Auchincloss, Louis. “Harold Frederic.” The Man Behind the Book: Literary Profiles. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. 114-23.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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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).

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.)

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.

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).

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.

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).

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).

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).

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.

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.

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).

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).