Auchincloss, Louis. “Harold Frederic.” The Man Behind the Book: Literary Profiles. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.114-23.

Auchincloss’ chapter entitled "Harold Frederic" is a psychological analysis that reflects Frederic’s multifarious thinking and the cultural milieu in which he was writing Seth’s Brother’s Wife and The Damnation of Theron Ware. For example, the portrayal of Father Forbes and the Catholic Church reflects Frederic’s views of priests and Catholicism. The “crux” of the novel lies in Theron Ware’s recognition of a “turning point in his career,” “the sensation of having been invited to become a citizen of [. . . the] world” of intellect, culture, and grace to which Father Forbes, Celia Madden, and Dr. Ledsmar belong (119-20). Sister Soulsby is “a tough, realistic but kindly woman who has been through the toughest mills of life and emerged as a noisy but effective church fund raiser” (120). Celia Madden is little more than a separate banking account, while Levi Gorringe is the voice of the reader in his speech condemning Theron Ware as “a man who’s so much meaner than any other man” (121). Auchincloss describes The Damnation of Theron Ware as a book, unlike Frederic’s other novels, in which the author “addresses himself to the bewilderment and ultimate absurdity of a semi-educated American would-be idealist struggling in the arid culture of a northern New York State small town towards the end of the nineteenth century” (116-17). He concludes that Theron Ware has learned nothing and continues to delude himself with fantasies about using “his gift as a preacher” to become a Senator by the time he is forty (121).

Becknell, Thomas. “Implication Through Reading The Damnation of Theron Ware.” American Literary Realism 24.1 (1991): 63-71.

Becknell’s article is a reader-response essay based on an extension of Randall Craig’s theory of a “hermeneutical gap” between “intended and model readers” (63). Becknell contends that thematic and hermeneutic gaps exist “between the available authorities (which are discredited), and a valid authority which Theron lacks” and between the authority of the reader and the authority of the author (64). Borrowing a term from Wolfgang Iser’s The Act of Reading, Becknell argues that the “‘horizon’ against which we view Theron’s awakening” is a “vast no-man’s-land between authority and personal judgment”; as readers, we want Theron Ware to be more than he is (65-66). This desire is a result of the way we read and our inability to “embrace all perspectives at once”; thus a problem of “authority” confronts our judgment (68). The competing authorities of Father Forbes, Dr. Ledsmar, and Celia Madden cloud Theron Ware’s judgment. When Madden tells Ware, “We find that you are a bore,” the “we” she refers to includes the author (again referring to “author-ity”) (70). Becknell asserts that we, as readers, forget the authority of the author because we want to see The Damnation of Theron Ware as a drama of lost faith and Theron Ware as a victim of temptation. He claims that readers can be misguided because they want to read the novel as a romance when they should be keying in on the signals of realism. Like truth, concludes Becknell, assumptions about authority begin with absolutes and end in relativity.

Bennett, Bridget. “The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination (1896).” The Damnation of Harold Frederic: His Lives and Works. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1997. 174-97.

Bennett approaches her analysis of Frederic’s novel from a biographical and cultural perspective. In Chapter 5, she claims the novel “is an embodiment of its own message—the difference between appearance and reality”—because both Theron Ware and the reader are misled with respect to his “illumination” (174). Bennett hypothesizes that Frederic expresses empathy for his main character, the “badly treated” Reverend Ware, probably because he too felt victimized by life’s circumstance (175). According to the Harold Frederic Papers in the Library of Congress, the author originally intended to kill off the title character by having him jump off the Brooklyn Bridge (built in 1883); however, Bennett contends that suicide might have made Ware appear to be a decadent hero. Death by alcohol would have been conventional and melodramatic. Thus the unexpected ending Frederic chose for Ware reflects the author’s pessimism regarding the Gilded Age and ironically perpetuates the themes of illumination and damnation. Bennett observes, “Theron is less illumined, as he believes, than literally blinded by the people and ideas that he encounters. It is in this debilitated state of hysterical blindness that he seems most like a moth helplessly circling a source of light that he believes to be the catalyst of his illumination, singeing himself every time he gets too close to it, and inevitably foundering into it” (178). This analysis reflects Frederic’s disillusionment with the Edenic myth of America and the corruption and falseness of its political and religious leaders—beliefs that are revealed through the characters in the novel. According to Bennett, “Theron’s anxiety about how others perceived him, his eagerness to please and naive belief in his own intellectual and social advances captured a painfully familiar aspect of American national character” (186). Bennett notes that similar themes may be found in the writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James.

Bramen, Carrie Tirado. “The Americanization of Theron Ware.” Novel 31.3 (1997): 63-86.

Bramen’s analysis of The Damnation of Theron Ware situates Frederic’s novel within a cultural and literary context. She notes in her article that for nearly twenty years after its publication, many critics and writers lauded The Damnation of Theron Ware as the “great American novel,” while others claimed that it was, in fact, Americanism that Frederic was criticizing. The Damnation of Theron Ware “can be read as Frederic’s attempt to prove that he was not just a local colorist [. . .], but a ‘national writer.’” Her essay is an exploration of how Frederic came “to signify a nationalist spirit of inviolate Americanism” with the publication of a novel that is clearly ambivalent in its representation of Theron Ware, an American who is assimilated by Irish Catholics. Bramen focuses on the “contrast between Americanism and alienism [read Protestantism and Catholicism], between the familiar and the unfamiliar” to demonstrate the subversive nature of Frederic’s novel. She offers an extended structural analysis of how Ware crosses cultural boundaries by simply walking in spaces such as roads, sidewalks, and the countryside as support for his reverse assimilation by the Catholics. According to Bramen, relocation to the “West”—a place where one need not worry about “foreignizing influences”—is the author’s remedy for countering Theron Ware’s reverse assimilation. (Note: The above is from WilsonSelect, an electronic database that does not include Novel's page numbers.)

Briggs, Austin, Jr. “The Damnation of Theron Ware.” The Novels of Harold Frederic. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1969. 97-139.

Briggs’ Chapter 5, The Damnation of Theron Ware, examines the themes of damnation and illumination with respect to the title character. Briggs notes that both Everett Carter and John Henry Raleigh argue that Ware is “reformed” at novel’s end: Carter writes of a fall “‘from innocence into knowledge,’” and Raleigh perceives a “‘wiser, if sadder’” Ware, who relocates to Seattle (108). According to Briggs, however, Ware is neither damned nor reformed in the course of his tenure in Octavius; in fact, he remains “pretty much the same old person” (113). Ware’s attitude, as reflected in his reminiscences about his former congregation in Tyre, reveals him to be an ambitious social climber and snob who dreams of “‘ultimate success and distinction’” (120). In light of Ware’s attitude, and other revelations regarding his character in the early pages of the novel, “one wonders,” writes Briggs, “how The Damnation can ever have been taken to be a novel about the transformation of a good man into a bad man” (117). The influence of Dr. Ledsmar, Father Forbes, and Celia Madden often has been judged as the cause of Ware’s fall; however, Briggs questions such judgments. Instead, he suggests that Ware’s fall is not a single event but rather a series of falls in which each new fall is followed by “a new illumination” (121). The fact that Ware fails to learn anything from his “illuminations,” Briggs concludes, suggests that Frederic viewed Ware as a “comic, rather than tragic” figure who is essentially unchanged at novel’s end (139).

Campbell, Donna M. “Frederic, Norris, and the Fear of Effeminacy.” Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1997. 75-108.

Campbell combines feminist theory and genre criticism to analyze Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware. The opening paragraphs of the chapter address the ever widening split between what James Lane Allen describes as the “Masculine” and “Feminine” principles in literature. Campbell argues that, alarmed at the growing “feminine ethic in literature,” naturalists embraced brutish masculinity as an “antidote” to feminine civilization (75). Campbell identifies “three different courses of thematic development [that] emerged in naturalistic fiction: the triumph of the brute, leading to the degeneration of the individual; the balance of the two opposing forces, leading to the perfect amalgamation of sensibility and ‘red-blooded’ vigor; and an excess of civilization, leading, ironically enough, to a degeneration similar to—and in some cases identical with—that which the emergence of the brute signals” (77). Campbell believes the title character in The Damnation of Theron Ware succumbs to this third possibility, becoming “a brute in taste and outlook” (79). Tracing “Frederic’s exploration of realism through his character’s progress from the conventions of sentimental and local color fiction to the harsh realities of naturalism” (80), Campbell notes that, as a minister, Theron Ware is a “hybrid female” (81). Subverting the “opposition between male authority and female community common in local color” fiction, Frederic instead focuses on the similarities between the roles of ministers and women (80-81). Powerless, Ware’s only options, according to the conventions of sentimental fiction, are to capitulate, threaten, or dissemble, and his only defenses are fainting, illness, and weeping—all feminine responses. Ware’s attempt at illumination results in degeneration when he begins “to see himself as a victim of impersonal forces [. . . which lead him] into a self-delusional justification of the naturalistic brute within” (91).

Carrington, Jr., George C. “Harold Frederic’s Clear Farcical Vision: The Damnation of Theron Ware.” American Literary Realism 19.3 (1987): 3-26.

Carrington’s genre analysis of Frederic’s novel opens with the claim that “Frederic’s America is farcical; it is a world in which behavior and events are basically determined by the need [. . .] for personal stability and security” (3). Thus, Carrington argues in this article, in Frederic’s interpretation of Howellsian realism, nearly all the characters in this farcical novel are knaves: “selfish aggressors” who manipulate “obtuse victims,” the fools (9). Theron Ware is unique in that his character is both knave and fool: the “fool-as-knave” tries to be a manipulator, but is hopelessly foolish, and the “knave-as-fool” blunders about seemingly helpless, provokes others to help him, and emerges relatively unharmed, ready to repeat the cycle (3). Although Carrington examines a number of devices standard to farce, he identifies hoaxing and acting as central to the development of the novel. Most of the hoaxing occurs in Ware’s mind: he deceives himself more effectively than he deceives any of the other characters. The external hoaxing takes on the form of acting—characters playing a role for the purpose of “self-maintenance” or personal stability (7). Seeing the arrival of Theron Ware in Octavius as a potential threat to their stability, most of the other characters in the novel take immediate and aggressive action toward Ware in order to maintain their positions. Of these, Sister Soulsby is deemed “the most perfect knave in the book”: she is deceptive, manipulative, and ruthless (18). Carrington concludes that the question of Theron Ware’s illumination or damnation is irrelevant because, in the farcical world of the novel, nothing significant has changed; and, in the end, it is the reader—not the characters—who is illumined through Frederic’s “‘clear human vision’ of comedy” (24).

Carter, Everett. Introduction. The Damnation of Theron Ware. By Harold Frederic. 1896. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1960. vii-xxiv.

Carter’s oft-cited introduction opens with a biographical survey of Frederic’s life before it moves on to a cultural and a moral examination of the trio of Father Forbes, Dr. Ledsmar, and Celia Madden as “seducers of innocence” (xxi). Carter claims that Theron Ware falls from innocence into knowledge, “a fall into the religious and scientific knowledge” and “the dark knowledge of the flesh” (xxi). Father Forbes is responsible for Ware’s religious crisis, while Dr. Ledsmar—a Darwinian atheist—introduces Ware to the writings of Renan. According to Carter, Celia Madden’s role in Theron Ware’s damnation is “evil” (x). The critic’s bibliography is a good source for contemporaneous reception of the novel: most of the citations are reviews or articles from the 1890s.

Carter, Everett. “Naturalism and Introspection.” Howells and the Age of Realism. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1966. 239-45.

Carter combines biographical and genre criticism in his chapter that examines Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware. According to Carter, Frederic “thought of himself as a realist,” a disciple of William Dean Howells. Howells preached “a fidelity to the life one knew, an immersion in one’s own experience, an unswerving loyalty to the truth and a hatred of the false and sentimental.” Like Howells, Frederic looked to his own life and region for inspiration. Unlike Howells, however, Frederic “found his interest going from the social to the individual, from the inequities in relations between men to the tormenting self-divisions within man, from an analysis of the normal and commonplace to a concern with those hidden recesses of the individual soul where cower lust and fear and primitive ignorance” (240). Frederic observed “a society in turmoil” due to social, economic, and scientific advances, which prompted a “struggle within the individual [. . .] attended by possibilities of evil as well as possibilities of good” (241). Theron Ware’s illumination results in his fall rather than his salvation. Because the characters of Ware, Father Forbes, and Celia Madden, as well as the scenes of New York State life, are “drawn from life,” Carter identifies The Damnation of Theron Ware as a work of “realism” (244-45). However, because Frederic also sought to explore a “psychological rather than a social truth” in his portrayal of Father Forbes, Celia Madden, Dr. Ledsmar, and the Soulsbys, he transforms the characters into archetypes (245).

