“…the world overlays and varnishes us…”: A Reading of Herman Melville’s Pierre

(This is an edited and slightly expanded version of a paper I wrote in grad school some years ago; again, the explanation for the tiresome MLA flourishes.)

Herman Melville’s seventh novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities can be said to be a work with more defenders than admirers, and therefor a work that attracts modes of criticism that emphasize justification instead of explanation; that is to say, the business of shedding some hermeneutical light is intimately bound up with the task of explaining (wishing) that the light will catch something worth seeing.  The reader of such criticism is assumed a skeptic.  Indeed, Pierre has generally only been judged worthy as a kind of post-Moby-Dick hangover (a metaphor for Melville’s psychological disturbances, which we hope weren’t overly determined by alcohol), or as a parody of contemporaneous novelistic modes, or as a precursor to broadly ‘modernist’ literary techniques, or simply the predecessor to Melville’s strong short fiction and poetry.  Very few have taken the book to be of value in itself, and matters are not helped by Pierre’s lurid subject matter (The plot briefly summarized: A young man breaks it off with his fiancé so he can marry his sister.) or its oblique approach to its thematic concerns.  Oftentimes, the emotions and subjects Melville evokes seem to exist at a right angle to the events of the story, especially the transparently autobiographical later chapters of the book in which the titular hero embarks on a doomed writing career.  Pierre, whatever its eccentricities as a story or as a work of art, is too rich and profound in many of its sections to be dismissed outright, but a significant challenge to any critic, still having to play the role of a defender, is to elucidate on the ‘ambiguities’ alluded to in the title.  The most effective way to do this is to consider, at least in part, the circumstances under which it was written and the motivations Melville had in writing it in the first place.

It is not unreasonable to suggest that Melville’s writing was every bit as exploratory as it was declarative; its sermonic tendencies may have obscured this point for some readers.  Putative statement need not be lacking in a capacity for ambiguity.  Melville wrote to work through his moral, aesthetic, spiritual, and psychological obsessions, and occasionally, over the course of a single work, his thematic and philosophical subjects would alter significantly, shooting off on discursive courses over which the author felt he may not have had full control.  Of the most importance, Melville would leave the shifts in theme apparent to his readers, as they were easily trackable through the alternating generic modalities of his style; the attentive reader could trace Melville’s thought process, or at least a literary proxy of it, over the events of a story.   Moby-Dick is the paradigmatic example of this tendency.  The critic Andrew Delbanco put it quite well: 

“He [Melville] was the first to understand that if a literary work is to register the improvisational nature of experience, it must be as spontaneous and self-surprising as the human mind itself.  …by concealing the existence of earlier versions of his work, he ran the risk of falsifying himself.  In this sense, Moby-Dick was like an active archeological site in which the layers of its own history are left deliberately exposed.  (146)

I will argue that while foregrounding the writing process is useful for understanding many of Melville’s works, it is absolutely essential for understanding Pierre.  Pierre is the novel where the act of composition is considered in a direct, literal fashion, and the value of writing is confronted and interrogated at length.  The mental process revealed over the course of the plot is one of disillusionment, but that assessment in itself is incomplete.  There are in fact multiple types of disillusionment on display, running from loss in faith in the security of the family unit, the viability of Christian morals, the achievability of an ideal artistic expression, the ability to communicate anything of oneself to others, and even the possibility of knowledge.  In writing Pierre, Melville displayed a forfeiture of faith in writing itself, or in the creative act which had sustained him for many years.  Considering his productivity after the publication of Pierre, it is safe to say that Melville recovered from this disenchantment to some degree, but his seventh novel represents what is probably his biggest crisis in faith; namely, his faith in his artistic mission. My task will be tracking the psychological and emotional trajectory of this crisis as presented in Pierre.

            The origins of Melville’s ‘Kraken’ book lay in his frustrations concerning readers’ expectations.  Pigeonholed as a relatively frivolous travel writer and “resident authority on things nautical and places exotic” (Higgins and Parker 5) Melville was keen to make the best use of his newly-discovered literary talents.  The genesis of his first post-Moby-Dick outing was part of his expanding effort to attain artistic and intellectual autonomy and uniqueness: “…in mid-November 1851… Melville was ripe for an attempt at a new, non-nautical genre through which he might make a bid for a high, less specialized literary reputation and through which he might satisfy his internal needs to surpass his previous literary achievements” (Higgins and Parker 5-6). Inevitably, such ambition is accompanied by anxiety, and Melville was (oddly?) predisposed to exacerbate it by modeling the dysfunctional dynamic of the Glendinning family, the focus of his novel’s incestuous drama, after his own family’s internal scandals.  Specifically, there is some reason to believe that Melville’s father, Allan Melville, had fathered an illegitimate daughter.  In addition, he had died in a state of delirium not dissimilar to that of Pierre Glendinning’s father (Higgins and Parker 6).  These disparate anxieties would coalesce to generate the story of Pierre.  The symbolic capacities of the subjects already existed in incipient form, as observed by Higgins and Parker:

In Pierre, the plot involving the sudden appearance of an unknown young woman, supposedly half-sister of the hero, had the great advantage of being easily allegorized within Melville’s psychological preoccupations: in the “boundless expansion” of Pierre’s life and mind Isabel would represent the invading unconscious.  (6)

This “invading unconscious” would prompt an internal unfolding that would disrupt every vestige of security the character of Pierre possessed.  Once Pierre comes to recognize the needs of his inner life, he becomes inescapably dissatisfied with his hollow existence at his estate, Saddle Meadows.  The story’s tragic dénouement is the revelation that Pierre is incapable of satisfying his social and psychological needs due to both his circumstances and personal flaws. 

            The parodic tendencies of Pierre are most conspicuous in the early parts of the book, where the pastoral quaintness of Pierre’s home at Saddle Meadows is too overtly saccharine to be taken seriously.  As one critic described it, “…we can suspect that nature has been too thoroughly domesticated…  This place is too soft a pastoral… its very lushness a symptom of unresolved and unrecognized problems” (Brodhead 226).  The picturesque environment is meant to symbolize the infantile falsity of Pierre’s youthful mindset at the start of the story.  Pierre’s troubles are clearly not meant to be contingent or avoidable, but a permanent feature of his condition that, in his ignorance and youth, he is initially unable to recognize.  Saddle Meadows is only edenic in appearance because Pierre has yet to acquire necessary knowledge, and this knowledge significantly prompts an inward-directed psychological investigation that comes to generate very external social consequences.

            As the great, exploratory symbol of Moby-Dick is the whale, the image that centers and structures the symbolic order of Pierre is the human face.  This implies many things, including a thematic concern for communication (Human expressions are ‘read,’ after all.) and human subjectivity (Human expressions reveal inner emotional truths, after all.).  It is a human face that initially disrupts Pierre’s harmonious existence.  Attending a social gathering with his mother, Pierre observes a young woman whom the reader later learns is Pierre’s half-sister Isabel.  Observing Isabel’s melancholy features exerts a profound influence on Pierre that proves life-altering: “…my creed of this world leads me to believe in visible, beautiful flesh… but now! – And again he [Pierre] would lose himself in the most surprising… ponderings, which baffled all the introspective cunning of his mind.  Himself was too much for himself” [Italics mine] (Melville 49).  Furthermore, Isabel’s face is said to “mystically appeal to his own private and individual affections… challenging him in his deepest moral being…”  (Melville 49). It is important to bear in mind that all of these ponderings occur well before Pierre has any way of knowing who Isabel is or her relation to him and his father.  Yet all of Pierre’s future anxieties are already present in incipient form, implying either an origin from within or a kind of mystical sympathy between the characters.  The challenge of Isabel’s countenance is that of an authentic image- perhaps kindred to a Platonic form, or deeper truth- that disrupts the superficial (some might say degraded to artificiality) appearances of Pierre’s immediate environment.  This initial shock prompts further, eventually self-destructive, reflections and discoveries.

            Upon learning of Isabel and her illegitimate origins, Pierre relocates the portrait of his father, whom he had previously venerated, and pauses a while to observe his features as the painting mediates them; this is the novel’s second considered ‘reading’ of a human face.  It prompts the first lesson of Pierre’s development, and that is the essential artifice and hypocrisy of the adult world and social environment he is about to enter as a young man coming of age.  Imagining the portrait speaking to him, Pierre hears: “I [the image in the painting] am thy father as he [Pierre’s actual father] more truly was.  In mature life, the world overlays and varnishes us… we, as it were, abdicate ourselves, and take unto us another self… in youth we are, Pierre, but in age we seem” (Italics Melville’s) (Melville 83).  The painting of his father reinforced Pierre’s heroic conception of the Glendinning family dynamic, and the recognition of the hollowness and inauthentic nature of its idealized portrayal signifies a simultaneous loss of faith in the possible accuracy of artistic expression.  In this section, Pierre learns that his social existence is false and that the lie is reinforced with the misleading idealizations of art. 

            The possible meanings of this revelation and their implications are temporarily deferred and the subsequent courses Pierre’s psychological development takes are significantly different.  They primarily concern a repudiation of contingency, or the efforts of Pierre to locate an eternal, transcendent principle in his inner self that owes nothing to the circumstances of his lived, social reality or the material world.  Pierre even asks himself, “How shall I steal yet further into Pierre, and show how this heavenly fire was helped to be contained in him, by mere contingent things… but I shall follow the endless, winding way… careless whither I be led, reckless where I land” (Melville 107).  Pierre makes this declaration with the intention of acting on the dictums issued from within his soul, to forsake mere propriety for eternal Truth.  The actions Pierre ends up taking are done with the purpose of creating a ‘pure’ social order in line with the eternal truths of God.  The impossibility of achieving such an order is supposed to be the crux of the story’s tragedy, but the resemblance of Pierre’s mission to Melville’s own literary endeavor is unmistakable.  Not content with his privileged but limited lot, he seeks alternatives courageously but recklessly, valuing the journey perhaps due to an intuitive understanding that the destination does not exist.

            The manner by which Pierre seeks his alternative social and moral being was and remains the most controversial aspect of his story.  He dissolves his relationship with the respectable young woman Lucy Tartan and arranges a false ‘marriage’ with his newly-discovered half-sister Isabel and then flees to a nameless city to pursue a career as a writer.  The incestuous subtext is immediately apparent, and the fact that Pierre seeks to justify his actions with broadly moral rhetoric makes the arrangement that much more grotesque and bizarre.  Amy Puett Putters put it quite well: “The work evolved… into a scathing portrayal of a young man consciously bent on doing right- honoring an obligation to support a girl he believes to be his late father’s illegitimate daughter- but unconsciously driven by incestuous love for this same girl” (239).  It is important to understand, however, that Pierre’s ethical concerns are not mere sublimation of sexual desire.  Rather, the two feelings coexist and amplify one another.  Richard Brodhead aptly described the tendency as a “holy feeling” that increases with its combination with a sexual desire and the suppression of the awareness of that desire (235). The result is an often confusing but fascinating yearning that is both authentically holy and genuinely profane.  Such a yearning is rearticulated in the later section in the form of Pierre’s attempt at beginning a career as a writer, a move that excites his inner desire for truth-telling but which he undertakes at least in part for vulgar (or at least practical), material reasons.  He needs to earn money for his new family.  However authentic each half of his desire may be on its own, practical demands work so that they cancel each other out, and Pierre is forced to lie to himself and others in order to pursue his ‘Truth.’  “The necessary deception,” observed the critic Lawrance Thompson, “to the effect that Isabel and Pierre are married, is but the first of innumerable subterfuges and lies which Pierre is forced to make… as he tries to imitate God…” (280).  The result is that both Pierre’s publishers and the relatives of his surrogate family correctly brand him a liar, and Pierre’s final self-recognition is the novel’s tragic ending.

            The fact that Pierre receives two nasty letters near the story’s end accusing him of being a liar and a fraud is significant.  They repudiate not so much Pierre’s moral mission as his inability (or possible unconscious unwillingness) to properly communicate its importance and legitimacy to anyone else.  The letter from Stanly and Frederic attacks Pierre’s pursuit of an alternative family and corresponding social structure, and the letter from the publisher attacks his artistic integrity, on moral grounds (Melville 356-357).  Neither set of accusations reflects the true motivations of Pierre, but rather the social compromises he had to make to pursue those motivations, and our protagonist is left with the reputation of possessing those familiar faults- that is, essentially fraudulent modes of expression- that he had previously ascribed to the social milieu he has come to reject and that were interrogated at length vis-à-vis the painting of Pierre’s father.  The most intriguing thing about Pierre is the manner in which Melville expands and alters the trajectory of its tragedy.  The surface plot involves a young man learning the impossibility of leading a holy and truthful life in line with God’s eternal laws because the material and contingent social concerns of the world make such a life impossible.  In pursuing this line of thought, Melville seemed to recognize a parallel with the creative desire, and the inherent uncertainty about whether art could codify and make coherent many of life’s mysteries.  He also came to recognize art’s capacity to be frivolous or fraudulent, and this led to at least a temporary state of disillusionment with his creative capacity.  The worst possible thing that could happen to an artist in Melville’s position is to be accused of inauthenticity, and this is exactly what happens to Pierre.  The split nature of the book’s tragedy is somewhat confused, but undeniably rich and possibly the single most revealing and autobiographical sequence in all of Melville’s works.  The depiction of the anxiety of the religious mission is partially abandoned for the portrait of the artist as young martyr.    

Works Cited

Delbanco, Andrew.  Melville: His World and Work.  New York: Random House, Inc.

• Print.

Melville, Herman.  Pierre, or the Ambiguities.  New York: Penguin.  1996.  Print.

Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parker, eds.  Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s Pierre,

            Or the Ambiguities.  Boston: G.K. Hall & Co.  1983.  Print.     

Brodhead, Richard.  “Conscious Idealizings and Unconscious Sexuality.”  Higgins and

            Parker 226-236.

Emmers, Amy Puett.  “New Crosslights on the Illegitimate Daughter in Pierre.” Higgins

            and Parker 237-240.

Higgins, Brian and Hershel Parker.  “Introduction.” Higgins and Parker 1-27

Thompson, Lawrance.  Melville’s Quarrel with God.  Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton

            University Press.  1952.  Print. 

“…then we give God the glory for it…”: Snake-handling and Pentecostalism

(Note: I’m not sure when I will be able to follow up on my first essay about Michelle Remembers, so no more prophecies concerning when that will be posted. Suffice to say, I am working on it. In the meantime, enjoy this old piece I originally wrote for an American Studies class back in the day.)

