have gone back to England, or
may have lit off for the territories where Roger Prynne owned land, we only get this glimpse of her future
outside Salem: “Letters came, with armorial seals upon them, though of bearing unknown to English
heraldry” (343).

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surround him. It is not love, but instinct” (128). Similarly, Pearl has no choice but to
leave the woods and re-join the world when Dimmesdale finally confesses his paternity:
“A spell was broken... As her tears fell upon her father’s cheek, they were the pledge that
she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor forever do battle with the world, but
be a woman in it” (339). Her isolation, her natural affinity for the wild growth of the
surrounding forests, are romantic fantasies, and the spell is broken not by a failure of
perception by the subject, but by objective socio-historical systems, by parenthood and
inheritance, and by what Dickens, in Dombey and Son, a novel that posits a destructive
advent of modernity in the form of the railroad, called “the old, old fashion—death!”

In a Mosses parable, the “new Adam and Eve,” who come to Earth moments after
the rest of the human race has vanished, fail to recognize the appeal of living for either
the future or for the past—conditions that occasionally muddle into what Hawthorne, in
another story, simplifies as Posterity. Viewing the site of Bunker Hill, the author asks if
Adam and Eve could have known how much blood had been spilled there, “it would
equally amaze them that one generation of men should perpetrate such carnage, and that a
subsequent generation should triumphantly commemorate it” (760). One tired customer
who visits the titular “Intelligence Office,” in another Mosses allegory, comes searching
futilely for “Tomorrow,” which he has wasted his life pursuing. The Intelligence Officer
tells him, “Continue your pursuit, and you will doubtless come up with him; but as to the
earthly gifts which you expect, he has scattered them all among a throng of yesterdays”
(884). And the figure of Posterity himself, who joins the “Select Party,” is labeled “the
man of the age to come” (953). Hawthorne, who admits in the “Old Manse” to preferring

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daily newspapers to dusty folios, values the ideal of posterity, but scoffs at the idea of
living for such a notion. Posterity tells the “select party” that “the cold, icy memory
which one generation may retain of another is but a poor recompense to barter life for.”
Instead, he tells the admiring guests, “the surest, the only, method is, to live truly and
wisely for your own age, whereby, if the native force be in you, you may likewise live for
posterity” (954).
In Blithedale, the communitarians feel more comfortable living for the future than
in living for the past, finding an eternity in the present. Theodore Parker, in The Dial, had
claimed that “the law of nature is the same at the Pole and the Line, on the day of Adam
and at this day,” while Ripley defended his fellow Transcendentalists as those who “feel
that they cannot and must not surrender the birth-right of their mental and religious
freedom to one or to many, to a name, or a church, or a catechism” (“Latest Form” 8).
The Blithedale residents, who toy with the idea of returning the land to its original Indian
name, reject that option because the word is too harsh and “seemed to fill the mouth with
a mixture of very stiff clay and very crumbly pebbles” (663). Coverdale, lying sick in
bed, reading all the standard Transcendentalist texts that Hawthorne’s sister-in-law was
selling back in Boston, finds the works of Emerson, Carlyle, and The Dial to be lonely,
“the outposts of the advance-guard of human progression,” voices that “came sadly from
among the shattered ruins of the past, but yet had hopeful echo of the future” (677).
Living deep in the fossilized past, as with living in the airy unrealized future, are both
insubstantial ideals. What connects the past and future, what gives substance to the
present, is history itself, the thing that draws Hawthorne to Salem, that requires Holgrave
to exchange reform for property, that brings Pearl into the world as a proper lady.

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Without the nostalgia of Cooper—Hawthorne, for all his conservatism, shows no love for
the displaced systems—the romances still play with the ideas of re-inheritance and
restoration that Cooper imported into the American romance, via Scott, and that
Sedgwick adapted to the liberal historiography that she was trying to wrest from the older
Calvinist providential narrative.
Aside from Dimmesdale’s revelation of paternity, there is one other moment in
Hawthorne’s romances that where the story crosses from ahistorical fantasy into the
historical realism of the Waverly romance. After Zenobia drowns at the end of Blithedale,
the commune ceases to be an Arcadia
12
and instead becomes a real place, a New World
colony that begins to unravel its own history. Even though Coverdale, at the end, laments
the failure of the place to “endure for generations, and be perfected, as the ages rolled
away, into the system of a people, of a world,” this is actually what has occurred with
Zenobia’s death (846). Earlier, when they had all discussed the commune’s future plans,
Coverdale had insisted that babies need to be born there. In fact, what the commune
needed was for death to intrude. After Zenobia’s suicide, “Blithedale, thus far in its
progress, had never found the necessity of a burial-ground,” but instead of burying and
mourning the dead according to a new and perfected system, “she was buried very much
as other people have been, for hundreds of years gone by.” This group of free-thinkers,
each of whom resent the very basic traditions of their forbearers, who all think that they

12
The selection of “Arcadia” rather than “Eden” as Coverdale’s favorite synonym for Blithedale is crucial.
The distinction between these two concepts is made by a Hungarian character in Arthur Phillips’ 2002
novel, Prague, speaking in broken English:

