uncertainty, alterity, and faith in nineteenth-century supernatural short stories

274 Pages·2017·1.42 MB·English

University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
Summer 2017
Make-believe: uncertainty, alterity, and faith in
nineteenth-century supernatural short stories
Justin David Cosner
University of Iowa
Copyright © 2017 Justin David Cosner
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/5738
Recommended Citation
Cosner, Justin David. "Make-believe: uncertainty, alterity, and faith in nineteenth-century supernatural short stories." PhD (Doctor of
Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2017.
https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.yt8awgcl
Follow this and additional works at:https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd
Part of theEnglish Language and Literature Commons
Make-Believe: Uncertainty, Alterity, and Faith
in Nineteenth-Century Supernatural Short Stories

by
Justin David Cosner

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy Degree in English
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa

August 2017

Thesis Supervisor:
Professor Lori Branch
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

____________________________

PH.D. THESIS
_______________

This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of

Justin David Cosner

has been approved by the Examining Committee for
the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy degree
in English at the August 2017 graduation.

Thesis Committee: ____________________________________________
Lori Branch, Thesis Supervisor

____________________________________________
Kathleen Diffley

____________________________________________
Ed Folsom

____________________________________________
Kristy Nabhan-Warren

____________________________________________
Garrett Stewart
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would take this moment and place to thank the following people for having helped me
reach this milestone.
Thanks to my family, those near and far, on whose strength, intelligence, and generosity
of spirit I leaned so continuously. Thanks especially to my father from whom I learned a passion
for literature and the value of intellectual rigor and also to my mother from whose artistic and
spiritual sensitivity I learned and which provided for me the balance.
Thank you also to my committee, Garrett Stewart, Ed Folsom, Kathleen Diffley, Kristy
Nabhan-Warren, and especially my director Lori Branch. Each of you provided guidance,
patience, and enduring wisdom on the specifics and the intangibles of the study of literature.
And a final thank you to my friends and cohort, here in Iowa City and back home in
California, whose faithfulness and time and energies provided me with the means and desire to
pursue this path.

ii
ABSTRACT

This thesis, “Make-Believe: Uncertainty, Alterity, and Faith in Nineteenth-Century
Supernatural Short Stories,” illustrates the confluence in nineteenth century America of a
philosophical investment in uncertainty and the emergence of a genre suited to its expression. I
argue that supernatural short story collections, characterized by stories with explicit fantastical
elements or which leave open that possibility, helped voice and explore uncertainty as a critique
of prevailing master narratives of both Enlightenment rationalism and religious orthodoxy. My
study examines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), Herman Melville’s
The Piazza Tales (1856), Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, and Other Conjure Tales
(1899), and Mary Wilkins Freeman’s The Wind in the Rose-Bush (1903), whose fantastic
elements question the confident subjectivity shored up by rationalism and the sense of totality it
projects. The genre’s insistent uncertainty conditions a reader into an alternative posture of
openness to possibilities—an openness which, at its most ethically effective, describes a means
to approach alterity without the totalizing certainty which so often reduces the other. The terms
of faith are crucial here, as a means to lend numinous or transcendent meaning to the world
beyond the reach of, and therefore setting limits on, rational materialism. But faith also functions
on an ethical and interpersonal level, in the act of believing the testimony of an other despite the
assumptions of the self. As the century progresses, this genre was taken up by authors with
identities more vulnerable to society’s master narratives and the power structures they uphold.
My final two chapters demonstrate how the supernatural uncertainty in these collections
provided not just a theoretical model for approaching otherness but a specific articulation of the
oppressions which certainty enables and the openness which the supernatural helps to found.
iii
PUBLIC ABSTRACT

This thesis illustrates the confluence in nineteenth century America of a philosophical
investment in uncertainty and the emergence of a genre suited to its expression. I argue that
supernatural short story collections helped voice and explore uncertainty as a critique of
prevailing master narratives of both Enlightenment rationalism and religious orthodoxy. My
study examines Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), The Piazza Tales (1856), The Conjure
Woman, and Other Conjure Tales (1899), and The Wind in the Rose-Bush (1903), whose
fantastic elements question the confident subjectivity shored up by rationalism and the sense of
totality it projects. The genre’s uncertainty conditions a an alternative posture of openness to
possibilities—an openness which, at its most ethically effective, describes a means to approach
alterity without the totalizing certainty which so often reduces the other. The terms of faith are
crucial here, as a means to lend numinous or transcendent meaning to the world beyond the reach
of, and setting limits on, rational materialism. But faith also functions on an ethical, in the act of
believing the testimony of an other despite the assumptions of the self. As the century
progresses, this genre was taken up by authors with identities more vulnerable to society’s
master narratives and the power structures they uphold. My final two chapters demonstrate how
the supernatural uncertainty in these collections provided not just a theoretical model for
approaching otherness but a specific articulation of the oppressions which certainty enables and
the openness which the supernatural helps to found.