R.G. Robins’s Pentecostalism in America (2010)and Ralph W. Hood and W. Paul Williamson’s Them That Believe (2008)are two fairly recent books that offer complementary but non-identical approaches to understanding Pentecostalism in the United States.  Robins is a historian, and endeavors to write a broad history of the movement in a chronological fashion and addresses the central doctrinal features of Pentecostalism as well as its distinctive practices.  He ably contextualizes Pentecostalism and illustrates its adaptability and role in modern U.S. culture.  Ralph W. Hood and W. Paul Williamson are psychologists who take a more interdisciplinary approach and focus exclusively on one aspect of the movement- serpent-handling.  Serpent-handling has not been a feature of any mainstream Pentecostal church since the early 1920s, though support for the practice appeared in Pentecostal periodicals through the 1940s.  It is today a practice associated exclusively with renegade sects throughout the Appalachian region of the U.S., and stands in marked contrast with the mainstream and global respectability attained by dominant Pentecostal denominations.  With its central ritual involving the handling of dangerous, venomous reptiles, serpent-handling sects are positioned as being in opposition to the dominant culture, depending on the family unit (kin-group formations, if one prefers) for its relative durability and longevity.  Hood and Williamson attempt to understand the appeal and function of this ritual from every perspective, and draw upon a range of disciplines within the social sciences and humanities in order to illuminate it from multiple conceptual angles.  The first portion of their book describes the history of Pentecostalism, and in many respects reads like an abridged version of Robins’ effort, and then moves on to a history of serpent-handling sects in Appalachia, pointing out the parallels with long-standing folk traditions.  From there, the authors describe the practice of snake-handling itself, and its meaning as a ritual.  Drawing on a psychoanalytic and evolutionary framework to explain the allure of the serpent as both sign and symbol, Hood and Williamson proffer an intriguing take on the practice which places the emphasis squarely on lived experience; William James is alluded to more than once. 

The value, I feel, of considering these two texts together has already been hinted.  Robins basically offers a ‘macro’ view of Pentecostalism, investigating the movement as a social and historical phenomenon with populist roots that eventually became institutionalized.  The role of institutionalization is of crucial concern when considering his history next to Hood and Williamson’s study.  According to Hood and Williamson, Pentecostalism’s arrival in the mainstream was the main driving force in the arrival of serpent-handling-as-sect.  Serpent-handling, in addition to providing a glimpse of a more ‘micro’ understanding of a religious movement and sensibility through the practice of rituals amongst small groups of people, serves as the oppositional shadow of the larger movement, a schismatic sect that brings to light the social, philosophical, and theological divisions within a religious movement.  The essence of the division is Biblical textual authority and the role it plays in understanding Pentecostalism’s most salient characteristic and ritual centerpiece- the Sign.  The reason the Division exists at all is social and political.  Biblical literalism makes intense demands on religious followers that are at odds with mainstream American culture and the general ebb and flow of modernity.  As a practice that can maim and kill, snake-handling will always, in all probability, be marginal both within the context of Pentecostalism and the cultural life of the United States, but as Hood and Williamson observe, prevalence is not the only standard that can be used to assess a religious ritual’s vitality; longevity is also important, and by that standard snake-handling has more than kept pace with mainstream Pentecostalism.  Considering the mainstream and marginal in Pentecostalism, as well as the larger social reality in relation to private belief and the often contentious relationship between social and religious values (something often overlooked in more secular-minded considerations of religion) will together be the principle focus of my analysis of Pentecostalism in America and Them That Believe.

                Pentecostalism in America, as already indicated, is a general history of the Pentecostal movement in the United States, a succinct but thorough overview of its historical and cultural roots, its development throughout the twentieth century, a discussion of its key foundational figures, and a speculation of its current import and possible future.  The trajectory of Pentecostalism has been an assured but by no means inevitable sprint to the mainstream, a religious sensibility that emerged as a reaction against the disorienting rootlessness inflicted by modernity.  As indicated by the name (The Pentecost refers to the moment when the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles), Pentecostalism drew from the teachings and experiences of the early church and was (and is) deeply concerned with the primeval origins of Christianity.  It is of a set of faith traditions that seek to purify and improve present conditions through a thorough apprehension of the primitive origins of faith.  Pentecostalism placed a strong emphasis on sanctification and the occurrence it sought for most vigorously was baptism- or possession- of believers by the Holy Spirit.  The manifestation of the Holy Spirit was invariably thought to be accompanied by a visual sign, and indeed, the Sign, properly understood, would come to dominate most features of Pentecostal worship.  Although there was much early uncertainty about what constituted a proper sign, it was ultimately- and intuitively- the Bible that would provide guidance to the faithful.  Early founders of the Pentecostal movement, such as Charles Parham, would come to favor glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, as the most conspicuous and persuasive indicator of possession by the Holy Spirit.  The popular stereotype of the ecstatic Pentecostal follower gibbering in a strange language has its origins in Parham’s insistence of glossolalia as the most important sign with scriptural support.  Specifically, Mark 16:17-18 names five signs that the resurrected Christ said would identify believers; speaking in tongues was just one of these.  The centrality of glossolalia is understandable considering that the remaining four signs are either extremely dangerous (taking up serpents, drinking poison) or are difficult to demonstrate in a social setting (healing the sick, casting out devils).  The perceived incompleteness of what would become mainstream Pentecostalism’s approach to the signs would set the stage for the schismatic biblical literalism of the snake-handling tradition.

Robins is forthright in his approach to history, indicating his possible bias from the introduction of his book by quoting the old aphorism that all history is autobiography.  Being raised in the Pentecostal tradition, he brings an insider’s perspective on the practices of the various churches, and places a strong emphasis on the diversity and adaptability of Pentecostal institutions.  In fact, according to Robins, it is the fundamental disunity of the movement that poses the biggest challenge to understanding it, and it is only by uncovering “an organic relation to a common past” (Robins 1) that Pentecostalism, as such, clicks into focus.  The origins lie in the Holiness movement of the late 19^th century, which was principally a Methodist school keen on reviving a Wesleyan understanding of sanctification.  With the benefit of hindsight, the holiness movement’s religious methods and rituals can be seen as being of greater significance than its theology.  The chief organizational practice was the camp meeting, a passionate and fraternal setting that both linked the faithful to a less divided and chaotic past and fostered fellow-feeling that was badly sought after in post-bellum America.  The sensibility was very much in reaction to the modern world, characterized by ethnic tension, urban rootlessness, and industrial-capitalist exploitation.  Compounding the sense of alienation was the often break-neck pace of social and technological change.  Renewal movements generally offered solace through a return to origins, with the early, 1^st century church serving as the exemplar and ideal.  Pentecostalism promised a return to the early church days of miracles.  This vision, it would seem to me, offers a very particular understanding of religious community, both in terms of organizational code and practical function.  Holiness gave people a sense of unity through a certain conception of the past that could be manifested, courtesy of the Holy Spirit, in the present, with the organizing metaphor of purity imputed to the Christian faith’s historical origins; Pentecostalism offered a means of confronting the problems of the day, ordered along the premise that modern life was tainted by myriad moral impurities.  The egalitarian approach and emphasis on spiritual autonomy ultimately doomed the Holiness movement to an early incoherence, but its energy would last into the early twentieth century when a number of preachers and theologians imbued the tendency present in the camp meetings with an appropriately symbolic significance, and empowered Pentecostalism with its own terminology.  Specifically, Charles Parham placed a new-found theological emphasis on glossolalia, which granted Pentecostalism a strong evangelical tool (Speaking in a different language without instruction was supposed to facilitate evangelicalism and thus herald Christ’s return.), a persuasive indicator of the presence of the Holy Spirit, and “the seal of the Bride of Christ” (Robins 23), or the marker of the true church.  Parham’s influence granted Pentecostalism a pronounced eschatological tendency, which was hardly alien to Evangelicalism, then or now.  Pentecostalism, perhaps more than any other faith, understood the evangelizing power of the Sign; it is what would bring unbelievers to God.  Speaking in tongues would not achieve widespread recognition until William Seymour, Parham’s African-American protégé, established a Mission on Azusa Street in Los Angeles.  From there, both Pentecostalism and its litany of signs would expand, eventually reaching every corner of the country (and beyond) and encompassing all five of the signs indicated in Mark 16:17-18. 

    Robins mentions the practice of snake-handling only three times in his history.  He is surprisingly non-judgmental, but predictably confers on it marginal status.  Clearly, the ritual cannot be ignored because of its notoriety, but sensible people can continue to doubt its overall importance to the Pentecostal movement.  Robins, like most scholars, locates the arrival of snake-handling as a religious ritual (as opposed to a folk tradition or one-off manifestation of religious enthusiasm) with the arrival of Pentecostalism in the American South.  He offers a persuasive but incomplete explanation for snake-handling’s Southern roots- “Southern Pentecostalism stood out from its regional peers for its emphasis on sanctification, its ethical rigorism (sic), and its strict church discipline.  In addition, the Pentecostal tendencies toward literalism and emotional intensity received their fullest expression here…  the region gave birth to the phenomenon of serpent handling, a Pentecostal subculture that… has etched one of the movement’s most enduring popular images” (44-45). Robins would seem to link the peculiarities of Sothern Pentecostalism to the peculiarities of the Southern character, and neglects the specifics of what Southern culture may have brought to Pentecostalism.  Hood and Williamson draw attention to the possible significance of folk traditions and previous isolated incidents of snake-handling at revivalist meetings across the South.  Robins correctly emphasizes how Southern conservatism magnified the already literalist tendencies of Pentecostalism; if all five of the signs described in Mark 16 were to be put into practice as a religious and ethical mandate anywhere, it would probably be in Appalachia.  What is even more remarkable is the degree of tolerance with which the practice was met by establishment Pentecostals of the time.  Robins writes, “Leaders… were slow to condemn the practice because of its textual basis and its apparent validation of their claim that all of the apostolic signs and wonders had been restored among them.  Condemnation would eventually come, but only after serpent handling had gone unchecked for several years” (45).  This would seem to indicate a tension within the early Pentecostal movement between religious fidelity and social utility.  It is a problem faced by many, if not most, religious movements; the conflict between concerning oneself with business beyond the physical, material world and maintaining an organization that is adaptable to the unavoidable demands of said world.  Snake-handling illustrates that the manifestation of this conflict occurs along (communal) ritual lines.  Ritual serves as the point where a religion’s metaphysics and spiritual orientation can be made manifest to any and all observers; it is the public face of a religion’s spirituality.  Pentecostalism, right from its inception, had pronounced fundamentalist tendencies, and the textual authority of the Bible was- and for the most part still is- regarded as absolute.  Since all of Pentecostalism’s religious signs (the foundation of Pentecostal ritual) have textual origins, this makes any “selective” take on scripture extraordinarily difficult.  However, to gain mainstream respectability in a modern American (later global) context, selective understandings of scripture became necessary.  In this respect, snake-handling sects can be regarded as the religious purity that mainstream Pentecostalism has chosen to reject, although Hood and Williamson make it clear in their study that any generalization about snake-handling in relation to mainstream Pentecostalism should be made with caution.

Them That Believe, in contrast to Robins’s work, is not strictly a history, but an interdisciplinary analysis that draws on historical, sociological, anthropological, psychological, and neurophysiological approaches to studying a specific religious ritual in its appropriate context.  Hood and Williamson announce at the outset that they are sympathetic to snake-handling sects, but do not practice the faith itself or share in its religious convictions.  This again provides a contrast to Robins, who brought an insider’s perspective to his study of Pentecostalism.  Them That Believe positions itself as an understanding outsider’s take on religious praxis.  The methodology employed by Williamson and Hood  is multi-faceted, as befits a resolutely interdisciplinary work, but the most important empirical evidence brought forth by their study was culled from several years’ worth of travel around the Appalachian region, visiting snake-handling churches as ‘participant observers’ and conducting extensive interviews with practitioners.  For this reason, it may be most useful to regard Hood and Williamson’s book as a work of anthropology, and the structure and on-the-ground functionality of the snake-handling ritual is given primary focus.  The early chapters of Them That Believe, however, are historical overviews, considering the history of Pentecostalism generally, the practice of snake-handling specifically, and the initial acceptance and eventual rejection of snake-handling by major Pentecostal churches.  There is some overlap between the material covered by Robins and Williamson and Hood, but for fairly intuitive reasons, Hood and Williamson give more attention to theology and ritual, though they share Robins’ understanding of the importance of region in accounting for Pentecostalism’s diversity and adaptability. 

The third and fourth chapters of Them That Believe contain the material of the greatest historical interest, not only in the context of Hood and Williamson’s study, but of the snake-handling tradition generally.  Snake-handling cannot be traced to any one figure in particular, but the man most commonly given credit for popularizing snake-handling and decisively establishing it as a religious tradition is George Went Hensley.  In yet another ironic historical turn, the most profoundly anti-modern incarnation of a profoundly anti-modern religious movement gained its early notoriety through the decidedly modern phenomenon of media sensationalism.  Hensley, a minister ordained at a prominent Pentecostal church called the Church of God, came to be troubled by the Church of God’s selective reading of Mark 16:17-18, which, as indicated previously, stipulated five signs that would signify true belief in Christ.  Although the specifics are uncertain owing to a dearth of textual evidence, it is commonly held that Hensley, while ministering at Owl Hollow in rural Tennessee, retired to the peak of a nearby mountain and came upon a rattlesnake, which he then took up without harm to himself.  Between 1910 and 1914, Hensley developed a reputation as an intensely charismatic preacher who regularly handled dangerous, venomous snakes, and he received a great deal of attention from local and national newspapers and magazines.  Hensley was by no means the first snake-handler; it is probable that, as a youth, he witnessed a young woman named Nancy Kleinieck handle serpents at a coal camp revival.  The handling of snakes as a sign of devotion was not without precedent in Appalachia, but it is generally agreed that Hensley’s charismatic religious work, backed by the perceived theological authority of emerging Pentecostalism, effectively paved the way for serpent handling as a viable religious tradition.  The history provided by Hood and Williamson is instructive for a number of reasons.  It demonstrates the process by which a religious practice becomes a tradition or ritual.  Historical authority (in this case textually mediated) articulated by a prominent figure of the faith joins with the right social milieu to create the impression of a divine manifestation, or something like a sacrament.  Evangelicalism provides a narrative foundation which makes the practice of the ritual seem coherent and desirable. 