Arcadia is not a mythological paradise as Eden. It symbolized first, as you say, a green
and perfect country life, but then we learn that Arcadians were very uneducated and
violence and cruel. For smart people then after, Arcadia is a symbol of intellectual’s
wrong effort to see happiness in savages. (55)

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can perfect the human race by destroying and building atop traditions, instantly agree on
how to dispose of Zenobia: “When the occasion came, we found it the simplest and truest
thing, after all, to content ourselves with the old fashion, taking away what we could but
interpolating no novelties, and particularly avoiding all frippery of flowers and cheerful
emblems” (840). At the end of the Emersonian bonfire in “Earth’s Holocaust,” which
razes humanity’s “wornout trumpery” to make room for youthful innovation, a
“thoughtful observer” assures the narrator that the destruction of a gallows solves
nothing: “Death... is an idea that cannot easily be dispense with in any condition between
he primal innocence and that other purity and perfection which perchance we are destined
to attain after traveling round the full circle” (897). In “The New Adam and Eve,” where
the new progenitors of the race have stumbled upon the Earth after a Millerite-like
doomsday,
13
the sentimental ending is undercut by its setting in a cemetery. Although
comforted by the love of God and each other, the narrator still asks, “Will they then
recognize, and so soon, that Time and the elements have an indefeasible claim on their
bodies?” (836). It is this recognition that will re-start the human race, not the regeneration
of an eternal youthfulness in man. In this context, one fears for the couple, Holgrave and
Phoebe, who join together the Maules and Pyncheons at the end of Seven Gables, who

13
The prophecy of Father Miller, which predicted that the world would end in 1843 or 1844, fascinated
Hawthorne, who put references to the Adventist Church in several of his stories, including “The New
Adam and Eve,” “Earth’s Holocaust,” and “The Hall of Fantasy.” In spite of his fascination, the inclusion
of Millerism in the latter story gives some idea of how seriously Hawthorne took the prophecy. Although
he entertained fears about mesmerism and spirit rapping, Hawthorne did not find the imminent return of
Christ as interesting as he found the readiness with which people believed in the end of the world. When
Miller’s prophecy failed to materialize, his movement predictably lost its members. However, a less-
specific End Times prophecy is both popular and lucrative in today’s American Protestantism, as witnessed
by the Left Behind novels. The premillennial dispensationalism of today is derived, in part, from the
English minister, John Nelson Darby, who promulgated his ideas in the 1830s.

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“transfigured the earth, and made it Eden again, and themselves the two first dwellers in
it” (616).
Unlike the conception of Home in the previous chapter, the earthly embodiment
of paradise, Home in Hawthorne’s novels and tales is linked to death. Characters only
find their homes after the recognition of mortality, when they realize that their works
shall decay, and when they accept the permanence of their surroundings. Coverdale may
eventually be frightened away from Blithedale, but his brief return to the commune leads
to a recognition that “the red clay, of which my frame was moulded, seemed nearer akin
to those crumbling furrows than to any other portion of the world’s dust. There was my
home; and there might be my grave.” The new Adam and Eve view the works of man
with curious incomprehension, seeing “the marks of wear and tear, and unrenewed decay,
which distinguish the works of man from the growth of nature” (812). The last third of
The Scarlet Letter is a passage out of Romance and into History, not only leading to
Pearl’s absorption back into hereditary tradition, but also leading to the acceptance, by
Hester and Dimmesdale, of the New World as their homes. For Hester, at first, there is
“wild and ghastly scenery all around her, and a home and comfort nowhere” (261). When
he first rejects the idea of running away to begin life anew, Dimmesdale announces, “I
must die here!” (289). When he comes out of the woods a wiser man, and then floats past
his parishioners to deliver his last impassioned Election sermon, it is as a man who has
accepted this place as his final “home.” The novel ends with the corpses of the two lovers
resting separately, with one tombstone serving for both—a destiny not so much in eternal
love, but in conjoined memory. Their dust might not be allowed to mingle, but their
stories have become one.

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Unlike the nostalgic retrospection of Cooper, or the utopian foreshadowing of
Sedgwick, Hawthorne does not presume that revelation belongs to the immediate start of
history. In fact, the reverse happens in Hawthorne’s history of reformation. Wisdom and
tolerance grow with the distance between original and present-day experience. For the
first generation, the one trying to materialize an otherwise insubstantial idea, a hereditary
attachment to the Old World still keeps them good-humored. They celebrate holidays
with some of the extravagance that they had once claimed to detest. They have “not been
born to an inheritance of Puritanic gloom,” but to an inheritance of their parents’ “stately,
magnificent, and joyous” Elizabethan world (316). However, as Hawthorne warns us:
Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the early emigrants, wore
the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage of it,
that all subsequent years have not sufficed to clean it up. We have yet to
learn against the forgotten art of gayety. (318)

Cooper, Sedgwick, and Lee all observed the harshness of the second generation
compared to the Old World reticence of their parents to enforce the Puritanical ideals
they had brought over from England. Hawthorne, though, refrains from portraying a
moment of lost perfection, either in the receding past or the upcoming future.
The old Reformation view of revelation tried to bring the past into the present,
searching for revelation in the life narrative of the seeker. The newer Reformation view,
typified by the liberal Unitarians, tried to accomplish the same thing, but brought the past
into the present by way of the future, reviving an ancient closeness to the divine by
putting man on a path toward Utopian perfection. The Transcendentalist conception of
revelation attempts to draw the past and future together into an eternal present—at any
moment, the well-trained mind can experience the spiritual presence of the Divine.

