Our Lady of Art

Chapter 5 examines Willa Cather’s neglected story, “Coming, Aphrodite” in light of her fascination with the bodily presentation that Camille Paglia would later call “sexual personae”—for which Cather develops her own Marian interpretive sensibility, half Roman Catholic and half Pagan, as a deliberate counterforce to the Puritan heritage deflating U.S. artistic and expressive culture. In her twenties, Cather was a prodigious journalist fascinated by the radiant figurae of statuary, painting, drama, poetry, and fiction both home and abroad—which she interrogated in explicitly religious terms, with a particular affinity for both Marian-Catholic dissent from the Puritan denial of the senses and its alternative of graced intercession. Cather learns to invite readers to the redemptive power of forbidden love: sex for its own sake, adultery whether intermittent or sustained or only imagined, same-sex beatings of the heart and meetings of the mind. Then, in “Coming, Aphrodite!,” in a way more literal that her readers could possibly have expected, Cather stages the male gaze of an avant-garde, sexually disciplined and romantically impervious, young painter in Washington Square, Don Hedger, who finds himself in thrall—through a closet peephole!—to the artful exhibitionism in body and song of an equally ambitious, alternatively brilliant ingénue, Eden Bower. Their pas de deux produces a profound, profoundly mutual, yet never-to-be domesticated, sexual intimacy, non-reproductive but dually procreative—all of it conducted under signs of Roman Latinate and Indo-Latino Catholicism, including a story within the story entitled “The Forty Lovers of the Princess.”

Vouchsafed by the Holy Ghost

Chapter 3 argues that the now-canonical reading of Kate Chopin’s small masterpiece, The Awakening, which takes Edna Pontellier’s sexual wanderlust as symptomatic of a racist, primitivistic projection (per Toni Morrison’s general formulation), utterly neglects the founding plot and concerted characterizations. In The Awakening, Edna, a married Kentucky Presbyterian, is set adrift among Creole Catholics who embody a sexual sacramentality that attracts her but that she can’t, herself, achieve, beyond eventual submission to adultery with a local lothario. When the story begins, Edna is chafing in her marriage to a self-involved financier and, despite her Calvinist upbringing and persisting individualist sensibility, becomes increasingly involved, Theron-style, with a Creole trio: Madame Ratignolle, the mother-woman who is sensual in aspect and touch; Robert Lebrun, a serial acolyte of older women who refuses to deliver on his sexual promise despite beguiling her on the refulgent isle of La Chenière Caminada; and Mademoiselle Reisz, a spinster artiste, whose way with Frédéric Chopin’s nocturnes is her way with Edna, soul and (implicitly) body. Thus The Awakening is American’s first major portrayal of the Protestant-adrift-among-Catholics, and it is only as such that it becomes our proto-feminist exploration of a wife’s quest for sexual and aesthetic autonomy. Whereas Frederic’s Theron Ware is one of talkiest books ever, The Awakening delineates temptations to Catholicism that are more show then tell, capturing the fault lines of full social incorporation in Edna’s fatal sea-swim, which can be understood both as a capitulation, in resurgent Protestant self-immolation, and as a visionary sacrifice.

The Carraway Confessional

Chapter 6 argues that the holy grail of Gatsby’s idolatrous love for Daisy, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, presents a profound challenge to the prepped and Ivied Midwestern Protestantism of Nick Carraway, who turns out to be an emotional exhibitionist not just an emotional voyeur. In “Absolution,” the story first intended as the novel’s first chapter, Fitzgerald establishes the theo-ontology of the gorgeous radiant lie, which because of its occasioned theatricality (witness critics Mitchell Breitwieser and Tracy Fessenden) courts ineffability, catechetical casuistry notwithstanding. To Nick, Jay Gatsby manifests a radiance that co-exists, somehow, with everything for which he has “unaffected scorn,” including nouveau-riche vulgarity, gangster-derived upper-class brutality, and delusional, out-sized masculine desire—for it calls, again mysteriously, to his homo-eros and own precarious class positioning (mirrored variously by the three women) and manifests itself in the tension between a Protestant transcendental “symbolist aesthetics” and a Catholic material sacramentality that descends even more directly from Hawthorne. In Nick’s literary confessional, the witness he bears to Gatsby’s “romantic readiness” is in itself more outrageously romantic still: that is, it is the testament of a seducee-convert to the passional incarnation of incommensurable love, as Marian Catholicism concentrates it, in the face of linen so dirty it can’t be laundered. At the last, what Nick has to confess is not his own myriad sexual and social foibles but rather a love for (the idol of Gatsby) so outsized and imminently felt it it courts, manifests, and arguably sanctions “an ineffably gorgeous lie.”

Densher’s Crucifixion—or A Beautiful, Beneficent Dishonesty?