Inevitably, the intrinsic danger of handling venomous reptiles brought this newly arrived ritual into conflict with the wider culture.  In 1936, a young man named Alfred Weaver attempted to handle a rattlesnake at one of Hensley’s sermons, and received multiple bites that would prove fatal.  This event is commonly thought to mark the beginning of Hensley and the tradition’s troubled legal status; as the twentieth century went on, more laws were passed forbidding snake-handling.  Presently, every Southern state with the exception of West Virginia has laws restricting the practice of handling dangerous snakes.  Hensley himself would later leave the Church of God to found his own church, the Church of God with Signs Following, and eventually die from a snakebite. 

What is remarkable is that the mainstream Church of God and its sister church, the Church of God of Prophecy, actively endorsed snake-handling for a time, citing its textual justification.  Official condemnation from the Church of God would occur in the 1920s, but as late as 1943 prominent Pentecostal leaders defended the practice.  M.A. Tomlinson, the son of Church of God of Prophecy founder A.J. Tomlinson, wrote in an editorial for a Pentecostal periodical, “We do not make a show of taking up serpents, but if they are brought to us and God’s power is present to manifest this sign that follows believers, then we give god the glory for it” (qtd. in Hood and Williamson 54).  Although the process was uneven, mainstream Pentecostalism would eventually abandon snake-handling entirely; indeed, many Pentecostal churches condemned it from the beginning.  Hood and Williamson argue that a useful model for understanding the schism between mainstream Pentecostalism and snake-handling sects is church-sect theory.  Church-sect theory, though imperfect, helps explain a counterintuitive fact; that the most conservative, high-demand churches are the ones that frequently possess the most longevity and vitality.  One would think intense religious requirements, whether social, personal, or conceptual, and their attendant stressors would run the risk of alienating church members over time, but this is not the case at all.  The members of sects, in contrast to churches, are almost exclusively voluntary in their association (one can be merely born into a church) and experience a great deal of tension with the dominant culture; inasmuch as this tension is distinctive, sects have a means of preserving themselves and their traditions, as the like-mindedness of the sect members in conjunction with their estrangement from a disapproving mainstream culture reinforces the centrality of the sect as the basis for social identity and a sense of belonging.  Importantly, Hood and Williamson observe, “…it… is important to recognize that as some sects grow by abandoning high-cost behaviors, a residual group that maintains these behaviors survives- although it may be seen as less successful when emphasis is on growth rather than survival…” (58) The high-cost behavior associated with snake-handling is one of the aspects of the faith that encourages its preservation.  Legal prohibitions add to the cost of snake-handling, ironically reinforcing the dynamic that ensures the longevity of controversial schismatic sects.  When viewed in the light of the history of Pentecostalism, this pattern reveals a compelling truth about Pentecostalism and perhaps religious movements generally.  It would seem that the features of a faith that enable its growth are not necessarily the same features that guarantee its preservation.  Pentecostalism got its start and early rapid growth by being relatively egalitarian, flexible, and adaptable, but some of the longest-lasting and most iconic traditions within the faith are the least flexible or amenable to alteration or compromise.

No consideration of snake-handling would be complete without an analysis of the practice of handling snakes itself.  Hood and Williamson helpfully devote a chapter to a more worldly consideration of the serpent as both sign and symbol (The distinction between the two concepts and how they interact through the ritual is crucial.) across cultures.  The snake is commonly associated with death and the phallus, although many traditions, such as Romanticism, have associated it with knowledge, the marginal, or the transgressive.  The fear of snakes would seem to be a human universal, probably with evolutionary origins.  The symbolic value of the snake takes on a special power when it is also manifested as a sign in the context of the snake-handling tradition.  The experience of handling the snake itself as part of a religious service is preceded, in the words of the believers themselves, as an acutely felt desire; as a ‘wanting to do.’  This in turn is replaced by fear and anticipation as the reptile is approached, and a sense of elation and victory when it is taken up without bodily harm.  It is important to understand that snake-handlers regard their practice as an imperative, or as something they must do.  They do not consider it as proof of faith and they do not expect to necessarily come away from the act unscathed.  The signs are followed because they are divine orders, what marks ‘them that believe.’  The appeal of the practice to believers is a direct connection with God.  In every instance, it is God, and not the believer, that manifests the sign.

Hood and Williamson conclude their study with an evaluation of the current state of snake-handling churches.  Because of the legal prohibitions on the practice in most states, many snake-handlers are reluctant to openly identify themselves.  As a consequence, the exact number of adherents to snake-handling is difficult to ascertain.  The typical church has very low membership, usually about 10-20 people.  A larger one may have up to 100 participants.  The most compelling point made in this final section of the book concerns the role of the family in maintaining the practice of snake-handling.  Because no mainstream institution supports the practice anymore, snake-handlers are dependent on the smaller but nonetheless powerful foundational unit of the family to practice and preserve their faith.  It is the practice, backed by familial support and granted narrative coherence thanks to both scripture and evangelical teaching, that preserves snake-handling as a faith tradition.  When attempting to understand snake-handling in relation to Pentecostalism generally, a number of challenges present themselves, but I feel this quote concerning the crisis of Pentecostalism on the eve of the First World War may capture something of the essence: “Pentecostalism was a bumptious, contrarian movement with sectarian instincts.  Pride, purity, and proof-texts dictated ‘separation from the world.’  But an extroverted, missionary-minded movement like Pentecostalism could never truly separate from the world it defined itself over against yet lived within and sought to save” (Robins 49-50).  In short, I feel it may be helpful to understand snake-handling as the embodiment of all of Pentecostalism’s most ‘separatist’ tendencies, the seeking of religious purity among a select few, even to the point of death, in relative seclusion.  The regional and theological coloring this separatist movement has taken on can give some indication about the character of the religious movement generally beyond its perceived, dominant socio-political aspects.  Purity would seem to be stronger at the margins of a faith, and in the case of Pentecostalism, faith is the conquest of death through signs and symbols.             

Works Cited

Hood, Ralph W. and W. Paul Williamson. Them That Believe: The Power and Meaning of the Christian
Serpent-Handling Tradition. Berkeley: University of California, 2008. Print.
Robins, R.G. Pentecostalism in America. Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, 2010. Print.

“… the universe a Judea, and God Jehovah its head…”: Melville’s Mardi and Neoplatonism.

(Note: I have fallen behind on my promised follow-up to my post on Michelle Remembers, so here is a little something to tide over all zero of my regular readers. It is a slightly edited version of a paper I wrote for an independent study back in grad school, so of course MLA formatting is present in all of its glory. I had previously posted on Herman Melville and his third novel, Mardi, here and here. Enjoy! I hope to have the MR post up sometime in October.)

Herman Melville’s literary ambitions underwent a significant change in character between his second and third novels, shifting away from the genre of fictionalized (though how fictionalized is still debated) travelogue to the romantic, philosophical, and more self-consciously ‘literary.’  The change is announced from the author’s note that precedes the title page of Melville’s third production, Mardi (1849):

“Not long ago, having published two narratives of voyages in the Pacific, which, in many quarters, were received with incredulity, the thought occurred to me, of indeed writing a romance of Polynesian adventure, and publishing it as such; to see whether the fiction might not, possibly, be received for a verity: in some degree the reverse of my experience.  This thought was the germ of others, which have resulted in Mardi.” (xvii)

Though the broad and expansive genre of the nautical adventure ostensibly remained the baseline for this literary project (Melville even promises to focus his attention on Polynesia, the setting of his first two works, Typee and Omoo.), Melville clearly intended for there to be dramatic formal, stylistic, and thematic alterations to the nature of his writing.  In that respect, Mardi does not disappoint.  Though Melville advertised an intention to compose a ‘romance,’ not necessarily in the Hawthornian sense of that word, there really is no pinning down the generic orientation of Melville’s third novel.  The author’s note foregrounds, right from the outset, an interest in the relationship between truth and fiction, a topic which inevitably summons the larger subject of epistemology.  Melville was notably frustrated by critics who took his Typee and Omoo as fabrications when he intended them to be reflections of his actual lived thoughts and experiences.  The fact that a literary mediation cast doubt on what Melville understood to be the truth would be the first ‘germ’ in the cultivation of a radically new way he had about how he understood and ‘thought with’ literature. This was no doubt helped along significantly by the immense volume of new books he was reading in the months leading up to and during the composition of Mardi.  Melville, being an expansive if occasionally confused thinker, must have noticed immediately that the problem of genre is at the heart of the question concerning the relationship of fiction and truth.  The formal conventions of genre and the specific, often constraining storytelling elements that go along with it, impose a degree of artifice on the vagaries, disunities, and contradictions that mark human thought.  Human thought may not necessarily be ‘the truth’ of the universe (in fact, it quite probably is not) but it is quite obviously the only material human beings have to work with for comprehending themselves and their environment, or whatever other phenomena they may care to ponder.  While composing Mardi, Melville discovered with an intense zeal his capacity for intellectual, spiritual, moral, and aesthetic exploration, and this led inexorably to a frustration with genre, more specifically his chosen genre of the seafaring romance.  The consequence of this struggle is a book that is of multiple genres, and which possesses little formal unity.  The critic Merrell R. Davis isolated no fewer than three distinct books within Melville’s ostensibly single volume: “The Narrative Beginning,” “The Romantic Interlude,” and “The Travelogue-Satire.”  It may be possible to isolate further books still.  Overall, Mardi gives the reader a vivid sense of the circumstances of its writing; when Melville seemingly exhausted the epistemological potential of one genre, he would move on to another, leaving the attentive critic with the over-arching impression of a meditation whose structural integrity hinges on the ongoing act of literary composition.    

            For these reasons, what ‘standard’ formal coherence exists in Mardi is, I would argue, a product of Melville‘s engagement with his major theme: knowledge.  Mardi can be taken as an intelligible record of an artist’s intellectual growth, but not as a fully-realized aesthetic achievement.  Melville’s favored rhetorical devices for the exploration of the range and limits of the human mind, especially in the later sections of the book, were the allegory and the philosophical dialogue.  The shifts in genre that occur throughout the novel, for the most part, can be tracked through the alteration of these rhetorical devices and related stylistic shifts; it is a compositional approach that has the effect of altering the ‘reality’ (that is, the superficially realistic qualities of the story and how they relate to the putative reality of the reader) of the narrative.  If one were to merely consider the events of the narrative, then Mardi would seem to be a more easily classifiable text.  As the scholar Chris Sten noted, Mardi can be understood as an “imaginary voyage,” or “one of the principal forms of the novel before the twentieth century.  The precursor of the modern genre of science fiction, which proposes to describe life in a distant time, the imaginary voyage pretended to describe life in a distant place…” (64)  This narrative form proved to be sufficiently expansive to accommodate the full range of Melville’s developing obsessions, leaving room for philosophical speculations, mythopoeic questing, rugged nautical adventure, pointed political satire, and much else besides.  The imaginary voyage would seem to have allowed Melville the opportunity to think about the world through a representation of the world (arguably the business of all literature) in the fluid and multifaceted way he desired.

            As I have indicated, the chief theme of Mardi is knowledge, and the cumulative effect of the narrative is that of a journey inward, into the life of the mind.  The story’s essentially tragic orientation is recognition of the frustrating insecurity that comes from an awareness of the limitations and frequent unreliability of human thought and perception.  The basic plot, or the bulk of it anyway, consists of the narrator Taji’s efforts to recover the maiden Yillah (a symbolic personification of a utopian or spiritual ideal) within the mythical South Seas archipelago of Mardi.  Assisting him is an entourage from the island kingdom of Odo whose members are each representations of certain human intellectual and creative faculties.  As Merrell Davis observed, “The voyage through Mardi is both a quest and a sight-seeing expedition, at once a grand tour of the innumerable islands of a mythical archipelago and a quest to recover a phantom… the voyage affords an opportunity for presenting… satirical characterizations which are directed toward the exposure of the follies and vices of man and the institutions which man has created” (142).  Mardi is a world in itself, an arena to be explored or mapped out.  Yillah can be taken as an ideal clarifying principle, or a vision of utopia.  Her perpetual elusiveness illustrates both the limitations of human knowledge, and the un-achievability of a utopian social order.  The relationship between the world and the means of representing the world, and by extension understanding the world, has central importance in Mardi.  The proliferation of diverse social orders and personalities in conjunction with a proliferation in symbolic representation is, I will argue, the principal reason behind its stylistic changes; as the world changes (that is to say, as we perceive more and more of the world’s varied constituent parts), so must the mode of representation, and any shift in representation in turn informs how the world comes to be understood, and how new information about it is processed.  The practical effect of this unfolding in the context of Melville’s novel is a drift away from representing reality into representing representation, or the patterns of human thought itself.  The ‘voyage thither’ of the subtitle could just as easily be ‘a voyage inward.’

            As I have established, Mardi is conspicuously lacking in a formal structure from a strictly ‘literary’ point of view, but some unity becomes legible if one thinks of it as less a novel and more a creative representation of an intellectual development.  In some respects, Mardi is a bildungsroman (or a confessional) masquerading as a romantic quest.  One critic who has gone further than most in tracking the elusive formal unity of Mardi is Bruce L. Grenberg, who reasonably observed, “Surely it is foolish to think that the shift from adventure-narrative to allegorical quest slipped into Mardi undetected by Melville… it seems manifest that Melville saw a unity in the book that has eluded most readers, a unity that comprises more than a simple consistence of narrative point of view” (27).  The narrator of the story, who will eventually adopt the moniker Taji, begins his tale as a bored and listless crewmember on a whaling ship becalmed at sea.  His dissatisfaction stems not just from mere boredom, but a more deeply felt spiritual malaise.  His vision of the universe is monistic, and perhaps panentheistic: “Thus all generations are blended: and heaven and earth of one kin… the nations and families, flocks and folds of the earth; one and all brothers in essence…  All things form but one whole; the universe a Judea, and God Jehovah its head” (Melville 12).  The narrow and circumscribed world of the whale ship Arcturion is hardly a fitting place to become better acquainted with the expansive divinity of the wider world.  This line also marks the first unambiguous evocation of a Neoplatonic conception of the world, a view that Melville granted a number of his narrators, most notably Ishmael from Moby-Dick.  In the Neoplatonic scheme, the Great Chain of Being, the most perfect being sits atop a metaphysical hierarchy and governs the apparent plurality of all things, including the principles of change and evolution.  The unity of the plurality can be understood in terms of the most perfect being on top- God.  “[F]or certainly in this conception of the universe, angels and earthlings… and human ‘nations and families’ can indeed be ‘brothers in essence… for all these creatures have in common their spiritual selves (their essences) and all emanate from the Supreme Being” (Zimmerman 39).  This understanding of ultimate truth deeply informs Taji’s quest and helps explain the seemingly endless proliferation of island nations explored in the later chapters of Mardi; from the Neoplatonic standpoint, one arrives at ultimate truth through an engagement with the diversity of forms- and concludes that they are ultimately One. 

