A "Study of Church in America": Catholicism as Exotic Other in The Damnation of Theron Ware

2006 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-58
Author(s):  
Aaron Urbanczyk
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Old World ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
Theron Ware ◽  
Damnation Of Theron Ware ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Erotic

AbstractThe Damnation of Theron Ware is the tale of a young Methodist minister's tragic downfall set in rural upstate New York. The inexperienced Reverend Ware finds himself in an environment which triggers his moral, spiritual, and intellectual degeneration. The novel represents Theron's temptations as a complex and organically connected web, at the center of which is Catholicism. "Unreformed" old world Roman Catholicism subsumes under its metaphorical auspices every specific register of transgressive alterity in Theron's imagination (e.g., ethnicity, aesthetics, the intellectual life, the erotic). Theron's romantic imagination radically misperceives Catholicism; it becomes the abyss of difference against which Theron gives way to "enlightened" agnosticism, pride, lust, avarice, covetousness, and self-loathing. The innocent young Methodist parson eventually loses his faith and becomes a stalker, a gossip, a thief, and a would-be adulterer. This transformation takes place through his experience with the Catholic "other" represented by Celia Madden, Father Vincent Forbes, and Dr. Ledsmar. Theron Ware misinterprets everyone associated with Catholicism, recasting the Catholic as the master trope under which all his desires for exotic transgression find an object. The Catholic becomes a dangerous mirror of Theron's perverse desires which "illumines" the way to his "Damnation."

scholarly journals Dokia Humenna’s Depiction of the Second World War and the OUN in Khreshchatyi iar: How Readers Responded

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Myroslav Shkandrij
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Reader Response ◽  
Ukrainian Academy ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Emigre Literature ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Way

<p class="EW-abstract"><strong>Abstract:</strong> When Dokia Humenna’s novel depicting the Second World War, <em>Khreshchatyi iar</em> (Khreshchatyk Ravine), was published in New York in 1956, it created a controversy. Readers were particularly interested in the way activists of the OUN were portrayed. This article analyzes readers’ comments and Humenna’s responses, which are today stored in the archives of the Ukrainian Academy of Science in New York. The novel is based on a diary Humenna kept during the German occupation of Kyiv in the years 1941-1943.</p><strong>Keywords: </strong>Dokia Humenna, <em>Khreshchatyi iar</em>, Second World War, OUN, Émigré Literature, Reader Response

Property and Selfhood in Herman Melville's Pierre

2006 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-199
Author(s):  
Jeffory A. Clymer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
Urban Market ◽  
The Family ◽  
Ideological Fantasy ◽  
Landed Gentry ◽  
Market Relations

In Pierre; or, the Ambiguities (1852) Herman Melville analyzes the intricacies of subjectivity and economics by way of two concrete and quite different forms of antebellum American property relations-the residual estates of the landed gentry in upstate New York and the emergent urban market economy of New York City. A condition of unassailability,of timelessness and imperviousness, infuses the family estate in Pierre, while incessant exchange characterizes the novel's urban finale. Taken together, these opposed economic arrangements represent Melville's meditation on how the very concept of alienability, the definitive aspect of modern property relations, impacted forms of non-slave identity in the antebellum United States. The condition of inalienability that structures the patrimonial estates presents the initially attractive possibility of removal from the turbulent world of property relations, exchange, and commodification,but it turns out to be an ideological fantasy supported primarily by violence and death. Melville, always one to brood about selfhood, and faced in Pierre with his realization of the rottenness at the core of his fantasy of a subjectivity not riven by alienability,responds with the novel's urban section. This second portion of the novel presents market relations as a horror wreaked principally on the self. Pierre, ultimately, represents Melville's monument to the desirability, and his dismay at the impossibility, of imagining identity outside the syntax of a market economy's version of property relations.

A Talk with Gabrielle Bell

2018 ◽  
pp. 225-234
Author(s):  
Annie Mok
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Support System ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Northern California ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
The Way

Everything Is Flammable, cartoonist Gabrielle Bell’s latest graphic novel for the Minneapolis publisher Uncivilized Books, follows Bell as she helps her mother rebuild a life and a support system after losing her Northern California home to a fire. Bell treks from her house in upstate New York to the California woods, encountering many human and animal characters along the way. I spoke to Gabrielle about diaries, metacognition, and more, over the phone from her apartment in Brooklyn....