Coale, Samuel. “Frederic and Hawthorne: The Romantic Roots of Naturalism.” American Literature 48.1 (March 1976): 29-45.

Coale’s article is a genre study of The Damnation of Theron Ware that examines Frederic’s literary roots—from melodrama to realism, romanticism to naturalism—with particular emphasis on Nathaniel Hawthorne as one of Frederic’s “literary parent[s]” (29). Coale notes that many critics have viewed Frederic’s best-seller as simply “another example of emerging American naturalism” (29), a genre that shared much in common with William Dean Howells’ realism, “although the overriding tone is determinedly pessimistic, not obdurately optimistic.” He asserts, however, that “[i]n turning from the abundant details of character in society to concentrate upon one soul or two and in bending their visions inward, [. . . Frederic] approached the psychological and allegorical territory that had appeared in Hawthorne’s fiction” (30). Coale offers several examples to support his claim: Theron Ware’s resemblance to Young Goodman Brown, another “American innocent”; the similarities between Damnation’s opening paragraphs and the forest scenes of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; and the use of light and dark imagery. Even the character of Sister Soulsby seems to fit the “Hawthornian mold” in her correspondence to Westervelt in The Blithedale Romance—clearly “a representative of the modern manipulative world, not to be trusted, however practical and useful her tools of the trade” (41). In fact, Coale claims, Sister Soulsby may be “the Devil of the piece.” He concludes that Frederic does not succeed in fusing romantic and naturalistic elements in this novel: the “romantic or Hawthornesque touches can only be self-justifications on Theron’s part for his actions, as his comments on determinism must be, and we cannot take them seriously” (43).

Coale, Samuel Chase. “Harold Frederic: Naturalism as Romantic Snarl.” In Hawthorne’s Shadow: American Romance from Melville to Mailer. Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 1985. 46-62.

Coale’s chapter on Harold Frederic is a reworking of his earlier article entitled “Frederic and Hawthorne: The Romantic Roots of Naturalism,” published in American Literature 48.1 (March 1976): 29-45.

Crisler, Jesse S. “Harold Frederic.” American Literary Realism 8 (1975): 250-55.

Crisler’s article is a bibliographical review of twelve dissertations on Harold Frederic and his writing. Charles C. Walcutt’s “Naturalism in the American Novel” (U of Michigan, 1938), the first dissertation to address Frederic’s novels, “views Frederic in connection with other ‘naturalistic’ writers” and, according to Crisler, is “valuable only as a prologue to later dissertations.” Paul Haines’ “Harold Frederic” (New York U, 1945) is the first dissertation to treat Frederic solely, “sets a worthy precedent in terms of research, content, technique, and presentation,” and is the only record for some of Frederic’s manuscripts that are apparently no longer extant (250). Marvin O. Mitchell’s “A Study of Romantic Elements in the Fiction of Edgar Watson Howe, Joseph Kirkland, Hamlin Garland, Harold Frederic, and Frank Norris” (U of North Carolina, 1953) argues that Frederic’s novels “mix romantic elements with realistic ones” (251). Robert H. Woodward’s “Harold Frederic: A Study of His Novels, Short Stories, and Plays” (U of Indiana, 1957) employs extensive use of the Harold Frederic Papers, housed in the Library of Congress, in a critical analysis of Frederic’s works. Thomas F. O’Donnell’s “The Regional Fiction of Upstate New York” (Syracuse U, 1957) addresses in one chapter Frederic’s works set in the U.S.. Charles B. Hands’ “Harold Frederic: A Critical Study of the American Works” (U of Notre Dame, 1959) draws upon earlier studies of Frederic in the “first completely critical treatment of the novelist” (252). Crisler dismisses Ralph R. Rogers’ “Harold Frederic: His Development as a Comic Realist” (Columbia U, 1961) because Rogers concludes that Frederic was a comic realist and appears to overlook Frederic’s use of irony that “more often than not transforms apparent comedy into gripping tragedy.” William J. Holmes’ “A Study of the Novels of Harold Frederic” (U of Iowa, 1962) supports the argument that Frederic was a realist; Crisler ranks Holmes’ study with Haines’ as “one of the best in its field.” Austin E. Briggs’ “The Novels of Harold Frederic” (Columbia U, 1963) approaches Frederic’s novels “from a ‘comic’ standpoint in which realism and romance are always combined.” According to Crisler, Stanton B. Garner’s “Harold Frederic: The Major Works” (Brown U, 1963) is “of extreme importance to Frederic criticism” (253) and “indispensable to evaluations of Frederic and his work” (254). Fred G. See’s “Metaphoric and Metonymic Imagery in Nineteenth Century American Fiction: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Harold Frederic” (U of California, Berkeley, 1967) examines Frederic’s novels within the framework of a late-nineteenth-century movement from romantic to realistic imagery. Crisler finds little value in Nancy Siferd’s “Textual Range in the Novels of Harold Frederic” (Bowling Green, 1970), with the exception of the chapters in which she investigates character motivation.

Dalton, Dale C. “MacEvoy’s Room.” The Frederic Herald 3.2 (1969): 5.

Dalton’s note examines MacEvoy’s room as a recurring structural device significant to Theron Ware’s fall in The Damnation of Theron Ware. When the Irish-Catholic wheelwright MacEvoy is fatally wounded falling from an elm tree he was ordered to trim on the Madden’s property, he is carried to his house in the outskirts of town. Theron Ware follows the bearers to MacEvoy’s house, the first house Ware visits upon moving to Octavius. MacEvoy’s room, described as “‘dark and ill-smelling,’” might also be called “Theron’s chamber of death,” observes Dalton, “for it holds other agents of Theron’s approaching ‘damnation,’” specifically Celia Madden and Father Forbes. In Chapter 10, when Ware has just returned from a visit to Forbes’ house, he finds his own house “‘bare and squalid’” and the fumes from the kerosene lamp “‘offensive to his nostrils.’” Lying in his room later that night, Ware can hear Madden playing her piano and recalls his first image her in MacEvoy’s room. In Chapter 15, MacEvoy’s room is again recalled: Ware rejects the Methodist Love-Feast as a “low” ceremony, held in the basement of the church; yet only three months earlier, he was mesmerized by the religious rites performed by Forbes in MacEvoy’s room. “MacEvoy’s fall is prophetic of Theron’s moral decline and spiritual death,” argues Dalton, and “MacEvoy’s room is [. . .] the structural device with which Frederic portrays Theron’s first acceptance of the new and rejection of the old” (5).

Davies, Horton. “Harold Frederic.” A Mirror of the Ministry in Modern Novels. New York: Oxford UP, 1959. 71-78.

Davies’ chapter entitled "Harold Frederic," although largely a summary of The Damnation of Theron Ware, is also a character study and a cultural critique of religion and science, examining particularly the “conflict between the old faith and the new knowledge.” Comparing Frederic’s novel to Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s Robert Elsmere, Davies states that Theron Ware’s “lapse,” unlike Robert Elsmere’s, “was moral not theological” (71). Further, “Frederic’s novel gives a much more sympathetic account of the older generation in religion” than is found in the novels of his contemporaries Mrs. Humphrey Ward and William Hale White; it also presents a “sophisticated treatment of the role of the Catholic enclave in a predominantly Protestant America” (72). Davies’ reading of the “genuine Soulsbys” (78) is quite favorable: “The Soulsbys prove in the end [. . .] to be the best friends of Ware and his wife” (76). Davies concludes, “This novel, then, is not so much a study of the agonizing problem of correlating traditional faith with the new scientific and historical knowledge; it is chiefly a study of the disintegration of a minister through succumbing to vanity, in the form of intellectual ambition” (78).

Donaldson, Scott. Introduction. The Damnation of Theron Ware. By Harold Frederic. 1896. New York: Penguin, 1986. vii-xxx.

Donaldson’s introduction to The Damnation of Theron Ware combines biographical and genre criticism with a brief character study. Part I is a biography of Harold Frederic: journalist, novelist, bon vivant, and polygamist. Part II opens with Donaldson’s acknowledgment that Frederic’s literary reputation generally rests upon a single novel, The Damnation of Theron Ware, a situation he regrets as unfortunate because Seth’s Brother’s Wife (1890), In the Valley (1890), and The Market-Place (1899) “represent major achievements” as well (xii). Donaldson states that Frederic’s novels “resist pigeonholing as works of realism, naturalism, or romance” and further asserts that Damnation “reveals traces of all three approaches” (xvi). Parts III, IV, and V explore the character development of Theron Ware, as well as of Father Forbes, Dr. Ledsmar, Celia Madden, and Sister Soulsby. The novel is described as a “subtle study of moral disintegration” (xviii), in which Ware “abandons his faith and seems at the end to have learned almost nothing from his ordeal” (xix).

Donaldson, Scott. “The Seduction of Theron Ware.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 29 (1975): 441-52.

Donaldson’s article is a psychological analysis of the causes of Theron Ware’s downfall. While Donaldson acknowledges that most critics point to the trio of Father Forbes, Dr. Ledsmar, and Celia Madden as the force behind Ware’s destruction, he asserts “the true villain of the piece” is Sister Soulsby, “who plays Mephistopheles” to Ware’s “Faust” (441-42). Donaldson points to characteristics of Sister Soulsby—her “deceptive appearance, commanding manner, and duplicitous methods of operation”—to support his judgment (442). Sister Soulsby is a master confidence artist who employs performance, flattery, and scripture quoted out-of-context to further her scheming manipulation of both Theron Ware and his congregation. After Sister Soulsby absolves Ware of any guilt for his participation in her scheme to cheat Levi Gorringe at the trustees’ meeting, he embraces her philosophy of pragmatism and vows to emulate her example; however, Donaldson concludes, “Theron Ware simply is not cut out for the role of deceiver” (451).

Dooley, Patrick K. “Fakes and Good Frauds: Pragmatic Religion in The Damnation of Theron Ware.” American Literary Realism 15.1 (1982): 74-85.

Dooley approaches his analysis of Frederic’s novel from a cultural and philosophical perspective. In this article, he defines pragmatism as “a technical and sophisticated epistemological position designed to settle the perennial questions of the nature and meaning of Truth” (74). For William James, the “truth of religion and religious belief is its beneficial consequences and valuable effects” (75). Dooley contends that The Damnation of Theron Ware “is a remarkable cultural document and an illuminating philosophical critique,” in which the author illustrates the nature of the difficulties of James’ “tender-minded” pragmatism and “the effects, beneficial and otherwise, of believing a lie” (74-76). According to Dooley, “Frederic stresses two facts: religious experiences are manufactured, and second, one does not have to be pious to produce religious experiences” (79). In fact, none of the central religious characters in this novel—Theron Ware, Father Forbes, and the Soulsbys—really believes in God, and all are, or aspire to be, “good frauds” (81). The essay traces the events leading to and following Ware’s counter-conversion. Dooley examines Father Forbes’ and Sister Soulsby’s pragmatic claims that truth is always relative. This perspective is illustrated in Father Forbes’ attitude toward the Catholic church and its secular function and in Sister Soulsby’s revelation about performance. Dooley concludes that Frederic does not resolve the question of whether or not a pragmatic account of religion—believing a lie if its effects are beneficial—is a satisfactory philosophy. Frederic leaves that for the reader to decide.

Eggers, Paul. “By Whose Authority? Point of View in the First Chapter of Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware.” Style 31.1 (1997): 81-95.

Eggers’ article combines reader-response and structural criticism in an examination of Chapter 1 of The Damnation of Theron Ware. Eggers argues that other critics who have examined authority in this novel (Oehlschlaeger and Becknell) have begun in Chapter 2, where the narrative focus and main characters are established. He contends, however, “that the first chapter both initiates and encapsulates the novel’s exploration of authority through a perplexing usage of shifting points of view.” Identification of these shifting points of view alternates between clarity and ambiguity, not only implicating readers in “‘unauthoritative’ readings” of the text but also focusing on the “book’s concern with authority.” The opening three paragraphs are traditional omniscient narration, but one word in the third paragraph, “nay,” suggests an “internal debate” that should give careful readers pause. The narrator changes for paragraphs four through six to an unnamed “observer.” The point of view appears to shift again in paragraphs ten and eleven to the “venerable Fathers” of the Methodist clergy. Their “sincerity” is called into question if the judgments rendered are not the implied author’s (as reported by the omniscient narrator). Point of view clearly shifts back to the omniscient narrator in paragraphs twelve through fifteen, influencing the reader’s perceptions of Theron and Alice Ware in later paragraphs in contrast to the proud Tecumseh congregation. Eggers’ analysis continues along this line, scrutinizing each paragraph in turn. When Ware is finally introduced to the reader, it is through the “objective” tone of a limited-omniscient narrator who has just replaced the “vitriolic tone of the parishioner-controlled narrative.” Since the reader is predisposed to be sympathetic toward the seemingly stoic and pious Reverend Ware, this impression influences the reader well into the book. As Eggers demonstrates, “both text and reader are rendered ‘unauthoritative’ through the agency of point of view.” (Note: The above is from WilsonSelect, an electronic database that does not include Style’s page numbers.)