            Even in the early, realistic chapters of Melville’s novel, Taji’s quest has a clear intellectual component, and the reader receives some subtle hints of the future dissolution of the recognizable ‘real’ world and the entrance into the fanciful world of the mythical archipelago.  Taji’s motivation for abandoning the Arcturion with his simpleton companion Jarl sets up the eventual generic shift: “We are asked to join a narrator who… flees a known and secure reality in search of self, tries simultaneously to penetrate and transcend the facts of the world in an effort to grasp the comprehensive meaning of those facts.  We are asked to enter the world of the mind” (Grenberg 28).  However, such an abdication of security, both physical and social (Jarl aside), cannot have immediate rewards.  Abandoning one’s ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is not a soft measure, and the most immediate effect is not one of transcendent experience but an encounter with the raw, brutal reality of the natural order.  Here the reader gets their first epistemic model- Empiricism.  More precisely, an empiricist approach to the natural world is joined with a Transcendentalist sensibility in Taji’s character.  “With the security of social order and custom behind him, the narrator finds himself frighteningly close to the dense reality he would transcend…  Melville is asking us to join his narrator in exploring the world as it truly is, not as it seems to be through habit and common perception” (Grenberg 28).  This intimate encounter with reality is perfectly matched with a relatively realistic (but typically rhapsodic and allusive) narrative style in the early chapters, and Taji’s method of epistemic mastery is careful observation and classification.  This is on display in chapter 13, where Taji describes the various species of shark observed from his and Jarl’s boat.  This task has a peculiar sense of urgency: “Ever present to us, was the apprehension of some sudden disaster from the extraordinary zoological specimens we almost hourly passed” (Melville 40).  The use of the term “zoological specimens,” as well as the explicit reference to the great German naturalists Muller and Henle, implies a solid grounding in the empirical or natural sciences.  Taji is classifying to conquer, to gain a knowledgeable basis for making his way in an apparently hostile and volatile environment.  Taxonomy is just the first of a plethora of knowledge-organizing models to come in Melville’s narrative.  It proves inadequate in itself as a means for truly achieving transcendent knowledge.  As Grenberg observed, “The mind can work upon, but not control, the reality that exerts itself suddenly and without warning…  it is this quality of nature’s unpredictability, with its implicit unconcern for human concerns, that most thwarts the narrator’s efforts to control his existence” (29). 

            It is tempting to mark the Aleema sequence of the novel as the first major generic transition Melville imposes.  It is the point where Taji confronts and kills the priest Aleema who is about to sacrifice the fair maiden Yillah as part of a religious ceremony.  This seems to be the moment where the far-fetched, but nonetheless reality-bound sailor’s yarns of the early chapter give away to the mythopoeic constructs of the romantic quest.  However, Chapter 38 (“The Sea on Fire”) may be a more appropriate marking point since it features a major epistemic shift for the narrator-protagonist.  After the events on the Parki, Taji, Jarl, and new companion Samoa come upon a phosphorescent patch of sea late at night.  It has a strange, otherworldly, ethereal majesty that prompts much speculation: “Now, sailors love marvels, and love to repeat them.  And from many an old shipmate I have heard various sage opinings…” (Melville 123)  Taji then proceeds to list the possible explanations for the sea’s luminescence, which include Jarl’s formulation that it is the consequence of “commotion among the mermaids,” Faraday’s theory that an electrical phenomenon in the atmosphere is responsible, and the theory that it is the product of dead matter in the sea itself.  “But these are only surmises; likely, but uncertain.  After science comes sentiment…” (Melville 123)  When it comes to assigning significance or meaning to an observed phenomenon, mere description or classification will not do.  Sentiment, or the peculiar, emotionally-charged vagaries of the human heart, seeks to inflict its own logic.  “The narrator’s gloss upon the fiery sea has multiplicity as its most salient feature… As logical explanation, scientific or otherwise, the narrator’s argument and conclusion are muddle-headed.  As poetic statements of Melville’s larger purposes, however, they are pure revelation” (Grenberg 31-32). The poetic principle here is of a strongly Romantic character: the imaginative engagement with nature.  Such a program introduces an additional lair of multiplicity through the introduction of ambiguity. The poetic principle lends itself to a peculiar personifying power when applied to the natural world, and in a manner that prefigures the far more violent quest of Captain Ahab, Taji is imbued with the desire to find the ultimate secret at the heart of nature.  “Yillah is nature’s prized secret, which the narrator is determined to possess at whatever risk or cost” (Grenberg 32-33).  Many a reader may find the introduction of such a romantic, mythopoeic entity like Yillah into a narrative that heretofore had been more-or-less realistic somewhat jarring, but her arrival could be said to have been subtly foreshadowed by the phosphorescent sea, since that is a point where the recognition of the desirability, if not necessity, of a new form of knowledge occurs. 

            The arrival of Yillah and Aleema on the scene prompts an action from Taji that parallels his abandonment of the Arcturion at the beginning of the novel.  Taji confronts and kills Aleema and “rescues” Yillah.  There follows a stretch of ten chapters where Yillah and Taji are together.  It is important to give this portion of the novel some attention, since it in large part defines the scope of Taji’s quest for Yillah following her disappearance.  The significance of the young lovers’ interactions corresponds to an ideal or idealized state, when nature is fully apprehended and in perfect harmony with the engaged imagination.  This engagement is dialectical, and in Melville’s story occurs in the arena of social interaction.  The foundational unit of this perfect state is two people- Taji and Yillah.  Yillah can take on a social existence- that is, she can come to symbolize an ideal of social organization- in the later travelogue-satire sections of Mardi in part because of the dialectical quality of her introduction and early development. 

            The murder of Aleema is not the only sin Taji commits when it comes to Yillah.  He also fabricates a story that brings Yillah’s mythical identity in line with his own.  Upon their first meeting, Yillah tells a story about how she is a native of Oroolia, “the island of delights,” and how in youth she was ensnared by a sentient vine and transformed into a blossom, which in time rebirthed her and cast her ashore on the island of Amma, the home of the priest Aleema.  She indicates that she has no actual memory of these events, but that they were revealed to Aleema in a dream.  Taji is skeptical of the literal veracity of this story, and believes, not unreasonably, that Aleema has deceived Yillah as part of the sacrificial rites: “For ulterior purposes connected with their sacerdotal supremacy, the priests of these climes oftentimes secret mere infants in their temples; and jealously secluding them from all intercourse with the world, craftily delude them, as they grow up, into the wildest conceits” (Melville 139). Taji, with his Neoplatonic orientation and its demands for a plurality of experience as the chief means of acquiring authoritative knowledge, strangely has no compunctions about indulging Yillah’s fantasies for personal gain; whatever his interest in Yillah, he does not have any immediate inclination to lift her veil of delusions.  “To possess her finally, the narrator does not discredit her dream world; he enters it by claiming for himself a divine origin in Oroolia and a dream past in which he was her lover” (Grenberg 33). This induces a state of “Romantic ecstasy,” or of seeming intimacy with Nature’s divine secret, the ultimate aesthetic goal of the Romantic imagination.  What this might suggest is an end to all strivings, if not for the complicating factor of time.  Romantic ecstasy is always fleeting, but leaves its mark to the effect of a restless epistemology.  “In conception, and perhaps in aspiration, Melville was… akin to Emerson and Thoreau; if these elevated moments were to be accepted as anything more than hallucination or willing self-deception, they had to be integral to one’s persistent experience of the world” (Grenberg 34).  Significantly, Taji and company make landfall on the island kingdom of Odo not long after acquiring Yillah.  The domain of the sea, unencumbered by the social conventions represented by the whale ship Arcturion, could be a credible arena for the development of dreams, or the imaginative faculties.  Sure enough, Taji manages to achieve an ideal in the form of Yillah, but such an ideal needs to be tested against the persistent, lived experience of the world in order to be authoritative and truly transcendent.  In a turn of events at once predictable and indicative of yet another epistemic shift, Yillah vanishes not long after the group arrives in Odo.  This sets the stage for the final section of the novel, the travelogue-satire with conspicuous shades of allegorical significance. 

            The sequence of events from Aleema’s murder at the hands of Taji to the disappearance of Yillah at Odo bears the character of an Edenic fall from grace, most conspicuously in the psychological effect it has on Taji.  He ponders to himself and to the wider heavens, “To you, ye stars, man owes his subtlest raptures, thoughts unspeakable, yet full of faith.  But how your mild effulgence stings the boding heart.  Am I a murderer, stars?”  (Melville 179)  Taji now has the stain of an original sin, and he now must dwell in a world which constantly reminds him of his fallen state.  His soliloquy to the stars reflects an awareness of, and a certain faith in, a heavenly, transcendent sphere, but at this point in his story the loss of Yillah has effectively cut him off from it.  Here there is an epistemic shift towards the moral, and the moral compass Taji adopts is of a special significance itself:  “Melville’s Mardian world and Taji’s ensuing search for Yillah throughout that world are irredeemably humanistic, and the ensuing search for Yillah… the attempt to realize humanity’s highest dreams, takes place in a context almost totally devoid of religious and transcendental implications…” (Grenberg 35)  It is no longer the transcendent but the social that is held up for scrutiny by Melville, and appropriately enough, the generic orientation of the text transforms from romantic adventure yarn to travelogue-satire.  Though there is a shift to the social, the world Melville depicts does not get any more noticeably earth-bound; this is the section of the narrative where Taji acquires his name and takes on the role of a Polynesian Demigod from the sun.  This role involves Taji taking on yet another fictional backstory which he cannot substantiate or expound upon at any length, and one that, oddly enough, strengthens his new-found social role within the kingdom of Odo.  While interacting with King Media (a self-styled Demigod himself) Taji remarks, “As for anything foreign in my aspect, and my ignorance of Mardian customs: – all this, instead of begetting a doubt unfavorable to my pretensions, but strengthened the conviction of them as verities” (Melville 174).  The transcendent realm may be remote from social existence, especially in terms of knowledge, but it still exerts an authoritative influence.  Furthermore, the social is no less mythological in potential.  When Taji becomes a demigod, he assumes a cultural significance to the Mardians, and soon his desires and aspirations, his grand Yillah-oriented narrative, assumes a social significance which prompts action and questing among other parties.  As H. Bruce Franklin observed, “This penultimate abdication [Taji leaving the ocean and arriving in Mardi] is his [Taji’s] penultimate allegorical death…  From this point on, ironically and appropriately the Mardians become far more important than the narrator.  ‘Taji’ as a Mardian conception becomes more significant than the player of Taji.  The three mythologists and their king make Taji’s quest their own” (44).  When personal transcendent knowledge assumes a social significance, it becomes myth, and myth prompts knowledge-seeking of a related, and perhaps cyclical, character.  Taji’s quest for Yillah becomes a kind of epistemological compass by which the Mardian explorers navigate their archipelago, and a frame of reference which helps, at least in part, to contextualize the information they acquire on their journey.  The journey has social significance not just because it is different and often conflicting social orders that are held up for scrutiny over the course of the travelogue-satire, but because the questers who adopt Taji’s obsessions are ideals and constituent parts of a civilized social order.  Grenberg is again quite helpful: “Taji and his companions in the quest, Media, Yoomy, Babbalanja, and Mohi, constitute not only the multifaceted individual personality… but also the multifaceted structure of civilized society… it is natural to stress the characters’ identities as functions of the mind… but it is also noteworthy that Melville draws an analogy between the individual and his society” (35).  Roughly, the questing characters can be taken as representations of mental faculties: Media is volition, Mohi is memory, Yoomy is creativity or imagination, and Babbalanja is reason and, occasionally, mystic perception.  The social analogues of these mental functions are the philosopher (Babbalanja), the historian (Mohi), the poet or artist (Yoomy), and the politician (Media).  Additionally, it is quite tempting to conceptualize these characters as the disparate parts of Melville’s artistic sensibilities, which he needed to synthesize in the space of the text in order to carry off a truly great feat of the literary imagination.  Taji fades into the background in order to give these new arrivals center stage, and this robs the quest for the missing Yillah of a great deal of dramatic urgency, but it can be argued that Taji does not fade from the narrative so much as he is fragmented into this new set of personalities which dramatize the conflicted and multifaceted nature of his epistemological quest.  Furthermore, Taji’s psychological and spiritual division can be understood as the inevitably and dramatically appropriate response to his fallen state and the loss of his Yillah: “[The] elastic relationship among the questers- threatening to break altogether periodically throughout the quest- reveals the disintegration of Taji’s personality in a world without Yillah” (Grenberg 36). By this point in the novel, Taji’s orientation toward knowledge has changed significantly.  In the beginning, his endeavors were marked by a general sense of intellectual restlessness and social isolation.  The latter quality in part informs Taji’s sense of independence, which aids his abilities as an inquirer, and his receptivity to the outside world.  A broad sense of curiosity and a desire to absorb information marks the early stage on Taji’s intellectual journey.  The encounter and communion with Yillah and her subsequent disappearance radically alter the manner in which Taji seeks understanding.  “Before he first discovers Yillah, his wanderings have no definite object.  After he loses her, he no longer drifts; he then searches specifically if futilely.  In Mardi, therefore, the hero’s life is presented in two stages: he is a wanderer, and then a searcher” (Dillingham 105).  A search implies an object or goal.  It is essentially a teleological project, and the structure of Melville’s allegory makes it clear that his protagonist eventually develops a strong desire to believe that human striving for knowledge and understanding would eventually yield fruits.  The epistemological goal, here represented by Yillah, serves an interpretive function in this quest; it is the standard by which new information is measured and contextualized. 