Chapter 4 takes up the perspective of Kate Croy over against that of lover Merton Densher, to recognize how James’ The Wings of the Dove moves the reader beyond the short-sighted Anglo-Puritan ethics of Densher to contemplate the “beauty” of Marian-Catholic beneficence, mercy, and non-zero-sum romantic vision—especially when it comes to the otherwise dark entwinements of love and death. From mid-century English critics Yvor Winters and F.R. Leavis to the latest U.S. aestheticians, Wings has long been understood to be a sordid tale of greed and betrayal redeemed precisely yet only by the rise of conscience in Densher—who, not coincidently, takes over the indirect discourse of the second half of the novel, to the point of declaring his personal Christian ascension. And yet it is not a coincidence that this part of Wings is set in Adriatic-Catholic Venice: a city of waterways and alleyways in which to go straight is to get there by gorgeous indirection—which, this chapter argues, is the objective correlative of how James’ notorious late style (postponements, fractures, multivalences) and huge melodramatic, Veronese-inspired canvas serves the alternative Marian knowingness, not only of Kate Croy, the visionary mistress among the Marian figures, but also of the dying yet still sexual Milly Theale, her surreptitious acolyte; and not only that of the two women in the romantic triangle but also of the three wondrous queer characters in support—besmitten yet selfless Susan Stringham, visionary doctor Sir Luke Strett, and Eugenio the major-domo of Venetian Living.

Coda

The coda to Transgression & Redemption considers how the knowledges, methods, and values of the book might contribute to further considerations of the American novel, with immediate emphasis on several canonical masterpieces of the 1930s, including William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939); how, alternatively, the critical repertoire of this book might contribute to Hollywood scholarship beyond poststructuralist feminist critique, with emphasis split between the erotic-spiritual edginess of individual Criterion-canonized masterpieces (the not happily-ever-after: Casablanca, All About Eve, Blue Velvet) and the luminous achievement of “sexually ever after” in serial Hollywood films, featuring Bogey and Bacall, Katherine Hepburn and one of her men, or Myrna Loy and William Powell; and how, finally, the book’s critical reorientation can reveal the mythopoetic force of American popular music, beginning for illustration’s sake with the two greatest vocalists in that history, Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, whose vocalized radiance, entailing bent notes and captured lyric, express obsessively the twin dimensions of incarnate passion, sex and sentiment. Or, as the two of them (sort of Catholics, Marian both) liked to put it, body and soul.

No Forgiveness in Heaven, No Forgetting in Hell

Chapter 7 argues that the word which brings the “nasty, grim little tale” of Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House to the surface is “sin” and that the hermeneutic that makes sense of the Professor’s love-driven crisis of will is German-American Catholic. The starting point of this revisionist reading is non-controversial; The Professor’s House frames one great homosocial, alternatively domestic, putatively anti-capitalist intergenerational romance (Tom Outland’s reminiscences of his cowpoke buddy, Roddy Blake) inside another (Professor St. Peter’s idealization and idolization of Tom Outland), both of which seem to be as pure of heart—and of fluid exchange—as the pristine air and water of Outland’s Blue Mesa. But the women of the novel, especially wife Lillian and the two daughters, would seem to have a different story to tell, regarding the Professor’s investments in Outland and Outland’s retreat with Roddy and what male-male romance has in it for women—a subtext of feminist perspective and women’s values that emerges, in remarkable clarity, as if by miracle, from the fractured yet relentless Catholic insinuations of the novel: a veritable catechism of silent revelations and muted insistences beginning, in fact, with the reclamation of the discourse and provenance of sin. It comes as a surprise, then, that a novel as sophisticated in sociological inquiry, sexual wisdom, and experimental form as The Professor’s House—one of the most academically revered, or at least attended to, novels in the current modernist canon—can and does have a moral—indeed, it tests for morality.

Introduction

To make sense of the presence of Catholic devotionalism in America’s putatively Protestant mainstream fiction, the Introduction recovers the mythopoetic criticism of Leslie A. Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, long-remembered only in gender and racial terms, to marshal his distinction between Protestant sentimentalism, in which Pauline anti-sexuality yields sexless households and male bonding, and the sanctification of passion in the Catholic Mediterranean, which re-sexualizes Mary and compulsively seeks redemption in transgression. Whereas Fiedler assumed that Roman Catholicism lost the literary battle for the American psyche, Transgression & Redemption argues that “the Protestant temptation to Marian Catholicism” anticipated by Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter really gets going by century’s end and culminates in the great American modern(ist) novels of the 1920s. It begins by identifying the core storytelling that dissents from Emersonian transcendentalism and that has dominated America’s novelistic canon since its inception: what a previous generation identifies as “melodramas of beset sexuality” that must now be seen, in a return to religious accountability, as martyr tales of forbidden love. Then the big reveal: it turns out that where there is sexual transgression in the American canon, there are almost always signs of redemption—and those signs are themselves almost always Catholic. The introduction proceeds from recent critical trends to outline further crucial changes in reading practices—leveraging female devotions against male delusion, thinking both/and instead of either/or, cultivating material immanence over transcendental symbolism—that prepare the way for comprehending the once-and-still-fearful religious Other central to the American literary imagination.