Fortenberry, George, Charlyne Dodge, Stanton Garner, and Robert H. Woodward, eds. The Correspondence of Harold Frederic. Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian UP, 1977.

Fortenberry, Dodge, Garner, and Woodward’s bibliography contains a complete file of letters to and from Harold Frederic, organized by date. In addition to the texts of the letters, the editors provide biographies of some of the correspondents, samples of letterhead used by Frederic, a list of “Known and Inferred Private Correspondence, Not Located,” and an index. The editors discovered five letters after this book had been published; the letters are listed in Noel Polk, The Literary Manuscripts of Harold Frederic: A Catalogue (New York: Garland, 1979) 104-07.

Garner, Stanton. “The Damnation of Theron Ware, or Illumination: The Title of Harold Frederic’s Novel.” Proof: The Yearbook of American Bibliographical and Textual Studies. Ed. Joseph Katz. Vol. 5. New York: J. Faust, 1979. 57-66.

Garner’s chapter is a textual analysis that focuses upon the title of Harold Frederic’s “finest novel” (57), published simultaneously as The Damnation of Theron Ware in the United States and as Illumination in England. Garner examines “the possibility that one title should have priority over the other” and produces evidence for both arguments: either the different titles were intentional, meant “to attract the two distinct bodies of readers to whom the novel was offered for sale,” or the Damnation title was unintended, printed in error (58). Evidence supporting the former argument includes the fact that (1) Frederic, in correspondence, referred to the novel as “The Damnation of Theron Ware” nearly two years before its publication in the U.S., (2) he did not change the Damnation title on the publisher’s proofs, and (3) the two different titles appear on the title pages of the U.S. and English original editions. However, evidence supporting the argument that the Damnation title was appended in error includes (1) literary gossip appearing in the London Daily Chronicle, The New York Times, The Critic, and The Review of Reviews as little as two months after the novel’s publication, (2) the addition of the English title as a subtitle to later American editions, (3) Frederic’s habit of making changes to his compositions up to the last possible moment, and (4) his documented difficulty in selecting titles for his works. Garner judges the evidence to be in favor of Illumination as Frederic’s preferred choice of title: “A return to Illumination would in all probability rectify an error which has for nearly eight decades misrepresented Frederic’s final intention” (65).

Garner, Stanton. “The Other Harold Frederic.” Upstate Literature: Essays in Memory of Thomas F. O’Donnell. Ed. Frank Bergmann. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1985. 129-41.

Garner’s chapter is a biographical sketch of Frederic that acknowledges his achievements as an editor and a journalist, but concentrates upon Frederic’s literary contributions as a writer of fiction. Joseph Conrad characterized Frederic as “a notable journalist (who had written some novels).” Garner contends that Conrad’s comment is an example of how Frederic’s fiction has been, and continues to be, misunderstood and underappreciated (130). In Garner’s opinion, Frederic is a “fine stylist” who, “in the ease and fluency of his language [. . .], belongs in the camp of Mark Twain” (133). Garner examines genre in The Damnation of Theron Ware, Gloria Mundi, and The Market-Place to show Frederic’s growth as an author. Frederic’s early works set in upstate New York establish him as a regionalist; however, most of Frederic’s later works are set abroad and are a “fusion of types,” borrowing elements of regionalism, realism, and romance (135). For example, elements of realism and romance flavor The Damnation of Theron Ware, one of Frederic’s later novels (although set in New York), with provocative social and moral issues. The setting of Gloria Mundi and The Market-Place, Frederic’s last two novels, moves beyond the Mohawk Valley to “the ancient European cradle out of which [. . . Frederic’s regional American] culture had risen” and on to “the future of the West and of mankind” in the character of Joel Thorpe. Garner concludes “that in addition to the regionalist we know there was another Harold Frederic whose vision grew much broader” (140).

Genthe, Charles V. “The Damnation of Theron Ware and Elmer Gantry.” Research Studies 32 (1964): 334-43.

Genthe’s article is a structural analysis of Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) and Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry (1927) that considers “striking similarities” in “certain characters, materials, and techniques” (334), suggesting that Lewis must have known Frederic’s novel. Celia Madden and Sharon Falconer, although “vastly different in background and occupation,” “epitomize beauty and savoir faire to Ware and Gantry, and the bower seduction scenes are markedly similar” (335). Ministers Theron Ware and Frank Shallard, a minor character in Elmer Gantry, share similar “background[s],” “environments,” and “influences,” specifically “Darwinism, the Higher Criticism, and the social gospel” (337). Genthe notes that the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871) “constituted a separation point between an old order of thought and a new” (338). Higher Criticism, in the minds of some clergymen, threatened to do away with God; and the social gospel, “a movement within the churches to help the common person in his struggle for a material existence,” “helped to level the old barriers between the secular and sacred” (339). For Theron Ware, these influences are embodied in the characters of Dr. Ledsmar, Father Forbes, and Celia Madden. For Frank Shallard, they are all combined in the single character of Dr. Bruno Zechlin, Professor of Hebrew at Mizpah Baptist Seminary. “[I]t is a tribute to American realism that Lewis and Frederic created these two characters and their plot situations with such verisimilitude,” writes Genthe. The similarity could be attributed to “the fact that both authors saw the same basic forces in American religious patterns,” or Lewis may have used Frederic’s novel for source material (343). Genthe opts for the second possibility, that Lewis borrowed from Frederic.

Graham, Don. “‘A Degenerate Methodist’: A New Review of The Damnation of Theron Ware.” American Literary Realism 9 (1976): 280-84.

Graham’s bibliographical article identifies and reprints an 1896 book review of The Damnation of Theron Ware previously unlisted in Frederic bibliographies. The unidentified reviewer labels the book “an important novel” (281) and proceeds to summarize the plot, concluding that “we suspect the probabilities of such unconscious degeneration; it seems impossible that the conditions postulated should precipitate so involuntary a downfall. It seems so useless the game these various characters play against the unfortunate minister; his disillusion is so gratuitous, so merciless” (284).

“Harold Frederic (1856-1898): A Critical Bibliography of Secondary Comment.” American Literary Realism 2 (1968): 1-70.

The editors of American Literary Realism, under the leadership of Clayton L. Eichelberger, along with twenty-four other contributors, compiled the first annotated bibliography of secondary criticism on Harold Frederic and his work. Sources for the bibliography include books, dissertations, and periodical articles; newspaper articles are specifically omitted. This bibliography provided the foundation upon which later bibliographies were complied (see Thomas F. O’Donnell, Stanton Garner, and Robert H. Woodward’s A Bibliography of Writings By and About Harold Frederic, 1975).

Heddendorf, David. “Pragmatists and Plots: Pierre and The Damnation of Theron Ware.” Studies in the Novel 22.3 (1990): 271-81.

Heddendorf’s article is a psychological study of Pierre Glendinning, in Herman Melville’s Pierre, and Theron Ware, in Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware, that focuses on the downfall of the two protagonists. According to Heddendorf, Glendinning and Ware seem incapable of comprehending the “prescription for practical results” recommended by their advisors, Plinlimmon and Sister Soulsby. The “rightness or wrongness” of the pragmatic figures of Plinlimmon and Sister Soulsby is not at issue, argues Heddendorf; rather “the relationship between philosophy and narrative is the point of these encounters [. . .] and the simple fact that neither Pierre nor Theron understands what his would-be counselor is talking about” (272). For Pierre Glendinning, it is a pamphlet by Plinlimmon that describes the “irrelevance of an absolute time standard to the requirement of everyday life” that he cannot understand because he is “repressing an understanding of his present extreme circumstances” (273). As readers, Heddendorf asserts, we can see that the pamphlet holds the pragmatic solution to Glendinning’s problems. For Theron Ware, Sister Soulsby’s declaration that she and her husband are “good frauds” is misleading; Ware assumes that he too is to be a “good fraud.” Unfortunately for Ware, he is not a very good fraud and manages to alienate family, friends, and community because he fails to understand Sister Soulsby’s advice. Heddendorf concludes, “In Pierre and The Damnation of Theron Ware, the narratives of belief, abandonment and new belief lead less happily to a view of human beings as not licensed but condemned to believe” (280).

Hirsh, John C. “The Frederic Papers, The McGlynn Affair, and The Damnation of Theron Ware.” American Literary Realism 17.1 (1984): 12-23.

Hirsh combines textual and biographical approaches in his examination of the Frederic Papers, preserved in the Library of Congress, “to help illuminate some of the more important structural and thematic concerns of the novel, particularly those affecting Fr. Forbes and the Catholics” (12). In his article, Hirsh produces excerpts from the author’s early notes that indicate some of the relationships that Frederic intended to develop, among them Theron Ware, Father Forbes, and Dr. Ledsmar; Celia Madden and Father Forbes; Father Forbes and his Bishop. Hirsh cites Paul Haines’ 1945 unpublished dissertation that identifies Father Edward Terry, a priest whom Frederic knew in Utica, as a possible source for the development of Father Forbes. However, Hirsh suggests that a more influential source may have been Father Edward McGlynn, an Irish-Catholic priest in New York who made newspaper headlines in the 1880s for his political activism and American ideal of Catholicism (he was excommunicated in 1887 and reconciled with the church in 1893). The character of Father Forbes, as it emerged in The Damnation of Theron Ware, is forceful, powerful, and sophisticated. Elements of the role that were in Frederic’s working notes but eliminated from the novel include public condemnation of the priest for a scandalous relationship with Celia Madden and serious political activism.

Howells, William Dean. “My Favorite Novelist and His Best Book.” W. D. Howells as Critic. Ed. Edwin H. Cady. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973. 268-80.

Howells’ review of Frederic’s novel was published in Munsey’s in April 1897. Howells names The Damnation of Theron Ware one of his favorite books. His comment on Frederic’s novel is often quoted by critics: “I was particularly interested in the book, for when you get to the end, although you have carried a hazy notion in your mind of the sort of man Ware was, you fully realize, for the first time, that the author has never for a moment represented him anywhere to you as a good or honest man, or as anything but a very selfish man” (278).

Jefferson, Margo. “Seven Unsung Novels Crying to be Filmed.” New York Times 18 Jan. 1998, late ed., sec. 2: 1+.

Jefferson’s feature article focuses on “seven unsung novels crying to be filmed” (1). While noting Hollywood’s recent fascination with making movies from the novels of Henry James, Jane Austin, all three Brontës, and Edith Wharton, Jefferson laments Hollywood’s oversight in not filming such novels as William Dean Howells’ A Modern Instance (1882), Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901), David Graham Phillips’ Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917), Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), Anzia Yezierska’s Salome of the Tenements (1923), and Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896).

Johnson, George W. “Harold Frederic’s Young Goodman Ware: The Ambiguities of a Realistic Romance.” Modern Fiction Studies 8 (1963): 361-74.

Johnson's article combines structural and genre criticism to explore the “sinning minister” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s works as an influence on Frederic’s minister, “brought up to date and given topicality in the ‘turbulent’ milieu of the 1890’s” (362). Although sensitive to Sister Soulsby’s duplicity, Johnson regards her influence as comparable to that of Celia Madden. Johnson writes, Sister Soulsby “patches together Theron’s splintered ego by giving him a role to play. Henceforth, she counsels, he is to be a conscious fraud, an actor superior to his audience.” Her seduction of Theron Ware takes a different tack from Celia Madden’s, “[b]ut Sister Soulsby has in a way seduced him” by appealing to his pride and fueling his ego. Ware emerges from the forest scene with Madden, “like another Dimmesdale,” unable to reconcile the “radical contradictions” that plague his mind (365). Johnson observes that Frederic’s novel is, on the one hand, “a realistic rendering of societal relationships” and, on the other, “a romancer’s poetic rendering, complete with archetypal trees, gardens, and snakes, of a representative figure” (367). In the character of Theron Ware, Frederic has created a “seeker who combines the temperament of both a romancer and a realist”; however, Johnson concludes that the novel “remains a literary near-miss” because “Theron Ware is an average man who remains throughout the book merely a boy” (372). A novel “[a]t the last more complicated than complex,” Johnson asserts that The Damnation of Theron Ware is “a flawed monument to an endeavor audacious, artful, and American” (374).

Jolliff, William. “The Damnation of Bryan Dalyrimple—and Theron Ware: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Debt to Harold Frederic.” Studies in Short Fiction 35.1 (1998): 85-90.