We the Animals and Honoring an Intimate Story of Brutal Love

2021 ◽  
pp. 002216782110086
Author(s):  
Nisha Gupta ◽  
Eric Greene
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Family Dynamics ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
The Family

In this edited interview, psychologists Nisha Gupta and Eric Greene interview filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar about We the Animals (2018), his film adaptation of the novel by Justin Torres. We the Animals is a coming-of-age story of an adolescent boy named Jonah who grows up with rambunctious brothers in a working class mixed-race family in upstate New York, and who must contend with both his volatile father and his emerging queer sexuality. Jonah’s mother and father have a volatile relationship that makes and unmakes the family many times over, often leaving the boys fending for themselves. As his brothers harden and grow into versions of their father, Jonah, who is the youngest, becomes increasingly aware of his desperate need to escape. Driven to the edge, Jonah embraces an imagined world all of his own. In this conversation, Jeremiah describes what it was like to honor novelist Justin’s intimate story by bringing it to screen, depict the nuanced realities of love interlaced with violence within family dynamics, and craft an immersive story that poses more questions than it answers.

Acquisitive Liaisons

2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-109
Author(s):  
Sarah Anne Kuczynski
Keyword(s):  
Gilded Age ◽  
Social World ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Personal Value ◽  
Theron Ware ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Damnation Of Theron Ware ◽  
Title Character

Sarah Anne Kuczynski, “Acquisitive Liaisons: Collecting and Alternative Valuing in Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware” (pp. 82–109) This essay reads Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) as an attempt to reimagine human relationships amid the unsettling of traditional, effortful methods for establishing personal value amid the socioeconomic stratification of Gilded Age America. Foregrounding the novel’s imbrication within late-nineteenth-century America’s “collecting mania,” this study contends that the relationship that forms between the Octavius elite and the title character closely resembles that between collector and recent acquisition. The idea that Theron is treated as an object by Celia and her friends might appear to lend support to the prevailing reading of the novel as a tale about a naive young minister who is used and abused by the worldly figures he idolizes. However, I offer a contrarian challenge to this dominant interpretation by demonstrating that Theron, in fact, consistently pursues objecthood and the fate of acquisition over the course of the novel—not in a masochistic sense but because, as this essay argues, within the Gilded Age social world of The Damnation of Theron Ware, the life of a prized possession has the potential to be a fulfilling one. Theron may talk of his grand plans for renovating his character but in reality he seizes every opportunity to retreat to a space where passivity is encouraged, where personal value is assigned rather than earned or enacted.

The Jewish Mother as Metonym for Community in Postwar America

2017 ◽  
pp. 169-182
Author(s):  
Josh Lambert
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Critique ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Old World ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Postwar America ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Guardian ◽  
Jewish Mother ◽  
The Way

This chapter considers the way in which the mother–son relationship depicted in Adele Wiseman's novel Crackpot in 1974 functions as a feminist critique of the Jewish mother in post-war America. It identifies a maternal character who affirms traditionalism and parochialism that acts as the guardian of identity and a bridge between the old world and the new. It also mentions Hoda, the protagonist of Crackpot and a prostitute, who decides to continue having sex with her son to create a relationship through which she can pass on the Jewish culture she learned from her father's stories. The chapter discusses the incestuous relationship in Crackpot, which models a picture of community that is simultaneously dependent and independent of genealogy. It argues that the novel vision of the Jewish mother is consonant with other Jewish cultural trends of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“An Expensive Leading Woman”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan R. Ellenberger
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Production Code ◽  
The Way

Hopkins is cast in Two Kinds of Women, William C. de Mille’s final film. She has a brief affair with actor John Gilbert. She does Dancing in the Dark with George Raft, with whom she battles on the set. Hopkins is given a two-month leave. On the way to New York, she adopts a baby boy in Chicago. Hopkins returns to Paramount, where Emanuel Cohen has replaced B. P. Schulberg as production chief. She argues with Cohen over assignments until she is assigned to Lubitsch’s iconic Trouble in Paradise. She’s scheduled to do No Man of Her Own with Clark Gable, but script problems cause a rift and she walks out. Hopkins agrees to do an adaptation of William Faulkner’s sordid novel Sanctuary, renamed The Story of Temple Drake. Battles between Paramount and the Hays office over how to bring the novel to the screen make this film a key reason the Production Code is enforced.

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