            Dysfunction of some sort marks every social order encountered by the questers in the kingdom of Mardi.  For Grenberg, there is a recurring pattern to the seemingly diverse range of social problems Melville presents through his Mardian kingdoms- the inability of their rulers and citizens to properly integrate knowledge and experience into a coherent sense of self, a necessary prerequisite for a stable social identity. “The disintegrated world of Juam, Willamilla, Ohonoo, and Vivenza is presented as a product of the disintegrated personalities of its rulers.  Thus, the quest for Yillah is both internal and external, the search for unity by the unintegrated self in a disintegrated world” (36).  Isolation combined with stasis creates the inadequacies present in the island kingdoms.  For Melville, relativism of a sort colors his assessments of different sociocultural landscapes, not because he felt there were no standards for judgment (Yillah’s presence would determine a utopian order) but because he felt that only comparisons among different social possibilities could yield sufficient information about the range of human possibility, understanding, and capacity to live and work in cohesive groups.  This understanding may very well be a reflection of Melville’s conception of perfect knowledge, the ability to integrate and properly contextualize and comprehend the essence of the full range of baffling and frightening information the external world hurls at human subjects. “The individual islands clearly signify the isolated and fragmented nature of individuals and states who through ignorance, weakness, stubbornness, or pride have cut themselves off from the world… the beliefs and behavior of all those they meet are presented as direct products of the ways they look at their world” (Grenberg 36-37).  The lack of utopia in Mardi is reflective of a lack of unity to human experience and perception, and thus signifies the impossibility of grasping any kind of ultimate knowledge.  This has profound implications for the eventual emotional effect of Melville’s novel.  Taji’s seeking after knowledge leads him to a greater incoherence, which strikes at the very unity of his sense of self; and yet he presses on.  “Taji simply refuses to accept the implications of his own experience.  His dream of attaining oneness with the universe is so intense that it blinds him to the facts of the world’s recalcitrance.  Melville wants us to see these dreams as both irresistible and impossible… Taji’s quest is as hopeless as it is necessary to his self-definition.” (Grenberg 47)  It is well worth mentioning that Taji’s transition from wanderer to quester inevitably entails a more active and opinionated engagement with the world.  In short, the more he learns, the more he is prompted to act towards a focused end.  The result of this development is a gradual articulation of the theme of the relationship between knowledge and action.  How does what we know (or think we know) encourage us to act, or not act?  For Melville, Mardi served as a sort of dry run for this theme, which would receive its greatest treatment in Moby-Dick, but the question has tragic implications in the context of Mardi as it is. 

            No consideration of Mardi would be complete without some attention paid toward Hautia, the mysterious and sensuous queen of Flozella.  Her heralds pursue Taji and his companions all over Mardi, attempting to entice him to Hautia’s lair.  Additionally, a trio of Aleema’s former associates pursues the band in an effort to kill Taji in retaliation for the murder of the priest.  Respectively, these different pursuers represent forces that would halt meaningful intellectual exploration; Hautia is the realm of comfortable illusion, while the vengeful companions of Aleema are potent reminders of the fallen state that inevitably tortures and limits the experiences of human beings.  Hautia is of slightly greater interest for the simple reason that she serves as a double for Yillah, or antithesis to Yillah’s thesis.  If Yillah is a poetic ideal, then Hautia is the folly of poetic illusions, or the superficially beguiling sights and sensations that distract people from the pursuit of real truth; artifice as opposed to art.  In her own way, Hautia represents the hazards of investing oneself too much in a beautiful illusion, much like Madame Bovary or Dorian Gray, and in that respect is the exact opposite of Yillah, who offered a ‘genuine’ vision of truth and beauty.  “As the symbol of fathomless creative power, she serves as both inspiration and nemesis to Taji and… to Melville, for as creative imagination she on the one hand offers the possibility of all things, while on the other hand she denies to all things any status other than that of possibility” (Grenberg 55).  This problem goes right to the heart of Melville’s project, which is fiction.  Fiction, when in thrall of Yillah, is in harmony with the governing principles of nature.  When it takes its cue from Hautia, fiction consists of nothing more than the meretricious beauties of mere fantasy and wish-fulfillment, superficially attractive, but lacking the permanent, self-sustaining value of truth. 

            Taji’s quest to recover Yillah, and achieve what he most desired from intellectual exploration- the perception of, and communion with, the ultimate truth or governing principle of the universe, is a failure.  His consolation is to continue in his pursuit beyond the realm of both quotidian reality, social responsibility, and the circumscribed nature of human thought itself.  His final defiant declaration as he leaves the Mardian archipelago pursued by Aleema’s former companions is quite telling- “Now, I am my own soul’s emperor; and my first act is abdication!  Hail!  Realm of shades!” (Melville 654)  This intensely Miltonic line, which recalls Satan’s outburst upon his banishment in Paradise Lost, can be understood as a kind of spiritual and intellectual suicide.  As Yillah cannot be found in Mardi, ultimate truth cannot be comprehended by ordinary human thought processes and habits.  Surrendering to the wide unknown strangely enough does not end Taji’s forward momentum; he has reached the limitations of earthly knowledge and then sets out for parts unknown.  It is quite tempting to consider this in light of Melville’s growth as a writer.  As the critic Harold Beaver remarked, “Fiction was the one centre where all divergencies might converge and where all inconsistencies must necessarily consist.  That was to become Melville’s task: not to resolve the dichotomies of love and hate, male and female, fact and fiction; but to calibrate their mutual tension” (39).  In the end, such a project could be emotionally powerful, intellectually edifying, and aesthetically pleasing, but never attuned to any revelatory promise.  For Melville, that was the tragedy of thought but the triumph of his fictional art.      

                   

Works Cited

Beaver, Harold.  “Mardi: A Sum of Inconsistencies.”  Herman Melville: Reassessments.  Ed.  A.

            Robert Lee.  London: Vision and Barnes and Noble, 1984.  28-40. Print.

Davis, Merrell R.  Melville’s Mardi: A Chartless Voyage.  New Haven: Yale University Press,

            1952.  Print.

Dillingham, William B.  An Artist in the Rigging: The Early Work of Herman Melville.

            Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972.  Print.

Franklin, Bruce H.  The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology.  Stanford: Stanford University

            Press, 1963.  Print.

Grenberg, Bruce L.  Some Other World to Find: Quest and Negation in the Works of Herman

            Melville.  Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989.  Print.

Melville, Herman.  Mardi, and A Voyage Thither: The Northwestern-Newberry Edition. 

            Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library,

            1970.  Print.

Sten, Christopher.  The Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel. 

            Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1996.  Print.

Zimmerman, Brett.  Herman Melville: Stargazer.  Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s

            University Press, 1998.  Print.   

“…where the little girl was a prisoner.”: A Peircean Semiotic Reading of Michelle Remembers (Part I)

(Note: I originally wrote the bulk of this piece in 2019. It was both fairly long and incomplete, so I will be presenting it here in modified, expanded, and edited form, and in two parts. The following is Part I. For those who need a primer on Peircean semiotic and how it might relate to the analysis of works of creative expression, I recommend these two overviews from Signo-Semio. I have also written on Peirce and literature here. I will link each source that I use the first time I use it as I don’t feel like writing a proper Works Cited, my superficial loyalty to MLA notwithstanding. Part II will probably be posted sometime next week.)

In the foreword of Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith’s lurid 1980 pseudo-exposé Michelle Remembers, Pazder, a Canadian psychiatrist, positions himself as a witness.  “It was my privilege to witness as she [Smith] risked the abyss, venturing far beyond her normal memory pool, her imaginings, fantasies, and dreams, to somewhere at the very core of her being…  Perhaps it was what Jungians call the ‘base of the psyche,’ the meeting ground of our ancestral past and our present, the source of myth and symbol, the junction of mind and body, heart and soul” (Pazder xii). Michelle Smith has the honor of being the explorer, the party who has “grappled with the polarities of life and death, love and hate, light and dark, good and evil” (Pazder xii).  Pazder then goes on to lay out some basic facts of the narrative the reader is about to imbibe- that it covers a series of therapy sessions that lasted 14 months, that these sessions addressed a frightening period in Michelle’s life, and that this period occurred around her fifth year; these memories were previously “buried” but then uncovered in the therapeutic context with a “purity that is a phenomenon in itself…”; the significance of this phenomenon is that it “provides an understanding of how a child survives,” an “achievement” that “will confront and inform many generations”  (Pazder xii). This foreword is quite helpful in that it illuminates the moral, aesthetic, and thematic intentions of the text clearly and unambiguously.  In fact, abolishing a measure of ambiguity that inflects both the scenario it describes and related cultural and psychological phenomena would seem to be its principle mission.  Michelle Remembers is a tale of recovering a horrific moral clarity from a bubbling cauldron of uncertainty.  This achievement of moral clarity has the unmistakable contours of a type trauma narrative, one which emphasizes the piercingly literal character of the (eventually) recalled, precipitating traumatic event, and one which centers a confrontation with the agent of the traumatic event.  It is a narrative type infinitely amenable to a semiotic reading, as symptomology- semiotic as John Locke understood it- features prominently in its development.  The Pazder half of this testimony, for all its proclamations of a non-intrusive ‘witness’ position in the affair, is perpetually observing Smith for marks of the Devil, reading the signs to craft a master sign of its own.  We may give this master sign the name of ‘trauma narrative,’ and it must be understood that this is a story embedded in a rich and multifaceted gothic tradition, with a submerged (some might say chthonian) character which suits its antagonist- Satan.

Michelle Remembers is a book permanently linked in the popular imagination with the satanic ritual abuse (SRA) moral panic that occurred in North America during the 1980s and 90s.  It is, in fact, seen by many scholars as a text which codified the narrative beats of a typical SRA testimony, and enabled the dissemination of SRA tropes through myriad communication and media networks which helped propagate the moral panic far and wide.  The text itself has all the features of a macabre gothic melodrama, including some rather quaint moralistic flourishes which are apparently meant to add an obscuring fig leaf to its essentially exploitative character.  In his foreword, quoted above, Pazder alluded to a metaphysics of inwardness that can be very easily associated with traditional Christian conceptions of ‘the soul,’ though he almost obligatorily dresses it up in a fashionable secular-scientific guise (Jung specifically is invoked for the purpose, a dated choice even in 1980).  This inwardness is a storytelling conceit, of course.  Gothic narratives traffic in the obscure, the buried, the submerged, and the hidden, and these qualities are just as likely to manifest in the genre’s characters’ individual psychologies as they are in narrative events.  Michelle’s putative deep-diving into her psyche to recover her traumatic experiences pure and whole must have the character of a steady, inward gaze in order to be persuasive on the narrative’s own terms, but there is more than enough evidence that the tale was crafted in a more dialectical fashion, with Pazder taking the more active role in developing its satanic character.  

The sociologist Mary de Young articulated the importance of Pazder and Smith’s potboiler- “The long-repressed memories of the pseudonymous Michelle were published in 1980… a best-seller that not only discursively links the master symbols of the decade- vulnerable children, the menacing devil and the psychological trauma model- but does so in an archetypal moral drama that so deeply resonated with cultural fears and anxieties that it incited the day care ritual abuse moral panic” (21).  The archetypal quality of the moral drama is what is key.  The plot, putatively true, involves a 27-year-old woman named Michelle (a pseudonym, as mentioned) who suffers from peculiar emotional disturbances relating to a recent miscarriage and a hodge-podge of unresolved family and relationship problems.  She seeks the services of a British Columbia-based therapist named Lawrence Pazder; significantly, both he and Smith come from staunch Roman Catholic backgrounds.  Smith had sought Pazder’s aid years prior as a university student.  In the early phase of her therapy, Michelle experiences some relief and comfort for her present condition but cannot banish the feeling that a body of repressed experience is at the core of her unhappiness and needs to be unearthed.  Pazder, in his capacity as a Virgil-esque guide to the dark corners of the psyche, soothingly eases Michelle into this difficult task.  Soon enough (from the reader’s perspective anyway), Pazder obtains a dark revelation.  After releasing a wall-piercing shriek, Michelle stammers:

It’s Malachi.  What’s happening to me?  I don’t know if it makes any sense… Oh! God, I hurt… I’m hurting… He’s hurting me all over, and something’s really scaring me.  His eyes are scaring me.  I can’t stand them.  They look crazy.  No!  Take them away.  He’s hurting my arms.  Ow.  Ow.  He’s throwing me upside down fast.  It’s hurting my arms.  I want to run away… He’s grabbing me tight… I can’t get away.  No! I can’t breathe… [coughing, gasping] He’s got me by the throat with one hand… Help!  Somebody’s got to help me… He’s pointing at me… He says he’s pointing me… He says, ‘North… west…’ and he points me real hard.  He turns me over and grabs my neck and points me.  I don’t want to be all pointy.  It hurts.  Why is he hurting me?  

…

No! No! No! Help! Mommy! Mommy!

Where’s my mommy?  Why isn’t she here?