Jolliff combines thematic criticism and character analysis in his note arguing that F. Scott Fitzgerald was influenced by Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware when he wrote “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong.” Jolliff establishes that Fitzgerald knew and admired Frederic’s novel. He states that “Bryan Dalyrimple’s story shares many similarities with Theron Ware’s both in theme and detail” and suggests that Dalyrimple was the prototype of Jay Gatsby (87). “[T]ypically adamic,” both Ware and Dalyrimple initially believe that hard work will lead to success, discover that “‘common sense’ is a code word that sometimes stands for the sacrifice of moral conviction,” and eventually surrender their “traditional ideas of good and evil” in favor of the common sense that will help them to obtain their worldly desires (87-88). As Ware and Dalyrimple abandon their moral codes, each finds that he has become better at his “legitimate work” (88). In addition, both rely upon their rhetorical skills as the key to their future success in politics. Noting that Dalyrimple’s “amoral mentor” and boss is named “Theron G. Macy” (89), Jolliff concludes, Ware and Dalyrimple “present us with examples of what sometimes happens when the American Adam comes of age: a thorough disillusionment resulting not in self-knowledge but in moral degeneracy. [. . .] For if Fitzgerald was the voice of a generation, surely Harold Frederic had prophesied its coming” (89-90).

Jolliff, William. “Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware.” The Explicator 47.2 (1989): 37-38.

Jolliff’s textual approach to Frederic’s novel reveals that one of the working titles for The Damnation of Theron Ware was “Snarl,” a term popularly interpreted as suggesting the tangled relationships of the novel’s characters. Jolliff offers another explanation. In his note, he suggests the title “would direct the reader to consider the beast within Theron Ware” and points to the “abundance of animal imagery” in the novel. Dr. Ledsmar renames one of his lizard specimens “the Rev. Theron Ware,” and “Theron’s name derives from a Greek word meaning ‘wild beast.’” At his lowest point, Theron Ware bemoans to Sister Soulsby, “[I]sn’t there any God at all—but only men who live and die like animals?” (37). Ware likens himself to a “mongrel cur,” one that Sister Soulsby threatens with a “good cuffing” if he does not shape up (38). Jolliff concludes that such an interpretation of the working title “Snarl” must certainly have been deliberate on the part of the author.

Kane, Patricia. “Lest Darkness Come Upon You: An Interpretation of The Damnation of Theron Ware.” Iowa English Bulletin 10 (1965): 55-59.

Kane’s article is a Biblical study of The Damnation of Theron Ware that focuses on Frederic’s use of symbols and images to trace Theron Ware’s fall from the light of innocence into the “darkness of damnation” (55). Theron and Alice Ware’s garden initially evokes not only “the lost agrarian America,” but also “the sterility of life in a small town, which is relieved only by faith in God.” Later, the garden becomes a spiritual symbol associated with Alice Ware, and Theron Ware’s attitudes toward his wife and her garden chart his descent. The image of a garden is also used to describe Theron Ware’s supposed illumination: at one point he vows to “bend all his energies to cultivating his mind till it should blossom like a garden” (56). Yet in the Maddens’ hothouse garden, Michael Madden tells Ware that his face now resembles that of a bar-keeper, not a saint, and asks him to leave. This scene recalls the Archangel Michael’s expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Jesus warns in John 12:35, “Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you; for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth” (57). Kane also notes Reverend Ware’s ironic use of “Christian language and symbolism of salvation to describe his damnation”: after his evening at Celia Madden’s house, Ware is “a new being” (John 3: 3) and a “child of light” (John 12: 36) (56-57). Ware believes himself to be reborn in lightness; but as Kane observes, he is confused and mistaken in his illumination—he is “becoming a child of darkness” (57). The light imagery turns evil when Ware is rebuffed by Celia Madden: “The horrible notion of killing her spread over the chaos of his mind with the effect of unearthly light,—red and abnormally evil” (59). Although Kane concedes that “the Biblical allusions here are not insistent,” she maintains that “they hover with enough tenacity to become part of a pattern in a story about a fall from innocence” (56).

Kantor, J. R. K. “The Damnation of Theron Ware and John Ward, Preacher.” The Serif 3.1 (1996): 16-21.

Kantor’s article is an analysis of the character development and structure of The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) and Margaret Deland’s John Ward, Preacher (1888). The similarities in the treatment of religious doctrine in the two stories, according to Kantor, support the thesis that Frederic was familiar with Deland’s novel. First, Kantor notes that critics have argued Frederic was familiar with Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s Robert Elsmere, a novel published the same year as John Ward, Preacher, and often reviewed with it because of their similarities. Second, attitudes toward religion are central to character development in both Frederic’s and Deland’s novels. The pragmatic attitudes of Sister Soulsby and of Gifford Woodhouse complement one another, and in the end, both characters are a source of consolation and hope. Kantor also notes similarities between the meetings of the ministers and the trustees in both novels. The trustees are in control, and both groups have one dissenter among them: Levi Gorringe opposes the high interest rate charged by the other trustees, and Elder Johnson defends Helen Ward against the judgment of the others. In both novels, church officials are opposed to all things Catholic. Finally, the names of the two ministers—Ware and Ward—cannot be ignored.

Klopfenstein, Glenn D. “‘The Flying Dutchman of American Literature’: Harold Frederic and the American Canon, a Centenary Overview.” American Literary Realism 30.1 (1997): 34-46.

Klopfenstein’s bibliographical article opens with a brief review of the state of Frederic scholarship since the 1950s. His reference to “the Flying Dutchman” is borrowed from Austin Briggs: “Harold Frederic, unless the interest of the 1960’s abides, seems doomed to play the Flying Dutchman of American literature. Over the decades he has been enthusiastically sighted again and again, only to disappear into the fogs of obscurity” (35). According to Klopfenstein, the exclusion of The Damnation of Theron Ware from the American canon can be attributed to “changing critical (aesthetic) standards and political (institutional) forces” (36); it has been exacerbated by Vernon Louis Parrington’s negative criticism of the novel in Main Currents in American Thought (1927). Klopfenstein further speculates that the novel and its author may have been marginalized prior to the work’s brief revival in the 1960s because Frederic, an expatriate living in England, was not American enough and his effeminate antihero was not masculine enough to appeal to critics. While lamenting that Frederic has been pigeonholed as a regionalist, a realist, and a naturalist, and that his novel has become “fodder for the reductions of literary theorists and specialists,” Klopfenstein praises Stanton Garner’s theory that Frederic’s “true descent” was from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville and holds out hope that The Damnation of Theron Ware may yet be resurrected in the coming years by a new generation of Frederic enthusiasts (43).

Krause, Sydney J. “Harold Frederic and the Failure Motif.” Studies in American Fiction 15.1 (1987): 55-69.

Krause’s cultural and psychological approach to Frederic’s novel juxtaposes the American myth of success with American novelists’ fascination with failure. Published during the period when “Horatio Alger stories were still at the ‘zenith of their fame’” (57), Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware “represents that counter-phenomenon in the American tradition wherein knowledge not only fails to set someone free, it actually enslaves him to a false notion of the freed Self” (56). A key element in Theron Ware’s failure, according to Krause's article, is “his inability to accept a negative image of himself for wrongs done” (59). Sympathetic to Ware’s motives for wanting “to cultivat[e] his mind till it should blossom like a garden,” Krause acknowledges “Frederic’s strategy of ambiguity,” wherein Ware’s desire for “personal enrichment” is hindered by his complete lack of self knowledge (61). Krause argues that Celia Madden’s musical seduction of Ware “becomes such a blatantly erotic performance as to constitute a rape of his senses” (62). For those “characters who fall socially and thereafter rehabilitate themselves, [ . . . Frederic] provides moral redemption” or, if necessary, a graceful death. However, those characters “who fall morally and fail to acknowledge it,” such as Ware, must live with their ignominy (63). Krause concludes that Theron Ware’s “failure is fundamental and national; it is his persisting in the American illusion that there is no final failure, that success only awaits a new beginning elsewhere” (64).

Lackey, Lionel. “Redemption and The Damnation of Theron Ware.” South Atlantic Review 55 (1990): 81-91.

Lackey’s biographical and psychological study examines Frederic’s portrayal, and possible redemption, of Theron Ware. Lackey’s article is a sympathetic reading of Ware influenced by his opinion that Frederic never achieved total honesty in his own life; thus “the author neither expected nor achieved total honesty in his characters” (81). Frederic’s practices regarding money, friendships, and extra-marital relationships, for example, are reflected in Ware’s desire for financial freedom, cultured friends, and a liaison with Celia Madden. Because Ware lacks “the financial access to culturally enlightened circles that would have afforded him the expertise and discretion to enter into moral ambiguities gracefully and knowingly—on Forbes’ and Celia’s own level,” they judge him a bore (85). Sister Soulsby consoles Theron Ware after his rejection by Celia Madden and Father Forbes. Some critics see this consolation as “a prelude to renewed vanity, delusion, and failure” (86), but Lackey prefers to believe “there is ground for hope that Theron may after all have learned something valuable from his mistakes [. . .]. Having lost his life, Theron may yet save it” (87). Lackey speculates that Frederic may have intended the ending to be ambiguous in order to pave the way for another book, perhaps “The Redemption of Theron Ware.” In any case, Lackey chooses “to place the best construction on the various ambivalences Frederic positions in the concluding chapters” (88).

LeClair, Thomas. “The Ascendant Eye: A Reading of The Damnation of Theron Ware.” Studies in American Fiction 3 (1975): 95-102.

LeClair’s psychological analysis of The Damnation of Theron Ware explores “the complex relationship between being seen and seeing, between the person as object of perception and the person as perceiver of self and others” (95). In his article, LeClair asserts that Theron Ware’s visibility as a small-town minister invites other characters to form superficial perceptions about his character, perceptions that ultimately contribute to Ware’s “loss of self” (96). Levi Gorringe, Celia Madden, and Sister Soulsby are each wrong in their initial impressions of “Theron’s superiority and potential for transformation” (97), but Theron Ware willingly embraces their characterizations, preferring the illusion of being seen to the reality of seeing. LeClair extends his argument to include the “recurring imagery of eyes and sight” and of “light, darkness, and elevation” (96). He concludes that “Theron abandons whatever was genuine in him, accepts the identity others provide, and eventually becomes a synthetic person, the makeshift creation of Sister Soulsby, [. . .who] advocates picking an illusion, knowing that it is an illusion, and then using it to survive in a time of confusion” (101-02).

Luedtke, Luther S. “Harold Frederic’s Satanic Sister Soulsby: Interpretation and Sources.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30.1 (1975): 82-104.

Luedtke’s thematic, especially moral, approach to The Damnation of Theron Ware identifies Sister Soulsby as “the agent of a damnation that has moral as well as social reality” (82; emphasis Luedtke’s). Luedtke writes in his article, “Frederic intends Sister Soulsby, the materialist, to function as a Mephistophelean tempter of Theron’s soul and a minion of spiritual darkness” (84). Tracing the four parts of the novel, Luedtke states that it is not Theron Ware’s introduction to his new church or town, Father Forbes, Dr. Ledsmar, or Celia Madden in Part I that sets him on the path to damnation, but rather it is his interaction with the Soulsbys in Part II that plants the seeds of his destruction. Sister Soulsby’s remarks about Alice Ware cause Theron Ware first to re-evaluate his marriage and, later, to suspect his wife of infidelity. Her lecture to Ware on the art and uses of performance prompt him to brag about his new perspective to Dr. Ledsmar and Celia Madden, alienating them in the process. Luedtke recites the Soulsbys’ long history of questionable employment and concludes that they are confidence artists for whom religion is “only the latest con game” (92). Ware believes Sister Soulsby when she tells him that she and Soulsby had “both soured on living by fakes” and are now “good frauds” (93). Luedtke notes Frederic’s debt to Nathaniel Hawthorne in the character of Westervelt (The Blithedale Romance), who, like Sister Soulsby, has false teeth and is “stamped with [. . . the] totems of the serpent and the evil eye” (94). Although Luedtke contends that The Damnation of Theron Ware offers ample evidence of Frederic’s “judgments on Sister Soulsby” (98), he concludes his essay by offering two British models for the character of Sister Soulsby: Lucy Helen Muriel Soulsby (1856-1927) and Charles Dickens’ fictional Mrs. Jellyby (Bleak House).

MacFarlane, Lisa. “Resurrecting Man: Desire and The Damnation of Theron Ware.” A Mighty Baptism: Race, Gender, and the Creation of American Protestantism. Ed. Susan Juster and Lisa MacFarlane. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1996. 65-80.

MacFarlane’s chapter is reprinted, with minor changes, from an article published in Studies in American Fiction 20.2 (1992): 127-43.

MacFarlane, Lisa Watt. “Resurrecting Man: Desire and The Damnation of Theron Ware.” Studies in American Fiction 20.2 (1992): 127-43.