Feast of Our Lady of Desire, Resplendent

Chapter 8, revisiting Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and taking its cue from Jake Barnes’s Catholic conscience, argues that Jake acts in recurrent if unspoken penitential redress, crafting with Lady Brett Ashley a sentimental, extramarital intimacy enabled, in part, but only in part, by his war wound. Barnes’ story entails the pilgrimage of his Anglo-American caste-mates from the monetary social economy of Paris to the buddy-buddy warmth of the borderland Pyrenees to the fully anticapitalist, extravagantly Catholic peasant Spain, where in religious festival male camaraderie is awash from spurting wine sacks and the holy spectacle of the bullfights offers truly enfleshed sacrifice—bloody, at times deadly Lady Brett, much admired and accomplished if still soul-doubting as the Goddess of resplendent desire, seeks in Pamplona to defeat the distancing worship of a Marian throne, setting her sights instead on communion with the men in the art of spectatorship (afición) only then to commingle with its great young bullfighter, Pedro Romero. Jake serves, of course, as the man in waiting to Our Lady Ashley—whereby pimp-istry and cuckoldry, requited sentiment and frustrated desire, wishful thinking and perfected intimacy dance together in lovely co-determination. In Fiedler’s broadest terms of love and death, Hemingway takes Transgression & Redemption full circle, enacting a Provençale-ization of the American imagination so thoroughly that incommensurable violative love is proven incarnate in the embodied passions of the heart but cannot be normatively domesticated—by Woman’s dictate (no children!) as much as by man’s fate—thus their blessed alt-intimacy.

Had There Been a Papist

This opening chapter revisits Hawthorne’s foundational The Scarlet Letter to initiate a proto-Catholic mode of inquiry and to leverage a renegade Catholic sense of divinity already at work within the Protestant American reflexive imagination. It begins with the recognition that The Scarlet Letter is mandatory not only because the novel has been used as the primary scene of instruction, top to bottom, in what constitutes true, and truly American, religion—correct conviction, just action, clear conscience—but also because, countermanding that instruction, the novel makes the bodily experience of spirit—a felt consecration of sexuality, including its violence—the litmus test for religious matters, in anticipation of Robert Orsi and the new religious historians. This chapter initiates a three-part experiment in analytical counter-exegesis: it explores the Marian-Catholic force of Hester’s felt sexual consecration, radiant motherhood, and supernatural issue (her daughter Pearl); it re-identifies the origins of Hawthorne’s story of homosocial stalking (Chillingworth) and ratcheted-up guilt (Dimmesdale) in the ancient Mediterranean folk tales of wandering prelates, cuckolded husbands, and murderous vengeance; and it presses beyond the transcendentalist claims of Hawthornian symbolism (that letter “A” on Hester’s smock) to discover and effect his nascent practice of material sacramentality. Tutoring a shift in the reader’s relationship to the novel, the chapter instigates an alternative mode of anti-Puritan dissent than Emersonian proto-feminist individualism, while practicing stylized criticism as a Catholicizing of criticism—establishing not only content (text, archive, value) but form, including modes of evidence, channels of access, and strategies of address, for a Catholic criticism.

Of Lascivious Mysticism and Other Hibernian Matters

Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware recasts The Scarlet Letter as a Methodist minister’s romance with Catholics and fin-de-siècle intellectual Catholicism. The Reverend Theron Ware is a liberal progressive Dimmesdale update, happily married at the novel’s outset, who is assigned to a fundamentalist, anti-Catholic congregation yet comes increasingly under the spell of a trio of erudite, somewhat unorthodox Catholic leaders—one of whom, Celia Madden, the Hester Prynne update, is a single woman, seemingly independent yet Church-integrated, whose mastery of the organ and articulation of Continental aesthetics are all too provocative to be ignored. The resultant interplay between Theron’s late-century Protestant dissipation and the edgy Catholicism of Celia and her erudite comrades (one priest, one scientist) is lit in knowing commentary—religious anthropology cum wicked irony—that hangs in the air long after Theron’s hurtful sexploration comes to its merciful—mercy-filled, Angel-conducted—end. In The Damnation of Theron Ware, the Catholic-inspired, Catholic-tutored mythopoetics of Protestant self-consciousness take a mighty leap forward, in seeming lock-step with Henry Adams and in anticipation of such contemporary thinkers as Richard Rodriguez, Camille Paglia, and James T. Fisher. Religious wanderlust is seen to drive forbidden love at least as much as the original way around. And the narrative staging of Protestant wonderment and wanderlust, dramatized in terms of the Protestant-side tangle between its persisting Calvinism and emergent liberal pragmatism, takes a nasty 180-degree turn against itself, courtesy of its Catholic protagonists—though, really, of its Protestant author.