The Evil course was exciting and fascinating. I selected a series of texts with paradigmatically evil characters such as Pap Finn, Popeye Vitelli, Stanley Kowalski, Lestat, and Anton Chigurh. We discussed slavery, murder, rape, war, vampirism, totalitarianism, infanticide, and the drug war.
The course went over so well that this fall when I was assigned a section of American Literature To 1880, I decided to come up with a variation on a theme. For this semester I designed the course around the theme of Deviance in Early American Literature. The first, most obvious text to include was The Scarlet Letter. It contains the obvious deviance of adultery, but both Hester and Dimmesdale also engage in theological and political deviance. There’s also witchcraft, gender issues, and class difference, to name a few. I also selected Poe’s only novel and several short stories, in which he explores the notion of perversity, or the human inclination to engage in reckless behavior that puts ourselves in physical, psychological, or spiritual danger. I of course selected Emerson’s “Divinity School Address,†which was considered so blasphemous at the time that he was afterwards banned from Harvard College for decades, and Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,†in which he famously says that “the true place for a just man is … a prison.†Dickinson, Whitman, Stowe, and Twain are on the syllabus, too.
But the most central text in terms of articulating the theme of Deviance and its centrality to early American literature is a little known work of Melville’s titled Pierre, or The Ambiguities. On the surface, the most obvious deviance in Pierre is the protagonist’s erotic attachment to a woman who may or may not be his illegitimate half sister. But there’s much more going on in this novel of ideas and its glacial plot. The work explores issues of personal and national identity in the decades immediately following the Revolutionary War.
Pierre Glendinning is the grandson of Revolutionary War heroes on both his maternal and paternal sides. Newly 21, he stands to inherit a vast estate purchased from Native American chieftains, to marry the local New England maiden, and become the de facto prince of Saddle Meadows. However, the novel makes us question the role of the Revolution in the psyche of the nation and its inhabitants. If revolutionary spirit is an essential character trait of Americanness, is it anathema for Pierre and those of his generation to come of age amidst luxury, ease, and conformity? Such a question is similar to those asked by Jonathan Edwards, who wrote “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God†in part to question the righteousness and godliness of later generation Puritans who had inherited the wealth and privilege that their ancestors had vainly believed were the marks of God’s election. Pierre simply asks a more secular version of essentially the same question.
To me, the most interesting part of the novel is toward the end when Pierre, his maybe sister Isabel (who is posing as his wife), and his former fiancée Lucy (who is posing as his cousin) are living together in rented rooms in a former church that has been converted to law offices on the bottom floors and artists’ studios on several upper floors. Pierre is attempting to make a living as a writer. Isabel hopes to play guitar and sing in the local taverns, and Lucy plans to sell her paintings. At this point in the novel, Melville becomes vicariously interested in artists and writers as marginal members of society, citizens he represents as deviant and poor but sincere and passionate, unlike Pierre’s socially and morally constipated mother and her peers who buy influence in church and state with charity and donations that thinly mask their implicit extortion.
The book is not an easy read by any means, but it is incredibly timely and relevant today. I ask the students to write essays that connect the texts to events in the contemporary era. As always, they find this pretty easy. Especially in campaign season. The first round of essays is due next week.
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