MacFarlane’s article is a feminist study of The Damnation of Theron Ware that examines the social and cultural roles of ministers, who are viewed as possessing both masculine and feminine characteristics. Ministers are often referred to as “feminized,” “neutral,” or “hybrid” because they represent “the patriarchal authority of God the Father” while their cultural work “aligns them socially with women” (128-29). The ambiguity of the minister’s “social constructions of gender,” according to MacFarlane, gives him power over both men and women (129). In The Damnation of Theron Ware, “a series of gender-confusing triangles”—particularly the Theron Ware-Alice Ware-Levi Gorringe and Theron Ware-Celia Madden-Father Forbes triangles—demonstrate Theron Ware’s unstable gender identity. In certain company, Ware takes on the role of female, while in other circumstances, he plays the role of the male. Even the novel’s ending is ambiguous in terms of gender identity: Ware dreams of succeeding in politics, a traditionally male-dominated sphere; however, when he “shivers with pleasure” at the fantasy of enthralling the masses with his rhetoric, he assumes a feminine identity (132). MacFarlane suggests that Frederic’s novel may be read as “an allegory about the social constructions of gender.” She concludes that “[t]he feminized minister is not an androgynous creature, selecting judiciously from an orderly list of binarily gendered characteristics. Rather, he is an instable, fractured being whose multiply gendered identity shifts as he negotiates his professional and personal positions” (141).

Michelson, Bruce. “Theron Ware in the Wilderness of Ideas.” American Literary Realism 25.1 (1992): 54-73.

Michelson’s article combines thematic and structural criticism in his examination of Theron Ware’s “modern intellectual experience” in The Damnation of Theron Ware (55). First, Michelson focuses on establishing the date for the novel’s action—late 1880s—in an effort to understand Ware’s “culture-crisis at the hands of Father Forbes, Dr. Ledsmar, and Celia Madden.” The trio, argues Michelson, are “intellectual-pretenders” for whom ideas are merely “social weapons, rationalizations, playthings for idle hours” (57). Initially regarding Ware as an acquisition, the poseurs compete in a game of one-upmanship, exhibiting for Ware their intellectual sophistication. When Ware tries to join their game, however, he fails to understand that “sayings and doings require no reconciliation” (60) and “self-interest and the protection of a public mask” are survival skills he has not mastered (61). Sister Soulsby tries to teach Ware this lesson, but he “never hears the right words at the right time” (67), and he “misses obvious signs of duplicity” in the actions of the trio (68). Ultimately, Forbes, Ledsmar, and Madden do not reject Ware for his duplicity, but for his “clumsiness in trying to do what they manage deftly” (70). “Disaster has taught [. . . Theron] little,” insists Michelson, “the consequences of stupidity have not crushed him.” Rather, “[a]s a modernized, incoherent man he may now be on his way to public triumphs, readier for them than ever before” (71). Thus Ware’s story, concludes Michelson, “is ultimately ‘about’ a change in American intellectual and cultural life, [. . .] of a degradation of the intellect” (72).

Miller, Linda Patterson. “Casting Graven Images: The Damnation of Theron Ware.” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 30 (1978): 179-84.

Miller's article combines moral and structural criticism in an analysis of the “moral wasteland” that confronts Alice Ware, Celia Madden, Sister Soulsby, and Theron Ware in The Damnation of Theron Ware. Their “search for personal salvation” transforms the concept of the church into something familiar and comforting: for Alice Ware, it is her “garden”; for Celia Madden, it is her “‘sacred chamber’ of art”; for Sister Soulsby, it is a “theatrical stage”; and for Theron Ware, it is the “‘maternal idea’ as embodied in Alice, Celia, and Sister Soulsby” (179). Alice Ware’s religion is her garden. Images of flowers blossoming and, later, withering are associated with her vivaciousness and despair. Miller observes that, rather than freeing her, both Methodism and her garden serve to isolate Alice Ware until she despairs, “[I]f there is a God, he has forgotten me” (180). Celia Madden seeks to transcend the wasteland in the “sacred chamber” of her rooms where she is worshipped as both seductress and madonna. When Celia Madden “cannot realize moments of transcendence,” she regards herself as “the most helpless and forlorn and lonesome of atoms” (181). Sister Soulsby’s approach is to disguise the wasteland with the machinery of the theatrical stage, all the while knowing that the performance is only an illusion. Theron Ware’s quest for salvation turns first to Alice Ware, then to Celia Madden, and finally to Sister Soulsby, but his misplaced faith in Sister Soulsby seals his damnation. Miller agrees with Stanton Garner’s assessment of Sister Soulsby’s failed religion: “to look for stage machinery instead of truth is to invite degeneration, to confuse darkness with illumination, to strike a bargain with Satan, to lose what weed-grown Paradise is left in a diminished world.” Miller concludes that none of the characters finds “real personal salvation”; none finds God (184).

Morace, Robert A. “Arthur Warren’s and Robert Sherard’s Interviews with Harold Frederic.” American Literary Realism 11.1 (1978): 52-70.

Morace’s article is a reprint of two “important interviews” with Harold Frederic that have been relatively inaccessible to Frederic scholars in the past. Morace’s intention was to “increase their accessibility and thereby to further the interests of Frederic scholarship” (52). Arthur Warren’s interview, entitled “An American Journalist in London. A Chat with Mr. Harold Frederic,” originally appeared in The Sketch on March 13, 1895. Robert H. Sherard’s interview, simply entitled “Harold Frederic,” originally appeared in The Idler in November 1897. (See the section “Frederic and Contemporaries: On Writing” for summaries of the interviews by Warren and Sherard.)

Morace, Robert A. “Harold Frederic’s ‘Degenerate Methodist.’” Markham Review 5 (1976): 58.

Morace’s bibliographical note reprints a portion of a long review of Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware that appeared in the San Francisco Wave on April 25, 1895. The anonymous reviewer writes, “Indeed, considering the book, there can be no question of its great ability, or of the vivid interest its narrative inspires. There is serious doubt, however, of the truth of the situations; we suspect the probabilities of such unconscious degeneration; it seems impossible that the conditions postulated should precipitate so involuntary a downfall” (58).

Myers, Robert M. “Antimodern Protest in The Damnation of Theron Ware.” American Literary Realism 26.3 (1994): 52-64.

Myers combines biographical and cultural criticism in his article to examine Frederic’s portrayal of nineteenth-century America, particularly the country’s attitude toward religion. According to Myers, many earlier critics of Frederic’s works “tended to see Frederic as an objective critic standing outside of his culture”; he, however, detects in The Damnation of Theron Ware the author’s concern for the effect of “overcivilization and fragmentation of modernism” on American cultural institutions (52). Frederic undertook extensive research on Methodism, Catholicism, and higher Biblical criticism in order to be as accurate as possible in his portrayal of a minister and a priest. Myers notes that Frederic’s sources on comparative religion “map a decline in traditional faith” resulting in “a profound ambivalence about the psychological and social effects of faithlessness.” Frederic’s own views on religion “altered between contempt for religious superstition and a recognition of the social value of religion”(54). In the 1890s, tensions between liberal Methodists, who “adopted the modern optimistic belief in the inevitability of progress,” and conservative Methodists, who protested the “modernizing trends of the liberals,” were dividing the church. Reverend Ware’s attempt to bring “modern ideas” to the Methodists of Octavius is thwarted by “a strong conservative faction” (56). Partly in reaction to his frustration with primitive Methodism, Ware embraces Celia Madden’s aesthetic paganism. He is also exposed to Father Forbes’ Catholicism, described by Myers as “a useful social institution” (59), and Sister Soulsby’s pragmatism, “based on social utility rather than theology.” Myers observes, “Father Forbes, Doctor Ledsmar, Celia, and Sister Soulsby all contribute to Theron’s destruction by consistently overestimating his ability to assimilate a modern view of religion.” Catholicism can tolerate a Father Forbes in its midst because the “corporate ethic of the Catholic Church de-emphasizes the significance of the individual priest” (60). Reverend Ware does not have that luxury in Methodism: “if the minister be corrupt his ministry will be corrupt also.” Myers concludes, “Forbes’ vision of a national church, focused on the needs of the consumers rather than doctrinal disputes with other religions, parallels simultaneous developments in American business. [. . .] The pragmatic approach to religion that emerges from Theron Ware points to a church strikingly similar to the modern corporation, an institution that took shape in the late nineteenth century” (61).

Myers, Robert M. “Author of The Damnation of Theron Ware.” Reluctant Expatriate: The Life of Harold Frederic. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1995. 115-34.

Myers’ biographical essay examines the influence of events in Harold Frederic’s life on the writing of The Damnation of Theron Ware. In this chapter, Myers notes that Frederic’s attempts to keep the circumstances of his unconventional life private—specifically, the maintenance of two households—may have “contributed to his conception of the difficulties Theron Ware faced as he began to separate his public from his private self” (116). A decade of expatriation may also have afforded Frederic an outsider’s perspective with regard to American culture; he was particularly concerned that “America had become overcivilized and that the homogenous American spirit was being torn apart by such factors as the growing class unrest and the increasing conflict between the sexes” (119). According to Myers, these concerns are reflected in Frederic’s novel. Having perused Frederic’s notes on “extensive readings in science, comparative religion, and the history of Methodism,” collected in The Frederic Papers in the Library of Congress, Myers also theorizes that Frederic may have used the characters of Father Forbes, Dr. Ledsmar, and Celia Madden to express his own views on religion, philosophy, and American culture (120).

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Fall From Grace.” Rev. of The Damnation of Theron Ware, by Harold Frederic. The New York Times Book Review 17 Dec. 1995: 24+.

Oates’ book review focuses upon genre and influence as she recalls her discovery of Frederic’s novel in the 1960s. In her opinion, the novel is an “odd, unexpected link between the crude naturalism of the young Stephen Crane [. . .] and the elegant dissections of wealthy New York society of Edith Wharton”; it has less in common with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction than it does with Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a novel in which the “young, ingenuous hero is ‘poisoned’ by a book of amoral hedonism and by his friendship with a mentor whose disregard for convention completely unhinges him.” The title character in The Damnation of Theron Ware is also seduced by worldly desires, and he has not one mentor, but four. Oates argues Frederic’s novel inspired two 1920s novels by Sinclair Lewis, Main Street and Elmer Gantry, but believes that Frederic manages his narrative with more finesse than does Lewis. She asserts, The Damnation of Theron Ware “is American literary realism at its most accomplished” and is also a comedy (24). Her prediction of Ware’s future is optimistic: “he will live from now on without illusion” and he “will not only survive but succeed” (25).

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Rediscovering Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware.” Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going. New York: Penguin, 1999. 304-10.

Oates’ chapter is a close version of her review entitled “Fall From Grace,” which first appeared in The New York Times Book Review in December 1995.

O’Donnell, Thomas F. “The Baxter Marginalia: Theron Ware a Clef.” Frederic Herald 1.3 (1967): 5.

O’Donnell’s note relates some of the brief marginalia contained in a copy of The Damnation of Theron Ware (Herbert S. Stone, 1899) acquired by O’Donnell and believed to have belonged to one of Harold Frederic’s close friends and first cousin, John Baxter. The marginalia are generally biographical in nature, referring to events, people, buildings, streets, or places that appear in Frederic’s novel and are also familiar to Baxter. For example, next to the text that reads, “[. . .] my very particular friend, Dr. Ledsmar,” the margin note reads, “My mother’s name and of course his mother’s as well spelled backwards” (underlined in original). Frederic’s and Baxter’s mothers’ maiden names were Ramsdell. Opposite the name “Father Forbes” on one page, Baxter wrote “Father Terry,” and next to “Octavius,” he wrote “Utica.” In two places, Baxter seems to identify elements in the book directly with Frederic: opposite the text that reads, “[. . .] and a copy of ‘Josephus’ which had belonged to his grandmother,” Baxter penned the words, “My grandmother’s book. Here he makes himself Theron”; opposite the text that reads, “[. . .] it did have a curious effect upon Theron Ware,” Baxter wrote, “Harry,” the name by which friends and family members knew Harold Frederic. O’Donnell states that the marginalia “demonstrate the extent to which F[rederic] relied on his memories of Utica as he wrote the novel” (5).

O’Donnell, Thomas F. “Harold Frederic (1856-1898).” American Literary Realism 1 (1967): 39-44.

O’Donnell’s article is a brief overview of the state of Frederic studies up to the 1960s. His bibliographical essay credits Paul Haines with the “rediscovery of Frederic” in 1945, when he wrote his “pioneer dissertation at New York University” (39). In the 1950s, about a half-dozen dissertations and articles continued the Frederic revival. Then from 1960 to 1965, the annual PMLA bibliographies listed thirty items of Frederic scholarship; O’Donnell briefly mentions most of them.

O’Donnell, Thomas F. “Theron Ware, the Irish Picnic, and Comus.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 46 (1975): 528-37.

