Abstract
This paper studies Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad” as a critique of Bunyan’s visionary tale, Pilgrim’s Progress, and examines the transformation of its religious ethos in the context of antebellum America. To this aim, this study mainly focuses on Hawthorne’s criticism of supernatural explanations, religious teleology, and divine salvation from the New Historical perspective of subversion and containment, and the way they are transformed in terms of natural explanations, chance, and secularly-minded terrestrial salvation, respectively. As a rewriting of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, “The Celestial Railroad” not only subverts the dogmatic and authoritarian religiosity of its predecessor but also demonstrates the containment of this religious discourse in a more this-worldly, humanistic, and secular vision, as the narrative is also vigilant about the repercussions that this transformation might bring about. The controversial and unsatisfactory ending of “The Celestial Railroad” is shown to be a point of strength in the story via two different interpretations: first, by appealing to the fictional nature of the dream vision, the ending undermines the truth claim ascribed to visions in the past and is thus made more appropriate to modern interpretations of dreams. Second, the contradiction at the end can function as a distraction to blur Hawthorne’s intentions and to protect him against possible accusations.
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Notes
New Historicism is a heterogeneous movement and its proponents have offered different explanations for subversion and containment. For example, Greenblatt approaches subversion and containment in a more monolithic fashion, whereas, for Dollimore, power is more contingent and thus subversion and containment can act in a variety of forms, even against the intentions of authority. Here, Dollimore’s more subtle and malleable concepts are employed.
The “blackness” that Melville refers to here might have to do with the covert and stealthy ambiance of Hawthorne’s sometimes heretical tales. Thompson (1952), in his Melville’s Quarrel with God, argues that the phrases like “blackness of darkness,” which Melville used elsewhere in the same review of Mosses to describe Hawthorne’s tales, is “the term which Jude used in the Bible (KJV, 1997, Jude. 1:13) to condemn the devilishness of heresiarchs” (p. 136).
It is noteworthy that Melville finds Hawthorne’s subversive capacity tantamount to Shakespeare’s, whose works are central to New Historical analysis.
Reverend Barzillai Frost was a zealous Unitarian preacher whose extremely orthodox conception of religion and Christianity (as the only means of salvation) met with strong reaction from Emerson and Hawthorne. Rev. Frost here could be a stereotypical example of the kind of orthodoxy that Emerson and Hawthorne, despite their differences, both endeavored to subvert. In The American Notebooks, Hawthorne (1974) ridiculed him as “the most useful of his class” by doing what “ministers did a hundred years ago” (p. 352).
The containment of the natural-law explanation was not exclusive to non-religious groups and secular movements in America. Evangelical Protestants like Charles Finney had shunned the supernaturalism of religion by depicting a God who acts through natural laws (Turner, 1985, p. 77). Turner mentions that about 1820: “conviction of a natural-law God, once confined to advanced thinkers, became common property of educated Christians. The old ‘steady sellers’ of the eighteenth-century book trade—devotional volumes featuring a mysterious, unpredictable Jehovah—expired. They were replaced by a new religious literature with a new, reliable Deity. Few tolerably well-read people believed any longer that God interrupted the course of nature to punish or reward His creatures. A terrific storm might still, in 1850, evoke thoughts of divine providence; the death of a loved one almost surely would. But providence no longer broke natural law; they moved in tandem” (p. 79).
Hawthorne believed that the idealism prevalent in New England acquired its name from Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.
Although there are no public accusations against Hawthorne, Emerson faced such accusations in his controversial “Divinity School Address” at Divinity Hall of Harvard University on July 15, 1838. In this address, Emerson put Transcendentalism’s main tenets against Unitarian theology. Emerson acclaimed Jesus as “a true man” who had venerated the human soul, but he discarded the need for miracles of Jesus to understand God and accused the church of making a pagan myth out of the figure of Christ. This address caused an uproar and the prominent Unitarian and a professor at Harvard Divinity, Norton (2000), accused Emerson of “insurrection of folly” to undo Christianity (p. 248). He published A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity (1839) in the next year, chastising Emerson’s secular spirituality. Norton certainly found Emerson’s view blasphemous, which amounted to nothing short of atheism. After the address, Emerson was not welcomed to speak at Harvard Divinity until after the Civil War (Richardson, 1996, p. 419), felt somehow cut off from Harvard and Unitarian Church, and spoke with more caution in public (p. 300).
In Etherege, Hawthorne (1974) cautions himself: “Now, if this great blackness and horror is to be underneath the story, there must be a frolic and dance of bacchanals all over the surface; else the effect would be utterly miserable. There may be a steam of horror escaping through safety valves, but generally, the tone must be joyous” p. 292).
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Hassanpour Darbandi, A., Rezaei, T. Hawthorne’s New Pilgrim’s Progress and Antebellum America: Subversion and Containment in “The Celestial Railroad”. Neophilologus 106, 147–165 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-021-09702-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-021-09702-9