…

            It was black and I could see my teddy bear… I loved the bear so much I wanted to become the bear… I wanted to crawl inside with him and be safe… I feel numb… there was nothing left of me just my head… no body… All that was left of my insides was a tiny warm spot… That’s all I was! (Italics and ellipses in original) (Pazder and Smith 15-17)

This outburst is one of the many blocks of text strewn about the pages of Michelle Remembers that are allegedly culled from tape recordings of the actual sessions Pazder conducted with Michelle Smith.  This particular outpouring of confused horror appears in chapter two, and in chapter three it is molded into a more legible form by Pazder which, not accidentally, transforms the inchoate wail of distress into a concrete, and some might say confront-able, manifestation of evil.  This semiotic process produces something akin to a literary symbol, or in Peircean terms, a rhematic symbolic legisign (the critic John Sheriff called it a class-8 sign for simplicity’s sake).  “The representamen [sign-vehicle] of a class-8 sign is represented by its interpretant as a sign of possible objects in their character merely- hence as a sign of the feeling, the quality of immediate consciousness, of what is in the mind in the present instant” (Sheriff 78). The symbolic quality of this sign class inevitably makes it subject to convention, and therefore the mediating powers of history and culture, but the sign as it is experienced has a forceful immediacy and impressionistic quality in consciousness, akin to Firstness.  Switching away from Michelle’s disorganized first-person accounts in chapter three, Pazder gives the reader a picture of satanic evil that comes to ground his narrative’s titillating aesthetic milieu, as well as its moral pretenses, rendered in a more superficially dispassionate third-person voice.  We now can better envision poor Michelle’s grotesque tortures: 

Some women had entered the darkened space, where the little girl was a prisoner.  They walked in a single file, oblivious to the child’s presence.  Clad in an oversized shirt, she watched, in fear and awe, as they went about their bizarre tasks- methodical, coldly efficient… some of them went about tacking up large black sheets on all four walls.  Then the women began to set up candles… Someone draped the bureau with a round black cloth embroidered in an intricate white design.  On top of the cloth were placed two silver goblets and a knife.  And more candles… 

One of the women approached Michelle and picked her up.  The little girl’s apprehension faded- she could not help but smile.  The woman was extraordinarily beautiful, with shining dark hair.  Unlike the others, who wore simple black dresses, this woman wore a black cape with a hood.  It set her apart.  Michelle thought: Ah! A princess!  (Pazder and Smith 21-22)

Such helpful tableaus and descriptions appear between Michelle’s first-person outbursts.  Both of the aforequoted passages present the reader with a treasure trove of signs for perusal and interpretations; they all function symbolically when considered in their literary context, but for the figures in the narrative- and by extension the reader- the indexical qualities of Malachi’s pointing hand and the ceremonial objects furnished by the female adherents to the cult can hardly be missed.  Indexical signs “direct the attention to their objects by blind compulsion… anything which focuses the attention is an index.  Anything which startles us is an index…. A fragment torn away from the object” (Peirce qtd. in Chandler 51). The semiotician Daniel Chandler succinctly summarized the matter: “Indexical relations offer the most direct connection with a referent, in strongest contrast to symbolic relations”  (Chandler 51).  Pazder is constantly reading symbols in Michelle’s stories and in Michelle herself, but the narrative routinely inscribes indexical significance to these symbols so that they ‘point to’ a metaphysical instantiation of evil, at first manifested in the underground cult of which Michelle was a victim, and later, climactically, by the devil himself.  The figures of the black-clad devil-worshiping women were in fact foreshadowed earlier in the novel when Pazder receives Michelle into one of their preliminary sessions.  He betrays an urge to read her semiotically in a rather Lockean mode (perhaps this is understandable, as Pazder is a physician), taking both her demeanor and choice of attire as indexically signifying something more than Michelle’s personal distress: “When she arrived, he received still another surprise: she was wearing black, all black- black blouse and black pants… it seemed an unmistakable sign to him that something was up.  So did her demeanor.  She was somber… She was like a high diver standing at the edge of the board on tiptoes… the equipoise before a swift, sure motion…” (Pazder and Smith 10)  The previously timorous Michelle seems to have acquired a measure of confidence, one that mimics the mannered precision of the Satanist women the reader will encounter in later chapters, and the black clothing speaks for itself.  Aside from invoking the pop-psychological trope of a victim of abuse coming to identify with her abusers, Michelle’s unconscious invocation of the female Satanists constitutes an indexical gesture to an imagined social reality- the satanic cult conspiracy.  Of course, this ‘reality’ is a fabrication, one constructed in collaboration with the therapist, but it is significant that the constructed symbol of social evil, mistaken for a material reality, is predicated on a perceived indexical relationship between the behavioral and physical features of a patient and a wider social context.  Considered in a more literary sense, Michelle’s presentation functions metonymically with the satanic cult conspiracy.  The dimestore poetry of the metaphor Pazder chooses to close his description of the eager-to-confess Michelle speaks its own truth.  Michelle’s confident manner is in service to the brute forces of gravity, and she is about to take a plunge into the abyss.  Her descent into the blackened regions of her repression is undertaken as if it were of her own volition, yet the fall is inevitable and all but requires a measure of passivity.  This general vision of Michele comes to serve as Pazder’s ‘ruling metaphor’ for Michelle, and so transforms her into the narrative’s symbol of innocence and strength.  An observation by Chandler is apropos: “Ruling metaphors reorganize experience.  They foreground ways of thinking that are consistent with them and background alternatives…” (155)  With such a vision of feminine poise, clearly in distress and subject to forces almost gravitational in their power, one needs to construct a particularly dastardly antagonist, a complementary metaphor to serve as the vision’s shadow.  As the satanic panic (considered as a sociological phenomenon) makes clear, such a process of construction has real consequences, as it makes reality for subjects. “Changes in our conceptual system do change what is real for us and affect how we see the world and act upon those perceptions” (Lakoff and Johnson qtd. in Chandler 155).  

Pazder cut his teeth studying tropical medicine and spent a period of time in West Africa, where he allegedly encountered a range of local black magic practices that did not neatly dovetail with a staunch Catholic sensibility.  This was apparently a lens by which he viewed and interpreted much of Michele’s testimony.  “Michelle remembered being hung upside-down as a child and twirled in dizzying circles by a black-robed man named Malachi, and having colored sticks dipped in liquid from a silver goblet inserted in every orifice of her body while beautiful black-robed women chanted and danced around her” (de Young 22). The narrative only gets more grisly and sensational from there.  The reader comes to understand that Michelle’s mother is a member of a clandestine satanic cult, and Malachi is an apparent senior member.  The abuse Michelle comes to suffer at the hands of this cult escalates over the course of the narrative until it obtains an almost pornographic intensity, though its penchant for discursively combining certain master cultural symbols as a means of explaining ambiguous experience in late modernity remains consistent throughout.  Michele is placed in a car with the body of a dead woman by Malachi and her mother.  Malachi then pushes the car into a ravine, causing a massive explosion which necessitates Michele clawing her way out through the wreckage.  Her subsequent stay in a hospital is cut short when the nurse, also a member of the cult, spirits her off to an isolated Victorian mansion where she is imprisoned in a basement.  The Nurse becomes something of a central antagonist, nearly eclipsing Malachi in the pageant of Michele’s tortures. “It was the nurse who brought her to a cemetery and forced her to stand in an empty grave, tricked her into defecating on a crucifix and bible, injected her with stupefying drugs, made her consume the flesh of a dead person, and brought a statue of the devil alive by daubing it with blood from an amputated finger” (de Young 22).  Satan makes an early appearance as an effigy in chapter thirteen.  A white statue of Lucifer features prominently in the cult’s graveyard rituals.  On one occasion, when the nurse is absent, Michele crawls inside the statue, an experience “which frighten[s] her because she [feels] she [is] in the devil” (Pazder and Smith 99). This proves to be but a prelude to one of the most grotesque incidents in the novel.  During a ceremony, a ‘possessed’ woman dances above and around Michele’s reclined body while the encircling cultists chant a satanic mass.  “As she danced, the chanting grew louder and louder, and she danced faster and faster until the air began to grate… and the possessed woman stood over Michele, her legs straddling the child’s petrified body.  The woman’s face came closer… and her snakelike tongue worked its way into the small girl’s mouth”  (Pazder and Smith 126-127). The snake imagery in this passage proves to be prophetic.  Another first-person interjection from Michele (again, presumably culled from the tape recordings of the sessions) elaborates on the experience: “It was like a snake was in my mouth.  And the next thing I know, I feel all funny down below… It was a snake!  It was a real snake, and it seemed like it was crawling out of me… I thought it was inside and it crawled out… I think she’s put a snake all the way through me” (Pazder and Smith 127). The transmogrification of this grotesque act of child sexual abuse into a fantastical, almost baroquely surreal supernatural event is in keeping with the novel’s semiotic process.  The raw material of traumatic experience, putatively unmediated and ‘literal’ as Cathy Caruth might have it (201), is here transformed into a potent, biblical symbol of wounded innocence.  In the context of the narrative, the snake has an indexical relationship with the woman’s tongue, in that it is effected through her abusive act.  It only gets worse from there.  Malachi slices a dead baby in half and smears Michele’s stomach with blood.  He then does the same to the white statue of the Devil and seals the young Michele within it.  “The only way I can see out is through those eyes… they pushed all the snakes in through the eyes, so they’re all at the bottom, and they put the rest of the dead baby in there and told me that’s what I got to eat” (Pazder and Smith 129). The serpent imagery proliferates, and the symbol of wounded innocence is granted a ghastly literality in the form of both the abused child and mutilated infant.  The tendency of Michele Remembers is to repeatedly compound its symbols, but simultaneously insist on their literality in the context of the traumatic experience.  The dead infants and kittens, the writhing snakes and hideous acts of sexual abuse and cannibalism, always need to multiply and proliferate across the narrative space.  It can be considered a resolution to an aporetic quality of the text- most of the imagined atrocities proffered by Michele have a conspicuous symbolic character that anyone in a post-Freud culture would recognize, but the traumatic narrative type embraced by the authors insists on a literality to the experience that prompts symbolic qualities to be disavowed.  The solution is to ascribe the significance of the symbolism to the activities of the imagined cultists and to escalate the extremity of their actions, so that the reader may not notice the psychoanalytic clichés behind the piles of baby entrails.  In an effort to transcend the symbolic, or to present their conceptions as something ‘more than’ symbolic, the authors pile up a thick layer of materiality over the symbolic surface of the text; this may make the symbol more ‘real’ and less overtly archetypal, but it paradoxically strengthens its ability to function as a symbol by making it that much more seemingly immediate (or indexical) to the unfolding psychologies of the characters.  The gruesome events and revelatory images function as literary symbols that acquire meaning in the context of a narrative that unspools temporally, developing the figures in the story as characters even while the authors insist on the literal nature of the things and events described through the pulpish use of violent extremity.  This tension within the text proves unresolvable, and the authors’ solution, as we shall see, is to attempt to produce an indexical gesture beyond the text itself by identifying evidence of satanic conspiracy in the ‘real world.’   

The ceremony continues: “The black-robed figures formed two circles, and each circle moved in the opposite direction from the other.  Suddenly, and in unison, all the celebrants swept their cloaks back and revealed what was beneath: children.  A child clung to each celebrant’s leg…” (Pazder and Smith 131) Realizing that nothing good could come of this scenario, Michelle attempts to help by first making a series of guttural animal noises that at first seem to imbue the satanic effigy with life.  “[T]hey thought it was the effigy come to life.  They still didn’t understand that it was a person inside.  Michelle wanted to burst out so badly… but it was no use; the more noise she made, the more real the effigy seemed”  (Pazder and Smith 131).  This is the point where the reader begins to acquire a precise idea as to what the final form of the Satan of the narrative will be, but in the moment its overt artificiality in the face of a credulous audience serves well as an accidental metaphor for Pazder and Smith’s entire project.  “In her frenzy, she grabbed what was at hand- the snakes… she gathered them up in handfuls and pushed them through the effigy’s eyes” (Pazder and Smith 132). The dismembered baby parts soon follow.  Strangely enough, this only seems to excite the celebrants and children as they proceed to dance ‘faster and faster.’  Michelle then spontaneously materializes outside the effigy and cuts a frantic and crazed figure.  It is the feral face of wounded, abused innocence which startles the followers of the Dark One.  “[T]he other children shrank from the sight of her… Everyone was standing still, shocked… They all seemed scared” (Pazder and Smith 132). The possessed woman who had previously menaced Michelle is the only one to approach her without fear.  She violently throws the girl on a bed and proceeds to vomit all over her, a move which mirrors the previous scene of the effigy vomiting forth serpents and decaying human parts.  Michelle then bolts, retrieving a snake from the floor and gripping it between her teeth.  Her wild, frantic flailing and snarling keeps the celebrants at bay.  Mary de Young reads this scene in a heroic light, as Michelle’s actions seem to scare the other children into fleeing (23).  The nightmare is not over for Michelle herself, however.  She notices a woman dressed in white whom she mistakes for her mother and approaches her for comfort.  The result is despairing: “’No! Michelle shrieked.  ‘It’s not my mom.  It’s that lady!’  Michelle was utterly crushed.  Slowly she turned to the effigy.  She knew there was only one place she belonged- inside the white thing.  She crawled back inside.  There was no escape” (Pazder and Smith 133). The fact that the false mother and the false Satan share the quality of vivid whiteness is almost certainly significant.  The crux of the ceremonies is the violation of purity and innocence, and the purity signified by whiteness proves to be a deception in the world of the cultists, and using it for the hue of their satanic idol a deliberate mockery.  Furthermore, the womb-like embrace of the satanic effigy seems to serve as a symbolic mirror to Michelle’s embrace of the false mother.  

The collaborative testimony of Pazder and Smith is obviously of a character that invites skepticism.  Apparently in unspoken recognition of this fact, the novel offers a manifestation of the hidden domain of the Satanists in the world outside the psychiatrist’s office, a scene which, not coincidentally, affirms the narrative’s moral sense and provides the blueprint for the defeat of the perceived subterranean evil lying in wait in the heart of modern industrial society.  It also enables a superficially plausible resolution to the tensions within the symbolic structure of the text.  Unsurprisingly, a grotesque pastiche of a traditional Christian conception of evil meets its adversary in a mawkish pastiche of conventional Catholic piety.  Mary de Young summarized the moment thus: “To bolster her spiritual defenses during the harrowing months of memory recovery, he brought her to be baptized by a local priest.  In the corner of the church, Michelle noticed a wooden bench incised with what appeared to be satanic symbols” (23).  More precisely, they are the same intricate symbols recalled by Michelle worn by the cultists.  The priest is baffled and outraged as to how the bench appeared in the church, and the resolution to everyone’s anxiety over this apparent ocular evidence of satanic machinations is to douse it with holy water and set it ablaze on a bonfire.  The unexamined conceit would seem to be comparable to the assumed indexical relationship between the signs of satanic activity and their hidden world.  Just as the Satanists somehow manifested their presence in the form of Michelle’s black clothing near the beginning of the narrative, so our heroic figures feel they can indexically strike against Satan’s underground by destroying their heretical graffiti.  There is at least some perceived evidence of success: “The photographs Pazder took of the burning seemed to the three of them to show a glowing spectral presence at the edge of the fire, a presence they took to be that of the Virgin Mary and her child, Jesus” (de Young 23). These photos serve to foreshadow the novel’s climactic confrontation between good and evil, and they possess a suggestive power that was probably lost on the authors: “The pictures were put away.  It was too much to think about.  They went back to their work, remembering.  But the photographs were on their minds… A month later, on a visit home, Dr. Pazder showed the photos to his father, asking him if there was any way to explain these anomalies.  His father said no, no way at all” (Pazder and Smith 151).  The critical reader may be tempted to infer that these photos, aside from almost certainly being a case of pareidolia, will have a contaminating effect on Pazder’s remaining sessions with Michelle.  In the literary sense, this anticipation of contamination serves as surprisingly effective foreshadowing.  