O’Donnell combines textual and structural criticism in an examination of possible literary sources for the scene of the Irish picnic in Frederic’s novel. In his article, he acknowledges Nathaniel Hawthorne’s influence on Frederic, but argues that John Milton’s masque Comus may have inspired the picnic in The Damnation of Theron Ware. Elements of Comus are echoed throughout the novel. According to O’Donnell, Comus is Theron Ware; the Lady is Celia Madden; and the Attendant Spirit is Father Forbes. However, Frederic’s version inverts certain elements: “Comus-Theron rather than the Lady moved along through a thick wood,” and he eagerly accepts the potion (lager beer) Milton’s Lady refuses (531). The Lady’s brothers do not rescue Celia Madden; rather she and Comus-Theron are left alone in the forest. And though it appears that Celia Madden may allow herself to be seduced by Comus-Theron, he receives only a perfunctory good-bye kiss from his Lady. While Milton’s Comus is a rewriting of the Circe legend, O’Donnell observes, “Abundant precedent for the naturalizing—and nationalizing—of European and classical myth was available in American literature” (535). He concludes that Comus clearly provided the elements necessary to Frederic’s “final climactic temptation” of Theron Ware (537).

O’Donnell, Thomas F., ed. The Merrill Checklist of Harold Frederic. Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill, 1969.

O’Donnell’s bibliography, a brief 34-page checklist, is a select compilation of writings by or about Harold Frederic “intended to provide students with the tools that will give them access to the most meaningful published resources for the study of an author” (iii). Divided into eight sections, the checklist begins with “Books and Major Separate Publications” (1-2), which includes both fiction and non-fiction, followed by “Uncollected Writings” (2-6), which includes fiction, poetry, reviews, and articles. Section III (6-7) lists “Editions” of Frederic’s works. Section IV, “Letters” (7), directs readers to Robert H. Woodward’s “Harold Frederic: A Bibliography.” (In 1969, The Correspondence of Harold Frederic had not been published.) Section V, “Special Journal” (7), lists a single journal, The Frederic Herald, devoted to short biographical, critical, and bibliographical notes on Frederic; nine issues were published between April 1967 and January 1970. Section VI (7-8) is “Bibliographies and Checklists”; Section VII (8) lists “Biographies.” The last and largest section, “Scholarship and Criticism” (9-34), lists books and articles about Frederic’s major works, arranged in sub-sections by title.

O’Donnell, Thomas F, and Hoyt C. Franchere. “The Damnation of Theron Ware.” Harold Frederic. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1961. 108-17.

O’Donnell and Franchere’s chapter on The Damnation of Theron Ware combines biographical and cultural criticism in an examination of the writing and reception of the novel. The essay opens with a survey of the novel’s contemporaneous reviews in both England and the United States, then moves on to speculate upon the genesis of the work, which took Frederic “five years of conscious, careful, and silent planning” to write. O’Donnell and Franchere believe the idea for the novel may have occurred to Frederic “as far back as his Utica days when his long conversations with Father Terry, the brilliant and candid priest, had so stimulated him” (110). They point out that Frederic observed the growth of religious skepticism in the 1870s and 1880s—fueled by Darwin’s theories, higher Biblical criticism, aestheticism, and intellectual epicureanism—and incorporated these influences in the characters of Dr. Ledsmar, Father Forbes, and Celia Madden, with disastrous results for his title character. Unable to reconcile “currents of thought that are disturbing the very universe of his time [, . . .] Theron brings about his own damnation,” conclude O’Donnell and Franchere (116).

O’Donnell, Thomas F., Stanton Garner, and Robert H. Woodward, eds. A Bibliography of Writings By and About Harold Frederic. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1975.

O’Donnell, Garner, and Woodward’s compilation is the most recent and comprehensive Harold Frederic bibliography published. It includes writings by and about Frederic and is “[i]ntended to be of use to the scholar, student, or interested general reader of Harold Frederic by providing various kinds of bibliographical information not previously available, or available only in periodicals and pamphlets.” “Writings by Frederic” (1-105) identifies Frederic’s books (fiction and non-fiction), shorter works (short fiction, essays, letters, and features), journalism (articles, editorials, and reviews in The Observer, New York Times, and The Manchester Guardian), and editions. “Writings about Frederic” (109-308) lists bibliographies; reviews and notices; writings to 1900 (books, newspapers, and periodicals); books, parts of books, monographs, and pamphlets (1900-1973); dissertations and theses; manuscripts, letters, library holdings, and likenesses; and The Frederic Herald. The compilers claim the book “lists every piece of published writing attributable to Frederic at this time (1974). [. . .] It identifies and locates all of Frederic’s manuscripts, letters, and related documents that could be uncovered by a lengthy and wide-ranging search. It lists—with brief objective annotations—most of the biographical, critical, and bibliographical comment about Frederic that appeared in print between 1879 and 1 January 1974. It also lists all those doctoral dissertations the compilers were able to identify as containing significant discussion of Frederic’s work, as well as a number of master’s theses” (v).

Oehlschlaeger, Fritz. “Passion, Authority, and Faith in The Damnation of Theron Ware.” American Literature 58.2 (1986): 238-55.

Oehlschlaeger’s article combines reader response, feminist, and psychological criticism in an analysis of authority in Frederic’s novel. According to Oehlschlaeger, Frederic “systematically discredits every authority figure in the novel while simultaneously revealing Theron’s own search for authority.” He argues that what Frederic’s novel presents “is not an innocent’s fall into corrupt sexuality but a critique of the way corrupt authority poisons sexuality,” a claim demonstrated in Theron Ware’s relationships with his wife Alice Ware and Celia Madden (239). Theron Ware becomes “progressively effeminized” by the novel’s “proscription of female sexuality by male authority” (244). All of the novel’s authority figures—the Methodist trustees; Father Forbes; Dr. Ledsmar; Sister Soulsby, perhaps the most complex authority figure; the Catholic Church; and even Jeremiah Madden, “the book’s most dignified figure”—are discredited by their words or actions (254). Oehlschlaeger acknowledges that critics have seen Sister Soulsby “either as a Satanic figure or as a voice for Frederic’s own supposed pragmatism” (246); however, he disagrees with both views. First, Sister Soulsby is neither all good nor all bad, and her pragmatism is “inadequate to deal with the highly irrational world that Frederic depicts,” which undercuts her validity as an authority figure (247). Second, Oehlschlaeger does not agree with critics who have pointed to Sister Soulsby’s pragmatism as an indication of Frederic’s personal views. In Oehlschlaeger’s opinion, Frederic’s views are evident in his respect for “certain religious values” represented by the venerable church elders and the Christian idea of repentance (253).

Polk, Noel. The Literary Manuscripts of Harold Frederic: A Catalogue. New York: Garland, 1979.

Polk’s bibliography identifies and locates Harold Frederic’s extant novel manuscripts. An examination of Frederic’s working papers shows him “to have been a disciplined, methodical worker and an unusually meticulous craftsman” (xi). Most of Frederic’s extant manuscripts are now located in the Library of Congress; however, Polk identifies the exceptions (thirteen locations in the U.S. and the U.K.). The manuscripts of Seth’s Brother’s Wife and The Lawton Girl are either lost or no longer extant. Paul Haines’ 1945 New York University dissertation, “Harold Frederic,” is the only source for descriptions and quotations from these manuscripts. Section A lists Frederic’s novels; Section B, stories; Section C, non-fiction prose; Section D, poetry; Section E, unpublished fiction; Section F, unpublished plays; Section G, unpublished poetry; and Section H, unpublished non-fiction prose. Section I lists miscellaneous items in the Library of Congress, such as three of Frederic’s diaries for the years 1891, 1892, and 1893; the Frederic-Heinemann (his London publisher) Papers; Frederic-Brown, Shipley & Co. Papers; miscellaneous, unclassifiable papers; Frederic’s will (not in Frederic’s hand); and a “photograph of Frederic and an unidentified woman, possibly Kate Lyon” (102). Section J is a guide to correspondences written by Harold Frederic. Polk directs readers to The Correspondence of Harold Frederic (1977) for a complete file of Frederic’s correspondence.

Prioleau, Elizabeth S. “The Minister and the Seductress in American Fiction: The Adamic Myth Redux.” Journal of American Culture 16.4 (1993): 1-6.

Prioleau’s structural approach identifies the “odd couple” of American literature that reveals “surprising shifts and reversals in the minister-temptress drama” (1) in six novels: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), Winston Churchill’s The Inside of the Cup (1913), Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry (1927), Peter De Vries’ The Mackerel Plaza (1958), and John Updike’s A Month of Sundays (1974). In her article, Prioleau observes that Hawthorne’s Dimmesdale is the model clergyman, a “saint on earth,” for whom Hester Prynne’s freedom and lawlessness prove to be powerfully seductive. When Dimmesdale falls, “the reverberations are momentous.” The title character in Frederic’s novel is a “diminished version” of Dimmesdale, and Celia Madden is a “spoiled, vain, fin de siecle voluptuary” (2). Prioleau observes, “Due to the minister’s lowered status at the century’s end,” Ware’s “fall resembles more of a pratfall, for which the reader feels mixed pathos and contempt.” Churchill’s innocent and idealistic minister, John, “denounces everything he had believed”; and his seducer, wealthy and freethinking “pagan” Alison Parr, “metamorphoses into a Victorian hausfrau—domestic and dependent” (3). Prioleau concludes that Churchill’s attempt to create “a happy resolution of the clergy-temptress drama” misses the mark. Literature in the 1920s reveals a decline in the clergyman’s reputation. Lewis’ Elmer Gantry is already corrupt when he meets Sharon Faulkner, an even more corrupt tent revivalist. By novel’s end, Faulkner is dead and Gantry has become the new “seducer, exploiter, megalomaniac, and muddled nonbeliever.” De Vries’ Andrew Mackerel is a degenerate minister who believes in nothing. The women in the novel are a parody of earlier seductresses such as Hester Prynne, prompting Prioleau to observe, “The temptations of America for clergymen in the fifties have been indulged to a point of satiation, ennui, and meaninglessness.” Lastly, Updike’s Tom Marshfield is both minister and seducer, and the temptresses—Ms. Prynne and Alicia—have “evolved into the seduced” (4).

Raleigh, John Henry. “The Damnation of Theron Ware.” American Literature 30 (1958): 210-27.

Raleigh’s analysis of The Damnation of Theron Ware situates Frederic’s writing within a cultural context. In his article, Raleigh argues that the novel reflects American history and culture on three levels: (1) its representation of nineteenth-century America, (2) its representation of the nineteenth-century American and “his relationship to Europe,” and (3) its “metaphorical statement about the essential polarities of all human existence” (213). On the first level, Raleigh describes Theron Ware as an anachronism: “an Emersonian, a Romantic, a lover of nature” (215). Ware’s “lingering intuitionalism” and “reliance upon feelings” are challenged by Celia Madden’s aestheticism and Dr. Ledsmar’s Darwinism (214). On the second level, Frederic’s novel “shows Irish Catholicism conquering American Protestantism,” an unusual perspective in the nineteenth century. In theme, the novel resembles Henry James’ Roderick Hudson; in the character of Sister Soulsby, Frederic has captured the essence of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn. On the third level, Raleigh asserts that the “highest and strongest” (223) attitudes in the novel belong to Father Forbes, “the voice of history, of tragedy, of loneliness, [. . .] of the mysteries that surround and encompass us,” and to Sister Soulsby, “the spokesman for the here-and-now, for life as a comedy, for the efficacy of common sense” (226). “As psychological surrogates,” Raleigh proposes, “Father Forbes is the ‘father,’ while Sister Soulsby is the ‘mother.’” He concludes that “the two forces represented by Father Forbes and Sister Soulsby are not antithetical but complementary.” Both are “right,” and neither subscribes to “Absolute Truths” (227).

Raleigh, John Henry. “The Damnation of Theron Ware.” Time, Place, and Idea: Essays on the Novel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1968. 75-95.

Raleigh’s chapter is a reprint of his article entitled “The Damnation of Theron Ware” that appeared in American Literature 30 (1958): 210-27.

Raleigh, John Henry. Introduction. The Damnation of Theron Ware. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960. vii-xxvi.

Raleigh’s introduction is a reprint of his article entitled “The Damnation of Theron Ware” that appeared in American Literature 30 (1958): 210-27.

Rees, John. “‘Dead Men’s Bones, Dead Men’s Beliefs’: Ideas of Antiquity in Upstate New York and Theron Ware.” American Studies 16.2 (1975): 77-87.

