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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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, 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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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).

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.

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).

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.

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).

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).

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).

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. “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).

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).

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).

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).