Though there are no shortage of fantastic details in Michelle Remembers that should arouse incredulity, the fact that a literal, personal Satan makes an appearance stands out as the clincher.  Of course, the novelistic character of Pazder and Smith’s enterprise scarcely makes the occurrence of the supernatural surprising. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how this gothic tale could conclude in any other way, since its pious pretenses make an Anne Radcliffe-esque return to material normality all but impossible.  The Devil needs to appear to satisfy the story’s elemental, Manichean moral sense.  

The appearance of the real devil is preceded by the destruction of the false one.  The white effigy, after a particularly gory round of child sacrifices, is cast into the flames of a bonfire (of course, this is the shadow of the real-world ceremony conducted earlier by Pazder, Smith, and the priest).  “On top of the bulging cloth was set the child’s head.  Nearby stood the effigy, once white but now completely reddened with blood; it had been placed at the center of a red circle that had been painted on the floor.  Michelle was taken and put in the circle too…  Michelle saw the figures closing their circle upon the effigy… In a double rank they bore it toward the fire and… heaved the grotesque red image into the flames” (Pazder and Smith 171). The dismembered child’s body is tossed on the fire as well.  This sacrifice of a facsimile of Satan is the necessary precondition for a more literal manifestation of Satan.  The effigy, in conjunction with the satanic celebrants, served to mediate Satan’s presence on earth.  With its ritualized destruction, the cult can experience a more primeval, unmediated manifestation of Satan.  When Satan makes his appearance, he is maddeningly indistinct and not immediately amenable to easy representation: “In one session Michelle drew pictures for Dr. Pazder as she emerged from the depths of memory.  She tried to show him some of the forms Satan was taking.  But she found her drawings too definite and distinct; Satan was vaporous and constantly changing” (Pazder and Smith, unpaginated pictorial insert). In Peircean terms, the effigy was Thirdness, and Satan himself Firstness. Thirdness should be understood as mediation, or that which brings a First and Second into relation.  “Now Thirdness is nothing but the character of an object which embodies Betweenness or Mediation in its simplest and most rudimentary form; and I use it as the name of that element of the phenomenon which is predominant wherever Mediation is predominant, and which reaches its fullness in Representation” (Peirce qtd. in Kalaga 49). Representation robs evil of a measure of its immediate power, which is to say it makes a conception of metaphysical evil seem somewhat less plausible.  The destruction of the effigy enables the devil to switch between the modalities of ontological Thirdness and Firstness; we shall not be distracted by the irony that this process is instantiated in the form of a literary symbol.  “Firstness refers to the mode of mere being without reference to anything else. Examples are unreflected feeling, a mere sensation of color and form; possibility or quality” (Aghaei 25). Presenting evil in this sense grants it a primeval and constitutive power that only a similarly positioned principle of ontological goodness could hope to defeat.  If this Manichean sensibility did not in itself seem the substance of a certain brand of ‘closed’ literary text, then the popular drama of ratiocination that forms the bulk of the narrative- here transpiring largely on the psychiatrist’s couch instead of within the more familiar detective-fronted criminal investigation- should further give the reader the distinct sensation of pulp-horror. Even the moral and religious pretenses dovetail neatly with then-recent popular cinematic offerings like Carrie (1976) and The Exorcist (1973).  Furthermore, it should not be surprising that the aforementioned Peircean modalities of firstness, secondness, and thirdness possess an explanatory power for the psychological significance ascribed to events and are transferable to a literary medium.  “In consciousness, feelings are Firstness; reaction-sensations or disturbances of feelings are Secondness; and general conceptions are Thirdness…” (Sherriff 66)  Michele’s character arc can, in many respects, be read as a psychological manifestation of the processual movement from Firstness to Thirdness; vague feelings of unease become physical disturbances that are then organized by an explanatory narrative.  There is significance in the fact that a sort of regression between the third and first modalities occurs in relation to the figure of Satan when he transforms from symbolic, inert (and iconic) idol to his ‘true’ form.  This shift betrays the essentially literary character of Michele Remembers.  “Without denying that we cannot escape from language, from Thirdness, Peirce shows us that Thirdness (linguistic, symbolic signs) can symbolically represent Firstness… literary art is language (Rhematic symbol) used to show, picture, symbolize the quality of immediate consciousness that can never be immediate to consciousness” (Sherrif 89).  Pazder and Smith are under the impression that they can say something about the Satan they hold with potent immediacy in consciousness, in Firstness, couched as he is in their conception of traumatic experience, but the story they end up telling places the Evil One perpetually in Thirdness.  The reader will not miss that Satan is a symbol, no matter what, and no account of an idol becoming ‘real’ is likely to change that.             

The Devil appears as a voice in the therapist’s office before he makes his pseudophysical entrance in Michelle’s recovered memory.  It intrudes upon Michelle’s typically childlike aspect, and soon enough the reader is treated to a duel between Michelle’s past child self and the possessive power of Lucifer.  It is clearly a depiction of something that resembles Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), which in turn can be thought of as a secular-scientific update of the concept of possession, phenomena that can be subsumed into the broader category of trance.  “Until the emergence of the alternate consciousness paradigm [MPD] the only category to express the inner experience of an alien consciousness was that of possession, intrusion from the outside” (Crabtree qtd. in Hacking 149). MPD would later be superseded by the category of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) among mental health professionals, but MPD is more relevant for a discussion of the condition depicted in Michelle Remembers. Ian Hacking is helpful for establishing the relevance of the condition for Michelle’s case: “The most distinctive symptoms become fully evident only in the course of treatment.  Hence the published descriptions of multiples best fit patients in therapy” (21-22). This provides a hint as to the dialogical quality of the specific manifestations of symptoms present in accounts of MPD and cases of recovered memory. The therapeutic context, setting aside the matter of whether or not it creates the symptoms in question, certainly molds perceptions of their emergence and constituent features.  The dynamic between therapist and patient eventually takes on the form of an investigation not at all removed in spirit from a detective story or supernatural thriller.  Pazder operates in the capacity of the lead detective while Smith serves as both his capable assistant and site of the crime, and by extension the principle body of evidence.  Abductive reasoning, of a sort, proves crucial to this unfolding semiotic process.  It functions much like the interpretation of a literary text, and involves an agent encountering a phenomenon which initially seems surprising, counterintuitive, or otherwise contrary to prior experience, and “he looks over its features and notices some remarkable character or relation among them, which he at once recognizes as being characteristic of some conception with which his mind is already stored, so that a theory is suggested which would explain (that is, render necessary) that which is surprising in the phenomena” (Peirce qtd. in de Waal 63). It is in effect reasoning towards a hypothesis.  In Peirce’s account, it is acknowledged that prior conceptions will inevitably influence hypothesis-formation.  This is pertinent to any reading of Michelle Remembers as it adequately accounts for how the discursive and culturally-historically-conditioned symbols of the devil and the familiar iconography of satanism and the occult came to inform Pazder and Smith’s understanding of the ambiguous symptoms experienced by Michelle.  Abductive reasoning, which is far more uncertain than the inductive and deductive varieties, can only serve as a starting point for inquiry.  “Some surprising fact B is observed. If A were true, B would be explicable as a matter of course.  Therefor there is reason to suspect A is true” (de Waal 64).  The intrepid and pious investigators of Michelle Remembers avail themselves of this mode of inquiry but tragically do not pause to question their underlying assumptions or test their hypotheses in a sufficiently rigorous manner.  Nevertheless, there is an internal logic to the manner in which Pazder and his associates make inferences from the more chaotic happenings of Michelle’s story.  

[I]t was possible to deduce the design behind the seemingly chaotic events Michelle recounted that autumn- the eighty-one day ceremony that lasted from September 7, 1955, until November 27, the final day of the Christian Church’s liturgical year.  Satan, they suggested, was beginning a Black Mass called the Feast of the Beast, a rite that takes place only once every twenty-seven years.  It employs many of the same elements as the Christian Mass, but uses them in precise opposition to that service, and it obeys a strict plan… The plan is based on the Horns of Death, the Satanic emblem used on the altar cloths and the backs of cloaks.  Just as the Christian Mass moves in the form of a cross, the Satanic worshippers trod the form of the Horns of Death, its shape that of the face of a horned pig. (Pazder and Smith 211)

The iconicity of the ritual is what is key.  Pazder and Smith believe that Satan must inscribe himself through his iconography to prompt the construction of the world he wants his worshippers to perceive, and this requires a little exegesis for the attentive reader to truly comprehend.  As the critic Christina Ljungberg would put it, “[I]conicity is generated by the readers as they decipher the signs, in their activity of making meaning – much like a detective trying to solve a murder case which, even though clues are indexical signs, involves evoking possible scenarios by calling up images, structuring these by putting them in context, and then picturing potential motifs and lines of development by comparing these to similar cases… Reading experientially is thus the performance of actively taking part in the dialogue with the text, the performative generation of a fictional world, a mental space in which we are able to move…” (275)  Pazder and Smith are functionally doing literary criticism in their hunt for real-world satanic activity, but they believe they are doing detective work proper: iconicity masquerading as indexicality. 

(Part II coming soon!)

“This night it shall be granted you to know their secret deeds…”- Nathaniel Hawthorne as Prophet of Satanic Ritual Abuse

(Note: I originally wrote this for an academic conference I attended some years ago, and as a result I never did a proper MLA Works Cited Page [a tragedy, I know] since at the time there were no other readerly eyes set to gaze on it. For this reason, I am linking the sources for this post.)

The American author Nathaniel Hawthorne’s (1804-1864) engagement with the Problem of Evil was usually too sophisticated to have much use for conventional devils.  Hawthorne’s writings are saturated in the religious traditions of Puritan New England, and he was acutely, even morbidly, aware of the burden of that tradition’s insistence on moral and spiritual purity (hence the term ‘puritan’).  The legacy of the Salem witch trials, in which his ancestor John Hathorne played a central role as a judge, haunted Hawthorne throughout his life, deeply entangling his concern with evil with the ideas of the social, the legal, and the historical.  It is not the least bit surprising that ghosts- some literal, some figurative, some in an ambiguous realm between those states- feature prominently in some of his written works.  His ambivalent and frequently oppositional stance towards his Puritan forebears impelled Hawthorne, intuitively enough, to develop a moral sensibility that was somewhat at odds with Puritan antecedents.  For the early settlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony, the devil of the Christian tradition, made frighteningly immediate in human affairs in the wake of Early Modern witch hunts, was both a literal being and personality, as well as a constant existential threat.  Though the causes of the Salem witch trials were myriad and complex (property disputes, anxieties about marginal or recalcitrant women in the community, and dread of Native American raids all played their part), this conception of the devil- the quintessential personification of radical evil, or evil for its own sake- made the idea of subversive witches all too credible.  Hawthorne made it a point to develop an understanding of evil that was considerably more sophisticated.  Cultural historian W. Scott Poole perhaps put it best when he observed, “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s work returned again and again to the problem of evil, not only for the individual but for the whole social order.  Hawthorne saw evil not in the visage of a supernatural Satan but rather in his own puritan heritage of intolerance and violence… Hawthorne concluded that the problem of sin and moral guilt, conceived by puritan America as a pact with Satan, actually existed within a complex web of social conventions, ideological commitments, and national ambitions” (78).  Despite this revision of Puritan moral sensibility, one piece of doctrine that Hawthorne could not abandon was the “Calvinist conviction that sin painted the human soul with the darkest of hues” (78).  Human depravity was innate, and sin was ubiquitous in Hawthorne’s universe.  When imagining agents of evil to inhabit this realm, Hawthorne generally crafted morally tainted humans who functioned as insidious tempters to the more sympathetic characters, and who had a decidedly professional and bourgeois orientation.  More than a few of these human characters, such as Roger Chillingworth from The Scarlet Letter or Judge Pyncheon from The House of the Seven Gables, are sufficiently indebted to the traditional image of the devil and can effectively do the devil’s work, though they lack overtly supernatural attributes.  Satan himself would only make sporadic appearances in the oeuvre of nineteenth century New England’s most celebrated literary artist, but when he did, the quality of his malevolence was closely tied to Hawthorne’s understanding of sin. 

            One of the most famous short stories Hawthorne ever wrote also features what may be the most potent depiction of the traditional Christian devil in American literature.  “Young Goodman Brown,” a tale describing a young puritan man named Goodman Brown residing in 17^th century Salem who experiences a hellish vision wherein he is invited, along with his wife Faith and the whole of his community, to attend a witches’ sabbath in the woods late at night, offers an evocative portrayal of spectral evidence merging with historical consciousness to depict the psychological toll of spiritual guilt.  As the critic David Levin observed, “[Brown] lets the Devil’s true statements about the mistreatment of Indians and Quakers prepare him to accept counterfeit evidence…”; that is, the reader should know better than Brown does to accept uncritically the visions of his community’s indulgence in satanic ritual, even if the Devil himself may possess an ontological reality and the specific crimes alleged in the community are all too credible.   However, the reality or unreality of this event is never definitively determined, with Hawthorne wisely choosing to shroud Goodman Brown’s vision in dream-like, ghostly ambiguity, but the experience is enough to poison the remainder of Brown’s life, as he comes to permanently reside in a state of guilt and moral doubt, suspicious of everyone and himself. 

