Areas of Criticism

Areas of Criticism - The Trio

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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).