iv
Table of Contents

Introduction 1
Chapter 1: “Imaginative Faith”: Uncertainty as Alternative in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses
from an Old Manse 21
Chapter 2: Uncertain Faith: Doubt, Alterity, and the Supernatural in Herman Melville’s The
Piazza Tales 70
Chapter 3: “Of My Own Imagination”: Credibility and the Racial Other in Charles Chesnutt's
The Conjure Woman, and Other Conjure Tales 132
Chapter 4: “Half Believed”: Spirituality and Women’s Circles in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s The
Wind in the Rose-Bush 192
Epilogue: Lingering Ghosts and Afterlives 248
Works Cited 255

v
Introduction

With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the United States doubled in size, helping mark the
beginning of a period of expansion and self-definition for the country which might be said to end
with the publication of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, in 1893, persuasively arguing
that this defining age of the American frontier was over. This explosion westward began in an
era of proliferations of Enlightenment thinking which sought to account for the world in terms of
a growing body of scientific knowledge and a sense that a comparable rationalistic approach
could also illuminate mysteries of morality, truth, and ethics. Alfred Bendixen situates the early
nineteenth century in terms of the “legacy of the Puritan condemnation of the fanciful and
frivolous combined with a post-Enlightenment valorization of ‘fact’ and empirical truth” (23).
Protestantism also helped pull Western religious practices toward a moral universe grounded in
the same logic of rational subjectivity. In the words of Gilman Ostrander, American intellectual
circles gravitated toward a more “modern, moral, republican, Protestant society functioning
within the framework of a divinely planned, orderly, and essentially changeless universe” (22).
The collusion of Enlightenment rationalism and Protestantism helped produce a subjectivity of
mastery and a literature which catered to it. Yet, there also arose counter-narratives which sought
to disrupt and contest these views. In the earliest examples of American literature, there appear
cracks in this confident rationalist subjectivity, cracks particularly visible in the supernatural
short story, whose embrace of the “fanciful and frivolous” this study will examine as a consistent
renunciation of those totalizing master narratives out of which it emerged.
To understand the supernatural short story, how its form and genre helped describe
alternatives to the dominant discourses of the nineteenth century, we might set the stage at the
1
beginning of the century with one of the first American novels, Charles Brockden-Brown’s
Wieland, (1798) written in the notably irrational style of the gothic. The novel narrates the
collapse of a respected family as its patriarch murders his kin, in accordance with what he
believes to be divine direction. The novel’s gothic style flirts with the possibility of the
supernatural, portraying a world in which irrationality disrupts the stable social order. And
Wieland’s themes are the dangerous, even murderous, eventualities of a figure seeking precisely
the mastery and certainty embedded in both Enlightenment and American Protestant ideologies.
The titular Wieland, whose temple features a bust of the rhetorician Cicero, a figure of
rationalism, “thirsted for the knowledge of [God’s] will,” but laments that his “knowledge has
always stopped short of certainty” (151). It is in pursuit of this certainty, and in confidence when
he feels it is attained, that Wieland destroys his own family, later rationally defending his actions
in the court of law. Wieland’s collapse of Enlightenment and religious forms of certainty help
describe constitutive elements prevailing in the nascent US culture more broadly, elements
which the destabilizing forces of gothic, and specifically supernatural writing (which I will come
to), so effectively disrupt.
Situating the historical moment of this collapse of rationalist discourses with religious
ones, Gordon Wood argues that after “the successes of natural science” the same models
“generated eighteenth-century moral philosophy—the search for the uniformities and regularities
of man's behavior” (414). But even the novel form in which Brown writes participates, in some
fashion, within the totalizing narratives of early America. Wood suggests how these discourses
produced “a new genre of literature—the novel with its authorial control and design” (415). He
cites the formal aims of the carefully plotted and causal novel that emerge from the very
ideological frameworks which Brown critiques. In this fashion, even as Brown’s genre and
2
themes work to destabilize Enlightenment ideologies, the formal expression of the novel subtly
reasserts them. Brown even participates in a tradition of late eighteenth century novels and
novelists justifying the art-form in utilitarian terms, hoping in the preface that the text will join
those past works “whose usefulness secures to them a lasting reputation” (3). Fittingly, in a letter
accompanying a copy of Wieland sent to Thomas Jefferson, Brown suggests it promotes the
“public good” (qtd. in Tompkins 46), defending the work against charges of frivolousness.
Other critics than Wood, including Anthony Galluzzo and Fredric Jameson, have noted
the connection between Enlightenment ideologies and the emergence of the novel. Less explored
than that connection has been the reverse, that is, the ways that short stories, as either discreet
units of literature themselves or fractured asynchronous collections, challenge and disrupt
precisely such broad and sweeping narratives. Short story collections are apt for such resistance
as their form can disrupt cohesive totalities, encourage openness to plural perspectives, and
imply alternatives to more monolithic narratives. Different than Woods’s view of “the novel with
its authorial control and design” (415), short story collections continually emphasize, and could
not even escape if they wished, a sense of fracturedness in their ultimate expressions. This
phenomenon is demonstrated in the publication of the first collection of American short stories in
Washington Irving’s The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819-1820). The collection
features diverse topics, tones, and styles, loosely held together by little more than their being the
supposed papers of the fictional Geoffrey Crayon.
What is more, short stories of the nineteenth century evince a surprisingly consistent
recourse to supernatural qualities which further help to disrupt the rationalist discourses of their
cultural moment. Mary Rohrberger suggests that “there is something quite different about the
short stories that began to appear in the early nineteenth century,” because “unlike the novel
3