            The specter of the Salem witch hunts haunts the proceedings of “Young Goodman Brown” quite conspicuously, though Hawthorne’s understanding of Puritan hypocrisy casts the reputed witchcraft and devil-worship in a substantially different light than the prosecutors of the witch-trials would have had it.  Hawthorne is more inventive in this respect than Arthur Miller would be about a century later.  Instead of casting terror of witches and the devil as a social delusion, Hawthorne invokes the symbolic order of the psychological and brings the supernatural fantasy to the forefront of his imaginative conception.  The devil- the actual devil- finds work in the puritan community but his method of temptation is at odds with the Puritan understanding of demonic temptation, which emphasized the isolated individual being drawn away from true faith and the Christian community.  The person in league with the devil was invariably at the margins of the community.  From the beginning it looks as though “Young Goodman Brown” will follow this model of temptation, with the title character moving away from his community and his “faith” into the wilderness (naturally, strongly associated with ‘heathen’ Native American tribes) to commune- in total isolation- with Satan.  It is a moral test, to be made in solitude, and one Brown is fairly confident he will pass owing to the Faith (both the abstract quality and his literal wife) he has in his home.  However, matters become increasingly complicated when Brown comes to perceive that the entire puritan community is attending the ceremony in the woods.  All of the people Brown esteemed as holy and upright are hypocritically allied with Satan, a revelation which can be taken as an unveiling of Brown’s own insecure faith if one reads it as a satanic deception.   If the vision is real, then the matter of evil is not peripheral to the community, nor is it an alien force assaulting from without (The devil’s calm and ingratiating style would seem to indicate that he seldom has to twist anyone’s arm to persuade them to do his work, though there is room for discussion concerning how much we should accept the manner in which he presents himself).  Evil is within, originating in the weakness of humankind’s fallen state, and it is pervasive, and even Brown’s ‘Faith’- both his wife and the concept[i] she symbolizes- is ripe for incorporation into this faithless and demonic order.  Near the close of the ceremony Brown attends with the whole of Salem looking on, Satan himself solemnly intones, “There… are all whom ye have reverenced from youth.  Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness and prayerful aspirations heavenward.  Yet here are they all in my worshipping assembly” (Hawthorne 72).  Brown’s terror is perfectly understandable, and derived from a sensibility which places one’s sense of moral certainty and security on the example of the prevailing social order.  When one acquires the perception that the social order is rotten, one’s previously stable social identity is likely to falter and possibly collapse into an abyss of fear and doubt.  But what is the precise nature of the ‘rotten-ness’ that Brown perceives?  Is the devil a potent enough symbol to persuade Brown of his community’s wickedness?  The devil goes on: “This night it shall be granted you to know their secret deeds; how hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton words to young maids of their households; how many a woman, eager for widow’s weeds, has given her husband a drink at bedtime and let him sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how beardless youths have made haste to inherit their fathers’ wealth; and how fair damsels- blush not, sweet ones- have dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole guest to an infant’s funeral” (Hawthorne 73-74).  The devil who is speaking may very well be a figment of Brown’s imagination.  The crimes he is describing, however, are very real.  The reality of sin, the hypocrisy of sin, and its place in the social order- central, and not peripheral or minor- destroys Brown’s faith completely.  “Young Goodman Brown” derives a significant portion of its power from the ambiguous reality of its Satan.  An awareness of common, distressingly everyday crimes and cruelties would be disillusioning enough for Brown, but the figure of the Devil grants the reality of human evil a unifying power by conceptualizing them all under a unitary category, one which then speaks eloquently of its own centrality to the community on which the protagonist is so intensely dependent.  Before his vision, Brown could have believed that sin was the consequence of being led astray from the community, but he cannot hold that conviction afterward.  Furthermore, human beings may not merely sin, but meet at witches’ Sabbaths to revel in their sin, and come to regard it as their key to transcendence.  Evil is frightening enough, but ritualized evil, done under the auspices of a charismatic, demonic leader, is truly horrifying, and only assailable if imputed to a hostile other; there is less to be done if it is nestled in the bosom of hearth and home.  Brown’s post-vision ambivalence does not just reflect a lack of confidence concerning ‘good’ and ‘evil’ but a perception of two kinds of evil- the solitary, putatively aberrant transgressive act, and the organized and systemic dysfunctional activities commonly associated with injustice.  The Devil serves, at least in Brown’s mind, as the organizational principle of systemic evils, and the ambiguity concerning his reality mirrors Brown’s ambivalence concerning how to comprehend the nature of human sin. 

            “Young Goodman Brown” is one of the most powerful stories exploring the nature of individual and social evil through the aegis of the dream-like, spectral symbolic, but it is hardly the only occurrence in the American cultural imagination where symbols, dreams, and the problem of evil coalesced.  In fact, the phenomenon is hardly confined to the literary.  More than a century after Hawthorne composed his short story, one of the most curious moral panics to ever occur in the United States began working in earnest on the public imagination.  It was broadly known as the “Satanic Panic” and it had its heyday throughout the 1980s through to the early 1990s.  W. Scott Poole offers a useful summary of the panic’s more salient characteristics: “[It] had three interrelated and mutually reinforcing expressions.  First… the widespread belief that a network of satanic covens existed throughout the country and that these groups were responsible for everything from animal mutilation to the kidnapping of children” (169). These Satanists were disguised, in the faintly paranoid Hawthorne-ian tradition, as upstanding members of the community and frequently practiced the “ritual abuse” of children and animals.  Compounding the menace, satanic influences had also apparently infiltrated the media, and were endeavoring to corrupt the young through such insidious pop-cultural phenomena as heavy metal music and fantasy role-playing games. These folk beliefs (they can scarcely be called anything else, despite the influence of modern mass media) eventually crystalized into a crisis around so-called Satanic ritual abuse (SRA) when a number of strange reports were made by concerned parents regarding the abuse of children at daycare centers.  The most infamous of these cases was the one concerning McMartin preschool, an investigation that would go on for over five years and eventually become the most expense criminal trial in American history.  The majority of the crimes alleged to have occurred at the McMartin preschool were nothing short of fantastic.  The mentally unstable parent who led the accusations would eventually allege that “goats had been sacrificed at the center, a baby had been murdered and its brains set on fire, and even that a lion had been introduced into the recurrent episodes of satanic torture” (Poole 170).  Eventually, most of the daycare staff were acquitted of all charges, with the trial of one other resulting in a hung jury.  The received wisdom regarding that case, and several others that were roughly contemporaneous, is that it was nothing less than a modern-day witch hunt, involving parents, psychologists, social workers, law enforcement, and community leaders repeatedly interrogating children with leading questions and refusing to relent until they expressed the cultural anxieties they wanted to hear articulated (from the mouths of babes, as it were).  The notion that the staff of McMartin were members of a Satan-worshiping cult is now a marginal opinion to say the least.

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            How could belief in such a bizarre series of events such as those alleged at the McMartin preschool ever gain traction with large swaths of the American public, or anyone else for that matter (Fear of Satanic cults and ritual abuse would eventually spread to other countries.)?  A possible answer suggests itself when one remembers that these child-abusing rituals were supposedly occuring at pre-schools.  Demonology tends to get a fresh lease on life during periods of perceived moral declension, or societal decline.  Whenever there is a seismic shift in social relations, demons can come to serve as popular and powerful metaphors for the inevitable accompanying anxieties.  As Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker wrote, “Deep within the culture, the demonology prevails in times of crisis.  When it is promoted by powerful social institutions and mixed with subversion myth, scapegoats are persecuted…” (33)  The so-called second wave of the feminist movement resulted in widespread changes regarding gender roles, with one of the more salient consequences being the increasing number of women who worked outside of the domestic sphere.  A consequence of this development was the increasing need to partially ‘outsource’ traditional women’s duties, and child-rearing, for intuitive reasons, came to be seen as the most potentially challenging task to pass onto some employee.  The need and demand for daycare increased significantly by the 1980s, and some parents inevitably became concerned about the sort of people they were trusting to care for their children. In the minds of many conservative (and even not-so-conservative) Americans, it appeared that the familiar maternal domesticity that seemed so essential to the raising of healthy children was being placed- at least some of the time- in the hands of potentially untrustworthy strangers.  This condition may have made parents and law enforcement credulous regarding imputations of abuse, but it does not fully explain the Satanism angle.

            Political scientist Malcolm McGrath has had quite a bit to say on the matter.  He observes that the SRA panic was closely associated, allied even, with what has come to be called the recovered memory movement.  The phenomenon of “recovered memories” was and is controversial among psychologists, neuroscientists, and health care professionals generally.  The basic unifying theory of the recovered memory movement pertained to a certain understanding of traumatic experience.  McGrath articulates it thusly: “The model holds that traumatic events can become etched in the brain like crystal-clear photographs, but also that the brain has a special defense mechanism.  When an event is too traumatic for a person to deal with, the brain has the capacity to break off the memory and hide it from conscious awareness” (114).  This, of course, is called repression.  The process of recovered memory therapy is supposed to lift the veil of repression, expose the traumatic experience, and compel the healing process.  There is no ambiguity regarding the course of representation with this particular therapy model.  Representation was supposed to achieve purity in the crucible of traumatic knowledge. Specifically, the method of recovering repressed memories came to be thought of as an effective way of confronting the traumatic experience of sexual abuse or assault.  This particular psychological model soon developed the reputation amongst many a concerned moral entrepreneur as an effective means to expose and confront a grievous social evil.  McGrath writes: “As the recovered memory movement gathered steam in the late 1980’s it began to form the basis of a coalition, taking in such unlikely bedfellows as radical feminists and right-wing Christian fundamentalists.  Radical feminists saw the incest survivor movement and recovered memory therapy as advances in the war of the sexes…  Advocates of recovered memory therapy and MPD specialists teamed up to defend the model of the human mind they had in common, and right-wing Christian fundamentalists saw recovered memory therapy as finally offering proof of the dangers that Satan and his followers posed to American society” (131).  The concept of recovered memory would later come in for severe criticism, and an oppositional model concerning the perceived unreliability or malleability of memory, the False Memory Movement if you will, came into being.  Presently, the memory wars are far from being resolved, though it is now generally accepted that traumatic memories can be repressed, though they are not usually, and that memory is distortable enough that false memories can sometimes be implanted, especially in children, though it would be erroneous to assume a significant portion of abuse claims are derived from false or implanted memories.      

            The fact that Satan would emerge from this psychological domain and as the progenitor of grave social turmoil should not be surprising.  The problem of evil apparently becomes more manageable through the aegis of convenient personification.  The historian Elaine Pagels, in fact, has argued that the origin of Satan in the Christian tradition grew out of an imperative to demonize heretics and perceived enemies of the young faith, and that Satan is in large part derived from stories of fallen angels, in opposition to Yahweh, that first made appearances in the context of Hellenistic Judaism.  Satan, though appropriately protean over the centuries, as any good symbol must be, has always been the leader of one’s human enemies, and is in the final analysis the orchestrator of human evils that allows those who believe in his existence to more effectively demonize the Other, and draw boundaries around the human community. 

            This close bond between the social and mythological should hardly be revelatory, but it takes on a special resonance, and perhaps significance, in my view, when we apply such sociocultural phenomena as the SRA panic to what cultural historian and theorist Ruth Leys calls the crisis of representation.  In a critical reading of trauma theorists like Cathy Caruth, who embrace a model of trauma that precludes representation per se because traumatic experience is putatively registered by the brain in a literal fashion, Leys posits a challenge.  Caruth argues that the linear path of traumatic experience and its unmediated nature result in a break or gap in meaning, which has profound implications for the narration of history itself, both personal and social.  Leys herself postulates in her own historical overview of the idea of trauma two different, and often competing poles: the mimetic and the anti-memetic.  The mimetic model of trauma involves a kind of mesmeric conception of the experience which involves an identification or imitation of the traumatic event.  This model makes room for the unreliability of accounts of the traumatic event since it asserts that trauma is incorporated into ordinary, and potentially fallible, memory.  The anti-mimetic model, on the other hand, while retaining the notion of imitation, holds that the subject remains aloof from the traumatic event, and can effectively become a spectator who perceives beyond representation, and can thus recount the trauma with near-eidetic precision.  The business of recovered memory very much planted its figurative flag in the anti-mimetic camp.  Its eschewal of mimesis and repudiation of the intrinsic hazards of representation allowed for the acceptance of distortions and illusions of a decidedly modern-mythical flavor.  These illusions were brought to bear on very real social problems- the tragic reality of child sexual abuse became the absurdity of satanic ritual abuse. 

            What is quite remarkable is that Hawthorne seemed to apprehend the essence of the American manifestation of this social psycho-drama a good century and a half before it panned out in a post-psychoanalytic cultural landscape saturated in modern audiovisual media.  Or perhaps it is not so remarkable, given Hawthorne’s well-documented preoccupation with the Salem witch trials orchestrated by his ancestors, a series of events that also depended on suspiciously spectral testimony, derived from visions revealing the work of Satan.  The dogmatic certainty of a moral crusade perhaps does not require a unifying demonic symbol that can serve as the putative primary mover of an enemy’s foul acts, but certainly such a symbol helps matters considerably.  Hawthorne’s instinctive awareness of this resulted in one of the more brilliant subversions of this human rhetorical and psychological device in literature.  In “Young Goodman Brown”, the figure of the devil does not sharpen moral certainty regarding the nature of sin or the quality of sinful human beings.  Quite the contrary, his actual appearance, though bequeathing sin with an appropriately social significance, in fact diminishes the protagonist’s moral confidence.  The key similarity between Hawthorne’s vision of the devil and the one that would manifest in the SRA panic was that they both featured a Satan who presided over and directed the secret, hidden crimes of the culture, or one who was intimately familiar with the ‘deep mystery of sin’ as it crept through the privately social and into every human heart, belying the outward public expression of the community.  The obvious difference between them was that Hawthorne’s devil was a symbol, whereas the one of most SRA narratives was personal and (usually) literal, and very much in line with the devil’s traditional social function of demonizing the Other.  Except with the standard SRA narrative, the Other was closely, intimately on hand in the manner of friends, neighbors, and family members; it was like Hawthorne’s devil had been made real in the minds of large swaths of the American public.  This could only be indicative of a general crisis in social trust: a shift from a belief in the goodness of one’s fellow citizens into a paranoid terror of them (or at least some of them). One could easily characterize this as the fate of Goodman Brown writ large, and it is apparently, when regarded as a sociological calamity, the raw psychological material for the witch hunt. The critic Michael Colacurcio wrote about the character of Goodman Brown: “The most significant fact about Brown’s naïve acceptance of the appearance of sanctity in his fellow saints is the swiftness with which it disappears.  Based on the normal, approved, social, presumably real manifestations of goodness, it is destroyed by extraordinary, private spectral intimations of badness.”  Ultimately, the effect of this is tragic for Brown because of the presumption and unwarranted moral certainty he exhibited at the outset of his liaison with the evil one.  The devil is very much the unifying agent of the spectral quality of Brown’s vision of sin, and it is an aspect which resonates throughout Hawthorne’s personal and historical consciousness.  Hawthorne recognized the intrinsic ambiguity of the experience and the pivotal role of representation, as well as the danger of denying the ambiguity and mistaking the representative or figurative for the literal act of evil. Many Americans would not be nearly as astute with their cultural symbols by the late twentieth century.                                                                                                                                        

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[i] It might be more accurate to say that the concept Faith symbolizes is ripe for re-direction of focus (towards evil as opposed to Christian love and mercy) whereas the literal character is amenable to incorporation, but I’m not about to clutter this essay with too many asides and caveats.