Rees’ biographical and psychological approach to the last of Frederic’s New York State novels leads him to speculate in this article that a “special regional consciousness” in areas like “religion, history, [. . . and] legend” contributes to the “psychological interest” of The Damnation of Theron Ware (78). Father Forbes claims that the “idea that humanity progresses” is “utterly baseless and empty.” Theron Ware confesses to Sister Soulsby, “It oppresses me, and yet it fascinates me—this idea that the dead men have known more than we know, done more than we do; that there is nothing new anywhere” (79). Rees contends that Frederic believed the past is constantly imposing itself on the present and that “beneath the rising American republic lay an empire of the dead” (83). Beliefs, for example, about pre-Columbian America—including the theory that “the Indians were descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel” and the Mound-builders were a “physically and mentally superior race”—promoted a sense of “religious antiquarianism” in residents of upstate New York, the regional consciousness that permeates Frederic’s novel (82-85).

Spangler, George. “Theron Ware and the Perils of Relativism.” Canadian Review of American Studies 5 (1974): 36-46.

Spangler’s thematic study critiques the moral values of nineteenth-century America by focusing upon the “economic motives in Theron’s behavior” and the “decisive role of the Soulsbys” in Theron Ware’s moral decline (36). According to Spangler's article, Theron Ware’s interest in money attracted him first to his wife and then to the very wealthy Celia Madden; it also inspired his idea to write a book on Abraham. In fact, Ware anticipates F. Scott Fitzgerald’s James Gatz and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. Ware’s relationship to the Soulsbys further reveals the morality of the period. His wholesale acceptance of Sister Soulsby’s ethics—wherein the “appearance of virtue is as important as the reality” and the ends justify the means—destroys his moral integrity; and Sister Soulsby’s seemingly casual comment about Alice Ware causes him to conclude that she is no longer worthy to be his wife (43).

Steele, Mildred R. “Ware’s Post-Seattle Career Dept.” Frederic Herald 3.2 (1969): 6.

Steele’s sketch describes Theron Ware’s political career in Seattle and, later, in Washington. This “sequel,” inspired by Steele’s reading of Ralph Rogers’ 1961 dissertation entitled “Harold Frederic: His Development as a Comic Realist,” outlines the major events of Ware’s new career with striking thematic and structural similarities to The Damnation of Theron Ware (6).

Stein, Allen F. “Evasions of an American Adam: Structure and Theme in The Damnation of Theron Ware.” American Literary Realism 5 (1972): 23-36.

Stein’s structural analysis of The Damnation of Theron Ware reveals “a whole series of spurious ‘fresh starts’ for Theron, recurring at virtually equidistant intervals in the plot-line” (23). Stein notes in this article that Theron Ware’s character, unlike that in most portrayals of an American Adam, “is ultimately unchanged by his process of initiation,” and the ending of the novel, “looking westward in Springtime, bespeaks [. . .] not affirmation, but damnation [. . .] rendered in mocking, anti-romantic terms criticizing misplaced faith in the powers of spiritual renewal in shallow souls” (24). The novel is divided into four parts, corresponding to the four seasons. Excluding the first three chapters and the last chapter, which are expository in nature, the story is structured in four groups of seven chapters each. The last chapter of each seven-chapter group ends in a supposed “resolution” to Ware’s most recent conflict (25). At the end of Part One, Reverend Ware has met the trio of Father Forbes, Dr. Ledsmar, and Celia Madden and has assumed an attitude of superiority over his wife and congregation. Throughout Part Two, Ware’s contempt for the unillumined grows, along with his suspicions about an illicit affair between his wife and Levi Gorringe. A temporary resolution to Ware’s conflicts is presented in the counsel of Sister Soulsby to be a “good fraud” (31). Part Three traces Ware’s rapid degeneration and alienation from his new, intellectual friends. In Part Four, encouraged by Celia Madden’s kiss, Ware turns his back on the Methodist world in favor of the civilized world represented by the trio. Stein observes, Ware’s “flouting of the conventions of both worlds will literally drive him from both into the western forests for a new start and new dreams” (33). In Chapter 31, rejected and forlorn, Ware turns to Sister Soulsby for consolation, but “Theron’s despair, unfortunately, is not symptomatic of any attempt to face the consequences of his actions in a mature manner” (35). In the final chapter, spring has returned with a new cycle of fresh starts for Theron Ware. Stein concludes, “Presumably Theron will rush blithely onward, an American Adam of the Gilded Age, so unsubstantial that nothing can touch him.” The damnation Ware suffers, according to Stein, is “the most insidious kind not only for him but [also] for his society” because he and others like him are unaware of their damnation (36).

Stronks, James. “Supplements to the Standard Bibliographies of Ade, Bierce, Crane, Frederic, Fuller, Garland, Norris, and Twain.” American Literary Realism 16.2 (1983): 272-77.

Stronks’ bibliographical note cites five additions to A Bibliography of Writings By and About Harold Frederic by Thomas F. O’Donnell, Stanton Garner, and Robert H. Woodward (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1975).

Stronks, James. “Supplements to the Standard Bibliographies of Crane, Dreiser, Frederic, Fuller, Garland, London, and Norris.” American Literary Realism 11.1 (1978): 124-33.

Stronks’ bibliographical note cites three additions to A Bibliography of Writings By and About Harold Frederic by Thomas F. O’Donnell, Stanton Garner, and Robert H. Woodward (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1975).

Stronks, James B. “Addenda to the Bibliographies of Stephen Crane, Dreiser, Frederic, Fuller, Garland, Herne, Howells, London, and Norris.” The Papers of the Bilbiographical Society of America 71.3 (1977): 362-68.

Stronks’ bibliographical note cites one addition to A Bibliography of Writings By and About Harold Frederic by Thomas F. O’Donnell, Stanton Garner, and Robert H. Woodward (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1975).

Strother, Garland. “The Control of Distance in Theron Ware.” Frederic Herald 3.2 (1969): 4.

Strother’s note is a structural analysis of Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware “involving the manipulation of Theron’s name” as a “distancing factor [. . .] between the narrator and Theron and, hence, between the reader and Theron.” When reporting from within the mind of Ware, Frederic’s narrator usually uses the character’s first name. Other times, when the narrator relates events from outside Ware’s mind, the references to the title character tend to be more formal—Theron Ware, “the Rev. Theron Ware,” and “the Rev. Mr. Ware”—and should alert readers to distance themselves from Ware (4).

Strother, Garland. “Shifts in Point of View in The Damnation of Theron Ware.” Frederic Herald 3.1 (1969): 2.

Strother opens his note by refuting Everett Carter’s assertion that The Damnation of Theron Ware is “told strictly from the minister’s point of view.” In his own structural analysis of the novel, Strother states that “[o]n at least three occasions, Frederic significantly shifts the point of view away from Theron to another character.” The first shift occurs in Chapter 21 when Dr. Ledsmar renames his lizard “‘the Rev. Mr. Ware.’” The second shift occurs in Chapter 25 when Levi Gorringe says that Ware is “‘so much meaner than any other man,’” and the third shift occurs in Chapter 26 when Father Forbes tells his housekeeper that he is not home should Ware call again. “The function of the shifts in point of view is in each case to indicate Theron’s loss of esteem in the eyes of another character. By shifting the point of view from Theron to the other character,” Strother argues, “Frederic dramatizes clearly this loss of esteem and foreshadows Theron’s eventual damnation” (2).

Strout, Cushing. “In Hawthorne’s Shadow: The Minister and the Woman in Howells, Adams, Frederic, and Updike.” Making American Tradition: Visions and Revisions from Ben Franklin to Alice Walker. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1990. 22-39.

Strout’s Chapter 2 examines the influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “marital triangle”—and more specifically, his “symbolic use of Hester Prynne”—in The Scarlet Letter (1850) on novels by William Dean Howells, Henry Adams, Harold Frederic, and John Updike. According to Strout, Hawthorne’s unlikely heroine is presented as a “female apostle [. . .] walking in the footsteps of the Puritan Anne Hutchinson” (22); symbolically, she poses a threat to established views about love, marriage, and Christian authority. Howells’ A Modern Instance (1882) treats the issue of divorce in its impartial portrayal of “a marriage without love and a love without marriage” (29). Adams’ title character in Esther (1884) is torn between her love for a minister and her scientific agnosticism; the romantic triangle “is defined by her relationship to a scientist and a minister” (30). In The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), argues Strout, “Frederic turned [. . . Hawthorne’s marital] triangle to the purposes of serious comedy” (33). The forest scene in which Celia Madden bestows upon Theron Ware a kiss is most reminiscent of the relationship between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale; however, Frederic’s version is “comically ironical” because Ware’s dream of a future with Celia Madden is “inspired by a kiss that is ‘a swift, almost perfunctory caress’” and his dream is corrupted by his lust for Madden’s wealth (33). Ware’s fall is less significant than Dimmesdale’s because Ware was “deeply flawed” to begin with. Ware, as a representative of his generation of Methodist preachers, is a poor specimen of religious piety as compared to the older generation present at the Nedahma conference. Thus, suggests Strout, “[t]he fall that Frederic measures is not a moral one within the minister but an historical one in America. [. . .] Frederic has an accurate sense of the way in which modernist forms of Protestantism were, in fact, allying themselves with science, evolution, and historical criticism of the Bible, jettisoning traditional Christian doctrine in the process and presupposing a sentimental confidence that change is inevitably progress” (33-34). The last section of this chapter addresses Updike’s Roger’s Version (1986), a comic tale of adultery, in which Hawthorne’s triangle is expanded to a marital quadrangle, related from the cuckolded husband’s perspective.

Suderman, Elmer F. “The Damnation of Theron Ware as a Criticism of American Religious Thought.” Huntington Library Quarterly 33 (1969): 61-75.

Suderman’s article combines psychological and genre criticism in an examination of The Damnation of Theron Ware and the conventions of the sentimental religious novel of the late nineteenth century. According to Suderman, Frederic’s decidedly non-sentimental novel “modifies the stereotype” and “brings it to life” (66). The young (Protestant) woman in the sentimental novel is recast as the sensual, red-headed, Irish-Catholic beauty Celia Madden. The young skeptic in the sentimental novel who is saved by his love for the young woman and her God is the Methodist minister Theron Ware. In The Damnation of Theron Ware, Celia Madden is the skeptic and Reverend Ware represents the already-converted young man. Rather than a conversion to Christianity, Ware experiences a counter-conversion to Madden’s religion of beauty and “absolute freedom from moral bugbears” (68-69). In one situation after another, Frederic subverts sentimental conventions: Ware converts in the space of a page as opposed to a few chapters; instead of giving up smoking, Ware accepts a cigarette from Madden; at the point in the novel where the young woman would typically pray for her skeptical young man, Madden offers Ware a drink of Benedictine; the convert’s faith in an afterlife is substituted for Ware’s faith in a life of luxury aboard a yacht. Suderman observes that Frederic “has transformed a sterile conventional plot into a convincing, realistic story” (71). Whereas the sentimental religious novel generally ended on an uplifting note, at the end of Chapter 31, Ware, feeling rejected and alone, questions the very existence of God. In true Theron Ware-fashion, however, he “does not live with his more realistic and somber knowledge very long. [. . .] Theron, after two conversions—three if you count the drunken orgy—returns to his routine life unchanged” (74).

Suderman, Elmer F. “Modernization as Damnation in The Damnation of Theron Ware.” Ball State University Forum 27.1 (1986): 12-19.

Suderman’s thematic consideration of The Damnation of Theron Ware focuses upon the way in which modernism causes “man” to think “differently about the nature of man, of the universe, of God,” and of “the different way in which he relates to himself and others, to the community and its institutions, and to God” (12). According to Suderman's article, modern attitudes have already damned Celia Madden, Sister Soulsby, Dr. Ledsmar, and Father Forbes when they are introduced to the reader. Furthermore, technological advancement and urbanization lead to the “damnation of community, a church, and a minister who discovers that his substitution of modern personality traits for traditional ones does not help him cope with an intractable world” (18). Suderman concludes that Theron Ware has no place in either modern or traditional society.

Vanderbeets, Richard. “The Ending of The Damnation of Theron Ware.” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 36 (1964): 358-59.

Vanderbeets’ textual analysis of Frederic’s novel and working notes challenges earlier criticism labeling Frederic a “comic realist” (358). The ending of The Damnation of Theron Ware, Vanderbeets argues in his article, is not tragic: Theron Ware relocates to Seattle for a career in real estate and dreams of becoming a Senator. However, Frederic’s working notes read, “Soulsby & wife at deathbed—their words finish book.” Vanderbeets contends that since this note immediately follows references to Ware, it must refer to his deathbed. Furthermore, if Frederic intended to kill off his main character in some earlier version of the novel, then the ending “reveals an inconsistency incompatible with the picture of ‘comic realist’” (359).

Watson, Douglas. “Folk Speech, Custom, and Belief in Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware and Stories of York State.” New York Folklore 3 (1977): 83-99.