201
Hawthorne, finally, managed to re-affirm an older Catholic view of history and
revelation, something that Brownson had also been working toward in his conception of
the atonement of Spirit and Matter. The “instinct” that draws a man homeward is the
same “instinct” that drops him to his knees in a Cathedral, that would have alerted the
new Adam and Eve to the necessity of prayer: “Like the dim awfulness of an ancient
forest, its very atmosphere would have incited them to prayer. Within the snug walls of a
metropolitan church there can be no such influence” (750). In “Earth’s Holocaust,” the
“thoughtful observer” questions the narrator’s Emersonian confidence in nature as the
true cathedral, responding to the narrator’s belief that “the woodpaths shall be the aisles
of our cathedral—the firmament itself shall be its ceiling,” with a question, “True... but
will they pause here?” (902-903). This loss of compelling religious architecture in the
Protestant world recalls Brownson’s pre-conversion lament for his contemporaries, who
travel to Europe and come back “half Catholics,” who sigh at “the rites and the sacred
symbols of the middle ages.” After conversion, he praised Catholicism based on his
rejection of Transcendentalism, complaining that “modern philosophy is mainly a
method, and develops a method of reasoning instead of presenting principles to
intellectual contemplation.” Unlike Catholicism, this modern philosophy “obscures first
principles, and impairs the native force and truthfulness of the intellect” (Vol. 5 172).
This deeper nostalgia, which bypasses the symbols of the new world, which looks
past Bunker Hill and the Puritan meeting house to the world before the Reformation, re-
occurs throughout the late nineteenth-century and into the early twentieth-century,
starting with Hawthorne in The Marble Faun, continuing with Portrait of a Lady, and
finding its fullest lament in Henry Adams’ Mount Saint Michel and Chartres, a study of

202
medieval “unity” intended to contrast its sequel, The Education of Henry Adams, a study
of twentieth-century “multiplicity.” In that first book, Adams echoes the feelings of
American tourists from the previous century, the ones who Brownson thought might be
half-converted by simply looking at the architecture. Musing the fate of the Virgin Marys
in the Church, Adams writes, “The Puritans abandoned the New Testament and the
Virgin in order to go back to the beginning, and renew the quarrel with Eve.” He adds,
“Honest tourists are seriously interested in putting the feeling back into the dead
architecture where it belongs” (261). Nearly eighty years earlier, Hawthorne had
recognized that this “feeling” could only come from “dead architecture,” whereas the
renovated architecture of the New World could inspire no one. When he leaves the Old
Manse, for example, “all the aged mosses were cleared unsparingly away; and there were
horrible whispers about brushing up the external walls with a coat of paint” (1148). This
completes the circular logic of either liberal theology or Transcendentalism: while the
Reformation reached past tradition to the earliest church, rejuvenating the individual
spirit by bringing it closer to the divine, the establishment of a new church eliminated the
history and tradition that paradoxically brought the worshipper back to the revelations of
the early apostles, something that only the dead Cathedrals of the Old World could
inspire.
As mentioned at the start of the chapter, it is foolish to try to pin down Hawthorne
inside a particular religious sect. His personal history took him through most of the era’s
movements, from his exposure to childhood Calvinism via his aunts, to the Unitarian
Boston where he was raised and eventually settled, to the Transcendentalism advocated
by his wife’s family, along with his friends at Brook Farm and in the Concord that

203
surrounded The Old Manse, to the nostalgic Catholicism of Americans who traveled to
Europe in the mid-century, exemplified by the expatriates of The Marble Faun. Unlike
the examination of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s historical romances in the previous
chapter, there is no effort here to point out a conversion experience in the author’s own
life. However, Hawthorne did certainly write at a time when the issues of revelation,
providential history, and the relationship of both to reform, were on the lips of educated
New Englanders. Regardless of his personal convictions, his view of revelation and
history was either an echo or a response to the Transcendentalist discourse prevalent in
his community, complicating the problems of nostalgia and utopianism that Cooper and
Sedgwick had explored in previous decades.

204
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Creator Gordon, Joel Matthew (author)

Core Title The reformation of the world: history, revelation, and reform in the antebellum American romance

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 11/17/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Catharine Maria Sedgwick,domestic novel,Eliza Buckminster Lee,historical romance,James Fenimore Cooper,Nathaniel Hawthorne,OAI-PMH Harvest,Orestes Brownson,Ralph Waldo Emerson,reform,transcendentalism,Unitarianism,Waverly romance

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kemp, Anthony (committee chair), Briggs, Sheila (committee member), Gustafson, Thomas B. (committee member)

Creator Email joel_gordon@yahoo.com,joelgord@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3534

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Rights Gordon, Joel Matthew

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