Watson’s linguistic and biographical study of The Damnation of Theron Ware and Stories of York State examines the materials and processes of folklore—specifically speech, customs, and beliefs. Watson reasons in his article, “Frederic’s life provided him with both a natural and a practiced awareness of the ‘folk,’ and his fiction became a medium for recording the particulars of that awareness.” Folk speech is “used for the purposes of characterization and establishment of setting.” It portrays Brother Pierce’s upstate New York fundamentalism: “We are a plain sort o’ folk up in these parts. [. . .] We ain’t gone traipsin’ after strange gods [. . .]. No new-fangled notions can go down here” (84). Sister Soulsby’s figurative expressions and use of proverbial sayings—“You’ve got to take folks as you find them” and “you’ve got to find them the best way you can”—“express her understanding of human nature and her attitude toward overcoming its limitations” (86). Watson notes three distinct dialect patterns in Stories of York State: the upstate New York dialect (similar to Pierce’s in The Damnation of Theron Ware), the Irish immigrant dialect, and the German immigrant dialect. In addition to using folk speech patterns to create realistic characters, Frederic also used folk beliefs and customs, such as the rustics’ opposition to intellectualism and the Methodists’ suspicions of the Irish and the Italians. Folk customs in The Damnation of Theron Ware include the camp meeting, the lovefeast, donation parties, and the rental of pews. According to Watson, Frederic attended a Methodist camp meeting in 1875 and wrote an essay attacking “the hypocrisies of the barely religious event” (96). “Frederic’s use of the folklore of his native Mohawk Valley,” asserts Watson, “appears to be not only extensive, but basically accurate as well” (97).

Wilkie, Brian. “Morality and Its Alternatives: The Damnation of Theron Ware.” Value and Vision in American Literature: Literary Essays in Honor of Ray Lewis White. Ed. Joseph Candido. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1999. 64-82.

Wilkie approaches his analysis of Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware from a moral and psychological perspective. His main purpose is to explore “the competing claims of morality and of a radically antinomian personal freedom” (66) that result in contradictions or a “confounding of affects” in the novel (69). For example, Wilkie describes Sister Soulsby as unscrupulous; however, he does not consider her self-absorbed or devious in her personal relationships. In fact, she seems to exhibit genuine concern for the Wares. Likewise, Celia Madden is both captivating and comic, and Father Forbes is both devoted to and dismissive of Catholicism. Dr. Ledsmar and Celia Madden seem to be the antithesis of one another, but they are united in their rejection of Theron Ware. Sister Soulsby, a pragmatist, and Celia Madden, an idealist, “both register an affinity to Chopin’s music.” According to Wilkie, “This method, of creating polarities (as they seem at first) that later dissolve into unities or (more often) fragment kaleidoscopically, is the heart of Frederic’s novelistic strategy in Theron Ware” (71). The death of MacEvoy “epitomizes the double vision of values—aesthetic and moral—that, perhaps more than any other of the novel’s confounding of affects, gives Theron Ware its disturbing resonance as philosophical speculation” (74): Jeremiah Madden, “the most sympathetically portrayed character in the entire novel,” is ultimately responsible for MacEvoy’s death, and the beauty of the last rites and of Celia Madden’s attire overshadows the somber images of MacEvoy’s deathbed (73). Wilkie suggests “that the recurrent strategy by which the novel’s affects cancel one another out are variants, presented indirectly, of its exploration of the antinomian theme” (77). Theron Ware’s attraction toward Celia Madden and Father Forbes may be commendable, but his actions toward them seem contemptible. Wilkie argues that “Frederic has rendered, with almost unique success, and primarily through his double-takes on matters involving values, the perennial problem that emerges when antinomian spiritual energizing clashes head-on with morality, when two perfectly valid senses of good collide” (77-78). Furthermore, Frederic avoids “definitive judgment[s]” with respect to the morality of his characters (78), while at the same time his novel demonstrates the “utter incompatibility” of the pursuit of both morality and beauty and freedom (80).

Wilson, Edmund. “Two Neglected American Novelists: II—Harold Frederic, the Expanding Upstarter.” The New Yorker (6 June 1970): 112-34.

Wilson’s biographical criticism of The Damnation of Theron Ware likens the title character to his creator, Harold Frederic. Wilson dedicates a large portion of his article to Frederic’s biography and a chronological review of Frederic’s literary works. Drawing parallels between events in Frederic’s life and events in his novels, Wilson states that Frederic “violates the genteel conventions by allowing sex often to figure in its rawest, least romantic form” (114). To support his point, Wilson cites Frederic’s public defense of prostitution in London and his maintenance of two households—one with his legally-married wife and children, the other with his common-law wife and children. The Damnation of Theron Ware is described as “amusing, absorbing, rather shocking” (124). Wilson identifies the “three tempters” (Father Forbes, Dr. Ledsmar, and Celia Madden) as the agents of Ware’s damnation and Sister Soulsby as the only “redeeming element among Theron’s mischief-making friends” (125-26). Ware’s “illumination” is a feeble version of the “intellectual and imaginative expansion” Frederic himself experienced. Furthermore, Frederic and Ware shared a “kind of disregard of consequences”; Wilson cites the serious debt both faced as an example (126). Wilson concludes that “Theron Ware was an unself-flattering version of Harold Frederic as a young provincial eager to widen his social, aesthetic, and intellectual scope and to make for himself a career” (133).

Wilson, Edmund. “Two Neglected American Novelists: Harold Frederic, the Expanding Upstater.” The Devils and Canon Barham: Ten Essays on Poets, Novelists and Monsters. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. 48-76.

Wilson’s chapter was first published as an article in The New Yorker (6 June 1970): 112-34.

Woodward, Robert H. “The Frederic Bibliographies: Errata.” The Frederic Herald 3.1 (1969): 3-4.

Woodward’s note identifies bibliographic errors in three published bibliographies of secondary comment on Frederic: “Harold Frederic: A Bibliography” by Robert H. Woodward (Studies in Bibliography 13 [1960]: 247-57); “Harold Frederic (1856-1898): A Critical Bibliography of Secondary Comment,” compiled by the editors of ALR and numerous contributors (American Literary Realism 2 [1968]: 1-70); and “Frederic’s Collection of Reviews: Supplement to the Checklist of Contemporary Reviews of Frederic’s Writings” by Robert H. Woodward (American Literary Realism 2 [1968]: 84-89).

Woodward, Robert H. “Harold Frederic: Supplemental Critical Bibliography of Secondary Comment.” American Literary Realism 3.2 (1970): 95-147.

Woodward’s critical bibliography is the first supplement to the bibliography compiled by the editors of American Literary Realism in 1968 (“Harold Frederic [1856-1898]: A Critical Bibliography of Secondary Comment”). This bibliography expands on the earlier compilation in that it includes newspaper articles and theses on Frederic. It is divided into three categories: books (including dissertations and theses), periodicals (including magazines and newspapers), and errata (corrections of known errors in the first Frederic bibliography).

Woodward, Robert H. “Some Sources for Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware.” American Literature 33.1 (1961): 46-51.

Woodward combines textual, biographical, and cultural criticism in his examination of Frederic’s writing methods and sources. The article opens with a statement Frederic made in an interview published in Literary Digest in which he describes his research: “‘I seek to know my people through and through. [. . .] I set myself the task of knowing everything they knew. [. . .] I have got up masses of stuff.’” Among the background works Frederic studied, Woodward cites Samuel Laing’s Human Origins (1892) as the source for Father Forbes’ Abraham speech and Zénaïde A. Ragozin’s The Story of Chaldea from the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria (1886) for Forbes’ discussion of eponyms. In the case of Dr. Ledsmar’s conversation with Theron Ware, all the German and French historians he refers to are among those listed in Mme. Ragozin’s book. The books Dr. Ledsmar loans to Reverend Ware, with the exception of the one written by Ernest Renan, are also on the list. According to Woodward, Celia Madden’s classification of people as Greeks or Jews comes from Renan’s Recollections of My Youth (1883). Frederic relied upon his readings in the Northern Christian Advocate, a Methodist journal, for “‘all the details of a Methodist minister’s work, obligation, and daily routine, and all the machinery of his church’” (46). Sister Soulsby’s woodchuck story is quoted almost verbatim from an 1893 issue of that journal. Woodward concludes that Frederic’s characters “had to reveal themselves—their intellectual selves as well as their personalities—through their conversation,” and that Frederic, “to make his characters speak convincingly, had to know what they would know” (50-51).

Ziff, Larzer. “Overcivilization: Harold Frederic, the Roosevelt-Adams Outlook, Owen Wister.” The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation. New York: Viking P, 1966. 206-28.

Ziff’s Chapter 10 situates Frederic’s writing, particularly The Damnation of Theron Ware, within the cultural milieu of the late nineteenth century. He characterizes Frederic as “a walking treasury of local history and manners,” which served to shape the imaginary towns of Tyre, Thessaly, and Tecumseh (207). “Possessed of an imaginative knowledge of his home county, in which character was inseparable from ethnic, religious, historical, political, and social conditions, [. . . Frederic] was able to follow Howells’ lead in producing a fiction of the commonplace, yet to surpass the dean in rendering a sense of communal density,” argues Ziff (209). The Damnation of Theron Ware, Frederic’s last novel set in New York State, represents a culmination of plot and material not achieved in any of his earlier novels; yet the novel reverberates “as a symbolic tale of America’s progress to disunity in the latter half of the nineteenth century” (212). In the character of Theron Ware, Frederic has created a “pitiful creature” who has thrown away the ideals of Christianity in favor of “a grab bag of third-hand tastes, ill-digested ideas, and smirkingly cynical opinions about those who nourished and shaped him” (214). One bright spot in this dark landscape is the Soulsbys, whose manipulations, according to Ziff, are “finally for the good of those manipulated.” The Soulsbys represent Frederic’s answer to Social Darwinism: “men can control the future of their society if they but yield power to the able” (216).

Zimmermann, David H. “Clay Feet, Modernism, and Fundamental Option in Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware.” The American Benedictine Review 45.1 (1994): 33-44.

Zimmermann’s thematic and psychological approach to The Damnation of Theron Ware focuses upon Frederic’s “careful study of Methodism and Catholicism.” Zimmermann argues in his article that the novel “records an important shift in religious thought within modern Christianity” (34). “[T]he theologies of Forbes and Soulsby,” notes Zimmermann, “include many tenets adopted by twentieth-century Christian theologians” (35). Father Forbes tells Reverend Ware, “The Church is always compromising” (37). This perspective reflects Forbes’ “positivist view of history that forms the basis of his theologies and biblical interpretations” (38); however, “[o]nce Forbes has altered Theron’s understanding of history, he has altered Theron’s understanding of religion [. . . without providing] him with any basis on which to begin reconstructing his understanding of the world” (39). Zimmermann suggests that, within the context of modern theology, Sister Soulsby has undergone a conversion because she and Soulsby have “both soured on living by fakes” (42). Sister Soulsby’s theology embraces a belief in “humanity’s essential goodness,” and she “provides Theron with the forgiveness and direction necessary to begin the redemptive process” (42-43). Zimmermann asserts that, unlike many critics who blame Father Forbes and Sister Soulsby for Ware’s damnation, he does not find fault with either of them. In fact, he does not consider Ware damned. According to Zimmermann, “damnation occurs only after death,” when the option of free choice can no longer be exercised. Thus, “Sister Soulsby is correct when she points out that the sheep and the goats will not be separated until judgment day” (44). Theron Ware’s future, in light of Zimmermann’s interpretation of Sister Soulsby’s and Father Forbes’ theologies, remains ambiguous.

Zlotnick, Joan. “The Damnation of Theron Ware, with a Backward Glance at Hawthorne.” Markham Review 2 (Feb 1971): 90-92.

Zlotnick’s genre study examines possible literary sources for The Damnation of Theron Ware. She notes in her article that Frederic considered Nathaniel Hawthorne one of his “literary parents” and compares Frederic’s novel to The Scarlet Letter, “Young Goodman Brown,” “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (90). Reverend Ware is likened to the “sinning minister” Dimmesdale and Young Goodman Brown, Celia Madden to Hester Prynne, and Dr. Ledsmar to Rappaccini and Chillingworth. Zlotnick argues that The Damnation of Theron Ware and “Young Goodman Brown” have the same theme, the loss of innocence. In addition, Frederic employs light and dark imagery to develop “the Hawthornian theme of reality versus appearance and even offers his own version of Hawthorne’s ocular deception.” Other imagery common to The Damnation of Theron Ware and “Young Goodman Brown” includes the forest scene and ribbons (in Celia Madden’s hair and on the maypole). Like many of Hawthorne’s characters, argues Zlotnick, Ware is not guilty of the sin of passion; instead, he is guilty of the sin of pride, “a sin which results in the separation of so many Hawthornian characters from the ‘magic circle of humanity’” (91).